#oc:Saturn Citrinova

[vocalchords]

may this letter find you in good health.

[fool-in-his-wedding-gown]

Hey hey imma ask you about #34 because I'm a sucker for angst ✨

34. How did they react when they learned they'd died of the plague?

Oh MAN this is a whole can of worms

So when I first played through the Arcana (before Saturn existed as a character before I made this blog etc etc), all I could think about the whole "died-of-the-plague-&-came-back" thing was "Huh. That has to cause some serious survivor's guilt."

& that was one of the first things I knew about Saturn. He's a man of reason, or at least he fancies himself one. & doing the math, it's easy to see why he came to that conclusion. Thousands of people died, so what made him deserving of being the one person to get a second chance? Surely there were people who could've done more with it than he did.

But it's not really about deserving. If it was, they'd have to play this endless game of "Who Is Most Worthy Of Being Revived From The Dead" and if you can only pick one person, that's not ever going to be a fair choice. So, no, maybe he didn't deserve it. But it's not like he chose to be pulled out of his own grave. And there's nothing to be done about it now— he can't give up his life for someone else to take. That's not how it works. The fact of the matter is someone loved him enough to move heaven and earth to get him back.

& for Saturn it was a sort of sink-or-swim situation in which he needed to realize that he deserved to be alive & he had to realize it then and there because they didn't have time. The Devil's threat was looming over them long before the Masquerade even started. He didn't get a chance to slow down and grieve and process. Which sucks. But that also means that the very act of attending the Masquerade forced him to assert that he is here and he is alive and it may not be that he is supposed to be alive but he is and he will not throw that away, because there are far more pressing matters at hand. "how can I sit here and enjoy party foods and favors and dress up and do all these frivolous things knowing full well I shouldn't even be here" and the answer is you should be here. idiot. now act like it. It's like cauterizing a wound before it can fester— he was forced to confront his guilt head-on & that was what got him through the realms of the Arcana & Valdemar's trap & gave him the strength to face the Devil.

I imagine he and the Star had a very lengthy discussion about it, but that's for another day :3

[fool-in-his-wedding-gown]

How about 8 and 11 for the ask game?

8. What did their masquerade outfit look like? Was their mask an animal, or something else?

I have yet to draw his masquerade costume, but Saturn's mask was a vague approximation of a lion, with a mane resembling sunbeams. I'm sure whatever the full outfit ends up looking like, it'll dial up the cosmic imagery by ten. Speaking of which,

11. Do they have any prominent motifs that appear in their design? What do they represent, if anything?

Daffodils - While not appearing too obviously in his actual appearance, they are his favorite flower & appear at important moments in his character development.

Red roses also appear briefly in his design— they're embroidered on the hems of his pants & appear frequently in his lacework. Where the daffodils appear during important steps forward, roses signify a step back— recollection and remembrance, often in relation to the Plague.

Suns/sunbeams - It is in Saturn's nature to shed light on the truth. Often, his magic appears as rays of light & his necklace is in the shape of a sun.

Stars/constellations - He's also a navigator. When using his magic, star charts often appear on the ground below him. His freckles also light up into a constellation pattern. Like the suns, they emphasize his relation to his magic & how it reflects his own values.

The rings of Saturn, while not playing nearly as much a prominent role, do appear in his magic on occasion, with the rings almost resembling halos & serving a similar function to the suns and stars. He also has little beads shaped like ringed planets hanging from his belt :3

[fool-in-his-wedding-gown]

2 and 4 for the MC ask game!

2. What do you have in common with your MC? What's different?

Similarities

Both transmasc

Both cane users

Same hairstyle?? I guess?? Similar??? Half my head is shaved and he just has a weird ponytail but yknow. we have that "hair swept over one shoulder" swag

glasses :3

Fiber crafters!! He makes lace & I sew

& Differences :3

Different color schemes!! He's a blue guy I'm a red guy

Saturn is far more honest than I ever have been or will be

He likes to travel! I do not

Listen.... I'm not gonna make any claims that I'm an expert musician or anything..... but at least I have 7 years' worth of experience under my belt. Saturn is not musically inclined at all. We love him anyway though

4. How did you choose their name? Does it have a specific meaning? If so, what?

One of the first things I decided when I was creating his design was that he was going to have a fairly prominent celestial motif to emphasize his line of work & his value of the truth above all else. His love of the cosmos translated into navigation which then translated into research and truth-seeking. So his close alignment with space goes hand in hand with his values and his skill set. All this to say that "Saturn" is just a rather on-the-nose reference to that fact. But yknow he's trans he chose it himself he can have a little bit of obvious symbolism.

His last name was a little bit more difficult to decide on; I knew I wanted something vaguely Slavic in line with Julian, Portia, & Nadia's last names, & eventually I drew most of my influences in terms of structure and sound from Russian. He was originally just going to be "Saturn Citrine", because his design has a lot of orange and yellow accents and citrine is an orange/yellow gemstone. But once I decided I wanted his name to follow vaguely Russian conventions, it wasn't too hard to reconfigure "Citrine" into "Citrinova" (this is technically what would be the feminine version of this name; the masculinized version would be "Citrinov" or something similar, but I find "Citrinova" rings better and reflects the kind of complex relationship with gender that a lot of trans people have, myself & Saturn included).

This, of course, immediately backfired on me because "Citrinova" sounds WAY TOO SIMILAR to "Satrinava", which is Nadia's last name. But by the time I realized this I'd had Saturn's name in place for a solid three weeks. I couldn't just change it. So we all have to live with my mistake

[fool-in-his-wedding-gown]

for the mc ask game: 6, 30, and 35!!

6. Do they have a playlist? Share a link! Why did you choose the songs you did?

I'll drop some explanations for the songs after I answer the other questions :3

Putting this under a cut because WOAH this post got long

30. What was their life like before the plague? Their childhood?

Saturn spent the first fourteen years of his life living with his parents & siblings! It was after he realized he was trans that things between them soured & he moved to Vesuvia to live with his aunt. There, he kicked his studies into high gear. He'd always had a fascination with the cosmos, and he'd always been curious, but now he was really taking it seriously. He was fifteen when his aunt died and left the shop to him, which wasn't exactly ideal. She was really the only person he had in Vesuvia (and especially the only person who saw him for who he was), but he couldn't exactly go back to his immediate family, so he stayed. By this point, he was an established researcher and astronomer, so running the shop on his own wasn't really a problem, but he was grieving and he was only fifteen. It took a lot out of him.

At sixteen, he couldn't take it anymore. The pursuit of knowledge (especially in his own field) had always been of the utmost importance to him, and he needed to get away. So when the role of a navigator aboard a merchant ship opened up... I mean, come on. Of course he took that chance. So, using his skills in starmaps and skycharts, he navigated this crew through the seas for a solid year. He was absolutely terrible at everything else (which was to be expected, he was the second-youngest person aboard with no previous nautical experience), but he kept the crew safe and away from dangerous shores and guided it through countless storms. He stepped off that ship at seventeen ready to expand his studies. The time abroad steeled his resolve, and he finally felt ready to combine his skills in his field and pour them into the study of magic. He pursued that for two years on his own. Lots of textbooks and disastrous failures, very little learning by example. His specific area of study was in truth-seeking, revealing, shedding light on dark corners. That's what he'd been doing since he was fifteen. This was just an extension of that with a different, much more efficient tool.

But pursuing it on his own could only take him so far. When he was nineteen, he realized he wanted to learn pyromancy & how to read tarot, and he realized he'd need help. Pyromancy is incredibly finicky and dangerous when wielded by inexperienced hands, and tarot is extremely hard to learn if one isn't being taught by someone already personally familiar with it (besides, it's not like he had his own deck). So he did some poking around and, through the grapevine, he heard about the talents of one Asra Alnazar. As it would happen, Saturn managed to find him on masquerade night.

What started as a business partnership ("you teach me tarot and pyromancy, and I'll show you how I learned my magic near exclusively from textbooks"), became a friendship became a queerplatonic partnership. Asra moved into the shop by the time Saturn was twenty.

Six years passed roughly uneventfully (minus some accidental fires, the both of them developing their skill in magic more, running the shop together, whatever the HELL was going on between Asra and Julian).

And then the plague hit, and everything went to shit. But that's a story for another time.

35. Do they have any material objects that are important to them? What & why?

A cane of orange-brown gnarled wood, given to him by his aunt. Saturn is disabled and this, on top of serving as his mobility aid, has deep sentimental value to him.

A necklace gifted to him by Asra. It's a pendant that looks like a sun, twisting beams radiating outwards from a spherical center. He's unsure if it has any magic tied to it, but if it does, he hasn't found it yet.

Okay songs time :3

I'm not gonna go over all twenty one songs, but I will go over a few of my favorites/most fitting!!

Cicada Days - The way this song expresses & explores grief & the way the narrator speaks to the person who can be presumed to be their partner I thought really reflected Saturn's own guilt & his desperation to be kept close to the people he loves. He may pretend to be a perfectly logical, impartial third party immune to bias, but at the end of the day, he's a man in love and he's afraid of losing that which he loves. Hence "don't let me leave, I'll only take more than I gave"

Battle Cries - A dialogue between two lovers. This one is about as simple as it gets— the two are at a crossroads. Whatever their current situation is, it isn't working. They must change or part ways, and it's clear one wants the former while the other wants the latter.

Curses - Man this one's lyrics just remind me of the plot a lot. "There's a fire in my brain and I'm burning up" & "This house says my name like an elegy" & "Ashes, ashes, dust to dust / The devil's after both of us" all just contain imagery that's very evocative of the plot for me

[fool-in-his-wedding-gown]

One funny aftereffect of me accidentally placing arbitrary limits on myself because That's What the Devs Did is that Saturn does not have a familiar. Now in context it makes sense— he's a rather clinical man who prefers the less messy sides of magic (amateur pyromancy notwithstanding). But really it's because MC doesn't have a familiar in canon (because familiars are animals deeply reflective of a character's backstory & personality & MC is meant to be a blank slate for the player to project onto and/or extrapolate upon). Anyway if he did have a familiar (unlikely) I think it would be an okapi or one of those big fuckoff huge centipedes

[fool-in-his-wedding-gown]

intro post!!

My name is Pleiades! I'm an amateur writer who got into The Arcana pretty recently, and I've started a writing project that I like to call Julian’s Route But Shifted Slightly To The Left, featuring my own take on The Arcana's main character, personal headcanons, tweaks to the plot, and pre- and post-route stuff :] (The word count as of 6/17/2023 is 79,640!!!)

My ask box is open to everyone, anons included!! I always love to hear from other people in the fandom, so feel free to drop by. That said, I can't promise I'll be able to follow anyone back or reply to posts, given this is a sideblog and I'd like to keep it separate from my main.

I tag all characters accordingly!

I also tag #art and #writing (though the latter tag is empty, for now)

Talking tag is #pleiades posts :3

And asks tag is #pleiades replies!

You can learn stuff about my characters in their respective tags: #oc:Saturn Citrinova & #oc:Constance Dyatlov (though, like the writing tag, Constance's is empty for now)

Posts unrelated to The Arcana are tagged as such with #not arcana, so feel free to block that if you'd like

Additional tag(s?) to be added once I start posting my own writing