Vagrant Story notes
Jul. 21st, 2002 02:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
petroniaThese are for moi. Online due to file version issues inherent in multi-computering, set to public because I have a tendency not to login to lj out of laziness. ...Though you can read them if you want. ^^; Spoilers, but like, duh.
One: this is going to involve politics.
The inquisition of the heretics. They still have inquisitors: Merlose is one. (Studied anachronisms. Love those X-Files tropes.) Could have been a long time ago. May not have been long at all. Very likely ran in cycles. Cardinal conducts witch-hunts. (Templars? Large churchly militia) Country apparently swarming with eschatologists for the hunting. There's your medieval French reference. Puzzlingly, *constitutional* religious freedom and implied separation of church and state. "While our Parliament cowers." Church pressures state to pass legislation, surely; some military leaders in agreement.
Key: they make it sound like it was a recent development. Damned religious freedom, tried it and didn't like it. Cultists bite. Some sort of political leverage on the side of the heretics - Bardoba, possibly and obviously. Valendia possibly still in throes of civil war, if not for Duke. Sounds like it lasted for a while... Five years ago? Ten years ago? (Could it have been 25 years ago?) Strong suggestion he put the current king on the throne, or solidified his hold there. Battles won - alliances gained? (Keep with the French references. Henri IV, surely... the edict of Nantes. Royal sympathy? Legislated religious freedom as a way to end the war, but apocalyptic cults sprang up, a thorny development.) Duke retains power as éminence grise. Cannot *possibly* be the Cardinal's political ally. Checks and balances...
Dark side to VKP. One wonders if there was ever... a Bay of Pigs? Too much James Ellroy.
"So the knights who came were not the King's men, but the Cardinal's?" Was Bardoba expecting the former? If so, did he think the King had turned against him? By whose hand the assassination attempt? VKP was right on the money, so to speak - Mullencamp's money - so we'll go with them. (This narrative has an issue with unreliable witnesses. It would be so much easier if one didn't have to stop at every sentence and ask seriously if the speaker had any reason to be lying through his/her teeth.) If so, LeSait is close to "acting" on the Duke - moving on him as a suspect in high treason and attempted regicide.
(Did Bardoba *know* this?)
Query: why the charade? Sydney's idea or the Duke's? (Does Sydney deserve a bloody Academy Award or what?) Examine the results of the little sally:
1) VKP HQ decides to move on Bardoba and his Mullencamp connections before they're severed for good. Hence, Ashley.
2) Cardinal Batistum decides... to do the same, apparently. But VKP merely wants evidence - "meddling fools," as they're dismissed - and Batistum wants the Gran Grimoire. He knows there *is* one, and he knows it's there, but he doesn't know it's the city. So how does he know what he knows, and no more or less?
(Esoteric books... published by a man later burned at the stake, containing plates purportedly engraved by Lucifer hirself... XDD)
So we're flushing out. But who are we flushing out? The King's men, or the Cardinal's? (Wow, *unintentional* Dumas reference.) Everyone thinks Bardoba broke with his cult, except senior and junior in question. I get this image of the Cardinal sending little feelers into Léa Monde for twenty years, and none of the agents ever reporting back... Mullencamp is controlling the place, ergo Bardoba's controlling the place, ergo he took the first opportunity he could to send his boys in to ransack Bardoba's pad. So maybe that was the entire point: who's going to come a-looking?
*If* Bardoba knew about the VKP, he must have known that once you pull the lever on the machine infernale it can't be stopped. But then, he's engineering his own death (and peripherally that of Sydney's). The only reason he'd have for ducking the issue would be Joshua. My next query was going to be about the timing for triggering the events, but methinks it could be simply Bardoba's doctors giving him a two-week prognosis.
When did Ashley really enter the picture? Sydney sure as heck *looked* surprised to see him, but then again if Sydney weren't a kooky cult leader he'd be the foremost Shakespearean actor of his age. I can *picture* his Hamlet, right here. ...Anyway, it took all of what, three hours for him to go from no-time-to-play-with-you to all-the-time-in-the-world-to-play-with-you, so forgive me if I catch a whiff of the stage. And Rosencrantz *did* say that it's thanks to him Ashley became "the VKP's errand-boy". Unreliable witness alert: cannot trust Rosencrantz further than he can be booted. Rosencrantz, however, is Mullencamp's only logical link with Agent Riot. Unreliable witness alert: that's if you believe R. was telling the truth about Ashley's past. However, believing otherwise would already imply R. and S. in cahoots to mess with Ashley's head, which would be improbable if Ashley picked randomly for mission.
Also, Bardoba tells Rosencrantz the lot is his if he goes to Léa Monde and takes care of Sydney, Blades et al. Cannot quite believe Bardoba intended to will it all to utter cad and bounder. Much more willing to believe Bardoba stringing him along. Do not feel very sorry for Rosencrantz.
Here's an odd one: Léa Monde *wasn't* a heretic city. The center of the Dark was also the holy ground of the Iocus priesthood. Lessee... the Franciscans? The Jesuits? An order that shook up the Church in a major way. Implication that the entire region was converted. Ex tenebris, Lux... The Kildean writings (not to mention the Temple) date from the city's founding, *waaaayy* before Iocus's round of reform. Twenty-five years ago the population wouldn't have known a thing about the Dark except for old wives' tales, poor sods.
"Only he who holds the Blood-Sin can succeed to the Dark City. The would-be successor must cede his phantom soul if he is to accept his prize - control of the Dark."
Unreliable witness alert, for the record: we're going to assume that Sydney told Hardin half the truth, as opposed to none of the truth. (Might as well, because if none of Hardin's information can be trusted we can wash our hands of making sense of this right here, and go and get a cool drink.) Actually, I *am* going to get a cool drink. So there.
...So according to Hardin, the Duke repents of his dark deeds. (Dark! Ha ha. I need sleep.) Regular people would call for a confessor, but Bardoba's soul is *seriously* in hock. Speculation as to how that happened. Possibly entire family born in hock to the Dark, but if that is the case cannot hope to cut off bloodline anyway - everyone wanted Joshua safe. Possibly just had to get Blood-Sin out of family - vary the will, so to speak, break the entail - but if that is the case, could have found a Hardin or a Riot, shanghaied him to Léa Monde and done the deed without any fuss. Why the fuss?
Oh, but the city had to be destroyed. Someone's reneging on a bargain, it reads to me... and it would make so much sense if it involved the soul of a first-born. There are only so many old faerie tales.
[ Gawd, I'm going to have to finish this some other time. If finish is the word. ]
When you get down to it, Guildenstern's most outstanding personality trait (well, besides megalomania) is an astonishingly bloody-minded literalism. You'd think a churchman would have more imagination. They tell him to go in there looking for the ultimate codex, so he spends days looking for a fucking *book* until Rosencrantz takes pity on him. Then it works for him, for once, because dear Lord do you have to be a bloody-minded literalist to figure out that bit about the tattoo. Not to mention to do what he then proceeds to do about it... Kawaisou na, Samantha. Boyfriend's failure to extend his metaphor-making abilities beyond Sunday catechism definitions is a shitty reason to die.
Geography: VKP HQ = Valnain (capital? It's 1 1/2 hours from the Graylands, express) . Both Bardoba residences = Graylands (Brittany? Poitou? XD). Léa Monde is a port, and very definitely in the south - screams Languedoc terribly, dunnit.
Sydney is sky blue. I didn't expect that. He likes Swinburne, and I didn't expect that either. Although I should have, I suppose. He's not exactly a Coleridge type.
One: this is going to involve politics.
The inquisition of the heretics. They still have inquisitors: Merlose is one. (Studied anachronisms. Love those X-Files tropes.) Could have been a long time ago. May not have been long at all. Very likely ran in cycles. Cardinal conducts witch-hunts. (Templars? Large churchly militia) Country apparently swarming with eschatologists for the hunting. There's your medieval French reference. Puzzlingly, *constitutional* religious freedom and implied separation of church and state. "While our Parliament cowers." Church pressures state to pass legislation, surely; some military leaders in agreement.
Key: they make it sound like it was a recent development. Damned religious freedom, tried it and didn't like it. Cultists bite. Some sort of political leverage on the side of the heretics - Bardoba, possibly and obviously. Valendia possibly still in throes of civil war, if not for Duke. Sounds like it lasted for a while... Five years ago? Ten years ago? (Could it have been 25 years ago?) Strong suggestion he put the current king on the throne, or solidified his hold there. Battles won - alliances gained? (Keep with the French references. Henri IV, surely... the edict of Nantes. Royal sympathy? Legislated religious freedom as a way to end the war, but apocalyptic cults sprang up, a thorny development.) Duke retains power as éminence grise. Cannot *possibly* be the Cardinal's political ally. Checks and balances...
Dark side to VKP. One wonders if there was ever... a Bay of Pigs? Too much James Ellroy.
"So the knights who came were not the King's men, but the Cardinal's?" Was Bardoba expecting the former? If so, did he think the King had turned against him? By whose hand the assassination attempt? VKP was right on the money, so to speak - Mullencamp's money - so we'll go with them. (This narrative has an issue with unreliable witnesses. It would be so much easier if one didn't have to stop at every sentence and ask seriously if the speaker had any reason to be lying through his/her teeth.) If so, LeSait is close to "acting" on the Duke - moving on him as a suspect in high treason and attempted regicide.
(Did Bardoba *know* this?)
Query: why the charade? Sydney's idea or the Duke's? (Does Sydney deserve a bloody Academy Award or what?) Examine the results of the little sally:
1) VKP HQ decides to move on Bardoba and his Mullencamp connections before they're severed for good. Hence, Ashley.
2) Cardinal Batistum decides... to do the same, apparently. But VKP merely wants evidence - "meddling fools," as they're dismissed - and Batistum wants the Gran Grimoire. He knows there *is* one, and he knows it's there, but he doesn't know it's the city. So how does he know what he knows, and no more or less?
(Esoteric books... published by a man later burned at the stake, containing plates purportedly engraved by Lucifer hirself... XDD)
So we're flushing out. But who are we flushing out? The King's men, or the Cardinal's? (Wow, *unintentional* Dumas reference.) Everyone thinks Bardoba broke with his cult, except senior and junior in question. I get this image of the Cardinal sending little feelers into Léa Monde for twenty years, and none of the agents ever reporting back... Mullencamp is controlling the place, ergo Bardoba's controlling the place, ergo he took the first opportunity he could to send his boys in to ransack Bardoba's pad. So maybe that was the entire point: who's going to come a-looking?
*If* Bardoba knew about the VKP, he must have known that once you pull the lever on the machine infernale it can't be stopped. But then, he's engineering his own death (and peripherally that of Sydney's). The only reason he'd have for ducking the issue would be Joshua. My next query was going to be about the timing for triggering the events, but methinks it could be simply Bardoba's doctors giving him a two-week prognosis.
When did Ashley really enter the picture? Sydney sure as heck *looked* surprised to see him, but then again if Sydney weren't a kooky cult leader he'd be the foremost Shakespearean actor of his age. I can *picture* his Hamlet, right here. ...Anyway, it took all of what, three hours for him to go from no-time-to-play-with-you to all-the-time-in-the-world-to-play-with-you, so forgive me if I catch a whiff of the stage. And Rosencrantz *did* say that it's thanks to him Ashley became "the VKP's errand-boy". Unreliable witness alert: cannot trust Rosencrantz further than he can be booted. Rosencrantz, however, is Mullencamp's only logical link with Agent Riot. Unreliable witness alert: that's if you believe R. was telling the truth about Ashley's past. However, believing otherwise would already imply R. and S. in cahoots to mess with Ashley's head, which would be improbable if Ashley picked randomly for mission.
Also, Bardoba tells Rosencrantz the lot is his if he goes to Léa Monde and takes care of Sydney, Blades et al. Cannot quite believe Bardoba intended to will it all to utter cad and bounder. Much more willing to believe Bardoba stringing him along. Do not feel very sorry for Rosencrantz.
Here's an odd one: Léa Monde *wasn't* a heretic city. The center of the Dark was also the holy ground of the Iocus priesthood. Lessee... the Franciscans? The Jesuits? An order that shook up the Church in a major way. Implication that the entire region was converted. Ex tenebris, Lux... The Kildean writings (not to mention the Temple) date from the city's founding, *waaaayy* before Iocus's round of reform. Twenty-five years ago the population wouldn't have known a thing about the Dark except for old wives' tales, poor sods.
"Only he who holds the Blood-Sin can succeed to the Dark City. The would-be successor must cede his phantom soul if he is to accept his prize - control of the Dark."
Unreliable witness alert, for the record: we're going to assume that Sydney told Hardin half the truth, as opposed to none of the truth. (Might as well, because if none of Hardin's information can be trusted we can wash our hands of making sense of this right here, and go and get a cool drink.) Actually, I *am* going to get a cool drink. So there.
...So according to Hardin, the Duke repents of his dark deeds. (Dark! Ha ha. I need sleep.) Regular people would call for a confessor, but Bardoba's soul is *seriously* in hock. Speculation as to how that happened. Possibly entire family born in hock to the Dark, but if that is the case cannot hope to cut off bloodline anyway - everyone wanted Joshua safe. Possibly just had to get Blood-Sin out of family - vary the will, so to speak, break the entail - but if that is the case, could have found a Hardin or a Riot, shanghaied him to Léa Monde and done the deed without any fuss. Why the fuss?
Oh, but the city had to be destroyed. Someone's reneging on a bargain, it reads to me... and it would make so much sense if it involved the soul of a first-born. There are only so many old faerie tales.
[ Gawd, I'm going to have to finish this some other time. If finish is the word. ]
When you get down to it, Guildenstern's most outstanding personality trait (well, besides megalomania) is an astonishingly bloody-minded literalism. You'd think a churchman would have more imagination. They tell him to go in there looking for the ultimate codex, so he spends days looking for a fucking *book* until Rosencrantz takes pity on him. Then it works for him, for once, because dear Lord do you have to be a bloody-minded literalist to figure out that bit about the tattoo. Not to mention to do what he then proceeds to do about it... Kawaisou na, Samantha. Boyfriend's failure to extend his metaphor-making abilities beyond Sunday catechism definitions is a shitty reason to die.
Geography: VKP HQ = Valnain (capital? It's 1 1/2 hours from the Graylands, express) . Both Bardoba residences = Graylands (Brittany? Poitou? XD). Léa Monde is a port, and very definitely in the south - screams Languedoc terribly, dunnit.
Sydney is sky blue. I didn't expect that. He likes Swinburne, and I didn't expect that either. Although I should have, I suppose. He's not exactly a Coleridge type.
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no subject
Date: 2002-07-21 01:14 am (UTC)So I probably shouldn't mention the crackrabbit origfic idea that Creed and I have where all my Vagrant Story muses are stage actors and the story begins with a party celebrating the successful opening of a production of Hamlet, right?
(Hardin is Hamlet, though; Sydney in this particular universe is about 50 and probably playing Claudius. Think Alexander Dane from Galaxy Quest crossed with Ian McKellen and you'll have about the right idea. Very British, very gay.)
no subject
Date: 2002-07-21 10:01 pm (UTC)(Girl auditioning for the role of Ophelia: I'll do a bit, then. You said it didn't have to be Shakespeare, right?
Kenneth Branagh character: uh, no...
Girl: All right then, this is Donna Summers.)
...Er, it *is* actually a film about a production of Hamlet. Despite the name. Incredibly fast-paced and British and shot in b&w, of all things. Lovely film. :)
That was the subconscious at work, though. I'd honestly forgotten R. and G. were characters in Hamlet. ...OTOH I have a ficbunny for Vagrant Story! It's the grossest concept I've ever come up with! I'm proud of me. XD
no subject
Date: 2002-08-15 05:36 am (UTC)Hmm, isn't it implied that Sydney has (unreliable) visions of the future? Ashley could have been randomly picked, and Sydney still know about it anyway. Waaah ... brain twisting into knot!
no subject
Date: 2003-05-10 08:21 am (UTC)Valendia Knights of the Peace Table of Organization
Grand Steward LeSait Chief Inquisitor Heldricht Chancellor Nordstrom
The Valendia Knights of the Peace (VKP) are broken into several organizational distinctions:
The Valendia Knights of the Peace: Valendia’s regular, standing army/internal police force, enjoined by Royal charter to protect the people of Valendia from all enemies foreign and domestic. Unlike the more honorary Knightly orders to which Valendia’s noble aristocrats claim membership by right of birth, the VKP is open to any man or woman between the ages of fifteen and forty who is willing to take the Oath to the service of the Crown and can bear the training necessary to create an adequate Knight. A fairly recent innovation following the end of Valendia’s most recent bout of civil wars, the VKP has grown rapidly in numbers and political influence, and represents a deliberate attempt to undercut the stranglehold on military power previously enjoyed by the entrenched aristocrats of the realm. As such, they are much better loved by the common run of the Valendian population than the nobility, who would dearly love to find some legal excuse to demolish both their royal favor and their power base. The VKP is under the direct command and oversight of Grand Steward LeSait, a canny, charismatic, and ruthless man of (alleged) illegitimate noble parentage who has an apparent passion for leveling the political playing field.
The VKP Office of the Inquisition: The Office of the Inquisition is the investigative arm of the VKP, operating in the field of intelligence acquisition and criminal investigation, under the direct command and oversight of Chief Inquisitor Heldricht. The Inquisition rarely, if ever, engages in actual military operations and its agents receive a proportionally lesser grade of combat training, if they even receive any at all.
The Riskbreaker Militia: The Special Operations Division of the VKP, consisting of perhaps two dozen individually selected and highly trained agents who operate both inside and outside Valendia against threats and targets of unusual nature. Each Riskbreaker is hand-selected by Grand Steward LeSait to undergo the rigorous physical and mental training necessary to instill the combat skills practiced by the Militia’s members; approximately half of those chosen to undertake said training do not survive to wear the title. The vast majority of Riskbreakers die in service. Their duties are inherently more dangerous and more irregular than those undertaken by the general run of VKP operatives and include (but are not limited to) external and domestic assassination, external and domestic intrigue in relation to/in opposition of the political maneuverings of the various noble houses and the fractured petty principalities of neighboring Ivalice, investigations too “hot” to be assigned to the Office of the Inquisition, and, often, specific investigation into “Kildean cult” related activity. The Riskbreaker Militia answers solely to Grand Steward LeSait.
The Kingsguard: Also known as His Majesty’s Royal Bodyguard or, occasionally, the Diplomatic Babysitting Service. The Kingsguard is the division of the VKP which exists solely for the protection of the Royal Family of Valendia (whichever family that happens to be) and is actually an organization that predates the founding of the VKP, but which was folded into their ranks when they were given their charter. The Kingsguard is under the command of Chancellor Nordstrom who has successfully negotiated an expansion of the Kingsguard’s influence, garnering the right to protect not only the person of the King and his family, but those of the highest noble peers of the realm, as well as foreign diplomats visiting Valendia from abroad.
no subject
Date: 2003-05-10 10:11 am (UTC)(methinks I only switched over into this story-mode of a sudden due to reading yours)
Re:
Date: 2003-05-11 05:37 am (UTC)I'm going to have to finish ONE WEEK eventually just so I can expound my philosophy of the Dark, too.
::/sobs::
But, seriously, I hammered out the whole Inquisitor thing on the basis of Callo Merlose's character bio in the VS strategy guide and the way she was portrayed in the game. I haven't thoroughly detailed the organizational structure of the Church of Iocus or the Crimson Blades yet, but that's on my list of things to do once I'm past the major deadline crunch on the project I'm currently working on. I'll post the results when I do.