Chương 37: Cut the Kid - MADEON (3:17)

THREAD: Corva Would NEVER Do This - What Is Zeke Even Writing Anymore? USER: Lorem-Ipsum Lorem-Ipsum (Original Poster) I feel like everything has gone crazy and someone needs to say this out loud: ZEKE'S FANFIC IS SUCH BOSHEET Corva has NEVER been a villain in the Fracture-verse. Not once. Not in Frontiers, not in Emberveil, and not in any of the cut content or dev notes that we've dug up over the years. Even at his least heroic, Corva has never been the bad guy.

He's a steady presence in the early parts of the games. He's a mentor figure. He's the NPC you cling to when everything starts turning to shit. His whole role in the game is to teach players how not to get themselves killed in the starting zone. He shows you the shortcuts and points out the safe paths and gives you enough information to make it to the next hub without rage-quitting. That's always been his role in the games. But Zeke is trying to turn him into a straight up slasher villain. Nope. Absolutely not.

That should tell everyone that Zeke doesn't understand the lore of the game he's playing. This is all pure bosheet. The guy is going full D and D on the plot. Fucking D and D already ruined Game of Thrones for me with their "oh, Dany just forgot about the Ironborn and their ships." Now Zeke is over here trying to snatch away their crown for Worst Adaptation. AshenRook THANK YOU. I'm so happy you made this thread because the comment section on Zeke's post is unbearable.

People are riding his dick so hard and talking up his story like it's Casablanca. It's not amazing. It's a steaming pile of shit. Corva is the moral center of the Fracture-verse. He's the anchor point. He's who players love and strive to be like. You don't turn him into a stab-happy psycho just to increase engagement on your fic. This whole story feels like shock-value for the clicks. GnomelandSecurity Counterpoint: we don't really know much about Corva's backstory. Go back and replay Emberveil.

Look at his character model. Listen to how he talks. Not only is the dood shady as hell, but his in-game model has an ankh. It's subtle and overlooked, but it's there. Why does he have an ankh? Why does a wandering drifter NPC have an ancient symbol tied to eternal life and the soul? I don't remember anyone on this forum ever asking that question before. MutantMannequin You know… Corva answered why he was carving an ankh, back when Zeke asked him that around the campfire.

But that wasn't really Zeke's question, was it? What he meant was "why do you know what an ankh is?" What if Corva was giving him a backstory just to kind of push aside Zeke's questions? Lilium_Mortem I always thought Corva was incredibly suspicious in this story. Why is someone so accomplished just so happens to be going on the same low stakes first expedition of this archaeologist that Zeke is? AshenRook The ankh is just cosmetic. It's character flavor. That's it. You're all reaching.

3Schofields Cosmetic doesn't mean meaningless. BrokenKing42 I'm not saying that I'm fully on Zeke's side here, but Corva's face-heel turn isn't as out-of-nowhere as everyone is pretending. His backstory has always felt a little off, and Lilium is right in that he's suspicious. His entire village gets wiped out by some mystery sickness that no one can identify, and yet somehow he survives? Then he immediately starts wandering and unlocks the drifter class.

But what everyone keeps skipping over is, when Corva told his "backstory," Cole visibly reacted when he mentioned the sickness hitting his village. What was that all about? Why would Cole, a dood who studied the Fracture extensively, react like that? That wasn't random. Lorem-Ipsum (Original Poster) That backstory was never in any of the games. Zeke made it all up. He's just inventing shit for attention. Or he's retconning lore because he wants his OC to be special.

Pick one of those answers because either one of them is more believable than Corva secretly being evil. DeadMienWalking Okay, then explain the ankhs? Explain why one man has soooooooo many ankhs. He's not exactly using them as good luck charms, is he? Lorem-Ipsum (Original Poster) Again, that's only in Zeke's fanfic. If you want to argue the lore, then stick to the lore. SoftLocked Imagine being this mad that a guy writing a fanfic about being stuck in a game isn't portraying your comfort NPC correctly.

AshenRook This isn't about comfort, it's about consistency. If Corva is indeed a big bad, or if he can just snap and try to wipe out his adventuring party, then it undermines every single interaction he's ever had with player characters across the game. It cheapens the entire relationship. DeadMienWalking | If you want to argue the lore, then stick to the lore. | Okay. Lore it is. Corva shows up in every game. Why is that? Isn't that weird and freakishly suspicious?

No matter which timeline theory you subscribe to in the game, Corva being everywhere is odd. If you believe that all the games take place in parallel universes that are happening at the same time, then why doesn't any other NPC show up in as many places as Corva does? If you think the Fracture-verse is a single world with a looping Fracture apocalypse, then how do you explain Corva showing up in EVERY SINGLE GAME. He's everywhere. That would imply that he has existed for several centuries.

Shit's weird and we've never gotten an answer about him. MutantMannequin | Why would Cole, a dood who's studied the Fracture extensively, react like that? | Oooo… Is Corva an outsider? Was that plague the Black Death? And does being an outsider somehow explain why he's in every game? VeneratedWitchHunter Oh come on. Now he's an outsider too? What's next, Corva is three kids in a trench coat? He's been dead the whole time and someone is Weekend-at-Bernie's-ing him around everywhere? You've all gone insane.

Saltmines You can mock it all you want, but the truth is we've never actually gotten a real backstory about Corva. The devs were always weirdly tight-lipped about him, and in every game he shows up he sidesteps the question. He'll give you advice, he'll tell you how to survive, he'll drop a little bit of philosophy, but he never actually explains who he is or where he came from. Not really.

Honestly, he reminds me a lot of the Joker in that one comic where he's talking about his past and he says something like, "Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes I remember it another. If I'm going to have a past, I'd prefer it be multiple choice." That's Corva in a nutshell. His appearances are vague and intentionally incomplete. From my perspective, Zeke isn't ruining Corva so much as trying to fill in the gaps that the devs deliberately left open. SpicyShoyu OH SHIT.

Corva always shows up when the player character is first starting out. And the player character is always classless. Corva is straight up hanging around the PC, getting ready to ankh the shit out of them, but then they get classes pretty easily. That's why he's never gone villain on any of us. Lorem-Ipsum (Original Poster) Or what if this is just a fanfic that completely ignores why people like Corva in the first place?

GnomelandSecurity Or what if this is a fanfic that finally answers why Corva never settles down anywhere? MutantMannequin I'm still subscribing to the theory that Corva is an outsider. It would explain why he knew about the ankhs, and why he keeps popping up across all the games. I mean… why else would he have so many ankhs? HonoredBibliophile Could just mean that outsiders have been coming to and affecting the Fracture-verse for a good long while, and left their marks.

SeasonalWitnessing What bugs me is that Zeke was doing so well with his lore early on, and then he drops all this shit on us. The House of Seasons stuff was legitimately good and clean. He laid out a new path through the House and earned people dimensional storage space. Folks were paying attention because he was uncovering lore. Now, he just decided to invent random nonsense and that detracts from his earlier work.

Every discussion in the lore threads that I frequent is getting derailed with animancy this and Corva that and ankhs everywhere. It's exhausting. Dood muddied his own well. Some_guy_161 He's incorporating other games into his fanfic too, not just Frontiers. He described fighting that Graven Hulk, which only exists in Emberveil. Maybe he thought we wouldn't notice. But we did. I'm not going to sit here and pretend it makes sense or say "huh, I didn't know that Graven Hulks could spawn in the Soundtrap."

PatchNoteLarry Hot take, Zeke's real problem is that we praised him too hard early on. He found legit lore once, and now he thinks that every idea he has is automatically gold. That's how you end up with "trust me bro" worldbuilding instead of evidence-based theorycrafting. FopperyandWhim Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. Can I just ask why you're all so mad about this fic? I'm reading it like serialized fiction and having a blast.

I asked in the main story thread why this forum has such a hate-boner for fanfic, and people explained it's because this fandom sees itself as a bunch of lore archaeologists. You dig and cross-reference and get emotionally attached to what's already there. Then Zeke waltzes in and starts messing everything up. But… so what? It's obvious that he's writing a fanfic. It's not canon. He's not a dev or the head writer or anything. If you love the lore, play the games. If you want more from the verse, read the fic.

That's the whole point of fanfics. I love them. They take worlds I already enjoy and tell completely different stories inside them. The hard part - the worldbuilding - is already done. I get to just relax and focus on the characters. There's a Pokemon fic where the MC is a zookeeper from Ohio or something, and he gets isekai'd into the pokemon world after Earth gets nuked. It's amazing and telling a different story from the games and the anime, but it doesn't detract from it. There's a WoW fic by - Seras, I think?

- that made me want to reinstall the game after not touching it for years. I even started reading the tie-in novels because of it. Hell, there's a Football Manager fanfic that is one of the best things that I've ever read. The MC can tell how good players are going to get, and he starts managing a team in the sixth tier of English football. I don't even like soccer, but after reading it I bought Football Manager and had a blast. So why is this fic so contentious?

Why is everyone so angry about Zeke writing what he wants? HandsWithoutArms Oh man… haven't played WoW in forever. I get what you're saying about fanfics. I've been reading that one you're talking about and it reminds me of the game. It's actually the reason I wanted to be a journalist. HexaDeweyDecimal | It's actually the reason I wanted to be a journalist. | How the hell did a fanfic make you want to be a journalist? HandsWithoutArms Ha. Not the fanfic. WoW.

It's a good thing I'm a video journalist and not in print. Sometimes I confuse myself with my writing. HexaDeweyDecimal … okay, new question. How the hell did WoW make you want to be a journalist? HandsWithoutArms It's kind of a long story but back when I had just graduated high school, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. Everyone around me was filling out college applications or joining the military and I was just there thinking if I go straight to college, I'm going to screw it up spectacularly.

I didn't want to do another four years of the last twelve years. You get me? So, I took a gap year, which mostly meant that I worked at a doctor's office during the day and played a ridiculous amount of WoW at night. When people would ask what my plans for the future were and why I wasn't heading off to college, I told them that I was mature enough to realize I wasn't mature enough for college yet. That sounded so much better than if you give me freedom and a dorm room, I will party myself into academic probation.

This was back during vanilla WoW. Straight out of the box WoW. It was maybe a patch or two in. They hadn't released Cataclysm or Legion yet. The Draenai and Blood Elves weren't a thing. PvP didn't even really exist. If you wanted to fight someone from the other faction, you had to go into their territory and murder them. Then Blizzard dropped a patch where it introduced the early honor system. Suddenly, killing someone from the other faction awarded you something. You got honor points. You got ranks.

Private, Corporal, Sergeant, all the way up the line. It was primitive, but it flipped a switch in the player base. I was questing one night in… Darkwood? Duskwood? It was a spooky forest zone just to the south of Stormwind, the main alliance city. It was late and I was grinding spiders by myself and I saw the most amazing thing. It was a stream of Alliance players racing through the area. They were coming down from Stormwind, cutting straight through Duskwood, and heading south.

Now, if you've never played early WoW, especially pre-battlegrounds, you need to know what that meant. The train of players was headed towards Stranglethorn Vale. STV. The Vietnam War of Azeroth. STV was hell on earth. It was a literal nightmare. People legit quit playing the game when they were forced into that zone. Alliance players were around level 30-40 and they went there to quest. I think Horde players were supposed to be around 35-45. It was the first real zone that pushed both factions into combat.

You'd be minding your own business, killing panthers or raptors or whatever, when suddenly a Horde rogue would materialize out of thin air, stab you six times, stun-lock you, and send you for respawn. Half the time it wasn't even level-appropriate players. They were level 60s hanging around the area just to mess up your day. Alliance players couldn't grind to level 40 because the Horde wouldn't let you. They'd just gank you into oblivion.

Just to drive home the Vietnam War aspect of the zone, there was a questline I remember from it that was basically Apocalypse Now, complete with a Colonel Kurtz stand-in. STV was hostile and unhinged and dangerous. So seeing a full Alliance migration headed to STV, I instantly knew they were headed down there to start some shit. I popped into the guild chat and asked if anyone knew what was going on, but nobody did. So I did the only sensible thing I could think of: I followed them.

I was running in the middle of this massive Alliance blob as it surged into STV, and I was narrating the whole thing in guild chat like I was a war correspondent. I was around level 25 or so, which was completely under-leveled for the region. It was dangerous for me because I kept pulling all the raptors and panthers because they were 10 levels higher than me and wanted to devour my delicious bones. And the entire time we were running, I was whispering to the other players. Why are you here? Where are we going?

What do you expect to happen? People were laughing, answering in-character or being half-serious RPers. I'd /say things like I was doing on-the-ground interviews.

"Alliance forces pushing deeper into Stranglethron. Horde resistance expected near the encampment." My guild was glued to the chat. One by one they started racing to STV to join us. The people running alongside me thought it was hilarious that this one idiot was treating the whole thing like a live news broadcast. It was chaotic. It was dumb. And it was my absolute favorite memory of the game.

Years later, when I was finally attending J-school, one of the school admission interviewers asked when I first thought about becoming a journalist. Obviously I told them about watching war reporters on TV and being inspired by people who were risking their lives to tell the truth and inform the public. Which is true. But, it really started that night in Stranglethorn Vale, typing up frantic field reports while sprinting through the jungle, trying not to get murdered by panthers, telling a story as it happened.

Caboodle Cool story bro, but what does any of that have to do with Zeke ruining Fracture lore? HandsWithoutArms Hexa asked me how WoW turned into me wanting to be a journalist. And Foppery was talking about fanfics and how they add to the fandom, not detract from it. Do you read the forum or just decide to be a dick and comment without actually adding anything to the discussion? GravemindLegacy (MOD) Hands, this is your first warning. Personal attacks will not be tolerated here.

OldManKiyote DeepFracture has always been protective of its lore, and I for one love that about this place. It's one of the things that separates us from the other fandoms. People here care deeply about this franchise and don't want to see it butchered. They take ownership of the franchise in a way that a lot of other fans don't. That can be good or bad. When it comes to fanfics, you can pretty easily split the fandom into three different groups based on how they react to it.

The first group is filled with fans that are happy that someone is writing anything at all. They like the premise of Zeke getting isekai'd into a world they already love, and they're treating his posts like what they are: fanfiction. Canon accuracy is optional for this group. If Zeke wants to duct-tape three different games together, invent new schools of magic, or turn Corva into a surprise villain, they shrug and keep reading. They're here for the characters, drama, and storytelling.

This group is just vibing with Zeke, they're not mad at him. The second group is a bit more cautious and protective of the lore, but they're not overly protective. They care about internal consistency and canon, but they're willing to tolerate deviations if there's a solid reason for it.

As long as Zeke clearly frames his story as speculation, or if he builds off of existing bread crumbs of lore that the games left behind, they'll squint at it and argue and complain about lack of citations, but they'll all eventually either accept it or politely agree to disagree. The most they'll say is "show your work" when Zeke invents new lore. It's the third group, Foppery, that you're wondering about. They're the hardliners.

If something in the story isn't explicitly backed up by in-game text, dev commentary, or datamined assets, they're going to be pissed. It honestly doesn't even matter how well written the idea is or how interesting it might be. If Zeke deviates from canon even a little, they'll draft a twelve-page essay about it. No matter what Zeke writes, he's always going to piss this group off. HexaDeweyDecimal It really is kind of like politics, for better or worse.

You've got two extremes that aren't going to change their minds, and then you've got the middle third - the independent swing voters. They are the ones who decide whether Zeke gets mild pushback for his ideas, or a full-on dogpile. Right now, Corva's heel-turn is pushing a lot of them from the 'skeptical but curious' column over into 'hmm… are we sure about this?' SeasonalWitnessing I don't totally agree with the politics analogy (and can we please keep all that out of this forum?) but I'll add something to it.

If Zeke had just stayed with the House of Seasons, he'd be getting basically zero pushback from the middle third. That arc was clean and careful and backed by real in-game lore. Once he jumped into the Soundtrap and turned Corva into an immortal body-snatcher, a lot of folks started to feel the story was going off the rails. SoftLocked Well, the middle third is the most interesting part of the fandom. They argue, they cite sources, they speculate, and sometimes they're wrong but they still engage with everything.

I'll take that over the people who treat the lore like it's holy scripture. EdinburoughArchivist Don't listen to these people Foppery. There's a much easier way to explain everything that is going on. Imagine that you love Star Wars. You've watched all the movies, played all the games, read all the books. You've got the Thrawn series memorized (both of them) and have beat KOTOR probably ten times. You even went to Disney World and waited in line for three hours to ride that escape from the First Order ride.

You didn't complain about the wait, even though it took forever and there were people in front of you complaining that you're a fairweather fan and you don't know anything about Star Wars even though you're wearing that Marc Ecko limited-edition Boba Fett hoodie and you went on a two-hour-long diatribe while in line about how The Old Republic MMO completely butchered Revan's character arc by making him good, then evil, then good again, and then somehow both good and evil at the same time.

The franchise means something to you. It reminds you of when you were a kid, running around your backyard pretending you were a Jedi, watching the movies on repeat, devouring any media that was Star Wars related. Now imagine someone writes a fanfic where Obi-Wan is secretly evil. Not the Jedi Order is flawed kind of evil. And not, "from my point of view the Jedi are evil." I'm talking about actively evil. He orchestrated the Clone Wars. He intentionally trained Anakin wrong so he'd turn into Darth Vader.

He was the mastermind behind everything and the real big bad the whole time. You can level some nuanced criticism at the franchise. You can point out the Jedi's hypocrisy, complain about them stealing children and forcing them into a religion early in their lives and taking them from their families, argue that Mace Windu was basically staging a coup when he tried to arrest Palpatine, a democratically-elected leader, or wonder whether Qui-Gon training Anakin would have changed anything.

Those are all interesting discussions. But imagine Zeke taking a character that you've loved for decades and just… shitting all over them. That's why people are having such a hard time with what Zeke's writing. It's not that the fanfic is bad. (It is.) It's that for some fans, Corva occupies that kind of space for them. He's their Obi-Wan. OldManKiyote Hey Foppery, I don't know if you can tell but Edinburough is obviously part of the third group that doesn't like that Zeke's writing a fanfic.

EdinburoughActivist Oh, because I think he should be held accountable to the lore? Because I don't like that he's changing a ton of stuff that we all love about the games? OldManKiyote No, it's more because you went straight to "Zeke is shitting on Obi-wan." Zeke is writing a fanfic where things go sideways and where a character that we thought we understood turns out to be much more complicated, messier, and darker than we thought.

He's not committing some grand act of vandalism here, he's just trying to tell a story. You don't have to like the direction he's taking the character, but let's not pretend that he's being sacrilegious or anything like that. This whole thing reeks of gatekeeping to me, and that's something you see over and over again with older franchises. A lot of people forget what nerd culture used to be like.

I'm talking about long ago, back before anime was on Netflix and Twitch streamers were making millions playing games on camera, and before Marvel movies were making billions of dollars. Back in the day, you kept your nerd stuff quiet. You didn't tell people you played video games. You didn't tell people you read comics, or sci-fi, or fantasy. And you sure as shit didn't tell people you played D&D. That was how you got mocked, sidelined, and branded as a weirdo. Hell, think of the Big Bang Theory.

That show is supposedly all about nerd culture, but if you actually watch it you see that the nerds are often the butt of the jokes. That's what it felt like being a nerd growing up back in the day. That all started to change when Halo dropped. Suddenly, all the dude-bros were into video games. They started playing Halo and CoD and Madden. I still remember hanging out with a buddy and his brother who'd just gotten back from Marine boot camp. We ordered pizza, had a LAN party, and played Halo the entire night.

And his brother was NOT a nerd. That was the tipping point. That was when nerd culture started to go mainstream. After that, Lord of the Rings swept the Oscars, Marvel became a cultural juggernaut, Game of Thrones was everywhere, and eSports was on ESPN. The tent got bigger. Liking all this stuff stopped being a liability and it started becoming normal. Most fandoms adapted to that. They welcomed new people in and they were excited that what they loved was being loved by others.

But there has always been that older subset of fans who remember getting bullied for liking this stuff, and instead of being relieved that the fandom is getting new fans, they get territorial. They start devising little purity tests. They start policing shit. They complain when someone isn't devoted in exactly the right way. That's what this whole Corva meltdown feels like. GnomelandSecurity I don't know about all that, but can we all please stop pretending that Corva is some immutable moral paragon?

He was never the moral center of the Fracture-verse like some poster claimed earlier. He's just a guy who shows up in a bunch of the games. That's it. Sure, he's a mentor figure to a lot of the player characters, but mentor characters go bad all the time in fiction. It's a pretty common trope. If anything, Zeke's version of Corva feels like a reaction to the setting actually being awful to live in.

He's actually thinking about the real-life consequences of living in this world, and how it would shape the characters in it. The Deadlands isn't a nice cozy place to be chilling in, it grinds people down. BrokenKing42 What kills me is people yelling about respecting the lore when the entire Fracture-verse is literally about broken timelines, overlapping worlds, and things not lining up cleanly. This whole setting is a mess, and that's the point. VoidWyrm69 Okay… we've officially gone off the rails here.

Less meta talk about fandom psychology and more talk about Zeke's actual choices in the story and how they don't make any sense. First, his class is ridiculous. He built up so many different clues in his story that pointed to him getting an archaeologist class or turning into a treasure hunter or something. And then out of nowhere, BOOM, Rockstar. That's why I joined this thread. His class just felt abrupt and it doesn't fit in with the story that he's told so far.

JadeCriminal ^ Void I was led to believe that gaining a class without guidance is related to stuff you do. Nothing that Zeke did is related to the Rockstar class. MrBobbins Yea, I was betting on him being an archaeologist too. He explored a lot of ruins in rapid succession. Old Town Old Train Old Mansion Old Battleground Then he was on an archaeology trip with Cole who has been lecturing at him for hours every day on history and taught by Corva how to run such an expedition.

Furthermore, since he entered the world he's been engaging with us, dedicated fans who are almost like archaeologists of the game. He even acquired a skill which sounds like a solid foundation for an archaeologist class: puzzle intuition. Malv0lio I get the disappointment. I for one was hoping for an Indian Jones / Uncharted style fanfic about the Deadlands. But I think Zeke did lay some ground work for him becoming a Rockstar. Maybe not overtly, but it was there.

I see him less as a "glam rock star" and more like Rage Against the Machine. Or he could even be like a rockerboy from the Cyberpunk pen and paper. He's a musician who is defined by his rebellion against authority. If you look at the class through that lens, it makes so much more sense. Think about his arc so far. He gets isekai'd into a world that he knows nothing about and all he has is this forum to guide him. Our advice can literally get him killed.

We are the authority and we tell him that we don't believe he's been isekai'd, and we bitch and moan about the House of Seasons stuff until we learn that it's actual lore. Then he has to face down the Eaters who are relentless, nightmarish things that are hunting him. He doesn't have nearly enough power to stand up to them. He's just a bug that gets squished under their authority.

Then he gets on that train and is accosted by the Asshole who is stronger and tougher than him, and Zeke couldn't stand up for himself OR help that lady who was killed by the Eaters. That's gotta piss him off. He hits The MIZ and goes into the Tock & Spanner where that alderman tries to intimidate him. That's when he finally snaps. That's when he finally starts to rebel. There's been subtle clues all along. He was talking back to us a little bit, but still being nice enough.

He stood up to the Asshole, but that didn't do much except to save his own pride a little. With the alderman, he finally set his feet and was like "I'm not gonna be intimidated." That was his first act of rebellion. And it snowballed from there. He was fighting back against the Jackal Runners, he bitched out Corva and the rest of the expedition when they threw him into combat, he yelled at us for not giving him great advice.

He's slowly stopped swallowing all the shit shoveled his way, and he is starting to stand up for himself. He's angry. He's frustrated. He wants to rebel. And what's the ultimate expression of that rebellion? When he's about to die to the echoes, he doesn't fall to his knees as a broken man. He stands up and screams a giant, defiant, FUCK YOU at all the things trying to kill him. If that's not straight up Rocker, I don't know what is. AshenRook Yea… I'm calling bosheet.

He probably found out about the Rockstar by reading through the forum and looking for cool cut content classes, and then just shoehorned that into his story. You know what, we need a valid opinion on all this. @Binary, what are your thoughts on Zeke's class so far? Binary_Arcana … I am going to wait to pass judgement until I see more from the story. GravemindLegacy (MOD) This thread has been locked due to excessive reports. Please remember that personal attacks will result in bans. Argue the lore, not each other.