"I suffer every single day, and you have the gall to tell me to not talk about it? I curse you, Sasha Waybright, that as long as I hate you, as long as I don't love you, you will never assume a human shape again! In one year's, time, this curse will become impossible to lift, and you shall never again torture this world with your cruelty!"
Sasha Waybright was once a noble duke's daughter, raised by her mother without a father present, always on business trips. That was until she offended a powerful sorceress and was cursed into the shape of a raven the shade of the sky at dawn.
When she runs into the woman who cursed her a week later, she's ready to brace her claws for impact (the caster's death would count as an absence of hatred, right?), but quickly aborts that plan as she looks into the witch's watery green eyes. Soon, Sasha finds herself having become the familiar of a witch who can't remember cursing her, but who is her only hope of returning to human form.
One Year's Time is an Amphibia fanfic by The_Thorns_Of_The_Colored_Rose_Blossoms
. It can be read here on Archive of Our Own.
Tropes in One Year's Time:
- Abusive Parents: It's mentioned that Sasha was beaten for not behaving properly and playing around as a child. Her parents also forced her to sever all ties with a friend just because they were leaving the town. When Sasha's curse starts taking a toll on her mind, she's actually looking forward to forgetting her parents and old home.
- Adaptational Gender Identity:
- It's briefly mentioned in a flashback that Yunan is a trans woman.
- Darcy is made a Composite Character with Aldrich and refered to by female pronouns.
- Adaptational Nice Guy:
- While Sasha's personality pre-curse isn't seen much, she seems to have been a much nicer person than she was pre-Character Development in the original show. Her more demanding and pushy attitudes are shown to be more a case of stress from being turned into a raven.
- Mayor Toadstool is only mentioned, but whereas in the show he was a corrupt politician who stole taxes from the townsfolk, here he seems to be a perfectly good leader who gives the amnesiac Marcy a fair deal on a house instead of exploiting her vulnerable position.
- Adaptational Relationship Overhaul: A flashback reveals that Olivia and Yunan are Marcy's biological parents, Yunan being a trans woman.
- Affectionate Nickname: Marcy takes to calling Sasha Baby Bird after she throws a tantrum. She eventually decides to properly name her Baby, which Sasha appreciates because it won't override her actual name.
- Amnesiac Dissonance: Marcy seems to be a very different person after losing her memories. Sasha, who is admittedly an Unreliable Narrator, recalls her as a cruel, frightening sorceress. In the present, she's a clumsy dork who does magic tricks when she's drunk. Flashbacks show that she really was a deeply troubled misanthrope with a sadistic streak who specifically wanted to curse someone she thought deserving to slowly lose their mind and become a bird over the course of a year so they could be her pet. At best she had a Freudian Excuse which quickly turns into Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse.
- Artistic License – Biology: Played for Laughs. Marcy covers Sasha's ears to tell Maddie a secret. Unfortunately, she doesn't know where raven ears are, resulting in Sasha hearing it anyway.
- Bury Your Gays: Yunan, the only confirmed trans woman in the fic, is gruesomly killed by a mob (for reasons unrelated to her being trans but still).
- Can't Hold Her Liquor: Marcy gets completely blackout drunk after a single mug of ale.
- Clever Crows: Sasha is obviously very clever for a corvid, since she still has a human mind, which many people remark upon.
- Contrived Coincidence: The first town Marcy stops at after Sasha becomes her familiar just so happens to be the town where Sasha has history with one of the denizens, and said denizen is the first person they run into.
- Crush Blush: When Marcy kisses Sasha's head and asks if she loves her, the narration notes that Sasha blushing would be an optical illusion because birds can't blush.
- Curse Escape Clause:
- Marcy cursed Sasha to be a raven for as long as she hated her, only changing back if Marcy started to love her within a years time, or else it would be permanent. If Marcy hadn't suffered memory loss soon afterward, this would be tantamount to never.
- While anyone can use the curses Maddie crafts from Sasha's feathers, only Sasha and Marcy can undo them.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Marcy grew up in a town that looked to her for healing, then refused to thank her for it and instead credited God. When a plague hit the town and she warned everyone she healed to rest for a few days, everyone but her mothers ignored her. As a result, her mothers were the only ones who didn't suffer a relapse, and were killed by angry townsfolk, who then still demanded that Marcy heal them. It's really no wonder she became a spiteful and petty witch.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Because of the medieval setting.
- Sasha notes that it's unusual to hear Anne talk openly about having been romantically interested in another girl.
- Sasha considers magic evil and corruptive at first because of her Christian upbringing. Admittedly she hasn't seen much to prove her wrong.
- Anne and Marcy go on the tavern to get drunk, despite Anne only being 17.
- Dirty Old Man: When she was still human, Sasha's education included reading aloud for old men who, according to her, could not keep their eyes off her despite her being 12 at the time.
- Disabled in the Adaptation: Marcy suffers from chronic pain, and has to lay down to rest every so often.
- Disproportionate Retribution: While Sasha was needlessly insensitive about Marcy's chronic pain and even aggressive, turning her into a raven, most likely forever, through a process described as excruciatingly painful seems a tad bit over the line.
- Dramatic Irony: No one but Sasha and the audience knows that she's a cursed human and not just an exceptionally intelligent raven, making it painfully ironic when Marcy and Anne treat her like a pet. Anne in particular mentions that she had a crush on a girl named Sasha as a child, unaware that Sasha is in the room with her.
- Entertainingly Wrong: Maddie points out that Marcy has magic books despite not being magic when Marcy asks about people who aren't born witches practicing magic. Thing is, Marcy is a witch, she just doesn't remember.
- Entitled Bastard: The people of Marcy's old village killed her mothers and still had the gall to ask her for healing.
- Eye Color Change: Marcy's eyes turn emerald green when she uses magic.
- Familiar: The amnesiac Marcy assumes that Sasha must be her familiar. This ends up more or less becoming true, as Sasha would rather stick close to the one person who can possibly lift her curse than risk setting out on her own. Sasha also turns out to have some innate magic power as a result of her curse, fulfilling the magical part of a familiar.
- Forced Transformation: The premise of the fic is that Sasha, a nobleman's daughter who was rude to a witch, is transformed into a raven. Marcy later turns her into a nightingale while drunk, though that is temporary.
- Fortune Teller: Valeriana appears as one, doing something to Anne that leaves her able to mildly predict the future and see through Sasha's curse.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Sasha is really not fond of Anne for getting too close with her witch. It doesn't help that Anne unintentionally ruins her valentine's day plans by picking the flowers Sasha had chosen for Marcy.
- Ignored Expert: When Marcy's village was struck by a plague, she told the people coming to her for healing that they should rest for a few days to recover properly. No one listened, and she would have to heal them all again two days later, rince and repeat. Her mothers were the only ones who listened.
- The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Apparently part of Sasha's curse, she thinks more bird-like the longer she is in a raven's body. By the beginning of the fic she's already losing her grasp of human concepts like written language and time, and she reacts to Marcy's praise like a domesticated bird would. She specifically avoids hunting to try to stave of Death of Personality as long as possible. By chapter 5, she's lost her ability to worry about it and soon can hardly even remember having been human.
- Misanthrope Supreme: It's revealed through flashbacks that pre-amnesia Marcy, because of her Freudian Excuse, had a deep distaste for humans. She wants to curse the entire world into animals and decides to pick out a spoiled noble girl as a teest subject, making the curse take a year to fully lock out of a sadistic desire to see her victim slowly lose their mind and beg for salvation.
- Mistaken for Pedophile: When Marcy invites Maddie over to read her magic books, Sasha unsuccessfully tries to point out how bad it would look for an adult woman to invite a young child over after dark to "learn magic".
- Nice Girl: While Marcy has become better after forgetting everything but is still somewhat unstable, and Sasha is nicer partially because she doesn't have the brain capacity to be mean anymore, Anne is a genuinely nice person who seemingly gets along with everyone. Sasha only dislikes her out of pettiness and jealousy, and even that goes away when Anne gifts her a bracelet that used to belong to her human self.
- Past Experience Nightmare: Sasha suffers recurring nightmares about the day Marcy cursed her.
- Power Incontinence: Marcy doesn't remember how to use her magic, and can only do it when drunk. To make up for it, her magic when drunk is extremely powerful and random.
- Predecessor Villain: Marcy, prior to her memory loss, learned how to cast curses from scrolls written by an ancient, deeply misanthropic witch named Darcy Aldrich Leviathan.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: Marcy has a feeling that she's a witch even after losing her memories, because she befriended a seemingly wild raven so quickly. Which is true, in a roundabout way, but befriending wild animals is not what makes her a witch.
- Shout-Out: Sasha and Anne's history seems to be a reference to The Owl House's Amity and Willow. A girl from a wealthy family befriends a peasant girl her age but is forced by her Abusive Parents to break contact with her and does so by driving her away with insults and elitism.
- Small Role, Big Impact: Darcy Aldrich Leviathan is long dead and only briefly mentioned, but their writing on curses played a big part in leading Marcy to become the vengeful petty witch who cursed Sasha.
- Secret Secret-Keeper: In chapter 5, Anne learns who and what Sasha is, but says nothing.
- Sympathy for the Devil: Sasha initially wants to try her best to kill Marcy, but when she sees how scared she is, she feels bad for her instead, despite having every reason to hate her.
- These Hands Have Killed: Sasha doesn't want to hunt prey out of fear that it will accelerate the mental effect of her curse. By chapter 7 she's too far gone to think about that anymore and kills a buttefly.
- Touched by Vorlons: Anne is a Prophet, someone with True Sight that lets her see brief glimpses of Sasha's true form and predict the outcome of her actions. She's had her powers since she was a child, but Hop Pop helped her seal them away so she wouldn't have to deal with them until she was ready. Valeriana awakens them in chapter 6.
- Transformation Horror: Sasha remembers the pain of turning into a raven, describing the thousands of needle pricks of her feathers growing, her eyes being ripped from their sockets and moving to the sides of her head, and bleeding from her wounds in the process. The fic doesn't shy away from showing the psychological horror side of things either, as Sasha finds herself forgetting basic human concepts and is all but certain that she won't be able to speak again if she ever does turn back into a human.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Maddie thinks it's a fun game to curse random vagrants, and is rather blasé about wether she can turn them back again.
- Unequal Rites: Maddie explains that born witches, like Marcy, can cast curses with just words of ill intent, whereas withces like her has to practice curses like the ones seen in the show, akin to charms or potions. Sasha is insulted that a pretend-witch wanted to use her feathers for her curses.
- Ungrateful Bastard: The people of Marcy's village would come to her when she was a child to have her heal their injuries, then leave and thank God for it without even a word of acknowledgement to Marcy herself. When everyone but Marcy's mothers ignore her advice to rest after being cured to recover fully, they kill them for being the only ones who don't suffer a relapse, and then have the gall to ask Marcy to heal them again.
- The Unintelligible: Sasha, being a raven, can only communicate through caws, and is therefore incomprehensible to humans. She doesn't have much better luck with other ravens, since she still has a human mind that can't understand raven talk.
- Unknown Rival: Anne has no idea that Marcy's pet raven considers her a rival for Marcy's affection.
- Unreliable Expositor: The jeweler seller who sells a bracelet Sasha lost when she was cursed into a raven recounts the story of how Sasha was cursed, but with the details extremely exaggerated, claiming that Sasha had insulted the witch (Sasha had been demeaning and threatening but had not used insults or even raised her voice), that she was turned into a giant monster with twelve eyes and six mouths (obviously false), and that she had only barely been chasen off after nearly killing her own handmaiden (Sasha was immediately attacked by the townsfolk after being transformed, and fled immediately after. The handmaiden called her a monster out of shock but Sasha never came near her).
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Sasha being a pink raven is treated as unusual enough to comment on, but not abnormal.
- Valentine's Day Episode: Chapter 2 is set in February, on and around Valentine's day. Sasha wants to give Marcy flowers in the hopes of making progress on lifting her curse. Her plans are unintentionally foiled by Anne, who picks the very same flowers Sasha had chosen to give to Marcy, and Sasha spends several days trying to find more flowers while Marcy thinks she left forever.
