Blog has currently gone Genshin Impact. Tread with caution.
(The Untamed) My epic 470k Yi City fix-it fic: Heaven Has A Road But No One Walks It
I'm a Fandom Old with zero patience for drama, antis and other nonsense, and will block anyone trying to pick a fight. Please note that this blog may contain NSFW and "problematic" stuff, and that I suck at tagging. I try to tag for general fandom and obvious spoilers, but have no spoons to remember custom cw tags - if you want to follow me, please be aware of this.
Comments, fun tags and asks will always make me create more - or send me a virtual hug through ko-fi! ♥
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But what if the 500 437-ish year-old world-saviour villain and child genius were forced to work together? And realized all the things they have in common? And finally found someone who not only understood them but treasured their otherness and weirdness? What then?
Making a pinned post to keep all the posts related to this story concept in roughly the same place!
Comics and fics in loosely chronological order:
Prologue part 1 and 2 (comic)
How It Started (comic)
Positive reinforcement (comic)
Fool's Flight (fanfic)
Visitor From Afar part 1 and 2 (comic)
A God's Playground (fanfic)
Ghosts In The Machine (short fic)
Reverting Into Evil Ways (comic)
A Machine Of A Certain Level Of Complexity (animatic)
Nominally Human (fanfic)
An Explosion Of Ingenuity (fanfic)
Physical Therapy (comic)
On A Dark And Stormy Night (fanfic)
Flawed AI Categorization (comic)
Non-comic art:
Fae Like Shiny Things
Gem Collector
Moon Siblings
Fanart and commissions:
Maths Past Bedtime
Writhing Like A Worm
This cracky little au is incredibly dear to my heart! If you like it and would like more of it, consider commenting? Encouragement is the fuel that keeps me in creative mode, interaction means the world to me!
To see all posts where I talk about this story, you can also just browse the #happy scrappy found family au tag!
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I would personally not translate Eftirvit as "foolishness", the way the Genshin wiki does. 🤔
Eftirvit does literally mean "after" and "wisdom/intelligence", to be wise after the fact. But it has nothing to do with being foolish?
To be efterklok (the same word in modern Swedish) is more coded with regret than foolishness. To only see how a bad thing could have been avoided after the fact, when it's much too late to do anything about it. Wasting time thinking about all the "could have"s that might have changed the outcome...
Which frankly makes it even yummier, in my opinion! Of course you could imagine a myriad ways to avert the Cataclysm... but only once it's much too late to turn back time and stop it.
thank you SO MUCH for reminding me about [feature of patriarchy] and [problem caused by lack of kids' sex ed] random tumblr user in the notes! louder for those in the back!
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Ohhhh I see, so when YOU rearrange someone's guts its "Hot" and "Sexy", but when I do it, it's "medical malpractice" and "the act of a deeply disturbed individual"
My woke take, as someone who has worked in both a public library and a school library, is that we desperately need both more books that are at a higher reading level but a less mature subject matter, and more books that are at a lower reading level but a more mature subject matter, because 8 year olds who are advanced readers are still 8 year olds and don't want to read about graphic violence and torture, and teens and adults who have learning difficulties or who are just later readers for whatever reason are still teens and adults and don't want to read about Billy the Bunny going to school or whatever the hell.
So like... If we think about it, Dottore is pretty damn loyal, isn't he?
400+ years, OG Zandik dead, and all of Dottore's remaining pieces still serving the Tsaritsa, to the point he literally killed all himself by pieces.
400+ years, potentially murdering or at least letting OG Zandik die, and all just to perfect an immortality elixir for Feofan. Hell, these segments who fights with each other (himself?) agrees on continuously taking care of Feofan (and explicitly works together on This One Thing, by the last check up's notes)
..... do you think if only Nahida / Kusanali managed to reach him when he's 8 or younger, even by dreams, Zandik might've grown up to be her best (but unwanted, due to his disregard to life) sword and shield?
TL;DR I think Dottore would only have followed Nahida if she displayed a willingness to defy the imposed order of the world, which she does, but only after he forces her hand. So, paradoxically, Dottore makes her into a god he could have followed.
Loyalty is such an interesting thing to think about in relation to Dottore. I think you're right that there's a certain loyalty in the lengths to which he goes to guarantee Pantalone's survival. But this dedication also transcends loyalty—so much that it almost becomes devotion.
It's no coincidence that Pantalone, né Feofan, aka Manifestation of God, is positioned in the God’s role in the Sanctuary of Surasthana, the place from which Nahida reigns. The people who get these dialogue trees are Archons and Sovereigns. So what does that make Pantalone to Dottore when the latter takes on the Traveler’s role? Imagine:
Dottore: Are you suggesting I worship you as a god?
Pantalone: Oh, I think you already have for the last 380 years or so
Zandik spared Specimen 3 after indiscriminately one-shotting the other test subjects. But it wasn't enough to simply not experiment on Feofan.
No, Zandik became his doctor, helped him join the Fatui, and partnered with him. Not experimented on but partnered with, a distinction we don't often see him make. I mean really, why is the Second Harbinger—the heretic scientist whose power rivals that of a god—acting as the personal physician of a bank clerk? Super normal. Totally reasonable.
Dottore doesn't act this way with anyone else, and no other relationship of his has lasted for so many centuries. Even his relationship with his other selves didn't last as long as his partnership with Pantalone. It was profound enough that Dottore’s primary memory is of Pantalone. The Marrows are the essence of his soul, and Pantalone comes first.
Yet I think this loyalty or devotion is its own kind of selfishness. Their partnership only works because their worldviews are aligned. Their loyalty is guaranteed by their shared convictions. As Pantalone says:
Neither he nor I are tolerated by the rules of this world. We were both searching for a new order... Our ideas of the final form that should take may have differed, but our journeys took a shared path.
More than anything, I think Dottore is loyal to his ambition. He wants to understand this rotten world to make it into something better, to cure it the way a Doctor would. Pantalone also has a vision for a better world that is mostly compatible with his.
And so does the Tsaritsa. She, too, wants a new order. My sense is that their shared goal is precisely why 35 has been so content to adopt the role of the Second Harbinger, going as far as to emphasize the fact that he thinks of himself as Dottore in his own mind.
Given that the pursuit of knowledge is central to who he is (the Doctor of the decaying world), I’m not sure anything could have stopped him from becoming disillusioned with Teyvat and the Sages’ gag order on critical thinking. Exile might have eroded his compassion and hastened the development of his ends-justify-the-means approach to research, but he’s not wrong in his condemnation of Fate. We know the Heavenly Principles made some questionable choices.
So I posit that the only way Zandik would ever have joined Nahida is if she were to demonstrate a clear desire to challenge the imposed order. Which she eventually does... but only after Dottore forces her hand.
In their final conversation, he appears genuinely impressed with her:
You have a formidable mind, and you are braver than I thought. Setting fire to the very thing your survival depends on… Your previous threat was empty, but this time, it is real.
This is the moment she becomes a god he could have followed. But this is arguably also the moment she becomes a god instead of a branch of Fate. She is, quite literally, born of Irminsul. Yet now she's severed herself from it, bargained with the Shades, and saved her people's lives at Irminsul's expense, giving them free will in the process.
To deliberately misquote Venti from the beginning of the game, loyalty demanded by a god is not loyalty at all. Nothing less than setting fire to Fate could have made Dottore stand beside Nahida. There's a delightful little paradox to their arc: Zandik was fated to be a heretic. But in his heresy he found a way to respect his nation's god.
(For a guy so disdainful of the divine, he sure does have a knack for empowering gods...)
Lots to think about here, and I'm sure I'll keep chewing on this because the more I'm writing about it, the more fascinating these dynamics are becoming to me. Thanks for the compelling ask!
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The most important step I took as a writer was realising that it's fine if people don't like what I write. It's fine if people don't like my words, my ideas, my characters, my stories, my jokes*. Once I stopped worrying about pleasing everyone, my writing got way more particular, way more me, and that means people won't like it, but I like it. I love what I write.
Knowing your country’s folklore comes in handy more often than you’d think.
It’s not that long ago my mom was talking about some Danish period drama she had been watching where at some point a woman kills her newborn baby she had out of wedlock so as not to be ostracized because the father abandoned her and my mom went “Tha poor baby and that poor women but what were women like her supposed to do? What a horrible time”
And I could helpfully add “That’s why we have mylings in Scandinavian folklore. They’re the ghosts of babies that were left in nature to die for this exact reason and it happened so often people believed that if you saw one there would be more nearby and they would crowd you until you got crushed under their weight” (should be noted we use the word genganger which means “those who walk again” and can be used for anything from ghosts to zombies to vampires to anything that was dead and came back hence why they can be ghosts that crush you. The lines are very blurred)
The horrified look on her face really added something to the conversation.
"Mad geniuses Dottore and Aino fiercely arguing proper robot aesthetics"
Thank you for this one @silvysartfulness I did think about Aino and Dottore interacting but it is incredibly unlikely haha
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After 13 years of this, it's still funny to me that detailing a full mental breakdown on tumblr is standard fare, but posting a nice selfie is a fraught decision.
