#for real I'm going to have to publish an annotated version with all the references and in-jokes explained

[tidyturnip]

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[rudjedet]

aph--lietuva replied to your post “Last night it suddenly hit me I can, should and will have the villain...”

I don't know what this refers to but I felt the same when quoting the epic of Gilgamesh in a fanart last week-

There’s a Middle Kingdom tale called The Eloquent Peasant which is what this is a reference too. In the story, a peasant’s donkey is stolen by a mean overseer, and the peasant pleads his case for the local steward and later even to the king. Because of his eloquence they make him talk for ten days, then he is finally granted justice. I already had a missing donkey in the book, but this is even better because I can actually have the characters know about that exact story.

I mean, imagine the villain, antagonist and protagonist sitting in the villain’s hideout. The protagonist is being her usual disagreeable self and the villain will not stand for it, sarcastically telling her she’s too eloquent for the peasant she is. The antagonist, who is a general and a member of the elite and can therefore be presumed to have read The Eloquent Peasant, can’t help but snort into his bowl, because although he very much wants the villain dead before dawn, fuck, that was actually a really funny joke. 

Ahhh man I love putting this sort of shit into my book

[ryqoshay]

I just thought of an idea recently and I'm not sure if you have this in your notes: How did Nico (or anyone else) approve of the photoshoot for #608 Maki (the magician UR paired with Kotori) if Maki said she didn't believe in magic in the "If I Knew Magic" side story? Or is that retconned out due to her belief in Santa? I think this could be one of the "Nico teasing/annoying Maki" stories that another anon suggested earlier.

I can think of a couple of ways Maki was chosen to be paired with Kotori for the set.

But first we’ll start with Kotori. I would wager she already had an idea for the set and was a shoo-in for it. Worth bearing in mind that the magic in question is less to do with fairies and fantasy or swords and sorcery or dungeons and dragons or whatever, and more to do with sleight of hand and misdirection. Kotori has nimble fingers from her work with costume design. Combine that with the charisma that earned her fame as Minalinsky and the world’s most innocent poker face and she could misdirect anyone. For the idolized version, I believe she had a prince and princess motif in mind and was a natural pick for the princess side.

This left a vacancy for the prince. And who best to fill that role than one of the soldier game trio? However, by this time both Umi and Eli would have already been paired with Kotori in the Yukata and Job v2 sets respectively. This leaves Maki. I have no doubt that there would be some ribbing involved by the likes of Nozomi and/or Nico, but I think the reasoning listed prior would be the public reason for the pairing.

I would also headcanon that Maki has little problem with the type of magic involved in this set. This type of magic, as described above, can be explained quite easily once one knows the trick and it has nothing to do with the supernatural. And like Kotori, she has the dexterity from her years playing the piano. This might have been enough for the others to believe she would excel at performing the tricks. However, at this stage in her life, her poker face is horrible. I can see her thinking too hard about the mechanics of the trick and in doing so, telegraphing her moves too much, especially to those already familiar with her dishonest tsundre’ish tendencies. She also gets flustered easily, so if something doesn’t go as planned, she may have that much more trouble the next time, especially if she has an audience, as she does in the Side Story for her card.

Worth mentioning, SIF Side Story Maki is quite the different girl than how she is portrayed in much of the rest of the franchise, SIF Main Stories included. One of the big things that stands out to me is her referring to herself as Maki-chan, something only found in the earliest of diary entries and a scarce few other places. Integrating these aspects simply as they are may lead to some rather disparaging disconnects in her overall personality. Of course this isn’t to say she doesn’t have her share of disconnects. In HtHaN, she has a rather glaring disconnect between her feelings for Nico and her insistence that she does not have time to date. But I hope I have portrayed it in a believable manner thus far. I am hoping that the way I integrate the Side Stories into HtHaN will also be believable. Though I have yet to finish the scene addressing the issue, I am having the Side Stories be mini interviews or annotations to accompany the pictures in the magazines in which all of the pictures are published. For these blurbs, Maki intentionally dons a cuter persona, as dictated in part by Nico, in an attempt to increase her appeal to the fans. I still have to catch up on some of the later Side Stories, so if this persona changes, that might be something I need to address.

Finally, as for her belief in Santa vs her cynicism of the supernatural, like Nozomi’s tarot cards, I can think of a real world example of such a disconnect; the Tyrannosaurus Rex. For decades, the T-Rex has been lorded as the king of dinosaurs, the king of hunters, or basically a killing machine capable of taking down anything it encountered. And Hollywood ran with this trope, always portraying the T-Rex as something worth fearing in battle. Then some paleontologists came up with the theory that instead of the king of hunters, T-Rex was instead the king of scavengers. They pointed to evidence of its eyes, its nostrils and olfactory components, its forearms, its teeth, its jaws, and most damningly, its legs. T-Rex has the legs of a walker, not a runner. To quote Jack Horner of a certain scene in Jurassic Park, “I think they could have gotten away from it in second gear.” However, nostalgia is a hard thing to combat with facts. And as such, many in the populace, even within the paleontological community itself and definitely in Hollywood, still cling to the idea that the Tyrannosaur was the king of hunters. Nostalgia is also the reason why Brontosaurus is now accepted as an alternate name for the Apatosaurus, but that’s another story.

That all said, despite Maki being a fairly critical thinker in many areas of her life, the nostalgia of growing up in household that allowed her to believe in Santa makes it for a hard idea to give up. She could easily listen to parody Christmas songs or comedy routines that mention how Santa isn’t real and just shrug it off because nostalgia has taken firm root in her mind. Perhaps she has tried to logic things out, maybe using the “sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” argument to explain things away. Or maybe she really has spent her entire life in a naïve bubble. Honesty, how Maki finally figures things out is still something I need to figure out myself, but I have a few ideas.