Junk-Artist

I wrote this fic for part of a secret Santa exchange with Jammerific. I've done beta work for her before and I feel really fortunate that I got paired to someone whose fandoms I'm actually familiar with and enjoy. I've never had anything more than a few scrapped drafts for Zelda.

I spent a while ruminating on what exactly to write instead of, you know, doing the writing part. Initially, I thought about doing a comedic echo of Jam's longfic, where I novelize an attempt to almost speedrun Breath of the Wild, heading straight for the final boss, but in finally managing to borrow a Switch, I was too breathtaken by the game's visuals to what I intended (that and it took substantially longer than I expected to do). I sat down and meditated on what to write about as someone suggested combing through the memories I had of the series and picking one to write about.

It soon hit me that my strongest memories of the series have never had anything to do with the plot or the characters. When I think about what I liked about this game or that game, it's always something about the atmosphere, the environment, or the sense of freedom. It's hard to explain to someone born after the Nintendo 64's console generation what was so breathtaking about seeing Hyrule Field for the first time in Ocarina of Time. It's full of nothing compared to modern open world games, and even games made a few years later blow it out of the water, but when it's the first and only time you've ever seen something like that, it's special.

It's been a while since I initially wrote this story, and there's not too much to say about it. It was loosely inspired by an element from The Spectre v1, where Jim Corrigan and the Spectre "sleep" at the same time. It contradicts elements from later comics, where Jim is shown to be incapable of sleeping, but I thought it would be interesting to combine the premise with later takes on the character. As a result, the version of both characters is a little "soupy", taking bits and pieces from a bunch of different versions of them, but I hope the story itself is clear despite that.

After I wrote this chapter, I got really stressed out by canon. I went back to check pretty much every bit of source material possible to make sure I wasn't contradicting anything, and I realized I forgot to take the Drama CD for X into account, where Ky and Potemkin fight over a piece of Blacktech. I went back and made revisions to the chapter to account for it and avoid contradictions (I really wanted to keep the chapter intact because I loved writing Potemkin and Ky's relationship in the story). There were a lot of small hiccups like that in the story's development.

After I wrote chapter 5, I sent it off to a friend who's been a big help reviewing/editing things for me. He offered a lot of good constructive criticism for most of my chapters, but he was floored by chapter 5 in particular and didn't have much to say other than that I pulled off the trope I was working with spectacularly, and that I needed to deliver with showing Potemkin's full strength before the story ended.

Truth be told, at that point in time, I hadn't given much thought to it. The story was always meant to deal with the negative consequences of power rather than revel in spectacle, but I think it also makes a fitting end to a character arc.

Most of the chapters in this story only took about a day or a day and a half at most for me to complete. This chapter was not the case. I don't know the first thing about how to overthrow the government and make it feel believable, and I'm sure as hell not going to half-ass it and claim ignorance, so I sat down and did a lot of research. I read up on historic coups, read an entire book on how to successfully execute a military coup (Coup d'état: A Practical Handbook), and extensively studied Zepp's geography based on that one panning shot of it from Xrd's story modes and tried to work out a map. In essence, I planned a coup against a fictional country.

These notes are fairly long compared to the past several, but bear with me. I went as deep with lore as I could while trying to marry it to reality. Also, if there's one thing I learned from Coup d'état: A Practical Handbook, it's that Zepp would be really vulnerable to a coup.

"I understand the situation. Leave the rest up to me."

That's Ky Kiske's winquote against Potemkin in Guilty Gear: The Missing Link. I went back and forth about whether or not I should even write this chapter because I wasn't sure whether or not I wanted to step on canon's toes, but it's not like we know exactly what happened in the game's story (and probably never will), so there are a lot of blanks left to fill in and it was a little too important to just leave out. I went over the full script for The Missing Link to see what I could pull out of it and I knew from that quote that I had to have Potemkin fight Ky -- and lose. I initially considered just covering what happened in Potemkin's internal monologue in the next chapter, but I eventually realized it would make up half the length of the chapter if I did it that way.

I've unfortunately been slacking on chapter notes, despite abiding by the update schedule I said I would. I've been a little busy on Fridays, so maybe I need to choose a different day of the week to update in the future.

With that out of the way, this was a chapter that wasn't originally in the outline for the story, but I really felt like I needed to touch on a few of the things in it. It's always stuck out to me that Potemkin is a borderline pacifist holding a position as a military officer, and I wanted to write something involving examining that position in a little more depth.

Truth be told, I didn't expect Gabriel to be such a major focus of this story when I started writing it, but after a few chapters, it was pretty clear that he was just as important as Potemkin. It was a bit of a challenge because we just don't know much about Gabriel, and what we do know often leaves more questions than answers. His relationship with Slayer is one of those things. What even are his powers, and how is he strong enough to fight Slayer? I make very little attempt to answer those questions in this story. The furthest I really go is an assumption that he's strong enough to produce shockwave with his attacks (which seems to be a major component of Potemkin's fighting style).

Fleshing out Gabriel's relationship with Slayer was interesting because I largely had to pull something out of my ass. On a subconscious level (I caught myself on this after writing Gabriel's exposition on Slayer), I think I ended up modeling their relationship on old jokes about what it would be like if Goku and Superman existed in the same universe, with Goku constantly trying to get poor Clark Kent to stop what he's doing and fight him in the middle of nowhere. Even though Slayer has a very posh, rational aesthetic, I think both his and Gabriel's reactions to Bedman in -SIGN- are as good as benchmark as you can get for their contrasting personalities. Gabriel is no-nonsense and prioritizes Truth, Justice, and the Zeppian Way. Slayer seems posh on the surface, but I think that deep down, he just really wants to fight a strong guy.

I've done my best to comply with canon for the sake of this story so far, but this chapter is one where I decided to fudge it just a bit. Based on their story mode dialogue, it seems like Potemkin and Slayer meet for the first time during XX's plot, but I think it's just ambiguous enough that I can fudge this in here. I really wanted to incorporate an encounter with another character while Potemkin was on the ground and I thought Slayer was the best pick for it. I fussed with the idea of using Baiken in a similar role, with her mistaking Potemkin for a Gear and attacking him, but I ultimately decided against it. I felt like I had done quite a bit to play up Potemkin's strength, and I wanted to fight someone unambiguously stronger at this point.

It feels very strange as a writer to do worldbuilding for a setting that doesn't belong to me. Like, expanding on characterization and backstories for fanfiction feels fairly normal to me, but there's a lot of stuff mentioned about Zepp in this story that just isn't present in canon -- and I have more on top of what's been written that just didn't make it into the story for one reason or another. You're largely stuck with what exists in canon, so I basically built around elements like "The country is a militant, isolationist airship. What are some elements that would arise from that?" and "Gabriel and Potemkin are freakishly strong. How would society and the government react to people like them existing in the roles they do?"

I've been writing for most of my life at this point, but this was the first time I sent a piece of writing to someone and they went "Holy shit, that's awesome!" I was really flattered by that, because I wasn't sure if the chapter turned out the way I wanted it to. I make use of rapidfire anime tropes, and it's hard to tell whether or not it's conveyed in writing.

Ever since I noticed it, I thought it was interesting that Guilty Gear seems kind of ambivalent toward nuclear weapons. Most Japanese fiction leans hard into "nukes are evil" to the extent that literal nuclear weapons tend to be avoided, but here's Guilty Gear, where Sol Badguy charges into battle riding an ICBM. of me wonders if maybe it says something about Ishiwatari's viewpoint on nuclear weapons. You gotta wonder sometimes.

This chapter wasn't actually present during my first half-a-draft of the story. It was something I added in retroactively while I was in the middle of writing the last four or five chapters. I had inspiration for it while I was writing and realized the story had way more chapters than I thought it would and felt, "Hey, I kind of need something between these chapters to space things out." I have a few more thoughts I want to mention about this chapter than most of the previous ones because this is (chronologically) where I start doing a lot of worldbuilding and I spent quite a bit of time doing homework on the chapter, especially on how tattoos change with muscle growth or weight gain.

The first thing I wanted to mention is barcode tattoos as a concept. I think my interpretation of them in the story -- that the actual barcodes are purely symbolic -- most likely goes against author intent, but it was a deliberate choice on my end in the name of creative liberty. In the same way a fanartist draws a character a little different from the original artist, a fanfiction writer filters characters and settings through their own lens when writing it, and I'm not trying to imitate canon as much as build on what I'm given and add my own flair to it.

For the record, you can't actually tattoo a barcode on someone and scan it because the person's skin would expand and contract too much. That would change the space between the bars, making it impossible for a scanner to read. It's especially implausible with someone still growing, like Potemkin.

Also, to clarify, the description of how tattoos are applied to slaves is meant to mirror livestock tattoos. I'd recommend looking up some images of the types of tattoo guns usually used on cattle. I wish I had some sort of diagram of what the machine in the story looks like, but the gist is that it has multiple rows of needles that punch in and out of someone's skin to apply the black bars for the barcode.

Anyone paying attention to the dates so far and doing the math might've noticed that if you flash forward to the actual canon events in the series, Potemkin is pretty young during the first game -- nineteen to be exact. It might seem like an odd choice (I think most people's headcanons peg him around 30 or so), but something about his character in Xrd specifically made me think to myself, "No, I think he's probably younger than that. He strikes me as a young adult."

Sometimes I wonder how far people will read into my writing after I've written it. There's a lot of stuff Gabriel says during this story that has a definite political bent, and I have to wonder if someone reading it would think that I'm using the character as a voice for my beliefs, as opposed to just writing how I think a character in his situation would rationalize his patriotism and service to his country, despite knowing he knows he lives in a dystopian nightmare.