A nice long one to sink my claws into today.
Pretty Little Windstorm (Tavros (HB, WV, Nepeta, Equius, Aradia, Sollux, SS, Vriska))
So…Tavros is being trained in swordfighting by HB. Neither quite seem the dueling type, but okay. And he’s got mechanical legs.
your horns do make it pretty easy, they’ve gone from decently big to kind of inconveniently huge in the last sweep
…how big are they, exactly? Because six-sweep Tavros’ horns are already ridiculously large.
And he’s friends with Vriska, somehow?
And his mental powers work on carapaces. I thought Tavros was limited to underlings.
Ah, so he’s part of the spy network with his powers. That’s a cool idea.
there are at least two ferals in Golden Park and possibly a zombie in Turning Park
Hm…
breaths fire
Breathes.
Staff carapaces are always hungry, you know: they do everything that needs to be done in the palace
…so, then why aren’t they getting fed enough? Are they some oppressed underclass? Why is WV so terrified, doesn’t he have any rights?
After a much shorter internal battle than the first, your Waitstaff Vassal takes the smaller of the cakes and begins to nibble.
This guy really doesn’t seem much like WV. He’s got the politeness down to fanon-perfect levels, but aside from that he’s timid and relatively restrained, and he’s not gobbling food at all, and he seems extremely friendly toward what seems like a feudal society, and one where he’s at the bottom of the pecking order no less.
And that’s a remarkably complex explanation for Serenity. I hope that’s tying into some plot thing for later.
It also sounds like staff for the palace and possibly city in general come from dispossessed people/carapaces, which is really not saying anything nice about whatever rule Aradia’s doing.
He’s so nice! You will have to get Aradia to give him some kind of nice thing to pay him back for what a nice guy he is. Maybe a fruit basket or a cool medal or a vacation or something. Maybe another farm, if he doesn’t like being a Waitstaff much.
It’d be a lot better to have some sort of system in place so there was help for people in general, instead of making special exceptions for the ones he stumbles across. I suppose there’s no reason to think Tavros is really thinking in broader terms, and maybe he’s pretty sheltered, but then again he’s got all his animal spies, he should have a moderate idea of what it’s like outside his own tower.
So. There’s a palace, and Aradia and Tavros both built it? …and also Nepeta lives there? In addition to Equius? I can see how flipping the hemospectrum gets you Aradia on top, but I’m lost as to how it changes trolls from solitary, far-flung individuals to all living together in a giant palace.
Also wow, why on earth isn’t WV calling for a rebellion when carapaces can be eaten alive at some greenblood’s whim?
“No,” you let her know, “you do not get to eat my subjects. They are mine and they have my protection.”
So she can eat everyone else then? I mean, it’s certainly a very feudal attitude, but it’s also one that royally sucks for everyone who isn’t royalty or under their personal protection.
He’s not even a troll! He’s not even an animal!
So what exactly are carapaces, then? Where do they come from?
Since he was a farmer, it’s not like they’re being manufactured as part of the palace staff directly, and if they’re being made for specific jobs like farmer, then you wouldn’t want them to go do something else, you’d just ship them to whatever other place you needed farming done at.
And since it doesn’t seem they have any protections, how do they survive? WV at least doesn’t seem capable of defending himself and it doesn’t seem like he’s got any legal recourse. Are they being churned out at a fast enough rate to offset this, and how/by who, since the ones we know are created for a particular purpose?
Also, did Tavros just beat an armed Nepeta and Pounce simultaneously while his leg is broken and his only weapon is the crutches he’s using to limp around, and while holding WV?
“We’ve talked about terrorizing the staff, kitten,” Aradia admonishes Nepeta. “Haven’t we talked?”
“You’ve talked,” Nepeta blubbers. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to pounce on something so impawsibly skittery-pounceable! Kitties have needs!”
“You’ll just have to meet them elsewhere, dear,” Aradia says
…so the official word is that she needs to eat carapaces that aren’t on the payroll, then? Not “don’t eat people”, just “don’t eat people who are currently useful to me personally”. Feferi was a much better empress-to-be.
triggering the hidden mechanisms that seal the biometal to the amputated surfaces of your thighs.
Wait, what? The knee was broken, he shouldn’t need to remove the hips to fix that. Even if the hip joint was messed up, he still shouldn’t need to pry off the metal casing attached to Tavros’ flesh.
So, Equius is still hemospectrum obsessed, but also somehow still giving Tavros shit over stuff like fighting with Nepeta except when suddenly he stops and flips to fawning?
“Here,” Aradia says kindly
You keep saying she’s being kind or having her talking nicely. You really shouldn’t need to be saying it. And it doesn’t seem especially IC – when I think of Aradia’s defining features, calling Nepeta kitten and cooing over people really isn’t anywhere on there.
Ugh lisping Sollux. Just say he has a lisp, reading phonic renditions of dialogue is incredibly irritating.
…that was a very long and involved process that doesn’t seem at all necessary. Why not just start with Serenity out of the amber? Unless how she got there and in amber and then to Alternia is going to be really important, this all seems like a ridiculously long diversion.
Huh. So there’s still the Alternian fleet, and they’re going to join it as adults, and…the fleet doesn’t do anything but just sit around in space? And they’ve got a higher tech level than the kids on Alternia, although not so high Sollux can’t hack into it. I think he’s saying they need to know it for when they become adults, although why exactly doesn’t seem clear.
watching silly old Noir films
Pretty sure that shouldn’t be capitalized.
And for some reason Slick is okay with serving Aradia, despite the part where Aradia is the Empress Elect and so she already technically owns everything anyway and he isn’t, and also the part where his job is still full of paperwork.
Still not clear why Vriska is managing to be friendly with Tavros instead of psychotic and threatening. I suppose I could see her acting like this if Tavros was more enthusiastic toward her, but that just switches the question of why Tavros is suddenly 0kay with how…Vriska she is.
I’m still confused why Tavros is the best fighter ever.
I don’t get to chose fucking anything, Vriska, you know that, you know it’s not like I chose, you know it’s that I got chosen. I am her Luminesence’s Grand Premier
…okay what? I was figuring it was just some feudal title like the rest. He’s not a rare blood type like, say, Kanaya or Karkat, and it can’t just be that he’s moderately high since there’s redder blood between him and Aradia, and anyway Eridan never was anything particular with Feferi. What was he chosen over?
Also, why are there lowblooded plots to overthrow Aradia if she’s a good empress elect? The ones with the regular hemospectrum seemed they were over the whole horrible oppression and misery thing.
A blue-blood through and through, her breath isn’t even steaming at all.
I really don’t know how fandom latched so hard onto the idea that somehow Mindfang’s diary saying the apparently lowblooded slave had surprisingly warm blood meant that lowbloods were warmer. I suppose that might have flipped in this one along with the rest…
“I knew it, I knew you liked my completely bitchin’ facial ornamentation,” you say, smugly preening it.
She throws a little rock at you, but misses. “Fuck off, bulgemunch.”
“You guys are matesprits now.”
Vriska’s ongoing, quadrant-flipping scandal with his beard, though, that’s amusing.
And something bad happened to Vriska’s home and probably lusus. Hm, that’s interesting.
…and Tavros continues to be the best fighter ever. I can believe that being well fed and getting daily training in swordfighting would make you pretty good at it, but if Vriska’s going around fighting deathmatchs in games with no rules but not dying, I kind of think she’d have an edge.
“Vriska Serket,” your friend says, sounding completely unfazed, “beta and placewinner, and Tavros Nitram, alpha and invitee.”
Why’s the invitee the alpha?
These are bluebloods like Vriska’s a blueblood, these are wild things, honed to the merciless peak of conditioning by constant warfare; boys and girls with icy stares and pricked up ears and shattered horns and snaggletooth grins, patchwork bodies reflecting sweep upon sweep’s worth of battlescars
I really think the ones surviving constant warfare have the edge on the boy learning proper dueling skills at the palace.
I am pleased by Vriska’s several levels of lying to drag Tavros into the fight, though. The chromocide was indeed a nice touch.
…but. They have a championship where the hundred best fighters all get together and they all fight to the death? It’s really hard to believe there’d be anyone left. I can see some dying, even a lot dying, and even more maiming, but I can’t think of how you could run something with a 99% death toll even if it was a complete free for all, let alone if it was supposedly taking the cream of the crop each year.
So. Tavros is a better fighting than Vriska, a better fighter than all the bluebloods combined, and he’s also better at dealing with backstabbing traps that aren’t even legal in blueblood deathmatches than Vriska. Also, somehow winning a tag team match with Vriska means Tavros is the sole champion?
Well. It’s interesting, but the characters do seem more like OCs with similar themes. Aradia is just a ruler-shaped cutout. Tavros talks like himself, but he’s a super perfect version – far more confident, kind and defending others, able to handle Vriska, and also the most incredible fighter ever in every way for some reason. Vriska seems like herself – a lot nicer, but still willing to lie to get someone to do something incredibly dangerous because she thinks it’s a good idea, and of all of them she’s the one I can best guess for why she’d be like that. Tavros I can sort of fill in the holes – he’s a lot more powerful in this AU, so there’s that, but then again he’s still umming and apologetic.
And there’s so much changed of the setting as well. Aradia’s now future empress, but no mention of any lusus protecting her or assassination attempts, and whatever’s going on with Tavros being Premier, and somehow they’re all living in a castle together, and there are carapaces everywhere with no clear explanation of why, and troll death games seem to be the sole province of bluebloods when in original canon they were played by kids across the hemospectrum, so why would flipping change that? The fact it’s taking place sweeps past when we’ve seen them is just introducing yet more change, and none of it seems to be really getting explained.
I’d really like to have a better idea of how the setting works and what kind of society they have, as well as drawing clearer lines to how the characters got to where they are from where we know them in canon. Also, for Tavros to be somewhat less perfect at everything.
Start From Scratch(Rose (Doc Scratch, Dave, John, Jade, Karkat, Kanaya))
(for a more readable version, here’s the stripped-format story.)
You do a mind-bogglingly good job with everyone’s voices. I killed the formatting to see Scratch’s writing more easily, but then found the rest of the pesterlogs perfectly distinct even without the coloring.
GG: he is so forgetful. D:GG: good thing we’re in here together!
Looks like you lost a line break here.
I’d really like to know more of what’s going on here – how did Karkat get into the scratched session while the other trolls are outside it (and are those ones even the same ones? Though Kanaya has kept her same handle unlike the scratched kids) and what’s going on with John and Jade being together, and did the world change in any way other than the kids’ upbringing, and oh god why the hell did Scratch do that?
Game Night for the Midnight Crew (MC)
I feel like I might have reviewed this over on FFN. Also, it’s awful and not the kind you can concrit, the kind where someone just…god I don’t even know. If you have a better idea than me, go forth and comment.
There Are Only Dreams Now… (Karkat, Terezi (Jack, Trolls))
I really don’t know what to make of this. The intermittent rhyme just makes it all sound kind of silly.
Also, this is six hundred words, it’s not a drabble. A drabble is a fic of exactly one hundred words.
Grasping For Your Hand (Karkat, Terezi)
I don’t quite get the appeal of this bad end timeline. We know it doesn’t come to pass because the catalyst for Terezi killing Vriska is knowing it would. Even if we assume that seers are peeking into other timelines, so things do go down like that at least one before the information filters back, that would mean any Terezi in that timeline wouldn’t know Vriska had doomed them, since if she knew she’d kill Vriska in the first place and the timeline never happens.
And past that, it’s just Karkat and Terezi being scared and saying they love each other, neither of which are new things. There’s no exploration of their characters here and nothing about them changes except for the part where they start off alive and end up dead the way we already knew they would.
Preparations (Terezi, Gamzee, Karkat, Sollux, Vriska (Jack))
So after the update, CapSep and a couple of anons in HSG I think had the idea that Terezi had a plan to get the others out of their hideout safely but would stay behind to smash the teleportalizer
…teleportalizers are two-way devices and wreaking one seems like it’s enough to render them inoperable. Failing that, they can’t figure out how to set a bomb?
As far as he knows, we’re all here. He’s going to comb this place looking for us before he gets bored and destroys it outright. I’ll face him alone, maybe I can buy you all some time, and if we’re lucky, he’ll think I’m the last one and give up the search.”
Well that makes slightly more sense, but he’ll smell all the others, won’t he?
And she doesn’t seem to have any plan for that, like cutting the survivors and getting their blood all over her so Jack will think they’re already dead or something.
It is a good explanation for why Jack only brings her two bodies (though I’d also like an explanation for where Gamzee ended up in that case) but the most of this seems to be running on fiat logic where characters can’t take an obvious better option because they just can’t.
It’s Not Healthy, But Here I Am. (Rose)
TT: This is not a healthy way to greive.
TT: My experience in phsycology taught me that much.
…so, are the spelling errors supposed to be a sign of how messed up Rose is, or what? Because I really think that’d be the last to go.
This is a good concept but I think it really needs more polishing. Rose is too plainspoken, and I think she’s also giving too much exposition to the reader. In both ways it’s just too easy to follow her, which doesn’t really give the feel of someone rambling into a dead person’s account.
An Excellent Host (Slick (Doc Scratch, Snowman))
Weight Of The World (Doc Scratch (Kanaya, Rose))
drabble-ish.
This is over a thousand words. A drabble is a specific writing exercise where you have to hit a hundred words exactly.
As to the story itself, quite interesting, and you manage to make little Scratch sound cute, which only makes adult Scratch calmly torturing Rose that much creepier. However, you say he knows everything – he doesn’t, there’s those dark pockets to take into consideration.
Pawn (WV (BQ, BK, Jack))
Tavros (HB, WV, Nepeta, Equius, Aradia, Sollux, SS, Vriska)
Rose (Doc Scratch, Dave, John, Jade, Karkat, Kanaya)
MC
Karkat, Terezi (Jack, Trolls)
Karkat, Terezi
Terezi, Gamzee, Karkat, Sollux, Vriska (Jack)
Rose
Slick (Doc Scratch, Snowman)
Doc Scratch (Kanaya, Rose)
WV (BQ, BK, Jack)
Five of ten again.