I’d be lying through my teeth if I told you that my decision to re-write Nintendo’s Fire Emblem: Three Houses (FE3H) as a novel-length, golden route, romantasy action story was fully intentional.

Back in 2024, I hit a challenging roadblock in my work on The Xenthian Cycle and needed a break. Enter Into the Fishpond, my seven-month obsession.

Registered members can read Into the Fishpond on AO3. I’ve also tagged all my reflections on what writing a novel-length project on AO3 taught me.

If you don’t know the game, FE3H pits the heirs of three nations against each other, first as academic rivals and then as opposing generals.

You play as Byleth, a nonbinary mercenary turned reluctant professor with their own secrets to unravel. Whichever leader Byleth champions will conquer the other houses and impose their vision on the continent.

The character writing is excellent, and all the endings are heartbreaking in some way. The game design forces you to make hard choices across the board, which makes it compulsively replayable (e.g., I’ve finished three out of four routes.)

As I began work on Fishpond, I knew a few things:

• My adaptation would be a romance. Since our setting is a secondary fantasy world, it’s technically romantasy.
• The principal character is from Earth and enters the game world aware of the story’s cannon events. In fanfiction circles, this structure makes Fishpond an Isekai story.
• Seteth, the school’s administrator, is the male protagonist.
• Zara, my thirty-something lead, would body swap into Byleth’s unoccupied female body (the player chooses which version of Byleth to play when the game starts).

Beyond that, everything else was up for grabs. Or so I thought.

In Chapter 1, the Goddess Sothis wandered into my adaptation and handed down the terms for a classic golden route.

With a year of hindsight, it was a wonderful decision. Rewriting FE3H as a golden route added richness to my adaptation.

Okay, what is a golden route?

In video games, a golden route maximizes positive resolutions across the board. For example, the main characters all live, peace is restored to the land, terrible choices are avoided, secrets are safely shared, and everyone gets what they want (at least in part).

Unlike Triangle Strategy, another popular video game, FE3H has no golden route. No matter what you do, at least one of the house leaders ends up dead, often alongside key supporters who won’t join any of the opposing armies.

Adding a golden route to the romance plot raised the stakes for all the characters and dramatically changed storylines for the house leaders who play supporting roles in my version of the story (e.g., Claude, Edelgard and Dimitri).

Writing a Golden Route also meant I could:

• Adapt the story’s overall ending.
• Avoid the five-year time skip written into the game’s original story, keeping us in the more idyllic, academic setting that all the routes share in the first half of play (“White Clouds”).
• Write new battles with the story’s best antagonists in ways the game doesn’t allow.
• Change all the endings for the major house lords, supporting players, and non-combatants.

Didn’t that torpedo the story’s conflict?

In short: no.

FE3H has layers of misunderstanding and betrayal baked into the narrative. Despite the wide-ranging success conditions, my adaptation had plenty of tension.

For example:

• Lady Rhea, the archbishop of Fódlan, is a character with deep secrets, a flawed psyche, and a decidedly amoral approach to statecraft. She remained a morally gray character in my work.
• The Agarthans, the true villains of FE3H, rarely get to fight the primary heroes (the game’s Verdant Wind route where you side with Claude is the exception). My adaptation sets them directly in opposition to the united school in ways that were new to readers. I used the game’s existing Agarthan spies and turncoats to foster suspicion and fear.
• Macuil, one of Seteth’s mysterious brothers, plays a minimal, off-screen role in the canonical story. Bringing him into the main plot and putting him at odds with Seteth allowed me to wrap lore drops in provocation. Macuil also let me build a unique supporting character since he’s absent for so much of the canonical experience.

Given the fraught, interconnected character histories, Zara’s and Byleth’s efforts to unite the house leaders still required care and discretion. They’re always on the edge of being found out, often in explosive ways.

What I learned

Fishpond follows the canonical story to a point. Reshuffling the possibilities around an outcome that readers had never seen in the game added extra intrigue.

After spending so much time on this thought experiment, I understand why FE3H doesn’t include a golden route:

• The extra scenes, maps and battles would mean a lot of complexity and development for a game that was already four months late when it was published in 2019.
• Fans complain that some routes aren’t as well developed as others (consensus seems to be that Azure Moon is strongest and Silver Snow weakest, though the debate continues).
• Adding the extra scenes required to support a new route would also mean more character dialogue. FE3H already has four routes + 1 partial DLC route, along with a full and excellent cast, so that’s a big additional cost.

Thanks to the comments, I know that some readers gave Fishpond a shot because it was tilting at this particular windmill, not the romance premise (Seteth is not as popular as the students for obvious reasons).

Conversely, writing an original female character, even one who spends much of the story wearing a body that is part of the game, meant some fans wouldn’t read my story. Some readers only want original pairings; others dislike the Isekai structure.

Either way, writing a golden route gave me another hook to Fishpond’s pitch. It’s an impulse that I’m glad that I embraced.

Other posts in this series:

• My AO3 stats model
• Overturning my Internet Bullshit: That time I wrote romantasy action on AO3

The post What Writing on AO3 Taught Me: Golden route = Powerful premise appeared first on E.M. Williams - Fantasy Author.

Live long enough, and you may overturn your past self’s Internet bullshit.

I’m a case in point.

Me circa 2015: “Fifty Shades of Grey is the hottest thing in publishing and I have formed negative opinions about fan fiction.”
Universe (grinning): “Hold my beer?”

Unpacking bullshit can be a long process

I’ve spent a lot of my middle adulthood digging out of elitism as a life choice. I’m also old enough that parts of that journey are visible in my Internet long-tail.

I grew up excelling in academics, and liked both school and learning. I won scholarships, awards, and medals. My family valued my achievements.

As I approached the end of my undergraduate degree, I had no idea what would make a viable career. What I wanted to do was write books. I didn’t believe that career would pay for my life, and neither did my family. At a loss, I leaned into earning a PhD in Science Fiction & Fantasy.

That way, I’d meet the writers I admired and study the books that I loved. Win-win, right?

Diligently, I earned a Master’s degree in Literary Theory. At some point on that journey, I realized I was more interested in writing books of my own than in talking about other people’s work for a living.

I started working, first in communications and then in marketing, and writing on the side.

Like many creatives, my ambitions and opinions about what makes a great book exceeded my ability to execute for a long, long time. It was frustrating. I despaired and felt envy for people I perceived as having what I wanted.

During this time, I wrote some unfortunate, judgemental things about fan fiction. The original essay isn’t worth your time.

My karmic turn in the river

In 2016, I read Liz Gilbert’s Big Magic. In it, she brings a non-elitist approach to creativity’s importance in our lives, while pointing out the elitism that exists in how we’re taught to think about how art and how it gets made.

During this period, I was also active on Twitter, which expanded my creative horizons. I listened to a lot of conversations about how widely people read, what participating in a fandom can mean, and why folks like what they like.

Reflecting on both experiences and my first essay after finishing Gilbert’s book, I realized I was doing nothing more profound than letting my fears about my writing prospects grab the mic while crapping on other people.

So I wrote “Death of a Fan Fiction Snob” to take myself to task.

For years, I thought that was it—lesson learned.

The muse had other plans.

The Switch game that changed everything

In 2019 and 2021, I played Fire Emblem: Three Houses (FE3H) for the Nintendo Switch.

It’s a strategy game set in a fantasy world with great characters, some heartbreaking choices, and a high degree of re-playability. I was quickly hooked. As I played the first of four possible routes, my passion for the game prompted me to read fan fiction for the first time.

Last February, I started rewriting the game as a romantasy action story on an Archive of Our Own, one of the biggest non-profit sites for fan fiction.

It’s called Into the Fishpond: A Three Houses Alliance. And it’s finished.

While Fishpond has a small yet kind following (~7,000+ hits), I’ve had some wonderful interactions with its readers (~170+ comments). Since it’s over 215,000 words, Fishpond is the longest story I’ve ever written. It taught me lots about writing faster, structuring scenes, and building sexual tension.

Like Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, which loosely inspired the title, Fishpond is a portal story about someone from our world who ends up in the portal world.

It’s also got:

• A romance between two people dealing with grief (if you know FE3H well, Fishpond is loosely a Setleth ship)
• Found family
• Dragons
• Intense battle scenes (surprise!!)
• Magical twins (again!?) whose sibling bond low-key powers the whole thing (picturing your shocked face)
• My first non-binary character
• A lot of non-canon lore that I made up as I went along

Want to know more? Here’s the plot teaser from Fishpond’s intro on AO3:

Zara has just finished playing Fire Emblem: Three Houses for the fourth time when she’s struck by the injustice of watching her favourite characters die time and again. Why can’t she save all of them?

Fortunately, the Goddess Sothis agrees that this is a problem worth solving.

Into the Fishpond by E. M. Williams

Getting over your Internet Bullshit

My Internet bullshit almost stopped me from writing Fishpond. I was embarrassed to have once held negative opinions about an activity to which I was now devoting so much time. At first, I spent a lot of time minimizing this new novel and what it meant to me.

Some kind friends pointed out how deeply sad I got writing Chaos Armor, and how much joy came into my face when I talked about Fishpond. I’m glad I listened to them.

Besides great joy, this creative side quest proved I can build an audience entirely separate from my social circles and professional network.

I don’t expect the crossover audience for Fishpond to be high. Without game context, I’m not sure how much sense the story makes to Xenthian Cycle readers, although I did get comments from some people who’ve never played the game and enjoyed it.

Either way, I’m proud of the work and wanted to share that it exists.

Here’s to living long enough to set your Internet bullshit on fire.

Other posts in this series:

• What Writing on AO3 Taught Me: Golden Route = Powerful Premise
• My AO3 stats model

The post Overturning my Internet bullshit appeared first on E.M. Williams - Fantasy Author.