To celebrate the 5-year anniversary of CTB, I thought it would be fun to compile a reading syllabus. If you weren’t aware, there’s a minor trend on book social media where authors or readers of self-reported academically rigorous fiction will put together a reading list of other books that their novel references or is inspired by. You saw it when it was recommended that readers read Dante’s Inferno before reading Kuang’s Katabasis, or the large stack of books SenLin Yu said inspired Alchemised.
Does CTB need a syllabus? Not really. I’m not all that intellectual, I don’t write intelligently, and I prefer not to pretend to be smarter than I am. But I need to do something to celebrate CTB, and this was an easy solution.
And, well, it is fun to talk about the other books and whatnot that inspire me.
It was surprisingly difficult to sift through works that have been generally influential on my art versus works that specifically influenced CTB. My goal is to cover only the latter, but the lines got blurred. I will also be mostly talking about books, but there will be some non-book things later on. I have talked a lot about some of these before, but humor me and let me talk about them again.
Without further ado, please enjoy!
* = indicates I read/watched it after I started CTB
BOOKS
Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht
I was taking a seminar class on Brecht when CTB first started brewing in my brain. I didn’t even want to be in this seminar, but COVID canceled the series I wanted to take, and my university auto-enrolled me in this class instead. I almost didn’t read this play either, as I had strategically skipped that week’s reading to handle assignments from other classes. But while struggling to find a topic for my mid-term paper, I ended up reading it belatedly in a fit of desperation. I’m glad I did.
There are obvious references to the play in CTB, with Meemaw, Kat, and her brothers being a one-to-one equivalent of the titular characters. The civilian camp itself would not exist without the play. The never-ending nature of Warriors’s war is also meant to replicate the way Brecht paints the endlessness of the Hundred Years War. As much as I don’t agree with Brecht about everything (especially his thoughts on epic theater), his works ended up being the push I needed to purposefully make my writing political (not that I’m very good at it). Funnily enough, the chapter of CTB I’m currently writing will probably end up having a direct reference to that midterm paper I wrote on Brecht (which, believe it or not, actually contained an entire section on the Legend of Zelda), but I will save that story for when the chapter is finished.
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
I was in my Brecht seminar when CTB was first conceived, but I was at the end of my Virginia Woolf seminar when I first started writing it (which was… four months later?). While you can argue that the themes of grief and identity in Mrs. Dalloway and Into the Lighthouse are echoed in CTB, I mostly used Woolf as a stylistic inspiration. I don’t particularly like stream of consciousness, but I like the way she shapes the narrative around a character’s thoughts. Some of my more outlandish stylistic choices, like the “Long Winter” section, can be traced back to her writing. I especially liked how Woolf explored identity in Orlando, and the grand scale she gives it compared to the claustrophobia of her other novels.
There’s a very silly reference to her in the first chapter. After reading five of her novels in a row, I noticed that she always found a way to use the word “unreality.” I noticed it in her first novel, and it was there all the way through to the last one I read. As a homage to her, unreality is used to describe the first appearance of the portal.
Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
This was one of the first classic novels I ever fell in love with, in no small part because the resolution of the entire story hinges on one character finding his life’s meaning in sacrifice. That character spent the entire novel being the worst version of himself, but finds redemption in doing one incredible good deed. It’s one of the few books that have ever made me cry, and I always try to emulate it in my own writing-- a perfect melding of emotional resolution with plot resolution.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
This is not a book for the faint of heart. I read it when I was sixteen, and it changed my brain chemistry. Not only is Nabokov a master of prose—you will never read imagery like his anywhere else—but he is the undisputed champion of an unreliable narrator. While Woolf’s works are great examples of blending thought with narration, Nabokov is great at working with how a narrator knowingly frames events to comply with their point of view. Plus, his narrator is simultaneously a horrendous human being while painting himself as charming and heroic. He is someone who wants to be liked, and it fucks with the reader’s head.
I will never achieve anything close to Nabokov’s level, but I have since fostered an interest in writing from unique, unconventional points of view— like abuse from the perspective of the abuser.
Heroes by Robert Cormier
For a book I don’t remember well, I’m amazed by how much I have looked back on it as something to emulate thematically. This is a book about a WWII soldier who is discharged after saving his comrades by throwing himself onto a grenade. However, the blast left him horrifically disfigured, and most people have trouble viewing him as a hero. But he doesn’t view himself as a hero either, as (spoiler) he had only thrown himself onto the grenade in order to kill himself— as retribution for previously failing to do the right thing when it mattered. Now that he’s back home, he sets off on a quest to murder his childhood hero.
I don’t remember much about the characters or what happens between the opener and the ending. I don’t even remember any of the characters’ names. I read this when I was thirteen, and while it's all hazy, it has truly stuck with me.
While I will credit other war stories as being more directly inspirational towards the war plot-line, this one plays heavily into how I write on heroism and trauma.
All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
This is an obligatory pick, as anyone who writes any war story is ultimately inspired by Western Front. My copy even has the tagline: The Greatest War Story Ever Told. In truth, CTB is inspired by WWI in general, and it’s unfair of me to pick out a singular work that encompasses that fascination. I grew up watching/reading a lot of war stories (thanks, Dad), but I have always been interested in how the brutality of the first modern war plays alongside its ultimate meaninglessness. This was a war that a lot of people wanted to fight simply because there hadn’t been a war in a while, and the echoes of it extend all through to today.
In that sense, All Quiet embodies WWI the best. It’s the novel about the futility of war. How Remarque portrays its brutality and the soldiers’ disillusionment is echoed in how I approached the day-to-day fighting of war in CTB.
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller*
When I started CTB, I knew that there were going to be a pair of characters from the country invading Hyrule that were going to be mirror versions of Warriors and Spirit— a “what would they have turned into if Spirit did not escape” scenario, personified. I knew Faovaria was going to be inspired by Ancient Greece and Rome. Beyond that, I was stuck. I didn’t know how to make these mirror characters interesting, much less their own character.
Then I read The Song of Achilles and thought to myself, What if I just made them Patrocles and Achilles?
Once that thought hit me, Nephus and Icarius sprang into my head fully-formed. This is also how the concept of thralls got added to Faovaria’s world-building.
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemesin
I first read this book for a seminar series I took on how race is reflected upon in science fiction. At that point in my life, my entire reading output was centered around school, and I had not kept up with modern sci-fi fantasy books in a long time. This ended up being the first modern fantasy book I read in years, and it’s one that gave me a great example of how elevated writing can be used in a fantasy story. I won’t spoil the twist, but the way the narrative in this book is presented became my reassurance that I could pull off the dual-timeline structure of CTB.
Movies, TV, and More
1917 (Movie)
In case one wasn’t enough, here’s another WWI example. Two of the most iconic scenes from this movie feature the main character running through battlefields filled with charging soldiers and explosions of light, which inspired the sequence where Warriors runs through the battlefield to save Wind in chapter 20.
Vinland Saga (Anime)*
I got back into watching anime during COVID, which I had fallen out of during high school. I’ve watched a lot of anime since, and there are tons of tiny little moments and details that could be traced to one or another. But the anime with the largest influence on CTB is Vinland Saga. If you haven’t watched it yet, stop whatever you’re doing and watch it now. It’s one of the greats, featuring one of the best characters ever created.
Everything from Thorfinn’s arc of wanting to be a better person, to the conflicting feelings of kinship and hatred he feels for Askeladd, to how Askeladd projects his life’s failings onto Thorfinn-- I watched it and recognized all of it as things I was trying to do in CTB. Vinland Saga gave me a much-needed demonstration of how to write these things well. Having an example of what the good version was allowed me to push Warriors to a greater extreme. If Vinland Saga was a steady line, I found where I wanted to add sharp peaks and low valleys. It retroactively gave me the foundational work I needed so that I could really build something more daring than I ever thought possible.
Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion (Anime)
I should start by acknowledging that Code Geass was my first true exposure at the age of 14 to a character who played the role of both villain and hero. You could draw a direct line from Lelouch to Spirit, probably. That’s not why I’m mentioning this, though. I wanted to name something—anything—as an inspiration for whatever love-hate thing Warriors and Spirit have got going on. The real answer is that they were influenced by a lot of things (Thorfinn from Vinland Saga needing Askeladd to live so that he can ultimately kill him himself shows itself in Spirit), but I wanted an example from before I started CTB.
The crazy, toxic ex-friends, now-enemies, would-still-die-for-each-other thing that Lelouch and Suzaku have is the closest I can come up with. If you think Warriors and Spirit are insane, those two are worse— a similar brand of obsessive crazy, but much more heavily antagonistic. Young me learned the value of having a pair of men who are weird about each other as the center of your story. Code Geass made me realize that if the men are not weird about each other, then the stakes are not high enough.
Daredevil (Comics/TV Show)
I don’t like superhero media anymore. My superhero phase wasn’t even that enthusiastic, as I spent my entire run enchanted by Daredevil, aka: Matt Murdock. Sometime during college, I got hooked on his character: self-sacrificing, a martyr complex, and self-destructive. There are superheroes who have been described that way before, but it’s all either fanon or mitigated by the writer’s belief that the character is ultimately cool. Matt Murdock is consistently portrayed as being the perpetrator of his own misery. He’s the problem. He’s always the problem.
Only the Netflix run of the TV show was out at the time, and I think the fandom was primarily filled with adults. I never had such a good fanfiction binge in my life—I read through the entire AO3 tag, page by page. No filters. I rarely, if ever, found a fic I didn’t like. It felt like everyone in the whole world understood what made Matt Murdock compelling.
He’s one of my favorite depictions of a self-destructive person, primarily in how it actively makes him suck as a person even when he’s trying to be good. If I didn’t get strangely attached to Matt Murdock, Spirit would not be what he is today, which is to say (to quote one of the most memorable comments I have ever gotten) an absolute cunt.
Princess Mononoke (Movie)
The Kingdom of Hyrule in CTB is meant to be on the cusp between two eras: a previously more magical time fading away, leaving behind the dread of the modern world to come. That mood is best exemplified by Princess Mononoke, where you see that the time of the gods is ending. I’ve always liked how the characters are helpless against the changing tides. Neither god nor human can prevent the world from changing, though they might compel it to come faster or slower.
I wanted that sense of helplessness and dread to permeate through Warriors’s era, that he could have lived a far happier life if he had not been born in uncertain times. Like Ashitaka, Warriors is also a relic of a world that is fading away and now finds himself unmoored without a place to belong.
Overwatch (Video Game)
As much as I want to be in denial, I have to face the facts: CTB is not the first time I have tried to write this story. A long time ago, I wrote and swiftly abandoned an Overwatch fanfiction that is, frankly, a prototype CTB. The premise was that three people who “grew up” during the heyday of Overwatch and experienced its downfall firsthand are now struggling to decide if they should or should not join the newly reformed Overwatch (a pre-fall, during the fall, and post-recall fic all at once).
Not only did this have many identical themes and ideas to CTB, but it also had dual timelines. Each chapter had the characters in the modern day reflecting on their past, complete with fully written flashbacks.
I abandoned this fic after three chapters. First, I got bored. Second, it was not easy to write. Three characters with three story lines (they were never going to meet in-story) that all had to have their own flashbacks with their own story lines— that’s six stories happening at once. And there wasn’t a set place in the story to show the flashbacks, either. In CTB, I always start with the past. In my prototype fic, they would commence mid-scene without the assistance of line breaks. It was unwieldy at best and a bitch at worst. The fic was broken upon arrival.
Still, I hung onto the idea. I knew the dual present-past structure could work. I just didn’t know how. So I sat on the concept for years until I had my MidLink romcom that I realized would be better off as a story about Warriors and his brothers. I was trying to figure out how to best show Warriors’s past when the dual structure crept back into my brain.
It’s terribly embarrassing to admit I was ever that deep into Overwatch, but there wouldn’t be CTB without my abandoned Overwatch fic laying the foundations. It goes to show that you should never abandon ideas entirely. It might just take a few years for them to come to fruition. When they’re ready to be used, you’ll know.
has anyone asked for director's commentary on the newest chapter bc WOW omg warriors actually getting to be king holy fuckin shiiiit.....
Ah, yes. Another opportunity to share my inane thoughts on a chapter I spent too much time on lol
This chapter came to me fairly easily, all things considered. No bouts of writer’s block, and only one or two instances of having to rewrite a scene to get it right. The long delay between chapters was solely due to a lack of time: the holiday season hit, I got a job, and I had a silly side project to complete.
Everything has finally calmed down now, though I am currently battling the monster known as being too tired from my job to write at night. But that’s a classic battle, and I will find a way to fight it.
Onto the chapter itself--
I like the idea that the moment Link commits to being a better person, he gets sick. It’s like that bit from Avatar: The Last Airbender where Zuko had a personal crisis that led to him being bedridden for a few days. Silly-ass behavior.
Peek that fun little bit of foreshadowing between Lincoln and Gaudin: “’Would you rather carry him on your back?’‘”
I mentioned a few times before that I was having an “interesting time” trying to get Link’s character arc to line up with the beginning of Warriors’s story. That was a lie. I have been massively underplaying how worried I was about not getting his character arc from the past to align with the present, and it has been stressing me the fuck out.
Then I wrote this bit: “Maybe when the next few generations have turned over, and he was truly a figment of history, his title would reflect that: the Hero of Rebirth, or something of the like.”
And I was like oh, he’s still delusional! Yay!! We’re on track!!!
Generally speaking, there was a stark difference between Link and Warriors’s POVs this chapter. In the past, you can see Link start to work himself up into cycles of anxiety with the way he worries about what other people think about him and what his actions mean existentially. He is a high-strung mess. Meanwhile, Warriors feels serene. He’s finally at peace with who he is, and he feels almost no need to perform the same rigmarole of self-pity and anxiety.
I don’t think this change in mindset was noticeable to anyone except me since, hilariously, Link’s plot is made of extremely low-stakes domestic troubles while Warriors is grappling with making sure the kingdom doesn’t get conquered.
I also like how when Link starts talking again, he doesn’t find relief in working through his depression enough to resume normal functions; instead, he twists himself up worrying that other people would think that he’s a fraud. He won’t let himself win. Literally.
I went a little out of my way to explain why Linkle has pet cuccoos, but unfortunately, I could not include a scene where Lincoln offered to get her a cat or dog, and she insisted on cuccoos. And Lincoln just shrugged and said, sure, I guess. Whatever works for you.
Having dual timelines means that I get to give characters multiple exits from the story. A majority of the knights are dead or gone from the plot altogether in the present day, but their final exit from the story is in the past. They don’t get a final, grand goodbye. There’s an assumption that Link will see them again. He will, technically. But for the readers, this is the last time we will see characters like Lincoln and Shigeo alive, and their final moments in the story are unremarkable and unsatisfying. But, hey-- Link will see them again someday.
Ayane using Link’s house as a hangout spot was vaguely alluded to during her introduction in chapter 9.
Ayane’s concept in the present day is more or less ‘stereotypical 14-year-old girl,’ and it was fun to show that she’s growing into that moody teenager now. Kids can change a lot in a few short months, and Link has more or less ignored her for half a year now.
I really enjoyed being able to put a magnifying glass on Proxi and Link’s relationship, highlighting how much of a burden it can be to be someone’s voice. I think fairies are more or less treated like unfeeling plot devices, and it’s been interesting for me to think about how it can feel to be suddenly made the voice of an emotionally wrecked man you barely know.
Despite it being one of the original scenes I came up with for the story, I almost cut that bit where Impa visited Link’s house for space. I kept it because I wanted to pair it with their reunion during the present day, but that scene got massively cut down from its original vision as well.
I say this a lot, but I wish I did more with Impa before this point. I’m sure the story works fine now, I can see the places were Impa would have been a stronger character if I included her more.
Link finally telling Jakuchō the whole story of what happened between him and Spirit was also a scene I envisioned from the beginning, though I had intended it to function more like a therapy session. I think it can still be read like that, but I think a lot of the progress I wanted him to make was achieved more by his yelling at Farore, followed by his struggle with feeling worried for Proxi.
I originally thought of the poisoned well story as a metaphor Link would use to describe why he thought he couldn’t ever be truly redeemed. As I played around with the metaphor, it turned into a story that sounded more like what Jakuchō would say to him to illustrate why his point of view wasn’t healthy. So, I gave the story to her to tell.
I also really like the idea of Link associating himself with a well when the threat of the Kakariko Well looms so large in the story as something that will be used to punish him.
Even now, I think Link’s concern stems less from a love for Proxi and more from a place of wanting to protect himself from further harm. He can’t suffer if Proxi is somewhere she wouldn’t get hurt.
Also, Link is so afraid of being alone that even though he recognizes that he doesn’t really want to travel anymore, he decides that he will if it means he can keep Proxi in his life.
Remember when I said I needed to go back into earlier parts of the story and adjust something in the Proxi storyline? I still haven’t done it yet. But basically, I realized that I was being needlessly coy about why Proxi was at the Fairy Fountain in Faron, and it’s actually very weird that these two never had a conversation about that (or her going onto the battlefield when trying to rescue Wind).
I still plan to add those conversations in, but it fell to the bottom of the priority list as I was rushing to finish the chapter. When I do it, I’ll let you know what chapters were adjusted.
Okay, onto the present day:
I like that after Warriors finds peace in himself, his first experience back in public are the people he grew up with. It’s sort of like he’s getting a moment to not only close a chapter in his life, but also redo his adolescence (if that makes sense…).
Tiff is named after Tiffany Problem, because it was the first thing that popped into my brain when trying to come up with peasant names.
As I mentioned before, I picked Link Dubya over Link Double-U because a) it reads as less clunky, and b) the George W. Bush reference was really funny to me.
I FINALLY got to write a scene where the entire Chain got to not only sit in the same room and chat with each other, but they also got to be funny. There are a ton of tiny bits that I personally thought were delightful, like Sky confiscating the wine and everyone being stressed out by the amount of money Warriors owes Ganondorf.
The funniest bit for me was the part where Time went through all 5 stages of grief when he realized it only happened once. That bit was inspired in part by this text post I saw about characters where it’s like “it’s weirder if two characters aren’t fucking about it” (wish I could find that post again).
Basically, I imagine that when Time realized what Spirit and Warriors got up to, he thought back to how weird they were about each other during the war and decided that, yeah, that actually makes sense.
(I imagine Mask back then just assumed that they were getting up to things because of how weirdly clingy both of them would get to each other. Like yeah, those are his brothers and they got something weird going on. He’s not going to touch it with a 10-foot pole, though.)
So when he found out that, nope, it only happened once, he had ten seconds to come to terms with the fact that not only were they that weird about each other back then for no discernible reason, but they didn’t do anything about it until the point where it was clearly a terrible idea. Despite all that, they still only do it once when everything he knows about them says that this should be a terrible decision they each make over and over again.
Time, realizing he really can’t keep up with whatever the fuck is going on in the situationship: “Uh… huh.”
I talked a bit here about how the friendship with the Chain is more or less over, but what I want to point out is that while it has ended, both sides are now doing what the other wanted from the beginning. The Chain wanted Warriors to freely offer up information and include them in his plans, which he does when explaining his situation with Ganondorf and his deal with Zelda. Warriors wanted the Chain to take his insight seriously and understand how the politics in his era worked, as they can do now. They are working together better than ever, but the friendship is gone.
You can also see me, the author, yelling about political moderates here. I think Warriors’s plan highlights what I think makes him a fun character: this cynical understanding of the world that he uses to try to do the right thing (ethics pending).
I originally was going to have two separate scenes where Warriors individually offers Sky and Wind the same advice, which I luckily realized could be combined into one.
Even though I didn’t set out with the intention of tying the resolutions of Sky and Wind’s subplots together, I think it really works on a thematic level.
I have a very rough system for keeping track of the passage of time during the present day. We entered Warriors’s era roughly around mid to late July. We’re currently in early to mid-November, which amounts to about 100 days.
I had Wind give that number at first, but then I ironically remembered that he has memory issues and decided that he probably wouldn’t remember the exact number of days anymore.
I also just enjoy bludgeoning the reader over the head with reminders that, yes, the passage of time is real and these characters are getting older. It’s one of those small things I think makes or breaks a story-- if you think your story is missing something, you should probably check to see if time is truly passing for the characters.
That scene with Torgi almost didn’t get written, but I stubbornly kept it in, and I am so glad that I did. There needed to be a scene where Warriors gets called out for essentially taking the easy way out. I really wanted to highlight to the reader that Warriors’s isn’t becoming this perfect hero. He’s willingly choosing a flawed resolution because, frankly, he’s just not willing to go the extra step being truly heroic would take. He just wants a happy ending, not the best ending.
“A peace that lasts is its own form of violence.” I frankly went off with that line, and I hope you all appreciated it lol
Also, Torgi’s 100% correct when he implied that the Lincoln and Ganondorf marriage would have ended in light of Ganondorf’s scheming. This is the word of god coming in to confirm that had Lincoln not died, he was about to enter a very messy divorce.
Impa and Warriors’s reunion gave me so much trouble, and is the primary reason why this chapter was delayed by a week. There was a conversation they need to have that I intended for them to do right before the inquiry.
But I kept running into the problem that once they had this conversation, the inquiry would no longer matter. I kept hitting this wall over and over again before I realized that I just needed to chuck that conversation into a later chapter. The only thing from that original conversation that stayed was Warriors giving his condolences for Shigeo’s death.
Oh, the inquiry.
You can tell that I was having a lot of fun. I’ve gotten a few comments about how the chapter really started to go off once the inquiry began, and I agree. Everything before felt like I was putting the last few pieces in place. Hell, I think everything from Spirit leaving until now has been a very careful arrangement of bullets so that I can now, finally, start unloading the damn gun.
If you’ve watched Legend of the Galactic Heroes, everything in this inquiry is going to be very familiar. I originally (3ish years ago) had a straight-up treason trial on the plot outline that I changed to an inquiry when I saw the scene in LOGH.
The treason trial would have begged the question as to why we would bother giving Warriors a real trial now, when I had made it very clear in the beginning that martial law would have gotten rid of due process for people suspected of treason. An inquiry does not have the same baggage.
Plus, the LOGH scene was built around politicians wanting to humiliate/harass someone they perceived as a political rival, which is exactly what I wanted this to be.
I was cackling to myself the entire time I was writing the speaker’s lines. Like, I just had so much fun with the sheer audacity of a sham trial.
I wanted to include a quick line from Warriors where he realized that, yes, if he had been given the chance to become a solicitor like he wanted to when he was a kid, he really would have been good at it. I did not write it because that would have been too heavy-handed.
Last chapter, I talked about how concerned I was that the tension got too deflated over the climax of the Spirit fight and I wouldn’t have enough time to raise the stakes again. I knew that the stakes were going to go from 0 to 100 once Nephus’s surprise attack began, but I was worried the story would feel meandering until then. I didn’t want it to be too obvious that I needed to buy time to put the last few things into place before letting the war storyline fully take over.
Did I succeed? Not really? In my eyes, every scene leading up to this moment was necessary to the plot and characters, and the looming threat of the inquiry did well enough to keep some sense of tension. But I’m also aware that there probably is a version of this story where I could have cut or combined scenes and still had a workable plot. I don’t have any specific ideas as to how that would work, but I can just feel these past two chapters dragging a little.
Also, hello foreshadowing I laid down in chapter 3 finally reaping its fruits! Thank you Midna and your walls for providing justification for this funky use of the Fused Shadows.
I was going to have the entire Chain rush in at the beginning of the attack to help, but there was so much happening already that I did not want to then have to juggle eight extra characters.
So the last portion of this chapter was written the day of posting. By that, I mean that I left the marriage scene for the day-of, but then decided to rewrite Warriors and Zelda’s fleeing from the castle because my original draft sucked.
One of the reasons why it sucked was that I was going to be coy about whether the king dies or not for a couple of more chapters, but I decided that I wanted to give Warriors’s crowning more weight. Plus, it would immediately cue the reader into realizing that Zelda knows how to remain calm under emotional duress.
My original wedding scene concepts tied in closely to my original idea for the proposal/bargain Warriors and Zelda made. In that version, they would have made the bargain the day that Zelda arrived back to Castle Town. Warriors would join her in a carriage to parade around the city as a way to avoid getting arrested to be put on trial. There, in front of everyone, they would have a covert bargaining scene. Right after they struck their deal, Zelda would order the parade to reroute to the Temple of Time where she would insist that she had to get married now.
Like I said last chapter, I scrapped this because I wanted Warriors to take more action in the story to fix things as opposed to waiting around for Zelda to help. Once the parade scene was trashed, so too did the original set-up for the marriage ceremony.
Can you tell I struggled a bit with the marriage vows? I was trying so hard not to use any phrases we use in real life, especially I now pronounce you man and wife and you may kiss the bride. I was struggling to find some phrasing that would read as wedding without being too familiar.
Small but vital detail you may have missed: in being crowned king, Warriors loses his original surname. Link Walton is gone, replaced by Link Harkinian.
I have mentioned this before, and I will mention it again: I love characters who lose by winning. Congrats, Warriors: you are now the King of Hyrule. This is your definition of hell. You will never be free.
For that reason, I wanted to end on the image not of the crown on his head, but on the shackle on his wrist. It’s heavy-handed symbolism for sure, but I want this to feel like losing.
And to top if off, the All hail the king! / Long live the king! then becomes ominous, like this is the sentence he’s been given for every crime he’s ever committed. He will always be an icon, less than human. He’ll be admired, but not loved. He’ll have to live, because now his life will never be his own.
Link Walton is dead. Long live King Harkinian.
Well… I think that’s everything important.
Spirit’s still not back in the story. Sad!
Anyway, some housekeeping: we’re still on track to finish the story in 4 chapters (3 story, 1 epilogue).
I will be unlocking the story so that non-archive users can read it again. It’s temporary, as I fully intend to lock it again once CTB is fully finished. So if the story being unlocked is important to you, keep that in mind!
All that being said, I am excited to get started on the next chapter! Until then, let me know what you think!
some trivia questions if they happen to hit any random worldbuilding you have ^-^
Do Spirit & Warriors have any favourite flowers, simply by appearance/scent or tied to someone else?
Do they have any spending habits, e.g indulging in treats or aren't particularly materialistic? Particularly Warriors, how was he doing on rupees and buying things during the quest with the Chain?
Did Warriors have any go-to stories to share about his war that wouldn't actually reveal much but would satisfy the Chain's curiosity?
Does Spirit have any particular memory (good or bad) that he remembers, or do they all blur together in a way where he has trouble picking out something specific from (unless tied to a physical injury)?
Favourite colors VS colors they most often wear (outside Warriors' hero outfit & Spirit's work uniform)
Oh yes! I love it when people ask me stuff like this!
Do Spirit & Warriors have any favourite flowers, simply by appearance/scent or tied to someone else?
Warriors would probably say roses, if only because he thinks that's the "right" answer (they're symbols of elegance and royalty, etc), but he doesn't know what his favorite flower is. His mother wore a floral perfume and, while he's never known what exactly which flower it’s based on, it's his favorite.
I've mentioned before that New Hyrule is just California. Since Spirit has lived most of his life on the coast, he's probably very well acquainted with golden poppies. I imagine the hills near Trading Post are covered in them during the spring. They remind him of home.
Do they have any spending habits, e.g indulging in treats or aren't particularly materialistic? Particularly Warriors, how was he doing on rupees and buying things during the quest with the Chain?
Warriors is materialistic in that he sees the importance of replicating the habits of the upper class, but he doesn't want a lot of things for himself. During his own era, his hero pension would make him middle class. Outside of his era, he seems rich. Rupees go farther the further back in time Warriors goes, so everyone else in the Chain thinks he's rich. He's just amazed at how much he could buy with such little money.
Because his wallet isn't endless, the money he brought with him on his quest (as well as everyone else's) has been designated as an emergency fund. If the Chain can hunt for food or get supplies and housing through a few hours of labor, they'll do that over using their money. Warriors actually had a lot of fun roughing it out, though he did complain more than once about not being able to go sleep on a comfy bed at night without having to spend a few hours doing odd-jobs first.
I think Spirit has no sense of how to budget or save money, and is only saved by the fact that he doesn't think about spending his money on a lot of things. This takes a lot of people back, as everyone assumes his meticulousness extends to anything beyond trains.
I've been trying to think of a way to explain how he has trouble conceptualizing money, and I'm not sure if I can. In his head, he doesn't have enough money to buy a house now so there's no point in ever trying to save up for it. He doesn't rush out to spend all of his money, but he doesn't hesitate to buy something if he needs it. After all, he needs it. He's lucked out in that he doesn't think he needs a lot, so he lives in a shitty apartment, wears shitty clothes, and fixes anything he can. If you write out his expenses, you would find he spends most of his money either on take out (man can't cook) or cigarettes (whenever he's not trying to quit).
Did Warriors have any go-to stories to share about his war that wouldn't actually reveal much but would satisfy the Chain's curiosity?
Warriors had a goal to never reveal anything incriminating about himself to the Chain, so he avoided talking about himself as much as possible. Whenever he was expected to share his experiences, he found a way to deflect or make it as boring as possible. For the war, his go-to was to talk briefly about a battle and taking as many tangents as he could about whatever forms or paperwork he had to do to make X happen until one of the other boys got fed up and directed the conversation elsewhere.
According to Warriors, he spent a lot of the war behind a desk and writing reports. Sure, he fought. He defeated Ganondorf, after all. But they were small blips between all of the bureaucracy.
Does Spirit have any particular memory (good or bad) that he remembers, or do they all blur together in a way where he has trouble picking out something specific from (unless tied to a physical injury)?
For Spirit, his memories are pretty clear. If asked, he could sit down and recount specific stories from the war in the order they happened. They haven't faded at all, and that's frustrating in his own way. There's a degree of detachment for most of them, to the point where he's still looking back and thinking "what was that?"
He thinks back a lot to his first few weeks in Warriors's era. It was before his first battle. They had just met and didn't know each other well. Warriors was busy and had thrown Spirit into training with the other soldiers to get him caught up to speed with how the military worked. Because he was a hero, everyone training with him gave him a wide berth. He was too shy to try to approach them. He was in a new, overwhelming environment. He was the loneliest he had ever been.
Spirit can remember how desperately he looked forward to the brief pockets of time he had with Warriors. He remembers seeing Warriors go about his business around the camp and how he wished Warriors would turn around and see him. He remembers of much he worried that Warriors wouldn't like him. He remembers when Warriors would suddenly notice his staring. He remembers how relieved he felt when Warriors smiled in returned.
Favourite colors VS colors they most often wear (outside Warriors' hero outfit & Spirit's work uniform)
I like the idea that every Link's favorite color is green. They are so different in a lot of ways yet for some reason, that’s the one thing they share.
Warriors's personal clothes are very desaturated. A lot of navy, white, and black. Dark blue would be a favorite of his, as it wouldn't read as mourning clothing. When he's not on duty, he wants to blend in. He also wants to be perceived as being older and mature, so he avoids bright colors or anything too flashy. Even though he's very conscious of the trends and wants to be perceived as worldly, his attire leans more towards the classic, if not outright old fashion.
That being said, he's probably at his happiest when he wears the simplest pair of trousers and shirt. That's workmen attire, and he likes the idea of not being able to care about his appearance sometimes.
Spirit's personal clothes are very practical. He's prone to getting dirty, so he wears darker colors to avoid doing laundry too much, He just wears whatever he gets his hands on and, if something gets a hole, he'll pick a random piece of fabric to patch it up. So while his base clothes are fairly dark, they're brighten up with patches of every color.
In New Hyrule, you have to wear a hat whenever you're outside. It's considered uncouth to have your hair showing. His go-to cap is a flat cap that has a bright red lining on the inside. Someone once told him that matching your accessories was very stylish, so if he wants to look more presentable, he'll try to match his outfit with the red lining inside his hat. How? He ties a red bandana around his neck and calls it a day.
Okokok while we wait for commentary my fav part of the chapter was the Chain convo. Twi said Wars is dead to him and Wars incorporated that firmly into his current perception (and has moved on emotionally) but the Chain ultimately have trouble just... Ignoring things like that.
The captain died, but Link Walton is still alive. They could have started over, maybe, regardless of how rocky their whole relationship is, the broken trust. Like they could talk more and find a nice neat reason for why all this had to happen and then could go back to how they used to be
My view on the Chain right now is slightly different, though I am so deep into Warriors's POV that I sometimes have a hard time discerning what a different character is thinking/feeling vs what Warriors thinks they do. So I might be wrong and my own text will argue against me, etc.
All that's to say that I think Warriors and the Chain are generally on the same page about where they are emotionally. His friendship with the Chain is more or less over, and all sides understand this in their own way. Twilight is at one end of the spectrum where he is mostly tolerating Warriors for the sake of getting everyone out, while on the opposite end we have Four who would be happy to keep Warriors around but knows it just would not be logistical anymore. Everyone else is somewhere else in the middle. (I'm also excluding Time from this conversation, for obvious reasons.)
When Warriors says that he intends to marry Zelda, everyone immediately understands that he would have to stay in his era. No one argues for him to join them anyway. No one says it's a tragedy that he'd be gone. Him leaving isn't upsetting, it's the reminder that they are going to have to separate some day. He'll be the first to leave, but he's not what they're mourning.
Wind illustrates this as literally as possible. Wind outright states that Warriors's leaving upsets him because of the precedent it sets in Wind's life: that he's gone through all these horrible, traumatic experiences that will never be satisfactorily resolved. If Warriors leaves now, then what the hell was all that about anyway?
One of the reoccurring themes in CTB is what do you do with an unfixable problem? At the beginning of the story, Warriors complains that he's become a problem that, in classic hero fashion, the rest of the Chain wants to solve. The problem with Warriors is that he not only broke their trust many times, but he has this history of abuse that doesn't disappear. He really isn't someone they want as a friend anymore.
The results is less of an implosion and more of a quiet separation. Before, both sides would fight and argue. Apologies were demanded and hashed out. Warriors would say he should leave, and he'd meet resistance. Now? No one is apologizing anymore. Everyone knows that once the opportunity arises, they'll all go their separate ways.
It's a sad, quiet ending to a friendship that legitimately saved Warriors's life. But things like that happens. Someones, you have to accept that you can't fix it. You have to walk away.
Hallo 🐦 Lowkey fascinated with present Spirit's little interaction with Kat... It was early into Spirit’s return lol. The scarf bit afterwards was also weird too. Trying to make Warriors look like his captain again. Outwardly at least what happened between Spirit and Katt seemed like, something Warriors would have done actually. Getting too close to someone he had a bad falling out with in the past and being dumbfounded when it doesn't work out.
Spirit has a good memory of the war and all the captain did to turn everyone against him, what did he expect of Kat in that moment? Even if Kat knew what really happened, that was five years ago, what was your angle engineer... Making Wars jealous, fishing for info, telling her about what the captain did or asking how she's been... What elicited that reaction!
Who is this adorable anime character and how are they gracing my ask box?
Spirit also highly suspected that Kat had been manipulated by Warriors into turning on him. He'd accused Warriors of orchestrating her big moment of dumping the chamber pot on him immediately after. After all, he felt awkward around Kat for a long time because she expressly liked him. He knew it didn't make sense for her to turn on him so suddenly.
So he has a soft spot for Kat-- holding out a torch for the possibility that he could get something back. The reader does not hear what Spirit specifically said to Kat, and I'll leave it unconfirmed as to what was said and why.
It is important to keep in mind:
This is the first Spirit heard of Kat's injury and disability
Spirit is trying out an ill-conceived plan to try to fix himself by being closer to Warriors
Kat has her own complicated feelings about Warriors between his history of being an asshole to her, his failure to save her, the fact that he killed the guys who hurt her, and that she nursed him on his journey to Faron.
Spirit is famously incapable of talking to anyone without shoving his foot into his mouth
I've been wondering for a while, what made you pick Walton and Macaryll as last names lol? Like, an actual reason or just "sounded right"? srry if youve already answered this xx
Around the time I started CTB, I had it in my brain that each hero's last name should incorporate elements of their hero title for ease of reading. So for Warriors, I planned to give him the last name Warton (y'know, as in War). But as I was first full-name dropping him in CTB, I went onto a surname website to double check if Warton was a real name. There, I saw Walton, which the site said meant "noble." I liked that and what it invoked way more, so I impulsively changed it to Walton.
Honestly, 10/10 decision on my part. It flows off the tongue so smoothly. You get two different L sounds, which makes his full name sound cohesive without sounding too repetitious. It can sound low or high class depending on the context. I did such a great job.
The story behind Macaryll is a bit more plot motivated. I wanted to give him a last name that immediately clarified that he was a descendant of Aryll without relying on just giving Wind a last name (in no small part because of how Aryll would feasibly change her last name after marriage). I ended up incorporating her name as a family name and adding the classic Irish "Mac" to indicate it's a clan name.
How that's actually pronounced sort of changes depending on my mood. Originally, I intended for it to be MICK-AR-EE-ILL, but I tried testing how the pronunciation might have been bastardized over the generations and have landed anywhere from MICK-ARE-ILL to MAC-ARE-ILL (sounds like mackerel). Depending on my mood, I tend to switch between the first and that last one the most.
🎉🎉Happy 4th Birthday to my one and only fanfiction! 🎉🎉
(You can tell how excited I am by the outdated graphic I'm using lol)
Jokes aside, it's been another year Warriors being a complicated person. It's incredible to me that there's still so much interest and support for a project I started while deep in the throes of pandemic-era quarantine.
Without all of you, I never would have gotten so far into this story. We're going to reach the end within the next handful of chapters, which has only been possible because at every step of the way, CTB has been shown nothing but gracious support.
Even though I bitch and complain, I am forever thankful for another fantastic year. Let's round this last bit with gusto!
As always, I try to do a little something to celebrate CTB making it another year. This time around, I am a little under-prepared, but I do have a few things.
Below is a collection of notes and outlines from my journals. They're a bit hard to read (my hand writing is very messy) and I've had to censor a few spoilers, but they're interesting to look at. Right?
And later today (whenever I schedule that post to go off), there will be a pretty hefty preview from the next chapter, which will released next weekend! That's actually the exciting thing.
Once more, thank you for another wonderful year! Of course, feel free to throw whatever questions you have about the series at me today. I have a job I need to do, but I will get to as many as I can whenever I am free from the capitalistic cogs!
Thank you so much!!!
-- Frankie xoxxo
Okay, let's review a selection of old notes. Because my handwriting is absolutely atrocious, I will provide some hopefully helpful commentary explaining what you're looking at.
Exhibit a) the very first sign of CTB in any of my journals was, weirdly enough, a doodle of Spirit:
Exhibit b) the very first outline I ever made, hastily written after I finished posting the first three chapters (which had originally been one chapter) and realized that I should probably have some form of a plan going:
Exhibit c) Various notes. Highlights include Warriors's thoughts on the monarchy, an abandoned plot point where the Master Sword burned Warriors for attacking Lana, the Chain's plot to fail the test, and early plans for Twilight and Wind being captured. I'm pretty sure the doodle is of Warriors and Kat dancing.
Exhibit d) Early scheming of how the hell I was going to end the story, spoilers censored. Also featuring some brainstorming for Faovaria, Wind and Warriors's relationship, Twilight being taking hostage by Faovaria, and early government coup idea.
Exhibit e) The first detailed outline for the story. This one lasted the longest out of all my outlines. You can see where I hastily split a few later chapters into two or switching plot points around. I have no idea what I was thinking when I initially had Warriors and co meet Ganondorf AFTER dueling Lincoln.
Exhibit f) Another Spirit doodle, to match the first one. This is post-war Spirit with his scar and longer hair. I mostly drew this to get a better visual of the scar.
Exhibit g) An improved version of the outline that took into account some changes I made to the pacing.
Exhibit h) The first time I mentioned Nephus by name in the notes. You can see I was really kicking around the idea of Twilight's rescue being resolved by Lana taking his place as choice captive.
Exhibit i) Another version of the outline, once more fixing the order and length of things for pacing reasons. The censored bits are for plot points that have not happened yet, and I'm amazed that I at any point thought they would happen that early in the story. The post-it note is another hasty pacing revision.
Exhibit j) During my hiatus after Spirit returned, I took a lot of time thinking through the last half of the story. During a long layover at an airport, I sat down and wrote out a summary of each act. Here you can see that I had planned for a plot line where Warriors would try to work with the Sheikah with plans to double cross them.
Exhibit k) Another outline revision. You can see here the beginning of last year's realization that the Hyrule Castle arc was going to take a lot more space and time than I had initially planned. The outline has since been revised again, which I won't share due to the amount I would need to censor.
And there we go! Believe it or not, but this is truly the most coherent sections of my notes. A lot of my brainstorming is unreadable, even to me. I hope you found this interesting!
