Man of Letters (new Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn fanfic)

[queenlua]

In Daein, Ambassador Naesala of Serenes spots a weakness in Pelleas, and takes him under his wing.

Pelleas & Naesala, Pelleas/Micaiah/Sothe, ~18k words.

Read here on AO3.

Author's notes are below the following cuts; please note they contain pretty big spoilers for the entire fic!

* The prompt I got was along the lines of "it'd be neat to see Naesala mentoring Pelleas in some capacity, post-game," and I liked that idea quite a bit... but the story didn't really come alive until I stumbled on the "what if Pelleas is illiterate?" angle.

* And once I landed that angle, I gave myself a whole bunch of unexpected Big Feelings, haha. Which probably deserve their own essay at some point, but the shitty drive-by bullet point version is something like:

-> I have a Machiavellian rant I go on sometimes, to the tune of: while it's indeed true that reading is often fun and worthwhile in-and-of-itself, the real reason to learn to read is because the written word is the most powerful technology humankind has ever harnessed and having facility with it gives you a very real and potent power that no one can ever take away. this is true both for base material reasons (you're harder to swindle, etc) and also for aiding-in-abstract-thought reasons. this is a thing that people understood for centuries, back when access to books was a rare and valuable thing, and you sure as hell weren't schooling your kid for vague, fun reasons. but I think sometimes gets lost when people are, like, how do we make sure kids aren't BORED when they are learning... and sure, i mean, if you can teach someone without making them bored, that's great... but sometimes you have to read boring shit because boring shit like "contracts" and "laws" in fact govern our world, and if you read them you get better at understanding them, which gives you power, and i want everyone to become extremely powerful

-> that being said: even the "fun" aspects of reading—the way in which one can be transported to a world and worldview very unlike one's own, whether that's via a schlocky mystery novel, or a thoughtfully-written work of anthropology, or the sort of sweeping frame you get from a big fat classic novel—are immensely freeing. in the story, Naesala's feeling rather unfree in a lot of ways—but he sees Pelleas there, and sees how he can make him free, and does so. that sort of thing.

-> there's a lot of fretting in Humanities Academia lately about how Kids These Days Can't Read, They Are Barely Literate, No One Reads Books Anymore, and so on. i can't quite tell how much of this is a genuine decline versus a moral panic. and thus i don't have any strong opinions about what, if anything, can or should be done about that.

but. i do think it's true that the primacy of literary culture is on the decline, probably primarily for humdrum technological reasons. folks read Dickens for entertainment before HBO was a thing; nowadays The Narrative You Need To Engage With To Feel Like Part Of Bourgeois Conversation is more likely to be something like the TV show Succession. and yeah you can argue that's a bad thing but you can make a reasonably plausible cause that this is Fine, Actually. i mean, Succession is pretty good TV. it has some important stuff it's trying to say.

but.

i mean, i was raised by an English teacher; i grew up on an internet when bandwidth was expensive and thus almost all communication was text-based; the internet stars were bloggers writing LONG GODDAMN POSTS rather than youtube video essayists. i'm not even the most bookish person i know—not by a long shot!—but all things being equal i'd rather read a book than watch a show; the books i've enjoyed most have, i think, made me more thoughtful and generous and attentive and alive in important ways that aren't as easily replicated in other mediums.

so i like literary culture in-and-of-itself & i think it's worth defending, even if it's never going to experience the kind of widespread reverence it once had. that's just me making a values judgment, Here Is A Way To Live I Consider Worthy. others may have other cultures they care more about! but that's mine, and so in my story, pelleas gets a taste of that. i hope he gets more.

SO YEAH

it was fun to explore all that. by sublimating all those feelings into fanfiction. for a children's video game. as one does.

* That being said, ugh, making this all come together was a much messier time than I've had writing in a long while. We'll... see how I feel about the final result in a few months' time? In particular my bugbears were:

* Bugbear #1: squaring away Naesala's motivations in all of this.

I didn't want him to be doing this for the sake of blowing up a relationship; I've already written that fic and it's called "Silent World." I'm easily bored; I don't like doing the same thing more than once!

But I also struggled to get to a Naesala who'd be doing this out of pure altruism, right. The Naesala in this fic is more genuinely penitent and pensive than most variations that I've written, but, there's still gotta be a slightly obnoxious edge to him or he's just not as fun, haha.

What I finally landed on was—okay, let's do a comparison. Last week, I got in an argument with a cryptocurrency guy at a ski lodge bar. Did I deliberately provoke that fight? No! I was legit just trying to pass some time, because the basketball game had finished broadcasting, and I still had half a beer to drink, and I love chatting with random strangers. But did I, uh, bother avoiding the topic when I damn well knew via shoulder-surfing that that dude had 90k dollars' worth of stuff in Solana? Er. No. No I did not. And if he'd been like "you are being Rude As Hell, why are you baiting me," I would've been like, you know, that's not entirely fair, but it's fair enough, right.

Naesala's schtick ended up being like that (and I hope that came across lol). I do think Naesala felt stirred by a benevolent whim to help Pelleas out because, come on, the dude is so pathetic, how can you not (with a side touch of professional disdain, the "oh christ i'll just fix it myself" when he realizes Micaiah hasn't noticed this when she really should know better) (and also a side touch of "ugh I'm feeling bored and trapped and annoyed, at least here's something I can be good at"). Pissing off Micaiah in the process was just, y'know. An entertaining supplementary thing. What a fucking troll

* Bugbear #2: I had really hoped I could keep this fic in SFW territory, actually. Partially for the purely instrumental reason of "wow, it's been a long time since I've written something I could link to in a SFW server," lol, but also... hm, I'm actually gotten kind of suspicious of my motivations when my mind drifts to "what if they have messy/weird sex" as a way to up the stakes in a story conflict, right?

There's times when that totally makes sense and is the right thing to do, to be clear. Something like "Bird in the Hand" is pretty inextricably About Sex and having the narrative play out that way is thus only good sense.

But often enough, when I'm struggling with the core conflict of the story and I'm like "what if they do Messy Physical Romance about it," it's the equivalent of wanting to write a huge cool physical barfight between two characters who have beef with each other—have you earned that fight? have you escalated things enough such this feels like the only way it can go? or are you just lazily reaching for the most Obvious Big Showy Way to demonstrate that the conflict exists?

But in the end I couldn't quite figure out how to make Micaiah's pull over Pelleas come across without some Weird Fucking Bedroom Dynamics coming into play. Maybe it's the fault of my own possibly-idiosyncratic take on the Dawn Brigade peeps—I read Micaiah as being weirdly skittish when it comes to talking about emotions, despite her empath powers–she's got a lot of selfish/terrified-of-losing-people impulses that I think she doesn't want to talk about directly, so best to avoid such talk altogether... anyway, yeah, that's what bumped the rating up to M lol

* Bugbear #3: oh god Pelleas is so pathetic. i mean. that's fun in a lot of ways. but it's too fun. starts to make you suspicious of your own motivations. am i only writing this bit because i love heaping misery upon the local sadboi....

* Bugbear #4: the narrative overall wound up being a combo of "weirdly quiet" and "herky-jerky moves forward" that... maybe was the only way it could've gone, but felt weird as the one writing it. Like, early on, I was messing with something where Micaiah sort of foists a paperwork-heavy position on Pelleas because she senses him drifting and wants to claw him back (not that she consciously realizes that's what she's doing!), and Pelleas brings all this shit to Naesala like "help, oh god, what do all these papers mean," and Naesala's looking over a pile of state secrets and is like "dude you REALLY shouldn't be showing me all this, just like, fyi," and had some antics there... but that ended up feeling like TOO much? too slapsticky? too sitcom episode-y? idk

so then I stepped that back & introduced some of the Sublimating Your Feelings Via Gardening stuff, but I spun my wheels for quite a while trying to hash out "okay what do Micaiah's actions Represent™ and what do Naesala's actions Represent™ and thus how does This Conflict Between Them Play Out," I had a Whole Dramatic Climactic Scene written with Naesala getting all yell-y and frustrated that Pelleas is still pathetic after everything Naesala's taught him, because damn if Naesala's feeling trapped at least someone else here should get to free... but that didn't feel right and I spun my wheels for quite a while... until I talked it over with a friend, who was like, "okay but from Pelleas's point-of-view who cares what the Ex Drama is, the point is that it doesn't matter because he can read now and he's got that no matter what." GOOD POINT. Poor Pelleas almost got smothered by my tacky shlocky need to have a Plot.

After that, I was able to finish the damn thing, but probably the overall tone should've been a lil more meditative or something, idk.

* Bugbear #5: I went back and forth on whether to add a brain crush angle to all of this, e.g. Pelleas isn't sure whether he wants to be Naesala or be with Naesala. Decided to nix it to make the central conceit cleaner but woulda been neat if I coulda made it work.

i think that covers all the main stuff. a couple other random odds & ends:

* i definitely had this article in mind when i came up with the "pelleas is illiterate" idea. that article was so surprising and sad and interesting to me when i first read it... i had no idea what adult illiteracy, borderline-literacy, etc, could look like, prior to that, or how that would even happen in what sounds like an otherwise-reasonable classroom... it got me on a tangent at the time, reading up on phonics-based learning and also adult literacy challenges in general. big thanks to that reporter for covering important shit

* Yes, if you squint and look at this sideways this is kind of a "Pelleas lives AU" sequel to "Silent World", and I considered mentioning as much upfront... but, eh, the emotional texture of the polycule is just different enough between those two works that I don't think the continuity quite works, alas

* i was tempted to go reread the opening party scene in War and Peace when i was writing that first "Pelleas at court" scene, but, thought i might make myself too bummed at how my party scene looked in comparison lol. I PLAN TO GO REREAD IT NOW THOUGH hey y'all did you know War and Peace is a banger

Comments

[kradeelav]

i may have read half your author's note while i was halfway through the fic because seeing the behind the scenes to your writing's just as delicious as the writing itself haha, but i liked the flavor it gave this <3 it was cute to smile at those little mentions (the "why" it felt so endearing and good for pelleas to get that little bit of independence like a fawn standing on its own two legs for the first time).

if it makes you feel better, naesala feels perfectly spot on here even with the slightly-more-altruisim on average on display; he also strikes me as somebody who goes through moods of being amused at creating-a-smidge-of-chaos through unassuming people getting powerful. and also hey, pelleas now technically owes him an emotional favor. that could help in the long run. :P

there was something endearing in this fic that felt like a capsule episode of an anime where it's a complete mini-story but *could* be within a larger series so that's so fascinating that in hindsight i could see the silent world vibes. :o love that.

[queenlua]

lmao GOSH KRAD DID U NOT SEE THE SPOILER WARNING

(the "pelleas is illiterate actually" thing is the only big spoiler and that's ch1 lol. but i was PROUD of that twist haha)

honestly at this rate maybe i'll write another pseudo-sequel fic four years from now, in which Naesala DOES cash in that favor Pelleas owes him, hmmMMMM.... i'll drop that somewhere in the idea bank, anyway, ty :P

so glad you liked the fic <3