Remix!

[lady_ganesh]

The bad news about remix is that I have no new awesome author to follow, because Walks Like a Turtleduck, Talks Like a Turtlebuck was written by the fantastic ranalore. But that is the only bad news, and it's not really so bad, is it?

For my normal remix assignment I had seta_suzume and spent a good four days panicking that I might not be able to write FMA. But I dug in anyway, narrowing it down to four stories, then two, than one.

Wildflowers (The Long Way to the Light remix) is a POV switch, which I am not sure I've ever done before for Remix. The original story is from Dr. Marcoh's POV, and I wanted to see what the village would look like from an insider's perspective, and how Scar would've seen his community's restoration.



I whined/panicked at theemdash and momebie about the worldbuilding, and then spent more time thinking about what kind of community the Ishvalans would rebuild. Marcoh says in the manga that the rebuilt Ishval should be a center for commerce, but I couldn't imagine an Amestris-sized Ishvalan city, at least not immediately in the wake of what had happened. The diaspora would've been scattered into small communities, and I decided they should keep those small communities.

So I had a story, and it was pretty well constructed, but there was something flat about it, so I threw it at lindentreeisle, who doesn't know the fandom, and made her look through it. Because I'm awesome like that. So we talked it over, and it helped, but I was still kind of flailing around a little. And then someone - I think it might've been momebie actually - linked Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Rules for Writing Fiction.

And there it was, bright as the sunshine:

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

And that was what I'd been missing - what did Scar want?

So I poked and prodded and thought about it, and I think I finally got there. I hope I did, anyway.

So thanks to all the people who helped me through, including red_squared, who I pulled in to beta. I really couldn't have done it without y'all.