#captainderyn rambles

[captainderyn]

If anyone would like some inside as to why I haven’t been as active here, this is why xD all my free time has been going into knitting and learning how to knit.

(This is my third(ish) project, first finished one aside from my attempts at knitting from 1830s knitting patterns for my old job)

On hand, yay can’t doom scroll if fingers are busy knitting, on the other hand…it’s a time consuming hobby lol

[tiredassmage]

Tyr and Arcann. Arcann and Tyr. @eorzeashan​ you asked me about this like a month or two ago and I ???? Have been trying to figure it out ever since. And then apparently it sort of slotted together last night at 12:18 am while I rambled in @captainderyn​‘s dms sO. I FINALLY HAVE SOMETHING COHESIVE. Kind of. We’ll see how competently I can string together sentences in this post.

They occupy a weird dynamic as far as current storyline goes where I’m not quite certain still where they stand... Perhaps it’s more still that they don’t have anywhere else to go that keeps them together over anything else.

But the short answer is that they’re not really... friends. That’s a lot of ground to cover for both of them and I’m not quite certain Tyr would ever be willing to close that much between them, given everything.

Tyr’s decision to bring him into the Alliance is driven more by the tactical advantage of having insider knowledge on Zakuul and Vaylin, and also by a respect and loyalty developed to Senya. Senya believes too much in Arcann for Tyr to accept her as collateral. And Tyr’s... kind of a result of people taking a wild chance that shouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in a Belsavis volcano of working out to begin with, anyway.

So, Arcann’s gotta work to earn his respect and trust just as much as with the rest of the Alliance. And the common ground allowed for that primarily? Tyr picks him up as a sparring partner.

Arcann’s still one of the most formidable Force-users Tyr’s ever had to wrangle with and it is very true that Valkorian’s intercession is one of the few reasons he was able to survive the first couple of encounters. Nobody wants that. And Vaylin is a force of nature. If Tyr can’t at least hold ground with Arcann, they’re going to have a much bigger problem.

It’s the one place Arcann sees Tyr in almost brutal honesty. They scare the living daylights out of the Alliance when they spar together. Lana, Theron, Arcann, several others repeatedly question how much of a good idea this course of action is.

Tyr keeps going back. Again. Arcann gets the upper hand several times. Again. Tyr puts everything he has into these spars. He’s not meaning to push Arcann, though I have to imagine that’s a part of the discomfort of the whole affair, but Tyr’s pushing himself. A little too far a little too often. Several times it ends because Arcann refuses to let him lunge into another duel because he’s visibly exhausted and, Commander? Are you certain? Lokin has to get involved and threaten to detain Tyr in medical physically several times before he and Arcann actually get anywhere talking about why.

For Tyr, it’s about the pressure, about everyone counting on him, about how failure isn’t an option. That close and personal, Arcann can’t help but see how much of himself Tyr puts into the Alliance. No matter what is or isn’t actually spoken, Arcann gains an understanding of what Tyr values.

They’re not... really the right people for each other to heal from their respective traumas. They’re not particularly capable of doing it on their own and some of their issues are so similar or related to the actions the other has taken that the kind of honesty and support that’d be beneficial to healing just... can’t come from each other. But they can at least understand. They can at least respect what they’re struggling with.

Arcann struggles a bit too much with guilt for putting Tyr in this position that he’s not really the right person to share the burden of why Tyr struggles with being the Commander. See: the “it’s not about you” and Tyr’s bitter laughter that of course it isn’t - it never is and never has been. He’s always been someone else’s tool or weapon as a Cipher. Which swings us back around to Arcann seeing, whether Tyr intends to show or not, just how much he has sacrificed for this all when they spar because Tyr can’t help but put everything into it because look at everything they could still stand to lose. Arcann’s... not the first person to try to kill him. That’s not the part that really weighs on Tyr’s chest. He’s not special for trying to kill him. What aches is the very real burden of being backed into a corner of a situation exponentially beyond his control (again) and having to swing for the fences again anyway because there is no other choice. Failure is not an option. Again.

It was never about Tyr. It just happened to him. Pawn again, Cipher.

That all said, Arcann is one of the few people that never questions his unwavering dedication to Theron in the entirety of the Nathema Conspiracy. And that means... a lot. Because Theron is everything to him. Theron is one of the few people to ever see him, wholly. To accept him. To believe there’s something more than a jaded ex-Cipher to it all. And Tyr was never ready to wrangle with the idea that he might’ve been wrong, that he might’ve finally fucked up and let his feelings get in the way of one of the most obvious betrayals to exist in the game - to be used by someone you thought you loved.

It wasn’t Theron. Tyr would’ve been ready to die for that belief. Thank the stars it wasn’t Theron because I’m not sure he would’ve ever really recovered from that otherwise.

So, yeah... Arcann and Tyr. Tyr and Arcann. They are... interesting. The short version is they have too much baggage between them to ever really be friends and they are not the right people for each other to deal with that baggage, but they do make fair progress towards genuine cooperation. They do see some sort of understanding in one another. It’s not forgiveness. There’s too much between them and what happened in the war for that to ever really work. But Tyr won’t stand in his way if he wants to try to be different. They surely both know that road is not easy to walk. You need all the allies you can get on that one.

[queen-scribbles]

finish your fics friday saturday

Tagged by @emeraldgreaves and while I don't currently have any oneshots still in the WIP except the long-languishing Heodi one, I'll see what i can do.

rules: send an ask with one of the listed WIPs, I'll add five sentences and ramble about it a bit. :3

Heodi snowed in help me finish this i beg you

OWaP

tLBT

(and I'll ramble about the Ardrali fic if you want, even tho I did finish the draft)

tagging @captainderyn @haledamage

[okami-zero]

It has occurred to me that I have read and enjoyed snippets of Dragon Age fanfiction on here and AO3, when my knowledge of the games is functionally nil. What infinitessimally small amount I DO know has been gleaned from snippets I saw a friend play and but and pieces and crumbs I have come across on tumblr and the occasional article on said games. I know far more about Mass Effect than I do anything DA.

But, I am still able to get invested in some of these fics because the writers I stumbled across just fucking....write in such a way that it doesn't really matter (thoigh I do sometimes have to whip uo some Google Fu to get some details, it's not hugely laborious).

Why I am rambling about this this particular morning (aside from boredom, work is slow) is Ibjust read a posted DA fic snippet and it hit me right int the feels, and pretty heavily. For characters I only know through these fics. There's also FFXIV srufd, too and I have NO BASIS WHATSOEVER for that game, I just know the music slaps and Yoshi P amuses me. And those fics still draw me in.

I have no idea where I was going with this... Or if I was going anywhere besides gushing about writers I follow. ^_^;

So, I'm just gonna shout out the writers I have been reading most lately, whether it's DA or FFXIV:

@elveny @kunstpause @irlaimsaaralath

Go read their stuff, it's all REALLY GOOD.

And a special shoutout to @captainderyn for freaking awesome SWTOR writing and for reblogging the three above and thus helping me stave off the terrible doldrums of IT work.

[corey-067]

I actually have most of @captainderyn‘s ask done! Only about a year later, but it was the oldest one I’ve managed to match up to an actual list! It’s kind of become a bit more of a narrative ramble leading up to the point, but that’s how my writing often goes, haha. Progress is slow, but I’m writing again.

[greyias]

OC Asks 3. How did you choose their name?

Also asked by @captainderyn​

Hahahahaha… okay, the short answer?: I’m an idiot. I didn’t realize I was going to love this game or this character as much as I did.

The long answer, well, I’ve alluded to it once or twice in the past, but I guess I should actually delve into it for real. But under a cut, because it’s probably going to get long.

I’m not sure if this should come with any kind of warning, but it’s kind of long and does delve into some personal stuff. So hopefully that doesn’t bother anyone!

Okay, so, when I first heard about this game in 2011, I had been out of fandom for several years, and had played a few MMOs here and there, but never really got into them for very long, mostly because I got bored very quickly with how repetitive they were. And then I read about this supposedly story and character-driven MMO, and I was intrigued. I was talking to my sister-in-law at the time about it, and ultimately realized I’d never be able to play because I didn’t have a PC capable of running it, and I was heavily into debt because of medical issues, to the point where I was having a difficult time affording my car payment, mortgage, and groceries.

So then Christmas rolls around, and my family has just about finished all of the presents when my brother and his wife go and bring in a special gift they’d been working on for several months: a frankensteined gaming PC that had one game installed on it, with several months of a subscription pre-paid: Star Wars the Old Republic

Needless to say, I was kind of bawling because no one had ever done something that nice to me before. And like? It’s kind of hard to describe what that previous year had been like without having a long, long side story but… it was difficult. It kind of sounds melodramatic to say it was hellish, but looking back on it? It kind of was. I was barely doing anything besides surviving, much less having fun. And here my sister-in-law had actually listened to a one-off conversation about how I was interested in this game but probably would never be able to play it, and like… took it upon herself to make that happen.

So of course the first thing I do is hook up my brand FrankenPC, load up the only game on it, and create a character! But it’s a MMO – and even though it’s billed on being story and character-based, I kind of don’t really believe it? Or at least don’t think my character is going to matter. So I do what I did with every other MMO, I used my online nickname to make a character (Greyias) so my friends can recognize me if they’re in-game, create a character that vaguely looks like me, and get to adventuring! 

The last name came when they rolled out legacies, and hey, I used “Highwind” for my short-lived Pirates of the Caribbean MMO toon. It’s also the last name for one of the main characters in my abandoned steampunk novel series, but that’s another story for another time.

(And then after about three days of learning the mechancis, re-roll said character on a different server, because OOPS! That wasn’t the server my brother and sister-in-law had started their guild on. She looked a little less like me this time. Probably should have changed the name, but I just wanted to see how the story turned out and eventually quest with my fam)

I realized my mistake around Coruscant when Kira joined up as a companion and I went “…uh oh.”

Because I’ve started to recognize I get a certain feeling when I like something, really like something to the point when I get… ideas. Story ideas. Character conversations and wondering “what if”. Of course, this is still in the open beta period, the game hasn’t even launched yet, there’s still long queues to log in and the grind is real, and I just want to see where this story is going and what Darth Angral is going to do, and why is this character so damn sincere and genuine and I don’t like characters that are the literal embodiment of sunshine, I like snarky snarksters and–oh. No I actually do like the Sunshine Jedi. A lot.

Now, a few of you may be like “I really don’t see what the problem is” – this is kind of an old school thing, and something that seems to have thankfully gotten a lot of pushback in the time since I had left fandom and the time since I rejoined it, and that is: The Dreaded Mary Sue

From about the time I had started writing fic when I was in my early teens and onwards it had been drilled into my head that Mary Sues were a bad thing. And self-inserts were worse. Especially if they were *gasp* FEMALE CHARACTERS. (We can’t have those girls having characters they identify with now, can we?) And like, those very relevant discussions aside, I was kind of… ashamed? That I had made a self-insert without realizing it? Despite the fact that like, the character that resulted from my playthrough was very much not me. Like, a significantly different person.

But I was starting to get story ideas and snatches of character bits, and like, I hadn’t written in so long, I hadn’t been inspired in so long. And honestly I just loved this little do-gooder goober, in all of her naive, happy-go-lucky glory. As well as her red-headed sidekick and this amazing dynamic that I had only really seen depicted between male characters previously. And so I promised myself if I got a story idea, I’d write it out and… just change Grey’s name to something else. So no one would know my secret crime, and I would be free, freeeee to scribble in the margins of canon.

It was a great plan, except, I had been playing with subtitles for the game on, so every time Grey would speak, her name would appear above it. And wouldn’t you know? I associated that name with that face, and well, I didn’t get that story idea yet, so it was. Fine I tell you. FINE.

I kept playing the game. In fact, I played the game a lot in the middle part of 2012, because wouldn’t you know? I had another round of medical issues that put me on short term disability and I actually had to retrain my body to sit in a chair for long periods of time (look, it’s a really long story, and this post is long enough as it is). So let’s just say… I got really attached to my little Sunshine Jedi who could go out and save the galaxy when I could barely walk a hundred feet.

And continued to play it off and on over the following years, until finally, finally the devs removed the grind wall in preparation for KotFE, and I was able to finish the Jedi Knight storyline and see where her story ended up. Then I played the next expansion on Makeb. Which was fun. Then I made the mistake that we all know I was eventually going to make: I played Shadow of Revan.

And met Theron fucking Shan. And my perfect little Jedi suddenly fell in love and oh crap. I’m escaping out of cutscenes to rewatch them. Like rewatching them an absurd amount of times. And as I’m going to sleep I’m like, getting entire bits of narration and brand new scenes and fic ideas in my head, and oh god. It finally happened. I try and resist the pull, but I play up through KotFE and I have no more story to stall any more. And the snippets just keep lulling me to sleep every night and… okay.

I probably need to rename this character now. Like, there’s an actual ability to do that in-game so I should get to it. Chop chop.

Nothing works. Nothing at all works. This should not be that hard, she can have any name, no one will know. Why can’t I think of a different name? I go to every single name site known to man, and none of them are her. Besides the fact, that’s her name, and I’m starting to feel kind of guilty for taking it away from her. Poor girl has been through so much in canon and now I’m taking away her name? What kind of monster am I? Okay, fine. I roll up a different Knight during the Dark vs Light event, gave that one an actual name that was not my online writer name just to see if I could trick my brain into writing about them.

Nope.

Maybe I’ll change my online name? “Let her keep the name Grey and I can just have a different name and…” – at this point I’m starting to realize I might be getting slightly neurotic over this whole thing.

Completely annoyed with myself for spending nearly a year trying to come up with a new name I’m starting to get desperate, thinking up ways to maybe just… write around it and not let people know her name until they maybe fall in love with her and hopefully just forget how it’s weird. That can work right? Okay, whatever at least I’m writing and it’s shutting these two up, and it’s all going good for several stories in and then suddenly I get to a scene that has more than one female character and I’m like “Shit… the jig is up.”

Meanwhile, I’ve started up a Dragon Age Origins playthrough, and like a dumbass, DO THE EXACT SAME THING with a female Cousland, and start whining to poor @for-the-flail on Twitter, on my fainting couch about how I can never write this character’s name because I named her after myself, and, bless her heart, she’s just like: “…um. Why?”

And I’m like “Because… we share a name… and that’s weird for people…?”

She goes “It’s not that weird. Why don’t you just write your stories? People will like them or not.”

And sheepishly, I realized she was right, and stopped being so diligent about hiding poor Grey’s name, and eventually, because you are all such lovely and encouraging people, eventually embraced it. (Come to think of it, I never did wind up writing about poor Cousland!Grey. Oops.)

So! That’s the long and ramble story of how she got her name and why it never changed despite my best efforts.

In summary: I’m an idiot 🤷‍♀️ but I think you guys love me anyway?

[captainderyn]

I’m in my ✨agent feelsss (tm)✨ and have we considered the following:

All three idiots are painfully loyal to each other. You would think of the three of them, Five would be the one that is “ImpInt first, friends second” but NOPE he’s the worst of the three. He’ll burn it to the ground for his people. What makes him different? Because everyone assumes he’s ImpInt before all else and he’s cultivated his reputation around that, he can get away with so much more in the way of taking care of those close to him AND his subordinate agents.

This is why he becomes so frustrated when he can’t pull strings to get Era out of What Happens To Cipher Nine. It’s one of the first times his loopholes don’t get him anywhere except the door slammed in his face.

Roslynd intensely advocates for all the cipher agents, probably more than she should as a fixer. Her concern should, per policy, just be Five. But she’s gotten in the faces of her superiors to advocate for the ciphers. There’s a reason Five is Agent Dad and she’s Agent Mom.

Building on the Ciphers, though it absolutely breaks policy, Five and Roslynd host home cooked dinners for the small, tight knit cipher deapartment. Many of them don’t have families to go home to and they deserve a hot, home cooked meal.

Referencing Five again, Roslynd and Rhys will be the first to put themselves between a threat and Five, whether he likes it or not. Especially by the time he retires from ImpInt, he’s one of the most effective Ciphers but I would argue the one on the thinnest hairpin of self destructing. It drives him crazy, but they don’t stop doing it from the time they’re in the Academy to the time Five medically retires.

Rhys is just as much Agent Dad to Era as Five is, even if she gravitates more towards Five. He’s always been behind the scenes trying to protect and help her. That’s OUR agent daughter (says the Dream Team)

[captainderyn]

I can’t articulate it fully right now but something something the absolutely horrific experience of V waking up after Mikoshi and her head is just…dead silent for the first time in a long while. It’s deafening. It’s terrifying.

There’s no Johnny materializing in the corner of her vision with some quick remark. Some ongoing internal monologue. It’s silent. It’s…empty. It feels like part of her has been ripped out of her, like there’s a hole that needs to be filled.

She’s been working towards this for however long. This has been the GOAL it’s what Johnny urged her to do, there in the end.

So why does she feel so empty? Why does she feel panicky and guilty and everything she shouldn’t be feeling?

If this was what she’s been working towards, why does her voice tremble when she calls out “…Johnny?”

And why do her eyes burn when there’s no response?

[captainderyn]

The wild urge to fuss with Rielay's backstory to have her become a fighter pilot in the Republic military before she took back to a life of smuggling. Because:

a) it would be a fun explanation for why she's such a good pilot and

b) it would be really funny for her to fly an XS Light freighter like a fighter plane change my mind. And then she teaches Emeldir how to fly and Risha and the crew of the Phoenix are like "WHAT ARE YOU DOING WE CAN'T MAKE THAT--oh. What the FUCK Emeldir?"

It would work to:

Rielay gets picked up off Corellia as a teen to be a paid-under-the-table mechanic on the ship she worked on, as in her original backstory. They get stuck in orbit around Coruscant during the Sacking and it leads to her captain disbanding the crew and selling her ship, leaving her crew SOL.

Without many options and with no official experience, Rielay joins the republic military and probably spends some time as a mechanic there before commissioning and becoming a pilot.

I dunno, food for thought for myself. I just like that Rielay is in my brain again.

[captainderyn]

Merry Christmas and happy new year to everyone!! I’ve been super MIA, mostly traveling all around to see family and fervently knitting to finish belated Christmas gifts.

I’m hoping to start coming out of my self imposed cave after the holidays, but I miss y’all ❤️ and in other news, there’s gonna be a Mr. Deryn (calling myself Mrs Deryn would imply I’m not the original xD)!! I got engaged!! So that’s been a fun new thing

[captainderyn]

I have only the most helpful of gaming buddies while to help me navigate Elden Ring 💜

[captainderyn]

The real hard difficulty mode in games is when my 50lbs German Shepherd decides he needs to be Laying On Top Of Me but also my hands must be patting him or he’ll flail around like a maniac 😑 we can’t lay next to me we have to be On Top Of Me or All The Way Across The Room (puppy tax picture for good measure)

[captainderyn]

The two little voidlings from my neighborhood are safely trapped, vetted, and in my spare room for socializing and finding their forever homes ❤️ volunteers who run cat advocate groups like the folks that are helping me with them are a the absolute best.

[captainderyn]

*me, physically restraining myself* I don’t!! Need!! To make!! a Ranger oc!!! I DONT—

[captainderyn]

BG3 released on Xbox you know what that means >:D

[captainderyn]

Hnnnn I can’t go into specifics because I don’t trust mobile readmores and don’t want to spoil Phantom Liberty but—

YOUR GONNA TELL ME THAT AFTER EVERYTHING V WENT THROUGH, EVERYTHING SHE DID THAT THIS IS WHAT SHE GETS? The absolute angsty angsty fics brewing in my head right now are real.

I’m going to ramble a bit in the tags after spoilers tags so BE WARNED