Rongodamiant Q&A!

Greetings to everyone reading this!

Either you've read through the entirety of Rongodamiant, or you went straight to this Q&A for some reasons. If you did, well, I can only encourage you to give this fanfiction a good read. If you do, I hope to see you again. At any rate, it's been a almost three weeks since Fate/Rongodamiant ended. As promised, here's a Q&A to satisfy all of your questions about this long, long story.

Or so I would say, but I didn't get any questions through ffn. I guess that's fitting, in an ironic way, but I'm also surprised that a story has long and large as Rongo hasn't spawned more confusion and/or curiosity. Thankfully, I did get a few question from Discord, so this Q&A can happen after all! This is a bonus for those of you who had the patience and passion to reach this tale to the end.

Here are the questions:

1/ How does you feel about finishing Rongodamiant?

I talked about this the Author's Notes for the epilogue, but it doesn't exactly feel real. Rongodamiant pretty much required my exclusive attention for writing. If I had tried writing something else in parallel, Rongo would still not be finished to this day. In seven and a half years, I've had the time to come up with ideas, give up on them and come up with more ideas.

I am notoriously terrible at predicting how much I'm going to write, so Rongodamiant kept going for much longer than I had bargained for. It does feel strange to suddenly be writing scenes I'd planned for the finale and to actual write an epilogue. It's a new feeling for me. On the other hand, it gave me more than enough time to see the end coming. I pretty much got my closure while writing the final chapter, that let me move on pretty fast.

2/ Who's your favourite Master? Servant? Master/Servant pair? Why?

This story has so many characters, I did what I could to give all of them some spotlight and development. Unavoidably, I think it's pretty obvious that some characters got more attention than the rest. Spotlight is not proportional to how much I like them, but as a writer it does affect my perception of them, since I have to spend more time with them. All the more since all characters were introduced together and stayed for a good while.

It's hard to pinpoint a favourite Master. Hatsuyo is a character that received quite a lot of attention, and her backstory chapter was a welcomed occasion to write something that isn't a Holy Grail War. She's also quite the complexe character to get right! In fact, I consider her the hardest to write and I was not looking forward to a lot of her parts, hah. If I had to pick who was the easiest/funniest to write, that's Ivan, even though compared to the rest of the cast he is a pretty simple character.

It's also hard to pick a Servant above the rest, but Hyde was extremely fun to write as well. Larger than lives personalities like Maui and Honda are also very easy to make flow inside a scene. Now that I think about it, since a good third of the Servants have canon counterparts (thank FGO), the ones who don't feel even more special.

The Migdal Bavel arc is something that's pretty important to me (obviously). Because of that, a certain trio has a special spot in my heart. So I'll have to pick Nimrod and Savrance as my favourite pair, if only for what they represent. That was also the arc where I was able to go the wildest despite the setting.

3/ Which Servant's sheet is your favourite?

I like Maui's sheet so much that I retconned her into the story. This is probably not something that a lot of people would remember, but early in Rongo I silently replaced a few Servants with some I prefered. Partially because I wanted to use only Ocs (Ozymandias was originally going to be the Rider of White). The first Archer of Red was Rama (before he came out in FGO) but I had so little ideas for him that, given the occasion, I picked a certain fisherman instead. Ganelon has a similar story too.

Nimrod's sheet is also a big contender for being a "final boss" type of line-up.

4/ Who is your least favourite Master? Servant? Master/Servant pair?

There's none of my characters that I dislike. If I didn't like them, they wouldn't be in the story in the first place. However, due to how Rongodamiant started out, I ended up with a tons of characters, more than one person should handle at once. As a result, I wasn't as inspired for each of them, and as you have no doubt noticed, I couldn't squeeze in the same amount of development for everyone.

Linandir took the bullet of being the first to die. Thanks to that, I think I managed to make the threat of death more believable in the first act. Elena and Naraku also received less spotlight than they would have deserved. Overall, I think the size of the cast had the advantage of offering a great variety of experiences and characters.

If I had to rewrite Rongodamiant (I wouldn't even if you paid me), not every Servant would make the cut. The fact that I did several retcons early on says a lot, but even now some of them drew the short straw. The ones who suffered the most from it are Scheherazade and Fuma, who were overshadowed by their Masters.

5/ How did you choose the Rongodamiant Servants?

Just picked figures I was interested in at the time, honestly. Aside from Rongodamiant, I've made dozens of Servant sheets, but that was after I'd already started this story. So back then, I had pretty basic idea for each of them, so I selected whomever I liked.

For reminders, I started Rongodamiant when FGO was nothing more than trailers. It was a very different era, a time where "Avenger" was limited to Angra Mainyu and the Beast class was some discarded concept from the prototype of F/SN. So there weren't that many canon Servants. Before the first chapter of Rongo was even written, several spots had very different figures. Aside from canon Servants, I remember I was going to make a male Nobunaga for Archer of White.

6/ How did you come up with the characters? Did you have any inspiration?

Fate/Rongodamiant is actually the second Fate fic I've ever written. The very first was one called Fate/Another, which no longer exists. It had a very different settings but many characters in common. Almost every Master and a few Servants carried over from Another, including Orianna Levent. Funnily enough, in Fate/Another, Honda was Ewald's Servant. I'll let you imagine what that pair would look like in Rongo.

This is also the explanation behind Berserker of Black's whole existence. He was a concept I'd thought of for Another, and one which unfortunately doesn't fit Rongodamiant as well. By the time I realized that though, it was too late to replace any more character.

For everyone else, uh... it's been over seven years, I don't remember that well! A lot of it were simple concepts, which is a good description for Rongodamiant as a whole. I started that story without thinking a lot of things through. At the time I told myself I would only write one Fate fanfic, and because of that I wanted to fit as many Servants as I could. This is one of the major reasons why Rongo ended up being so long.

But it's also what gave Rongodamiant a unique identity. Most of the story and the characters were not defined in details. A good 80% of Rongo was decided and improvised as I went on (and I'm being generous).

When it comes to inspiration, there's not much that comes to mind as a result. Although, one major source of inspiration for me at the time was Toaru Majustu no Index. It had an impact on how I write character powers and battle scenes early on, and there's even a few references in some character names.

7/ Are there any new project you plan to write?

Definitely, absolutely, without a doubt.

The future is uncertain, but I'm someone who needs to be writing or else I'll get restless eventually. That being said, this is it for Legends Storyteller; Fate/Rongodamiant is my last fanfiction, the only one I managed to finish. I've been itching to move on to original stories for far too long. What form it will take and when I'll be able to publish is stuff I can't say for sure.

Nothing can be certain, except for the fact that I will be writing.

That's all the questions I've received. If some of you have reached this Q&A after the facts, I'll still be happy to answer any question you have. But now, it's time to turn the last page of Fate/Rongodamiant, and close the book on the last seven years of my life.

It was an honour.

~Legends Storyteller