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Galliar


On a journey into a world of infinite possibility...

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Nov
15th
2019

Rambling About My 127 Snip, Edge of Dawn · 6:29am Nov 15th, 2019

Good day. If you’re reading this, I imagine that you’ve come from GMBlackjack’s Songs of the Spheres. If not, this entire post is going to mean nothing to you. If you're curious, here's a link to the story:

Songs of the Spheres

I have worked with GM for about a year at this point as an editor and have followed the story since around when arc 2 was first being published. I also contributed to the first Sombra Clipshow with the clip about Toph and the greatest villain that Songs has ever seen: Melon Lord. I also founded the ‘Blackjack is an idiot’ watch through the latter half of arc 4, and long served as its only member until its purpose was fulfilled.

More pertinently for this post, I wrote the snip ‘Edge of Dawn’ for chapter 127. Even as one of the longest snips in the entire anthology, I still feel like there were a number of details, choices, and ideas surrounding the story that I didn’t have opportunity to properly get into as I would have originally liked. This post serves in part as author's notes, and in part as a way to get my own thoughts of my work out there.

This is a ‘Word of God’ blog post, so unless something is definitively stated within the text you can just take it as my own interpretation of events or ideas surrounding the snip. I’ll be breaking this up into sections, addressing things that I believe to be important. Depending on when I put this up, I might also address some concerns from commenters on Songs itself.

FOR ANYONE THAT HASN’T READ SONGS OF THE SPHERES UP THROUGH CHAPTER 127, THIS IS THE ONLY SPOILER WARNING.

Without further ado:

Why?

Why, why, why did I write a 9.2k word snip?

I read the War for Existence long before it started to be published and had some strong opinions against the Collapse. As a lot of people have agreed, it seems like the obvious morally wrong choice on the surface, and far less likely to produce a positive outcome than preservation due to the cost in life alone. For the better part of the past year I’d felt the same way, agreeing entirely with the side of Preservation with barely a second thought.

Even when I finished all the drafts GM had made available, I continued to be active with the community that had built up around the story for what I’m going to call ‘secret reasons.’ The multiverse of Songs has remained a constant presence, to the point where I’ll laugh off coincidences as the Tower intervening in my life. I didn’t really think about this arc in that time, though.

Then in July of 2019, Fire Emblem Three Houses came out. And I fell in love. I won’t be able to explain this without spoiling the game, so SPOILER WARNING.

For some background: the game follows several different storylines depending on which of the titular houses you, the player character (Byleth by default), choose to lead. My first choice was the Black Eagles, led by Edelgard. This proved to be one of the best decisions I’ve made in my gaming career.

As I played through the Black Eagles storyline, I found myself again and again reminded of the War for Existence, and Corona’s role in it. For every step I stood by Edelgard’s in game I saw another line of comparison I could draw between the two characters. It changed my perspective regarding the War substantially.

Eventually this was something I talked about (see: gushed) to GM himself about the game. This convinced him to slot Edelgard into a scene with the collapse. At this time, he also suggested I write a snip. And… eventually, write I did.

But the length?

That was more of an accident, frankly. As I said I had a lot of things I wanted to play with, toys in the sandbox, but only so much time and space. He gave us a 10k word limit and a date deadline. Three days before I submitted my snip to him, it had been only 2k words, and I’d been very unhappy with it. He’d had to talk me out of starting over or throwing it away entirely at one point.

I think that the combination of the deadline and having a fortunately open weekend might’ve been the major contributors to me actually finishing. Until that final rush, I’d only had the first scene through to Pharynx’s reveal even written. While I’d had ideas for what I wanted to do, – to the point where I’d ask Mal about his plans for the battle between Tzeentch and the Emperor - that first night of crunch time was when I’d figured out what the snip was. Unfortunately, really starting three days before it is due made it difficult to crunch things down.

Otherwise I might have been able to cut off a good 1k words of extra detailing and dialogue. Which is not to say I’m unhappy with the final product, I’m honestly super proud of myself that I managed to make something that quickly that GM deemed to be worth sharing. That said, there’s always little things that could’ve been done to make things better.

Edelgard

Edelgard has become one of my absolute favorite characters in… anything ever, really, in record times. My greatest fear with this snip is that I could do her a disservice, which some other fans of her might suggest on a few of the decisions that she made. While I feel like who she is as a person is addressed within the snip itself, a few of her actions might raise a few questions among other fans. Those are mostly what I’m hoping to address.

Why would Edelgard show Corona her entire life in their first meeting?

This should have been one of the harder decisions to make, but the second I’d thought of it, it seemed perfect. In the game, Edelgard is incredibly closed off, unable to make herself trust others. The only person she was able to confide in for a long part of her life up to the events of the game was Hubert, who feeds into her paranoia with his own trust issues.

The only person she ever truly confides in is Byleth, should they take charge of the Black Eagle house. In Byleth she confides her past torture, her second crest, and even her nightmares. She even begins to hint at what she truly wants to accomplish in life, in spite of what it’d mean. This is something she doesn’t do for any other character.

The Edelgard within the snip has lived with Byleth for over a century. A large portion of that time was spent within Equis Vitis, surrounded largely by ponies that live and breathe harmony. I’d be more surprised if she didn’t become at least a bit more open.

The other reason is that she recognizes the path that Corona’s walking. As the snip says, ‘Her only shame was that she wasn’t the one to ask.’ There’s an implicit camaraderie from both of them, and Edelgard recognized it before she walked into the room. That she knew ‘Hubert’ was a shapeshifter before she’d walked into the room was basically just one more excuse.

Why does Edelgard have a Persona?

This is a harder question to answer, for a few reasons. One reason is that ‘secret’ I alluded to earlier that I don’t believe I’ll talk about here.

The other reason is that a portion of this snip was inspire by Persona 5. Namely, the song ‘Beneath the Mask’ has a line: ‘I’m a shapeshifter/ at Poe’s masquerade.’ With the Raven Hotel being run by a robot named Poe… come on. This song was also the reason that Pharynx and Makoto were included as well, which I’ll discuss more later.

Moreover, Persona as a whole was originally planned to play a bigger role in the snip. The first fight with Claude hadn’t been planned originally. Instead, there was going to be one longer fight with more characters involved in the Warp, a sort of Marvel-style Civil War fight with characters that never made it into Songs, each with their own history in the multiverse. This would’ve included other Persona users, even alongside Xion.

Claude eventually got moved to a different fight, in addition to a change in direction for Xion herself. It made it difficult to justify other characters appearing for Preservation. The Crimson Strike Force retained many of its characters though.

With the decreased role of Persona, I still wanted to pay some tribute to the series. That’s why Makoto got to stay, and Edelgard kept hers through the changes. It also gave me an excuse for why Edelgard could go into the Warp ahead of the others using what amounted to her Phantom Thief form.

Xion

Before I even presume a question, I’m going to open with ‘secret reasons’ for why not everything will be answered. Xion was always, always going to be in this scene. And for not as long, Mal Masque wanted me to kill off Malal. These are things that were decided long ago, and no one was going to take them from me.

Plans?

Xion went through a number of changes from her original form in the planning of the snip.

Originally, she was going to appear as she does in the Kingdom Hearts games for the full fight. She was going to dual wield keyblades, and she was going to be the scariest thing in the Warp besides Tzeentch and the Emperor themselves.

Around the time I decided to remove Claude from the scene, an idea struck me. As a writer, my main method of writing is basically like a child in a sandbox. I throw a bunch of toys – or in this case skills, properties, characters, traits, and tools – against a story and see what comes of it. One of the tools I hadn’t fully taken advantage of is that Xion can appear to be other people based on memories. In Kingdom Hearts, this was only regarding people’s relations to Sora, but out here in the greater whole of the multiverse?

What the hell happened to her?

This is the first question I wanted to incite in people. And I’m sorry, this is a secret reasons question, so there’s a limit to how much detail I can go into.

What I can tell you is my intent. I wanted to evoke even a hint of the personality shift that Dimitri had taken in the build up to Three Houses release. From the game’s reveal Dimitri had been treated as a sort of hanger on, a basic chivalrous character. Edelgard and Claude had both seemed far more interesting.

The last major trailer for the game showcased a major shift in that opinion with Dimitri’s now famous line: ‘Kill every last one of them.’

When combined with… a bunch of opportunities, including Xion’s changing face and Claude being moved to another scene, I saw opportunity.

What’s up with her toolkit?

With the exception of her ice power and the keyblade, each ability that Xion has was intended to reference a character she saw die. The most obvious one is Dimitri, who’s spear she carries along with her keyblade.

Less obvious might be her dual wielding of her weapons, or the wind magic she uses to maneuver through the odd gravity of the Warp storm. She was also intended to have a rifle at one point, but I couldn’t think of a good excuse at the time to squeeze it in without dragging things out more. Any guesses on who’s being referenced?

As for her actual keyblade, the one described is an imagined design for the snip. It was meant to resemble the Dark Tower itself, with a rose for a keychain, but in hindsight I’m not certain how well that translated. I even gave it a name: ‘Infinite Possibility.’

Does she have any relation to the Xehanort in the snip, ‘A Heart’s Gambit?’

I’m sorry to say, no. Sarge’s Kingdom Heart’s cluster is distinct from the one this Xion originates from. Because as we all know, on top of everything else crazy about the Kingdom Hearts storyline we also need alternate timelines to coexist.

Sarge’s snip is a brilliant depiction of the series through Xehanort, I felt, and he finished his snip well ahead of mine. I briefly considered dropping Xion entirely before I decided on emphasizing her connection to memories over her keyblade.

The Crimson Strike Force

I can’t give every character their own section, but I can briefly highlight a few of the choices I made for characters on the Strike Force. Overall, I tried to choose characters that I could justify to myself could ever bring themselves to join the side of Collapse, and even among those I only considered those who would be joining essentially alone.

Buddy Armstrong

The LISA series of games is one of the most messed up games I have ever played. I should know, I played through LISA the Painful at least 4 times. Considering her history, which is decidedly horrifying, my main issue with Buddy wasn’t ‘would she join the collapse’ but how do I make her useful? She is at her core a fairly normal human beyond her blood-soaked history.

The main buff I gave her was her sword. Buddy was trained to kill by her father from early in her life. She managed to cut her way through the strongest men in her post-apocalyptic world almost entirely on her own, but that wouldn’t have been enough when put on a stage with godly weapons. What exactly her sword is made from is part of the ‘secret’, but it served to make her capable of standing on her own against the lower levels of opponents the Strike Force would be facing.

The mutants – Joy Mutants from the series - came as a surprise to me though. It clicked while writing her first scene that if she’s going to have the trumpet to control her mutated dad, she could control any mutant out there. She turned from a foot soldier/assassin into almost a summoner, functionally. The mutants also worked as a hush hush parallel for Edelgard’s journey that I sadly didn’t get to spend more time on.

Makoto

I feel bad how little use I made of Makoto. She was my favorite party member in Persona 5 character wise, but she’s also only human and fights with her hands. Without a Persona in the first fight, she was forced into the role of a gunslinger and a small bit of moral compass. Even in the Warp, she was outclassed by Xion. I don’t regret her addition at all given her part in the first Strike Force scene, though I wish she got at least a moment of cool.

Doomfist

Doomfist was a late addition to the snip. I knew he’d be collapse long ago, given his love of conflict driving people to evolve. What greater evolution could there be than people defeating the greatest power in the multiverse?

Even so, I basically threw him into the first scene to be someone to question Edelgard’s leadership. Then I started writing the fights and this man just kept creeping into them! Despite his simple motivations the gauntlet he wears is an incredibly versatile tool, and Doomfist himself is incredibly cinematic by nature. He got two of the coolest, if not the coolest action parts in the entire snips. Launching Edelgard into the sky to tackle a wyvern, and his Meteor Strike against Xion.

Doomfist’s contribution has to be the single most surprising thing to have happened in the writing process for this entire thing. He basically went and wrote himself!

Claus

Claus… ah, Claus. Mother 3 is a beautiful game.

I put Claus in because the alternative was Porky Minch… who I think would rather be a Nihilist. I also felt like I could imagine a number of scenarios where Claus would side with collapse, even if I’ll admit I never picked one as definitive for him here.

I already felt like I’d had a core group with Edelgard, Buddy, Makoto, and Doomfist, though, which is why Claus got his happy ending off-screen. It also let me show time pass without writing about every single mission or any of the other dozens of unnamed Strike Force members.

Hornet

Hornet is a bit of a relic from an older plan for the snip. The Knight was originally going to be fighting alongside Xion at the end, and Hornet being opposite would’ve showcased a difference in growth. With the Knight being cut, and me feeling less and less confident in my Hornet I backpedaled a lot on what I wanted from her. Buddy was already an assassin of sorts, and Doomfist slotted into her core role in the Strike Force nicely.

After the first fight, I imagine Hornet was able to be healed from her wound and return to fight with the Strike Force for the duration of the war. She only didn’t make it to the Xion fight because she hadn’t been found.

A-Train

A-Train was the last addition I made to the Strike Force, and I feel gross even acknowledging him. I finished the first season of the Boys recently, and I felt compelled to acknowledge the show in some way in the most morally ambiguous conflict in all of Songs. Of all the characters, I thought A-Train was the most likely to flip for one reason: he could blame the Tower for his faults.

His addiction? Ka did this to me! Him getting old and slowing down? Ka’s making a point! So, on and so forth.

The rest of the Seven and Vought I feel would be Preservation, mostly because it’s the ‘popular’ choice and they could profit off of it. Although I’ll admit I don’t want to even pretend I can get into Homelander’s head.

A-Train didn’t make the last fight because I think he would have been a bit too much on top of the others. In addition, I feel like his attitude and actions would be punished in some prior conflict, and he wouldn’t have survived long enough to ever see the Xion fight.

Other

I considered a few other characters for the team, though didn’t slot them in. As a few examples:

Arvis (Fire Emblem: Genealogy): He gets an unnamed cameo, but overall, I thought he’d feel redundant with Edelgard, and given this was her snip… I didn’t give him a major part.

Warframe Ponies: Blaster suggested I add his characters from the Requiem of Shadows snip, and I did consider it, but the more I thought about it the more I thought they’d more likely be given their own team. The Strike Force was for heroes with nowhere else.

That one Certain Pony: Sorry, guys. I forgot.

Process

How did you go about writing this?

I normally start with a rough outline, making special note of things I really want to happen. Sometimes I keep this outline separate, other time’s I’ll paste it into the document and delete items off it as I complete them. It helps keep me on trajectory, and on occasion keeps characters from running wild.

If it isn’t obvious, my main focus at all times is letting the characters being themselves. A blessing and a curse. My first draft will always consist of run-off ideas and tangents just so the characters I involve in a situation can act as they want to. I think I was actually restrained in this regard for this snip!

Another thing I do is the ‘toys in a sandbox’ thing. It’s like Chekhov’s gun, but they’re scattered all over the house. It makes improvising scenes super fun, creating situations like Doomfist using the gauntlet to throw Edelgard at Claude’s wyvern. Then since Claus was there anyway, I gave him the final blow against the wyvern. This style of writing has some major drawbacks though, a few of those being that it can make things drag on and it can mean you miss something. Something like giving Makoto a moment to shine.

Stylistic choices

A given writer’s style will always be their own, and sometimes certain quirks won’t be intentional. I could hardly tell you all of mine, but there are a few things I’ve noticed I do on purpose.

One thing I like to do is swap between dialogue heavy and description heavy writing, whether every few paragraphs or every few pages. Descriptions can mean character actions or setting or other such things.

Something that GMBlackjack and I have talked about is banter. Namely, he does it all the time while I generally don’t. When two characters are fighting each other in a live-or-die scenario, joking takes away from the tension and rips me out of the moment. I deliberately teased this difference at one point in the snip, and in hindsight have at least two other spots where I did it by accident.

I also tend to dance around violence. Gruesome things happen, like the man being eaten alive by the mutants or Xion being cut clean in half, but I skirt the issue by addressing people’s reactions to it happening. I think anything you could imagine is worse than what I could write to some extent. If I went into details about either of these events, I would’ve felt it to be gratuitous besides.

Characters

I’ve given each major character their own section, but this is more a general section. When I write, who the characters are comes first and foremost. I approached almost every character in the snip as if the snip could have been about them. The first scene originated because of an unrelated idea of something I wanted to do with Pharynx long before this snip was conceptualized, or before Three Houses had been released.

This snip could have been about Makoto, the character that would likely be the least into the collapse’s cause. I could’ve delved into the emotions and logic that first brought to the Raven Hotel, and then what kept her there.

It could have been about Buddy, fighting for her vain and impossible freedom. It could have been about Doomfist taking part the multiverses greatest conflict – and evolution – ever. It could have been about Claus finding peace in what happened to him and rebecoming human, or A-Train’s road to self-destruction. It could have been about Claude desperately trying to bring a friend home, or Xion’s- well, motivations. Hell, it could’ve been about Byleth saying goodbye to his beloved in hopes of saving lives, only to lose his own meaninglessly with the fall of Equis Vitis.

Other

What’s the Soundtrack for this snip?

I’m glad you asked, me. As I wrote, I thought of a song to go with a lot of the scenes, though not every single one. Here’s a few of them, possibly with links if I remember to add them and YouTube hasn't killed the videos:

The Raven Hotel: Beneath the Mask – Persona 5

Buddy’s mutants march on the castle: Brokentooth March – Lisa the Joyful

Battle against Claude/Hilda: God-Shattering Star – Fire Emblem Three Houses

Battle against Xion: Apex of the World – Fire Emblem Three Houses

Final Conversation: Edge of Dawn (Full Version) – Fire Emblem Three Houses

If you had the opportunity to go back, would you change anything?

Yes.

One of the first things I’d find some places I could cut back on word count. Explanations that didn’t add anything or events that didn’t pay off. The Hotel sequence at the start is probably the biggest offender, given how much less of it paid off than I originally wanted.

I’ve also considered - in the time since 127’s posting – that Corona could’ve made a reference to Iroh in the final scene. She’s passing on her own wisdom to another over tea. If there’s a single opportunity I regret missing in the entire snip, it’s this. Even if it amounted to wording her advice like he would, or even finding some of his advice to restate directly.

Honestly, there’s enough missed opportunities that I’d probably have never finished if I tried to fit them all in. Arguably, I already fit too much in.

Conclusion

When I started this snip, I had one goal: write about Edelgard. I wanted to capture that moral uncertainty that she conveys in Three Houses, and that the War for Existence embodies. I wanted to share my passion for a handful of amazing characters in a way that went beyond gushing about them. I didn’t have a grand question I wanted to ask, though a few ideas might have crept in anyway. I'd rather not talk about those though, as I think it will mean something different to everyone that reads it.

This post went on a lot longer than I’d intended. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. If there's anything I didn't talk about, feel free to ask. Unless it's concerning my 'secret reason' that you've already guessed, I'll most likely answer. It's getting me to stop talking that's the real trick. :raritywink:

Comments ( 2 )

Why are there no other comments here!?

Anyway, I just want to say that I absolutely loved your snip Galliar! And not just for the Kingdom Hearts stuff, I think this was really well written and well paced. I for one did recognize the Tower themed keyblade and had to stop for a minute to think “wow, that’s really cool. I Wish I had thought of that myself.”

Argh! If I knew ahead of time you were going to use Xion I would have totally collaborated with ya! The cross snip nods in this chapter were really cool and it would have been neat to be able to mention her presence in A Hearts Gambit.

In any case you should link this post in a comment on 127. This makes me want to write an authors notes thing myself, so I’ll see if I can do that before this all gets too old ya?

5159009
I'd guess there's no other comments because this Author's notes is about half the length of my snip. :derpytongue2:

When I first saw your snip, I *thought* about mentioning Xion to you, but... well, even though they're both Kingdom Hearts related, my Xion and your Xehanort are from different iterations of Kingdom Hearts in the multiverse. I've had this Xion and a large portion of her history in the back of my mind for a long time, long before I started considering doing a snip.

I'd also talked to Mal about using the Warp way before either of us had gotten our respective snips going. The last scene with Corona taking off the glasses from Mal's last scene was essentially me rolling with how he'd ended his. At the time, that had been the only planned fight for the entire snip with other characters there which meant Xion's part would have far lesser. Then I ended moving Claude, and left Xion flying solo in that scene. By the time I'd made that decision, GM had decided to move the deadline up and the snip was due within 40 hours.

I might link it in the comments, as you suggest. I didn't want to when I first put this up because I didn't want to risk pulling the spotlight away from everyone else's snips, but at this point I don't think that'll be an issue.

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