Ignis probably could considering she’s the daughter to the people that’s running a big time weapons company and actually gave Nova like 20 grand for everyone’s new clothes.
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True but while she may have a decent amount of wealth to be able to fund the League and the personnel attached to it. It’s another thing entirely to fund the repairing of an entire sector of a city and the repayment for the lives lost during the incident, plus I’m not sure if her family would be willing to allow themselves to get attached to such an issue in terms of supporting the people who destroyed the area financially.
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I am not sure thats the case, superheroes have existed for centuries in this world so people are used to them, my guess would be repairing superhero damage is just a line of item in the budget.
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I’ve got a few songs that I keep in mind for the characters, ye! If you check the code, you can see there’s a few *comments under some of the Hero Profiles with songs (and the specific portion of them) that represent the cast at least a little.
I don’t have a theme for the Broken Cult, but I do have one for the King and Queen. The name alone should tip you off what it’s like: Victory. (Three guesses who I imagine vocalizing 
).
There’s also Reality, which was by Divide Music, but that one’s probably closer to them when they set up shop in Crete instead of their whole lives.
The rest of the cast also has songs, though they’re full ones with lyrics instead of just themes.
Forlorn gets Rise Against’s Help is on the Way. alongside Empty Chairs.
Ignis keeps her Kids Again by Artist vs Poet, though there’s also others like Tonight Alive’s World Away. If she’s in a romance with the MC, probably add Awake by Artist vs Poet or Dead Man Walking by The Script as well.
Seeker’s got… a few. Outlines by All Time Low, No Control by Set It Off, but there are also two I consider a lot, both in Spanish. Me Llama (She Calls Me), by Beret, and No Pide Tanto, Idiota (She’s Not Asking For A Lot), by Maldita Nerea. He also technically shares Kids Again with Ignis.
Gloria’s is one of the most representative ones. Untraveled Road by Thousand Foot Krutch is quite literally what I listened to while writing his dialogue, and it’s what I go back to when he comes up.
Aki has Kaunaz Dagaz by Brothers of Metal, though the reason behind that particular song won’t become clear yet.
Ignis can probably cover the repair costs of anything caused by her personally. Even if she didn’t, Gloria likely wouldn’t force the League to pay.
Again, you’re thinking a bit too big, but also not big enough.
The League was brought as protection. Their job is to protect.
But for Seeker, that job goes out the fucking window the millisecond it impedes him from watching out and protecting Ignis.
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Does Seeker abandon protecting G7 leaders to save Ignis and one of the leaders die?
That is one thing that can explain everything.
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Okay so who wants to start betting on which leader dies? I got a five on Hiro the Japanese PM.
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I got 100 on the French President or Italian Prime Minister.
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All I’m gonna say is that I’ve had the ending to Chapter 5 planned since I started Chapter 4.
And my biggest headache about writing it remains how to sell it to an Ignismancer.
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As an Ignismancer I would say do what you gotta do. I think it’s been made fairly clear that though you can romance her it isn’t going to end well, especially now with the rewrite where you can tell that these two people do have an affinity for one another and there is always that risk that things can end at any moment when these two realize their feelings for one another.
If that is what you are worried about anyway lol. But maybe it’s my personal preference for making my MC’s suffer coming out.
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Not quite what my worry is, but I appreciate the support regardless!
You’ll see what I mean soon enough, it’s less a problem of how to structure it and more a “oh, this should probably cause drama, huh?”.
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That’s why you DON’T fight the King over this, because fighting the King strikes me as a chump’s game in the best of cases. You point out that what he’s about to do involves the sacrifice of innocent lives and how would the Queen, someone who’s motto was “protect to win”, feel about him and HERSELF knowing that she’s only alive because a bunch of innocents got slaughtered? How would someone who’s main goal in life was to protect the innocent look themselves in the mirror every day, knowing that their face is drenched in innocent blood?
People keep trying to fight the Broken King, a dude who’s done literally nothing of note for the past thousand years, instead of figuring out ways that would let them not need to fight the King in the first place, and I keep wondering why. You’re all a bunch of Glorias. (In case it isn’t obvious, Other Me’s getting a hell of a time trying to get that battle lust up and running)
To which the League answers, “Well, YOU’RE the ones who set the place to be deliberately attacked, so we’re paying jack squat. What are you going to do about it? Cry? By the way, Seeker alone can go through half your entire military in under half an hour and we’re moving to Crete. Byeeeeeeesieeees.”
I mean, not gonna lie, I TOO would unhesitantingly let Gloria die if it meant protecting anybody from the team. Or random people. Or a goldfish. Ok, not Stratton or Dark Star.
I’m betting NOT the French lady, because she and Gloria are apparently a thing and that’d be throwing away a narrative hook. Unless, of course, Gloria actually intends for her specifically to die because “oh no, I cared so much about her, woe is I, also, y’know, war for love, follow me, fools, uh, I mean, loyal Americans.”
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No comment on what the King would or wouldn’t do to bring the Queen back, but:
The Queen essentially “built” the King’s morality. As a few characters will tell you, the King was more a force of nature than a normal person, and it was the Queen that taught him better in many aspects (or at all. The Queen was the one that taught him how to read, for example).
Right now, what the Queen taught him remains. They’re ‘chains’, so to speak, that keep the King behaving as he ‘should’, or as ‘the Queen would want’.
But it’s been a thousand years, and now only one of those chains remain.
What do you think will happen if certain people keep forcibly pulling on a chain that has been in constant use for a thousand years?
And, of course, how much do you trust the morals of a woman that lived more than a thousand years ago, and saw the deaths of 80,000 as no skin off her back?
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Considering those 80,000 people were about to engage in genocide, and she even gave them a warning first, quite a bit. She certainly ranks infinitely higher than Gloria (and than Stratton, but hey, who doesn’t?).
EDIT: I mean, we don’t know enough about Back-Then Crete to actually evaluate her policies (where does she stand on, say, slavery, a common enough practice back then?), but while “she killed 80,000 dudes about to engage in genocide” DOES move the morality needle, it’s not in the direction of “Bad”.
She gets bonus points for going from “siding with the Byzantines against the Cretans” when the Cretans were being shits to “siding with the Cretans against the Byzantines” when the Byzantines were being genocidal shits.
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There’s actually a little bit about that. It’s one of the first things I wrote. See here:
There’s not much besides little snippets I’ve written, but one of the other big things is that she made it legal for women to own property.
There’s arguably a pragmatic reason behind that one, but…
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Thank you.
There’s something weird with this sentence: “and the proposition of slave workers turned the advocate for it into two cleanly divided advocates” EDIT: No, wait, no there isn’t, I just got it.
Except, of course, that if the Queen said “that’s a bad dude” the King would have their head off so fast it’d hit the floor and roll into the ocean before the dude even realised they were dead, right?
Op, there it is:
Hahaha, “Oh shit the nice one is dead, better get REAL keen on making a better world for everyone”.
Never mind the King, at this point I want to bring the Blitz Queen back and put her in charge of… everything, really.
I mean, it’s not like the Queen needed for it to be legal for women to own property for HER to own property. Like, who was going to go up to her and go “actually, you don’t own this, you FEMALE”? People who are about to get removed from the gene pool, that’s who. Darwin Award winners, right there.
An unrelated thought has occurred. In the next… not necessarily update, but scene, if you have Aki talk Forlorn down (because the option is sending Seeker and I’d like to make it through this without a team member getting put through a cuisinart), and you (presumably) go along to give her cover and make sure she has time to do it, what are the chances of Forlorn ignoring everything else and coming for your throat if you’re an Akimancer?
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Oh, it means she got rid of him. In the 'banana split’ kind of way. The Queen was not a fan of slavery. Later in history, Crete actually got runaway slaves from Crimea pretty often.
Oh, definitely. The Queen did as the Queen wanted.
The reason is for the people under her. Remember, the King and Queen took over Crete in the aftermath of a war. A large amount of Crete’s male population died in this war (an army of 40k got destroyed, for example), which meant that there was a lot of properties and such in the island that now fell to their wives/mothers/etc. The Queen made it legal for these women to run and inherit these properties from their deceased partners.
Women remained something of a fixture in Crete thanks to that. They weren’t allowed to serve in the army (well, after the Queen died and other groups started governing, anyway), but they were still allowed to sponsor and finance the navy’s ships. Crete’s foremost naval squadron for… centuries has been dubbed ‘Lioness Squadron’, since it was originally paid for by women.
The current head of the navy is also a woman. Since Crete’s a naval-focused country, she’s actually got the highest rank compared to all other branches. She has precedence over anyone but the President.
Not very high. Note that Aki states that Forlorn barely recognizes her.
In his head, he’s reverted to a few years in the past. That definitely predates your messing around with Aki, and it also predates him even joining the League.
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Yeah, I got it later, but I guess you’d already read the original when I edited. My bad.
Oh, I see, I see.
Seriously, there’s nothing I’ve heard about this woman that doesn’t make my first reaction when meeting the King want to be “sorry for your loss, how can I help bring her back and hand her the keys to the city world?”
And thus I get to keep all my limbs for another day.
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When slavery and caste systems were disturbingly common? Not much at all.
Well as Havenstone’s own WIP on this site makes abundantly clear equality between the sexes does not in and of itself preclude slavery or harsh caste systems.
And while fictional Crete under the queen may have been moderate for its time, that also does not mean it would translate well to the modern world.
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This was EXACTLY my hesitation, but apparently slavery was an extremely very much no-go with the Queen, and while there seems to have been a class system, if one of the upper classes decided they were very upper, they became lower. By a head.
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Of course, the Queen has her personal failures still. A few of them are relating to the King, but learning about them will take a while longer. She isn’t perfect by any means.
And, of course, the fact does remain that as friendly as she might have been to the populace, the Queen was still an absolute ruler whose mere ‘suggestion’ might as well be a law, on the basis that she had a complete monopoly on force. One could possibly argue that she was a dictator forcing her ideology on a people.
…And, likewise, she still engaged in trade and such with countries that were definitely not great (the Byzantines, Scandinavian nations, most of the Middle East and North Africa, etc), so you could try and argue she was an accomplice on some level.
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