I spent the morning of November 9th, 2016, crying.

Yes, we're about to get political here. I think if you've stuck with me for nearly 130k words, you probably have an inkling of where I stand on the political spectrum, anyway. (The light from the Republican party won't reach me for another five billion years, give or take. I'm also anti-monarchy.)

It was, to put it plainly, my worst nightmare. During my bus ride to work, I would look at the other passengers and wonder if they'd voted for fascism. I had to work with people who celebrated his win. I watched my friends cry in fear.

And all the while, people began saying, "It won't happen, someone will stop him before Inauguration Day!"

That day passed with no one stopping him. And so many other days have passed, and people still shout, "Someone will stop him! Someone will save us!"

No one is going to save us. There is no sole savior coming to fix everything.

Instead, we need to save us.

It was this thought that informed a large part of What Twist of Fate, especially its ending. Why should Noctis be the only one to really save the world? Why should he have to die for it? Yes, he's helped along the way, but at the end of the day, it's his death that saves the world. What if he had failed? And why were we supposed to be content with a story that amounts to, "You have no say in your own life because deities order it that way"?

(I do understand there is a cultural difference between Japan and most Western countries in this aspect. I'm not here to criticize that, only the story of FFXV.)

It's interesting to compare FFXV with FFX, the first Final Fantasy I'd played. In FFX, Yuna's death (and the deaths of all Summoners who defeat Sin) is treated as the horror and tragedy that it is, and it's shown to be unacceptable. Why did Noctis' friends not put up the same fight as Yuna's did to save his life at the end? Because he was a King and it was expected of him?

Mostly, I felt the worst for Ardyn Izunia. And since this was before his DLC came out, I wondered about his life before the start of FFXV, and whether or not he had an Oracle of his own. I wanted to subvert the typical image of the "pure" holy woman, who is always white with blonde hair and blue eyes. I began to toy around with ideas and looked up names, coming across "Elpis", which meant hope and was the last spirit left in Pandora's Box after she opened it.

I was also always unhappy with the lack of women in FFXV's story. Lunafreya was given some good parts, but otherwise, women didn't have as much of an impact on the story and the world as I'd come to expect from FF games. There's a lot to criticize about the portrayal of women in the FF games leading up to XV, but at least they're actually present to criticize, instead of shoved to the side. We never even see Noctis' mother, and Luna and Ravus' mother is killed off on screen. It seemed like if you were a major-role woman in FFXV, your role was to die to further the story of the male leads.

All this ended up becoming Elpis Maialen, a Black woman who became the first Oracle. I wanted her story to be driven by women at first: By her love for her sister Charis, and her mother. It's Charis' illness that leads Elpis to commit the sin of going to the outside world and seeking out Ardyn. It's her mother's strict upbringing that informs who Elpis is as a person and her choices. I wrote The Burden of Shadows pretty quickly, and I thought, "I won't play around in this sandbox too much, I don't think."

Yeah, I lied. Even though I committed to killing Elpis off at the end, and even though Burden technically ends with following the canon and having Elpis and Ardyn reunite in the Beyond, I kept thinking, "But what if...?"

I went through one or two ideas for Twist, with one of them being Bahamut intentionally bringing Elpis back to life and having her live with Lunafreya and Ravus. That didn't feel right, though, and I stalled pretty quickly on that idea. I watched Kingsglaive and became interested in exploring the society of Lucis and how the royals are actually viewed by the "common" people.

Then I realized: Of course, make Elpis reborn as a literal nobody. She isn't part of the Kingsglaive or Guard, she doesn't personally know Noctis or his friends. She's just a woman from a small town that was taken over by Niflheim and adopted another girl as her younger sister when they became refugees. She would be living a mostly normal life with the commoners of Insomnia until it fell. That way, I could explore the parts of the world that the main story didn't have time to do.

Over the course of the story, I push back on the idea that there should be a sole savior of humanity. Bahamut is defeated through a group effort. Elpis only becomes a goddess because of the strength of people's belief in her, and she rejects it, correctly realizing that she's being made into a savior. I wanted to show that people managed during the Long Night because they came together and helped each other out. And I wanted to deconstruct the idea of fate and the fairness of the gods having a say in human lives. Eos, admittedly, was a surprise, but in a world increasingly changing due to human-caused climate change, Mother Nature literally hitting back made sense.

So, in the end, What Twist of Fate is about destroying destiny, about the wonder of humans, and hope. It's always about hope. And love, a love so strong that not even death could end it in Elpis' case; a love so powerful that it caused a divine being to turn the world upside down so the object of their love could become a goddess, in Alexus' case; and in Ardyn's case, a love that led him back to the light. It's about redemption and what we have to do in order to earn that redemption, and whether that means we're worthy of forgiveness. Ardyn helped save the world for selfish reasons: Does that mean he's redeemed? Maybe. But he's not forgiven, at least not by many of the characters, not just yet.

A few of the FF references I slipped in:

Chapter 2: Seventh Heaven, the bar Elpis works at, is the bar Tifa owns in FFVII. "real Emotion" is the opening theme of FFX-2.
Chapter 5: "Otherworld" is the opening to FFX.

I love fairytales, and so What Twist of Fate in influenced by them. I use the "Rule of Three" first in Elpis' meetings with Ardyn: Their brief encounter in chapter one, their meeting during the fall of Insomnia, and then their last meeting in Altissia. It's this last meeting, specifically, where Elpis' memories are returned to her and she remembers Ardyn and her past life. Then I use it again during "The Revelation of Hope": Elpis meets Eos three times, with the last meeting being the one where Eos is healed from Starscourge.

I also use the idea of "true love's kiss". It's a kiss that brings Ardyn back from his daemonified form in "Death and the Lady"; this is also referencing my favorite fairytale, Beauty and the Beast. Alexus stops Ardyn from kissing Elpis in "So Familiar a Gleam" because if they hadn't, that kiss would have broken the "spell" placed on Elpis' memories, and she would have remembered everything then. That would have put a wrench in Alexus' plans.

I'm sure there's more I've forgotten along the way. I've been working on this for over a year, after all, and didn't leave detailed notes for myself.

I want to thank ValkyrieofArdyn for sticking with the story for this long, and for listening to me ramble about everything and anything. I want to thank my readers who stuck with me as I gleefully ignored canon and substituted my own for 130k words. Y'all have been great, and have gotten me through a few dark periods.

Lastly, of course I need to say this isn't the end. I cannot be stopped. There will be another FFXV story coming from me some day, though I will say Elpis won't be the POV character for it. If you like, you can give me your guesses as to who you think the third story might focus on.

Thank you!