Bavitz

I'm Bavitz. Author of Fargo, Modern Cannibals, Cockatiel x Chameleon, and more! Site: https://bavitz.neocities.org/ | Twitter: @IMBavitz

[weaselandfriends]

Bavitz Site

Hello, I created a small Neocities website:

On here you can find links to my accounts, all my stories on AO3, and hosted PDF downloads of all my stories. I put the PDF downloads there so that, if any of these fan fiction sites ever go down (or get banned), you can still access the stories.

Please give me suggestions if you know of anything I can add to the site!

[weaselandfriends]

Do you have a story page on RR already? Wanted to follow it before I forget.

Can you make a (publicly accessible) story page before publishing the story? I didn't know that was possible. But I'm so bad at navigating all these websites.

I've commissioned cover art for this story that's almost finished, and I've been waiting for that to come in before I make the request for RR to approve the story.

EDIT: You can follow my author page (https://www.royalroad.com/profile/298653), which will notify you when I post a new story.

[weaselandfriends]

What Fire Emblem game would you recommend starting with?

In a vacuum, my go-to recommendation is Sacred Stones for the Gameboy Advance. It's generally considered the easiest and most forgiving pre-Casual Mode FE, and it also has one of the better stories in the franchise. On top of that, it's probably the shortest Fire Emblem, so it's not a huge time investment.

The only drawback here is that Sacred Stones doesn't have Casual Mode. As I mentioned in a previous ask, Casual Mode turns off the permadeath mechanic that makes old Fire Emblem so unforgiving for inexperienced players. (Though I'll mention that depending on the method by which you play, you might be able to approximate Casual Mode via a maneuver known as a "save state".)

Among the more recent Fire Emblem games that do have Casual Mode, I'd say you have two real options as an entry point for the series, each with their own pros and cons. The first option is Awakening for the 3DS, which has pretty straightforward Fire Emblem gameplay, but also an uncharacteristically goofy plot and tone that often verges on self-parodic. The second is Three Houses for the Switch, which has a great story and characters, but is a sort of hybrid monstrosity between Fire Emblem gameplay and Persona social link gameplay. It's no mistake that Awakening and Three Houses are the two most popular games in the franchise.

[weaselandfriends]

Guess what? My eighth book, LEAVE LUCK TO HEAVEN, is coming soon! It will begin on August 17, 2026, with an initial release of the first 20,000 words to be followed by twice-weekly chapters after that.

This epic fantasy adventure will be long, longer most likely than any of my previous works. It will also be my first truly serial story since 2023.

What's it about? What can you expect? Read more to find out!

Hague is a niche but successful streamer and speedrunner best known for his many world records and ridiculous challenge runs across the Fire Emblem franchise. He's good and he knows it, calling himself "The Best in the World" to anyone and everyone, especially his 1,000 or so average viewers. But one day, after a particularly outrageous boast on stream—"If God exists, I guarantee I'd beat them at Fire Emblem"—God takes him up on his offer.

In a flash, Hague finds himself transported to the domain of Sophia, the cruel, capricious, and dangerously bored Goddess of Knowledge. She likes nothing better than to cut arrogant humans down to size for her entertainment, and Hague is her latest victim. She challenges him to a "game" with her, "unlike anything you've ever experienced," with no less than his life on the line as punishment for losing. Hague is undaunted. Or rather, he knows he has no way out except to do what he does best—win.

Sophia casts Hague down to the fantasy world of Perrania, a political powder keg where nations teeter on the brink of total war. The appearance of Hague, a "Summoned Hero" from another world, is exactly the spark needed to start the explosion, with every major player in the world vying either to take Hague's head or force him under their control. To survive, Hague has to navigate the turmoil, recruit underdog allies, train a ragtag army, and lead them to tactical victory against vastly superior forces. Easy right? All stuff he's done before in Fire Emblem, but now it's real, with Sophia subtly manipulating his enemies against him in a massive chess match of heroes, villains, and everything in between.

A chess match both figurative and literal. In this world, battles take the form of turn-based combat where soldiers move across a gridded gameboard. It really is Fire Emblem, and Hague knows that if anyone can beat this rigged game, it's him. The only question is, will all his speedrun tech and game knowledge be enough to win against a literal goddess?

For fans of my earlier story When I Win the World Ends, I'm bringing the same ethos toward game-mechanics-as-narrative to Leave Luck to Heaven. I see this story as the next step after When I Win, applying its ideas and concepts at a much grander and more ambitious scale. Also like When I Win, no knowledge of Fire Emblem is necessary to understand and enjoy Leave Luck to Heaven—I've taken especial care to make sure the story is legible even to a completely layman audience.

Major influences on this story include Ender's Game (the master player pushing the game to its limit and being pushed to his limit in turn), Umineko When They Cry (the epic metaphysical chess match against a cackling she-witch with humans as pieces), and Worth the Candle (the interpersonal aspect of games and the implications of a world built around them). For the past year, I've been designing the world of Perrania with great help from Lurina, author of The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere, to ensure a deep, complex, and fully-fleshed out setting tightly interwoven with the story's themes, narrative concepts, and structure.

The result is something I'm extremely excited to share with you and that I think has the potential to be truly special. Look forward to August 17!

[weaselandfriends]

One week until Leave Luck to Heaven begins!

A few more details:

The story will initially be posted only on RoyalRoad, in the hopes of consolidating views and reviews there. RoyalRoad discoverability is based almost entirely on trending, and trending is accomplished via a high concentration of engagement in a short amount of time. It's a "rich get richer" type system, so consolidation makes the most sense. I do plan to eventually port the story to all my other usual haunts, like AO3 and Spacebattles, but I hope you'll all check out the story on RR to start.

Actually I'm not just hoping that. I'm providing a little incentive: Anyone who leaves a review on RoyalRoad will receive a cameo appearance in Leave Luck to Heaven. (You can opt out if you don't want to.) I'll provide more details about how this works once I've posted the first group of chapters, at which point the mechanics of how these cameos will work should be more obvious.

The story will release with its first seven chapters (about 20,000 words), and will receive a chapter a day for the rest of release week. After that, I'll switch to two chapters a week (Monday and Friday). The average chapter length is between 3,000 and 4,000 words.

As a side note: in many ways, this is the most ambitious story I've ever attempted. For my previous long serial works I entered with a less serious mindset. This story is far more deliberate, but also at a massive scale compared to my previous works. I'm strangely nervous... I really hope everyone enjoys it!

[weaselandfriends]

why don't you like It?

The movie? It's just kinda not that good. It is a book that presents some pretty significant challenges for adaptation and while the idea of sectioning the child and adult sections of the novel into two distinct halves makes a lot of functional sense, the story is sort of designed around the constant switching back-and-forth between the storylines. Just seeing one half at a time is to the detriment of both halves, especially the second half (though I didn't see It Part 2), but also the first.

Like think about the story of Part 1 by itself. Basically you see like seven or eight scenes where each member of The Goonies individually gets spooked by Pennywise, then they team up for a climax that ends with them injuring but not really ending the threat. It's sort of lifeless and repetitive when drained of the mystique of the band as adults getting back together, which as a frame narrative presents questions about the setting and situation that the childhood scenes slowly answer.

So it's ultimately just sort of sauceless. There was nothing about it I found super objectionably bad, the technical aspects are all fine, but Part 1 is just a narrative that on its own lacks power.

Beyond that I generally think Stephen King, despite being known for long works, is at his best with shorter ones like Misery, Long Walk, or Cujo. Horror sort of defuses eventually if it draws on too long, so an epic horror is a truly difficult feat that King often fumbles sooner or later (though It is not nearly as disastrous in its endgame as The Stand).

[weaselandfriends]

So I was bored, and LLTH is coming soon, and I've never actually played a Fire Emblem game, so I thought, hey, why not try one out? I get access to Path of Radiance with my switch online subscription so...

...I'm gettin my fuckin ass kicked bruh I'm on EASY and I'm still locked in an idiot death spiral where I keep losing the units the game desperately throws at me. Titania is HARD CARRYING. Is this normal for a first try or am I just really bad???

Prior to the implementation of "Casual Mode" (which turns off unit permadeath) in Fire Emblem Awakening (2013), Fire Emblem had a reputation as a brutally difficult series, only for hardcore grognards. The newer games also have way, way easier Easy Modes, with difficulty tuned down so much they're basically a formality for people who just want to experience the story.

Ironically, Path of Radiance is generally considered one of the easier pre-Casual Mode entries. Even so, a first timer will likely struggle while learning the basics, so I don't think your experience is abnormal. Some advice from me:

Titania is an excellent unit. Don't be afraid to use her as a crutch early on, and she'll even scale well into the later parts of the game. Sometimes people will caution about her "stealing EXP" from other units because she's already promoted and gains EXP more slowly, but this is complete nonsense.

The most important stat in Fire Emblem is Movement. Mounted units and flying units are usually the best in the game, and Path of Radiance is one of the best examples of that. Beyond Titania, some great units to use are Oscar, Kieran, Marcia, and Jill. Around the middle of the game you get a unit named Tanith who is not only a great unit in her own right, but also has a special skill that lets her summon disposable mooks who are perfect for baiting enemy attacks.

The hardest maps in the game are Chapter 5 and Chapter 8. Most older Fire Emblem games have inverted difficulty curves where the game is at its hardest at the beginning. As the game progresses your units generally outpace

Whenever you start a new map, always check the enemies to see if there are any with faces and names. They are basically always recruitable unless they're the boss. PoR in particular loves to drop random recruitable units among the enemies without telling you about them.

As this game goes on, money becomes a nonissue; you're basically handed tons of it at random intervals. Don't feel the need to be stingy with your resources. Forging stronger weapons even at high cost is usually pretty worthwhile.

I think that about covers it? If I knew a bit more about how you were playing I could probably give some more specific info, but that should at least give you something to go on.

[weaselandfriends]

Fire Emblem Tier List

[weaselandfriends]

And also a tier list for every Fire Emblem character

[weaselandfriends]

thoughts on all of peter jackson's stuff that isn't lord of the rings

You are talking to the person who has like an extended, multi-paragraph long explanation of the film Braindead in three different books you know that right?

King Kong mid

The Frighteners not a Peter Jackson movie it's a Zemeckis movie that Zemeckis didn't feel like directing so he got the newbie New Zealander director to do it for him

But Braindead? Braindead is my jam

[weaselandfriends]

Fire Emblem Tier List

[weaselandfriends]

opinions on the scream franchise? i noticed you rated the first film oddly low considering how well-liked it is

I really liked Scream the first time I watched it, but on a more recent rewatch it came across as dated and also outdone by later meta horror. Sort of similar to how weak Halloween plays today despite how much ground it broke on the slasher genre. I still thought Scream 2, which pushes the conceit to more extreme levels, was strong on rewatch though. Scream 3 sucks ass (uncontroversial opinion) and I haven't seen any of the newer ones.

[weaselandfriends]

so terribly sorry to ask you another question about gazemaize, are they still going to be making stuff? their tumblr's gone, you don't have to answer this or anything just really obsessed with chili and bunkertrapped

(also you're an inspiration to me as a writer, SO EXCITED FOR LEAVE LUCK TO HEAVEN, you and your ilk are the only writers that understand the world today, 1/X and Modern Cannibals fucking changed me, thank you!)

@gazemaized

I'll let them respond in their own words...

(And Hell Yeah, you better be hyped for Leave Luck to Heaven. It kicks ass. Ten days remain...)

[weaselandfriends]

is Papimon named after a digimon?

Papimon is named after Papimon "Miffy" Ittikasem, a Thai influencer who I became aware of due to her short stint as a player in the Thai League of Legends league. Her surname, Jaengsirirungrote, is a modified version of the surname of Kasaemen "SoulKenJiz" Jamroonsirirungrote, another Thai League of Legends esports player.

[weaselandfriends]

would you be willing to share the truman-show-twist anime, perhaps under a read more so no one is spoiled unwantingly?

Okay. Spoilers for some anime that has a Truman Show twist under the cut:

It's Blood-C, my second favorite anime, which takes the Truman Show premise in a much more extreme horror direction.

[weaselandfriends]

fucked up alt-timeline where you write leave fate to hell instead

What would that translate into in Japanese?

[weaselandfriends]

Thoughts on Murakami?

The Murakami that is well known, the quote-unquote "Magical Realism" Murakami, sucks. One of the profusion of gimmick authors popular in the literary scene lately who are obsessed with presenting a sort of "brand" with easily identifiable stylistic quirks. For Murakami, this is the jazz, the descriptions of people washing themselves, the weird sex, and of course the "magical realism." I've read three books in this mold of Murakami and two of them, Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84, just suck. The third, Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, is actually pretty decent, the Friday the 13th Part 4 of this style where he's doing all the things he usually does but executed to its maximum possible potential.

That was the first side of Murakami I was exposed to, so I didn't have a high opinion of him. More recently I've read Norwegian Wood and Underground and come to the conclusion that Murakami could actually cook if he wasn't wrapped up in the literary industrial complex blitz of selling "Haruki Murakami" as a distinctive art style. Norwegian Wood is like a prototype of the harem visual novel and sort of fascinating in that context, while Underground is a work that had a massive influence on When I Win the World Ends.

[weaselandfriends]

thoughts on spike lee?

The only Spike Lee films I've seen are 25th Hour (which I liked but last saw in high school) and the bad Oldboy remake, so I don't feel like I can adequately express an opinion.

[weaselandfriends]

if one of your works got an adaptation, would you prefer having a large input (e.g helping directly write the script for it, making important creative decisions), or would you prefer to let someone else form their own vision and take a role with less control?

I would love to see another creative figure reinterpret my work into a new medium. I am utterly baffled by what seems the near universal preciousness authors seem to have with their works, where they grow aghast at the littlest adaptational changes. I feel like the author more than anyone ought to know just how malleable a story is, how subject to change it is and even was in their own mind before they finally reified it on the page.

I have half an essay written on the subject of adaptational changes right now, discussing Witch Hat Atelier, Reze Arc, and the Shiboyugi Cloudy Beach movie. Unfortunately I keep not working on it because I'm hard grinding Leave Luck to Heaven right now.