#all of these are vax centric fics so...

[kal-theravenquing]

Writing Update!

Okay, so still struggling to write anything but making progress.

For the past 2 weeks, I have worked on the following stories;

Soul Drunk - requested (only request I'm doing!) - An alternative ending to episode 9 of The Legend of Vox Machina season 3, where Vax faces the consequences of his deal with the Matron when he's overwhelmed by the souls of the dead after killing the dragon who killed his mother when he was young.

Separation Burns - An alternative universe where Vex'ahlia and Vax'ildan didn't find each other again when Vex abandoned Vax after they ran away from Syngorn, as seen in flashbacks from episode 3 of The Legend of Vox Machina season 2, and Vax falls into the hands of Byron Anders and, in time, the Briarwoods while Vex finds herself in New Byroden.

The Cost Of One Soul - An alternative ending to episode 12 of The Legend of Vox Machina season 3, where Vax pays the ultimate price to save Percy from Orthax and unintentionally gives the demon his soul instead.

Growing Pains - In an alternative universe where the Chroma Conclave don't attack until later on, Vox Machina start hunting down Delilah's cult when Vax is captured by cultists and is used in a ritual meant to make Delilah a new vessel to return in that ends up turning Vax into an infant. Vox Machina find themselves working against the clock to protect Vax while stopping the cult from bringing back the Briarwoods, while Vax has to grow up all over again.

Not My Mark - An alternative universe with a/b/o themes, where Vax is an omega who is forced to pretend he is an alpha by his father until he is caught during heat by the Briarwoods and falls pregnant as a result. How does Vax handle this new trauma? How does Percy react? And could Vax really bring Sylas' kids into the world and raise them as his own? What changes?

And We All Fall Down - An alternative ending to season one of The Legend of Vox Machina where Vox Machina are defeated and taken captive by the Briarwoods after the fight at the ziggurat. Very dark, no good. Just angst, evilness and suffering.

DISCLAIMER - While I am still actively working on these fics at current, there is no guarantee I will finish them as my mental health is ever swinging back and forth like a pendulum, and my motivation is the same.

Any questions about my stories are appreciated in the form of asks, comments or reblogs!

If you're interested in any of the stories mentioned, the following are actively being posted on my AO3 account [ vaxyl ] here;

Hoping to make these updates more consistently in future. 🤞

[grayintogreen]

will you ever come back to the litmor universe once ycdhn is finished? maybe exploring the major changes campaign 3 would have?

Yes! I actually have several planned fics, including a Lucien-centric multichapter that deals with a few loose ends in his narrative and a fic that covers the LitMoR version of the Solstice one-shot. I’ve set up a lot of stuff that gives the Nein more investment in the moon plot without taking anything away from Bells Hells that I’m definitely interested in exploring.

For example and without spoiling anything in future chapters: Lucien/Molly are Ruidusborn so what effect might that have? What would the Vorbing do to Cree’s magic? What would Keyleth think about Vax having a cleric? Jayne is still out there and only guaranteed Caleb seven years of peace before she starts her shit again. Sharna and Gabriel are both still out there. What will the Aeorans do now that they’re set loose on Exandria? PLENTY of stuff remains and the world has changed so much I could probably do another full fic that’s just based on Campaign Three, which honestly given all of the things I just listed could very well fill an entire third installment.

I consider the story a duology but there’s plenty of more story to tell and I’ve been so invested in this AU for so long that I don’t really want to leave it, even if I take a short break to plot out future installments. Why not just commit to this being an over two million word piece?

[ravendruid]

Vividsketches & Crispysnake, I want you both to know I have been stewing on this for weeks, if not months, and I'm so happy y'all picked up on it :')

“You’re my knight in shining armor, Vax’ildan.” Vax chuckled and bowed slightly at her, waving a hand toward the dimly lit apartment, “You’re welcome Your Highness.” Keyleth snorted and walked in, looking over her shoulder to say, “I’m not a princess.” “Maybe not in this universe. Maybe you were one in an alternate universe,” Vax winked and closed the door behind him. “Only if you were my personal guard. Sir Vax’ildan.”

It's not only a reference to My Fair Lady by Waltwhitmansbeard, but also For the love of a princess by Romeoandjulietyouwish, my two favorite fics, and the reason why I started writing.

For those who aren't familiar with these, first of all, HOW? They are objectively the best Vaxleth-centric fics ever posted. They're both stories of Princess Keyleth who falls in love with her Knight, Vax'ildan. My advice is to start with For the Love of a Princess because it's shorter and will leave you wanting for more. You can then satiate your hunger by reading My Fair Lady, which was inspired by it, that is now a million 141 chapters long.

ANYHOO, SORRY FOR SAPPY TIMES. I just realized last night that it has been seven months since I started sharing my writing on tumblr and ao3 and it made me emotional (which I've been a lot, especially everything that happened recently). So I just wanted to make a cute post to thank you all for your support, either as a reader or as an inspiration. And no, I'm not tagging anyone because I'm a weenie who's going to post this and then run to hide under the blankets in fear.

[utilitycaster]

It’s so interesting how spot-on you were with the thoughts about toxic Beaujes folxs fleeing to D20. The same person who’s been starting shit on twitter just found out that CR doesn’t allow mass-produced zines, and used that fact to make some batshit generalization about how “that’s why the fandom is corporatized and violent and racist towards any canon-contradicting fanon like all my beaujester friends told me and now I’m parroting it uncritically”.

So I think this might be my last post on this unless some more wild shit goes down (very possible) not because I disagree but just because I am also trying to be conscious of overshadowing my genuine excitement for The Ravening War. But yeah...like, I followed a few people who were CR fanartists until Beauyasha started happening and unfollowed them once that went down; it was extremely exhausting watching a bunch of (mostly white) people in their early 20s suddenly claim a show they'd watched over 200 episodes of was hopelessly problematic simply because their ship didn't happen. It was a truly vile combination of normal shipping drama plus appropriated social justice language about said shipping drama plus, as others have noted, middle-class white queer people [a demographic I fit into myself] shoving aside narratives about POC or working class people because they aren't explicitly queer narratives (or even narratives about queer people that aren't to their exact specifications of what queerness looks like; see people who refuse to respect Molly's pronouns or who erase Vax's bisexuality because he was primarily romantically involved with a woman).

The zine thing is fucking wild in particular for the following reasons:

The two CR-centric zines that person has mentioned as not ultimately moving forward were both zines that intended to pay the artists, ie, at least partially for profit rather than charity zines.

I am not personally in a creative industry but I've been reliably told by basically everyone who is that CR's policy is boilerplate.

CR has a pretty extensive history of showcasing and hiring fanartists; this is not opposition to fan content, which is how this wack job is attempting to portray it.

Similarly no one is devaluing fan content; they're just saying "you are throwing a big old hissy fit in public about the hypothetical scenario of The Ravening War not honoring a ship that has, and I am not joking here, six fics on Ao3 in total." (For reference: Lapin/Theo, a ship that person actively dislikes, has 56 works, which, idk I feel that's almost ten times as widely accepted fanlore.)

Their twitter currently is bragging about their cookbook zine (which as far as I know wasn't based in fanon but was just a cookbook with fanart in it) and not about their currently active charity zine (which is the one about Belizabeth and Citrina). Also that charity zine is available for free which really undercuts the "for charity" aspect. Anyway a cool thing to do is to not buy it, but just donate directly to the International Rescue Committee or your refugee-supporting charity of choice.

Anyway. This was an opportunity to rant a lot but I will leave you with this: I am not the right person, obviously, to enumerate every possible issue with CR's portrayal of characters of color nor the lack of diversity of the cast. I think discussions of racism and lack of representation in actual play are important to have. But it's telling that fanartists, specifically, who left CR over Beau and Jester not getting together but pretended this was about social justice, always seem to go to D20. Or NADDPod. Or Friends at the Table. Or have their art featured in the TAZ graphic novels. All majority white or entirely white main casts.

They rarely seem to go to, say, Rivals of Waterdeep, or Into the Motherlands, or Three Black Halflings (and those are still some of the better known examples, frankly). People complaining that Critical Role hates lesbians for having a lesbian relationship they didn't like never seem to check out The Broadswords, or use resources like this to find women-led actual play. It's about getting clicks; they want to find an existing fandom to adore them rather than use the power they claim to wield to popularize something underrated.

Anyway that's the last reason why I think I'm done for now: I think the best and most satisfying thing is to starve them of attention, and to enjoy the Ravening War and art and fic about it from fans who are happy to be here.

[sovinly]

sovin i have been following you for YEARS because of your les mis writing and somehow completely missed until now that you are into critical role, a show that ive managed to throw my entire soul into. have you done any writing for critical role?

oh man, anon friend!!! You’ve been here that long?! <3

(Someday I will get back to writing for Les Mis; when will my energy return from the war. But I am glad you like it!)

And yesssss, I love Critical Role so much! Isn’t it a delight?

I have written a couple things for it, all for Campaign 1!

There are a couple of short prompted ficlets: An AU where Vex and Vax run a coffee shop in Westruun, and some Vax/Gilmore AU where they have emotions and cozy winter nights in Whitestone

And then a full, proper fic! It is Cassandra-centric, with Kynan and Desmond the carriage driver as the major supporting characters, that explores trauma and recovery, and goes AU after the Vorugal fight (because that’s when I wrote it).

I hope you enjoy them, if you give them a shot!

[eponymous-rose]

Maaan, there’s some really discouraging patterns cropping up with the fan stuff in the wake of the campaign finale of CR. Like, one or two of these fics/reactions/what-have-you? Yeah, I’d expect that. But it’s so widespread!

First off is like, dang, we straight-up had canon moments where Vax told Keyleth he hoped she’d move on after his death, and Marisha mentioned in her epilogue that Keyleth probably did that. The sheer number of “nope she mourns for a thousand years alone and miserable” things I’ve seen is really fucked up, man. Hell, it’s also a little fucked up that in all the Vex/Percy stuff I’ve seen there’s been very little acknowledgement that, in the 80-100 years Vex is likely to outlive Percy, she might conceivably have her own adventures and, yes, even fall in love again. 

Like, yeah, it’s fiction. But I just keep thinking and thinking and thinking about a friend of mine who was widowed at 25, like, I know how many people thought her life was over when that happened, I know how many people thought she’d never have a relationship again, I know how many side-eyes and snide remarks she’s getting now that it’s been five years and she’s getting out into the world again. I know a man who’s happily remarried after losing his wife of 30 years, and god, wouldn’t you know it, it’s always the women who are seen as a little scandalous for not spending the rest of their life in mourning. 

I will absolutely believe that some of the folks writing this stuff are aware of how fucked up it would be in real life and are just indulging their hyper-romantic “I’ll be true even in death” tropes, but damn, dude, that trope is fucked. That trope is so fucked! The notion that falling in love after your True Love’s death somehow minimizes that first relationship is so damn toxic. Please don’t buy into this bullshit. Please believe that women can have an existence beyond their love interest (even, and perhaps especially, if that love interest dies), write women who can fall in love again and again and again without minimizing any of those loves, and damn, just please write those women?

Just... claiming that the default should be mourning over another lifetime or ten until you die is so cruel and short-sighted that I just want to scoop these folks up and wrap them in a warm blanket and tell them, you know you’re worth more than that, right? You really, really know it?

And god, the whole thing about Pike/Scanlan is that it wasn’t a case of “dude acts like an ass until the woman gives up and falls in love”, it was “dude acts like an ass, realizes he’s acting like an ass, gets to know the woman as an actual human being (well, gnome), stops putting expectations on her, and generally chills the fuck out, at which point they get together because they’ve had some time to get to know each other without all that weirdness.” But there’s so much stuff now going back to the stuff that Scanlan apologized for in canon and painting it as a cute forerunner to the relationship, and I’m just sort of... boggled, man. Again, there are moments where it’s clearly being done with some self-awareness, but so much of this fan reaction really is straight-up “it’s cute because he acted like an ass until she gave up and fell in love!”

I’m also seeing the same damn pattern that cropped up when Vex/Percy became canon, which was that suddenly all the Vex-centric fics were about her relationship with Percy, while Percy had plenty of stories still being written about his family or his own angst or his own character arc. I’m seeing so much Pike fic that’s exclusively about her relationship with Scanlan, whereas it’s not that hard to find Scanlan stories that are still, you know, first and foremost about Scanlan.

It’s so dang disappointing to me, because this show may not be perfect, but it’s weirdly doing a damn good job of portraying some relationship and character stuff in a more mature light that you usually get in media. I’m so not used to canon doing better with this stuff with fandom. Something about that is fundamentally backwards.

[awkwardspiritanimals]

so i have like five or six short pieces (+title, which is very important to my Process) that i’ve put enough thought into at this point to at least start on them for the college!au that’s vaguely related to chances in that percy and cass are together for the entirety of the post-briarwoods time and cass is a full-fledged member of vm alongside her brother

general intro piece about how they all came together and came to consider themselves a group

a scanlan thing about their group dinners that looks at scanlan’s role as the Dad Friend and also introduces a lot of how the guest players/npcs fit into the group’s dynamic

the proper introduction of the two de rolos, or vax finds two tree people sleeping on pike’s couches one night

a pike/pike+grog-centric bit about art student grog’s studio space

the pseudo-introduction of their crappy dive bar hangout the slayer’s take where kash and zahra bartend

tiberius’s departure and later death and the group dealing with that

maybe a tiny little kynan/cass + percy thing that probably doesn’t make much sense without providing context for that relationship before that bit

and i kind of want to write at least some of them up and post them as a non-linear, to be continued over time one shot series in the college!au as my first bits of fic in the fandom, just because chances (de rolo siblings fic) is going to 1) probably take me months to finish, 2) follow canon for the most part so until the gang’s adventures end-isa or we have a general idea of how they’ll end i can’t even really finish it completely??, and 3) be absolutely fucking ginormous

[ravendruid]

Be In My Eyes - Chapter 1

This is a Vaxleth-centric College AU fic, where our group of chucklefucks share an apartment. You can also find this fic available on AO3. The title was inspired by the song Flowers in Your Hair by The Lumineers.

In the town of Byroden stood a large oak tree, behind which a small girl tried to hide from her brother, her dark hair in a messy braid and her hazel-brown eyes searching the direction from which she had seen him last. She was holding a stick almost as big as her with a piece of string tied to each end in what looked like a makeshift bow.

“Come on, Vex! It’s getting late, and I’m hungry!” A boy’s voice sounded in the distance. The girl, Vex, took a deep breath before she started to round the tree, as slowly and quietly as she could, looking for the source of the voice.

Vex wasn’t as great at hiding as he was, so he spotted her with ease, crouching by the roots of the large tree with her back to him. His equally dark hair fell at the sides of his face, a face so similar to the girl’s, but for the slight change of his features. The boy was able to approach his sister from behind without her noticing, his feet so silent against the dry ground that one could guess he was levitating. 

“Caught you!”

The girl jumped in place, raised a hand to her chest, and screamed as she turned to face him. “Vax! You scared me!”

Vax laughed at his sister’s reaction. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders. “I’m sorry stubby. We really should get going." He pulled her along with him. “It’s getting dark."

The girl finally nodded in agreement and they walked together, his arm still draped around her, until they reached the small wooden house, where a woman with thick dark hair stood in front of a stove, stirring a pot of stew.

***

The mountain town of Zephrah was located on a hill of the Summit Peaks, surrounded by trees and nature, among which stood a small, modest house, made of logs and stone. The gravel path leading to the wooden door was laden with beautiful flowers of various colors, and the planters in front of the windows sported a few bulbs of flowers ready to bloom. 

There was chatter coming and the nice smell of food cooking from inside the house as a tall, white-haired man stirred a pot on the stove while a small red-haired girl sat at the table, drawing flowers on a piece of paper.

“We learned about flowers today." The girl said as she drew a daisy. “We learned about cherry blossoms, snowdrops, and wildflowers… there are so many flowers with so many colors, and they’re all so pretty!” She finished tracing the daisy, only to start drawing a second one right next to it.

"Yes, flowers are one of the most beautiful things nature has to offer." The man said, looking over his shoulder. “They don't necessarily need to be merely decorative. They can have many uses, as you know." The girl nodded with her gaze still focused on the drawing, seemingly happy with the answer. “Keyleth dear, will you please set the table? Dinner is almost ready."

Keyleth nodded in response before her father turned his gaze back to the pot and started to collect her things by placing her coloring pencils inside a cute green pencil case. “Dad, what was mom’s favorite flower?”

Keyleth’s mother had died almost five years ago, when she was only five, and she didn’t have many memories of her, so she often asked her father questions about her. Keyleth knew that sometimes it hurt him to talk about her mom, but he knew it was important for her to know about her, so he would always answer her questions, especially the ones about what her mom loved and all her favorite things.

“She loved chamomiles." Her father answered with a smile. “They are beautiful, smell good, and they make great tea!” Like every time he spoke about his wife, Keyleth could see the threat of tears at the corners of his eyes.

“I love chamomiles too. I remember when mom used to make me tea when I was sick." Keyleth’s voice was soft and nostalgic. “I miss her so much."

Her father stepped away from the stove, making sure to turn it off beforehand, and approached her, crouching to her height and pulling her into a hug. “I know dear. I miss her too."