I Have Finished My Draft

[ebonwinged_nova]

Clocks in at about 45k words right now with one scene missing; the content itself should mostly be fine and only require some details editing. That took way too long, but sometimes that's just how things are. It's a postcanon xenoblade 3 fic with a twist, namely:

Click for ending spoilers

The worlds still separated, but instead of everything resetting to pre-Intersection, Origin dumped everyone into the corresponding world as they were at the end; also N is there because I wanted him to be.

I wrote the first draft before Future Redeemed so it's not compliant with that, but even if I hadn't I wouldn't have made it compliant, given my extremely mixed feelings about the entire DLC.

I'll be letting it rest for some time and draft something else before going back to it. In practice that'll be either the "I hurt N a lot" fic or the "Z hosts cutthroat kitchen" one. Languagefic, despite being much older than either of those ideas, apparently still needs time in the mental oven before I can knuckle down and actually write it (why do I keep insisting on writing slice of life, why do I do this to myself, I know I'm not good at it) and the FR rewrite... may or may not happen but I don't think I'm in the mood for that right now.

I'm leaning towards the cutthroat kitchen one. Despite being a more complex story (yes, there's a story to it) with a larger cast I have a clearer idea for how it'll go down.

Comments

Re: (Lmao, god. A whole second essay)

[ebonwinged_nova]

Having some optional heroes sit in on a strategy meeting and drop some optional lines that don't alter the scene as a whole would be a good compromise between not being able to involve optional heroes in main story and not showing them at all, yeah.

Crys... Crys Crys Crys. I love the IDEA behind Crys and Noah facing off like that but it's so unceremoniously rushed through and then never mentioned again that it really does a disservice to their relationship. At minimum they could have like... brought it up in the cutscenes with N in Origin or something, considering that Crys mentoring Noah as an offseer was one of the key pieces that made Noah not turn out like that? Or at least that's what the framing during the mist vision scenes suggested to me...

That being said, I think freeing people from the term service while still in Aionios would have been a misstep. It would have taken out so much of the urgency in having to free them from Aionios, because while the annihilation effect will eventually eat all of the world that's... not going to happen anytime soon and having that strict time limit (made a little less strict by Mio not having her mark anymore) propel the plot forward is a good thing in my book. (They just should have propelled it with more care, lol.)

Also, my understanding is that Mio effectively doesn't have Moebius powers anymore after the eclipse because Z turned it off. I think she says something to that effect while they go to the Cloudkeep.

They should have made X and Y personally involve themselves in the war at this point, I think. It would have been an escalation (we know they're Z's right hand people, we know they're special in some way so it presents a ramp up from fighting "just" regular moebius) and it would have given them the opportunity to add more meat to the two, plus expand on Z a little more. Bring Isurd back into the story (I think closely involving him right after chapter 3 would have been difficult, because while dragging sidequest characters around in ways that don't make sense is something I can overlook*, him immediately abandoning his colony to go search for the city with Ouroboros would have been weird). Valdi and Bolearis, as discussed. The aforementioned strategy meeting could have been here as well. Then I think Crys could have presented another ramp up in personal tension for Noah when he makes himself known, and defeating him could have served as a sort of reversal in this "war intermission" before they go on to defeat X and/or Y, removing one of the final obstacles presenting the colonies from focusing their attention on storming Origin. Something like that.

I have a strong feeling they had to make cuts due to dev constraints, honestly. Finding the origin metal for the ship feels INCREDIBLY uninspired for a game that largely avoided mindless fetchquesting with no story bits attached, and you absolutely can not tell me they intended to have X and Y go out without so much as a cutscene. I really do think they had things planned that they couldn't follow through on, and that is so very disappointing, to think about what they could have made of this all if they'd just had more time and budget.

As for some Moebius being older, I think K (you know, the grunt in colony 4) is from the City for sure. Reasoning being that I think real world swears are actually City slang, as evidenced by Matthew using them fairly liberally and Noah only ever saying shit after coming into contact with them; and K also says that Taion's vaunted intuition is full of shit. Don't know what to make of Triton though, when he moves to the City I had the impression he's not from there...

*(Yes, I did drag Isurd into jail with me.)

Re: (Lmao, god. A whole second essay)

[yvannairie]

(lmao. I decided to deal with the mental dissonance byelecting to think that if they're not required for a mission, they weren't there. IIRC I also had him along for the batshit chain attack skill he has, but the plot would simply be too much of a mess if any of the heroes besides Riku and Manana went missing for an entire month like that)

You might be right about the plot losing in a sense of urgency if the term limit was removed, but a) that could have been easily addressed by making X and Y way more active, and starting an all-out war with the Moebius firing off Annihilators and accelerating the production of soldiers a la Miyabi, Cammuravi, in an attempt to reset the playing field b/c if they just kill everyone sufficiently uppity,things will calm back down and b) I... Already kinda felt like the tension regarding the term limit ran out after chapter six >>); Even if we assume Mio was _the oldest amongst all the characters, by the time the eclipse was over, a bunch of them were also tent-term and would have logically been a few weeks at most away from Homecoming.

Honestly, what I really would have wanted was a Xeno 1 style hard line of no return that completely locks you out of doing the Affinity quests for Heroes who died during the time the gang was in prison, like how you could miss out on a bunch of quests in Alcamoth b/c the quest givers get Telethia'd, with a secondary way (perhaps Z's lab in Camp Omega) to raise the level cap for their classes?

Would it be sadistic? Yes. Am I probably gonna incorporate it into a fic for funsies regardless? hehehehehehe

Re: (Lmao, god. A whole second essay)

[ebonwinged_nova]

Hmm, I think we may just have to agree to disagree on the term limit removal idea. XD Personally I don't think X and Y getting involved would provide enough tension to replace it, but YMMV.

As iffy as time limited quests can be in video games, for fic material that's a goldmine ahahaha.