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queenlua"Verso," Sciel says, smiling brightly, "I'm starting to think you don't want our little expedition to succeed."Read here on AO3.
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Verso’s working toward another end. Sciel won’t let that happen.
Set during Act 3.
Sciel &/ Verso, ~7k words.
this is NOT the clair obscur fic i was shouting about on tumblr this past summer. that thing is an overgrown formless monstrosity that is DEFINITELY still getting worked on but MAY OR MAY NOT ever see the light of day because uh. wow it's sure something.
but, see, i have this thing i do, when i'm toying with a new canon in a fannish way, where i try to avoid reading any fic in the fandom until after i've published my first work in the fandom. i'm like "oh no, what if The Fanon Interpretations™ distort my own unique-to-me viewpoint on canon, i must Ground Myself first & the way to do that is Write My Own Fic First." and yes i know this probably doesn't even work & is an insane way to engage with fandom but alas it is apparently how i am built.
ANYWAY, i was wanting to read some Clair Obscur fic, but since writing aforementioned overgrown formless monstrosity is taking forever, i couldn't see myself being able to actually do that anytime soon. "do i have any other ideas about this canon," i thought to myself, "like, a shorter fic that i could actually execute and accomplish in quicker timeframe"?
i... have a couple other ideas, as it turns out, actually! but THIS is the one that acquired form the fastest & got written first, and...
...yeah i didn't expect "Sciel noncons Verso" to be my fandom debut either but here we are. life's full of surprises innit!
other things of note/amusement:
* a recurring theme in my Tellius fanfiction is "during Part 4, when the world is frozen in stone, ppl start making terrible sleeping-around choices." i'll note this fic is set during Act 3 which is Clair Obscur's canon-equivalent version of "world is frozen in stone" and boy howdy is a terrible sleeping-around choice made. even when i'm not writing Tellius, i'm writing Tellius <3
* I feel like I acquired Words Disease sometime in the past year so I was pleased to actually have a draft come in at a short story length instead of some gangling thing. like ok yes it gained an extra 2k+ words during revisions, that part pissed me off, but it still comes in at under 7.5k so i'm counting that as a #win
* clair obscur is a funky little canon to write because so much of its writing’s strength comes from its sparseness, by how much character & worldbuilding work it does via bare implication, and also, yeah, by having good physical & voice actors conveying everything.
which makes it a slightly funky beast to write fanfiction about, because a good piece of writing generally^ requires one to flesh things out much more concretely, and in fact often derives its strength from that very concreteness.
^ yes yes obviously you can have writing that is sparse, that is "movie-like," etc, but (1) I Don't Wanna Do That Tho and (2) i do think that sort of thing works against the natural strengths of the medium. i want to write a story that feels like a story, not a story that feels like a movie
...but as soon as you start fleshing things out in a way more appropriate to the medium, you start noticing a lot of weird edges? you're looking at cardboard standees from the other side? you realize actually the cross-stitching piece is pretty ugly if you stare at it from the back? that thing where some visual artists' sketches always look better than their complete pieces because your brain "picks" the "best" lines and just vibes with those in the sketches, and your brain can't do the autocorrect thing for the final piece? idk i'm losing the metaphor here.
to be clear i don't think this is a weakness in Clair Obscur's writing, at all. having an ugly back for your cross-stitch piece literally does not matter if people are only looking at it from the front. just a problem for me, personally, because i'm doing shenanigans :P
anyway this mostly manifested in my being kind of annoyed that we only ever get the barest glimpses of Sciel Acting Out When She's Having A Bad Time. i like that she's a generally even-tempered character, but i don't think she's the kind of saint that would be nice all the time, but since canon doesn't really give much to go on, any extrapolation you do to get Sciel Into A Bad Place sort of prompts "fuck is this out-of-character / if it IS out-of-character, do i care, have i made a convincing argument for my own read of this character"-type worries.
the last time i remember struggling with this was Claude von Fucking Fireemblem, though to Clair Obscur's credit, like, the Claude case was much more annoying, because that dude has so much screentime that it sort of starts to beggar belief that we never see him out of sorts. Sciel's a more minor character in her own story so it did feel more natural to Extrapolate Various Stuff.
* FIRST STORY FINISHED SINCE MAY I AM A GOD etc etc
* eta: just because i was thinking of it today: the flashback to sciel and pierre's house was among the last scenes i wrote for the story & i was stuck on it for a while until i was like "well what would i be like if Bird Guy died." the answer is fuckedupinsane. that's why her place has the same breakfast nook as mine. rip sciel sorry about your life. so yeah tl;dr buying a house remains one of the most emotionally charged experiences of my entire life (which yes reflects that i've had a pretty easy life; i'm not unaware of my blessings lol); good thing i can still mine it for fanfiction purposes...!
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Date: 2025-11-25 01:06 am (UTC)even when i'm not writing Tellius, i'm writing Tellius a.k.a story of our lives.
The "crossstitch viewed from the back" is such an accurate metaphor (the backside of my pieces have some very interesting stitching choices, which is not unlike stitching together what you think canon is doing). But as long as the front is convincing, who cares? :D
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Date: 2025-11-25 01:19 am (UTC)and re: cross stitch back: yeah, it depends so much on the Genre and What You're Trying To Accomplish, but eg in movies specifically, if there's a plot hole that doens't quite make sense that doesn't occur to you until several days later, but the *emotional* core was there and all the moment-to-moment character motivations made sense, landed appropriately, etc... it's not much of a "gotcha" to point out some kind of mechanical inconsistency, like, who cares, that wasn't what was holding up the narrative.
imo it's harder for prose narrative to get away with as much of that sort of thing but def happens there too for sure
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Date: 2025-12-12 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-12 07:40 pm (UTC)* by "good" i mean "suffering" you know how it goes
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Date: 2025-12-12 09:49 pm (UTC)