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pixelgrotto · 3 years

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Night City, I barely remember ya

I beat Cyberpunk 2077 last month, and honestly, I haven’t thought about Cyberpunk 2077 that much since.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. CD Projekt Red’s follow-up to The Witcher 3 was meant to be the sort of game that would stick in your mind after completion. It was promoted over eight years of hype stemming from its initial 2013 reveal as a example of CD Projekt’s infamous “vodka and Slavic magic” - a behemoth destined to change open world RPGs forever. But in the roughly 12 weeks since its release, the stuff that’s happened to Cyberpunk 2077, including its delisting from the Playstation store for being chock full of bugs and the theft of its source code by hackers, has been more cyberpunk than the actual game.

I was one of those people super hyped for this game when it was first announced. I mean, the Witcher franchise left an indelible impression on me; how could I not be psyched to see its devs tackle one of my favorite sci-fi genres? But my hype deflated over the years, largely due to tales of terrible crunch emerging from CD Projekt’s studios and social media marketing that was ill-advised at best and transphobic at worst. Everything seemed to slowly hint that the game’s vision of “cyberpunk” - a genre that can tell incredible futuristic tales of social upheaval and marginalized peoples - would be mostly style with not so much substance.

Despite me keeping my fingers crossed, the end product is pretty much what I feared - and I guess I should’ve known, since the official sourcebook for Cyberpunk 2020, the tabletop RPG that CD Projekt Red used as inspiration, actually lists “style over substance” as one of its rules.

Cyberpunk 2077’s main story revolves around a merc who dreams of big time heists in Night City named V. After a heist goes south, V ends up absorbing a biochip made by big bad corporation Arasaka that features the captured personality of rockstar-turned-terrorist Johnny Silverhand, played by Keanu Reeves - who, to be fair, does a good job with the material he’s given. Cue a bunch of quests that revolve around V and Johnny coming to terms with each other, taking down Arasaka and figuring out how to separate the chip from V’s brain.

In theory, this sounds like a cool way to explore the very cyberpunk themes of identity and what it means to have a corrupt company preserve a human soul beyond its organic shell. In reality, though, the story’s a surface level examination of these concepts, and Johnny Silverhand remains a massive dick throughout most of the game, only becoming relatable if players give him the benefit of the doubt - which they’re expected to do because he’s played by Keanu Reeves.

Johnny’s animosity towards Arasaka is also never completely outlined. He - and most other characters in Night City - keep telling V that corporations are awful because they disregard human rights and destroy the environment, but we never get many chances to see for ourselves how Arasaka and similar companies, like Militech or Kang Tao, actually do this. Arasaka does kidnap Johnny’s ex-girlfriend and is behind the tech that transfers his soul to a biochip, yes, but Johnny also threatens to destroy them at all of his shows and eventually sets off a bomb in their headquarters. Not that I’m siding with the corporation, but for much of the game we’re expected to treat them as the number one enemy simply because other characters say so, which is very much a “show, don’t tell” missed opportunity. If anything, Arasaka’s portrayal feels more like a vestige of the cyberpunk genre’s unfortunate maturation during the 1980s, where the fear of Japanese conglomerates taking over the world was common and a future where Asian companies were all-powerful instead of Western ones seemed like a dystopia.

Cyberpunk 2077 is very much caught in that yesteryear mold, featuring elements that might have been progressive in the 1980s but seem passé now. For a game that relied on questionable representation of trans people in its marketing, there were no notable trans NPCs that I came across, and even though there’s a robust character creation system where you actually can make a trans person, the game makes the troubling decision to only offer binary pronouns tied to V’s voice. Despite the fact that many of the best modern cyperbunk works deal with body augmentation and the line between man and machine, most of the physical modifications you can pay for at Night City’s “ripperdoc” facilities are niche features that only offer minimal stat boosts, with only two major ones that I know of - the mantis blades and gorilla arms - actually causing extensive changes to V’s looks. And finally, while there are tons of characters of color in the game, ranging from the Haitian Voodoo Boys gang to V’s “friendly ethnic friend™” Jackie Welles, most of them are varying degrees of stereotypical. For instance, Goro Takemura, an ex-Arasaka employee, sends you text messages reminiscent of haiku at one point because he’s Japanese and has to talk like a formal, honorable samurai or something.

If you’re able to look past these issues - along with the myriad of bugs that Cyberpunk 2077 shipped with - there’s still the niggling feeling that this game could have been so much more. The signs of a troubled development process are numerous, and there are Reddit threads packed with still-visible remnants - like useless combat skill perks and an entire metro system - that were part of gameplay elements gutted at some point in order for those overworked CD Projekt Red programmers to make a long-delayed release date. Even mainstay stuff in the open world genre - like the police chases common in the Grand Theft Autos - are absent, and Cyberpunk 2077’s 2018 demo, chock full of promised features that never made it into the final product, has to be one of the most notorious bits of smoke ‘n mirrors “gameplay” in recent memory.

Perhaps most bothersome is the feeling that a lot of your choices don’t seem to matter all that much in Cyberpunk 2077, which once touted itself as “a full-fledged RPG, not a shooter with RPG elements,” but ends up feeling more like the latter than the former. The game’s three different lifepaths - nomad, streetkid and corpo - only amount to about thirty minutes of unique playtime at the start and a few different dialogue options. The vehicle combat sequences that punctuate key missions are largely scripted, looking cool but offering little consequences depending on what V aims at. The side quests I encountered had minimal branching paths, and the only time the main story opened up to offer some real choice was in the game’s final chapter. Considering that CD Projekt once developed The Witcher 2 - a 2011 game that branches dramatically at its halfway mark to the point where a lot of folks insist that you need to play it twice in order to feel satisfied - Cyberpunk 2077 feels like a step back.

And yet, despite all of these criticisms, I still put nearly 80 hours into the game over the course of December, January and February. You don’t do that for something that’s patently unfun, so let me be clear - there is an entertaining experience buried beneath an avalanche of unfulfilled potential here. Driving on my Akira-esque bike through Night City’s slums as the game’s best song bumped on the radio, taking out legions of baddies with my mantis blades and relishing in the game’s extensive photo mode (as you can probably tell by my screenshots above) was a good time. In spite of his assholery, I did feel something akin to attachment for that bastard Johnny Silverhand by the finale, and there were a few key moments - like when I was scuba diving in the ocean with my girlfriend Judy, looking at the remains of a town destroyed by the land seizing machinations of corporations - that felt like this game had something to say beyond “bang bang gunplay and neon aesthetic.”

But at the end of the day, while I do feel moderately interested in someday checking out Cyberpunk Red (the newest iteration of this franchise’s tabletop RPG), CD Projekt’s seven-year-hyped-up behemoth has largely faded from my brain one month after beating it. On Twitter, I’ve seen Cyberpunk 2077 described as something akin to a flashy Netflix series with lots of fanfare and flair but not much else - and I can’t really argue with that statement.

Night City was supposed to be the stuff of a long-term relationship. Instead, it feels more like a fling.

#pixel grotto #now playing #cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk #cd projekt red

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nyxelestia · 7 years

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What I Didn't Write in 2016

Plotbunnies that I never ended up writing (and, if I'm going to be honest with myself, probably never will).

Ghost Allison - Death wasn't enough to stop Allison from protecting her friends. (ETA: Never Mind.)

Jordan and Derek, Guilty (BR)OTP Fic (Unrequited Marrish and Sterek) - Jordan and Derek hate themselves for loving Lydia and Stiles. >:)

Post Season 2 Allison/Lydia, with Pregnant Lydia - Jackson impregnated Lydia just before he died in the Season 2 finale. Allison steps in.

West Wing Sterek AU - Stiles as the First Son, and Derek as the President's assistant. They are basically Zoey and Charlie. That's it, that's the plot.

Stiles-Centric AU (Witch!Claudia -> Warlock!Stiles) - A completely plot-less AU/idea about Claudia having been a powerful witch, and Stiles having inherited some magical ability from her.

Sheriff Stilinski Was Once Johnny Cage (Stallison or Gen) - altered to fit the Teen Wolf universe, the events of the Mortal Kombat movie were the manipulations of the nogitsune, before it was re-imprisoned back in California. When it escapes again, it intentionally possessed "Johnny Cage's son".

Avatar Scott AU (Sciles) - Scott is the Avatar, and Stiles is his non-bending best friend who he doesn't go anywhere without and who helps him learn. The Swamp Tree is called the Nemeton, and the academic fox spirits at the library are getting corrupted, which leads to one possessed Stiles.

Werewolf!Sheriff (Sterek) - The Sheriff gets Bitten, comedy and angst ensue. Let's be real, if I wrote this, it would mostly be angst.

Teen Dad Stiles (Pre/Post Sterek) - Babies don't make everything better, and in fact can ruin your lives, especially if you're a teenager.

Chris/Melissa/John Fic - What was originally a farce just to fuck with Rafael blossoms into an actual relationship. Their kids...try not to think about it.

"Seraph Stilinski" (Gen) - Claudia was a demon, the Sheriff is an angel, and all the forces of Heaven and Hell are deadset on making sure the world never finds out they had a kid together - the best way to do that being to kill the kid.

Stiles Number 7 (Clone AU, Derek & Stiles, Derek's POV) - Stiles is one of several clones, who are all based on Dylan O'Brien's other acting roles.

Trans Scott Fic (Scott & Stiles - Possible Sciles?) - Scott was born female, but is a boy. Stiles was his first and fiercest advocate, which is why the nogitsune acts like a transphobe the moment it possesses Stiles.

Details below!

Ghost Allison

ETA: So I ended up not only writing a fic for this one, but making a fanvid as well. Go figure.

Exactly what it sounds like: Allison is a ghost. I play around with various ghost mythologies, but the end result is that the pack realizes that Allison never left and she's been with them all along (which is why no one in the pack ever died after 3B). She sent Scott back after Theo killed him, she nudged Lydia in the right direction when she was in Eichen House, and she intentionally made Scott think of her when her own ancestor, Sebastian, tried to claw him for the memories.

This one, though, I'm actually not writing because I have an idea on how to make it a fanvid, instead. ♥

Jordan and Derek, Guilty (BR)OTP Fic (Unrequited Marrish and Sterek)

Basically, a fic which takes the age differences seriously. It's a lot of Jordan and Derek slowly realizing the other one is also, like themselves, attracted to a teenager (who, even while "legal", they just do not feel comfortable trying to start a relationship with, for many reasons, age merely being the biggest one).

It oscillated between humorous (the boys commiserating over the snarky teen geniuses they're in love with) and dark (the boys sleeping with each other and openly using each other as a "distraction" from the kids they are in love with). It was going to end with these two working behind the scenes to set up Stydia, figuring that Stiles and Lydia were better off with each other than with them, and then Derek and Jordan kinda parting ways and moving on, better able to love their respective teenagers from afar.

Post Season 2 Allison/Lydia, with Pregnant Lydia

Inspired by this gifset. Jackson actually died in the Season 2 finale, and Lydia found out she was pregnant with his baby soon after - and with Jackson dead, she refused to abort it. My twist is that Lydia's pregnancy is progressing against the backdrop of canon (though in an AU where, because Allison stayed to help Lydia through the pregnancy, she helped find Erica and Boyd, meaning they lived, and the Hale pack was more cohesive by the time Deucalion made his move). Lydia is explicitly targeted by the alpha pack because of her pregnancy (since the pack is an actual pack in this AU, practically everyone sees Lydia as family, and thus her baby as their future niece/nephew). The nogitsune tried to make her miscarry - though thankfully, it failed, if only barely. The fact that it was distracted attempting to cause the miscarriage meant Allison survived, though also only barely. Lydia was with Derek when Kate attacked, so the baby was born prematurely. Allison - at this point fully in love with and dedicated to Lydia and the baby - is furious, so when the pack goes to rescue Derek, she kills Kate for hurting Lydia and potentially killing the baby. Luckily, the pack comes back to Beacon Hills to find Lydia and her baby daughter are safe and on the path to recovery. The baby is named Jackie, after her lost father, and everyone loves her and all the bullshit of Season 4 never happened. The first full moon even reveals that the baby is actually going to be a werewolf, which Lydia is - much to everyone else's surprise - delighted by. Lydia is grateful to have the power to protect her friends, but being a banshee is traumatic and she's glad to know that her baby won't have to suffer through it. The epilogue is Satomi introducing herself and her pack to Scott and his pack - not from the fear and death of the deadpool, but to celebrate the new arrival to Scott's pack.

West Wing Sterek AU - First Son Stiles

Derek comes to the White House looking for a mailroom job, needing to support himself and his sisters after the rest of his family is killed in a brutal housefire. Due to a series of shenanigans, he gets hired as President Stilinski's body-man/personal assistant, instead. He eventually ends up dating the First Son, Stiles, and life seems good for him...until the First Family, the staff, and Derek are shot at by Neo-Nazis, because they object to the First Son being in a gay relationship. They stick together through that, though they split up later for personal reasons...yet Derek still loses his mind when Stiles' new boyfriend's stupidity gets Stiles kidnapped. As such, they eventually reunite (with only a little bit of meddling from Stiles' dad.) (This based off the Zoey/Charlie arc in The West Wing. Charlie's mom was a cop killed in the line of duty, and the Neo-Nazis attack because Charlie is black while Zoey is white. After they split, Zoey's new boyfriend gave her some E despite her already saying she didn't want it, and while he had no nefarious intentions beyond that, this made her vulnerable and led to her kidnapping.)

Stiles-Centric AU (Witch!Claudia -> Warlock!Stiles)

AU where Claudia was actually a very, very powerful witch. Stiles and the Sheriff have known about the supernatural world all along (Scott only found out after he was Bitten), and this somehow nebulously led to no real change in the events of Season 2, but after it, Erica and Boyd were saved from the alpha pack, and Allison stuck around town instead of leaving, so come Season 3 - when the story starts - the pack is a more cohesive pack, Allison is rebuilding her Hunting group/"family" with a new code, and Stiles is formally training to become Derek's emissary (and then Scott's, once Derek gives up his spark to save Cora, while Scott becomes the True Alpha). This one, I chose not to write because while I had some individual scenes and such planned out, I had no actual plot in mind.

The closest was some weird rom-com bullshit in which a coven comes into town and accuses the pack of breaking into their stuff/breaking some old wards of theirs. It's about to turn into a fight until Scott and Stiles show up and recognizes "Stiles's mom's book-club friends", and the witches recognize Scott and Stiles. They have trouble believing that the little boy who used to play with Stiles is now a True Alpha, but they do realize Stiles' "breaking" the wards/shields were genuine accidents - those shields were originally set up by Claudia, and the only thing more powerful than them are talismans she gave to Stiles and the Sheriff (made out of the Sheriff's old dog tags). They actually want Stiles to come with them, but they shrug it off when he declines and chooses to stay with his pack. One of the witches who is new to the coven tries to instigate a fight, but they're all like, "we can't fight them, we helped potty train them!" That's quite literally the extent of my planning for this fic. :P

Sheriff Stilinski Was Once Johnny Cage - Mortal Kombat (Stallison or Gen)

AU where "Stilinski" is actually Claudia's family name, which the Sheriff changed his name to in order to escape the fame of his movie days - he was actually born as Johnny Cage. Kitana was 'merely' a thousand years old, and a kitsune (halfway through the story, we find out she's Noshiko's older sister). Liu Kang is like Deaton, a Spark/Emissary/monk/user-of-magic (he grew up learning it, ran away from it, and the events of the movie were him coming back to that heritage). Sonya Blade is a Hunter from a Russian/Russian-descended family that has a testy relationship with the Argents (though she's not the leader yet in the events of the Mortal Kombat movie). The events of the Mortal Kombat movie were altered, so that it turns out the sorcerer Shang Tsung wasn't working for some other-dimensional demon, but the nogitsune (which Kitana accidentally released in the process of looking for her long-lost sister). The "tournament" was an elaborate human sacrifice ritual to superpower the sorcerer (and then/thus the nogitsune). Luckily, this original badass quartet managed to put a stop to the preceedings, and put the nogitsune back in its prison in California. Unfortunately, they were not able to capture Shang Tsung (which is why he later turns up leading a Yakuza ring right under Johnny Cage's nose in Beacon Hills - the actor playing Silver Finger is the guy who played the evil sorcerer in the Mortal Kombat movie). The story starts a few decades after that, though. Stiles is still very much the guy we all know and love, except that he grew up learning martial arts from his dad, his godfather "Uncle" Liu, and his godmothers "Aunt" Sonya and "Aunt" Kitana. (It's mostly just a hobby for him, something he does with his dad on the weekends.) The Sheriff and Stiles are both attempting to figure out or solve the supernatural drama, but from different directions. Both are attempting to protect each other from it, so neither of them know that the other one is involved until Matt's attack on the station, when they both know the kanima when they see it. Stiles learns the truth about his Uncle and Aunts, with Liu and Sonya even coming to town (though they don't really make it until after the Season 2 finale). Liu helps Stiles get started on learning how to be an Emissary, while Sonya (now the leader of her Hunting family) helps Allison clean up the Argent family and its mess. Kitana doesn't show up until the events of Season 3B, which is when it comes out that she and Noshiko are estranged sisters. Since Stiles genuinely sees Kitana as his aunt, this leads to him and Kira viewing each other as something akin to long-lost cousins. The joy of newfound family is short-lived, since the nogitsune has escaped yet again - and it wants revenge, which is why out of all the people it could've taken, it chose to possess Johnny Cage's son. >:) This fic was going to have a lot fun parallels between two quartets - the "original" quartet of Johnny Cage, Sonya Blade, Liu Kang, and Princess Kitana, against the "new" quartet of Stiles, Allison, Lydia, and Scott. However, it wasn't a fic I could really write about a single event or short period of time. Conversely, I didn't want to start yet another long, drawn-out, and heavily involved AU, when I'm already writing three of them.

Avatar Scott AU (Sciles)

From this post. Avatar AU, where Scott is the Avatar, and Stiles is his non-bending best friend and companion. Scott had many earthbending masters, though his most valuable lessons came from Stiles' father, the metal-bending Chief of Police. The Fire Nation hasn't attacked yet, but aspirations for world conquest are simmering in its royal family, the Argents.

Allison - a Yu Yan archer - has been exiled, ends up befriending the Avatar, and finds him the best fire-bending teacher possible: Kira, a lightning-bender. Monk Deaton teaches him airbending, as well as how to take care of the air-bison and all the other creatures of the Avatar world. (He is also an avid Pai Sho player, and taught Stiles how to play - and gave him a White Lotus tile when the boys finally left the temple after Scott mastered air-bending.) The Hales are the chiefs of the Water Tribe, who have always lived by the moon, and Derek is the one tasked to teach Scott water-bending.

Scott's first "mission" as the Avatar is to find out who is trying to attack the most spiritual tree in the world, the Nemeton. Before he tries, though, he has to go to The Library to learn about it. Unfortunately, something has been corrupting the fox spirits there, which no one realizes until one takes Stiles away from Scott. This was a premise, but there no actual plot to this, hence why I didn't write it.

Werewolf!Sheriff (Sterek)

In an AU where Erica, Boyd, and Allison all lived, and Isaac, Jackson, and Cora never left. Stiles has been instrumental in training all of them (especially once he sees what a disaster at it Derek was.) Werewolf shenanigans leads to the Sheriff getting Bitten by some rogue alpha, so now he has to learn how to be a werewolf. There are some good sides - he's loving how useful his new, enhanced senses are in his investigative work, and Stiles lets him eat whatever he wants. Unfortunately, he doesn't react well to the news that he can never drink again, and his first full-moon is trauatizing for everyone.

It was a lot of themes about how growing up can change your relationships with your parents and other parental figures around you. A big part of the story is that the Sheriff largely sees Scott as something akin to another son, but Scott has to be the Sheriff's alpha in order to protect him and everyone around them - and Stiles often unwittingly follows suit, as the Emissary. So their relationships kinda get flipped on their heads. And remember all the psychological nastiness of Scott's first full moon, and the physical violence of several other characters' first full moons? Yeah, imagine the Sheriff doing that, directed at his actual son and his adoptive son. >:)

(Despite not having enough of a plot to bother writing this, I did somehow develop plans for a sequel where this happens all over again because Melissa gets Bitten, too. However, in her case, she just asked Scott to Bite her, so she made an active choice to become a werewolf, well-aware of all the strife that would come with it.)

Teen Dad Stiles (Pre/Post Sterek)

Stiles and Malia didn't exactly use protection when they screwed in the basement of Eichen House in 3B, and Malia gets pregnant. In this AU, though, she never wanted to stay in the human world, so after she gives birth to the baby (toward the end of summer, just before senior year), she regains her coyote shift and returns to the wild - for good. Stiles is left with a baby, and the whole pack is supportive, and Derek in particular chips in a lot, since the baby is family (via Malia), and he's feeling a little bit responsible (for a variety of reasons). However, this isn't a feel-good fic where babies make everything better. Even with all the support in the world, being a parent is tough, and being a teen parent especially so. Stiles struggles with being a teenage father, and affects his social life, his ability to handle supernatural problems, and his grades - and with them, his career aspirations. He resents being a teen father, and slowly starts to resent the baby. Babies not only don't make everything better, but Stiles starts to feel like the baby ruined his life. Derek - seeing what could happen to the baby if she were raised by someone who resented or even hated her - demands full custody, and even threatens to sue for it. Stiles is resisting mostly because of what a massive blow to his pride and his sense of self this is, though also because he feels like Derek taking the baby out of obligation wouldn't be much better. (His resentment of being a teen parent is so deep, he doesn't realize that Derek - in a much better place in life to raise a child - actually looks forward to having a kid to take care of.) Derek is about to force the issue, but everyone remembers that while Stiles is the father, he is still a teenager, which is why the final say/official custody actually fell to the Sheriff - who saw the same thing Derek did, and thus agreed that the baby should go to Derek instead of staying with Stiles. The fic ends with the epilogue, which takes on the baby's first birthday, and when Stiles is getting ready to head off to college. There are no promises that Derek will wait for Stiles, nor that Stiles will ever "come back" or reclaim the baby. But Derek will always be there for Stiles, and while Stiles may not raise the baby, he will still be a big part of her life and try to do right by her in his limited capacity.

You can probably see why I didn't write this. Look, I'm sorry, but no matter how cute they are, sometimes babies not only don't make things better, they really do ruin people's lives.

Chris/Melissa/John Fic

This was a pretty cutsey fic idea, set in some nebulous post-S4 world, but where Allison lived and Isaac never left - and where Rafael McCall did, indeed, come back to Beacon Hills like he said he would in Season 4. However, he seems to be trying to 'reclaim' his place in the McCall family, refusing to see that Melissa has no interest in reuniting with him or that Scott neither wants nor needs him. (I consider this to be very OOC for him, though, which is a small part of why I didn't bother writing this.) The story actually begins after some minor supernatural scuffle results in Chris and the Sheriff crashing at Melissa's place for a night while the kids are out and about. The next morning, Rafael happens to barge into the house unannounced, sees Melissa making breakfast for Chris and the Sheriff (with Chris and the Sheriff in boxers and tee-shirts, since Melissa didn't have anything that could fit them), and jumps to the wrong conclusion. Rather than disabuse him of the notion, though, the three pretend they did, indeed, have some kind of threesome, leading to Rafael to storm off in disgust. They actually continue this facade for a while, much to the kids' amusement - it seems like the perfect way to throw people off their tracks, while making Rafael (and a few other interested parties) not think twice about some strange behavior. However, the fake relationship eventually grows into a real one, the three of them banding together to take care of and protect the kids in the face of all the supernatural crazy that is Beacon Hills. Their kids do find out that this "fake" threesome has become a real one. They struggle with it at first, for different reasons, but eventually come to be glad for their parents. (Mid-way through college, the two men knock up Melissa. The kids' reaction mostly boils down to teasing the parents for getting into an accidental pregnancy after having spent years lecturing the teenagers on practicing safe sex specifically to prevent something like this from happening. But when their baby sister is born, they spoil her to bits.)

"Seraph Stilinski" (Gen)

A kind of very dark Good Omens crossover/AU, with a lot of Saga undertones to it. Heaven and Hell have long been at war with each other, a conflict as old as humanity itself. One of the most powerful Arch Angels and another very powerful demon left their respective sides after falling in love with each other. They became human, which hid them from their former comrades, and spent multiple lifetimes together like this. Eventually, they even had a child together, taking great pains to make it look like that child was adopted, should someone unfortunately discover them. However, they realized too late that the process of having a child would doom the mother - which led to Claudia's human form deteriorating. She probably could've been cured just by undoing the human body and returning to her former self, but to do that would've been to reveal her location to the depths of hell, and possibly the truth about her child, so she died rather than put her husband and Stiles at risk. Supposedly, the Stilinski family happens to have been in Beacon Hills for a long time, and have passed down some uncanny resemblances, which is one no one questions it on the rare occasions they could swear they see John (or, I guess he's Noah, now?) in some decades-old photograph or century-old painting. However, some things aren't adding up, and by the end of Season 2, Stiles knows his father isn't human, and is a lot older than he looks. But the Sheriff is keeping remarkably tight-lipped about it all, which doesn't make sense until Stiles is possessed by a demonic fox-spirit...who the Sheriff says is, in the closest approximation to human terms, Claudia's brother - and thus, Stiles' uncle. And to think Derek thought he had it bad!

I also didn't write it because it was sprawling into some multi-million year angelic/demonic conspiracy. The reason why Claudia and John tried to hide that Stiles was their kid was because a angel-demon child was taboo, due to myths that such a child would be tremendously powerful. They were very confused when their baby was human, though relieved to see this would make him easier to hide. However, various "higher ups" in both Heaven and Hell still want this kid dead, and eventually, everyone figures out why. It's not that Stiles is particularly powerful, but that all humans are - they are not bound to any concept, object, element, or natural entity like angels, demons, spirits, and most supernatural creatures are. Things that devastate other creatures - iron, salt, silver, etc. - humans cloak themselves in, and powerful roots or herbs like mountain ash have zero effect on them. Despite humans being so physically weak and slow and their senses being so dulled, they've taken over the planet, and they can even leave it, a concept that up until recent was deemed impossible by everyone on and around Earth. In the purely physical sense, humans are "weak", but from the supernatural standpoint, humans are tremendously powerful (and/or rather, invincible). So why to the "higher ups" want him dead, if all humans are powerful? Well, Stiles is proof that all humans - all of humanity - are descendants of angels and demons. That thing about the conflict between heaven and hell being as old as humanity? Well, Heaven and Hell - angels and demons - predate humanity. Stiles - a confirmed child of an angel and a demon - is living proof that they weren't always at war, and that in fact there was so much fraternizing/uniting between these two sides, they created enough "demon/angel children" to create a whole new species: humans. Stiles is living proof that angels and demons can coexist peacefully, so of course everyone wants him dead before word of this gets out. This got very convoluted and extremely Sheriff-centric (with surprisingly little of Stiles or the pack in it), so I never bothered writing it. The Sheriff is popular, but not that popular/not on his own, so I doubted this would get read much, and if it's just for myself, why bother writing it when I can enjoy a story in my head?

Stiles Number 7 (Clone AU, Derek & Stiles, though surprisingly not necessarily Derek/Stiles)

A Clone AU, loosely based off of the tween novel series Amy Number Seven (which is like the middle school version of Orphan Black, but focused on the character coping with the clone background after finding out about it, rather than the clone mystery itself). Mostly Derek's POV. Basically, Seasons 1 and 2 are largely unchanged, except there are multiple implications that Stiles was kidnapped as a child and only recently returned home, but Derek doesn't know or figure out the details. Meanwhile, throughout these events, Stiles and Scott make a lot of references to Stiles getting help from mysterious "cousins" and "brothers".

After Matt's attack on the police station, Stiles calls in those mysterious cousins. Derek meets this AU's version of Minho, Brenda, Theresa, and Newt when Stiles goes missing after the Championship Game in the S2 finale. They are Stiles' "cousins", and despite the fact Stiles has been kidnapped, everyone agrees Stiles was kidnapped by "someone local", so the problem isn't big enough to warrant calling in Stiles' "brothers" just yet. Derek still had no clue what the fuck is going on, but not only are Stiles' cousins clearly child soldiers, Stiles himself actually manages to disable Gerard in that basement, and he's the one that frees Erica and Boyd. The warehouse battle still happens, and Stiles' mysterious cousins vanish soon after, and Derek is still very confused - even more so because Stiles is disturbingly competent and militant when it comes to finding and rescuing Erica and Boyd. (And also because Stiles disappears to "go help his cousins/brothers" once or twice throughout the summer.) However, the nogitsune is a BIG problem, which is when Derek gets to meet Stiles' "brothers" - clones.

These clones are all basically OC's inspired by/based on Dylan O'Brien's other roles. In this universe, the kids were made by some evil organization trying to produce soldiers, and these kids were the experiments/subjects. They survived, escaped, etc. - and now this story is about their lives afterwards. (The "cousins" were various experiments in how to amplify certain human strengths, while the "brothers" were just an experiment to successfully clone human beings. The next step was basically to "combine" these two experiments - clone people with those amplified traits - but these kids escaped and destroyed the organization doing this before that could happen.)

This was going to be fun once Stiles' "brothers" roll into town, because neither the pack nor the "cousins" are willing to kill Stiles - but his brothers are, and in fact are setting out to do that, leading to the clones working against the pack and the "cousins". The clones are all completely normal humans, while the pack are obviously supernatural, and the "cousins" have some superpowered traits (amplifications of hints of what we saw in the books), not to mention they've got the law and Hunters on their side (via the Sheriff and Allison). Despite this, the two sides are pretty evenly matched. Later, Stiles thinks that his "brothers" should very easily have been able to kick everyone else's asses, so he thinks they just didn't try hard enough because they didn't want him to die, and doesn't believe they were actually outmatched; some of his "brothers" are...not disagreeing. :P

Trans Scott Fic (Scott & Stiles - Possible Sciles?)

A fic where Scott had been born genetically female, but is transitioning to male - and has been for quite a while by the time he is Bitten. There is a lot of dysmorphia because the werewolf Bite interferes with the transition process, but Stiles learns magic specifically to counteract these problems. There was also a big plot arc where this interfered with Scott's ability to completely turn into a wolf (but once he does, the wolf form is male). To be honest, there wasn't much of a plot, just a lot of smaller ideas or scenes I had in mind. The ones I originally came up with - and at the center of the story - are something which I expect would be extremely controversial at best.

Stiles has always been Scott's Number One advocate, and his first defender in the face of transphobia. Where Scott tries to assume the best of people and educate everyone, Stiles thinks Scott shouldn't waste his time and that transphobes should just go die in a fire. Stiles was the first person Scott ever told, and he was the one who helped Scott talk to his parents to get the transition process started, when Scott was too scared to.

So when a thousand year old chaos spirit intent on causing as much emotional pain as possible possesses Stiles, what does it do? Deadnames Scott, constantly calling him by his birth name and intentionally referring to him with female pronouns as much as possible. This is directly parallel to Scott's transphobic father coming back into town and doing the same thing, insisting that Scott is his daughter, deadnaming him and misgendering him. What Rafael is doing to Scott out of transphobia, the nogitsune is doing because it knows how much it hurts Scott (and Stiles). What transphobes insist is "natural" or "right", the nogitsune is using as a weapon in its psychological warfare - because it's just that bad, that painful, and that devastating.

#teen wolf au #teen wolf fanfic #or at least ideas for them #teen wolf #nyxie writes things #or rather #nyxie DOESN'T write things

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