Did I make a full chart mapping out what makes the mechs similar to make the most realistic oc possible and then not use it? Um, next question?

I know it's a bit hard to read, so I'll put the transcription here. The image id is under the cut.

Evan

Doll from the same collection as The Toy Soldier

Evan was sold to a museum for oddities where his exterior was kept in perfect condition, but the clockwork inside was neglected for years. Still, they expected him to dance. Over the years, he didn't want to dance.

One day, he shouted at the other dancers. Right before he could run or fight, the clockwork froze. After that, he moved rooms and nobody came to fix him, freezing him in that angry position, alone in the dark. He was alone with his thoughts and the music he played in his head.

Then the museum closed.

It's a blur (and a secret.) Somehow a kind stranger with metal nerves found him. She fixed him.

Space is wonderful. It's open. He can go anywhere.

[Image ID: A paper with drawings and writing done in ink and pencil sits on wood. The drawings are as follows:

An illustration of a character from the lower neck up. He has large round eyes with long eye lashes, freckles, and long thick hair that appears to be dark. He looks very feminine. Next to him is a banner meant to look like a ribbon folded over. It says, "Evan," on it.

Below it is a character in a glass case. The base is a trapezoid. On the bottom front is what looks like a plaque. There is a person inside wearing a dress. His face is scribbled out.

On the far right of the page is a simple drawing of two gears. Where they meet, there is a zig-zag line. More zig-zag lines are around them.

On the left again is a picture of a person again. He is leaning forward with his arms out behind him and his hands clenched into fists. His facial expression is angry. He has long hair with a bow in the back and wears a on old fashioned dress. His shoes are mary janes. In front of him is a box marked "burn" and behind are two more boxes. The larger one says, "storage" and has fragile tape on it. The smaller says, "junk." The background is dark.

To the right is an illustration of a building. The main part has a sign that says "Museum" on top, but the first u has fallen . The building itself has a number of windows of different styles and an extra door far above the ground. The left side has a stone tower extending off of it and the right side has been built up off the ground and has two windows. One is shattered with a tethered bird flying out of it.

The final image on the bottom right of the paper is the silhouette of two people both from the ribs up. The first with horns and medium length hair while the second has no horns and short hair.

End Image ID]

For the fic writer asks - 18 & 20?

thanks!!

fic writer asks

18. Do you have a WIP that you keep telling yourself you’ll eventually get back to, but deep down you know that’s probably a lie?

rest in peace, 100hrs fic. It was an idea based off a tumblr post. Basically, Grian was the version of himself from 3rd life and last life, and was convinced that he was stuck in the last life world after dying as a sort of limbo for everything bad he did. Scar was his Hermitcraft self and had no idea about traffic series. Joel was his self from Empires and also had no clue about traffic series. It was going to be a delightful mess of everybody sort of knowing each other but not the full picture--Grian can hardly face Scar after everything that happened in traffic series, but Scar doesn't quite get why this version of Grian avoids him since he's straight from Boatem. Joel is a king and has no idea who these other two are and why Grian knows him so well from their red life partnership.

the other is possibly my Listener!Jimmy-centric Last Life fic where he was going to break the game loops, but that got shuffled to the side after Martyn's new lore came out. I will proudly say I still somehow predicted like half of Martyn's Last Life lore in my notes for the fic though! I developed the backstory/lore of Lonesome Dreams during the course of planning this fic. LD was the backstory for Jimmy in this fic. In the end, y'all got Lonesome Dreams, but not the other fic.

I still have ideas for something involving Listener!Jimmy and timeloops and traffic series though....it may not be totally scrapped forever!

20. What’s your favorite part about the fanfiction writing process?

writing my favorite parts! also writing tense, heavy-ish conversations between characters. i, like probably every other person on earth, hate writing the parts that don't come naturally to me. i don't mind the planning/outline process either, it can be really fun, but I do feel a pressure to connect everything for long fics since i'm very inexperienced in fics with like. an actual plot.

the outlining process is super fun though when i suddenly connect thigns in my brain. i often do parts of this while i drive back and forth from home to my apartment, since i can just sort of talk through my ideas to myself while looking at the road. lots of stuff I do get planned this way lol

Which one is the first?

OH HOHO! You've stumbled onto one of my most complex aus I have, simply because it's a dimension-traveling au of another one of my aus.

This doc is for an AU where the Gaia in my Calamity Cloud AU (an AU where Cloud was a SOLDIER experimented on in the womb and ended up going crazy and becoming the Son of Calamity) is dying and Zack (and maybe one or 2 more characters) gets saved by Aerith/the planet and is sent to a "canon" timeline.

The doc title is Visitors from an Alternate Timeline AU.

The first section of said doc is:

First scene is Cloud finding the group when he's sent to investigate an earthquake on the western continent. They fight and he does an admirable job of fighting all of them (struggling with a Zack that hates him along the way) but has to be saved by Vincent (who was contacted to help but was running behind).

My C!Cloud au is quite developed and I'm willing to answer questions about how that timeline differs from canon in a separate ask because I have literal pages of backstory written for it, as well as character breakdowns for that version of Zack (who basically takes canon Cloud's role in the story post-Nibelheim) and Calamity Cloud...

Some more details about this particular au:

Calamity Cloud - or "Strife", as I'll be referring to him as - is mostly fueled by rage and wants everyone to know that it was him responsible for his actions, not anyone else, so he doesn't ever really try to control Zack (the reasons why heavily related to his backstory). So, him being literally too angry to die/stay dead, means he keeps popping up and ends up destroying that version of Gaia.

Zack (and others) get pulled to a "post-canon" (post-Dirge, but it's my version of Dirge because that plot is a travesty) timeline and shows up somewhere on the western continent. Cloud gets sent to investigate and is attacked upon his appearance because he looks similar enough to Strife, but one of them is Zack so he refuses to actually kill any of them and is thus struggling to fend them off since they're trying to kill him.

He's saved by Vincent popping up to break up the fight (he's recognized by the weird people) and explains that Cloud isn't out to destroy the world. What happens next is dependent on whether that version of Sephiroth also made it out or not, for obvious reasons.

From there, all I have hashed out is that they get brought back to Edge and find out the differences in the timeline and deal with it via angst and hurt/comfort.

This particular version of the AU is probably only going to be a drabble or 2, covering Zack's recovery and growing friendship with Cloud + Co since I really don't see the potential for a multi-chaptered fic in it. Of course, if any of yall would like to see a full fic, you'll have to bug me about it.

⭐⭐⭐!! I'm behind on catching up with Indefensible (bc I am also in the US and have been Big Overwhelmed too, so sending positive mental health vibes your way as well), so I will leave it to you to pick a part of a fic that you are most dying to discuss!

AH bb take your time catching up, there’s no rush!! It will still be there whenever you’re ready <3 I will send some positive mental health vibes right back at you, lord knows all of us in the US really need them lol 

Okay, so my pick for this...hmmm, why don’t we talk about TRAUMA. I’ve had a lot of people comment about how I handle everyone’s trauma in the series, so I figure that’s a solid point of interest :)

I knew I was going to be writing this fic before I had actually played all the games, which gave me a bit of an advantage from a writing perspective because I actually took a HUGE amount of notes while I played. The most important of these notes were pages that I called “Lists of Trauma”. And I had one for every character. I would set them up every time I saw something in the games that would have been potentially traumatic, including backstory stuff that came to light. Then I’d write down what the trauma was, when it occurred, and how I felt it would affect them (both immediately and long term). 

Pretty much everybody gets that Miles Edgeworth is traumatized. The game does a decent job of showing some of that, by giving him PTSD and mentioning his fear of elevators, using his recurring nightmares as a plot point, etc. But Miles is by FAR not the only one in the series traumatized. Pretty much every case is enough to send someone to therapy for a hell of a long time, but it’s not always highlighted as much as Miles, and I think it’s easy to brush everyone else’s trauma under the rug because their coping methods were a little more understated. I do think the evidence is there in the games, but it’s not obvious (Capcom puts a lot more subtlety in there than I initially would have expected. Either that or I’m adding subtext on my own and giving them too much credit. EITHER WAY, it did give me a lot to study and pick apart.)

One of the biggest themes in my writing is addressing and processing trauma (lol can you tell I have trauma I have worked on processing? hahaha). I tend to lean towards doing it in healthy and productive ways, as well, so I was HYPERFOCUSED on all the events happening to each individual character. By the end of the canon storylines, I had a pretty solid idea of what people still needed to work through and how things were holding them back, which is honestly how I arrived at some of the plotlines I did. They’re all engineered to be ways to push the characters where they need to be in order to heal. Or at least to grow (full healing is gonna take decades and y’all I can’t be writing this for the rest of my life haha)

In some cases, like with Phoenix and Miles and their relationship, I knew that it was going to involve a massive breaking point to get them anywhere. It’s been decades in game-time and they haven’t taken very many steps forward, which tells me that repression is so ingrained you basically have to make them completely snap and land in a place of “nothing left to lose” before they’d take any more steps. Hence the remote location and the cold temperatures and them working together and the closet scene and the hot tub scene and the spit-take scene and the obvious trap and...etc. Really had to slam their damn heads together repeatedly for this one. 

But their trauma, while being some of the most obvious, wasn’t the only kind I wanted to address. Like, seeing everything play out with Apollo and Dhurke, I just kept thinking how fuckin badly that would mess someone up, and that isn’t even considering what he’d gone through BEFORE that (former boss was a murderer, and the ways he found out weren’t the softest. Best friend murdered, and the circumstances around it ended up with him getting physically injured TWICE. There’s a lot going on with that poor boy.) And Maya, who is forever cheery in the games, always struck me as someone who hid any negative emotions at all costs, and holy shit she has to have a few. She’s been accused of murder, manipulated by family, her sister was murdered, she had to raise her cousin from a young age, she’s been kidnapped MULTIPLE TIMES, had her body taken over by someone that DEFINITELY wanted to kill her and her best friend. On top of that, the first games make it pretty clear she has some inferiority issues, and alllll those traumatic situations would have only fed into it. I think she got really good at covering that up rather than really good at feeling confident. 

Pretty much all the characters got trauma’d at one point or another, and the timeline over the span of canon basically meant that nobody ever had much time to recover before some other bullshit was happening. It’s why many of the characters in Indefensible, sometimes more than once, have opined about it being neverending or how they were losing hope that they’d ever have a whole year that was just normal. 

I’ve included so many scenes where they are just breaking down and talking about feelings, because holy fuck they all need to. lol It’s also why I ended up jumping on the FranMaya bandwagon so hard because the way that the pair of them are traumatized and how they handle it is very complementary to each other. I think they’re both able to pull the dark out and soothe it within one another, keep each other from overthinking things, and provide a sudden rock to lean on when things get difficult again. If they didn’t have each other, I think the second half of Indefensible wouldn’t work as well, because Franziska absolutely would have snapped irreparably. But, uh, that won’t make as much sense until later. ;)

Anyways, this was long and rambly and I could probably make a separate post about each individual character’s trauma and how the fic is designed to shine a spotlight on it and get them to start processing it. I THINK ABOUT THIS STUFF A LOT, OKAY? 

Link to the fic if anybody needs it: Indefensible