Questions Once More, I have. (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

First as always, a bit of a sitrep. I have finished work on Heroes of the High Seas, I will be sending it out to its editor(s?) later tonight. I will then start work on FILFy Teacher and work on that until next Tuesday. If I haven’t finished the chapter by then, I will leave it and switch on to the winner of the Ranma poll, as I don’t want work on the fourth story of the month to get in the way of the other three poll-chosen stories.

That being said, I wish to also ask a few more questions of you all going forward.

First, for Magic of the Force:

1.      I think it’s pretty clear that Anakin is no longer going to willingly dive headfirst into the Dark Side as he did in cannon. The war will still shape him to a certain degree, but he will be becoming a knight in truth sooner than in canon but he’s no longer prone to falling to the Dark Side at the drop of the metaphorical hat.

However, there remains one question: Anakin wants to be in love with someone. Padme is most decidedly no longer on the table. So who should it be? I’m open for suggestions so long as they are from this period, and not a padawan at this time. I would prefer a Force user, but that isn’t a game changer. I’m just curious to see you who you all might want to see eventually involved with him.

2.      This one might just be me, but I’m afraid that it feels to me as if my Sidious POVs are getting too repetitive. Should I cut them out until something major occurs? Or are his little movements on the political scene still interesting enough even while he basically is forced to play a slooow game while the war continues on and nothing major occurs for a little while in terms of his clandestine war against the Jedi?

Second, some questions for my Ranma fans and Stallion of the Line.  (Yes, hopefully, Tomon will be getting the chapter back to me at some point this week and I will host the final version of the latest chapter here and over on fanfic. We will see.)

1.      Should Ace and Whitebeard’s crew attempt to strike out on their own, elevate Ace or Marco to try and take over the position of a Yonko? Or should they toss in their lot with Raffy right away? The latter is how I initially thought it would play out, but I’m not certain Marco and the other surviving commanders would be willing to go with it.

2.      Shiki. I’m honestly uncertain what to do with this character from here on. Would he try to take over the white beer crew? He kind of has them all under his power right now. Could be a a source of internal conflict among the pirates there. Or is he honorable enough to just finish helping them escape, and then go his own way, which may or may not include taking up his plans again that white beard had interrupted. Or should he be the one to try and retrieve white beards weapon and body? Curious to see what people think of him.

3.      Should I have Sanji’s estranged family reach out to the Straw Hat crew same way that they reached out to Big Mom? I have two ways I can play with Reiju and the rest, I’m just not certain which makes the most sense given everything that has occurred. I just don’t have as good a handle on the patriarch of the Vinsmoke family’s character as I would like to have.

And lastly, some Fate Touched in Middle Earth questions.

1.      The Blue Wizards and the Easterlings. I’m curious which version of the Blue Wizards people believe is more canonically accurate, because Tolkien himself changed the background of the Blue Wizards later in life. At first, the two brothers, followers of Ulmo, had gone east and eventually they fell into darkness. Whether or not that meant they failed, and were subsequently killed, or turned to evil as Saruman later does, is up for interpretation, although Tolkien later hinted in his letters that maybe they started secret cults based around dark magic that survived even Sauron’s fall, hence one interpretation that I might go with in the future when dealing with the Easterlings.

The other interpretation comes later in Tolkien’s life, and basically boils down to the idea that they were sent earlier than the other wizards, and actually succeeded for a time, damaging Sauron’s control over the Easterlings in such a way that they could not devote the sheer numbers that they would otherwise have been able to bring to bear against the men of the east and the elves, who would have been overwhelmed otherwise.

Pretty different interpretations, as I said. I’m not going to promise to follow one or the other just yet, as I think that I will be delving into the Easterling’s only vaguely, and only through, heh, violent interactions against them for quite a while. I’m just curious about which you all find the most intriguing.

2.      Thorin and war.  Have I made Thorin an interesting enough character that you all would like to see a point of view from his perspective as he journeys past the Iron Hills into the lands of his wife’s people? And further, would you like to see the dwarves at war without Harry and Tauriel being there for a bit?

3.      Same question in general terms with Aragorn. I have plans to follow him, and to a lesser extent, Harry and Tauriel’s journey in Gondor later on in the story. However, I am wondering about whether or not I should show some interactions with him and with the other rangers of the North prior to that time. That is a part of Aragorn story that we don’t know much about. Leadership is a tricky thing, and just because he was raised to be a leader doesn’t mean that it is all smooth sailing after all. Yet a part of me thinks that showing that stuff in detail would drag the story on, and I am uncertain that it needs it.

(And yes folks, I will be showing some instances soon about his interactions with Elrond, and Arwen and how he fell in love with her. That’s kind of a must, LOL, as it shapes everything else about his life going forward.)

And last, but certainly not least, a moment of silence for the passing of a legend. For those of you who don’t know, James Earl Jones, the voice actor for Darth Vader, the actor who played Thulsa Doom in Conan and many other roles throughout his time as an actor, passed away yesterday at the age of ninety-four. He will be missed, just as Terry Pratchett, Leonard Nemoy and Sir Christopher Lee before him.