#jaslavesglory

This story is something that's been stewing in my brain for years in one form or another. I think it ultimately stems from an ancient fanfic (still up on FFN by the way) that novelizes Guilty Gear: The Missing Link. The chapter expanding upon Potemkin's backstory is really strong, but I remember there was one element of it that stuck out to me like a sore thumb, despite the story's attempt to adhere to canon wherever it could: Potemkin has a wife and child in it. Now, I dunno if you've ever read the essay "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex" before (if you're going to look it up right now, it's NSFW, so don't say I didn't warn you), but it discusses the problems with the physical end of having children if you have super strength, and while it ironically doesn't apply to the Man of Steel himself, it should apply to Potemkin, who can't control his strength.

And that thought was basically the genesis of this whole story. Super strength seems like an awesome power on paper, but only if you can control it. Potemkin doesn't have that luxury, to the point of needing reinforced pencils, and adding on to that, there's the lore tidbit that his mutation is still making him stronger with or without his input. Of course, that also logically means he wouldn't have been as strong when he was younger, and that's a little unsettling to think about, because it implies he had to grow into not being able to hold a pencil without breaking it.

After some time spent writing, this story grew from a simple exploration of a character's youth and background to a chronicling of his journey to manhood. I didn't originally anticipate it would be this long, but I kept adding more and more under the pretense that I needed more in-universe time to flesh out the character development and make all of the dots connect from my mental impression of Potemkin's depressing youth to what we actually see in the games.

This is the first time I've actually completed a writing project of this size, fanfiction or original fiction, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. Despite it being a Guilty Gear story, I really wanted this to stand on its own, and I wrote it with the intention of feeling like a complete, self-contained story from front to back.

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.