#junkartist

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.

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.