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kindlespark · 2 months

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omg i was just going through ur babel posts and i was wondering if u had any more details abt the cohortswap au, it looked super interesting! love ur art btw <3

HELLO. I AM SO SO MAD THIS TOOK ME SO LONG TO ANSWER BC I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO ASK FOR MONTHS but i haven't had like a single free hour until now ANYWAY OF COURSE THANK U SM FOR TAKING INTEREST

MAJOR BABEL SPOILERS AHEAD //

cohortswap is basically an au eren @chromathesia came up with where griffin and robin swap places in the story; robin is now the older golden child gone astray, and griffin is now the younger second failure. and the rest of the cohorts get swapped with them!

we have a lore doc that is like over 14 pages long but we are keeping the full thing under wraps for now because eren is writing a massive fic they don't want to spoil too early lmaooo

some foundational deets:

ramy still dies... so sorry. except in this case he and robin planned to run and leave babel for the hermes society together (the um. romantic eloping is implied but unfortunately i don't think either of them get a real chance to act on it), and they plan for victoire to stay behind to keep leaking information out to them. letty finds out and betrays them the same way; calling the cops and barging in with a gun and. yeah. except this time, because it happens outside their dorm rooms, robin manages to escape, and drags ramy's body across half of oxford to bury him in the garden of the old library. he is deeply deeply fucked up from this

professor lovell doesn't die... so sorry. furious about robin's betrayal, he blames it on robin being corrupted by spending too long in his home country, and rips griffin out of china early. but he realises very quickly that griffin isn't fluent in chinese and can barely hold a candle to robin's talent. he never tells griffin about robin but very much takes it all out on griffin, who grows up feeling compared to a ghost his whole childhood. when he first meets robin it all clicks, and he can't help but resent his older brother for the hell he got put through

to save herself, victoire sucks up to letty, tells her that she almost got hooked by hermes and wants out and to put it behind them after everything, and letty is so desperate to believe it that she pulls all her strings to vouch for her and keep her safe. victoire remains at babel and she keeps working covertly with hermes under letty's nose. my comic was about letty and victoire first seeing griffin in babel, and mistaking him for robin. letty doesnt take it well lmao but also in her bullheaded stubbornness starts to treats griffin as her second chance to prevent robin's "mistakes" from happening again lollll

so that's like the general premise! here's some other fun deets:

robin is... severely depressed but is determined to follow through on hermes' work and not give himself an easy out like ramy implied. griffin is so desperately eager for more of hermes when he finds out, but robin keeps him at an arms' length for ages because he's literally been wanting to die for years and is not prepared or willing to have a little brother to look after now. they end up butting heads more often than not and it's a very strained relationship (as griffin and robin's relationship is in canon)

when griffin fails his silver-working test, it's because robin tries to help offhand by giving him a matchpair he came up with. griffin can't get it to work in the exam, but worst of all, chakravarti recognises it as robin's work. he doesn't report griffin for it since he's also a part of hermes, but he tries to give griffin a second chance to come up with his own, and griffin can't, so he fails. up until that point griffin had been trying to hide from robin how little he knew, so the look on robin's face when griffin next sees him is unbearable, like, the mix of pity and anger that griffin didn't tell him, the disappointment that griffin wasn't the connection to robin's culture he wanted, the guilt that robin let lovell rip someone else out of their home, and now griffin knows exactly what letting down an older brother feels like. but it all happens in the half second before robin squashes it all down and gets down to business because there are more important things to worry about and maybe it's good that can't get caught up in griffin's life like this. to quote eren: "i think the worst part to griffin would be that robin just treats it like a setback. like okay, that's one less tool for you to use, you'll have to make up for that deficiency somewhere, moving on, when he wants robin to react as though it's personal to him that griffin doesn't measure up because it should be, because griffin's not good enough for their father (and robin always rolls his eyes when griffin tries to claim lovell and griffin knows why but lies to himself that he doesn't) so he must not be good enough to this tarnished golden child, the prodigal son that lovell tried to recreate. but no, he's just slightly more ineffectual gear within the revolution now, that's a slight hiccup at best and not an entire childhood snatched away from a boy whose clearest memory of canton is the smell of sesame oil in a wok"

robin warns griffin about recruiting evie very early on, but doesn't tell him about letty or ramy for a long while because the wound is still fresh. griffin still persists, and robin is forced to whisk griffin out of babel after he kills evie. and he's just a mess whispering "you were right you were right im sorry im so sorry" because robin told him this could happen, but he let love and idealism cloud his judgments with evie, and robin has NEVER seen griffin like this, and any angry berating about griffin's stupid misjudgments die on his lips

griffin/anthony is so so very real. anthony is recruited by victoire separately, so griffin isn't even aware for a while and i think anthony actually held off on telling griffin bc of how close he was with sterling LOL. griffin and sterling had something insane going on at first, with sterling trying to be genuinely sympathetic to griffin's plight as an attempt to distinguish himself from his uncle's legacy, before the years drive them apart and griffin becomes aware that everything sterling conceded to him was merely lipservice. anthony and griffin get really close after they realise the other is already apart of hermes and post-evie as well. eren writes sterling as a critique of armchair radicals who see a sliver of violent liberation in practice and easily revert back into believing that the oppressed are savages. evie is a critique of white woman tears <3 i do believe she cries every time someone called her out for saying anything a little racist

yeah um there is way more and we both have comic/fic wips we're working on for the au but i will end this post here because it got so insanely long christ above. thank you so much for the question though i have soooo many thoughts about cohortswap au it's been absolutely taking over my brain

#cohortswap #babel #babel spoilers #enatchios #chromathesia #long post #i'm literally so sorry this got so long #i feel crazy

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kindlespark · 2 months

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cohortswap anon here, aouhgkdhgkdh hi

im so emo over the idea of robin getting to pick up his cantonese again, like that experience of going back to a place where nobodys going to second guess you based on your appearance or treat you differently is so ough. im curious about his adjustment period though cause from personal experience and friends experience ppl from one's home country can usually clock someone as diaspora and its kind of jarring to have that feeling of being out of place no matter which country you're in.

thank you for the fun fact and good luck on your play >:) and tell eren i said hi >:)

HI ANON im so sorry this took so long for me to get to i've been soooo busy but my play just opened so im almost free!! i actually wrote a whole a response to this on mobile a week ago and then my tumblr app crashed and i lost it all so i gave up :sob:

yeah i think it's such a deliberate choice by kuang to have robin and the majority of his cohort lose their home languages and it made me feel crazy (/pos) as someone who is also chinese diaspora and is only fluent in english; my parents didn't pass down any of their chinese dialects to me (and some of them are endangered)! it clearly draws from kuang's own experience as well.

there's no way robin doesn't feel a kind of alienation even when he returns to canton and people don't look twice at him; i think he would feel that even if he could (and when he does eventually) speak cantonese. that boy's survivor's guilt is off the charts, and living/looking at the reality he tried so hard to ignore and was ultimately complicit in while living in luxury at babel would make him feel like he shouldn't even have the right to set foot in his home country anymore. but i think he would simultaneously feel the most useful while there; finally living up to ramy's expectations of him and helping however he can to smuggle silverworking practice into canton; this is him atoning for being alive and doing all the hard work that ramy told him not to run from.

robin can get by in canton with just mandarin well enough that i think it takes him a while to try speaking in cantonese again, out of a kind of guilt and embarrassment, but it does become necessary and i think robin's journey with relearning would also be a part of him learning chinese silverworking tradition; there's this really good fic i read that's an in-universe academic paper about silver-working in asia, and it's simply canon to me now. robin using chinese silver-working techniques in his work against the british empire is simply so real to me

thanks for the interest anon!! kinda got rambly here idk if this answered ur request but i never get sick of talking abt this book and this au >:)

#babel #cohortswap

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