James_D_Fawkes
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[Hereafter] Chapter I: Cosmic Joke
🕑 Added 2021-03-20 08:25:42 +0000 UTCEveryone, please, please let me know your thoughts with this one. I'm incredibly uncertain whether or not to keep the idea of "Taylor Hebert and the Fujimaru twins save the world." It might seem like a bit of a copout, instead of just picking a gender for Ritsuka and being done with it, but there's a lot that I think I'd have to cut out if I pared it down to just one.
Thematically, Ritsuka as the naive idealist with a compassionate heart and Vlad III as the hard man who made his legend making hard, even cruel decisions work incredibly well as Taylor's foils, but adding a fraternal twin lets me inject some humor that might otherwise have no place, and I'm not sure whether it's worth it to keep the course or pare it down.
For reference, Ritsuka (m) would be a more serious character, closer to the guy in the Babylonia anime or First Order, while Rika/Ryuko (f) would be a bit sillier, because she's the only sane (wo)man left amidst a bunch of crazy people in frankly crazy situations.
I'm just not sure it's worth it to have her reactions to everything or to keep tighter to the themes at the cost of some levity.
In any case, I give you the first chapter of Hereafter, Cosmic Joke. It's much closer to a prologue, and things will truly start next chapter.
Comments
Caractacus
I think I spent too much time just in Taylor's head, and also that I'm not sure I captured her inhibited state too well. The narration, from her POV, should feel a little disjointed, because smoke inhalation is having a deleterious effect on her ability to focus and hone her thoughts. But I didn't much like this opening chapter, either. I do think it's the weakest part of the story, so far.
Chris Evelyn
This first chapter seems a lot more disjointed, and less polished then anything you wrote in Essense. The writing just seems a lot more rough. Was this intentional? it was a real surprise given the quality we've all come to expect.
Caractacus
Part of the problem we run into is that only a handful of Nasu's entire library has been officially translated. The original FSN never got one. Neither did the Fate/Zero light novels. I think Mahoyo hasn't gotten one, and most if not all of the material books haven't gotten one. KnK never got a dub, and I'm not sure the LNs it's based on were ever officially translated, either. So it's hard to weed out what is an official term officially translated, what is that but also has Nasu's stamp as the "real" term, and what is just a fan term that has permeated the fandom. As far as who Taylor learned from goes, that's stuff that will be revealed later on down the line.
Mordred
I'm unsure on the Japanese version I'm just going off the anime and the wiki which both say Magician doubt it will actually be relevant though. Yeah fair enough I assumed because it was mentioned that she spent two years cramming around Magi they would have taught her the differences. Yeah true enough I've got in headcannon that he provided some assistance considering they go into alternate timelines which encroaches on his purview. Again doesn't actually particularly matter. Thanks for the prompt response :)
Caractacus
It depends on the translation you read. If I remember right, when Kiritsugu offers to adopt Shirou, he actually calls himself a "magician." The words used in Japanese are, to my knowledge, "majutsushi" for magi and "mahou tsukai" for users of True Magic. "Magician" is, I think, just a fan translation term that's stuck around the fandom. None of that's particularly relevant for Taylor, though. She's basically a complete novice. She's better informed and more skilled than the twins, but she doesn't particularly care about being precise in her language when she's more concerned about what she can *do* with magecraft. Insofar as Zelretch's involvement. Whether he is at all and to what degree is impossible to know, until Nasu says otherwise.
Mordred
Nice first chapter, one thing I noticed though was that it referred to magicians on loan from the Mage's association, which is wrong unless Zeltrech decided to help for some reason.
