TVTropes Now available in the app store!
Open

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Legend of Zelda Fanfic - The Great Desert (explaining my fic)

Go To

Shadsie Staring At My Own Grave from Across From the Cemetery Since: Nov, 2010 Relationship Status: My elf kissing days are over
Staring At My Own Grave
#1: Sep 18th 2014 at 7:17:20 PM

Okay, I just googled myself out of curiosity and boredom and have found reviews in strange places.

I had no idea so many people liked my old fic The Great Desert or that it was so... controversial?

I just saw this review. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18047246-the-great-desert Since it is similar to a review I've seen on here (on the Recs page here, though that one had far less details as to what went wrong), I thought "I wonder how many people would like to see the main author of this story try to weasel her way out of things?"

I have been out of touch with my co-writer on it for some time. She's gone onto other fandoms and is generally busy with life. I have no life, which is why I am here. I am willing to answer questions, but I don't know when I can get in touch with her again to speak of her part. I'd have to get her nose out of Sherlock, first. This is also a main reason why the rebuild/updated version of the fanfic ("The Greater Desert" ) has failed to get off the ground.

It seems the main problems that people bring up (both on reviews at random sites I find and brought up directly in the reviews on fanfiction dot net) is that Genre Shift - switching gears in the story. Let me address that.

When I was just cutting my teeth in Zelda fandom, I was getting out of Trigun fandom, which was the place where I met Redmagelilith. As I was becoming obsessed with Hyrule, I was still obsessed with Planet Gunsmoke and had all these ideas for a Wild West Hyrule. I also hadn't seen much in the ways of any serious fanfic addressing such a setting, though there were other kinds of Alternate Universes in Zelda stories. She started telling me her ideas for some science fiction stuff applied to Hyrule (bear in mind, this is long before Skyward Sword existed) and we... wound up thinking it would be fun to combine the two ideas in the form of a two-person round-robin roleplay on instant messenger.

It was one of those rare, long, ongoing "shooting the breeze / something to do when bored" roleplay-thing that actually developed a storyline and was brought to an ending. As such, the temptation for me to turn it into a fan fiction proper was too great. We'd originally planned for me to do a chapter, my co-writer to do a chapter, then me again, but she lost interest in keeping up the writing pace I wanted, so I started writing everything out, myself, and sending her chapters to preview and discuss before editing and final posting.

Some of our ideas... were kind of fighting each other the whole time. Lil seemed to want to go with more of a science fiction vibe and wanted the magic to be sufficiently advanced technology. I wanted more magic and mystical stuff and more of the original Western feel. I kind of decided the idea of including a few modern day things, like black and white television was acceptable / made for good flavor because the Legend Of Zelda is very schitzo-tech as it is.

Frankly, posting the fic chapter by chapter on Zelda Dungeon was earning me a bit of a snit-fit simply over the use of guns in the story. "Guns in Zelda" is VERY controversial on that forum. And no, talking of cannon-turrets in Wind Waker will not save you.

The Goddesses being...what the turned out to be, was Lil's idea, but I liked it. I liked it a lot. Because I wanted there to be some magic (such as earlier stuff with ghosts and certain monsters and spiritual goings on) to not be explainable by technology, Lil came up with the "Aether" idea - the spiritual life-force of Hyrule.

As for the push and pull between the people of Hyrule believing/not believing in magic... the reviewer up above seemed to have missed (or maybe we didn't explain it well enough? It's been a while since I've gone over the fic) the fact that the growing failure of belief in magic wasn't universal. Particularly, the Royal Family (i.e. the nobles, Castle Town, who traded with the Twili) did continue to know about and practice magic. It was the common people of Hyrule - the people far-flung in the land, such as the ones way, way out in Link's province, who were becoming more materialistic and technically-dependent. The magic was drying up in the land. The Royals were actually still holding onto it. (And, yeah, the politicians were pretty much the only ones who had contact with the Twili, as I recall having written it).

The ending chapters... were rushed. Blame it on the manic side of the illness I suffer from? Maybe? I got to a point where I was starting to become tired of working on the fanfic and really wanted to bring it forth to the conclusion we'd decided on for it, to hurry up and get it completed already. The story suffered from the rush. I know it suffered.

There were a lot of things changed from the original incarnation as a roleplay by the end. Still, I think it explains a lot about the story to confess "This is what happens when a roleplay between friends becomes a fic." - It was something that Lilith and I did together, compromised on and created together. It was a work of fun between two friends and unless I get a head injury or one of the more terrible illness of old age years from now, I am always going to have fond memories of working on it and a warm feeling when I go back and take a look at it.

It doesn't bother me that it's a little controversial... particularly since the people giving it a lot of criticism seem to be doing so out of "This was such a well-written fic! This started out so good! Then the plot got all wonky!"

In fact, I am greatly amused at the reaction to the plot's eventual weirdness. It makes me remember how weird the original roleplay was... and how fun.

So, I guess it's not going to be another My Inner Life for the fandom, yet isn't a masterpiece, it it seems to be one of the better known fics in the fandom...I guess.

It certainly seems to be my best-known fanfic (except maybe the oneshots "Wolfhide" and "Flowers For Fi" )... so I thought if there were any fans of it here, per-se, or detractors, or people who are "Oh, I remember that" or "Oh I've heard of that" ... that I owed an explanation.

Yes, there are reasons why it got weird. Yes, I've done fics - even multichapter ones - beyond it. I don't know if you'd judge those as less weird, though.

edited 18th Sep '14 8:13:03 PM by Shadsie

In which I attempt to be a writer.
Add Post

Total posts: 1
Top