#queenlua

[markoftheasphodel]

queenlua asks: "oh also how'd you pick that title"

It's a quote from Alexander Pope, as cited in an editorial in the London Times, on the stupidity on busting members of the Rolling Stones for weed and diet pills circa 1967.

Sigma S Star, my fictional band, is 3.5/6 inspired by the Stones and 2.5/6 inspired by Pink Floyd.

[nihilnovisubsole]

ok if you REALLY mean ANY ship then let's here your take on naesala/leanne

or naesala/reyson. or both. fuck. i hit enter too fast

omg i had a really busy week at work, so i've been looking forward to sitting down and answering this for days. i love venturing into ship territory that i know nothing about. i could do this forever. anyway. these are fire emblem names, right

would you ship it? well, for a start, this naesala guy is hilarious. he looks like he should be voiced by crispin freeman and have geocities fansites. i mean that as a compliment. it seems he and leanne were childhood friends, and there's an ending where they get married and have bird babies? how wholesome.

her brother reyson, though. this looks spicier. it sounds like they start out as enemies, but naesala goes on a journey to redeem himself in the end? i mean, i've seen ships built on far less. between the political intrigue and the contrasting hair colors, i could see how it'd appeal to people.

wait a minute, naesala SELLS reyson? good lord, what is fire emblem about.

what would be your favorite thing about the ship? my very thin familiarity with the series tells me that it's about ordinary people being swept up in the chaos of conflicts bigger than them. i think in a setting like that, it's important to focus on how people tether themselves to each other despite these forces, and despite their differences. the three clearly have a lot of history, so whichever one you pair the raven king with, it could be fun to lean into those years of baggage.

i'm sooo curious to know what @arthoure thinks!

[airlock]

6, 11, 27!

(pertinent to this ask meme)

#6 - Who's your favorite lord/protagonist?

I may or may not have recently declared a crusade in his name.

(Claude is up there as well also!)

  #11 - A character that deserved better?

speaking of which, Claude would have been a prime candidate here, but at least, Three Hopes finally gave him a route that feels like it's his own and not the church's sloppy... firsts. although that route did bring with it a new candidate for this question (they did so little with shahid,)

anyway, god, how does one even begin to choose? I could nominate like half of every female cast from the Kaga era games for one thing. get to the modern games, and you get countless characters who would've benefitted greatly from not being under pressure from being a viable target for the resident customizable protagonist's gaping S-supporting maw. the ones in the middle of the maelstrom are safe from that sort of sweeping problem, but that's not to say they don't have any characters they inidividually did dirty... (Lyn deserved more story relevance, Elincia deserved more time in the limelight in Radiant Dawn, Eirika deserves more respect from the fandom if that counts, and that's just going through protagonists)

anyway, a solid chunk of Awakening's second generation deserved to be in a better game -- perhaps even their own game -- so I guess that's also a big one

  #27 - Any fanfics/fan content you’d recommend? (You can plug your own stuff it’s fine)

sneaky creature you are to ask that, considering how much of your stuff I'll rec in a half heartbeat,

anyway, I'm not nearly as avid of a reader as I should be, for being a writer, but here's some of the finest Fire Emblem fanfic that my terrible brain managed not to wander astray from:

Princess of Dawn and its sequels by @wyvern-dork are the ultimate gesture of dedication to a blorbo that I've ever had the privilege of witnessing, let's see, around 80 chapters of so far. y'know, out of the 193 total that are presently up. to describe it only as a novelization of the Akaneia Saga, starring Minerva and featuring Minerva/Palla, would be selling it short. I think the more accurate thing to call it, rather, is the Minerva bible.

not looking for a work that will beautifully gobble up your entire life like that, though? first off all, why aren't you? but second of all, you can still get your Minerva/Palla from the same tap in shorter form: in Blades of Champions, where the two of them are some of the tryhardingest fencers in the whole modern alternate universe

and to complete the hat-trick on recs for this particular friend's works, there's Fingers Through the Sand. in this fic, Luthier dies at war and Delthea's journey to completely mishandle her grief eventually takes her across the sea and to befriend another magical powerhouse with a heart full of grief -- Linde. it will hurt you perfectly while dazzling you with stuff about magic

but lest you think I'm letting you off without another Akaneia rec with lots of magic in it -- as if; here's simplicity by name, the delightful gift I was given for nagamas 2021. it's Merric/Arlen, albeit with some flexibility as to how romantic you read their interactions here exactly, also they're both magnificently trans of gender in there

and I'm not done with the magic yet, or with the ones I've managed to prompt out onto existance. after all, @dornishsphinx‘s May You Arrive at Fertile Phthia dotted that year's FE Rarepair Exchange for me with some of the most evocative (and, at least once, haunting) descriptions of magic I've ever seen. besides that, it also has an intriguing Erk/Nino story largely set after Binding Blade, ie, well after they've both disappeared. it is deliciously detailed, and even has a bunch of Homeric references if that happens to be something you're interested in

while we're at Elibe, @royaltyjunk's the pain in my heart cannot be shared (i really miss you) deserves a mention at the very least because Lyn opening a text convo with Hector with "order bitch" remains one of the most beautifully in-character things I've ever seen for her and it's the first line of the piece- besides that, it's also a modern AU story taking place in our here world, but one might say that it's still about how much Lyn misses the plains.

anyway, let's cap this off with a hat-trick of @queenlua recs, notwithstanding that this tag there is entirely redundant with the other notifications she's about to be getting for this post- anyway, the first one of them is Silent World, a three-chapterer in which Naesala attempts to ruin Micaiah and Sothe's relationship for shits and giggles. it's not quite SFW and it does in fact feature Micaiah/Sothe, but if you're fine with both of those things, then you may join in me suddenly finding Sothe a much more interesting character than you may have originally figured (plus, that Micaiah and Naesala are great characters should require no convincing, but they're still in peak form here, so, that's just Oops! All Interesting)

and here's another three-chapterer while I'm at it -- Where the River Meets the Sea. it's a Claude/Hilda story that doesn't skirt around the dodgy history between Hilda and Almyra -- the opposite, in fact, as that's one of the central themes. the other being that these two are both extremely nonconfrontational people and, sometimes, that's not a good thing. anyway, Lorenz writes a strongly worded letter in this, so, that's the real #1 reason why you should go read it right now

and I'm not done asking you to enjoy Lorenz content either; for that matter, neither am I done with the modern AUs. because summer is miles and miles away is the white whale that I will always be kindly, playfully, yet persistently prodding the author about picking back up someday. it's a Claude/Lorenz story where all the Garreg Mach people are Harvard graduates, Claude is the tech startup bro he was always meant to be, Lorenz hasn't matured quite as fast as he did in canon without a war to light a fire in his ass, and Hilda is great

plus, there's always my own work to recommend, but I take in pride in all the stuff I got to make these days, so, it's hard to pick and choose just a handful. you could always check out my ao3 page and read every last one of them. but to select a few regardless: The Winter Bird is my love letter to all of the Dawn Brigade's obscure underappreciated blorbos; Forests and People features Jamke, Edain, Dew, and probably some of the funniest lines I've ever managed to get into a piece; Building Trust, slightly longer-form than my usual fare, is an ongoing effort to make Catria/Clair happen -- you know, on my part, on their parts, and on Minerva and Palla's parts, with the time they have to spare while they're not flirting with each other -- and if you're in luck I might actually finish the fourth and final chapter this year; and then there's my most recent piece, MozghuzCon, where I drastically exceed my own expectations vis-a-vis story length for a spot of modern AU Bernadetta/Marianne where they're both very transgender, very neurodivergent, and very nerdy.

[nightpool]

hackers (1995) is such a fantastic movie, very pleased to see someone else giving it its due, congrats on your excellent taste. also: i am curious what you'd pick for the other two of the three movies ever, of all time...!

okay I couldn't get it down to three but there are definitively four movies that exist:

Hackers (1995)

Mind Game (2004, bad)

The Blues Brothers (1980, good)

The Italian Job (1969, good)

The Italian Job (2003, impossible to tell whether it's good or not)

Ocean's 11 (2004, good)

you'll notice the last three is just the same movie three different times.

[nostalgebraist]

I seem to recall you wrote a review of The Day He Himself Shall Wipe My Tears Away but I can't find it anywhere. Did you write such a review, and if so, are you willing to throw me a link? Thanks :)

I didn’t write a review per se, just a post recommending it.

[cyanoscarlet]

Happy Fanfic Writer Friday! What is a fic you've posted that you think deserves more attention? What is it about?

Happy Fanfic Writer Friday!

due to the dead, a Yuna (Final Fantasy X) centric piece set in a modern/canon fusion timeline, in which she ponders about her duty as a summoner and how she had tried to break free from it.

(Also on my writing blog, here.)

Writing this back then meant a lot to me, because those were the days counting down to the start of my clinical clerkship, and that time I was afraid of everything and wanted to quit and run away from it all. Also, I personally headcanon Yuna with a little more fire in her to fight fate as it were— and that she’d make a wonderful doctor in a modern setting.

(Sink by @queenlua, the piece this was heavily inspired/influenced by, is also an amazing read, and deserves so much love.)

[agoddamn]

queenlua replied to your post: “[Dispense with Crests and the Goddess], and...

tbf, i’m willing to forgive *some* of the naivete on the basis of “there is not yet a meritocratic government for El to look at & thus see its obvious failure modes”; a lot of Enlightenment-era writing seems kinda naive by modern standards too :P (not much; i think El does have an oddly narrow viewpoint even by that standard, but)

There’s enough modern attitudes present in-game (women, gays, etc) that it feels hard for me to backshift into that. Especially since her ending seems to validate it with a quick “and then she fixed the aristocracy and it was great”.

And there’s also a point where I just can’t...like, is it her looking like an idiot supposed to be on purpose? In blions (IIRC) she throws in Dmitri’s face “and how would you know what the commoners want” and the scene treats it like an intense own...and I’m sitting here going “wait, sorry, is the princess in her castle REALLY mocking the man who’s been a hobo on the run for the last five years about being out of touch with the people”?

[deetvar]

For @queenlua

-> any Three Houses ships/characters who you’ve majorly changed your opinion about—either because of fun conversations here about it, or just because of replaying, seeing new parts of the script, thinking a lot, whatever?

- All for the worse. I am growing increasily annoyed with a variety of fanwork that seeks to "fix problematic aspects" of characters via shipping. This isn't inherently bad because such thing could evolve organically but what I'm given is NOT that. I won't say anything more specific because I don't want no one misrepping me as something I didn't say nor imply. That said, as an extension of that...I am getting real tired of fanon depictions of Hilda especially off the backtrain of every flack Ingrid has been getting. Ugh. I would say something mean and semi-poignant but I ain't ready for no discourse.

-> what phat beat should i put on my playlist for walking to work tomorrow?

- The Marías. If you want an indie pop rock band with elements of jazz, psychedelia, and Latin flair here and there, go ahead. They've been in my head loop for a couple months now. I Don't Know You, Ruthless, Over The Moon, are IMO their best English songs. If you don't mind Spanish, then Cariño and Dèjate Llevar.

-> what got you into Fire Emblem in the first place?

- I was in Mexico on vacation and I was watching a Poketuber named Hayduun play a ROM hack called Pokemon Snakewood. I wanted to play it myself but couldn't figure out how to patch a file on my phone, so I downloaded a ROM of FE7 and here we are.

-> i love all your posts on mesoamerican mythology!  if i wanted to dig deeper, do you have like, 1-3 books you’d recommend for places to start?

- The Popol Vuh. It is the Maya Creation Myth and simply you have to read it, period. Don't go into this like it's an epic poem or something like...The Bible. People think it's because it's the creation myth it must have "gravitas" to which I say "fuck you." The Popol Vuh was composed by Maya elders just wanting it written down so it's not gone FOREVER. It even has a preamble saying that because Big J is in town and their old religion is crumbling away at the hands of the missionaries.

Aside from that I recommend Feathered Serpent, Dark Heart of Sky: Myths of Mexico by David Bowles. I haven't had the chance to read it myself but if you want a concise thread of the mythology (plus some mythologies of Maya, Zapotec, and other groups) without having to read those stuffy old codices in Spanish. David Bowles does good word, he reads Classical Nahuatl and he gives the mythology some flair that is not perfectly allowed from Nahuatl to English.