#haven smp | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

knife-moth-mc · 5 months

Text

Welcome To Haven

(a post-mortem of my Arc 1 poem)

One for the lost Two for the seeker Down in the void Where minds grow yet bleaker Trust for a monster Doubt for a curse A weapon or answer For wanting or worse Fear for a secret Friendship for guilt And for those who try To ease the world's tilt A hope for the future A cry for the past A play for the present Roles still being cast No respite for any With something to ask No choice without harm done For this thankless task No truth and no progress No blessing but doubt No hand to hold onto The hand reaching out This debris gathers No matter the cost Where none are forsaken Nor truly are lost

I told Gawain I would write this something like a year and a half ago now. I'd apologize that it took me so long but honestly I'm just glad it's done at this point.

@gawaininred enjoy!

So, first things first. This poem is clumsy. I don’t think it’s bad, by any means—I’m incredibly proud of what I did here. But this was a new thing for me, so I tried to make it easier by loosening rhythm and syllable constraints, and having relatively short lines. I think in the end this hurt me more than it helped me, which is why the arc 2 poem is so much stricter and more complicated.

One for the lost Two for the seeker Down in the void Where minds grow yet bleaker

I wasn’t at all sure where I was going with my plot at first—it wasn’t until the second stanza that I started to pull the bones of it together—so I gave myself an easy and ambiguous start. You can go pretty much anywhere from “one for the lost”! My original intention was simply to evoke the nursery rhyme that starts with “one for sorrow” (there are multiple versions with different second lines). I realized almost immediately that the poem was going to be a bit long to stick with that faithfully all the way through, but it’s still at the heart of the poem all the way through. Interestingly, I remembered later that I had started another poem with “one for the lost” a few years back. The full first line of that one is “One for the lost who no longer miss home”. Make of that what you will.

The “two” in “two for the seeker” refers to the two surviving cats, Dove and Moira. I knew right away that I was going to work them into lore, but I didn’t know exactly how until much later on. The seeking, of course, refers to the more general search for answers, as well. This is the stream in which everyone immediately goes to the place they were told to avoid, just in case there’s something interesting there, after all. Ending the line with a trochee was intended mainly as a challenge to myself, because I knew I was locking myself into a very limited pool of words to end the final stanza with.

“Down in the void” is ironically a pretty light-hearted stream given the gravity with which the void has come to be treated on Haven. At the time, though, I didn’t put that much thought into it.

The stanza ends with an unnecessarily long line—“where minds grow bleaker” would have worked just as well. But it felt very important to me to stress that the bleakness was not a new state, simply a worsening one. Would I change it now? Maybe. The difference in meaning feels less notable to me now than it did then. But I think it adds a little something—at the very least, the implications that c!Moth’s state of mind is already in some way unstable by this point.

Trust for a monster Doubt for a curse A weapon or answer For wanting or worse

The monster is Moth, obviously, but it’s also c!Sleep. I like to play with ambiguity in my titles, something I’ve leaned harder into during my second arc. Moth and c!Oz trust each other, to some extent. Meanwhile, Moth and Sleep trust each other immediately (Moth more so than Sleep). It’s not a naive trust, though; Moth is well aware that Sleep is a monster. It knew right away that Sleep was like it. It trusts him more freely and deeply because of that, which is a dubious choice, but Moth is at this point so terrified of someone learning its secret that having someone who knows but doesn’t care comes as an incredible relief.

This early in Haven, Moth’s secret hasn’t been explicitly stated on screen. The title referring to it as a curse is a nod toward how it sees itself. As for the doubt… this is when Moth’s spiral starts, I think. C!Gawain has such a strong theme of right vs wrong that Moth, in its aspect as someone desperate for approval, latches onto that simplistic worldview and doesn’t let go.

Both the weapon and the answer refer to Bird. They’re a mercenary, and Beanie has been doing a fantastic job of playing the nuances of that as an identity—how it shapes you, how you grow into it. As far as the answer goes, this is the stream in which c!Moth puts out a hit on its on-and-off tormentor, K. This doesn’t end up being a very good answer to its problems, but it’s very solidly an answer that ends up driving the conflict moving forward.

“For wanting or worse” is the title I’m proudest of as a title. It frames the act of wanting as something negative, and that’s a major theme to this arc. C!Moth has a tendency to put itself to the side, to prioritize the people around it over itself. It knows what it wants, deep down inside, but the struggle to admit that takes… honestly, until arc 2. There’s a specific moment in arc 2 where it finally plainly says what it wants. Until then, desire is something that it can only be scared and ashamed of.

Part of the tragedy of this arc is that as Moth comes to terms with what it wants, and starts trying to set boundaries about that, the people around it read its behavior as another example of it putting others before itself.

Fear for a secret Friendship for guilt And for those who try To ease the world’s tilt

“Fear for a secret” is pretty straightforward. Someone knows its secret, and it’s scared—at this point in the story, it’s pretty sure that Gawain is the only person who can meaningfully kill it. But I’m glad that this line goes to this stream; if fear and secrets are to be associated with any part of this arc, it should be the part full of sick desperation and attempts to curtail the spread of a painful truth.

The next line doesn’t have much thought behind it if I’m being honest. Moth feels guilty. Sleep is its friend. This is followed by “and for those who try,” which I am much more satisfied with. It’s not a plot-heavy stream, but it is full of people trying to be good to each other. What is that worth? Well, things could have gone any way at this point. I just wanted to highlight that the love was there. The final line of this stanza completes the thought with the idea of trying to make things better, make things right.

A hope for the future A cry for the past A play for the present Roles still being cast

Moth meets c!Angel and they hit it off great, but Angel wants to leave Haven and assumes everyone agrees with her. Moth doesn’t. The hope for the future is yet another thing to be afraid of. Conversely, it indulges in its fear of the past, allowing August to convince it to jump into the void where it experiences a memory of the person it’s hurt most. The title is also a bit of a joke, due to the fact that I did cry during this stream.

With future and past explicitly mentioned, I knew I had to do a line about the present, and I chose “play” as a word here because it evokes fun as well as struggle. The fun aspect is important because this is the stream in which Moth meets c!Renn, the living doll; the struggle aspect is a nod to the many Havenites making plays for control around this time if not on this stream.

The meat of “roles still being cast” is Moth confidently telling c!Jackdaw that it’s possible to choose to be a good person, something that it’s still trying to convince itself of. I think that this is the title that most speaks for itself in the context of its stream.

No respite for any With something to ask No choice without harm done For this thankless task

This is the stream in which it’s revealed that Anathema, the person whose body Moth is living inside, is still alive, ever present and aware. There’s no respite for him, and no respite for Moth, who now feels even more pressure to do right by Anathema but still lacks a way forward.

It asks its friends for understanding and support, and is denied. They see it as being self-sacrificing. Absolutely not! Doesn’t it know it’s valued? Doesn’t it know it’s loved? They rush to reaffirm it, and alienate it in the process.

Miserable and alone, it meets Sylph, who tells it that the iron golem walled up in the villager trading hall is hurt by being trapped. Moth, who is deeply uncomfortable with iron, tells Sylph to free the golem, effectively preventing itself from entering the hall itself. If harm has to be done, then Moth will take on that harm itself. Denied a chance to pursue its desires, it hurts itself in a mockery of what it wants.

The thankless task is, honestly, existing. Moth feels more helpless than ever. It doesn’t want to die, but it doesn’t want to keep the status quo, either. It’s treading water. It’s putting unsustainable effort into what others take for granted. The only person to meaningfully reach out to it is August, who gives it hope in the form of a possible timeshare of the body, but in a way that’s a thankless task as well—it knows Anathema won’t want to agree to the timeshare, and it considers him justified in his objections.

No truth and no progress No blessing but doubt No hand to hold onto The hand reaching out

Moth lies to Aster about whether it has potions, a moment that stuck out to me so much I named the stream after it. In the next stream, it meets Lux, the wannabe king of Haven. Moth is disappointed in Lux’s, well, everything, and decides it does not support him in this whatsoever.

The latter half of this stanza involves Moth reaching out for meaningful connection. It… kind of finds that, but not to the degree it really needs.

This debris gathers No matter the cost Where none are forsaken Nor truly are lost

I originally wrote this line as “this detritus gathers” and was promptly informed that I was pronouncing detritus wrong. I’m still upset about this. But debris serves the same purpose, namely labeling the stream in which Moth acquires TNT by participating in blowing up a(n admittedly abandoned) village.

On the other hand, I wrote the rest of this stanza before the streams in question, since we had already pretty tightly plotted what was going to happen, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how well it all fits. “No matter the cost” is the title of a stream in which someone declares that they’re unilaterally instating their vision of society above any objections, for one. I knew that Moth and Sleep were going to argue about their philosophies, but not to that degree!

This is followed by the bitter, ironic “where none are forsaken,” in which both Moth and Anathema are in fact forsaken. Moth begs for help in this stream, to the point of tears, and is only rebuffed. This refusal is completely unrelated to it—Gawain had recently run into problems of their own—but it doesn’t know that. All it knows is that one more person is trying to control what options it has. One more person is deciding against its will to enforce what they think is best for it.

And we come full circle, ending the poem with the same word that helped open it: lost. No one in this stream is truly lost, as the title says. Anathema, who doesn’t even know how long he’s been trapped in this hell, is set loose upon Haven; Moth is forced out of the light in his stead, but that can’t last forever, can it?

#haven smp #contains major spoilers for my first Haven SMP arc!#i'm still really proud of myself for writing this all approximately in real-time as the arc progressed #astoundingly coherent given that I didn't know how it would end until months after I started it

5 notes · View notes