The Legend of Samus and Ilia

Hey! Welcome to the Show Notes for The Legend of Samus and Ilia, a crossover fanfic between Metroid Prime Trilogy and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess that I'm currently writing over on AO3. If you haven't already read the fic, now is a good time 😉.

In this blogseries I'm going to be pulling apart specific themes, moments, and/or approaches I've taken while writing the story, and analysing them to shed some light on how those decisions were made. Note, of course, that as the writer, I can't tell you whether my decisions were effective—that's for you to decide. But what I can do is share some insight into the writing process, which I think holds some merit in its own right.

This series will not be exhaustive, and just because I don't cover something doesn't mean it isn't there. Moments can have multiple significances, and I won't cover them all. And, sometimes you say something and only understand what it really meant much later. Consider this just a brief sketch of the possibilities.

Somewhat atypically, these blogposts will be arranged thematically, not chronologically. They won't contain spoilers for future chapters, but anything published so far is fair game. This post is the Introduction, and will talk about the work as a whole, and high‐level details about its construction.

Origins—

So, wind back, idk, eight or so months. I had been spending a lot of my time in the nonfiction realm, having just published The CYBRE Manifesto, but was growing pretty tired of the take‐machine, whereïn impassioned individuals spend long hours tryïng to express how they feel about something only to see it spread around and consumed like the latest pulp novel, with little in the way of action or consequence happening as a result. I figured that if I wanted to change the culture, I might have more success with actual pulp novels. So I got into fandom.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess has always been my fanfiction home; it's actually what got me (back) into writing in middle school, doing a collaborative piece with friends. And, I'm very gay. So I was browsing the F/F fics for The Legend of Zelda on AO3, looking for inspiration, when I noticed something unexpected.

That thing was Zelmus. In retrospect, this shouldn't have been that surprising: Samus and Zelda are both Known Lesbians, and they're both in Smash, so really, it was only a matter of time before somebody shipped them together. But some of the fics were really good.

Those of you who have played Twilight Princess know that Zelda… doesn't have a huge role, there. And so I got myself thinking, first as a joke, and then seriously, well, what if Samus went and fell in love with Ilia instead?

Themes—

And honestly the more I thought about it, the more sold I was. I appreciated the contrasts: Samus hails from an urban, cybrepunk dystopia; Ilia lives in a rural fantasy landscape. I wanted to do a story about queer trauma, and healing, and I wanted to locate it in a place far away from the urban centres that most people think of when they hear ‘LGBT’. And, I'm very gay. I wanted to do a story about that too.

If you asked me what my №1 goal for the fic is now, I might say something along the lines of the following:

Goal: Respectfully portray as many different facets and perspectives on trans and queer life as practically feasible within a single romance fic.

It may surprise you to learn that this was not my goal starting out. Although I personally headcanoned Samus as a trans woman, I wasn't sure the extent to which I wanted to include that in the fic, especially if it was going to be taking place largely in the faux‐mediæval setting of the land of Hyrule. Then I read this fic by busterkuri, which includes this glorious little segment:

Time and healing meant the nightmares came less often, but she could still expect about one a month. It had become routine, but that didn't mean that it became more comfortable. She popped her estradiol under her tongue and started browsing through her messaging system, popping it up so it displayed through the apartment's holographic systems.

This was the good part of the new routine. Getting to see the messages Rosalina had sent her, remembering what they talked about last night and seeing what new pictures there had been overnight. It was good entertainment while working out, far better than watching the news or the 5 AM informercials.

After that, she ate breakfast, her standard of cereal and two pieces of toast. She munched down while looking at various videos online.

Before too long, she could forget she had ever had the nightmare.

…and I was like, fuck, can't let a Rosalina/Samus fic show me up.

There's more to the story than that, of course, that was just the start. While I was doïng research for the fic, I noticed an image in the concept art for Telma (Hyrule Historia, p. 183) that is uhh… pretty transphobic (the caption: “She tries to act like a woman, but there's something masculine about her”)—but then I actually considered: what if I just do make Telma trans…

Telma, who owns a bar, helped organize the Resistance, and has the local physician hugely in her debt, as a trans woman…

You see where this is going, right? And this actually perfectly explains why all the members of the Resistance know each other in the first place, because Telma's bar is a gay bar, and the Resistance is the queer Resistance…

…So at this point I was just like “fuck it let's make half the characters trans.” And as I fleshed out Samus's backstory with Joey, those themes just made themselves more and more known.

Format—

In terms of format, I really wanted this to be a light, low‐stress project that I could use to flex my writing chops and build skills for bigger, other projects. I was (am?) also working on another romance story (not a fanwork) which involved very long, very formal (in terms of structure, not prose) chapters and a fair deal of comparative literature studies on top of it, and it was taking me months to make any headway, simply by nature of the work. So I wanted something I could push out a little faster.

TLoSaI Ξ was planned from the beginning to be 24 chapters, each containing four sections, hopefully averaging about 1000 words per. The chapters are grouped by three into volumes (making 8 volumes total), each of which will be hopefully thematically‐related. And, each pair of volumes will wind up as something of an arc.

Having a formal structure like this really helps with the planning process, because it basically just presents me with a set number of slots, and all I have to do is figure out how to fill them. The symmetry of the chapters and volumes and work‐as‐a‐whole allows me to easily draw parallels and create reverberations. In the first chapter, I compare and contrast Samus and Ilia's methods of coping with past trauma and loss through simple apposition.

The structured nature of the story is exemplified by the opening poems, which serve as summaries for each chapter. These are written as four verses of iambic tetrameter, each verse corresponding to one of the chapter's sections (and properly, giving the section its title). The idea of using poems to convey the contents of a chapter was given to me by Romance of the Three Kingdoms, whereïn each chapter consists of two sections, rather than four. Rightfully speaking, if I had to cite my sources regarding the layout and format of this story, they would be Three Kingdoms… and romance anime.

In addition to the main four sections (a–d), there are also two side‐sections (x & y), consisting of smut and fluff, respectively. These are titled ‘Intermissions’ and ‘Paralogues’, and right now are published as separate fics—although I'm thinking of bringing them in and just publishing them below the main content, to keep things organized a little better. I came up with the idea for these gaiden sections after I realized that, starting with volume 3, the story would shift (for a bit) to Beth and Luda's trip to Hyrule—and I didn't want people to lose interest in the main ship (Samus/Ilia), or the fic as a whole, during that time. The goal of these sidechapters is to, in the case of the smut, keep the sexytimes somewhat self‐contained, but also to allow me to focus on characters and scenarios outside of just that which is relevant to whatever is going on in the main plot.

Closing Words—

This blog is ActivityPub‐federated, which means you can follow it from anywhere on the fediverse at @tlosai@write.as. I'll try to update it with some regularity.

If you have specific moments, themes, or authorial decisions you want me to talk about in more depth, ask me @Leaf@fandom.ink or in the comments to the fic. If there's a short answer, I'll do my best to give it—and if there's a longer one, it might lead to another post here on this blog.