#and I'd simply rather die than tell anyone in my life abt this

[starlingskulls]

also one of the cats i work with really fucked my shit up last shift and i feel very upset about it One because uhmm. rude. but also because ohhh that's deeper than i've ever gone and it didn't hurt that bad .. very interesting information

[liloinkoink]

hey if you need an excuse to talk more about the movie 6 treebark au, consider this that. i'd love to hear more >:D

of course of course thank you for enabling me. hey guys here’s the fucking directors cut of this fic i posted two hours ago

this is going to be long and all over the place we’re just going to have to live with that. i just thought about this so much

here’s some details abt the fic vs the actual movie (and movie stuff i couldn’t include), details from alternate plot for this au, and some little details i want to call attention to with actual content and word/formatting choices

so, first of all, this is based off my favorite One Piece movie. the villain is a former pirate captain who lost his entire crew in a shipwreck 20 years prior, and now sustains plantlike doubles/fakes through luring other pirate crews to his island and feeding the crews to the Lily Carnation. the movie’s ambiguous on a lot of stuff, such as how exactly she works, or if the crew is aware they’re not real or if they know of what their captain is doing (though it seems no). the captain, known simply as the Baron, takes a special glee in leaving only the captain of each crew alive, so that they too can understand the despair of being “completely alone in the vast [ocean]” before asking them if they’d like to die. every single captain, apparently, says yes

i obviously didn’t go with that route, tho i do have an outline for if i went for the true movie plot. if i did, i’d have approached this differently, though there are pieces of that version in this one—the tall crown to hide the sprout on Ren’s head and Martyn’s magic flowers in his hair were meant to mislead anyone who might know the movie to assume the Baron’s stand-in is Ren, as Ren is the leader/‘captain,’ rather than Martyn

i picked Martyn for the Baron instead of Ren because, honestly, i wasn’t sure if Ren would have the stomach for killing so many innocents to bring his kingdom back. Ren has bloodlust, sure, especially on red, but he tends to have a strong moral backing about it. especially in third life. Martyn is… not always so ethically rigid

all the actual movie plot aside, for this i went more for the days after ‘revival,’ from the pov of one of the ‘revived’—which reminds me, actually!

my personal favorite fact abt this fic is Ren isn’t actually in it. the only third life character actually in this is martyn. ren is dead. the character called Ren in this is a double. he’s not real. he doesn’t know that, but he’s literally just a plant. like, legit—once the baron is beat in the movie, his entire crew turns into human-height saplings. they’re fake. ship of theseus’d rendog.

…my dumbest/funniest minor detail i used to imply the fact this isn’t ren: the lilies in Martyn’s hair don’t bother Ren despite the fact he mentions them being toxic to dogs / he’s “allergic” to lilies bc he’s not a dog anymore. he’s a plant

anyway/related, we don’t know much about the Baron’s OG crew, but the fakes seem to be pretty accurate. they help the Baron play games that separate visiting crews, and while they can be tricky or underhanded, they’re not outright evil the way the Baron is. they’re pirates, so they’re not kind, but i don’t get the impression they’re, like, supernaturally evil under the Lily’s influence. they also have a genuine love for the Baron, which he returns, however twisted it’s become. they go with whatever scheme the Baron concocts to defeat the pirates who arrive here bc they’re deeply loyal to him, but there’s none of his sadism. they’re also not involved in the direct killing/feeding, and i sort of get the impression the Baron doesn’t tell them about it, but that’s a bit headcanon territory

all this to say: while this isn’t Ren, the Lily hasn’t changed him. he’s preserved exactly as the original was.

this is, relatedly, the reason Martyn’s little magical mood flowers never change from the white lilies—it’s got nothing to do with the Lily at all. he’s grieving, his king/partner is dead, and he’s not addressing it. he’s constantly looking at ‘Ren’ and seeing what he knows he’s lost. this whole fic Martyn is refusing to address or process or heal from his grief, and thus, the funerary flowers stay

speaking of Martyn’s lilies, i want everyone to know the Lily Carnation looks like this:

she’s not even a lily. she’s adorable. she’s got a little bib for eating people. i love her

(she also has two other forms which i will lightly call ‘kind of uncanny’ and ‘deeply disgusting’ but we won’t worry about those, esp bc there was no way to easily fit either in this fic) (more on that in a minute tho)

related, if you noticed, i did specify that Martyn, in the Ren ‘revival’ scene, had not only white lilies, but yellow and red lilies as well to match her! also bc yellow and red lilies mean loyalty/new beginnings and love/passion, respectively (if i remember right), which was fun.

there’s also a few more little details that you might notice if you know the movie which i had a lot of fun including but couldn’t bring up.

the simplest is the big “life after life after life” paragraph is a loose reference to the really repetitive first line of the movie, the Baron’s call for “if you are a pirate among pirates among pirates amount pirates…” as a way to ask for the best of the best to come take on his island challenges (and be torn apart).

it also visually mimics (and, i hope, emotionally evokes) one of my favroite visuals of the movie, the reveal of the Dozens of graves hidden on the island. which is a fact i didn’t even notice till Haunted pointed it out lmfao. couldn’t find an image of that online, but here’s two screenshots of a scene taking place in and showing a very small section of the graveyard

(we don’t get to know if these graves are for the crew or the baron’s victims, though considering how large it spans in every direction from this point, i would imagine the latter. which is… as fascinating as it is horrifying. who is making them? the baron? why? i love this graveyard)

another example: the fakes can’t directly think about the fact they’re dead or else they start to wither rapidly. like, within seconds they dry out and collapse if made to think about their death by an outside force (and can only be brought back to full health by the Lily being fed). i couldn’t have Ren do this on screen in a scene in his own POV, so i compromised by having him start feeling sick if he poked at that particular mental wound too much. Martyn can tell he’s dwelling on it bc he starts literally wilting and steers him away

(the crew members don’t have death wounds in the movie but i think they’re cool so. now they have them)

it didn’t get to come up at all, but the Lily on Martyn’s shoulder isn’t her main body, and the actual thing is this… massive black tube with a flat face. (gonna include some images, so and i’m gonna say maybe? trypo warning for the second image)

here’s the Actual Lily from far away and an image of a few people stuck in her… mouth? people drop on the face and are absorbed alive. just so you can get a sense of how big she is and what she does

or, here’s the Lily form i called “kind of uncanny”

unauthorized fucking thing.

didn’t have any way to include that in Ren pov tho, uh, this is what happens to everyone Martyn leads away. i was going to have something about Martyn disappearing to some barren hill off to the side of the island on occasion, to go to the Lily’s true body, but i thought it would be too confusing to add this without explaining why it was there. sometimes you have to cut accuracy for coherency, it happens. besides, it’s not like the Lily can’t eat from her little body… but for that, i’ll just. say that the little bits of body horror i included were on par for the movie

hmm. one last thing i want known if my favorite line of the fic was this:

this was originally written to go in the first scene, but i moved it to the last one to delay immediate blame on Martyn (lingering desire from the ‘full movie’ plan). the Hand severed from his heart was threefold—Martyn loses the person he loves most, yes, but a literal hand cannot function or exist if the heart of its body is destroyed. also, Martyn loses his heart in that he loses the part of him that would care what he’s doing is wrong

also, the second to last paragraph:

the ‘terrible terrible thing’ is a Ren quote from the execution, in which he tells Martyn he’s going to ask him to do ‘a terrible terrible thing.’ so obviously i had to twist his words here for something he would never ask of Martyn

my final note about this fic is The Real Actual Person Martyn keeps up with One Piece, and he’s tweeted abt watching other One Piece movies, which means there’s a nonzero chance this man could read this and understand it, which horrifies me