Throneless // Fate x Highschool DxD

Been a while, eh?

So it's been, what, nearly a year? Half a year? Listen, I'm terrible with time...

Yeah, I have my reasons for unpublishing this story and they don’t seem unreasonable. To me at least.

The first is that I didn’t want more readers to come to this story. More readers would mean more people asking me to update a story I wasn’t working on. And trust me, people get annoyed by that pretty quickly.

The second is that I had no form knowledge of either of the franchises this story is based on.

I am and will likely stay a casual Fate fan, with most of my knowledge from the series coming from lore videos and the only two shows I watched, Aprocypha and Grand Order. The same goes for DxD, with me having only ever watched the series when I was in middle school (yes this destroyed my personality) and my planning for the series going with my pacing as I read the light novel at the same time I was writing this story.

A lot of my focus on the story of Camelot came from my own personal knowledge and study of the legends of the Knights of the Round Table. I tried to do a mix of what the Typemoon Wiki had on the knights’ past and the historical mythos.

And lastly, I didn’t know where I was going to take this.

And the speed at which it blew up almost certainly gave me a bit of anxiety. After all, most of my followers come from Throneless and I felt that if I continued writing it would only grow to be disappointing to my readers, and it had already been disappointing to plenty who read it at the start.

But these were clearly Fate fan freaks who couldn’t come to understand the concept of Artoria being as strong as she was because of the conflicts she took part in because of the Holy Grail.

Artoria as she was written in this story didn’t have to experience those conflicts because she was reincarnated as a (practically) normal Japanese girl who didn’t need to cut mountains in half, and for some reason, this was a hard concept to understand.

Then there's the people who were crying out how Artoria was the pinnacle of humanity and shouldn't have become a devil when, hate to break it to them, Artoria is no more human than Gilgamesh is. Artoria is pretty commonly written to be half human and half dragon, with her dragon blood being the reason she has so much magic power. She was never the pinnacle of humanity, she was the pinnacle of kings.

And even then, of the three kings from the Feast of Kings, Iskander is the only one who could be considered successful with Greece still standing to this day, even if it isn't to the same size as his empire. Half of the knights of the round table betrayed Artoria in one way or another, yet all of Iskander's men stood with him even in death. And he was fully human.

Artoria is often represented as the flawless king, but that flawless king can only truly exist without strife in a flawless world, which ironically makes her flawed. It made her a martyr who died for nothing.

Iskander, meanwhile, was a selfish king in a selfish world. He lived up to the expectations people had of him and surpassed them, making them loyal beyond life. He was flawless. He was Artoria's opposite.

But a flawless character isn't fun to write.

So, what does this mean I’ve been doing in the meantime? Getting better at writing. At least, I’d like to imagine I was.

If DxD and Fate were shows I were casual about, I figured cutting my teeth writing a fic for a franchise I actually love would help me generate ideas for other stuff I’d like to write.

The Devil’s Luck, my Fairy Tail story, has done exactly this.

Does this mean I plan to come back to this story anytime soon? No, but I am putting the idea out there for future documentation for myself to go back to or for someone else to take ideas from and write.

When I write I try to always take a singular idea as the basis for what I’m writing before trying to put some sprinkles of other ideas in. For Throneless, this idea was peace and the paradoxical struggle of how Artoria was only ever to achieve it through violence, only for more violence to come and steal that peace away again.

Just as there was peace before Mordred’s revolution that destroyed Camelot, there was peace before the Chaos Brigade wanted more war.

Artoria was in a position to look at her past which had become nothing more than myth, the kingdom she had tried to support turned into a figment of imagination and her own image was replaced with a false visage of a man named Arthur. She would be viewed as someone who had become the ideal king, but she would realise she could never be an ideal king in a realistic world.

This was why she would eventually become, to a degree, her alter.

She didn’t want to be a martyr, she wanted quiet, she wanted peace. The means didn’t matter, only that she got to the end she wanted.

She would fall more into the line of thinking that Iskander preached during the Feast of Kings, and something I had originally had her say my first bout writing this story.

Artoria and Morgan le Fay would become a silent faction amongst the devils. People with power people feared to upset but had reasonable ambitions that weren't in any way something most people would try to call stupid.

Live and prosper, silently.

Fade into the background once all was said and done, enjoying their peace and happiness.

This was and by a large margin still is where I want to take this story.

But I have differing plans on how to approach this.

And this point on it will likely be spoilers, so read at your own discretion.

I think what I'm going to do is change the protagonist to someone I know more about. Mordred, but I am also removing Morgan as a love interest for that same reason. Does this mean I'll be removing her from the story?

No.

But I will be changing her position to something that suits her more greatly. I will be keeping her story integration largely the same, being reincarnated as Grayfia's sister but she will end up taking the position as head of the house after Grayfia married Sirzechs.

This was my plan originally, but I didn't get far enough to make the revelation that, surprise surprise, Morgan le Fay bended the truth.

But Artoria will take a drastic change in position, too. She won't be present for the lathe part either, and that's because she'll also be moving to another role I know better, the Lion King.

And no not the Disney version, but instead the Grand Order: Camelot version.

But the key difference is that Merlin will have been there to be an advisor to her, so even after losing her humanity she isn't going to nuke the world anytime soon.

A side plot will likely happen with Morgan and Mordred trying to find her and bring her to their side in the fight against the Chaos Brigade and the Dragon Gods.

So there you have it. My plans and whatnot. But now I have another question for you lot, should I keep it harem?

I ask because I feel like it would be interesting to keep Issei in the story as well, and Mordred feels to me like a devoted but maybe demisexual lover.

I don't know, I'm just a sucker for slow burn romances and feel like I had dived too deeply into the romance in the original version of this story.

That being said, fans of DxD do give me ideas of who you would think would be good romance partners for the Saber of Red.

Personally I feel like Xenovia and Irina are obvious choices, swords and tomboys go together like swords and tomboys. But then there's the softer side to Mordred that would push her to someone like Asia for instance or maybe even Rossweise.

But I also wouldn't be against someone like Kiba either.

Point is, I'm not writing anymore than two love interests.

Hell, I'm not against the idea of writing with no love interest but it is DxD so who knows how that would go out.

And should I write it with Mordred or keep the same structure I had originally with Artoria as the protagonist?

Anyway, thank ya for reading and this is your local Irish lesbian signing out!