#old-tober

The story starts during the Academy phase when Leonie and Lorenz are friends, then the war breaks out, and it follows them through the time skip and the war.

Each fic is readable independently (by design, and also people have read them separately and reported back that they had fun), but they are also fun as a pair. There’s a lot of stuff in Leonie’s fic that doesn’t make it into Lorenz’s fic, and vice versa. I also have a friend who read it fandom blind and had fun with it! So that is wonderful too :)

It has a lot of original worldbuilding for the Leicester Alliance. It has cute moments. It has funny moments. It has plot stuff. It has lots of Golden Deer cameos.

One interesting thing (for me) is that you can see my writing get better over the course of the fic. Like, on the one hand, bummer that I wasn’t perfect throughout. On the other hand, you gotta love growth!

This is the single longest fic for this ship! Like, taken separately and taken together. And I’ve written a goodly amount of other stuff for these two as well. At one point I manually calculated by WC what percentage of leonie/lorenz fics I had written, and I was at 75%. I’m sure the number is different now, but that’s fun to think about.

Final note: I made hard copies of it, and they look pretty rad

I also really leaned into the concept of the Alliance not as a country but an actual Alliance of smaller, sovereign states. (This is reflected in the fic by the effort I made not to refer to the Alliance as a country, even though I think the game does.) This instantly made the politics within the Alliance more tricky and exciting for me. 

Building off the Five Great Houses, I inferred the existence of other, smaller Houses and decided that it made sense if there were more, smaller houses. 

From there… Listen. A lot of the throwaway details about how the Alliance works in this fic is just inspired by US history/politics. The Great Houses are the colonies with large populations. The smaller Houses are the colonies with smaller populations. The delicate balance of power between the Great Houses and the Lesser Houses is why the US ended up with a bicameral legislature. In the Alliance, however, the Great Houses have more votes per-house, but the Lesser Houses have more votes in total. If the Lesser Houses band together, they can outvote the Great Houses. 

Each House/territory has its own alliances and opponents. Specifically, Gloucester is a Great House, but they are stymied by their delightful neighbors, Acheron. In my fic, the various lesser Houses have their own “thing” that explains, at least in part, why they weren’t eaten/claimed by the nearby Great Houses. Some of the smaller territories are just more defensible or have geography that makes them not-so-desirable farmland, which makes them not-so-desirable for conquering. (This is why there are so many smaller territories near the mountain ranges.) Some of them have economic power because there are mines or other valuable resources within their boundaries. Some of them control an important port (this is Neities, aka the Foot Guy’s family, for any superfans out there. His family controls the only port on the southeastern border) or an important mountain pass/trade route (Marlton and Forneau). Acheron is important because their family controls the Great Bridge of Myrddin. Other than that, they’re surrounded by Gloucester Territory. But they control that bridge, and the other small territories stand with Acheron with reasonable consistency—not out of loyalty to Acheron himself (he sucks) but because to allow Acheron to be threatened or even conquered would weaken the position of all the lesser Houses.

The Great Houses are influential because of their territory, but also because of their agricultural production (Riegan and Gloucester), their position as border territories (Goneril and Gloucester again), or for cultural/economic reasons (Edmund, Riegan). In the fic, Ordelia actually is a relatively small territory… but it was a larger territory. Ordelia lost territory after the whole Those Who Slither thing, and their territory was mostly claimed by Gloucester (I think maybe Goneril got a slice too but definitely Gloucester). This influences Lorenz and Lystihea’s interactions, and it plays into Lorenz and Lysithea being Purple. :3 Ordelia is actually a branch family of Gloucester, in the same way the Riegans relate to the Faerghan royal family. Also the Gloucesters and Fraldarius family are related, which is a shout-out to another FE3H fic. 

In canon, Lorenz is really invested in Gloucester and Alliance politics as a whole, so I as the author had to invest in Alliance politics. Not only does it give life to the setting, but it also gives Lorenz things to say and do. Lorenz cares so much about the Alliance, and it informs his priorities and his thoughts. It influences his relationship with Claude and shapes his arc in the fic. It also influences his relationship with Leonie—not just the noble-commoner thing, and not just the liege-citizen thing, but also because both Lorenz and Leonie talk about home a lot. We know the name of Leonie’s village. I had to make up place names for the other two Golden Deer commoners. (Kierwall is called that because I thought maybe Kirsten was derived from their ancestral home. He and Leonie relate to each other in a few specific ways because they both come from commoner stock in Gloucester, whereas Ignatz’s cultural context is slightly different because his family is from Riegan.) Both Lorenz and Leonie carry their land with them in their hearts; even when they travel, they know where their roots still lie. 

Other setting notes: more broadly, I conceptualize the Empire as the most obviously restrictive culture because they’re the oldest country? Does that make sense? No idea. That’s why their nobles “bend the knee.” The Holy Kingdom of Faerghus is all about vows and dying-breath loyalty and the Goddess, so their lords go through a confirmation. The Alliance isn’t really even a single country, and they’re a bit of a hodge podge, so their lords go through a Disputation when a new leader (spokesperson? chairman?) is chosen. (Also! I thought it was fitting that a character like Lorenz would come out of a culture where the leaders are inducted through a long-ass debate.) 

I’m going to do the smut one because my rambling there will be shorter

“with care and attention”  is the first-ever fic I posted for FE3H, and it’s smut. I’ve joked before that my debut into any fandom is always smut, but honestly that’s less of a joke and more of an accurate observation.

I have little memory of the contents of this fic, just that I was kind of nervous to be posting it, and at the time of writing this thing about it, it has... 8 comments (4 of which are my responses). It’s been up for a little more than 2 years. So I often sort of forget it exists, but that makes it extra amazing when someone finds it and says they liked it :) And it marks my entrypoint into posting for my current fandom! And the comments on it are SO nice, they’re like “I like the sexy consent! I like the way the intimacy is portrayed.” It makes me feel like I did something spiffy :)

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“All things considered (could be worse)” is, no lie, my most viewed, most kudos’ed, most bookmarked, subscribed, and commented-on fic on AO3 to date and probably ever. I feel very comfortably saying I probably “peaked” already* (*if you measure success by those metrics, and I don’t) so I have full freedom to dick around forevermore, amen. 

I really, really don’t understand when fic writers are all “oh no someone found my old fic and commented that they like I’m embarrassed” because I LOVE that! Obviously, I’m participating in this event :) When I get a comment on an old fic, it’s like getting a letter from a friend I haven’t seen in a long time. “Oh, hello! You’re still out there, doing your thing! Good for you! I love you!”

I don’t know why this fic is as widely-read as it is? I’d like to think it’s because I’m an amazing writer but there are a lot of amazing writers in the world.

I hope it’s because it’s a very cozy piece. It’s like “oh what if this part of the premise were harder, but everything else was somehow easier? what if Matt and Foggy met, and they still became friends, what if Karen Page showed up and they became a team, what if Marci and Claire were there and everyone was kind in their own way? What if people asked for help and received it?”

So I think maybe, it is still as well-liked as it is because it’s nice to think about that. And the format (mostly slice-of-life episodes kinda??) supports that. 

The meta-story of working on and ultimately finishing that fic is that kind of story too, because I started it, and then I didn’t have time, but kind comments kept coming in, and that gave me the motivation to finish the story--for me, for the characters, and especially for the people who read it and liked it. The fic is complete because of the random generosity of internet strangers :)