Notes for "Famed Genius"
First, to get this out of the way: Canon says that Hector and company "go westward" at the end of Cog of Destiny to find the cave with Armads, and then it does a convenient cut to the Western Isles. There isn't even an arrow on the map to follow. They're just suddenly at the Western Isles, despite the fact that this would be a several-month detour involving boats while everyone is rather riled up about how Nergal is regaining his power and we'd better all hurry.
I realized the location of the Armads was that far away fairly late in this project. I thought about revising the fic to a different point in time, but it changed far too much. Ultimately I decided the whole Western Isles travel handwave made no sense as presented in canon. This is why Athos transports them in a (handwavey) paragraph.
Now. I readily admit that I find it extremely entertaining to follow badfic cliches in letter while subverting them in spirit. Famed Genius, however -- which I will call Reset from here on out because that was the working title and I'm fonder of it (ditched it as the final title because it made the twist too obvious) -- did not begin this way. ( Imagine did.)
Reset began as an idea spawned from a conversation on marius_sidorov's journal. Some people mentioned that the lords remark on how young the tactician is. This is meant, of course, to bring the player into the role. It more likely implies an age in the later teens, about the same age as the lords. But I thought it would be funny to go to the extreme and write Mark the 13-year-old tactician in all his thirteen-year-old glory. The original concept prioritized the idea that Mark acted Exactly His Age despite being a great tactician, and the troops reacted accordingly. I winced a little at the mild contradiction to the way the lords treat Mark in-game, but I consider that an acceptable sacrifice. This concept still made it strongly into the final version of Reset, but differently so: as a juxtaposition of external perception and secret personal truths. The original few sketches I threw out were far more lighthearted:
Tent flaps curling in her wake, Vaida burst into Hector's tent the evening she joined the league. “Why did nobody tell me,” she fumed, “that this army is run by a child?”
By now long accustomed to this reaction, Hector crossed his arms and began on his often-rehearsed speech. “Eliwood and I run this army. If you're talking about Mark, he's good at what he does. So we take him with us. You'll see what I mean.”
“By putting my neck on the line? Ha!” Vaida slammed her hand on the table and Hector's hand darted out to steady his inkwell just in time. “What kind of lunatics are you all?”
“Look. I follow his orders. I'm alive, aren't I?”
Vaida paused, staring him down. She had quite a presence, Hector realized, stifling his unease as he returned her gaze evenly. “If,” she said, a single biting syllable, “I sense a hint of today's foolishness, I will lead Umbriel straight out of the battlefield. Do you understand?”
No one's keeping you here anyway. Hector thought to himself. “I hear you. … So what did Mark do this time?”
And, while I did make a stab at game mechanics/player perfectionism, it was more comical than anything:
“Watch him send me into a ring of archers,” she growled, ramming spare javelins into Umbriel's packs with more force than necessary.
“He wouldn't,” Heath said, voice pitched in genuine defense of their tactician. “I've never seen a tactician so concerned with his soldiers' survival. Or good at keeping them alive.”
“Pah. So now the child is a saint too, is he?”
Heath flushed and muttered, “Actually, I think casualties just hurt his pride.”
But I can't say this version of things held my interest. Honestly, I hated it even while writing it, which is usually a kiss of death for WIPs. I skipped around scenes, even though I'd held myself to writing first drafts in chronological order for the last year. I wrote up a few scenes involving Mark talking with Nino. (The dynamic was originally supposed to be a remark on the idea that not all kids with issues are unusually wise for their age. Yes, Mark had issues even then, considering that he somehow ended up passed out in the middle of Sacae, although I didn't imagine them to be in any way like how they ultimately turned out in Reset.) Then, while hammering along, it occurred to me that despite deciding that Mark came from a family of tacticians, that still didn't explain how he is that damn flawless at tactics.
No real tactician gets through a war with no losses whatsoever. None. No matter how prodigious. (This is probably mark_asphodel's favorite unacknowledged-in-fanfiction fact of war.) For a moment I made a joke to myself about how Mark has the power to turn back time by restarting the chapter, amirite? Then I thought this through, considered the kind of impact it would have on his psychology, and bam, suddenly I was extremely interested in writing this. Apparently poking at canon + children with mental problems = a happy Ammie. Many drafts (that amounted to almost a full rewrite) later, I was happy with this story.
I think you will find it charming to know that FE7 itself supports the interpretation that every unsuccessful chapter run has Happened. On successive playthroughs, you'll note that the game displays Battles, Wins, Losses at the bottom of each character profile. (The thing that pops up when you press R.) Yes, Losses. Deaths from things that happened before you pressed A B Start Select! It keeps track. It remembers. Eerie.
Still, I do like this as a remark on what makes a Gary-Stu a Gary-Stu, or an OC fic an exercise in self-indulgence. An (optional, of course) exercise for the critically inclined: compile a list of classic Tactician Gary-Stu traits that this Mark exhibits. Yet is Mark here a Tactician Gary-Stu? (Reset!Mark scores 30 on the Mary Sue Litmus Test, by the way.)
I am of the belief that we fixate too much on the symptoms and not the disease. Offering concrit to newcomers in the form of "don't write a tactician with superpowers" may temporarily stop individual Gary-Stu projects but it will not produce better writers. Not to mention, it may befuddle them when they see perfectly acceptable examples of gifted protagonists in quality published work.
But I'll cut the preaching. My two cents is this story.
I love any feedback, even if it's just "Hi, I read this." :)
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EDIT: I decided that people would want this kind of stuff in a notes post.
Laran - The Etruscan god of war
"Four years older than me" - I went off the Japanese version, wherein Lyn was sixteen at the beginning of the game.
Hibernia, Jutes, Aquileia - Also known as Fibernia, Djute, Aquleia. The three spellings I used are consistent with real-world references.
Tyr, Ares - War gods from Norse and Greek pantheons respectively.
Bellona, Edith - Female names with etymology stemming from "war".
Incidentally, I retook the litmus test for Mark after I'd finished the final draft and scored 35 the second time.