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ladyymontilyet · 7 years

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drace, do you have any idea what you've done?? i'll ask for 01, 02, 04, 10, 12, 13, 21, 28, 32, 33, 39 and 50

bunder a read more bc i talk!!!! too much!!!

1. When did you first start writing?

Uh. Ok so I have two technical starts-- if you mean writing and sharing my writing, I was maybe ten or eleven, and I posted MLP fanfic to quotev and soon after got into RPing in the Hetalia fandom. If you mean writing as a hobby in general it wasssssssss grade five. We had to write short stories and I know mine was probably pretty bad (all I remember is it was some sort of retelling of the whole King Arthur mythos, or what I knew of it at age 8/9 lmao) and I really, really liked it. Which is why I still write, and also definitely a direct result of my reading habits when I was small bc I was. super far in reading as a kid to the point teachers were frustrated that I walked into grade two with my dad;s old copy of The Hobbit and could explain Harry Potter better than the student teacher. That’s off topic, tho, but what I’m saying is I’ve always been really proud of my lit skills lmao

2. What was your favourite book growing up?

This is going to come as a shock to anyone who has spoken to me for more than five minutes but I loved The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien with my entire being growing up. I also loved this lil information book I had on beluga whales bc I had a thing for beluga whales.

4. Have you ever thrown a book across a room?

Like from reading it and getting a plot twist??? No. I’ve probably tossed a textbook to pass it to someone tho??? Usually when a book hits me with shit I close it and take a few seconds to be like “F U C K”

10. What’s your biggest writer pet-peeve?

From a writing standpoint or a reading standpoint??? Both. Ok both uh from a writing point I hate wanting to write, and having the motivation and time and words but when I put things down and it all feels wrong and I slowly get more frustrated at myself and my writing until I doubt if I’m even a decent writer at all. From a reading standpoint it’s when authors don’t fucking use commas. they exist. use them. continue. a. sentence. for. more. than. two.. words. if. ur. not. making. a. point. (im looking at u hunger games u piece of shit)

12. Who is your favourite author?

god dont do this to me elfie shit ok uh. I’M NARROWING IT DOWN TO TOP 3 bc I really dont have a favourite???? I like authors and stories but rarely would I follow an author just for their writing.

1 J. R. R Tolkien (shocking, I know)

2 V. E Schwabb (I BOUGHT ADSOM ON A WHIM AND I LOVE IT SO MUCH I preordered the collectors edition despite it coming out in like. 7 months)

3 Rick Riordan (listen i love his style of storytelling it’s got quirk and its relatable in that it doesnt force jokes or sarcasm, ALSO the pjo series is??? prime for OCs)

13. What’s your favourite writing quote?

I’m taking this a lil liberally but. Directly related to writing and story-telling, I really love this one from Varric Tethras in Dragon Age II (its also the quote that like. solidified how much he resonates with me as a character like gosh) and it’s “ There’s power in stories, though. That’s all history is: the best tales. The ones that last. Might as well be mine. “

And talking more liberally for creating in general, it’s that longass one from RVB15 where Vic talks about creating, and that a world without stories is empty space and im tearing up typing these quotes oh gosh

21. Do you outline?

oh no. ive done it once maybe??? but that was for a class project so. i wing it and sometimes i go back and edit but mostly if i post something it was a one run thing haha

28. Which do you find hardest: the beginning, the middle, or the end?

Beginnings for sure 100%

listen i can jump in and get to it and put things together and plan for them if i need to and i can wrap things up so im satisfied but???? for some reason not setting the scene up while running with it is hard for me and i always find the beginnings i rite feel awkward and clunky and i dont like that when the rest of my writing feels mmore flowy. bleh.

32. How do you feel abut friends and close relatives reading your work?

first rule of my writing is that i dont show my family because i dont. idk i just dont. thinking of showing them makes me uncomfortable and even my dad, who im close with, doesnt get to know anything bc i know he’ll make it a joke and hurt me without meaning to

as for close friends im???? it depends. My online friends have seen my riting a lot, most of them I became friends with through roleplaying, so I’m super lucky to have seen that same side of them as well, and I’m always willing to show them my writing. Real life friends is.... mroe iffy. I’ve had some of them read my writing in person, and usually it makes me really anxious and flustered bc I’m a mess. the only person irl that I really trust with my writing without feeling too iffy on is my best friend but. first of all I’ve known her nearly a decade, and second of all she knew weeb me in person, and put up with that every day, so I know she’s seen me write worse. Idk immore open showing my work online thatn I am in person.

33. Are you interested in having your work published?

outside of fanfiction, I’d like to one day. I’d like to pt a story out there and have people like it and fall in love with my characters because writing means so much to me, and???? it’d be fucking magical to touch someone like I was as a kid in books but first of all I can’t carry a plotline and second of all I doubt that anything I could write would be worth it. there’s always gonna be something better, and that’s fine but especially since I focus on fantasy whenever I write my own ideas it wouldn’t go far.

long and short of it is I’d love to because I’d love to be able to reach out to people like authors did to me with their work as a kid, but I doubt I’d ever get there.

39. What’s the weirdest story idea you’ve ever had?

I’ve had this idea kicking around for the longest time about how the universe unravelling was an accepted problem in life and ive thought of ways to branch it in but. usually it just sits lmao

50. If you could live in any fictional world, which would it be?

Now, normally I’d sayMiddle-Earth right away, and don’t get me wrong I’d love to live there too, but at the same time, Red London from A Darker Shade of Magic is really appealing too lmao. Maybe Thedas, even???? Gosh. I’d love to live in plenty tbh

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scifrey · 7 years

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Improbable Press put out a call asking fan fiction authors how they went from Free to Fee. Here’s my response. Happy reading!

The Story of How I Started Selling Stories

My parents, teachers, and acting/singing coaches will all tell you that I've always been a story teller. For the first twenty four years of my life, I was determined to do so through musical theatre, though I had always secretly harbored the desire to write a hit stage play. My early writing consisted of plays for my friends and I to put on, interspersed with prose that I supposed would one day become a novel, but which wasn't my passion.

I was a big reader, but where this habit came from, I'm not certain. While my mother always had a book on the go - whatever crumbling paperback law thriller or murder mystery she'd been handed by the woman down the street when she was done it, which was then passed on to the next neighbor - my father and brothers preferred sports (either on TV or outside in the yard) over reading. I stumbled into fantasy and science fiction because Wil Wheaton was hot, and his show was on every Friday night, and from there I consumed every Star Trek tie-in novel my tiny rural library carried, then started following the authors of the novels into their other worlds and series.

So you won't be surprised to learn that this was how I found fan fiction for the first time. My "I love this, gee, I wonder what else there is?" muscle was well developed by junior high, and before the internet had come to The Middle Of Nowhere Rural Ontario, I had already gotten quite adept at search keywords and codexes to track down more books to consume. Imagine my shock and joy when, in the middle of my Phantom of the Opera phase (come on, fess up, you had one too), the internet in my school library told me about not only Fredrick Forsyth and Susan Kay's stunning re-tellings, but of something called fan fiction.

I wasted a lot of the librarian's ink and paper printing out these books and secreting them into binders and pretending to do school work at my desk or backstage between scenes. A lot. And yes, I still have most of them.

And as we all well know, the jump between reading and writing is a short when one is submerged so fully in communities of creators. Everyone else's "What If" rubs off on you, and it's just a matter of time before you find yourself playing with the idea of coaxing a few plot bunnies over to spend some time with you. Not everyone loves to write, but gosh darn it, if you want to give it a try, then you couldn't ask for a better, more supportive community. It doesn't matter how new you are to it, everyone reads, everyone comments, everyone makes suggestions. People beta read. People edit. People co-write. People cheer, and support, and recommend, and enthuse. Yeah, there are the occasional jerks, flammers, and wank-mongers, but on the whole? There's literally no better place to learn how to be a writer than in fandom, I firmly believe this.

So, of course, born storyteller that I am, I had to give it a try.

I started writing fan fiction in 1991 for a small, relatively obscure Canadian/Luxembourg co-pro children’s show called Dracula: the Series. I used to get up and watch it on Saturday mornings, in my PJs, before heading off to whichever rehearsal or read through or practice I had that year.

1995 brought the English dub of Sailor Moon to my life, (and put me on the path to voice acting), and along with a high-school friend, I wrote, printed out, illustrated, and bound my first “book” – a self-insert story that was just over eleven pages long, which introduced new Scouts based on us. From there, I didn’t really stop.

1996 led me to Forever Knight and Dragon Ball Z, and from there to my friend’s basement where they’d just installed the internet. We chatted with strangers on ICQ, joined Yahoo!Groups and Bravenet Chat Boards. (Incidentally, a friend from my DBZ chat group turned out to be a huge DtS fan, too. We wrote a big crossover together which is probably only accessible on the Wayback Machine now. We stayed friends, helped each other through this writing thing, and now she’s Ruthanne Reid, author of the popular Among the Mythos series.) In 2000 I got a fanfiction.net account and never looked back.

In 2001, while in my first year of university for Dramatic Arts, I made my first Real Live fandom friends. We wrote epic-length self-insert fics in Harry Potter and Fushigi Yuugi, cosplayed at conventions (sometimes using the on-campus wardrobe department’s terrifyingly ancient serger), and made fan art and comics in our sketchbooks around studying for our finals and writing essays on critical theory or classical Latin. I was explaining the plot of the next big fic I was going to write to one of them, an older girl who had been my T.A. but loved Interview with the Vampire just as dearly as I, when she said, “You know, this sounds really interesting. Why don’t you strip all the fandom stuff out of the story and just write it as a novel?”

You can do that? was my first thought.

No! I don’t want to! Writing is my fun hobby. What will happen if I try to be a writer and get rejected by everyone and I end up hating it? was my second.

But the seed was planted. Slowly at first, and then at increasingly obsessive pace, I began writing my first novel around an undergrad thesis, fourth-year essays, several other big fanfics that popped me into the cusp of BNF status but never quite over the tine, and then a move to Japan to teach English. From 2002-2007 I wrote about 300 000 words on the novel that I would eventually shut away in my desk drawer and ignore until I published on Wattpad under my pseudonym on a lark. It was messy. It was long. It was self-indulgent and blatantly inspired by Master of Mosquiton, Interview with the Vampire, Forever Knight, and anything written by Tanya Huff, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Charlaine Harris. This was fine for fanfic, but in terms of being comfortable with presenting it to agents and publishing houses, I felt that it wasn’t original enough.

By this time I was teaching overseas, and in my spare time (and boy, was there a lot of spare time while sitting in a Japanese teacher’s office for 40 hours per week when one only actually teaches for 11 of them) I started applying to MA programs (where I eventually wrote my thesis on Mary Sue Fan Fiction). I also spent it researching “How to Get Published”, mostly by Googling it and/or buy/reading the few books on the topic in English I could find at the local book store or order from the just-then-gaining-international traction online bookstore Amazon.

What that research mostly told me was “Write and sell a bunch of short fiction first, so you have proof that a) you can do the work and b) you can finish what you promise you’ll finish and c) you have proof that other people think you’re worth spending money on.”

Short fiction. Huh. Of course we’d studied short stories in school, and I’d even taken a short story writing class in university, though nothing I’d written for the class was indicative of the kinds of stories I preferred to tell. But I felt pretty confident about this whole writing short stories thing… after all, I’d been doing weekly challenges for years. Drabbles. Flashfic. Stories and chapters that were limited to the word count cap that LiveJournal put on its posts. I’d written novellas without knowing that’s what they were called; I’d written whole novels about other people’s characters. All I needed was an idea. Short fiction I could do.

Unfortunately, everything that came to me was fanfic inspired. It frustrated me, because I didn’t want to write a serial-numbers-filed-off story. I wanted to write something original and epic and inspiring. Something just mine. I started and stopped a lot of stories in 2006-2007. I’d been doing NaNoWriMo for years by then, having been introduced to it in undergrad, and I was determined that this would be the year that I wrote something I could shop. Something just mine. Something unique.

While I adored fanfiction, I was convinced that I couldn't make a career on it. What had once been a fun hobby soon because a source of torment. Why could I think of a hundred ways to write a meet-cute between my favorite ships, but come up utterly blank when it came to something new and original and just mine?

It took me a while to realize that my playwriting and short story teachers had been correct when they said that there are no original stories in the world, no way you can tell a tale that someone else hasn’t already tried. The "Man vs." list exists for a reason.

The unique part isn’t your story, it’s your voice. Your lived life, your experiences, your way of forming images and structuring sentences. Your choices about who the narrator character is, and what the POV will be, and how the characters handle the conflict. In that way, every piece of writing ever done is individual and unique, even the fanfic. Because nobody is going to portray that character’s quirk or speech pattern quite like you do, nobody is going to structure your plot or your imagery like you. Because there is only one of you. Only one of me. Even if we're all writing fanfiction, no one's story sounds like anyone else's, or is told like anyone else's.

That is the reality of being a storyteller.

And strangely enough, the woman who opened my eyes to this was a psychic from a psychic fair I attended, who told me that Mark Twain was standing over her shoulder admonishing me to stop fretting and just get something on the page – but to never forget character. My strength, she said that he said, was in creating memorable, well written, well rounded characters. And that my book should focus on that above concerns of plot or pacing.

Well, okay. If Mark Twain says that’s what my strength is, then that’s what my strength is, right? Who am I to argue with the ghost of Mark Freaking Twain?

An accident with a bike and a car on a rice patty left me immobile for six weeks in 2006, and I decided that if I was finally going to write this original short story to sell – especially since I would need income, as the accident made it obvious that I would never be able to dance professionally, and probably would never be able to tread the boards in musicals – now was the perfect time. I was going to stop fighting my fannish training and write.

I cherry picked and combined my favorite aspects of Doctor Who, Stargate: Atlantis, Torchwood, The Farm Show/The Drawer Boy, and my own melancholy experiences with culture shock and liminal-living in a foreign culture, and wrote a novella titled (Back). It was a character study of a woman named Evvie who, through an accident of time travel, meets the future version of her infant daughter Gwen. And realizes she doesn’t like the woman her daughter will become. It was a story about accepting people for who they are, instead of who you wish they would be, and had a strong undercurrent of the turbulence I was going through in trying to figure out my own sexuality and that I wouldn't have the future in performance that I had been working toward since I was four.

Deciding that I would worry about where I would try to publish the story after it had been written, I sat down and wrote what ended up being (at least for me) a pretty standard-length fanfic: 18,762 words. It was only after I had finished the story that I looked up what category that put it in – Novella. Using paying reputable markets, like Duotrope, the Writer’s Digest, MSFV, Absolute Write, SFWA, my local Writer’s Union, Writer Beware, I realized that I had shot myself in the foot.

It seems like nearly nobody publishes novellas anymore. SF/F and Literary Fiction seem to be the last two bastions of the novella, and the competition to get one published is fierce. The markets that accepted SF/F novellas was vanishingly thin I had to do a lot of Googling and digging to figure out who I could submit to with an unagented/unsolicited SF/F novella. If I recall correctly, it was only about ten publications. I built an excel database and filled it with all the info I found.

I put together a query letter and sent it off using my database to guide me. Most of the rejections were kind, and said that the story was good, just too long/too short/ too sci-fi-y/not sci-fi-y enough. Only one market offered on it – for $10 USD. Beggers couldn’t be choosers, even if I had hoped to make a little more than ten bucks, and I accepted.

It was a paid professional publication, and that’s what mattered to me. I had the first entry on my bibliography, and something to point to in my query letters to prove that I was a worthy investment for a publisher/agent.

And energized by this, and now aware that length really does matter, even in online-only publications, I started writing other shorts to pad out my bibliography more.

I tried to tailor these ones to what my research told me the "mainstream industry" and "mainstream audiences" wanted, and those stories? Those were shot down one after the other. I was still writing fanfiction at the time, too, and those stories were doing well, getting lots of positive feedback, so why weren’t my stories?

In 2007 I returned to Canada and Academia, frustrated by my lack of sales, desperate to kick off my publishing career, and feeling a creative void left by having to depart theatre because of my new difficulties walking. I wrote my MA, and decided that if (Back) was the only original story that people liked, then I’d try to expand it into a novel.

Over the course of two years I did my coursework, and read everything there was to read about how to get a book deal, started hanging out in writer’s/author’s groups in Toronto and met some great people who were willing to guide me, and expanded (Back) into the novel Triptych. I kept reminding myself what Mark Twain said – character was my strength, the ability to make the kind of people that other writers wanted to write stories about, a skill I’d honed while writing fanfic. Because that's what we do, isn't it? Sure, we write fix-its and AUs and fusions and finish cancelled shows, and fill in missing scenes, but what we're all really doing is playing with characters, isn't it? Characters draw us to fanfic, and characters keep us there. Characters is what we specialize in.

Fanfic had taught me to work with a beta reader, so I started asking my fic betas if they'd like a go at my original novel. Fellow fanfic writers, can I just say how valuable editors and beta readers in the community are? These are people who do something that I've paid a professional editor thousands of dollars to do for free out of sheer love. Treasure your beta readers, folks. Really.

“It reminds me a lot of fan fiction,” one reader said. “The intense attention to character and their inner life, and the way that the worldbuilding isn’t dumped but sprinkled in an instance at a time, like, you know, a really good AU. I love it.”

Dear Lord. I couldn’t have written a better recommendation or a more flattering description if I’d tried. Mark Twain was right, it seems. And fanfic was the training ground, for me – my apprenticeship in storytelling.

Of course... what Mr. Twain hadn't explained is that character-study novels just don't sell in SF/F. They say Harry Potter was rejected twelve times? HA. I shopped Triptych to both agents and small presses who didn't require you to have an agent to publish with them, and I got 64 rejections. Take that, J.K.

At first the rejection letters were forms and photocopied "no thanks" slips. But every time I got feedback from a publisher or agent, I took it to heart, adjusted the manuscript, edited, tweaked, tweaked, tweaked. Eventually, the rejections started to get more personal. "I loved this character, but I don't know how to sell this book." And "I really enjoyed the read, but it doesn't really fit the rest of our catalogue." And "What if you rewrote the novel to be about the action event that happens before the book even starts, instead of focusing solely on the emotional aftermath?"

In other words - "Stop writing fanfiction." There seemed to be a huge disconnect between what the readership wanted and what the publishing world thought they wanted.

Disheartened, frustrated, and wondering if I was going to have to give up on my dreams of being a professional creative, I attended Ad Astra, a convention in Toronto, in 2009. At a room party, complaining to my author friends that "nobody wanted my gay alien threesome book!" a woman I didn't know asked me about the novel. We chatted, and it turned out she was the acquisitions editor for Dragon Moon Press, and incidentally, also a fan of fan fiction.

I sent her Triptych. She rejected it. I asked why. She gave me a laundry list of reasons. I said, "If I can address these issues and rewrite it, would you be willing to look at it again?" She said yes. She was certain, however, that I wouldn't be able to fix it. I spent the summer rewriting - while making sure to stay true to my original tone of the novel, and writing a character-study fanfiction. I sent it in the fall. I do believe it was Christmas eve when I received the offer of publication.

From there, my little fic-inspired novel was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards and a CBC Bookie, was named one of the best books of 2011 by the Advocate, and garnered a starred review and a place on the Best Books Of The Year at Publishers Weekly.

The award nominations led me to an agent, and further contracts, and even conversations with studio execs. It also made me the target of Requires Only That You Hate, and other cranky, horrible reviewers. But you know what? I've had worse on a forum, and on ff.n, and LJ. It sucked, and it hurt, but if there's one thing fandom has taught me, it's that not everyone is going to love what you do, and not everyone interprets things the same way you do. The only thing we can do is learn from the critique if it's valid and thoughtful, and ignore the screaming hate and bullying. Then you pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and go write something else.

Because a screaming hater? Is not going to ruin my love of storytelling.

But for all that... the day someone made me fan art based on Triptych is one etched in my memory. It means far more to me than any of the emails I ever received inquiring about representation or film rights, or wanting meetings to discuss series.

The lesson I learned from publishing Triptych - now sadly out of print, but we're looking for a new home for it - is that if I chase what the "mainstream" and the "industry" want, I'll never write anything that sells because my heart won't be in it. I have to keep writing like a fanficcer, even if I'm not writing fanfic, if I want to create something that resonates with people. And if it takes time for the publishers and acquiring editors to figure out what I'm doing, and how to sell it, then fine - I have an agent on my side now, and a small growing number of supporters, readers, and editors who love what I do.

Do I still write fanfic? Very, very rarely. I’ve had some pretty demanding contracts and deadlines in the last two years, so I’ve had to pare down my writing to only what’s needed to fulfill my obligations. Doesn’t mean I don’t have ideas for fics constantly.

Sometimes the urge is powerful enough that I do give into it – I wrote To A Stranger, based on Mad Lori’s Performance in a Leading Role Sherlock AU recently, when I should have been writing the second and third novels of The Accidental Turn Series. And even more recently, I cleaned up To A Stranger into something resembling a real screenplay and started shopping it around to film festivals and producers because I love this story, I love what I did with it, and I’m proud of the work. If To A Stranger is only ever a fanfic, that’s fine with me. I poured my heart into it and am so proud of it. But I figure that if there’s one more project I could possibly get into the real world, then why not go for it?

The worst thing the festival heads and producers can say about the work is: “No, thank you.” And being an online writer has taught me not to take the “no, thank you”s personally. Applying the values of Don’t Like Don’t Read or Not My Kink to your publication/agent search makes it much easier to handle the rejections – not every story is for every person.

Maybe once every producer in North America has rejected it, I might think about working with someone to adapt the screenplay into an illustrated comic fanbook? Who knows?

That’s the joy of starting out as a writer in fandom – felixibility, adaptability, creative problem-solving and cross-platform storytelling comes as naturally as breathing to us fan writers. It’s what we do.

You may not think that this is a strength, but trust me, it is. I was never so shocked at an author’s meetup as when I suggested to someone that their “writer’s block” sounded to me like they were telling the story in the wrong format. “I think this is a comic, not a novel,” I’d said. “It sounds so visual. That's why the story is resisting you.” And they stared at me like I suddenly had an extra head and said, “But I’m a novelist.” I said, “No, you’re a writer. Try it.” They never did, as far as I know, and they never finished that book, either.

As fans, our strength isn't just in what we write, or how we come to our stories. It’s also about the physical practice of writing, too. We’re a group of people who have learned to carry notebooks, squeeze in a few hundred words between classes, or when the baby is napping, or during our lunch breaks, or on commute home. This is our hobby, we fit it in around our lives and jobs, and that has taught us the importance of just making time.

We are, on average, more dedicated and constant writers than some of the “novelists” that I’ve met: the folks who wait for inspiration to strike, who quit their day jobs in pursuit of some lofty ideal of having an office and drinking whiskey and walking the quay and waiting for madam muse to grace them, who throw themselves at MFAs and writing retreats, as if it's the attendance that makes them writers and not the work of it.

We fans are career writers. We don’t wait for inspiration to come to us, we chase it down with a butterfly net. We write when and where we can. More than that, we finish things. (Or we have the good sense to know when to abandon something that isn’t working.) We write to deadlines. Self-imposed ones, even.

We write 5k on a weekend for fun, and think NaNoWriMo’s 50k goal and 1667 words per day are a walk in the park. (When I know it terrifies some of the best-selling published authors I hang out with.) Or if we fans don’t write fast, then we know that slow and steady works too, and we’re willing to stick it out until our story is finished, even if it takes years of weekly updates to do so. We have patience, and perseverance, and passion.

This is what being a fanfiction writer has given me. Not only a career as a writer, but tools and a skill-set to write work that other people think is work awarding, adapting, and promoting. And the courage to stick to my guns when it comes to telling the kinds of stories that I want to tell.

This is what being a fanfiction writer gives us.

Aren’t we lucky, fellow fans? Hasn’t our training been spectacular?

J.M. (@scifrey) is a SF/F author, and professional smartypants on AMI Audio’s Live From Studio 5. She’s appeared in podcasts, documentaries, and on television to discuss all things geeky through the lens of academia. Her debut novel TRIPTYCH was nominated for two Lambda Literary Awards, nominated for a 2011 CBC Bookie, was named one of The Advocate’s Best Overlooked Books of 2011, and garnered both a starred review and a place among the Best Books of 2011 from Publishers Weekly. Her sophomore novel, an epic-length feminist meta-fantasy THE UNTOLD TALE (Accidental Turn Series #1), debuted to acclaim in 2015 and was followed by THE FORGOTTEN TALE (Accidental Turn Series #2) this past December. FF.N | LJ |AO3| Books | Tumblr

#Improbable Press #Fan Fiction #fanfiction #triptych #j.m. frey #the accidental turn series #free to fee #words for writers

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sillyfudgemonkeys · 7 years

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How I want PQ2 to go down.

(note hade to retype this cause it got deleted in the middle of publishing somehow so yeah round two! 8U)

Ok so this is going to be part of a series of connecting posts on how I think certain games should go down. Things to note with this game is I’m thinking it’ll be P3PxP5, so yeah I know you’re probably thinking “*gasp* Spoilers?!” And no I will try to make this post as spoiler free as possible, I might allude to something but it’ll be really vague so that only people who played the game know what’s up. So yeah you’re ok if you haven’t played P5. Also I will do a separate post that is like a Q and A and it’ll explain my reasons as to why in more depth, but it’ll also be a very spoilery P5 post so yeah if you want spoilers for P5 stay tuned for a separate post. With that lets get started

Note before reading: I will be referring to FeMC as Hamuko, P3 Male MC as Minato, and P5MC as Akira (his manga name) in this, you can still name them later just for typing purposes I’m doing this. Also you should note that while I did type a main plot for this, and tbh I think it came out fairly well considering I’m not well versed in one of the mythos and I did that after 2 hours of research, it’s not the thing I’m really concerned about beyond it setting the stage for P3PxP5 to meet. So if you don’t like the main plot and think you have a better one I’d love to hear it!

Name of the game: PQ2: Oasis in the Abyss as @kazusakai came up with it (and i love it cause it fits so well! ;w;). It fits since P3P had Vision Quest/Desert of Doors, and P5 has a desert dungeon and a song called River in the Desert (DON’T LOOK UP THAT SONG’S LYRICS THO AS IT CONTAINS MASSIVE SPOILERS).

Themes: We know P3’s themes, death yada yada. P5’s being fighting corruption and justice yada yada. There’s also going to be a big theme with deserts and things associated with that as well as oasis/rivers (hence the name). (note this is to keep in mind that I tried really hard to make the plot revolve around these specific themes so yeah)

Setting: Just like PQ2 it involves the whole ripping out of your timeline stuff from PQ, tho in this case it involves an alternate universe as it’s Hamuko instead of Minato (from what we can tell by the easter eggs in P5, P5 seems to be in the same universe as P3/4 but later in the timeline like 2016). Like with P3 in PQ it’s right around the time of their cancelled school festival that they get pulled out. With P5 it happens around their school festival too (maybe actually a little later as this way all characters are officially on your team, like Haru). The world they get pulled into might actually take the setting of P5’s school, with the dungeon portion actually being part of the Desert of Doors.

Main Plot: Ok so like PQ, there’s a mysterious duo. They have no memories (except for the vaguest of vague), can’t summon a Persona, look foreign (like Zen does, aka they have darker skin), look somewhere around the age of a 3rd year in high school or a 1st/2nd year in college (they don’t wear school uniforms so that’s why it’s hard to tell), and have to fight as a duo. The boy’s name is Seto (世登, means the world) and the girl’s name is Nori (義 means Righteousness/justice). The boy’s appearance: white hair (Seto means white in Javanese, not the mythos I’m using but still neat), red t shirt with a weird dog on it (note following the link will spoil my surprise 8U), his weapon is a book or staff that casts healing magic (he’s very similar to Rei’s role). His personality is very easy going and happy go lucky, fulfilling Rei’s role in that regard as well. Nori has long brownish hair, with a blue t shirt with a falcon like bird on it, she uses bows and arrows and uses offensive magic (similar to Zen). Her personality is more serious, but not to the same point as Zen, as she can still take a joke and goof around. There will be ship feels with Seto/Nori just like with Zen and Rei, tho it should be noted that Seto has a tendency to flirt with Haru, not that he understands why, but it makes Nori jealous (note she’s upset with Seto not Haru, she likes Haru) and Seto comically has to apologize every time he does it (don’t worry there’s a good reason I’m having this kind of trope or else I wouldn’t have in here in the first place).

Ok so Seto and Nori have amnesia, but they do seem to remember just a little bit more than Zen and Rei, that being they know they came there themselves and have something to do there but just can’t remember what (Zen and Rei don’t have that memory back till their first dungeon I think). They also know that they’ve known each other for a long time and they think they remember that Seto and Nori are their names but yeah. Seto and Nori are really close, Nori likes to brag about how she’s always by Seto’s side and how she wants him to lean on her. Seto is shown to be upset that he always leans on her and wish she would lean on him once and awhile. Also like PQ, they start off pretty happy only to then get darker and more serious as it goes on.

(now to power though the story portion) Ok so we get through the 1st dungeon and we find out that the reason why they’re here is because they’re looking for someone. We get to the 2nd dungeon and we find out that it’s connected to Seto’s brother they are looking for, they can’t remember why still and theorize maybe he ran away and are trying to get him back. 3rd dungeon is where they find out that Seto’s brother was murdered (paralleling the doctor in PQ, also Death theme), and they realize that they might be there to find the killer and to avenge his brother (justice theme for P5). 4th dungeon we are confronted by a Shadow/Cognitive Existence (this is a term from P5 and while this concept has been used in past Persona games without having a name to it, it’s basically a Shadow or something that looks like a Shadow Self but isn’t and that’s your spoiler free explanation) find out that it was Seto who killed his brother (or so it seems). They fight a boss called “Osiris” (some of you might be connecting the dots now). The 5th dungeon revolves around Seto’s judgement and fight the goddess (c’mon there’s always a god) Isis (*gasp* Yukari control your Persona 8U Jk).

“Oh ok so it’s Egyptian myth” Ahaha nope not exactly, I want to make it more complicated than that (because spoiler reasons I can only say complicated). Like I could just go with only the Egyptian myth, but I feel the need to mix it in with another mythos (think Jun’s Chronos/Cronos from P2). Again sorry if it’s not mixed very well, I didn’t put more than an hour’s thought into it so there could be a neat way for them to do it. Ok so like, if you connected the dots or followed that link above, you’d find out that Seto is actual Seth/Set (spelled Seto in Japanese) the Egyptian god of storms, desert, chaos, violence and war (this also explains why he hits on Haru, if you still don’t get it stay tuned for a spoiler post). This guy is the one who killed his brother Osiris. BUT he’s also Seth from Gnostic/Christian mythos, who is the brother who “replaced” Abel after his death by Cain (hence why Seto wanted to seek vengeance). It turns out that in like a bonus boss fight (like with Zeus in PQ) that you fight Cain and thus connecting the two Mythos. As for Nori, while her name I derived from Seth’s wife in Gnostic lore, Norea (so I guess Norei would’ve been more accurate but alksfdklanf;a leave me alone ;w; 義 was too good to pass up), though in other lore his wife’s name is Azura (which reminds me of azul which means blue and that’s why her shirt is blue lafndsl;fna word play 8U). As for who she represents in Egyptian lore it’s Nephthys, Seth’s wife there too.

As for why they had their memories confused, it could be the fact that they fused together or the shock or whatever. Again I’m not too concerned with the main plot as long as I get P3PxP5 feels and it helps with their character I’m fine. Ok phew that’s over. I think I got everything from when I originally typed it. (I do go into some more detail on this in the endings later, and maybe splitting the two mythos into two routes could work).

Cast Make up: Ok before I get to B plot I should talk about how the cast will be made up cause it’s important to me. I think we should have a game where we only have the whole P5 cast and Hamuko (aka not the rest of the P3(P) cast except Velvet Room people). Ok like maybe I’ll have Aigis and/or Pharos there too (reasons stated later), but I’m mostly focused on Hamuko herself in relation with P5 kids. I have reasons, one is that we don’t’ get possible rehash of PQ’s plot. I say possible because unlike Minato, Hamuko SLs with her whole team and is in turn closer to them. So like P3’s side B plot could possibly not take place because of this, or it could but…yeah. As for the revenge B plot on the P4 side, while I’d LOVE to see how the P5 kids would talk it over I don’t want a rehash of the plot tbh.

The other thing this’ll fix is screen time and writing. Ok, PQ was a pretty great game but the way the characters were written was a little wonky (same with Ultimax but that poor thing got shafted so hard and let’s just focus on PQ). Like everyone was mean (dunno why they were, but the characters didn’t seem to offended by each other’s comments…still confused why this happened) and reduced to quirks (the main point). With just having Hamuko, Theo, Liz, and Margret (and again, maybe Pharos and/or Aigis) with the P5 cast it’ll make it easier than having to balance aaaallll the characters in from SEES and IT.

But I also think this make sense in a meta sense too. Like, PQ was part of what I dub the Labrynth Trilogy (PQ/Arena/Ultimax), PQ was made to explain how the P3/4 kids could trust each other so easily and work so well together, and that’s because they subconsciously remembered each other form that time. Now for P5? Say in Arena 3 the P5 kids meet the P3 team, but the problem is that it’s not the same P3 team (different universe with P3P remember?), P5 kids might feel the need to help P3 team but P3 team wouldn’t trust them (cause they don’t subconsciously remember them, only the P5 kids do), and then the P4 team def doesn’t know the P5 team and vice versa and alkdsfnkl;af it’d just be a real mess. I mean I can see them making it work but why make it so hard? But what if it’s just one person the P5 kids care about? What if the P5 kids do get in a tussle with the P3/4 kids over said person? That person being Hamuko. She’d be the Hamuko from the P3/4/5 timeline, she wouldn’t know the P5 kids, she wouldn’t know SEES, she’s not the same Hamuko from the P3P timeline (probably has a different name too), so she’s a different person, but it would be interesting to see P5 kids trying to help her because they knew another her from another universe (Oh hey P2 people am I getting you attention? 8U). It’s also easier to juggle only one person like that instead of a group of people. That’s my little preview for Arena 3 and/or 4, back to PQ2.

B Plot: Ok so like I said above I didn’t want a rehash of the plot, but if they did change it a bit…..it would be similar but different. Like, ok, so Hamuko is technically closer to her team than Minato. Instead of Yukari saying stuff like “we’re not that close”, Hamuko would muse to the P5 kids saying “Man looking at you guys I can see you’re all are really close as a group….makes me realize just how close my team might actually not be as I originally thought. Up until now I thought we all kind of got along, I thought we were close… But maybe it was only me that they’re close to….” She’ll later talk about how she might’ve instinctively known it all along, and so that’s why she tried so hard to get everyone to be closer to her. She realizes she’s the glue that holds everyone together and is afraid that if something happens to her they’ll all fall apart. She’ll then worry that maybe she’s actually not that close to everyone as she thinks she is, those reasons are: Yukari goes behind everyone’s back to ask Fuuka to get info for her, Fuuka doesn’t treat Hamuko the same way as she treats Natsuki aka her best friend, Mitsuru and Aigis can’t be SL at that time yet (tho Mitsuru does praise Hamuko and Aigis is always by her side so it’s like they’re strangers), Junpei/Akihiko/Ken all have a roadblock at some point so you can’t become closer to them, Shinjiro is fairly reluctant to SL with you even during ranks in the beginning, Koro is a dog (and also doesn’t want you to replace his owner) (so basically they’re all closer to her than Minato, but yet there’s still a barrier for her that she can’t seem to get over). And maybe the last B plot being that she hates how she has to be perky and a stepford smiler, as it puts a lot of pressure on her and she’s actually really stressed out. And also maybe how she feels like she’s usually stuck in the middle of everyone’s drama (ie Yukari vs Mitsuru cause she gets pulled along during the beach scene, Ken vs Shinjiro via SLing with them)

On the P5 side they could have their ideologies throw into question, maybe they start to second guess themselves on how they’re “heroes” considering they’re going about it shonen like and are peacocks about it, while Hamuko and SEES kind of have no choice in the matter (on top of not being recognized either). Or the ethical question on how they actually change the heart of their bad guys, did they really reform the person or did they force them? And other stuff relating to that.

Edit: Also how maybe hinting that if Hamuko hadn’t gone to Gekkou she would’ve been worse off than if she had gone (aka her living without the events of P3P is worse than her dying at the end of P3P, aka hint hint I might be foreshadowing another one of my “How I want Persona ___ to go” 8U)

Mechanics: Ok so it’ll basically be like PQ, fool arcana gets split up so everyone can use a secondary persona yada yada. The only difference is that I think there should be spell fusions (I have a very good reason for this, I won’t list it here but it’s a very good reason). Now how they go about the fusions depends, is it going to be like P2’s (or maybe like P3’s but with two people instead of one) and you can manually do it? Or will it be like P4G’s and it happens randomly. I kind of want the former but the latter would work fine (as long as they have a lot more combos, like everyone can have a different fusion spell with everybody).

Also Justine and Caroline will be in charge of the fusions (Igor isn’t there again btw), I think Caroline will do the fusions while Justine does whatever Marie’s job was (street passes). Theo and Liz have the same jobs as back in PQ. Margaret is here again, but she’s not the same as the one in PQ (she’s her P3P self), so the interactions between her, Theo and Liz will be different. Also the siblings interactions between the twins will be…..interesting. XD

Endings/story structure: Ok so this why I think we might need to have Aigis (and/or Pharos, but really Aigis). We could probably have 2 routes even if its’ only with fewer people on the P3P side, but we need some characters to bounce convos off of so that’s where Aigis comes in (other than her and Pharos having a special connection to Hamuko, Hamuko would need to be by herself for her to be pulled away, that place is probably her room, and Aigis and Pharos are the only two who would probably be in her room at that time…..cause Pharos does what he wants and Aigis would be taking care of you at that time. So yeah that’s why they’re the ones that would be there). Anyways we could have that. But I’m thinking more along the lines of having both MCs speak but having dialogue options that are similar to the ones Arena got (And P4D I think, anyways Yu had them and I know Kanji, Chie, and Yukiko had them as a way to get the gag endings, you chose and they just spoke the lines). And so because your choices matter maybe that leads to different endings, heck maybe we get two routes of the story (one being the Gnostic side and the other being the Egyptian side, depending on your choices up to that point), and then we get a true ending (where they’re mixed together) if you clear both story sides. 8U Or you still have the Gnostic/Egyptian routes, but it’s more connected to which MC you choose (like you play as Hamuko then you get the Egyptian route, you play as Akira you get the Gnostic route, you clear both then the true route is open to whichever MC you choose to play as only a few lines will be changed between playing as one or the other in the true route).

Dungeon: I’m thinking of having more dungeons in this game. Either be it more story dungeons (I know I did the 5 dungeon story structure up top but yeah) or just a lot of bonus dungeons. I think we should bring back Vision Quest (cause P3P is involved of course we should), be able to refight bosses but stronger, be able to fight PQ bosses but stronger. I think we should get the Group Date Café back as at least a mini dungeon (c’mon it was THE BEST part of PQ, and I know shippers are hungry for it).

And so yeah that’s basically all I have. I’m open to ideas. I hope Atlus does make this game (like legit just P3FeMC with P5 crossover is all I ask for). XD

Also here’s the spoiler Q and A post, feel free to ask questions I’ll answer them there.

#persona 5 #p5 #persona 3 #p3 #persona q #pq #persona 3 portable #p3p

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