Your kimi bono fotb ask response made me realize that despite having followed you for a while and as a result having seen many posts that you tagged fotb i never actually realized what it stood for lol for the past few months i’ve been alternating between thinking it stands for fresh off the boat or, later, once i realized that it was a fantasy au, fellowship of the (b)ring. Oops.
So anyways i loved your answer to the ask so much that i just read through everything you’ve tagged with it and wow!! This world you’ve imagined up is so so sick!! I’m always impressed with your ideas but this one in particular is crazy to me, probably because it comes with a whole world with its own lore and also SO many characters with rich backgrounds + interlocking stories (and, if i read one of your asks right, some character sheets???) Did you know you are insane and also an inspiration to us all?? ? Anyways. I am quite curious about how you see rosquez fitting in given what little you mentioned about fantasy spain and fantasy italy not getting along but also so interested in enea + pedro (loyal knight pedro im foaming at the mouth…. i imagine him in my mind’s eye and I like what i see!!)
scREAMS sometimes i completely forget that i never actually call it by its full name. have i EVER called it by its full name on main??? oh my god. anyway fotb stands for Flat Of The Blade lmao. fellowship of the 🅱️ring is vastly superior in every way, though
re: the lore and everything like. as i've mentioned in passing a couple times there is a whole map which is how you know a bitch is in too deep and YES there are character sheets!! i think sometime early last year i was relistening to one of my fave d&d podcasts and was like well. i have this fantasy au. might as well build fucking d&d character sheets for the fotb cast. and i did! there are ten of them as it turns out i just looked. i love putting time and energy into things that will never see the light of day
PHEWWWW YOU HAVE UNLEASHED SOME THINGS WITH THIS ASK!!! really this should be a two-parter but we'll see how we go i apologize so much in advance!!
SOOOOOOOOOO rosquez. here's the thing no matter the au they've got to have a whirlwind romance that turns tragic. and that's what happens to them here naturally. i guess to explain their bit we have to talk about the war a little bit? as touched on briefly in the previous post about fotb, the war started out mostly as little border skirmishes between basically all of the sections/provinces/countries. no one really liked each other and no one wanted to work with each other but fantasy spain & italy especially had a TON of beef because there's this disputed territory in between them that they'd been fighting over for yeeears and years even before the war started in earnest. (this area in "present day" is technically neutral land but is largely controlled by the south in collaboration with fantasy spain) (somewhat relevantly all of the countries are all still sovereign, even fantasy italy! lewis is The King people respect him all around but he's only truly the King in the south)
anyway the war happens, it is bloody and messy and unfocused until they (as mentioned) find focus and unite against the blood magic-using italians, which is fair. honestly. at that point you've got the italians largely just defending their own territory vs making any attempts at invasion, and their "proper" army is pretty flimsy by the end of everything especially once the magic runs out lol (there's some stuff to say about the magic but we'll get into that another time). BUT during one of the later stage border skirmishes (this is after the Defeat of italy but the war drags on a bit after that because of the pre-existing spain-italy beef) there's an incident where valentino is separated from his roving gang of horseback orphans and is near-fatally injured, left for dead, pinned under his dead horse. i have referred to the italians as horse cultists a few times; this is partially because, well, ferrari. and partially because they LOVE their horses. like a lot of these guys have grown up with their horses from childhood and when their horses die it's a massive deal, often more of a big deal than a person dying? there's all sorts of rituals and funeral pyres and things and usually a year-long grieving period where they just. don't have a horse. don't ride. it's agony lol. so vale being pinned under the body of his dead horse who he has been riding for well over a decade is traumatic on a lot of levels lmao
enter: marc marquez! marc, who is like, 19 or 20 at this point? and joined in the fighting three or four years prior more out of honour than outright hate for fantasy italy has also been separated from his gang of roving spaniards, but he is not injured, and he finds vale, and it's like. i think valentino is probably pretty well-known, definitely in fantasy italy and to a lesser extent in fantasy spain? infamous over there for sure. so marc has this opportunity to kill valentino, and to be able to say I Killed Valentino Rossi, which would be... glorious, especially for someone his age. like he'd be lauded forfuckinever about it. but i think also marc at this point has a very tender heart. and he knows enough about the culture to know this dead horse situation is a legitimate tragedy, and so the options then narrow down to mercy-killing (which would still end with Glory, technically) or. save valentino's life.
shocking no one he chooses the latter lmao. so you've got this short stocky dude heaving a full-grown horse off of this guy who has killed So Many of marc's countrymen, and then checking out vale's wounds, and then TREATING his wounds. i don't think marc is big on like healing-craft by any means but he knows enough that vale is stabilized, and he's able to get vale to a relatively safe place (significantly less safe for marc, because they head west and into fantasy italy!). they also camp out that night and marc goes back to the body of vale's horse and clips some of her hair for vale to keep because, as mentioned, he knows enough about the culture to know how significant the horse is. vale wants to hate him sooooooooo bad. but is. so touched by this
it takes them like two weeks, then, but they manage to stumble back to valentino's hometown (where all the orphans are yay! and where luca's dad is the "lord" (there's a bit of a different system in fantasy italy which again we'll get into another time). and marc just. stays there. for like a year and a half. and the rosquez romance grows and grows and it gets very Very serious until there's a fucking raid by a rogue fantasy spain group lmao
essentially what happens then is this town is fucking decimated. any kids that weren't orphans before sure are now, including luca. the town is burnt to the ground, so so so many people die, and this town was sort of one of the last Proper towns left? so it's this extremely horrific final blow and it happens AFTER the war which is like. not good. (nothing ever comes of it because fantasy italy is still on thin ice and since all the countries are sovereign lewis can't intervene and insist on any punishments etc, and fantasy france just doesn't give a fuck). so this is happening, and vale is standing in the fucking inferno that was his home, and he immediately blames marc. how could this group have gotten so close undetected without help? has marc been a plant this whole time? basically vale goes temporarily truly insane and marc is pleading with him and trying to reason with him but obviously this doesn't go well; valentino goes after him with a knife or sword and fucks up marc's arm (!) and at that point marc runs. valentino chases him for ages through the forest in the night, it's all very dramatic. there's some ironing out that needs to be done with the details here but marc encounters An Italian who does believe that he's not been undercover this whole time and helps him escape, and coincidentally (like a day or two later) marc runs into alex close to the border of fantasy spain, at which point he just collapses and is real fucked up for a long time, but they get him home, relatively safe if not entirely whole
and vale spends the next ten years literally roving the land killing any spaniards he sees even close to italian land because he hates marc So Much lmao. marc sort of grows out of it but he carries that sadness with him for a very very long time
(they do see each other again during the second war. but that's another story)
okay this is so much. this is too much. i'm going to rb with the pedrea bit even though i THINK it should be shorter than this LOL but!!! thank you THANK you for coming into my inbox and indeed my HEART by asking abt fotb 😭😭😭😭
