Title: Forged Destiny
Author: Coeur Al'Aran
Rating: T
Genre: Adventure/Romance
Status: In-Progress
Pairings: Jaune/Blake
Summary: Jaune had always dreamed of being a Hero, of being someone. But dreams were just that; for in the world of Remnant the Class you are born with determines your fate. Jaune was born a Blacksmith, and thus that was his destiny. But when a strange opportunity allows him to change that, can a simple Blacksmith become something more within the Beacon Academy for Heroes?
Link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12044591/1/Forged-Destiny

Coeur has always been hit or miss in this fandom, with some people really liking his stuff and some people really hating it. Personally I was mostly a fan of the fics that used canon with a light touch then pushed off to go do something else. So, with Forged Destiny we got something a bit nice. The world of Remnant effectively runs off of RPG mechanics. Not as if the players were in a video game or trapped in another world, but built on the ground up where people are born with classes and gain stats and levels as they progress.

Jaune is a Blacksmith, a member of the NPC (Needs-Protection-Cast), has somehow come across an artefact that allows the cursor above his head to read off as a member of the Hero Caste, in this case a Knight. Using this item he follows his dreams to become a Hero and joins the Beacon Academy for Heroes. He makes friends with canon RWBY cast, most of them heroes themselves, and discovers there's a lot more to being a Hero than simple a title floating above your head.

It might sound a bit similar to a subplot in Log Horizon, and in fact a bunch of reviews in the early chapters refer to this, but in fact it is quite different. I always feel like Coeur does his best when allows himself to stretch his creative juices a bit out of his comfort zone, but in quite a few of his stories he lets himself fall far too much into Stations of Canon with a few minor adjustments. Forged Destiny is anything but.

Some of the characters are different, but some still act the same, albeit for completely different reasons. Velvet, for example is pretty much shy because she's also an NPC. Cardin still hates Jaune but that's mostly because it's a rivalry between the Warrior and Knight, two classes with fairly similar roles within a party. Blake isolates herself less because she's a faunus in a human institution and more because she's an Assassin amongst more 'heroic' classes. These altered backstories mesh fairly well with the world building, although random facts about the classes, castes, and laws of the world get added in as errata—I mean, as things Jaune should have known, being a Hero of course.

Good:
As mentioned above, I'm a sucker for world building and unique plots. I don't care about yet another Beacon Initiation to get launched off a cliff and trying to show off skills in an epic landing strategy. A 'realistic' reason behind quests, party compositions, stratified societies, and even a sort of self-directing skill-tree system are all things new to me in RWBY and while I've never appreciated info-dumps, there's quite a bit of information given in a more natural way.

No canon-rehash, villains are still villains even if they affect the world in different ways. The sequence of events are new plot definitely goes off in ways that are mostly unsuspecting. Especially as Jaune, with no real combat stats or skills to speak of, needs to figure out ways to win fights in a manner that doesn't give him away. Granted, most of the time this simply means he throws a stronger member like Pyrrha at the problem, but there are a few occasions where he has to do some sideways thinking to resolve a fight.

Bad:
Jaune himself still remains one of the weaker parts of this story. It's somewhat inevitable since it seems that's how Coeur always seems to write him, bumbling his way through with glimpses of genius here and there. Part of it is also that he seems willing to pick up various Idiot or Conflict Balls as the plot demands. They can range from having introspective navel-gazing moments where he tries to figure out what's so different between Heroes and NPCs only to go off and do something no self-respecting hero would ever do, piss-poor excuses to explain what he's doing to his friends (which most of the time they only accept because the truth is such an outside-context problem to them they couldn't think of anything else), or just simply allowing himself some bleeding-heart morality problems which cause him to do things which everybody else agrees is a horrible idea and yet he does it anyways.

In the earlier parts of the story he manages to get away with it quite a bit. As the story progresses, however, either due to the situation or simply being under closer scrutiny, it does start to bite him back, so there is that at least.

Overall this is one of few stories I still follow from Coeur and I feel like it's good enough to have kept my attention for this long (and it's also one of his longer works). It also helps that as of this writing one of the bigger changes to the status quo has just dropped:

Spoiler

...in that his true class finally got dropped and now everybody is reacting to that.

4/5 definitely a story I could read, then probably read again to pick up any hints of foreshadowing I might have missed previously.

 

I really like this story, it's my favorite Coeur RWBY story right now.

No major flaws with his writing style, the characters & world are reimagined in an interesting way and Jaune makes for a good MC in the context of this story as a NPC learning What It Means To Be A Hero.

Some of this is that Jaune doesn't have the same background knowledge as someone born & raised a hero.

Spoiler

I think him not revealing as a Blacksmith earlier could reasonably said to be the idiot ball, but many of his previous blunders are due to him not being raised in the cultural context of being a hero.

The

It also updates weekly, which is great.

4/5 overall.

 

What really annoys me about this story is that it does such a bad job about explaining how the lvl system actually work and what it means.

Like what does high lvl even mean in this story? Weiss mother was able to block Jaunes sword strike even though strength is his best stat, because she is high lvl. So if she has a C in strength as mage she would need to be three times his lvl and with a D four time his lvl or much more than that since jaunes Charisma doesn't rise at all. But how could that be? If she had such a high lvl how can Jaune even hit here with her having at least three or four times his dexterity? Is it just me or has the author completly forgotten about Jaunes dex problems? And if Weiss mother is on such a high lvl how can her daughter fight her at all magically with at best half her stats in everything?

Why does Jaune moan like everybody else in his party about the heat in Vacuo if he has a high constitution and aura? Shouldn't there be differences? Like Ruby with her really low contitution score?

How could Jaune kill that one soldier without meaning to when he is at most three times his lvl and not be killed by all the "high" lvl opponents they fight?

All those problems kinda cultivate in the main problem of this story: It always feels like things happen because the author says they do and not because they make sense or even should happen. This make Jaunes perspective and the whole rpg system of the world feel really inconsistent.

2/5

 

The latest chapter, just posted today, was incredible, with an absolutely exhilarating scene to cap off one arc and start another.

 

I have to admit it has its issues but Litrpg is kinda my guilty pleasure, so I’m immensly enjoying it.

Coeur is a bit like Kenchi with his writing and he carved himself a good niche out of a decent story starved fandom. Only one I havent enjoyed out of his writings so far has been Captain Dragon with its really shitty start which is basically like an Azkaban!!harry (herpderp)

So to summarise; update speed and writing quality as well as a general easy to read style it’s 4/5 from me.

 

I might need to catch up on this story because of recent developments, but broadly speaking, I agree with this--the RPG elements are simultaneously what this story tries to found itself on and completely superfluous at times, to the point that parts of it fall apart. For example, as is made clear by the story itself, people with higher levels can 100% help those with lower levels grind, which you'd figure would make a huge impact on the setting, since if some badass takes a Blacksmith hunting for a few weeks, they can get much stronger equipment.

Similarly, you'd figure that with the only difference between Soldier Caste and Hero Caste being the failing of literally one test, which is dumb as fuck for it's own reasons--but if all it takes to close the gap is a Hero grinding, you'd figure that'd also be a huge deal. The involvement of Heroes in wars is supposed to by this huge deal that the setting bends over backwards to avoid, but the difference between Soldiers and Heroes is just levels and there are ways to get levels.

What's more, the huge difference between how Heroes and NPCs level is supposed to matter, but how that displays in reality never seems to matter? Hell, Heroes supposedly get skills like Ruby's, who cut down a chunk of a forest casually that one time, but they barely even use those abilities in practice.

The story likes to have it's game mechanics when it's convenient, but hates having to actually consider what they mean, and that's a big issue as it goes on.

 

This chapter was pretty good

Spoiler

I didn't enjoy the angsty-ness of him and Ruby trying to pass off the crown to eachother although I could understand and I felt like this moment was some powercreep BS a bit

And finally the end of the romance angst hopefully, I'll probably tune in more for the epilogue and wrap up of this fic but I think I'll steer clear of Coeur fics from now on.

 

Forged Destiny is complete. Robot slave, mark it so.

But in all seriousness, Forged Destiny was great. Refrshing AU, with some truly epic moments (e.g. the forging of the sword at Ansel), and did the RPG elements well - that is, kept in the background, and used to shape the overaching plot rather than individual character interactions.

 

This was pretty excellent. It was such a long, nice adventure. Multiple completed arcs that string together coherently and problems that escalate at a good pace. It feels so strange, really, with how low quality some fanfiction can be, but this was just overall a good story. I could see it done as an original piece.