#love the idea of the academic rivalry tho. conferences are wild whenever both labs attend

[darkscaleswriter]

For the director's cut ask game: I've bothered you to the end of time and back about this, but it's been a few years and I maintain that (while your ongoing TMNT one is GREAT, I'm loving the detail and the nuance!) Start It All Again is one of the best and funniest AUs you've ever written. Got anything left to talk about on that front?

(ask for a director’s cut on any of my fics!)

LMAO not a bother!! so happy you like Start It All Again enough to still be thinking about it, have a random assortment of thoughts under the cut :DDD

I don't really have any concrete plans for this au, but it's interesting to go back and re-read stuff that I wrote when I was in a very different place in life. I think if I were to rewrite this fic, the main change I'd make would be shifting the knights' professions from cops to… idk, firefighters or a search and rescue team or something. maybe a security or private investigation company, depending on the vibes haha.

for future fics, it could be interesting to explore the mechanics of reincarnation in this au since it's universe where the links are aware of their reincarnations and this ficlet is far from their first go-around. how many other characters are aware of their past lives? is vaati? I think it would be immensely funny for vaati's modern scheme to take over hyrule to be attempting to orchestrate a corporate takeover of hyrule inc., and the links thwart him by breaking into his server room and destroying everything with swords lmfao. ironically, vaati's company did not back up their data to the cloud. whoops!

vaati: well if i'd known you'd still be using SWORDS in THIS DAY AND AGE--

the links: dude literally when have we ever NOT used swords

ganon is of the opinion that this one's on vaati for failing to have pattern recognition, lol. ganon is also quietly making his own data backups, which isn't going to help him in the end, but it's cute that he tries.

re-reading the comments we spitballed back and forth when i first posted this fic, the adoption roadtrip could also be another fun direction to explore! i wonder if the reincarnated characters would've developed some way to reach out to each other upon getting their memories back, since they've gone through this at least a few times by now. depending on the pace of reincarnations (are the lives back to back? are they separated by a consistent timeframe? are they separated by a random timeframe?), they may or may not be familiar with current technology. use some kind of handwave-y triforce connection or something??

similarly, do people tend to reincarnate in the same family lines and/or physically near each other? are the links and zelda usually neighbors? is it completely random? i think it would be funny if it was random, and there was a life where by sheer dumb luck, everyone ended up on the same city block EXCEPT ganon, who somehow found himself on an antarctic research station or something. he got his memories back very late in that life, and by that point he was already an established uhhh let's say field biologist, so he decided to keep spending the rest of that life tracking leopard seals bc why not. he eventually runs into zelda and the links at a conference and there is very nearly a brawl. their labs proceed to start a bitter academic rivalry that is renowned in their field for years afterward.

speaking of academia, have any historians picked up on this group of people recurring throughout hyrule's history? do the characters look the same in their reincarnations, allowing for a possible record of the same faces showing up over and over again in records? how well-known is the reincarnation phenomenon? is it publicly known at all? on one hand, it would be immensely funny for academics to immediately start knockout tournaments over who gets to approach the reincarnated characters for interviews first. on the other hand, that sounds exhausting and annoying for the reincarnated characters.

it's easier to handle if the reincarnation thing isn't publicly known, which doesn't exclude conspiracy theorists and particularly dogged historians from figuring it out and tracking them down anyway, but this probably happens very infrequently if at all. any conspiracy theorists would be so vindicated though lmao. it's not a conspiracy theory if it's real!!

anyway, there's a lot on this universe that could be explored. thank you for reminding me about this au, it was fun to think about it again!! maybe i'll go back to it someday, who knows haha ^.^