oooooo please tell me (who knows nothing on the subject) about orv swap au
hehehe. hehehehehehe. hehehehehehehhehehehhheheheh <- guy who is so normal
the premise of orv swap au (name has yet to be finalized) is this: what if kdj and yjh swapped narrative positions (reader <-> character) but very little else? what if a video game player enters a time loop to save his favorite character from dying over and over again and also to end the apocalypse?
admittedly it's not super fleshed out yet (a lot of the changes this premise would introduce are still not hammered out yet) but here are some points under the cut (novel spoilers ahead!)
orv swap au starts with pro gamer yjh who feels :/ abt his job, but hey, it pays the bills. despite (or maybe because of) his relative popularity as a pro gamer and networking with the agency/sponsors/people to impress, he's kind of isolated in a way that's detrimental, a facade of someone he's not whenever he's on camera
something to play around with is the idea of agency? maybe this yjh doesn't feel like he has any and has his hands tied between the lifestyle and being under public scrutiny and not having enough of a support system to leave everything behind. maybe he doesn't know what else he would even do. maybe he's aimless and drifting with nothing to hold on to.
his favorite video game is what i've been thinking of as World's Hardest To Play Indie Game (not based on difficulty but just on the experience of consuming it) a boring, exposition heavy, player-hostile, poorly designed, slightly buggy mess of a barely-playable game: twsa, a game that was not finished upon release and experiences with sporadic updates every now and then.
the ending tree to this game is so convoluted its insane. also theres no save states so if you die (very likely) u restart babeyyy.
twsa (video game) does have multiple endings, all of which happen when kdj, your main character, dies. some are farther into the apocolypse than others, some paths require meta knowledge of future events or character actions or items or whatever. the "true ending" is either analogous to the original 1863: kdj makes it to the end at the cost of everyone he loves, or hsy's modified 1863: kdj makes himself enemy of the scenario to secure a way out for the kimcom remnants.
there's branches on the choices tree where everyone dies and everything sucks and is bad forever and theres choices to make where kdj gets to make a family and they don't really get to settle down but they can get pretty close to it among the ruins of the apocalypse. through all his testing, yjh finds that these endings are nice but peter out - to get to the end of the apocalypse yjh has to claw his way there inch by painful inch, through betrayal and sacrifice, and he still cant fully get past it
i originally wanted to finagle a yoohankim 3 way swap but i couldn't figure it out. swap aus are a lot easier to work with when they're even numbers, at least to me, so this au features a ysa who is a video game company employee by day and by night she really has become god this time (and also a terrible indie dev). and this is how jungdoksang can still win !!!!
also yjh's coworker from Real Life hsy :) i haven't decided if she's like an employee for the same agency, or if she's someone else in the gaming circles that yjh interacts with sometimes (in my heart theyre in like some sort of discord server together), or something like that but she's around. whatever she does she is twitter cancelled for something. to me.
the only other character swaps are lsk and yma. yma is yjh's estranged sister (in broad strokes there's a vague bad parent situation going on here) (they used to be close until they drifted apart and slowly started hating each other [there is an abyss between them that neither of them can bridge]) (he feels that she betrayed him and threw him under the bus so he left [maybe he gets kicked out]) (she feels that he abandoned her to whatever situation they have going on [he didn't even try to take her with him]) and he has to find her when the apocalypse starts. yjh older sibling to yma gives us a whole different little dynamic to explore from kdj ysk (there's different levels of responsibility and guilt and blame when you're talking siblings that are soooooo interesting to me. sorry that i see any set of siblings and immediately try to figure out how to make them worse)
lsk is kdj's mom who appeared into existence at some point with kdj and they were both just adults. that's weird isn't it. oh well. i guess she can become a transcendent later too for funsies
everyone else stays in the same configuration of Real Person vs Character to me this is a very important aspect
this point has no precedent with the swap, nothing particular that would change to cause this, but it would be so funny if lgy was a little gamer boy who is an avid yjh hater. hates that guy. shows up to competitions to boo him. tunes into yjh's silent no-mic speedrunning streams to mald in chat but yjh +mods don't ban him bc its kinda funny.
anyways the apocalypse starts when yjh and his coworker/fellow gamer hsy are on a train to twitchcon and lgy is also there (also headed to twitchcon) and he brings bugs because he likes them but also to sabotage yjh specifically. its just funny if this happened. you understand
instead of having reader-related skills and abilities, yjh's skills are video game player based! he gets flavor text insight on people, location, and items, things like that. notably, he has the ability to reset, to bring himself back to the beginning of the apocalypse
orv swap proper follows yjh as the Player of the Game (Consumer of the Narrative) who lives hundred of lifetimes in this ruined-world-become-reality "replaying" [read: time looping through] the game to reshape it to save his fave character from self implosion (kdj with no dissociation is very prone to dying. all the time.). to revisit the idea of playing with yjh and the idea of agency, of creation, the only way to get past the apocalypse is to go off the beaten path, to choose options that weren't even there in the game. when in space, at his darkest point, yjh becomes a writer. in this story, at his darkest point, he has to become a creator too
please do not ask me how the epilogues go i dont know how the epilogues go (i don't want to throw yjh back into a train for milennia after he Just went through a thousand resets so i'm sending kdj for that but i havent fully planned how or why)
anyways, hope that helps!!! :)
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FAUST
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(lore/blurb about him under the cut, if ur interested)
Suggestive joke & double entendre connoisseur, and the visitor to many a person’s bed, Faust is, perhaps, the friendliest and most personable person under the Professor’s employ. His entire character is generally summed up in two (three?) words -- sleazy cat-boy... but if you bother to get to know him on a personal level, you may realize that it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
He has a relatively carefree personality, trying to simply enjoy life one day at a time and prioritize having a good time over any kind of stressful work. That’s not to say he doesn’t do his job well though - there’s a reason the Professor trusts him enough to work for him, after all.
Faust is a hybrid - His cat-like features are a result of artificial replacements... and fate simply not favouring anything ‘ordinary’. A mix-up in an order for artificial optics gave him cat-like eyes, and beyond that point he simply decided ‘why not have some fun with it?’, thus trading in his partially-deaf sense of (human) hearing for enhanced auditory replacements.
Despite his optimism and outward ‘charm’, Faust is also a very lucky example of what can happen if you are ill-fated enough to be a victim of organ harvesting. Without the intervention of the Professor and Dr. Bernhardt (mostly the latter), he wouldn’t have survived. Even then, being clinically dead for almost three minutes before being revived was enough to give him rather severe amnesia -- ‘Faust’ is not his birth name. He has very little memory about who he used to be... and likes keeping it that way.
Whoever he used to be, isn’t who he is now, and he isn’t about to waste a chance to enjoy this newfound life of his by making himself miserable looking into who he was and what he can’t go back to.
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Faust is technically an (JJBA) Android AU insert/redesign of the Cat-Man character from my JoJo reader-insert fanfic 'Midnight Meetings with a Manticore' over on AO3. He was intended to be one big shitpost... but then he actually ended up being the one character my friend and I are super invested in fhfgdj
He's a hella self-indulgent (and fun) character though... truly me rejecting the concept of 'cringe', even if his design makes me super embarrassed to share LOL
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U alive?
Eh kinda. I think I've been on tumblr maybe a handful of times in the last two or so months and I'll favorite a few things then leave again. To be real with you? It's all so fucking fake and empty to me anymore.
I very quickly got more done then I can put into words with pretty much everyone I follow and everyone who follows me and all of tumblr.
It's not going to sound good because I'm not going to sugar coat this or walk it back because that'll be useless. Everyone is just going to twist whatever I say at this point so here it is:
It is very telling that when I, a trans man, reblogged posts (and directly asked mutuals) to literally do nothing and not spend money on the new IPs that came out this year that actively use that money to harm trans people I was told to mind my business. That their personal blogs and spending habits have no impact on trans people and that my request to literally do nothing instead of spending money, again to DO NOTHING, to help trans people was unreasonable. But. But that's fine what ever. I'll just mind my business I guess and only reblog helpful stuff, positivity, and fandom. That's cool we'll all stay in our corners and that'll be the end of it. Nah tho. Because when I do nothing, when I don't want my blog, the one the very same people said shouldn't be concerned with suffering, taken over by literal live footage of children dieing and some of the most horrific things some how I'm actively participating in genocide.
When others actually participate in my suffering the request to do nothing is too much and how dare anyone even imply that makes them a participant in trans deaths. When I do nothing, on a god damn tumblr blog let's remember the stakes here and the difference between literally giving money to fund transphobia and me simply not reblogging something, in the face of others suffering I'm automatically an antisemitic hate mongering participant in a genocide.
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