The Music of Writing: Grand Central Arena

I didn't have any music that specifically associated itself with Diamonds are Forever, and I think I'll do the Eric Flint coauthored works as a group, so that brings us to the Arenaverse's origin.

I built up a very significant soundtrack around Grand Central Arena, so this will be a fairly long post!

I have always "seen" the Arenaverse in my head as a TV series, often as an anime, and any series needs an opening theme. Ultimately, I ended up choosing the OP from Wild ARMs 4: "I Look Up At The Sky Because You Are There". This is the extended version; for the actual opening I'd use the shorter version, and I actually have the entire opening video in my head, starting with the Holy Grail crew looking out in amazement, zooming out from them to show the successively huger views of the Arena until it zooms out... to Ariane's eye, and then to numerous other character scenes and flashes of events.

Nothing has influenced the events in the Arenaverse quite like Hyperion, and so the next piece is for DuQuesne, realizing that his world is a fantasy... and then watching it collapse about him. But in the end, he decides to protect others, including the desperate members of the nascent OSC, all encapsulated in this piece: Prologue to Dirge of Cerberus. 

The first of the Great Factions to greet our heroes (rather than confront them) is the Faith, in the person of First Initiate Guide Nyanthus. The Faith demanded music that exemplified the best of their Faction; not martial, not confrontational, but embracing what all species had to offer, building to the beauty and wonder of the Arena that the Voidbuilders, the Creators, have made for all to behold. To encapsulate this, I chose Hymn, by Vangelis.

The dark mirror of the Faith is the Shadeweavers, and they get a darker theme -- Gothic Power, by X-Ray Dog. I originally encountered this theme in one of the earliest trailers for The Fellowship of the Ring, and it stuck with me. It is perhaps even  more specifically Amas-Garao's theme.

The Molothos are militant, regimented, and unswerving, and they deserve a theme reflecting that. I chose The Blade Seeker, from Soul Calibur III, for them. 

When the Molothos confront DuQuesne and Carl, DuQuesne must unleash the self he has hidden for five decades. Trigger Situation, from Dirge of Cerberus, is what I call the theme for DuQuesne's Awakening. "Your problem, you pea-brained, pompous, overbearing crayfish, is that you think you have the faintest idea of what you're dealing with."

The Arena itself has a theme, which I found in a somewhat unlikely place; the first half of the instrumental of Passion, from the video game Kingdom Hearts. This piece does double duty, however, because at 1:55 it becomes DuQuesne's Victory -- the desperate ploy in which DuQuesne and Carl Edlund manage to use the Molothos' shuttle to ambush and destroy the warship Blessing of Fire, winning Humanity's first Challenge. 

Orphan -- the mysterious sole member of the Faction of the Liberated -- also deserves his theme, and I gave him one: The Silver Surfer, from the second Fantastic Four film. The choice became even more apropos later, when we discover that Orphan has been the sole observer and agent for the vastly more powerful and engimatically ancient Vindatri.

Humanity is tricked into a challenge by the Blessed, but the joke turns out to be on them when they discover that the Leader of the Faction of Humanity is a top-flight pilot and a daredevil to boot. Ariane's desperate and thrilling flight through the Skyfall is encapsulated in the Airwolf Theme, in this version specifically at 6:43 in this long-form version

Amas-Garao arranges for another challenge as well; but he finds that even in declaring the Challenge, Ariane Austin is not to be underestimated; to the theme of What Shall We Die For?, from Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Ariane tells him to be ready to lose, because she will SHOW him who humanity truly is.

And Ariane Austin carries out her promise, facing down the supposedly unbeatable Shadeweaver in a terrible one-on-one battle which I wrote to Unmei no Hi - Spirit VS Spirt/Day of Destiny from Dragonball Z. Amas-Garao seemed unbeatable... but Ariane found a key to unlock something no one ever imagined. 

There are of course some more tracks for the later books -- but we will get to them in good time!