talonsaga-trash

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Wrote More Talon Saga Fic!

Summary:

It's hard for Nettle to look at the women from the Bermuda Facilities, and what she could have become. Fortunately, there's someone to talk to her about it.

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whenever characters have a weird dad and a missing/dead/unmentioned mom the fandom tendency is to assume she's normal to balance it out. but it's always valid to instead assume she matched his freak. that she was freakier. if canon won't give you enough insane women to work with it's always morally correct to fill in the blanks with your own

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Happy mother's day to the worst mother ever. RIP Elder Wyrm, you fucked up your nominally functional clone children in record time.

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The thing with dragons existing specifically in Our World as an urban fantasy concept, and not a fantasy world that's vaguely based in ancient mythology, is that dragons EVOLVED. Sure there's magic involved, but they're still somewhere in the taxanomic system.

Anyway, I think that dragons are on the crocodile+bird side of the reptile divide, because they display both bony plates/scales of crocodiles and the upright posture/s-shaped neck of birds. They were perhaps a close cousin of the pterosaur, breaking off from the family tree at around the same time.

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i will defend that fictional teenage girl with my life. i literally don’t even care what she did. you would’ve done it too if you were her she’s probably handling things better than you would in her shoes

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A reinjured whumpee who is bleeding profusely and a carer who's like, "You better--you better stop that. That's not even your blood to bleed, that's mine. You know it's impolite to return a gift!"

Alternately it's one of those grabs whumpee's shirt in a way that appears rough but is actually very mindful of wounds "Hey, asshole! That's my blood!"

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Okay Riley is so important to me though because he is angry and impulsive and brash, but he is also a caretaker. That's not the female protagonist or some matronly character, that's him! He's the one who is constantly looking out for his people's safety and whose motivations always circle back to the vulnerable people under his wing. His weak point, identified by Talon, isn't getting caught up in his rage or seeking revenge, it's sending two kids his way. His "white whale" isn't defeating Talon, it's rescuing a group of dragonelles. He is allowed to have his anger, he is never condemned for it, and it does not interfere with the fact that he is and will always be a caretaker, and finds that his most important attribute.

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I will read a Julie Kagawa series and become obsessed with making the love interest life worse. It happens every time!

This is all to say I finished the Talon Saga and it has consumed my brain.

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Have some Talon-Era Dante, back before everything went wrong.

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My favorite part of Legion is in Dante's flashbacks to Crescent Beach where he sees Ember looking at surfers on the ocean and immediately thinks "oh, I have to keep an eye on that, she could get herself in trouble/get hurt if she takes up surfing" knowing FULL WELL that Dante canonically took up rock climbing while in Crescent Beach. Like, Dante, I know you want to believe that you're the level-headed and responsible sibling, but one of these activities is significantly more dangerous than the other. If anyone's getting hurt it's you, buddy.

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Also taking advantage of this moment: What do you think about Fire N Gold from Bea Miller? I think it reflects perfectly Talon for some strange reason...

God that brings back MEMORIES, back when the fandom was more active (so like, five people) that made it into multiple playlists, especially for the early series.

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I'm here 5 hours late, How would you represent the SA trope to make it better? (I need to know cuz 13 yo me would have made the same mistakes if she had a pencil in hand)

Also how do you represent trauma in general? Its my weakest point when creating a story ✌️

Referring to this post, in which I talk about my thoughts on Ember and Garret's introduction scene.

I'm going to be looking at this specific scene rather than the attempted rape/rescue romance trope in general, and I think that it comes down to a number of choices. This scene, like most scenes, exists to do multiple things for the story. It 1- introduces Ember and Garret to each other, 2- gives Garret a little hero moment, 3 immediately acquaints Ember to Garret's propensity for violence, 4- immediately acquaints Garret to Ember's temper, and 5-makes Ember worry that she could have shifted in the middle of a bunch of humans and killed all of them. So, if one were to try to make this scene better, it comes down to prioritizing what is most important in this list.

If point 2 is most important, it could be as simple as Ember and co. taking a day-trip, their car breaking down, and Garret and Tristan offering a ride back to town. But personally, I think that point 2 weakens the scene rather than aids it— I see that it's drawing on medieval romance tropes, and while I respect that Talon is supposed to be a contemporary knightly romance, I don't think it's a good INTRODUCTION to the romance plotline, because even though Garret is a modern-day knight, Ember is not a modern-day knight's love interest. So that brings us to points 3, 4, and 5.

What's more important? Garret's violence, Ember's temper? Is there a way to show all three without a scenario of Garret rescuing Ember?

The easiest answer is to just make it a non-sexual encounter. Have Garret and Tristan show up during a mugging rather than a rape threat. Honestly, this would make the scene a lot better in my eyes, because a mugging is a lot less loaded than a rape threat. However,it still has the issue of Garret being a "savior" and being rewarded with Ember's affection.

So this is what I propose:

Ember sees Kristen and Lexi hanging around a bunch of weird frat bros. They say they're going to Lone Rock Cove. Ember thinks she'd rather do literally anything other than cram 6 people into a jeep, three of which are strangers, and turns them down.

Tristan, with slightly more world experience than your average teenager, goes 'huh. Three frat boys just convinced two teenagers to drive off with them. That's bad.'

Ember is approached by two strangers, staring after the car with her friends in it. "did your friends get into a stranger's car and leave you on the beach" they ask. "Yep." Ember says. "That seems really shady."

"Wait, what?" says Ember, who is sixteen and also a dragon, and is still learning the intricacies of human interaction. She rethinks the situation, realizes that yes, it was as weird and creepy as she thought it was, and when Garret and Tristan offer to follow them to make sure her friends are okay, she immediately inserts herself into the car with them. The scene follows similarly, except instead of three girls getting rescued by two dashing knights in shining armor, it's two girls watching their best friend pull up with two strangers, sprint towards the men harassing them, and hit them with a wrench she found in the backseat of Tristan and Garret's car.

This change keeps the majority of the points as in canon: Garret meets Ember and then immediately sees her temper for what it is. Garret and Tristan would probably participate in the ensuing fight, so Ember also clocks Garret's ability for violence. Hell, if you want Garret to keep a little hero moment, Ember doesn't have any combat training, yet— it would be totally reasonable for her to get knocked down and then Garret to defend her. And if she were knocked down, her first instinct would be to shift, which would provide the same internal conflict. But the noticeable difference is that Ember is not getting caught in a situation that she needs rescued from— she is meeting Garret on even ground, choosing to go into a dangerous situation, and at no point is under threat of sexual assault. If she gets hit during the fight, it's not because she spurned someone's advances and is being threatened with far worse, it's just because she's in a fight and getting hit happens. And that, in my mind, would make the scene a much stronger introduction to the romance plotline.

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As much as I love the Talon Saga and will defend its literary merit until the day I die, there is one scene that I actively dislike, and it is unfortunately a lynchpin scene for the whole series:

Ember and Garret's first meeting.

Attempted sexual assault, only to be stopped by a male love interest to exemplify their goodness or otherwise endear them to the would-be victim, is one of my least favorite tropes. This is not because I believe SA shouldn't be portrayed in literature, or even because I feel that literary women should save themselves instead of needing rescue from these situations, but because the use of this trope in this context takes an incredibly traumatizing event for many IRL people, and it's turned into, not a moment centered on the woman having violence inflicted upon her, but instead a method to prop up the male character and give him an opportunity to be heroic in her eyes. In this, the woman's interest/attention in the man is often given as a reward for his virtue.

Is this a cynical reading of the trope? Maybe. But again: I hate this trope, so I'm going to be cynical about it.

That being said, though, this trope comes up in a lot of literature. It's very popular. I have read a lot of said literature. And The Talon Saga is the version of it where, if I don't like it, I don't dislike it nearly as much as in other books. This is for two major reasons and two petty ones:

JKags at least as a precedent, since she's basing a lot of TTS on medieval romances. So at least it fits with the genre.

She gets to dole out some violence to her would-be rapist. Is this largely superficial? Yes. But it still helps.

The scene does not exist SOLELY to prop Garret up as a Good Guy (TM): it also facilitates that the first time Garret and Ember meet, it's within the context of violence. The first thing Garret learns about Ember is her anger, and that is an important part of both Ember as a person and their development as a couple. So at least it's serving a dual purpose.

Most importantly, Garret is not saving her from being raped. He's (unwittingly) saving her from committing a triple homicide. This doesn't help with the above "violence against a woman is used to prop up a man", but it does shift the power dynamics in this situation— Ember was not, at any point, unable to defend herself, and it was pretty explicitly stated that she would not have refused to defend herself in order to avoid outing herself as a dragon. She would have immolated those guys. Ember never loses her agency in order for Garret to take his role of "rescuer"

Overall, I don't feel like these reasons are good enough to save the usage of this trope, and that does weaken the romance as a whole in my eyes. I think that Garret and Ember could have met under violent circumstances that didn't place Ember as a victim of sexual assault or use that sexual assault to facilitate a romance rather than treating it as the trauma that it is. However, breaking it down shows how someone turn even weak tropes into workable scenes.

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Hello, there! I found your fics and tumblr a few days ago, and was immediately hooked by finding someone else who is addicted to the Talon Saga. Also, your fics are extremely high quality and are awesome (also somehow 90% of the fandom’s fics on Ao3).

Anyway, here’s one of my personal Talon headcannons: Talon is going to dissolve into a civil war within a year from Inferno. It’s been implied that al the majority of the high level executives, Wyrms, and close-to-Wyrm-age dragons were not loyal and only held in check by the Elder Wyrm, and it’s equally likely that the Archivist isn’t the only dragon with a hidden network of loyal agents hidden in Talon. There is absolutely going to be a war of power plays to hope the CEO position once dragons like Reign learn what happened. It makes sense of the Archivist is actively suppressing information from getting out to the rest of the organisation, so everyone’s afraid of making moves while it’s possible that Ember was rewritten the Elder Wyrm’s memories. However, it’s going to become really clear that she isn’t once she starts making major changes to the running of Talon. And then? Dragons are smart, and they’ve been fighting an underground war for centuries. It wouldn’t be a stretch for some of those powerful dragons (not all, but enough) to turn their plots and plans against Ember once it becomes clear who she is?

The war with St George has ended, but would that truly stop the dragons who turned Talon into the monster it has been?

Hello, and thank you for your comments!! Super glad you found me here, too— I'm not as active as I used to be, but I still love being able to talk about TTS and posting my art.

As for your headcanon... look, I want to say that everything is fixed and our favorite characters finally get to live in peacetime, but Talon is 100% heading into a civil war, and the end of Inferno gives less the vibes of "everything is fixed forever :D" and more "the protagonists have power over their situation and some breathing room, so this is where we're deciding to leave the story". But Ember pretty much did an accidental coup. She has strong allies in St. George, the underground, and the Archivist, but like all organizations that gained power through bloody means, there are a lot of factions in Talon that aren't going to be happy about being told things like "stop human trafficking and drug cartells" (two businesses Talon canonically profits from). And some of those factions can be appeased, but others will split off to try to retain power.

Honestly, I don't think the war with St. George even fully ended. I fully think that Ward is forming his own faction of Order survivors. The war for longterm change in Talon and the Order is likely a decades-long struggle that simply Cannot Be Covered in a 5-book YA series.

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Are Dragons Cold-Blooded in The Talon Saga?

SIGNS POINT TO YES:

Reptilian of the non-avian variety��� might be closest related to lizards, which are cold-blooded.

Seem to prefer warm or temperate climates.

Warm-bloodedness has only evolved twice, seems unlikely it would happen a third time.

Fire breathing may have evolved as a temperature regulation technique in place of endothermic development.

SIGNS POINT TO NO:

Canonically require high and habitual calorie intake, which is unusual for many modern reptiles— could indicate calorie consumption is for thermoregulation.

Have no mentions of sunning behavior as dragons or as humans.

Generating enough heat and energy to breathe fire seems like it might need thermoregulation to function.

CONCLUSION:

I have gained net zero information.

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I've emerged to re-write one of my old fics and post it anew: Trust Instincts; INSTINCTS BAD is back, and it comes with more lore.

Fic patches include:

15k more words

More unified themes of what it means to go rogue

Angst

Wes having a bad time

What more could you ask for?

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what is it about the least canon-compliant aromantic headcanons that makes them the best. like when a character shows no romantic attraction okay that is pretty awesome. but when romance is a big part of a character/plot? oh now we're fucking cooking