headcanon meta aaaaand meta on fire emblem fandom

[omaewokorosu]

As I mentioned before in the preceding entry, I am from Smash Brothers fandom, and my Marth was different from the majority of Marths in that fandom because I just couldn't relate to him. So I made him in my image not unlike what it says about Adam and God in the Bible, except no dirt was involved. The majority of Marths were cold, distant, bitchy people who I would punch in the face and say awful things to if I ever chanced to meet them. Also, there was something about ice. Yeah, I don't know either. Marth doesn't even have ice/water powers. He's actually rather normal.

That was the beginning of me creating my Marth. I am a normal person, or I like to think I am, and so Marth was as well. There was some angst and whatever about being an orphan, and he was proper and dignified because hurr he is a prince and all that. And though he liked to keep his distance from people who were 'lower' than he was, he wasn't cold at all. My Marth was always nice to people. And he didn't speak Japanese.

okay he did in the beginning and I had just gotten into watching anime in Japanese with fansubs so I was excited, okay? Marth wasn't slinging, "Omae wo korosu," around at least.

It's probably a good thing I didn't write for Gundam Wing until years later. Ho boy.

But at least that was understandable because, uh, he talks in Japanese! Fire Emblem anime dub, you can go fuck yourself. (It's amusing that I never went, OMG MARTH SOUNDS SO HAWT and yet that was one of the reasons I loved Heero. I had a huge mental disconnect, if you can believe that.)

So we had weeaboo!Marth but at least he acted not like a stuck up asshole. With ice power things or whatever. And he didn't treat Roy (or others) like shit. Also, he wasn't abused. That was a huge thing. They would talk about his father (who was not named Cornelius--what, you expected Smash Brothers fandom to know that? You are giving the majority of people in that fandom too much credit) beating him and Marth being a weepy uke and this is sounding too much like an incestuous version of "Okane ga Nai".

oh yeah and Marth was a weepy fucking uke. I ALWAYS MADE MARTH TOP JUST TO SUBVERT THAT. Or top from the bottom.

with the exception of Papa to Kiss in the Dark, Midorikawa Hikaru does not fucking play uke.

Also, Marth has never shown 'uke' tendencies. That doesn't mean he won't ever play catcher to someone's pitcher, but he won't be Mira Munakata either.

OH DAMMIT NOW I CAN'T UNSEE IT. (And then my thoughts jumped from Mira to Miki. Even Miki isn't squish enough to be Mira. OH GOD WHY DID YOU GO TO MIKAGE, BRAIN? YOU DON'T SEE MIKAGE AS BEING SEXUAL although he sure as hell sounds sexual.)

But yeah. Then I played FE3 (book one) because sarajayechan was playing through it again, and so we did it together. And I lol'd at Marth not wearing pants. And I thought that Marth had no personality, at least none that I could tell, aside from other people said he was. Oho, Marth is awesome? Why haven't I seen this then? Why does he not react to the news about his mother? Why does he not react to anything really ever? IS HE NOT HUMAN? Does he have the emotional capabilities of a cinder block? Seriously. I was doing a lot of, "If this were Smash Brothers fandom, I would write Marth..." because then, well, Marth would actually act like a normal human being instead of someone people just told me about but I was never shown. Marth's a kind-hearted boy? I haven't seen it, but thanks for telling me, Jeigan/Morodorf/whoever.

He basically goes, "Oh, my mother was horrifically killed? OH MAI GAWD SOLDIERS WE MUST FIGHT!"

And that bothered me a whole lot, because I know that if I found out my mother was horrifically murdered after being kept prisoner and probably tortured, I would've fucking gutted the person responsible like a fish and bathed in their blood. Or perhaps it wouldn't have sunken in, or I would've thought that the fucker was full of it, and I'd gut him like a fish for even joking about it.

SO THEN I GOT TO THINKING, "How would Marth react to this?" Of course I had no idea because Marth didn't react to it in canon. This was late 2007, early 2008, btw. So then I thought, "If I were Marth, what would he do?"

Cue somewhat reserved, bitter Marth.

If this is beginning to sound familiar, it should. I would be kind of worried if it didn't.

So then I started looking through the game script and picking out things, like Marth's age and throwing in things about that too. Someone who just lost his parents, had his sister kidnapped, was betrayed by a supposed ally and distant relative, and had their kingdom invaded isn't going to be anywhere near normal.

At least emotionally. And I used that. I used it all. To me it just made sense, it was logical. I wrote "Now It's Done". I didn't finish it. I let it collect dust on my Google Docs. I wrote "Shades of the Exiled". This was not the 'norm' for Marth. Mostly because no one really wrote for Akaneia, so there was no 'norm'. I said, "Fuck it, I don't care."

FE11 just came out. I played it in Japanese. From what I could tell, this Marth had a personality. A PERSONALITY! And I didn't have to create one for him. I had something to do by now. I was perfectly prepared to throw my Marth out of the window.

I had to tweak my Marth, but I didn't have to change him too much.

Either I can tell the future, Intelligent Systems can read my mind, or they said exactly what I did when confronted with Marth in FE1.

And bonus meta on the real reason I came back to Fire Emblem fandom.

As everyone knows, shortly after I dipped my toes into Akaneia fandom (as it was called then), I left the fandom for Weiss Kreuz, in which I write about a group of psychopaths who happen to be psychics and just horribly fucked up. I psychoanalyse everything. But my bonnie lies over the ocean, you see. I was out of Fire Emblem fandom for almost two years. No one wrote for Archanea except me and a couple of other people, and there was stuff going on in Elibe fandom, and I was on the verge of a mental breakdown, so I left. I said goodbye, and I left, and I thought it was for good. I really did. I went on to the Weiss Kreuz fandom, I went back to Gundam Wing fandom. I was heavily into anime again.

You can blame Marth for that if you want. And Youtube. And Mewlon. And the fact that Live Pastel Collection 2005 exists.

In the interim, I was honing my headcanon for Marth. I was taking notes on the game script, formulating theories. I occasionally wrote some fic I never published because I didn't care enough and it was Archanea, who the hell would read it? (That never stopped me from writing FE6.) I still read fic, I still jumped in on discussions in places like Manna's and Sara's journals. Because I loved Fire Emblem, I loved the fandom experience, even if I only occasionally jumped in.

I will be completely honest with you guys. Though Archanea was indeed the fandom that brought me back here, it was the work of a couple of fics that made me think of coming back.

This one, actually. And this one. Yes, I actually remember the fics that brought me back here. Because if it wasn't for that one fic that made me think, "Hey, I'm not the only one who writes Marth like this," I would have probably never returned to Fire Emblem fandom. You have to be a really awesome writer to be able to get a fic to make me think something, or want me to do something, or ship something, or basically change my opinion on something. And those fics? They made me go, "Hey, I miss writing for Archanea, I miss being apart of this."

I didn't come back right away, though I did start writing Archanea again. And I did meta on Marth about how I thought he could very easily go crazy and people thought I was crazy except for a few people who agreed with me. And I stepped up participation in discussions, met even more awesome people, and then I was going to come back! I even had my comeback fic written and everything. (I never posted my comeback fic, btw. I will, as apart of FE100 and Shades of the Exiled.)

Then wank about Gunlord happened, I had been gone for two years, and I was all D: at the dogpiling and went, like those old people who sit in a rocker on their front porch, "What the hell happened? This isn't what I remember." Seriously.

I waited for that to die down and then I posted, after two years of collecting dust, "Now It's Done", which was written before I played FE11 in English (my Japanese reading skills are still pretty suck, so I only got the gist of things initially). It was Marth/Nyna to an extent, and when I wrote it initially I was all NO ONE WOULD READ MARTH/NYNA, SELF. NO ONE.

Because "NO ONE WILL READ THIS" stopped me from writing FE6 when two other people did. It also stopped me from writing Heero/Relena. And from writing Tuxedo Wallace.

(I was being sarcastic.)

(Also, Tuxedo Wallace was more of a middle finger towards fandom and its "SRS FIC OR NONE AT ALL KTHNX" attitude that I had witnessed on the anon meme, so I didn't really care anyway.)

This was back when I found a collection of FE11 shit I hadn't posted and I posted it on DW in its unfinished glory with a, "This fic has been rotting away on my Google Docs account for around two years or so. Obviously I forgot about it so my bad on that. Maybe one day I will make this all nice and edited and awesome to post on FFN, but right now it's more, "Meh, whatever."" attached.

AND THEN I GOT A COMMENT. It said: "I'd like very much if you polished this up and released it to the wide world."

(That's not the whole comment, btw.)

So I looked the fic over and away I went on working on it. Not much had changed in two years, except my headcanon on Marth expanded, and I changed some of Nyna's stuff so she was more what I thought of now than back then, gave it a better ending than the five I had drafted out originally, and then posted it.

That was my new comeback fic.

THEN I RELEASED A SHIT LOAD OF MARTH META. Because in case you haven't noticed, I like Marth. I like him a lot. SOMEONE ON THE ANON MEME EVEN SAID THIS. "[...] she LOVES Marth [...]" even. Everyone knows.

I think Marth deserves his own tag now. I might have to do that retroactively or something.

Archanea? has the most extensive headcanon ever. Out of all the Fire Emblem fandoms I've been apart of, out of all the fandoms period. Just for one character, no less. Because I love it. I absolutely love it. I love it better than Elibe fandom, even, and I loved Elibe fandom a lot. (Now I just have a love-hate relationship with it.) I don't care that it's small. I love it all the same.

So you can imagine my ire when people were trying to get me away from Archanea fandom and back into Elibe fandom, even saying things like, "You have to be patient and wait until she gets bored of Archanea/Akaneia/whatever." I don't think that's completely verbatim, but it's pretty spot-on.

Archanea fanfiction, discussions, people involved with it? They were the ones who made me want to come back. I knew that if I came back to Fire Emblem fandom, it probably wouldn't be in Elibe fandom. I've said my piece about Elibe. There's only so much I can do with Roy/Lilina before I start rehashing my own shit. Only so much I can do with Roy unless I make him a psychological mess.

Then he'd sound like Marth with red hair.

Besides, I was bored of Elibe, and that was why I left. I don't owe anything to anyone to come back. You want Elibe fic? I will happily point you in the directions of 85934854 people I know who write for it. You like Roy/Lilina? Do a character search, or a summary search. You like Kent/Lyn? Go read Manna's/Improvisation's stuff. You want Eliwood/Ninian? There's Sara Jaye. You want Eliwood/Fiora? I have two awesome fics you can read. I am not the only one who writes Elibe. I'm sorry you thought my stuff was awesome and you want to see more Elibe, but I didn't pull any of my old stuff (reason being people still read it and enjoy it), and I'm not the only one who writes it. I write for Archanea now. Some of my best work has been Archanea.

Meanwhile I will write my [somewhat crazy, perhaps borderline crazy] prince and be perfectly content! Because Marth is the one character I love to pieces. I would love him even if he wasn't voiced by my favourite seiyuu ever. Marth was always my favourite character, even before I'd played Fire Emblem or gave a damn about it. Yes, I thought he was a girl. Yes, I made fun of him, bashed him, cursed at him, and said I hated him. I torture the ones I love the most, otherwise I wouldn't give a damn. (They also say you hurt the ones you love the most.) But I love him all the same, and I love him even more now that IS gave him a reason for me to give a fuck.

I write my meta because I enjoy writing about writing. (Most writers enjoy writing about writing, because they know what they're talking about [for the most part].) I enjoy writing about Marth. I enjoy writing about writing Marth. I like discussions, I like geeking out. I don't care if I'm the only one who reads my meta--I still post it. I'd post here on LJ even if I never got a single comment, although I'd probably be a little lonely.

Likewise I post my fic, even when I have doubts about whether or not someone will read it (I did post "Now It's Done" after all, and Tuxedo Wallace, and Heero/Relena), because I enjoy it, and someone else will glance upon it and maybe be all, "Hey, someone thinks the same way!" and they won't feel like an outcast and they'll join in on fandom!

After all, that's what made me think about coming back. It all started with a fic.

And if I had any reservations now, well, I wouldn't have posted "My Sins Won't Leave Me".

I'll probably write moar meta later (I really am in the meta state of mind today), but I need foods before my stomach threatens to end my existence. So that will have to wait.