#echoedverse

[arthur-kilgore]

Came here through a mutual, and I'm intrigued by the fic you're writing. Any particular reason you picked Charlotte Balfour as your deuteragonist? Wonderful writing, by the way. :-)

Thank you for your kind words, and for this ask!! (Also apologizing in advance for how long this is lol, the short answer is I am so autistic about these characters /lh)

The first reason I started writing echoed fragments was because after replaying the epilogue for the second time I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Charles’ grief has so strongly changed him and is still impacting him 8 years later; I’m a Charthur truther to my core, but even in a platonic interpretation Arthur’s death (and the destruction of the gang, it wasn’t just about Arthur) was something that he hadn’t healed from all that time later.

To be someone as principled, skilled, and talented as Charles and to end up in the depths of Saint Denis, throwing street fights for money and being somewhat entangled with the mob? The way he throws himself into protecting John and Uncle when he had no real obligation to do so? That’s a man still reeling from the loss of the first community he’s let himself form a connection with since losing his family at a young age, and who possibly still feels guilty about leaving and not being there when the bitter end came, even though leaving when he did was inarguably the right thing to do.

Despite the fact that Charles cut ties and had the cleanest getaway of any of them, he *chose* to come back and faced the aftermath alone, carried Arthur across state lines to bury him, alone, and then what?? He spent the next 8 years alone? Why did he not return to the Wapiti, or if he did, why did he leave if his other option was being on his own, throwing street fights in Saint Denis, where he would have still been a wanted man??

Whatever happened to Charles between 1899 and 1907, if the end result was Uncle - of all people - hearing rumors about Charles from states away, and Uncle *of all people* deciding that Charles was in enough trouble that they needed to intervene… it couldn’t have been anything good. I wanted so badly for him to have a chance to properly grieve and actually heal, and to not be alone through that process, so I decided that if R* wasn’t going to do it then I would lol

At the same time, Charlotte is one of the characters that I absolutely love to talk about and roll around in my brain. The more I thought about Charlotte and her mission line, the more I started to realize just how much these two had in common, personality-wise and particularly in regard to their freshly acquired grief and how it left them utterly alone after their loss, since both live on the outskirts of society (albeit for very different reasons, but the end result is the same).

The difference for Charlotte is that when she was at her absolute lowest, someone stepped in and was able to pull her back onto her feet - it quite literally saved her, and she went on to live a very meaningful and fulfilling life thanks to the care and compassion that Arthur showed her.

Charles was a close friend of the man who saved her life (whom she can no longer do anything to help), PLUS that man is fresh off the type of grief she knows all too well and is still working through herself; I think that given the opportunity Charlotte would want to pay that compassion forward. In addition to being able to grieve their losses together and having someone to lean on who knows exactly what you’re going through, I also just think they would have gotten along very well if they had ever crossed paths, so I made sure they did :3

The writing itself is slow going, but I have a whole general outline for this AU that already extends past the RDR1 canon timeline - one of the core ideas I want to explore is how the ripple effects of Arthur’s actions at the end of his life (mostly following canon with some slight modifications) end up having lifelong impacts for those who survived, and Charlotte happens to be one of the early indicators of that ripple effect. By showing her how to hunt he taught her to survive, and by giving her his horse he facilitated a personal connection that Arthur himself could never have anticipated - but because of that, the impacts of Arthur’s choices continue to resonate throughout the years.

#cm answers #anon ask #i can talk about the echoedverse for hours i am thinking about it constantly #thank you again for sending this in!! #echoedverse

[arthur-kilgore]

hiyaa its the same anon again :))

i read ur fic and i need u to know that it ruined me emotionally and i will never recover

sooo many of my favourite works have hurt me but that hurt a lot more

im invested now :)))) gonna be so annoying ab it lol

- 🦋 (if u need to tag me as smth)

I’m so glad to hear it resonated with you, PLEASE feel free to send asks about it anytime because then i can also be annoying about it <3 it also helps keep me motivated for chapter 3, which I have like 80% done but the last bit has been slow going 😫 life stuff got in the way for a bit but I’ve been making progress again the past couple of weeks!! I’ve got a lot in mind for this au, we’re only at the beginning right now 🩵

#cm answers #🦋 anon #echoedverse

[arthur-kilgore]

I am fighting for my life every time i open my docs but I have been slowly chipping away at my echoedverse WIP again

#i got like 3.5k written right after i posted the last chapter and then didn’t touch it for a solid two months 😬 #but we’re getting there #cm writes #echoedverse

[arthur-kilgore]

So here’s the thing about chapter 6 that has plagued me for months now; I thought I noticed a difference in Arthur’s appearance between my first and second playthroughs but I wasn’t certain because I didn’t take a lot of screenshots. For my third playthrough I played it up as much as possible (#2 I took really good care of Arthur, frequent rest/baths/meals/etc, #3 I neglected him as much as I possibly could) and uh, yeah. Screenshots for comparison.

#I wish I’d remembered to take his hat off because I think his forehead vein is also more prominent but seeing the difference in his eyes.. #rdr2 spoilers #arthur morgan #rdr2 #i had another very upsetting revelation confirmed for echoedverse purposes but i will discuss that another time #i am still unwell about all of this #arthur husbandry

[arthur-kilgore]

Charles Smith and Charlotte Balfour are opposite sides of the same coin:

Both rejects of modern society, one by birthright and one by choice

Both intelligent, tenacious, and compassionate

Both learned to survive on their own because there was no alternative

Both fell into Arthur Morgan’s orbit for a brief moment of time and, for better or worse, had their lives changed because of it

Both lost their chosen family and had to grieve alone

At the end of chapter 6 they weren’t that far away from each other geographically and I have spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about what could have happened if their paths had crossed in that period of time, how things could have been different for both of them. Could it have changed anything in the bigger picture of red dead redemption? I certainly think it’s possible.

#charles smith #charlotte balfour #yes i am echoedverse posting dont @ me (please do actually) #i'm thinking about them and writing about them. just in a non-constructive way #rdr2 #cm writes #the echoedverse

[arthur-kilgore]

I have been thinking of how to rewrite BATPM for my echoedverse wip in such a way that Charles doesn’t end up taking care of Arthur after he gets back and genuinely the only thing that seems feasible is having to nerf Charles too so I’m going to apologize in advance for that if it ever sees the light of day

#like not nearly as bad as arthur got it but it has to be something that also waylays him for several weeks yanno. #but then they can recover together and become inseparable #dropping a little totally unrelated tidbit since chapter 3 is taking so long enjoy #charthur #the echoedverse #rdr2

[arthur-kilgore]

In case there’s anyone who hasn’t given up on me updating my wip I would like you to know that I am very slowly making progress on it again

#the bar is on the ground as far as my rate of progress goes but at least we’ve dragged it out of #the mud #I have a daily writing goal of literally just one new sentence a day and then when I write a full paragraph in one go it feels like #I’ve really done something lmao #cm writes #the echoedverse

[arthur-kilgore]

hiii :) feel free to ignore this but did you ever keep working on your spiritfarer rdr2 au? no pressure but i was curious ❤️

Hey there! The short answer is kind of; it was originally going to be the post-RDR1 arc for an OC that won’t be introduced in my main WIP for… quite some time yet, but then after actually finishing the game i came to the conclusion that it makes a lot more sense for Arthur to be the spiritfarer than the OC I had in mind, so I’ve been grappling with separating the Spiritfarer AU from my Echoedverse WIP, and while I’ve been conceptualizing the story I’ve been dealing with pretty gnarly writer’s block and haven’t made much progress on either story 😅

I do have a Charthur snippet that I wrote for the original ending, if you’re interested I’d be happy to share it! I’m still hoping to get the new version down on paper someday, but I have no idea when or if I’ll manage it.

#when i say i changed the ending i mean that it’s… much more aligned with the actual Spiritfarer ending if you catch my drift #the snipper has that element of grief but it’s also happy overall imo #anon ask #spiritfarer au #snippet*