#ctb lore

Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

This was one of the first classic novels I ever fell in love with, in no small part because the resolution of the entire story hinges on one character finding his life’s meaning in sacrifice. That character spent the entire novel being the worst version of himself, but finds redemption in doing one incredible good deed. It’s one of the few books that have ever made me cry, and I always try to emulate it in my own writing-- a perfect melding of emotional resolution with plot resolution.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

This is not a book for the faint of heart. I read it when I was sixteen, and it changed my brain chemistry. Not only is Nabokov a master of prose—you will never read imagery like his anywhere else—but he is the undisputed champion of an unreliable narrator. While Woolf’s works are great examples of blending thought with narration, Nabokov is great at working with how a narrator knowingly frames events to comply with their point of view. Plus, his narrator is simultaneously a horrendous human being while painting himself as charming and heroic. He is someone who wants to be liked, and it fucks with the reader’s head.

I will never achieve anything close to Nabokov’s level, but I have since fostered an interest in writing from unique, unconventional points of view— like abuse from the perspective of the abuser.

Heroes by Robert Cormier

For a book I don’t remember well, I’m amazed by how much I have looked back on it as something to emulate thematically. This is a book about a WWII soldier who is discharged after saving his comrades by throwing himself onto a grenade. However, the blast left him horrifically disfigured, and most people have trouble viewing him as a hero. But he doesn’t view himself as a hero either, as (spoiler) he had only thrown himself onto the grenade in order to kill himself— as retribution for previously failing to do the right thing when it mattered. Now that he’s back home, he sets off on a quest to murder his childhood hero.

I don’t remember much about the characters or what happens between the opener and the ending. I don’t even remember any of the characters’ names. I read this when I was thirteen, and while it's all hazy, it has truly stuck with me.

While I will credit other war stories as being more directly inspirational towards the war plot-line, this one plays heavily into how I write on heroism and trauma.

All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

This is an obligatory pick, as anyone who writes any war story is ultimately inspired by Western Front. My copy even has the tagline: The Greatest War Story Ever Told. In truth, CTB is inspired by WWI in general, and it’s unfair of me to pick out a singular work that encompasses that fascination. I grew up watching/reading a lot of war stories (thanks, Dad), but I have always been interested in how the brutality of the first modern war plays alongside its ultimate meaninglessness. This was a war that a lot of people wanted to fight simply because there hadn’t been a war in a while, and the echoes of it extend all through to today.

In that sense, All Quiet embodies WWI the best. It’s the novel about the futility of war. How Remarque portrays its brutality and the soldiers’ disillusionment is echoed in how I approached the day-to-day fighting of war in CTB.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller*

When I started CTB, I knew that there were going to be a pair of characters from the country invading Hyrule that were going to be mirror versions of Warriors and Spirit— a “what would they have turned into if Spirit did not escape” scenario, personified. I knew Faovaria was going to be inspired by Ancient Greece and Rome. Beyond that, I was stuck. I didn’t know how to make these mirror characters interesting, much less their own character.

Then I read The Song of Achilles and thought to myself, What if I just made them Patrocles and Achilles?

Once that thought hit me, Nephus and Icarius sprang into my head fully-formed. This is also how the concept of thralls got added to Faovaria’s world-building.

The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemesin

I first read this book for a seminar series I took on how race is reflected upon in science fiction. At that point in my life, my entire reading output was centered around school, and I had not kept up with modern sci-fi fantasy books in a long time. This ended up being the first modern fantasy book I read in years, and it’s one that gave me a great example of how elevated writing can be used in a fantasy story. I won’t spoil the twist, but the way the narrative in this book is presented became my reassurance that I could pull off the dual-timeline structure of CTB.

Movies, TV, and More

1917 (Movie)

In case one wasn’t enough, here’s another WWI example. Two of the most iconic scenes from this movie feature the main character running through battlefields filled with charging soldiers and explosions of light, which inspired the sequence where Warriors runs through the battlefield to save Wind in chapter 20.

Vinland Saga (Anime)*

I got back into watching anime during COVID, which I had fallen out of during high school. I’ve watched a lot of anime since, and there are tons of tiny little moments and details that could be traced to one or another. But the anime with the largest influence on CTB is Vinland Saga. If you haven’t watched it yet, stop whatever you’re doing and watch it now. It’s one of the greats, featuring one of the best characters ever created.

Everything from Thorfinn’s arc of wanting to be a better person, to the conflicting feelings of kinship and hatred he feels for Askeladd, to how Askeladd projects his life’s failings onto Thorfinn-- I watched it and recognized all of it as things I was trying to do in CTB. Vinland Saga gave me a much-needed demonstration of how to write these things well. Having an example of what the good version was allowed me to push Warriors to a greater extreme. If Vinland Saga was a steady line, I found where I wanted to add sharp peaks and low valleys. It retroactively gave me the foundational work I needed so that I could really build something more daring than I ever thought possible.

Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion (Anime)

I should start by acknowledging that Code Geass was my first true exposure at the age of 14 to a character who played the role of both villain and hero. You could draw a direct line from Lelouch to Spirit, probably. That’s not why I’m mentioning this, though. I wanted to name something—anything—as an inspiration for whatever love-hate thing Warriors and Spirit have got going on. The real answer is that they were influenced by a lot of things (Thorfinn from Vinland Saga needing Askeladd to live so that he can ultimately kill him himself shows itself in Spirit), but I wanted an example from before I started CTB.

The crazy, toxic ex-friends, now-enemies, would-still-die-for-each-other thing that Lelouch and Suzaku have is the closest I can come up with. If you think Warriors and Spirit are insane, those two are worse— a similar brand of obsessive crazy, but much more heavily antagonistic. Young me learned the value of having a pair of men who are weird about each other as the center of your story. Code Geass made me realize that if the men are not weird about each other, then the stakes are not high enough.

Daredevil (Comics/TV Show)

I don’t like superhero media anymore. My superhero phase wasn’t even that enthusiastic, as I spent my entire run enchanted by Daredevil, aka: Matt Murdock. Sometime during college, I got hooked on his character: self-sacrificing, a martyr complex, and self-destructive. There are superheroes who have been described that way before, but it’s all either fanon or mitigated by the writer’s belief that the character is ultimately cool. Matt Murdock is consistently portrayed as being the perpetrator of his own misery. He’s the problem. He’s always the problem.

Only the Netflix run of the TV show was out at the time, and I think the fandom was primarily filled with adults. I never had such a good fanfiction binge in my life—I read through the entire AO3 tag, page by page. No filters. I rarely, if ever, found a fic I didn’t like. It felt like everyone in the whole world understood what made Matt Murdock compelling.

He’s one of my favorite depictions of a self-destructive person, primarily in how it actively makes him suck as a person even when he’s trying to be good. If I didn’t get strangely attached to Matt Murdock, Spirit would not be what he is today, which is to say (to quote one of the most memorable comments I have ever gotten) an absolute cunt.

Princess Mononoke (Movie)

The Kingdom of Hyrule in CTB is meant to be on the cusp between two eras: a previously more magical time fading away, leaving behind the dread of the modern world to come. That mood is best exemplified by Princess Mononoke, where you see that the time of the gods is ending. I’ve always liked how the characters are helpless against the changing tides. Neither god nor human can prevent the world from changing, though they might compel it to come faster or slower.

I wanted that sense of helplessness and dread to permeate through Warriors’s era, that he could have lived a far happier life if he had not been born in uncertain times. Like Ashitaka, Warriors is also a relic of a world that is fading away and now finds himself unmoored without a place to belong.

Overwatch (Video Game)

As much as I want to be in denial, I have to face the facts: CTB is not the first time I have tried to write this story. A long time ago, I wrote and swiftly abandoned an Overwatch fanfiction that is, frankly, a prototype CTB. The premise was that three people who “grew up” during the heyday of Overwatch and experienced its downfall firsthand are now struggling to decide if they should or should not join the newly reformed Overwatch (a pre-fall, during the fall, and post-recall fic all at once).

Not only did this have many identical themes and ideas to CTB, but it also had dual timelines. Each chapter had the characters in the modern day reflecting on their past, complete with fully written flashbacks.

I abandoned this fic after three chapters. First, I got bored. Second, it was not easy to write. Three characters with three story lines (they were never going to meet in-story) that all had to have their own flashbacks with their own story lines— that’s six stories happening at once. And there wasn’t a set place in the story to show the flashbacks, either. In CTB, I always start with the past. In my prototype fic, they would commence mid-scene without the assistance of line breaks. It was unwieldy at best and a bitch at worst. The fic was broken upon arrival.

Still, I hung onto the idea. I knew the dual present-past structure could work. I just didn’t know how. So I sat on the concept for years until I had my MidLink romcom that I realized would be better off as a story about Warriors and his brothers. I was trying to figure out how to best show Warriors’s past when the dual structure crept back into my brain.

Generally speaking, there was a stark difference between Link and Warriors’s POVs this chapter. In the past, you can see Link start to work himself up into cycles of anxiety with the way he worries about what other people think about him and what his actions mean existentially. He is a high-strung mess. Meanwhile, Warriors feels serene. He’s finally at peace with who he is, and he feels almost no need to perform the same rigmarole of self-pity and anxiety.

I don’t think this change in mindset was noticeable to anyone except me since, hilariously, Link’s plot is made of extremely low-stakes domestic troubles while Warriors is grappling with making sure the kingdom doesn’t get conquered.

I also like how when Link starts talking again, he doesn’t find relief in working through his depression enough to resume normal functions; instead, he twists himself up worrying that other people would think that he’s a fraud. He won’t let himself win. Literally.

I went a little out of my way to explain why Linkle has pet cuccoos, but unfortunately, I could not include a scene where Lincoln offered to get her a cat or dog, and she insisted on cuccoos. And Lincoln just shrugged and said, sure, I guess. Whatever works for you.

Having dual timelines means that I get to give characters multiple exits from the story. A majority of the knights are dead or gone from the plot altogether in the present day, but their final exit from the story is in the past. They don’t get a final, grand goodbye. There’s an assumption that Link will see them again. He will, technically. But for the readers, this is the last time we will see characters like Lincoln and Shigeo alive, and their final moments in the story are unremarkable and unsatisfying. But, hey-- Link will see them again someday.

Ayane using Link’s house as a hangout spot was vaguely alluded to during her introduction in chapter 9.

Ayane’s concept in the present day is more or less ‘stereotypical 14-year-old girl,’ and it was fun to show that she’s growing into that moody teenager now. Kids can change a lot in a few short months, and Link has more or less ignored her for half a year now.

I really enjoyed being able to put a magnifying glass on Proxi and Link’s relationship, highlighting how much of a burden it can be to be someone’s voice. I think fairies are more or less treated like unfeeling plot devices, and it’s been interesting for me to think about how it can feel to be suddenly made the voice of an emotionally wrecked man you barely know.

Despite it being one of the original scenes I came up with for the story, I almost cut that bit where Impa visited Link’s house for space. I kept it because I wanted to pair it with their reunion during the present day, but that scene got massively cut down from its original vision as well.

I say this a lot, but I wish I did more with Impa before this point. I’m sure the story works fine now, I can see the places were Impa would have been a stronger character if I included her more.

Link finally telling Jakuchō the whole story of what happened between him and Spirit was also a scene I envisioned from the beginning, though I had intended it to function more like a therapy session. I think it can still be read like that, but I think a lot of the progress I wanted him to make was achieved more by his yelling at Farore, followed by his struggle with feeling worried for Proxi.

I originally thought of the poisoned well story as a metaphor Link would use to describe why he thought he couldn’t ever be truly redeemed. As I played around with the metaphor, it turned into a story that sounded more like what Jakuchō would say to him to illustrate why his point of view wasn’t healthy. So, I gave the story to her to tell.

I also really like the idea of Link associating himself with a well when the threat of the Kakariko Well looms so large in the story as something that will be used to punish him.

Even now, I think Link’s concern stems less from a love for Proxi and more from a place of wanting to protect himself from further harm. He can’t suffer if Proxi is somewhere she wouldn’t get hurt.

Also, Link is so afraid of being alone that even though he recognizes that he doesn’t really want to travel anymore, he decides that he will if it means he can keep Proxi in his life.

Remember when I said I needed to go back into earlier parts of the story and adjust something in the Proxi storyline? I still haven’t done it yet. But basically, I realized that I was being needlessly coy about why Proxi was at the Fairy Fountain in Faron, and it’s actually very weird that these two never had a conversation about that (or her going onto the battlefield when trying to rescue Wind).

I still plan to add those conversations in, but it fell to the bottom of the priority list as I was rushing to finish the chapter. When I do it, I’ll let you know what chapters were adjusted.

Okay, onto the present day:

I like that after Warriors finds peace in himself, his first experience back in public are the people he grew up with. It’s sort of like he’s getting a moment to not only close a chapter in his life, but also redo his adolescence (if that makes sense…).

Tiff is named after Tiffany Problem, because it was the first thing that popped into my brain when trying to come up with peasant names.

As I mentioned before, I picked Link Dubya over Link Double-U because a) it reads as less clunky, and b) the George W. Bush reference was really funny to me.

I FINALLY got to write a scene where the entire Chain got to not only sit in the same room and chat with each other, but they also got to be funny. There are a ton of tiny bits that I personally thought were delightful, like Sky confiscating the wine and everyone being stressed out by the amount of money Warriors owes Ganondorf.

The funniest bit for me was the part where Time went through all 5 stages of grief when he realized it only happened once. That bit was inspired in part by this text post I saw about characters where it’s like “it’s weirder if two characters aren’t fucking about it” (wish I could find that post again).

Basically, I imagine that when Time realized what Spirit and Warriors got up to, he thought back to how weird they were about each other during the war and decided that, yeah, that actually makes sense.

(I imagine Mask back then just assumed that they were getting up to things because of how weirdly clingy both of them would get to each other. Like yeah, those are his brothers and they got something weird going on. He’s not going to touch it with a 10-foot pole, though.)

So when he found out that, nope, it only happened once, he had ten seconds to come to terms with the fact that not only were they that weird about each other back then for no discernible reason, but they didn’t do anything about it until the point where it was clearly a terrible idea. Despite all that, they still only do it once when everything he knows about them says that this should be a terrible decision they each make over and over again.

Time, realizing he really can’t keep up with whatever the fuck is going on in the situationship: “Uh… huh.”

I talked a bit here about how the friendship with the Chain is more or less over, but what I want to point out is that while it has ended, both sides are now doing what the other wanted from the beginning. The Chain wanted Warriors to freely offer up information and include them in his plans, which he does when explaining his situation with Ganondorf and his deal with Zelda. Warriors wanted the Chain to take his insight seriously and understand how the politics in his era worked, as they can do now. They are working together better than ever, but the friendship is gone.

You can also see me, the author, yelling about political moderates here. I think Warriors’s plan highlights what I think makes him a fun character: this cynical understanding of the world that he uses to try to do the right thing (ethics pending).

I originally was going to have two separate scenes where Warriors individually offers Sky and Wind the same advice, which I luckily realized could be combined into one.

Even though I didn’t set out with the intention of tying the resolutions of Sky and Wind’s subplots together, I think it really works on a thematic level.

I have a very rough system for keeping track of the passage of time during the present day. We entered Warriors’s era roughly around mid to late July. We’re currently in early to mid-November, which amounts to about 100 days.

I had Wind give that number at first, but then I ironically remembered that he has memory issues and decided that he probably wouldn’t remember the exact number of days anymore.

I also just enjoy bludgeoning the reader over the head with reminders that, yes, the passage of time is real and these characters are getting older. It’s one of those small things I think makes or breaks a story-- if you think your story is missing something, you should probably check to see if time is truly passing for the characters.

That scene with Torgi almost didn’t get written, but I stubbornly kept it in, and I am so glad that I did. There needed to be a scene where Warriors gets called out for essentially taking the easy way out. I really wanted to highlight to the reader that Warriors’s isn’t becoming this perfect hero. He’s willingly choosing a flawed resolution because, frankly, he’s just not willing to go the extra step being truly heroic would take. He just wants a happy ending, not the best ending.

“A peace that lasts is its own form of violence.” I frankly went off with that line, and I hope you all appreciated it lol

Also, Torgi’s 100% correct when he implied that the Lincoln and Ganondorf marriage would have ended in light of Ganondorf’s scheming. This is the word of god coming in to confirm that had Lincoln not died, he was about to enter a very messy divorce.

Impa and Warriors’s reunion gave me so much trouble, and is the primary reason why this chapter was delayed by a week. There was a conversation they need to have that I intended for them to do right before the inquiry.

But I kept running into the problem that once they had this conversation, the inquiry would no longer matter. I kept hitting this wall over and over again before I realized that I just needed to chuck that conversation into a later chapter. The only thing from that original conversation that stayed was Warriors giving his condolences for Shigeo’s death.

Oh, the inquiry.

You can tell that I was having a lot of fun. I’ve gotten a few comments about how the chapter really started to go off once the inquiry began, and I agree. Everything before felt like I was putting the last few pieces in place. Hell, I think everything from Spirit leaving until now has been a very careful arrangement of bullets so that I can now, finally, start unloading the damn gun.

If you’ve watched Legend of the Galactic Heroes, everything in this inquiry is going to be very familiar. I originally (3ish years ago) had a straight-up treason trial on the plot outline that I changed to an inquiry when I saw the scene in LOGH.

The treason trial would have begged the question as to why we would bother giving Warriors a real trial now, when I had made it very clear in the beginning that martial law would have gotten rid of due process for people suspected of treason. An inquiry does not have the same baggage.

Plus, the LOGH scene was built around politicians wanting to humiliate/harass someone they perceived as a political rival, which is exactly what I wanted this to be.

I was cackling to myself the entire time I was writing the speaker’s lines. Like, I just had so much fun with the sheer audacity of a sham trial.

I wanted to include a quick line from Warriors where he realized that, yes, if he had been given the chance to become a solicitor like he wanted to when he was a kid, he really would have been good at it. I did not write it because that would have been too heavy-handed.

Last chapter, I talked about how concerned I was that the tension got too deflated over the climax of the Spirit fight and I wouldn’t have enough time to raise the stakes again. I knew that the stakes were going to go from 0 to 100 once Nephus’s surprise attack began, but I was worried the story would feel meandering until then. I didn’t want it to be too obvious that I needed to buy time to put the last few things into place before letting the war storyline fully take over.

Did I succeed? Not really? In my eyes, every scene leading up to this moment was necessary to the plot and characters, and the looming threat of the inquiry did well enough to keep some sense of tension. But I’m also aware that there probably is a version of this story where I could have cut or combined scenes and still had a workable plot. I don’t have any specific ideas as to how that would work, but I can just feel these past two chapters dragging a little.

Also, hello foreshadowing I laid down in chapter 3 finally reaping its fruits! Thank you Midna and your walls for providing justification for this funky use of the Fused Shadows.

I was going to have the entire Chain rush in at the beginning of the attack to help, but there was so much happening already that I did not want to then have to juggle eight extra characters.

So the last portion of this chapter was written the day of posting. By that, I mean that I left the marriage scene for the day-of, but then decided to rewrite Warriors and Zelda’s fleeing from the castle because my original draft sucked.

One of the reasons why it sucked was that I was going to be coy about whether the king dies or not for a couple of more chapters, but I decided that I wanted to give Warriors’s crowning more weight. Plus, it would immediately cue the reader into realizing that Zelda knows how to remain calm under emotional duress.

My original wedding scene concepts tied in closely to my original idea for the proposal/bargain Warriors and Zelda made. In that version, they would have made the bargain the day that Zelda arrived back to Castle Town. Warriors would join her in a carriage to parade around the city as a way to avoid getting arrested to be put on trial. There, in front of everyone, they would have a covert bargaining scene. Right after they struck their deal, Zelda would order the parade to reroute to the Temple of Time where she would insist that she had to get married now.

Like I said last chapter, I scrapped this because I wanted Warriors to take more action in the story to fix things as opposed to waiting around for Zelda to help. Once the parade scene was trashed, so too did the original set-up for the marriage ceremony.

Can you tell I struggled a bit with the marriage vows? I was trying so hard not to use any phrases we use in real life, especially I now pronounce you man and wife and you may kiss the bride. I was struggling to find some phrasing that would read as wedding without being too familiar.

Small but vital detail you may have missed: in being crowned king, Warriors loses his original surname. Link Walton is gone, replaced by Link Harkinian.

I have mentioned this before, and I will mention it again: I love characters who lose by winning. Congrats, Warriors: you are now the King of Hyrule. This is your definition of hell. You will never be free.

For that reason, I wanted to end on the image not of the crown on his head, but on the shackle on his wrist. It’s heavy-handed symbolism for sure, but I want this to feel like losing.

And to top if off, the All hail the king! / Long live the king! then becomes ominous, like this is the sentence he’s been given for every crime he’s ever committed. He will always be an icon, less than human. He’ll be admired, but not loved. He’ll have to live, because now his life will never be his own.

Link Walton is dead. Long live King Harkinian.

Well… I think that’s everything important.

Spirit’s still not back in the story. Sad!

Anyway, some housekeeping: we’re still on track to finish the story in 4 chapters (3 story, 1 epilogue).

I will be unlocking the story so that non-archive users can read it again. It’s temporary, as I fully intend to lock it again once CTB is fully finished. So if the story being unlocked is important to you, keep that in mind!