Fresh Midnight Question For You:

ashlynn n briar redesign

“…Trixie?”

WHEN I DIE I MAY NOT GO TO HEAVEN I DON'T KNOW IF THEY LET COWBOYS IN

I return from my bg3 stupor with a fresh 2 am question:

was the TAU story and world a concept you were baking for a long time until you had a chance to write it, or was it a more recent creation?

Do you find it easy or hard to build out new story concepts? Like, do you need to sit on them a while until they feel right, or does it just come pouring out of you from the start? Or a secret, third thing?

Just anything about your personal creation process!

lol hi it might not surprise you to learn that i am also steeping in bg3 (i am still stumbling around act 1! i'm not allowed to play until i hit daily sequel writing quota, which is healthy, i'm sure, but does mean i am somewhat behind just about everyone i know who is also playing :P)

(my first Tav is an enormous nb tiefling bard named Faretheewell who is, imo, perfect. very beautiful. very kind. definitely does drag. lying a lot, but mostly just for funsies. has turned astarion into their little purse dog.)

ANYWAY, TO THE ACTUAL QUESTION:

TAU's an interesting case because it was cannibalized from a couple different ongoing projects into something entirely new.

The characters had been floating around in different iterations since about 2013, and their final forms in Archive are quite distinct from the original seed! Imagine Sunai as an exiled diplomat who got involuntarily apprenticed to a cursed king/the last magician in the world; imagine Veyadi as a disowned god-child tasked with murdering the last magician! I'm still probably going to use that world somewhere so I'll mum about it now (it's the one I call "grandma heist.")

((imo that's why you should always yoink characters you like from whatever source you enjoy, be it your own or something else -- they will inevitably change in their new context, often so substantially that they are nigh unrecognizable.))

The story concept also originated in 2013: "Pacific Rim, but the mechs are built out of the kaiju, and pilots must have survived being poisoned by those kaiju." The addition of strange and upsetting AIs of divine power was somewhat inherited from the story Sunai and Adi came from, where divinity was fraught, fractured, and hungry.

Here's a funny. In 2017 I thought TAU would be a nice, simple, clean project. However. I know some folks who turn out gloriously clean first drafts. I AM NOT ONE OF THEM. My brain is a hazardous work environment, very non-OSHA compliant. Basically I do a lot of thought work in the drafting, so the drafts are consequently messy, and there are a LOT of changes from concept to actual workable manuscript.

Which I suppose is to say that story concepts nest in my brain quite often when it is healthy. The frequency with which I land on new and interesting story thoughts is actually a pretty good indicator of how well I am doing ambiently! Right now I'm storing up a lot of them, some of which I am fairly rabid about -- nearly as rabid as I am about Archive, which is the real indicator of a project that is ready to transition from Thought to Work. They are described here as "apocalypse magicians" and other such things. There's one that's going to be kind of an argument with Lovecraftian unknowability via desconstruction of Enlightenment epistemologies + queer identity destruction, and another that's going to be the Le Carré approach to espionage + magic as divinity meets public service + interplanetary empires intruding on your bumfuck planet offering the solution to climate change might still be bad actually. (I want to write that last with my wife and we are making SUCH GOOD FUCKING SHIPS FOR IT.)

How to summarize this? 1) find a story notion/concept about which i can obsess, 2) actually start writing it, 3) mess up spectacularly for a few drafts, 4) finally whittle together something more or less correct, 5) that's my editor's problem now!!

something quite yuriful happening here

anyways for people who didn't see the last post, this is my hc for alistair's mother: an alice who got caught in wonderland once the portal closed and has to contend with being stuck there forever and raising her young child there... so she's complicated with it 😌 and since I'm playing by eah rules where we're generations deep she and the cheshire cat (kitty's mom ver.) Are at this point similar aged so they're best friends in a way...😊

Jayce: omg dude we were so drunk last night! (had 1 mimosa)

Viktor: yeah (was sober)

This cat is so eepy, kitty is sleepy

Do I need to become a one person fandom for The Archive Undying? Is anyone else here can anyone hear me?? The Archive Undying?!!?!!!!! Sunai? Sunai anyone? Veyadi??? Hello???

having spoilery thoughts about The Archive Undying in the context of that post that someday the queer couple that says "let's fuck it all and run away together!" should actually do it:

Sunai and Veyadi don't actually run away but I do think that's what emotionally/ethically happened in the last quarter or so of the book?

Sunai's initial motivation was to prevent the totalitarian state from getting to keep an enforcer mecha to oppress his home city. Made perfect sense. Despite the emotional upheavals and betrayals and murders, that kept being true pretty much up until the Maw eats him. We learn that the Passenger trying to help him do this is the same entity that has caused Corruption aka the deaths of AIs who became tyrants.

And there's a whole ethical quandary there bc the AIs who died were tyrants and Iterate Fractal ate people and there should be some force that can stop even gods. But also the Passenger killed these AI in ways that led to the deaths of millions of people and left their corpses as weapons that could be used by the Harbor and left their remnants as hungry scavengers who kill people.

And so as various characters align with/against the Passenger I am just lost on how I should feel. It's cause is noble in abstract! It's methods cause great suffering! It's unclear why the Passenger cares about killing the Maw at this point given that it is no longer controlling a large group of people. Perhaps it is just that Sunai asks and Veyadi asks and Ruhi asks and the Passenger always answers when people ask because that is it's purpose.

And then Sunai is one with the Maw, who is a remnant of Iterate Fractal and that larger plot goes out the window. His friends want to separate them or mercy kill him or kill the Maw with him as collateral damage. He can't be separated from the Maw, who had always wanted him as their conscience and thus horribly abused him his whole life. Veyadi, on realizing that they can't be separated decides he wants to protect Sunai more than he wants to kill the Maw. They fight the Passenger and Ruhi, who remains laser fixated on the larger cause.

And that's the point where the pair of them decide to leave and they leave. Sure, the Passenger might be the only force capable of protecting humans from tyrant AIs. But they no longer care about that compared to the fight to live and get to be together. They imprison it and Ruhi (and, if I understand correctly, entomb Ruhi alive in eternal torment??) to prevent it from ever trying to kill them again. They survive together. The End.

And, well. The gays sure did run away from their problems together for once! but boy howdy was I unsure of how to feel about that final arc.

i still have The Archive Undying brainrot but i'm currently too restless to make, like, real art about it. so here's another sketch dump. bonus lil sunai enjoying an oversized winter gear coat :D