#but then they're resorted to annoying filler characters

[nocofamilyau]

not related to noco at all but what is katie and sadie’s relationship like now?

pretty good all things considered! while they're both married to two sweet guys and have separate families (none of their kids are other td characters, unfortunately...) they're still really close, and still live next to each other at that same beach town they grew up in, now both running that successful 80s themed ice cream business they've been dreaming of! its safe to say they probably suffered the least on Total Drama, only leaving with a couple of minor scars, good god were they lucky..

[cboffshore]

Right Here, Right Now: Main Character Decision Making In On Sea, Sunlight, and Sky

Or: a casual essay examining planning, privilege, and immediacy in On Sea, Sunlight, and Sky, because I had some Really Fun Thoughts about my work today and decided to write about them. This might be a little messy, but I think it's still worth a post.

Obviously, spoilers for the latest installment (which drives a lot of this essay by virtue of being the longest installment yet), and the series as a whole, so it's under the cut.

There's a core tenet in my work on OSSAS over the years: everything Nya and Nadakhan do is, ultimately, pointless. After all, these fics are meant as gap fillers to complete Nya's experience after "The Last Resort," and we all know how Skybound ends by now. (I hope. If you don't... maybe don't read this?) So what I've tried to remember this whole time is that I don't have to worry about long-term canon consequences, because no matter what I write, the imaginary timeline gets wiped clean no matter what. (Yes, I'm the kind of person who worries about canon compliance that heavily.) They're acting for now, not the next season.

The thing is: my characters don't know that. In their fictional world, all of this is very, very real. Actions do have consequences, and besides being pointless, a lot of the shit I have Nya and Nadakhan do is just plain goofy from a distance. Gull swarm! Bullshit chase scene! Chess night that goes horribly wrong, set up specifically to mess with Nya! Everyone is fueled by spite and desperation the entire time.

That being said: that's all on purpose. Without consciously realizing it (although I know I recognized it on some level while writing), I spent OSSAS examining how Nya and Nadakhan both perceive and use immediacy - especially when reacting on the spot.

Let's take a step back and look at canon. Nadakhan's entire MO is, basically, to annoy his victims so much that they opt to just give up entirely by accepting his offer to wish it all away. Key components of this include:

Rushing his opponents and refusing to give them the time they need to come up with their own plan

Keeping them in one spot

Confronting them while they're alone

Most of the time, this works. I don't think I need to rehash that - you can pull up any confrontation in the season and watch these at play. The first hiccup we see is when Jay flips the script on him (accidentally), by getting so afraid that he makes a wish that summons Nya to the scene, which ruins that third component and forces Nadakhan to abandon the attempt. While these fics aren't about Jay, I wanted to mention this scene as a summary of how we know Nadakhan operates well before OSSAS slots into the timeline.

What do we learn from this?

On one hand, Nadakhan has a system in place - this guy likes his plans watertight. He's got rules that he plays by, generally without fail.

However: Nadakhan doesn't adapt well to change. We also see how he reacts when he finds out Delara's dead, his crew has been scattered, and his realm destroyed, so we knew about this already, but his confrontation with Jay helps highlight it. We also know that he sticks to his plans at all costs. Flintlocke attempting to convince him that he's got enough doesn't work, because at that point Nadakhan's so set on his very particular plan that he doesn't know how to accept that he's already won. (The commitment issues discussed in chapter 5 of the 2023 installment are different from what I'm talking about here, just so we're clear.)

Fatal flaw, that. And what a fun one - and very fun to use in my writing.

At this point in the timeline, whether he's willing to accept it or not, Nadakhan is fully in charge. He's got control over the skies; he's got mad resources; he's got Nya, who is central to his final plot and (despite all the chaos I keep letting her cause) is unable to leave. In OSSAS, he's got plenty of space and time; this allows him to read Nya and attempt to come up with solid consequences whenever she tries to rebel. For instance, in A Disappearing Act (Done Poorly), Nya uses her elemental powers to stage an immediate escape. This does not work; she's caught and brought back, and in Coughing Up Feathers, is forced to wear a Vengestone bracelet to prevent similar attempts. Ordinarily - under the rules Nadakhan's been playing by the whole season - this would be effective, right? Nadakhan used Vengestone on Jay to suppress his powers, after all. Why wouldn't this work?

Because the rule surrounding Vengestone has changed.

As of "Wishmasters," Vengestone amplifies power - but that's a relatively new thing at this point. Nadakhan hasn't interacted with Vengestone since the rescue mission (and according to my fic timeline had the bracelet made a while ago), so in CUF, I thought it would be appropriate to have him forget about granting that wish in order to let Nya weaponize it. Naturally, she does, and he doesn't figure it out until the following night (the prologue of If I Can Think (Of Something Clever)); embarrassed, he removes the bracelet from the equation and tries to figure something else out. His next attempts - destroying her comms bracelet and orchestrating a cruel false escape for Nya - are a lot more cut-and-dried, but still ultimately force Nya to look for alternative ways to resist that he's not expecting. Even when he thinks he's orchestrated it fully, he misses that. In the fake escape attempt reveal, he admits that he didn't expect her to use a chain as a weapon in addition to the torch he laid out. He also didn't expect Nya to react so violently to the image of Landon - he chose a friendlier face to approach her with, hoping she'd maybe cooperate when the end drew near, but didn't expect her to simply lump him in with the rest of the crew and fight him off the same way in the combat sequence. (Talk about a superiority complex...) When Nya points these things out to him, he panics and tries to change the subject.

Nadakhan's issue here is that he believes his plans are so solid that nothing can break them, so when hiccups like the Vengestone thing pop up, he's not entirely sure how to deal with them beyond simply shoving that to the side and moving onto his next scheme. This shows up in the IICT chess confrontation, too - when Nya doesn't react quite how he hopes she will to the bombs he drops, he either tries to redirect to the chess game or another topic to avoid feeling that shame of failure. This is because, like when he came up with his initial plan, Nadakhan plans for the long-term and doesn't worry about immediate effects. He knows his plan from top to bottom way before the crew catches on, and is unwilling to budge from it. He's had so much time and privilege to weave this tapestry that he can't imagine anyone going at it with scissors, so he doesn't arrange for any sort of Plan B.

Nya, however, is very much waving those scissors recklessly - at least, when she can reach them.

Unlike Nadakhan, Nya doesn't really have that same sort of space and time. She knows approximately what's going to happen, but not quite when. As fic author, I've given her about a week between her capture and the wedding - but she doesn't know that! For all she knows, at any moment, someone could barge in and drag her out to get hitched. She doesn't have the privilege to take her sweet time planning, so all of her moves are immediate reactions to her situation. Her escape attempt in ADA(DP) is a spur-of-the-moment plan triggered by her remembering a key detail about Nadakhan's quarters and making a wild guess about how she can weaponize it; the gull thing in CUF is an accidental discovery that she only gets to test twice before using it on Nadakhan. The longest she takes to formulate a plan is a day in IICT, which is the shortest amount of time she needs to gather the information to break out. After that, the combat scene is entirely improvised, and so are her personal attacks towards Nadakhan during the final chess scene. Everything she does is inspired by something either said, remembered, or realized in the moment. (Respectively: she weaponizes the line about Nadakhan's father teaching him chess, the dream, and the realization that Nadakhan fridges major problems instead of pivoting to deal with them immediately.)

As such, the effects of Nya's actions aren't long-term, at least not by design. She can't effectively plan for a future she knows so little about, and she's frustrated, so she takes it out on the now: little digs at Nadakhan that she knows he can't adjust to quickly or calmly, and actions that do serious damage to his attempts to control her.

Ironically, Nya's making snap judgements the entire time - the exact thing Nadakhan usually banks on when dealing with opposition. However, Nadakhan relies on those snap decisions being made to avoid him - not attack him.

Nya's cornered this whole time. Nadakhan's not trying to get rid of her like he is everyone else, so he tries to contain her. This upsets a key part of his usual strategy, which Nya recognizes early on (even if she doesn't really give thought to it - it's an unconscious undercurrent). By keeping her within easy reach, he's ironically given her a taste of the same privileges he has: he forces interactions that unwittingly help her learn about him and provides plenty of chances to push his buttons. Usually, he only interacts with people once or twice - enough to knock them off the map and shrug them off. However, he's pulled Nya into a position where he has to be around her to keep an eye on her... which goes two ways, of course. He's trying to read her; she's trying to read him.

Ultimately, Nya comes out on top - not because I think snap judgements are the way to go for most issues (I, too, like my plans solid and often dislike adjusting to new things), but because this is a season where how people react in the moment matters. We all know the season is resolved peacefully thanks to a quick, emotional judgement Jay makes; although this is very much not a Jay series, I like to think that Nya helps pave the way for this success by breaking down Nadakhan's self-confidence to the point where he really starts to lose his ability to insure his own work. (Let's talk about how he doubts Delara even loves him after she's resurrected sometime - I'm also trying to build into that.)

I don't really have a good ending for this - after all, I wrote this on an impulse - but isn't it neat how these things work out sometimes?