Grand Battle Planning and General Discussion Thread

I'd like to make an argument why you should read my novella length Intense Struggle post.

Last year out of nowhere over the course of a couple of weeks I came to realize that my mum who I thought had been supportive of me since my transition had been harbouring significant anti-trans sentiments this entire time and never saw me as anything other than my agab.

In the month or so after that bob got eagle time tentatively up and running and I saw an opportunity to resume work on an Intense Struggle post I had started years ago. The basic conceit of the post is a complete rewrite of Aph's character through key moments of the battle and I thought I was almost done with the post until I decided I wanted some interstitial scenes to connect these pieces together.

In this interstitial sections I envisioned a rewritten backstory for Aph. Here she was being guided, trained to kill the Monitor (the host of IS) by an ever-present but never visible entity called The Ghost. As I wrote this post and it got longer and longer, something of my own life bled in there. I wrote about her loneliness, I wrote about her desire to live up to the expectations of her absent parent and her desire to be something else. I wrote about her desire to be seen, to be acknowledged for the person that she is.

In the post Enyo (her chosen name) gains some measure of understanding, some measure of compromise from her parental figure. In real life my mum has never used the correct pronouns for me, has never stood up for me when someone has misgendered me, has straight up told me that she believes I will always be male. Though I never intended to soften the character of the Ghost I couldn't help but offer Enyo some grace where I have had none.

This post is probably the best post, or at least my favourite post, I have ever written for Grand Battles and I doubt anybody will ever actually read it (due to the sheer length of the post and also the fact that it's so deep into the oldest unfinished grand battle). But that's okay. To a certain extent this post was only ever for me; an opportunity to indulge myself, give her a foxie friend, give her mask, give her a slice of battenberg and a creme egg and whatever the fuck else I felt like imprinting onto her at any given moment.