It's seven in the morning (the winter is unkind to me in so many ways and yet it's my favorite season bitter biting into my skin and bone) and i have read this entire series in two days (all in the space between sleeping and tired where my body doesn't do what I want). I want to shovel every word of this into my mouth like cereal and enjoy the delicacy it's so fantastic it's raw and bitter and colorful and grinning all teeth bared like warnings like laughter. It's everything to me and it might be the time and the lack of sleep but I'm lavishing in it and you deserve to know the amount of praise I'm willing to heap on you to prove a point.
What does it say about me as a person that of my All Time Favorite Fics, two of them are about a kind person who sees ghosts and is hurt by them and is still choosing to be kind and good because no one else can do what they do? The horror makes the kindness blinding and its so much to me like glow in the dark stars, right?
(For a series with ghosts in it, they're aren't a lot of ghosts in AA. It's been a weird sticking point for me, which might have informed my own fic hallowed but also i just like ghosts and haunted haunting places where someone is Gone but not gone in the same way a place is a character has wants and needs yknow??? Idk like I said I've been awake a long time and my brain is stewing in itself.)
Small changes, right? Diego isn't good (hes an ass and hes selfish but being selfish is being human imho) but he's a good person and there's a distinction there that I wonder how it will echo when the poor man wakes to find himself weighted in flesh that hates the years spent supine and drip-fed. Mia lives but that doesn't change Phoenix on the stand, injured and glaring, certain as all hell that he will claw his way to Redd White on the stand and Redd White in jail because he forged his chains with his own hands with every deed and when he dies he'll be an iron cocoon sinking into a molten lake for all his effort. Maya is Maya is Maya — and it's so much that she, like Diego, like Miles, like Mia, looked at Phoenix and called her fear to heel because He Would Rather Kill Himself Than Hurt Mia (and it's comforting to know someone like that is on your side). Iris. Just Iris in her entirety and Dahlia and how you never explained away the pain but gave it name and form and a burial in place to say "Iris of Hazakura Temple will have comfort through Phoenix for all she might have hurt him he did love and care for her" yknow? (Not that canon ever said she didn't but what isn't said in canon can fill books and hundreds of thousands of words of fanfiction can't it lol.)
I think for all my words here I said very little so I suppose — TLDR: this was great and I will be thinking about it for a long while as I finally have unblocked my own creative processes.
The 24th might take my time away but my energy is back and it's because of this series so thank you.
Also have a second kudos for every work in this series (+3 Kudos) since the site won't let me double up. :T
I am chewing and swallowing this comment up right now. Absolutely losing my mind. It's so fucking good to hear people just read and read and I'm glad it was there to keep you company while you couldn't sleep. And knowing it inspired you to keep working on your own stuff? THAT is the epitome of praise as far as I'm concerned so thank you for telling me.
Ya know, I don't know, but I'm exactly the same - all my favourite stories are the ones with characters choosing to be kind despite everything around them trying to force them not to be. You still get to make that choice. And sometimes you make the wrong one. But you can do better next time.
Lmao, no worries, ghost stories are my favourite kind. It doesn't even need actual ghosts - AA has a few, but so many of the people haunting the narrative we only see briefly or not at all, and yet they're everywhere. Gregory, Von Karma, Dahlia, Misty: without them, the events of the games would never have happened, and that's just the original trilogy. Where do you start to separate how they lived with how they died? Can you ascribe a legacy to a dead person when they never got a chance to decide for themselves? How do you go on living seeing dead people everywhere you look? I just fuckin--AH i love ghost stories :D
I said this in a previous comment to someone else I think: i'm slowly lighting fires under canon. A lot of them are already spreading. Diego in particular, yeah, that's going to be a mess and a half. The world doesn't need him to keep turning, and there he'll be right back at the start. He deserves to be a little selfish (and I absolutely agree with you on that point). Mia's here and yet not (for now. Maybe she has been longer than she noticed). White, well, who doesn't dig their own grave in the end? A shame he can't feel the hands clawing at his back, dragging him deeper. In a way, Maya's the most difficult to write, because my mind wants to jump ahead to Phoenix And Maya, Maya And Nick (Do Not Separate), but they're not there yet. At least if she's learned anything, it's to make her own decisions. Feys are funny about death that way. But Phoenix won't ever forget that. Iris, Iris, Iris - another haunting, this time with bones and blood (she will not deserve to die the way she does). She has had Bikini, but she had Phoenix too. Of course it meant/means/will mean so much. That's the joy of fanfiction :) and Dahlia, a tragedy in the shape of a girl. I have so much more to say about her, but it couldn't be Diego who said it.
You said more than enough. Like I said, I'm happy and grateful to have inspired your own work. And thank you so much for taking the time to write this comment (and for the extra kudos)! I'll be carrying it with me through my own writing <3
Choose joy. Choose kindness. Your Phoenix is hurt by the dead (they don't mean to they're scared they're hurting) and the living (who see Other and Death and are afraid in an animal way so they lash out in a human way and for all the scars ghosts leave on his skin, the ones you can't see—the human ones—are worse) and he is KIND. He is HELPFUL. He's Nick. It's a good AU because that is Phoenix—someone who is kind, who wants to help those that have nobody else im their corner, someone who looks at a scared girl being accused of her sister's murder and says "no" and helps her to his detriment and his gain—at his core. A kind person.
God yeah like...the opening line from A Christmas Carol really lives rent-free in my head all the time. "Jacob Marley was dead; to begin with." The story is haunted, before it begins, by the passing of Jacob Marley, and from that point onward it is about ghosts, even if Marley never showed his face or if any Real Ghosts showed up. Grief is haunting. Mourning is being haunted. Stories haunted by characters in their absence (even if they never had a part to play past haunting) are stories with holes that howl and I LOVE playing in that space.
The world is choked in ghosts (real) and ghosts (emotional) and ghosts (memories) and to visualize them is...it's about choosing to think about everything we touch and everyone who touched us. What keeps us? When would we let go? Valerie holding the knife in her back to remind her and fading at last when all is said and done. Diego unable to think of the body in the hospital bed as his but knowing in his bones he is a brother and god he hates this kid (it's him he hates and he stills his hand and tries to show himself some kindness because he was a kid and Diego but nothing more, an obligation, everyone leaves but he won't without saying so). Fawles who wanted to apologize more than he wanted Dahlia brought to justice because Mia and Diego were nice to him and he repayed them with death. Swallows, who screams and claws and curses "why didn't you die why was it me?!" Staying for love, for others, for yourself, because you're stuck, for revenge, because you're lost, because you don't know what else to do.
(I've always loved horror from a young age and to this day I think Gothic Horror got it right. A house is a character. A place is haunted. Memories are ghosts. You inhale new and exhale old and everyone dies one inch at a time and so bouquets of wild garlic line your windows and wrap around your neck so the soft pink-purple wards away the fangs of evil for one night more. You stitch together a new person who laments they are (cogito ergo sum) and cannot ever be (not in the true way, though Velveteen if given the choice) and you have made your own haunting. Your body is a home too, in its right, so places are vessels.)
(Apparently sleeping did little for my brain filtering out my words lmao.)
But yeah uh...I love Maya. I love Maya on her own and I love Maya And Phoenix as a unit as Do Not Seperate as one-in-two. It's why she's the main character of my own work, because i want her to shine and sometimes that means the wringer lmao.
I like to give credit where it's due and boy its due lmao.
Yeees, whenever someone says a kind character is ‘bland’ or something I’m just ‘god that sounds like a you problem’ because kindness is never a given. It’s always a choice, one that has to be made over and over, even when it’s hard, even when cruelty might be easier, and it is so much easier said than done. S’what so many stories are for, I think. Just to remind us that it is hard—but it’s also possible. Phoenix gets angry. He’s selfish. Sometimes oblivious. And honestly he’s a bit of a bitch. But at his best (and he always gets there eventually) he wants to help people. So he does. Like his logic, straight and true.
Gothic horror is such good food (I might be hungry I’ve been writing all day and keep forgetting to snack lmao we’re both doing great). Fricking, Dorian Gray: “I am tired of myself tonight. I should like to be somebody else.” Haunted by himself the entire time. Confessions of a Justified Sinner: “I feel as if I were the same person.” Maybe about the devil, maybe about a hallucination, you are the evil and the evil is you. Isn’t it? Is it? Or the monologue from the end of the game Anatomy: “What happens to a house when it is left alone?... It may grow lonesome… It may haunt itself… It may grow angry… It may grow bitter. It may grow hungry.” All those things we feel ourselves but don’t want to admit we do. Growing in the dark. Growing with or without us. Growing in spite of us. Or because of us.
Poor Valerie… probably? Poor Fawles… to a point? (When do you stop holding a dead person accountable?). Swallow is just collateral, of course it wasn’t fair. (How much do you owe a dead person? Phoenix was scared. He didn’t mean to.) But choosing to be better. But you’re not unforgiveable, but the time would pass anyway, but you have a chance so many people don’t so get up and go Diego. Go on then, boy.
I’m just rambling myself now lol. Yeeess I love Maya (that's the other reason she's difficult to write - I wanna give her her due). I’ll jump over to look at your fic when I get a chance! She can get a little main character suffering, as a treat. Jokes aside, she absolutely deserves the spotlight, and I’m fascinated by the premise.
:D thanks, credit’s still mostly to you though. You’d get it done without me, I just got to give you a push.
Comment on Spark Your Fires
SandrC on Chapter 3 Sat 20 Jan 2024 01:33PM UTC
Comment Actions
Kitisonfire on Chapter 3 Sat 20 Jan 2024 06:25PM UTC
Comment Actions
SandrC on Chapter 3 Sat 20 Jan 2024 09:12PM UTC
Comment Actions
Kitisonfire on Chapter 3 Sat 20 Jan 2024 10:32PM UTC
Comment Actions