#lucanis lunchboxes

Spite's first attempt at cooking. He hasn't gotten the hang of it quite yet, but he's trying! What would you want Spite to try to cook for you? (He's open to suggestions.) I'm planning on writing more of these with the longer-term goal of modding these notes into DA:TV.

Maybe one day he'll even make something edible. We're all rooting for him.

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Part of an on-going series of fan-writings. See the full Masterlist here.

Watching Taash and Lucanis' friendship develop was an unexpected bright point of the companion interactions for me. If you haven't heard all of their companion banter, you are missing out! They both struggle with putting their feelings to words and prefer problems they can stab. There are some painful, beautiful parallels between how they've learned to cope with wanting acceptance and love from emotionally unavailable mothers. (Or grandmothers, in Lucanis' case.) The generational trauma bonding is real. And they really DO try to use their words for each other. Ugh I just loved the hell out of all their little conversations. (Edit - Writing Nerd Ramblings Below:) I loved the whiplash with how matter-of-fact Lucanis was whenever he spoke about the ABSOLUTE HORRORS he's dealt with. To me, that's this massive breadcrumb on how deeply he has stuffed down his feelings and what he has faced in his past. "My parents died horribly. Do you want to go on a date when this is all over?" This leads me to something I'm fiddling with. It's been an interesting exercise trying to find the right pace for how to fill out these entries and tease at romance without changing who Lucanis is. He's romantically distant. Inexperienced. Terrified of what it would mean to want Rook. But he's also deeply empathetic. A teammate who shows care through acts of service. An avid romance reader. He's seen his cousin Illario work his magic at romance and Lucanis has picked up enough to fool Rook, at least at the start. (Even though I think the wall lean is more fun to interpret as a "Oh, he's a romance book" guy. Because he totally got that out of a book. Let's be real.) The reason I started writing these was I thought the push-pull of Lucanis being more vulnerable through an indirect form, like writing, could work to feed us, the hungry players, while still leaning into the "disaster bisexual" label his writer used for him. What's more disaster-bi-coded than flirty texting followed by weirdly distant in-person interactions? It begs the question, how slow is a slow burn?

Enjoying my work? You can leave me a tip on Ko-Fi | Have a request? Part of an on-going series of fan-writings. See the full Masterlist here.

Something fun I've been playing with is comparing the different versions of Spite we meet in Veilguard:

There's the chaotic, petulant Spite we see talking to Lucanis.

And the stilted, impulsive outbursts we hear when Spite takes him over.

And the ruminative beat poetry Spite leaves behind in Lucanis' logbooks.

Like Lucanis, Spite has distinctive facets to how he talks depending on the subject and audience. Neither of them write quite like they speak, and I found these styles to be too consistent to consider it an accident. So I think it's a neat quirk and a worthy challenge to play with. Because it should sound like him, but not at the cost to losing those traits he leaves in his writing. Sorry, I ramble. Words are neat.

***Also, Spite has some markers in his canonical writing that can be misread as grammatical or spelling mistakes. For the love of the Maker -- it's done on purpose. :P

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Part of an on-going series of fan-writings. See the full Masterlist here.

Writing Rambles

There's a lovely feeling when we reach the paella cutscene with Lucanis that the group is finally getting into their groove. It feels like a found family, with trust and rapport built one fade-touched stone at a time.

So naturally, I wanted to explore the opposite of that. How many things can go wrong at once? How can everyone give into their impulses or fall back on old habits in a way that gives the gang a ways to grow, while making as many little nods to lore, existing banter, and honoring the canon?

It was a doozy and this runs long. I don't generally like long codices, but I worked with an editor on this piece and shaved it within an inch of its life. (I like to think it still packs in a whole lot of scenery, despite how efficient I tried to be.) In a perfect world, this kind of writing might live in a few codex entries by different authors, or coexist with an ambient dialogue to let the note breathe a bit.

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Part of an on-going series of fan-writings. See the full Masterlist here.

This is a codex entry that I wrote the night I finished the game. (I actually wrote the 8 earliest Lunchboxes all in one, fevered pass. Now, I have fellow writers reading my entries and I'm juggling a few other Veilguard projects, so they may come out less often, but in exchange for higher quality.) I hadn't chosen the lichdom path for Emmrich on that run, so I got a minor detail wrong. This revision fixes those details and, I think, is a little less "anti-lich Emmrich" than my first attempt. I think a lot about the line Lucanis says in Cafe Pietra, "to live fully is to live truly." It ties into his love of food and the focus and attention he gives little experiences. After I started a mortuary apprenticeship in the late 2010's, I felt like my brain got rewired in a similar way. Between daily on-call removals, sweeping up the crematory retort, and embalmings, death was suddenly mundane but ever-present. Maybe it was the exposure to all of the chemistry involved, but I leaned much harder into mixology and indulging in my foodie side. Death, it seems, made me hungry for life.

Enjoying my work? You can leave me a tip on Ko-Fi | Have a request? Part of an on-going series of fan-writings. See the full Masterlist here.