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Hello World! This started as a descriptive outline but morphed into just writing. The next chapter after this one is the outline bit, all three chapters afterwards are just story format, though there is some glossing over in chapter three since I hadn’t quite given up on it being an outline by that point. I was bit by a plotbunny, and I did not fully understand what that meant until I was typing frantically at three am having been trying to get all the ideas down since seven pm. I wrote this forever ago, planning to write it all and then post, but I am almost certainly not going to, because life is crazy, but I thought it was a novel enough idea that someone else could get use out of it. The next bit is an informative rant on canon KotLC and why this fic is the way it is. Hopefully someone likes it, I have a lot more where it came from.
If you want to skip the rest of this chapter and hop into the story, that's fine too! The rest of this chapter is not strictly necessary for understanding the actually story part.
Keeper of the Lost Cities was one of my favourite book series when I was younger, and it holds a special space in my heart. However, books 8, 8.5 and 9 were harder to connect with for me, probably because I’m older, and as you get older your literary tastes change. I mostly read those three for the nostalgia, and when book 10 finally comes out I am planning to read it, again, mostly for the nostalgia of it.
Another thing that changed my perspective over the books is the dystopian sheen to them. If you are of the opinion that the elves can do no wrong that’s fine, this is just my opinion, but maybe this story idea isn’t really for you.
I’ve been taught that anything called a Utopia is not, and when you really look at the Lost Cities there is a lot that, logically, has to be different than described. Della (a Vacker, at least, I’m pretty sure it was Della) tells Sophie in Book ! that everyone loves their job, that work is always fun. Then they take a ride in a carriage manned by an elf, and I cannot believe that every elf that drives euciriptide carriages in Atlantis is in love with their job. The Gnomes like gardening, sure, but I cannot imagine enough of them love laundry and cleaning for massive estates like Candleshade to not be incredibly dusty all the time. Who manages the electrical power plants? Or, if they use candles who scraps the wax? If the lighting all those blue fire crystal things, then I can’t believe I’m saying this, but poor Fintan sitting there for years and doing nothing but filling crystals with ever-burning fire. Society, no matter how well organized, has jobs that need to be done but nobody likes, and pretending there aren’t is, as I said, dystopian.
Sophie, having a talent (well, not just one, by a long shot, but she’s a middle grade fiction protagonist and she’s got main-character magic bleeding out her ears) automatically places her in a higher social class, even with the “raised by humans” discrepancy. We, as an audience, never really see talentless characters and how having that label affects them outside of a brief conversation with Dex’s Dad Kesler, Dex freaking out about Rex being apparently talentless, and the longest discussion is when Jurek, the dude in charge of the Alicorns who is plot relevant for like only two chapters before never being mentioned again, expresses his bitterness about how, no, Sophie doesn’t understand the Lost Cities, not really, because she has Talent and is, therefore, Important. I think this was a significant moment, but Sophie feels uncertain for a tiny bit and basically forgets about it. Y’all, I love Sophie, but as Ro loves to point out, she’s pretty clueless sometimes. (Also, you don’t get a full education if you happen to be talentless. Foxfire is not “the elite” it is “the only”, and if you don’t have a talent you cannot graduate as a canon fact. Straight up dystopian.)
This will turn into a very long rant if I don’t slow myself down, so I’ll mention the thing that is actually important to this Original Plan FanFic. Forkle orchestration of Sophie’s removal from her family is very cult-like. Cults tend to recruit people who are sad, lonely, looking for belonging, and at a transition point in their life. Sophie, in those very first chapters, is all of those things. She feels isolated from her academic peers, she feels disconnected from her family, and she’s about to undergo a major change. As someone who was a younger high schooler and has gone through some college classes at the same time, the reception to young smart people is drastically different in high school and in college. High school is rough because teenagers, as a whole, are mean, secularized, jealous creatures, especially to those who are obviously different. I had issues with teachers about being significantly younger at my small, smart-magnet school. Sophie, who is crazy young for a senior, at a public high school would have issues in any universe, and feeling isolated at home was not helping one whit. I always had a rather different reaction when I was in college. It was community college, just like Sophie was going to go to, and when I mentioned how old I was for some reason or another people, professors especially, thought that was so cool. Sophie, being incredibly young, would have had that amazement in spades. However much she was scorned in high school, I believe more than that would have been praised in college. She, in those first few chapters, sees herself as a freak and a burden. If she had waited four more months I think the decision to essentially leave all she had ever known behind for new world, new school, new parents, (also I love the Ruewen’s they are very nice but Sophie? What? What happened to your parents of your first twelve years of life? The heck?) the decision would have been much more complex. Forkle was going to leave Sophie in the Forbidden Cities “for longer” (he never actually specifies) and if he did I think he would have had a much, much different situation on his hands. Taking a lonely twelve year old on an adventure is one thing, but taking a smart twenty-five year old away to fairyland the same way would be nigh impossible. So I wrote about it!
Enjoy!