#This entire dilemma brought to you by: robot not knowing how to worldbuild askr or write literally any of its characters

[ro-botany]

Making awakening fanfics has been an experience for me because it really made me notice how...fast? The plot happens 😭

Whenever I have an event take place in the normal awakening timeline and it really doesn't connect with anything in the game, I find that I have to use like...the brief peace time period to use it because it's *so* hard to fit my ideas anywhere else.

YEAH they really speed through things askdjd it can make it hard to place things.

I think part of that effect comes down to the chapters just cutting past a lot of the travel time that an army would realistically have between destinations. Idk how big Archanea and Valm are, but they ARE each called continents so presumably they're pretty big. Carting people and supplies the kinds of distances that would realistically stretch between major plot points would take a while. There's definitely a lot more room between major events than it can feel like, and plenty room to place random events there for fic purposes. Thats the premise a lot of the support convos rely on, tbh.

My issue tbh is more one of like... where do I place things so I hit the emotional beats I want without also giving the villains of the story an opportunity to immediately derail everything?

My basic premise is "drop the good timeline crew and RKC into a petri dish and see what they do". I _really_ like the flavour of interpersonal conflict that comes out of having mid-story good timeline crew in that mix; but since future!Grima is still around at that point, we have a hard time playing out that conflict because an evil dragon can make RKC act according to their will at any moment and Ruin Everything. I could solve that by making it a post-game story, sure; but that ends up being a very different story because the good guys already won so there's no doubt to needle at, and it isnt a bad story but idk if its my preferred direction to take this thing.

Maybe if we give powered down Grima a range limit on puppeteering that could work... Bleh.

#This entire dilemma brought to you by: robot not knowing how to worldbuild askr or write literally any of its characters #I could just keep with the askr setting plan! It solves many issues! But idk who tf Alfonse is or how the order even works and it bothers m #overthinking is my power and my curse