I have to think about this one carefully... (Radiant Historia)

Too many belts!

 

Also, if we're going to repost silly things I posted in the Radiant Historia tag ages ago, I feel like this needs to be included.

 

Spoiler: About the best ending...

Heiss gives over his soul bit for the ritual, which implies that Eruca got it because the ritual requires that the not-Sacrifice have the strength of what are now essentially two souls. Since that returned soul piece is returned - this might mean some weird things for Eruca, who now has half the soul of her father that was taken in weird, twisted directions by Heiss.

Having a soul that belonged to someone who (presumably) wasn't the same gender as the original owner isn't seen as any big deal, and in-game it doesn't seem to affect their original personality at all, but that soul piece has a LOT of history and didn't originally belong to Eruca at all. And say Stocke dies before she does (which, what with all the time travel is not unlikely) and she gets that soul piece back, too - can a person's soul be overstuffed?

So many unanswered questions!

 

Spoiler

I've always headcanoned that most of the sacrifice's soul gets more or less used up in the ritual, so there's not much left, but I know other people who take it in different directions.

And we don't actually know that it doesn't effect their personality, because we don't see anyone before and after. Stocke has a lot of much more obvious things that could change his personality, so it'd be impossible to pin anything on the soul stuff, plus everything we know of Ernst is secondhand and biased. And we don't know anything about pre-death Heiss at all (artbook calls him Heinrich, and despite my tendency to "lolno" a lot of the artbook, it's as good a name as any).

I did once suggest "AU where Stocke is a trans woman and immediately starts presenting as female post-mindwipe because she thinks hey, starting a new life somewhere else, might as well do it as the right gender, and Heiss is like ??? and blames Eruca because ~obviously~ this is her fault." :::PPP

 

It's enough of a mystery one can do what one likes with it then. Frustrating (because it's nice to have something to springboard off of), but useful (because then you can do whatever the hell suits you)!

Also, I am going through your RH tag on tumblr and having a lot of fun, and have a bunch of fic tabs open for later perusal.

Alsoalso, I see I may be sullying up the AO3 RH tag when I do write fic of it. Only two explicit works so far? Ho hum >_>;; (... Oh hey, I see one of my favorite fic people wrote RH fic before sie moved on to Homestuck!)

 

I did see you liked the pizza fic, which I wrote because it was clearly something the fandom desperately needed. :::PPP (If you hit my first fic, it has a number of things where my opinions and headcanons have changed a lot over time (and quite a bit of stuff I'd change on a writing/technical level, if I cared enough), because I wrote it not very long after I finished the game. For what that's worth.)

One of the E works is deliberately overrated and overtagged because someone complained that people were making out in a fic rated T, and they wanted to scare this person off from trying to read the other one so they wouldn't get upset again. #secret insider knowledge

 

I always figure old fic isn't usually going to reflect a fan's current ideas about the canon, no worries.

... That's hilarious. Oh my god. Reminds me of one time ceruleancynic got a snotty comment for including implied sex in a fic about two young men in an evolving relationship. The sheer amount of wtf...

Sooo basically that means I'll be the first person crawling up from the sewer grating to leave a genuine explicit offering? Hmm. That'd be typical me, though, because

 

There's the inexplicable dubcon fic, an angsty Stocke/Raynie fic, and a Dias/Selvan fic waaay in the back, but I think that's all the porn so far, yeah. It's a side-effect of there only really being ~four writers producing significant amounts of fic so far (me, Quicksilver, Tanaka, and Anweyr), and only one of us writing smut. Skewed sample.

(Incidentally, if there's one fic even more baffling than "why would you choose THAT pairing for dubcon," it's that there's an incest fic that, while properly tagged, never in any way mentions that the pairing is incest. I'm 95% sure they wrote it before they finished the game.)

 

Well, then. *climbs out of trash can, plants self in the smut writer's corner of the fandom* :D (probably pale smut as well as the usual kind, because Stocke is ripe for hates-being-touched-but-is-touch-starved-and-doesn't-realize-until-he-has-to-be-cared-for sorts of fic.) (I may be projecting on him just a little.)

Haha, whoops! And clearly didn't pick up on the Interesting Implications that are pretty clear after his campfire conversation with her. (Maybe they didn't even get that far yet? Hm.)

 

Projection or not, that is 1000% my headcanon.

Spoiler

On top of any brainweird, he grew up in a deeply dysfunctional family with intense cultural expectations of "proper" behavior and had to act older and more mature than he was. Since nobody so much as mentions the kids' biological mom, she probably died when they were young, which narrows the field of adults who were even remotely likely to be giving the royal kids hugs to, like. Maybe a nanny. And certainly never in public. So affectionate human contact in general is probably kind of weird and unfamiliar to both of them.

 

By the way, since Mercury is going through my RH tag, another extremely terrible observation I made quite a while ago but don't think I've ever posted on Tumblr:

Spoiler: spoilers and also probably a general trigger warning

Everyone knows Stocke is the boss's favorite, and least some of the Specint crowd think it's unearned.

A lot of people, on finding out the older, male boss is doting on and acting overly friendly toward a much younger and very good-looking employee, are going to make assumptions about why that employee is the favorite, and the first guess isn't going to be "nepotism."

 

I was thinking along those lines when I saw discussion of the weird doting in your tag. It's awful and I love it. :3 :3 :3

 

Heiss would probably murder anyone who he knew was spreading rumors like that, but not all of it would get back to him, and some people might take the mysterious deaths of anyone who talked about it as proof.

 

Bonus points for Rosch, who is not good at feelings, very awkwardly trying to figure out how/if he should ask.

 

Poor Rosch! He's already (justifiably) horrified enough at the situation... :(

I just had a headcanon re: Stocke being touchstarved--

Spoiler

Every time he has to go to Sonja to get patched up - which is a lot, the guy doesn't have sufficient regard for his own well being - she notices after a while that he relaxes under her hands. She's never anything but crisp and professional of course, and he's the same, but as he comes to trust her and they come to be friends she notices that during examinations or treatments, his posture loses some of its tension and he seems just a tiny bit happier.

This of course just makes her even more worried for him, especially since Rosch tells her that as far as he can tell, Stocke is celibate as a monk. (That bit of information puts a speculative glint in her eye. Much later when she feels safe in teasing Rosch about his not-all-that-well-concealed Feelings for Stocke she lets slip some of that speculation, which causes Rosch to turn bright red and hide his head under a pillow for a solid thirty minutes.)

 

"Maybe if I hide the feelings can't find me and I can pretend that I'm straight." :::PPP

 

I should write ridiculous smut where Garland and Rosch have to wrestle for Reasons and it results in a boner from Garland, a whyboner from Rosch, and a very confused boner from Stocke.

Speaking of Rosch, I have all sorts of thoughts on his Gauntlet that I will try to get to tomorrow.

Also, this game may inspire me to start drawing again. But no promises.

 

Another very important thing I really need to finish sometime: that fic where Pierre from the Resistance had a hopeless unrequited crush on Ernst and is really not dealing well with the arrival of what appears to be his evil twin.

Especially because he really doesn't want to admit the evil twin is hotter.

 

Wrote a thing about Rosch's Gauntlet.

 

I think it's a pretty popular headcanon. =P And also sadly under-explored in fic. I do mean to get into some of that in Homefires (cw: Raynie/Stocke), but there's so much else that needs to happen first. And also I need time to write the damn thing. >_<