Exile//Vilify: The Final Update - The Work is Complete!
(5.30.22)
The final update. There is a LOT I could say here, but I’m just going to let it rest for a few days and speak for itself before I say anything further.
As a reminder, this update is not just one chapter, it is three parts. A final chapter, an epilogue, and another little vignette at the end. Make sure you read through to the end!
Content Warning: it should be obvious by now, but there is a major character death in this chapter. There is also a pretty graphic description of Astor’s final transformation. Take care of yourselves and take breaks if you need! It’s emotionally heavy, but I think the end is very beautiful.
It’s been a fantastic journey with you all. I’ll have a longer post about this later. Thank you all for going along on it with me.
Link to AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28086507/chapters/98433576#workskin
(The following is a really long post both on my thoughts on the end of the novel and what it means to me personally, as well as my plans looking into the future and where you’ll be able to find me from here.)
First of all, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading and coming to the end of this fic. It was a monster of a project and I’m both sad and relieved to see it come to an end. It started out just as an idea that would not leave my mind, inspired by a song I somehow came to associate with him, playing on repeat over and over again the same way I pictured him brooding over his fate and exile.
Images of him staring out over the canyon and thinking on the castle, a place he might have once loved and lived in, as he watched the king raise armies and the Divine Beasts that would only serve to seal his doom. How Astor, knowing this, simply watched it all happen, beholden to his own part in the prophecy, destined to take his part against him, like something on a giant chess board the two of them were forced to play out.
Ever since December of 2020, I have wanted to do that picture of him justice, and while the story evolved to put much less focus on the mental chessboard between Astor the king - the makers and defiers of prophecy - I found that truly a lot of set-up and explanation was needed in order to build a world in which Astor would inhabit, love, and be doomed to destroy. A man who is destined to have everything stripped away from him in the name of Ganon must have something to strip away in the first place.
It also started from a point of observation for me, something about the world in BOTW and the Legend of Zelda franchise as a whole I had been mulling over long before we met Astor. And that is, in their world: it seems like there is no free will. Zelda must awaken her power despite her own desire to focus on Sheikah tech, Link is chosen by the King, and then the sword, and simply must fight because he is destined to be a hero, and that is what heroes do. There is so much focus on fate and prophecy in the LOZ series as a whole, and the more you think about it, if prophecies are always meant to be true, and some people have no choice in being heroes, others must then have no choice in being villains. People in prophecies are “chosen,” they do not choose, and even on a meta level, as this is a video game franchise, the player is literally controlling every aspect of the character and their movements. Their actions are not their own. They are being puppeteered.
I played through BOTW the first time and progressively thought about how unfair it all seemed - the very same thing had happened 10,000 years ago, and how it was rearing its ugly head again. Did Rhoam, like many a tragic Greek figure, actually fulfill and exacerbate his doom by trying so desperately to work against it? These are the very same questions that plagued my mind when I began the fic, posed by Thelem at the end of the book. I use my writing to explore concepts, ask questions and discover the answers for myself through the process of writing a book. And in the almost two years I spent to write Exile//Vilify, I found myself ending with just as many questions as I had at the start, with not a single one of them answered. No knowledge gained, nothing completely worked through. The same doomed prophecy as it was at the start, and nothing anyone could do about it.
But by the end, I realized that it didn’t matter. I wrote 150k words about a life to be stripped from - a life we all knew the ending of from the beginning - and just like many of the characters kept repeating, it was about the moment. The process. Loving and fully living in each moment even if you fail, even if you know where it will end. Failure is something I fear desperately in my own life. I have great anxiety about putting so much time and effort and love into making my dreams come true, only to have them fizzle out and stripped away from me in the end. What if I fail despite how hard I try? What if I am destined to fail, what if I have no say in whether I fail or not? And while this book by no means made me overcome that fear, it did draw my attention to it, which I should have recognized from the beginning when I joked about Astor being such a failure as a villain. Unlike Astor though, I am happy I get to live in a world with free will, where even if I do fail, I can try again, and make choices on how to respond, and know my life is mine to do my own with.
Astor is not as fortunate.
I know I’m not alone when I say that I felt robbed of Astor as a villain. He seemed so interesting, to have such great potential, and yet he was hollow and near pointless in his existence. I wanted so badly to fill the gaps, to do justice to an otherwise eschewed character. I love doing that in my work - focusing on the stories that lie between, that other people may write off or ignore. My writing of this fic was an act of appreciation, in a way, or a proposal for something that could have been, something we - all of us - had the freedom to create after being given such a one-note villain who will be nothing but thrown away and forgotten in a spinoff game. It doesn’t matter, because he matters to us, and that is what makes the difference.
I’ve been told multiple times this fic has been viewed as “the bible” in our small but mighty Astor community, and I can’t tell you what this means to me. It means a lot for me to be viewed as someone who had that kind of influence on our collective idea of this character. I’m certainly not claiming to be an authority, but I’m glad my fic has come to have its place in our literature and that so many people have come to recognize and enjoy it. It’s a gen fic with no major romance about a side character in a side game, there’s no way it was ever going to reach the levels of big mainstream loz fics out there, but that doesn’t matter, because Astor matters to me, and he matters to us, and the nearly 4k hits and 150 kudos the fic has at the time of writing this - along with all the comments - are more than enough for me.
But now that the fic is over, what do we do?
I’ll admit I’m still going through the writer’s mourning period/withdrawal after finishing a book, but I can feel the recovery coming on soon. I have a few smaller ideas already on the table (along with Trouble Will Find Me), one regarding an alternate route I almost took for Astor in Exile//Vilify (more explicitly as a reincarnation of Ganon’s seer). That would be a very small one-shot fic. I do still have Stories from Exile for you to read and will occasionally update (have a lot of ideas still on my list there). However, that said, these are no longer my top priority in the same way Exile//Vilify was. Because until I started writing Exile//Vilify, I hadn’t really considered myself part of the loz community at all. I was a Pokémon writer, and I have a trilogy that I took a detour from in order to get this fic out of my mind. I’m going to set my focus on returning to that series now, although like I’ve said, I do still plan on popping into this community. I’m not going to ghost you all, I’ll still answer asks, stay active, and post every now and then. You, and this fic, have meant too much to me over the course of this journey for me to go away like that.
So please, don’t be a stranger! Your thoughts and asks and messages are always welcome. If you want to make art or other fics inspired by my worldbuilding, please do. I thought this was clear, but I’ve never explicitly stated it. You’re fully welcome to use my ideas as long as I get a shoutout - mostly just because I also want to see it :). I worked too hard on this for too long for other people not to use it for ideas. Please do. Show me your art. Show me your things. I want to love them.
So where can you find me now? Here on this blog, of course, although tumblr seems to have not necessarily “shadowbanned,” but blocked some of its functionality after the ios ban. So if you’re not checking here, you can reach me on my main @silverjirachi.
If you are interested in my pokemon series (focusing on the hoenn region and hardenshipping, Archie and Maxie) you can follow @the-dead-sea-trilogy and @hoenn-pride, my pokemon side blogs, the first of course for my fic related things and the other for general pokemon things.
And of course, you can still find the rest of my work by browsing my author page on AO3. I’ve posted WIP wednesdays and previews of my coming fics there.
Also-
In the coming weeks or a few months into the future, I may be making a special offer regarding a physical release of this book. I get all my fics hard-cover bound for my own personal collection, but I’ve already had a few people ask me about having copies of their own. Keep your eyes open for an update on when/how this will happen if you are interested. It will be a very small, one-time thing to friends and close fans as, naturally, it’s going to be a gift coming from mostly my own wallet.
I’m going to conclude by dropping a bit of music here. (Slight Exile//Vilify spoilers, so if you haven’t read the ending yet, please do). But, as you might have figured out by the ending, Thelem is somewhat of a narrator character. He was my way to ask questions of the fic - the questions he asks at the end - and acted as a guardian angel of sorts of the book. He is my representation of my love for the story, and of the story of Astor as a whole. It was very, very early on in my writing process when I realized what would have to happen to him by the end, and I cried and was frustrated about it when I realized, but somehow that made me grow to appreciate and love him even more, strengthening his role in the novel as a whole. There was one song by The National - who also wrote the song Exile Vilify (The National, weirdly, has inspired all my fics thus far) that I came across around this same time that somehow I came to associate with Thelem.
The lyrics, though indirect, speak to me of a man resigned to yet content with his place in life, and how that place is flooded with this melancholy sort of love informed by the pain of the reality around him. This is in such stark contrast to the way we see Astor throughout his life - who knows no peace with the weight of prophecy that weighs over his head. I kept turning the lyrics, “Sorry I hurt you, but they say love is a virtue, don’t they?” over in my mind, like this man knew how things would end and let it happen anyway - out of love. He knows what he has to do is painful, but he does it because love - devotion - is a virtuous thing that is not always happy. And so as much as the song Exile Vilify is the namesake and first inspiration for the fic, Sea of Love has been its secret, underlying theme. It followed shortly after, and has always informed my perspective in writing it, knowing where it all would end, and I’m glad I can finally share that with you.
Because while I thought I was writing a book about prophecy, about the inherent “fucked-up”ness of being a chosen one, in a weird way, the fic was written about, and at its heart, is about love. Love of the character, love of the process, love of the story, and the twisted, distorted love of prophecy. It’s about how all those things affected the courses each of their lives - both for better and for the worse - at the time of Astor’s demise. It’s not the ending, it’s the moments shaped by love in between. Because, as Thelem says at the end of the book - love, while painful, still lessens the fall of everything.
And so that is how I will choose to end. Once again, thank you so much for all the support, for making me feel like I was part of a community, and for reading my story of Astor to its ending. It made such a difference to me, and I’m looking forward to the next things on the horizon.
exile//vilify physical release: copyediting/proofreading help
hi everybody! like i said, i intend to do a limited release of physical copies of exile//vilify sometime in the near future. that said, i want to make sure the manuscript is as polished and as free from error as it can possibly be.
the lovely @sharlmbracta has already offered to help do some copyediting and feedback work (and has completed chapter one) and i wanted to put out an ask just to see if anyone else would be interested in lending a hand.
please note that your help is not a requirement and if you cannot help me out at this time, you will still be able to get a physical copy when i get them printed. i am only asking for help solely to make the process go a little bit faster and smoother - not because it is an expectation.
The bulk of the work for the physical release is already coming out of my own wallet (I can’t charge money for the fic) so unfortunately I can’t offer to pay you. However I’d give you a shoutout in the front matter and I’d also maybe write you a little note in there :3
If you’re interested, please reply to this post or shoot me a message on my main. (I can’t receive DMs on this blog)
Welp... it’s looking like we are almost to the end of this magnificent journey. I’m not even done writing yet and yet I still kinda don’t want it to come to an end. But I figured I’d give you all a little heads up as to what’s looming over the horizon so you can know what to expect and so you can prepare yourselves to sob uncontrollably be ready for when the final update hits.
It’s looking like there will only be 2 more updates before the fic’s conclusion. We have one more full, regularly-structured chapter like we’ve been seeing as normal. Then there will be a chapter that might be a bit longer than usual (not sure yet) plus some small snippets that will make more sense when we get there, then an epilogue/conclusion.
That final chapter plus the epilogue moments will be released together on the day of the final update (you will thank me for this, I promise).
After that, I will probably take a break to rest, cry, and celebrate the completion of my fic. It’s been an amazing journey and I’m so excited to draw it to its end, as much as I’m sure I’m gonna miss. This has been my past year - over a year now - and I’ve met and interacted with so many lovely people as a result of it. Finally coming to the end of a whole 150k is gonna be a whole event for me, definitely, and I might need some time off depending on how I feel. There’s always a chance I completely skyrocket in the opposite direction though and dive headfirst into my next project to escape the melancholic feeling of “Wow, that happened,” but we’ll see.
Stories from Exile (Ongoing Exile//Vilify related snippets) and Trouble Will Find Me (Thelem and Azelphir Order of the Seers spinoff) will then update on their own time. Trouble Will Find Me is likely to get an update very close to or immediately after the release of the final portions of Exile//Vilify, and it will include the first few chapters of the book, and then the rest will be added in later. I don’t plan to update that one by chapter as I have for Exile//Vilify - Trouble Will Find Me will either be released in chunks, or as a whole all at once.
I have a lot of writing to do between now and then, but I just wanted to keep you all in the know! I plan to remind you all again when those final chapters get closer to dropping.
