meoawa

[meoawa]

How the Incubators fit into this mess

So the incubators are aliens that have long since figured out how to suppress their alien order.

One important thing to note is that they like to "Reward" species for finding a way to make active use of the negentropic nature of Puella Magi. I say reward but from the Incubator's perspective it's a perfectly fair trade.

Helping integrate the Doppel effect into the Human Order (in this case by signing up Homura and co. as the Masters of Purple) so that they can use old favors to get Alaya to hand over a copy for them to use in the future is a case of "Why WOULDN'T we do that?" And for undoing the degradation of mystery and making it so that the more people who know how to do magecraft the stronger it is, that is a case of "Here is everything your species needs to keep improving on the thing that will massively improve the effectiveness of future operations," and the doppel effect is is one of the very few examples that warranted that benefit.

[meoawa]

Order the soul marks start to persist between timelines, vaguely concurrent events, and why.

I intend for every mark to have either some sort of personal revelation involving the other girls or a new trick for Homura.

What I've got currently:

First is obviously the Madoka-Homura bond. This one is made to persist after Homura makes the choice to keep going after learning about Madoka's potential increasing with every loop.

Next is the Hitomi-Sayaka bond, I don't know the cause but Homura sees the beneficial knock-on effects of this one, takes a metaphorical look at Mami and Kyoko's situation, and asks "now where is Yuma Chitose's residence?"

Next is the Kyoko-Homura bond. Kyoko is now incredibly exasperated with how Homura readily admits to telling Kyoko about Yuma specifically because it causes Kyoko and Mami to reconcile.

Next is the Hitomi-Homura bond. Homura has figured out Romance, thus she can turn Kyoko and Hitomi into blushing messes. Homura and Madoka are now the most lovey-dovey couple in Mitakihara, news at 8.

Next is the Kyoko-Mami bond. Mami is now concerned with many of Homura's habits and why they started. (see Kyoko-Homura regarding Yuma) In other news Homura has found Nagisa.

Homura-Ui happens after reaching the point of being able to manifest a Doppel at will, even outside of Kamihama.

Next is the Homura-Mami bond, I know that Doppels will be vital here. Homura has figured out how to recruit Oriko and Kirika and is way too forthright with past timeline details involving them, to the consternation of all of Mitakihara's magical girls.

Next is the Kyoko-Sayaka bond. Homura's met mirror clones of her moms, Kyoko is having the obvious crisis.

Next is the Madoka-Sayaka bond.

Homura-Touka after figuring out the Doppel Dress

Next is the Madoka-Hitomi bond.

Next is the Homura-Sayaka bond.

Next is the Madoka-Mami bond.

And Homura-Nemu is last with Homura figuring out how to freely manifest her Labyrinth.

[meoawa]

Order of summoning and circumstances of some summoners and servants(mostly just Artoria and Tart)

Illya was brought to Fuyuki during the fourth war and thus aged normally and also acquires the Emiya crest. She summons Archer at the cannon time then starts badgering Shirou to summon Saber.

Shirou, with help from Illya, Sakura, and Rin has a better time with his magecraft and picks up blacksmithing after learning his element and origin. He summons Saber a week after Illya.

Rin summons Caster who, after parsing the Great Grail war Rules, drags Rin to the Emiya household and tells Shirou that he will teach him everything he knows after barging in and explaining things, much to the concern and confusion of Illya, Shirou, and Sakura, who was staying over that night.

Sakura is rescued from her canon fate by the magus tradition for siblings that share a soulmate being having the sibling that doesn't get the crest find their own path. She summons Rider the next day

The other three masters of red are found and brought to the Emiya Household.

Artoria is much better mentally with Camelot lasting beyond her reign, the Lancelot-Guinevere affair being openly being between soulmates with one in a political marriage, teaching Mordred to be a good king, and her deal with Alaya being for the ability to reach her soulmates naturally(see Lion_of_Avalon's Pursuit of the dream on AO3https://archiveofourown.org/works/34621243/chapters/86187268)

The Magia Record plot happens and is resolved/averted a year after the end of Homura's timeloops, leading to there being a doppel field encompassing all of Japan by the time of the grail war. The Wings of Magius eventually figure out how to reverse the transformation into a Witch and soon Wraiths start to spawn within the Doppel field.

Kyoko Madoka and Oriko summon their servants while Homura is in Europe looking for Catalysts.

For Catalysts Homura finds Riz's Witch and Mordred's lance, and potentially a few minor catalysts for the others.

Sayaka summons Mordred expecting her to be Saber/Lancer, but gets Saber/Avenger because of Morgan le Fay having Been summoned as Caster of Black.

Homura is the last of the Purple team to summon as she needed to purify Riz's Greif seed into a soul gem, get a new body for her, and then finally enlist her help in summoning Tart.

[meoawa]

Overambitious PMMM Fate Soulmate Crossover

Soulmate bonds can both be forged at birth or over time. Homura starts out with only two marks indicating her as the soul child of Tart and Riz/Liz Hawkwood.

All her other bonds don't persist between loops until some threshold is reached, the first being her bond with Madoka after finding the resolve to keep going after learning that Madoka's potential increases every loop.

Each bond that persists between the loops adds generally beneficial changes to the timeline, though not all can be concisely explained.

Homura's mother was from a magus family that her element and origin was actively detrimental to the practicing of the family magecraft. As a result Homura's crest is filled with a mess of knowledge from before Homura's mother found her speciality of creating animals with Magical Circuits similarly to how one would make a Homunculus.

For the Fate Characters it's a Shirou/Artoria/Illya/Rin/Sakura/Luvia from birth soulbond.

Another result of Soulbonds is that Artoria and Mordred have positive relations with each other with Artoria giving the crown to Mordred to look for her soulmates. Mordred would then kill Morgan le Fay with a cold iron lance modeled after Rhongomyniad.

The 5th Grail war is interesting in that someone made a second grail, hooked it up to the first and made it so that it was two simultaneous great grail wars.

This second grail has a few kinks in that all the servants tied to it (Purple and Blue) are dual classed, if one side summons a Ruler the grail won't summon an independent Ruler but does provide the required command seals to the First grail's ruler.

War Participants

Red

Shirou, Saber Artoria

Illya, Archer Heracles

Rin, Caster EMIYA

Sakura, Rider Medusa

Bazett, Lancer Cu Chulainn

Luvia, Assassin Hassan of serenity

TBD, Berserker TBD

Black

TBD, Caster Morgan le Fay

TBD, Saber TBD

TBD, Lancer TBD

TBD, Archer TBD

TBD, Saber TBD

TBD, Berserker TBD

TBD, Assassin TBD

Red/Black Ruler Johanna

Purple

Homura, Rider/Ruler Tart/Jeanne D'Arc

Sayaka, Saber/Avenger Mordred

Madoka, Assassin/Berserker Jack(ie) the Ripper

Kyoko, Lancer/TBD TBD

Mami, Caster/TBD TBD

Hitomi, Archer/TBD TBD

Oriko/Kirika, Berserker/Saber Lancelot

Blue

TBD, Caster/Foreigner Giles

TBD, Saber/TBD TBD

TBD, Lancer/TBD TBD

TBD, Archer/TBD TBD

TBD, Saber/TBD TBD

TBD, Berserker/TBD TBD

TBD, Assassin/TBD TBD

[meoawa]

Order of summoning and circumstances of some summoners and servants(mostly just Artoria and Tart)

Illya was brought to Fuyuki during the fourth war and thus aged normally and also acquires the Emiya crest. She summons Archer at the cannon time then starts badgering Shirou to summon Saber.

Shirou, with help from Illya, Sakura, and Rin has a better time with his magecraft and picks up blacksmithing after learning his element and origin. He summons Saber a week after Illya.

Rin summons Caster who, after parsing the Great Grail war Rules, drags Rin to the Emiya household and tells Shirou that he will teach him everything he knows after barging in and explaining things, much to the concern and confusion of Illya, Shirou, and Sakura, who was staying over that night.

Sakura is rescued from her canon fate by the magus tradition for siblings that share a soulmate being having the sibling that doesn't get the crest find their own path. She summons Rider the next day

The other three masters of red are found and brought to the Emiya Household.

Artoria is much better mentally with Camelot lasting beyond her reign, the Lancelot-Guinevere affair being openly being between soulmates with one in a political marriage, teaching Mordred to be a good king, and her deal with Alaya being for the ability to reach her soulmates naturally(see Lion_of_Avalon's Pursuit of the dream on AO3https://archiveofourown.org/works/34621243/chapters/86187268)

The Magia Record plot happens and is resolved/averted a year after the end of Homura's timeloops, leading to there being a doppel field encompassing all of Japan by the time of the grail war. The Wings of Magius eventually figure out how to reverse the transformation into a Witch and soon Wraiths start to spawn within the Doppel field.

Kyoko Madoka and Oriko summon their servants while Homura is in Europe looking for Catalysts.

For Catalysts Homura finds Riz's Witch and Mordred's lance, and potentially a few minor catalysts for the others.

Sayaka summons Mordred expecting her to be Saber/Lancer, but gets Saber/Avenger because of Morgan le Fay having Been summoned as Caster of Black.

Homura is the last of the Purple team to summon as she needed to purify Riz's Greif seed into a soul gem, get a new body for her, and then finally enlist her help in summoning Tart.

The location of the hidden crypt containing Liz/Riz's witch was provided by a Mirror Witch clone early on in Homura's loops.

Mordred died of old age. She also took one look at Shirou's soulmarks and immediately calls him mom in front of Sakura and Taiga(who was read into the Moonlit world just an hour earlier after noticing the command seals.)

Soulmates who are extremely temporally separated tend to have the ones from earlier in the time stream encounter temporal anomalies in their teens so they live happy lives together. Alaya is the force behind the time travel and obviously extorts some Counter Guardian time from anyone usable as one, sometimes adding to their legend, most relevantly with Tart by having her disappear just moments before the flames of the Pyre touched her.

[meoawa]

Overambitious PMMM Fate Soulmate Crossover

Soulmate bonds can both be forged at birth or over time. Homura starts out with only two marks indicating her as the soul child of Tart and Riz/Liz Hawkwood.

All her other bonds don't persist between loops until some threshold is reached, the first being her bond with Madoka after finding the resolve to keep going after learning that Madoka's potential increases every loop.

Each bond that persists between the loops adds generally beneficial changes to the timeline, though not all can be concisely explained.

Homura's mother was from a magus family that her element and origin was actively detrimental to the practicing of the family magecraft. As a result Homura's crest is filled with a mess of knowledge from before Homura's mother found her speciality of creating animals with Magical Circuits similarly to how one would make a Homunculus.

For the Fate Characters it's a Shirou/Artoria/Illya/Rin/Sakura/Luvia from birth soulbond.

Another result of Soulbonds is that Artoria and Mordred have positive relations with each other with Artoria giving the crown to Mordred to look for her soulmates. Mordred would then kill Morgan le Fay with a cold iron lance modeled after Rhongomyniad.

The 5th Grail war is interesting in that someone made a second grail, hooked it up to the first and made it so that it was two simultaneous great grail wars.

This second grail has a few kinks in that all the servants tied to it (Purple and Blue) are dual classed, if one side summons a Ruler the grail won't summon an independent Ruler but does provide the required command seals to the First grail's ruler.

War Participants

Red

Shirou, Saber Artoria

Illya, Archer Heracles

Rin, Caster EMIYA

Sakura, Rider Medusa

Bazett, Lancer Cu Chulainn

Luvia, Assassin Hassan of serenity

TBD, Berserker TBD

Black

TBD, Caster Morgan le Fay

TBD, Saber TBD

TBD, Lancer TBD

TBD, Archer TBD

TBD, Saber TBD

TBD, Berserker TBD

TBD, Assassin TBD

Red/Black Ruler Johanna

Purple

Homura, Lancer/Ruler Tart/Jeanne D'Arc

Sayaka, Saber/Avenger Mordred

Madoka, Assassin/Berserker Jack(ie) the Ripper

Kyoko, Rider/TBD TBD

Mami, Caster/TBD TBD

Hitomi, Archer/TBD TBD

Oriko/Kirika/Touka/Nemu/Ui, Berserker/Saber Lancelot

Blue

TBD, Caster/Foreigner Giles

TBD, Saber/TBD TBD

TBD, Lancer/TBD TBD

TBD, Archer/TBD TBD

TBD, Saber/TBD TBD

TBD, Berserker/TBD TBD

TBD, Assassin/TBD TBD

[meoawa]

It feels a little weird to me that there was emphasis on both Shigaraki’s and Midoriya’s memories melding together but we didn’t get anything more significant from Midoriya before he was kicked out of the vestige realm.

I saw someone theorize that we're still in the mind space as some kind of AFO deception

[meoawa]

The First Line

A lot of people out there will tell you that the first line of a novel is the most important. I've seen the wisdom that the first line must grab the readers attention, be some kind of a "hook" to draw them in deeper, or to tonally reflect the main themes. That the first line needs to throw the reader into the thick of it!

But how true is that really? It's been nagging me for a while now as someone who has started more fics than I've completed.

Out of curiosity, I grabbed a handful of my favorite novels and compiled their first lines.

"There are many legends about my mother." Daughter of the Moon Goddess, Sue Lynn Tan

This line doesn't really establish much about the plot of this book. Not the narrator's name, goal, conflict, or even the setting. We can make some inferences from the existence of legends around someone, but 'legendary' only narrows anything down because of the book's title. It is, however, indicative of the narration style and the novel's prose.

"Mary Jekyll stared down at her mother's coffin." The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, Theodora Cross

This line puts us right into a scene. Some real In Medias Res. Except... it's not really an action scene. It's a somber affair. And from Mary's staring, it's safe to say she has some heavy thoughts on the matter.

We can also make some assumptions from the wording choice. Looking down at the coffin suggests that she is standing over it, so we know at once this takes place during the funeral.

Interestingly--and I'm going to break my soft rule of not addressing the rest of the text here--this line does not allude to the novel's framing device.

"The temperature of the room dropped fast." Bartimaeus: The Amulet of Samarkand, Jonathan Stroud

This is another opening that's setting a scene instead of trying to introduce us to the cast or conflict, or even to the setting. Why is it getting colder? We can infer from the fact that the temperature is dropping fast that this probably isn't a good thing or at least not a normal thing.

"I've seen Steelheart bleed." Steelheart, Brandon Sanderson

This line fascinates me. It says a lot and, at the same time, very little. We know that someone named Steelheart exists, obviously. However, the narrator is giving gravitas to the sight of them bleeding. So we've already learned that Steelheart doesn't bleed very often, and seeing it was worth remembering. But who Steelheart is and why the narrator cares? Nothing in this line indicates that.

"Kendra stared out the side window of the SUV, watching foliage blur past." Fablehaven, Brandon Mull

I think this is the most relatable opening line I have listed here, since I can instantly in my mind picture the expression on Kendra's face knowing nothing else about her, or where she's going. We can guess she's probably not happy to be going there since she's staring out the window with what I would assume to be boredom. That's some conflict there. But, like, extremely minor conflict.

"The tired old carriage, pulled by two tired old horses, rumbled onto the wharf, its creaky wheels bumpety-bumping on the uneven planks, waking Peter from his restless slumber." Peter and the Starcatchers, Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson

Well this sentence rambled on a bit didn't it? But it's very evocative. It tells us very little about the story (beyond Peter's name) but it sets the scene beautifully. Not only is it evocative of the scenery, but the time period (from the horse-drawn carriage) and the tone as well. We also know that Peter wasn't sleeping very well, which indicates that he's either anxious about something or that sleeping in this carriage wasn't very easy. Or both.

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

This is the kind of line that would get me murdered by a lot of writing advice that I've seen over the years. This line tells you next to nothing, not even whether or not its weird for hobbits to live in holes. What this line does do is ease us into the narration style that Tolkien employs, which is generally slow and descriptive.

Okay...?

So what was the point of all of that?

Well, this experiment has solidified my opinion on something. As I said, I've been having thoughts about opening lines, but I think that the actual first line of the book is not as important as the first scene of the book. None of these lines out of context are that good. Sure, The Hobbit is iconic, but that's not because that line itself is phenomenal. It's practically "Once Upon A Time."

But it works for the scene.

The first scene is far more interesting to me than the first line. I'm not so impatient that if the first line fails to captivate me I'll toss the book aside. And I know that's true for other people because H. Bomberguy posted a four-hour video on plagiarism and we all watched it.

What this means, I think, is that we don't need to treat our audience as if we're in an arms race against their dwindling attention spans as if we'll lose them forever to TikTok if the first sentence isn't the pinnacle of literature.

People will give a work a chance. That's what the summary is for; to tell people if they'll like it so they can know to give it a try.

If you were afraid to write, or to share your writing, because you didn't think the first line was good enough... I don't think that matters. I think that people won't hate it. Won't turn up their noses in disgust.

[meoawa]

Menagerie x Toontown: To no one's surprise, a Quirk that can temporarily turn you into a cartoon character works incredibly well on animals. Thumbs for everyone!

Their one weakness, removed...

[meoawa]

Saiyan AU: So, I know that Garaki was captured (or worse, which would be fine). But what happened to Tsuyu’s siblings and the rest of Garaki’s League? Or did they all become part of Super Mina as well?

Asui's siblings are more loyal to King Piccolo than they are to her. Much like Kami originally did, they assume she'll be picking up the slack. Finding out that she's really not interested sets them off. She ends up having to fight them, but in the end doesn't kill them. They're apprehended like Garaki.

As for the rest of the League, I think it really is just Shigaraki and Kurogiri. I'm not even sure Garaki knows about the whole Shimura thing. With AFO dead, Garaki's ambition squarely on revenge on specifically Inko and All Might, and no leadership position, I'm not really sure what Shigaraki is up to.

[meoawa]

Crack Theory: The Glowing Baby wasn't the first Quirked human. They just held the first NOTICEABLE Quirk, because all prior Quirks were more minor.

Someone else had a Quirk that caused Quirks to manifest in animals, and the rest is history.

It would make sense

[meoawa]

Monster of Mustafu x Saiyan:

Izuku, adopted adaptor: Wait! We need to get the others!

Inko, serial adopter: Others?

Ashido Mina, the Android Majin: help pls

Well then

[meoawa]

Super Polycule x Hive Mind: All villains might as well retire.

I tried my best but seven months later I do not know what the Super Polycule is referencing

[meoawa]

Villainous Activity x Yakuza Inko: Inko happens to overhear about a new villain group working in her area. Well, it's always nice to have new connections, and if they're too much of a problem, well... Cut to six months later when she suddenly has over a half dozen new kids.

Holy shit this ask (plus 3 more!!!) from September 14 finally appeared in my askbox, explaining why it's been telling me that i had more asks than there were in the box! Great job, Tumblr!

Uh, anyway, sucks to be AFO.

[meoawa]

Would Saiyan x Kismet interact in any significant way?

Well they'd probably figure out the whole Rock of the Gods thing faster. If it even managed to penetrate Midoriya's skin.

[meoawa]

PMMM x Nasuverse crossover + Epithets!

I had this horrible idea of giving Homura Akemi an origin, element and Epithet that are all Despair. Her magus training pre-timeloop consists of basic jewelcraft, reinforcement, and some mystic code creation. She doesn't have much practice with her epithet (outside of the emotional sense that would logically come with any Emotion Epithet) because she doesn't like using it thanks to her innocence .

[meoawa]

I have never seen God Eater, and the RWBY weapons that stand out to me as ones Mei would take an interest in after going on a wiki walk are the three over the top ones, Crescent Rose, Harbinger, and Omen.

for reference

Weapon Master x Manager Toga with possible addition of Engineered Solutions: Toga has Mei watch RWBY for weapon ideas.

Personally my preferred media in which melee weapons are also guns is God Eater.