Chatty December: Final Fantasy VIII
Final Fantasy VIII! Favorite characters and why? Favorite ships and why? What did you enjoy about the game, what didn't you enjoy about the game?
Favorite characters...
Well, honestly, my first playthrough I spent the entire first disc hoping someone would shoot Squall in the head, please please, and when Seifer was torturing him I was frankly rooting for Seifer to kill him. And rather disappointed when he lived. It wasn't until after that, when Rinoa started actually getting through to him (along with everyone else) that I started liking Squall at all. I actually don't remember how I felt about the rest of the cast at first - really, my dislike of Squall was pretty well all-pervading, and then finally engaging and wondering about the character.
By the end of the first playthrough, I was more than willing to say that Squall and Rinoa deserved each other. Which is not to say that I particularly liked either of them, but I could see in them the potential - not actually realized in the game - to be a formidable and likable pair. However, I could also see that they had at least a fifty fifty shot of exploding in massive drama and tears within the first three months. Neither of them were all that self-aware, neither of them were all that good at communicating. So while they meshed sometimes, it was often completely by accident.
AND THE STORY DID NOT END RIGHT. I mean yes you have the Ultimecia time loop and all that. But the point of the game was the romance, it took up most of the freakin' run time really, and it wasn't resolved. They weren't an OTP and they hadn't broken up. They'd only gotten as far as Squall admitting to her conscious face he cared about her and vice versa. That's the START of a relationship, it's not the actual thing itself.
...Essentially, FFVIII launched my habit of fanfiction because damnit, the story wasn't finished. It had to be finished. And my first and still longest fanfic, Griever, was basically me going "okay, so, you COULD work well together, and you WANT to work well together, so what would it take to actually make that happen and not grief and tears after a month?" and sticking a plot around it, much as the game itself had done.
So...I'm a Squall/Rinoa shipper first and foremost, but not because either character was my favorite; rather, I liked who the two of them became when they managed to click.
In the course of my fanficcing over this game, and meeting people who liked it (this was my first fandom, you realize) I started really liking Zell, and how Zell fit into the whole. And on replays I kept going "wow. This guy is camp. I mean I can buy that he's straight and clueless, but I can TOTALLY see why people would say he's gay." Except I couldn't actually make that leap myself; I never really managed to see Zell as carefreee gay, but rather a clueless and very camp kind of guy who neither knew nor much cared how his words and actions would be perceived.
This started my perception of Squall/Zell as a UST; Squall being attracted to Zell's general free spiritedness, but Zell being ...pretty well clueless that Squall's patience had another element to it.
The AU of my own headcanon let the three of them - Squall, Rinoa, and Zell - be together as a triad, because the world needs more bi love and I didn't (and don't) think it's necessary that Squall choose.
Over time I grew to love the whole cast of the game about equally, really, which I suppose is a nice reversal from where I started. They're all flawed, and they're all engaging in their own way. The pairings I am mentally stuck with are Squall/Rinoa/Zell, Irvine/Selphie, and Quistis+Seifer (as a more sibling pair than lovers, which would be ew to me).
What did I enjoy about the game? The cast, in the end. The very flaws that I'd hated when I started playing wound up making the game so much more interesting as the team picks up the shards of its memories and figures the story out. I liked that Laguna was basically a decent guy who just couldn't catch a break with an automated break-catcher. I liked that Squall and Laguna didn't have a Disney Moment but that the plot left that whole tangle unresolved, because that tangle would've taken a whole game on its own to resolve. I appreciated that the game was essentially about isolation and the need for communication (even when it's poor communication), the need to reach out to others even when you suck at it or just plain don't know how.
What did I dislike? That the game world created essentially a horror show and then flat out refused to address the horrors it had created. SeeDs are child soldiers. Not a member on that team is older than 17 at game start. All of them have spent their entire lives in training for combat, and IN combat. This world takes its war-orphaned children, steals their memories, and then sends them to fight new wars. What. The. Actual. Fuck. The crises Squall's mentally whinging about through the first half of the game are very normal teenage crises - but he's not a normal teenager, and he's not in a normal world. The crises he's having, given his background, should've been hitting him at like age 12 or something. By 17 he might be lost when it comes to love (as really, I can't see there being a lot of love-without-strings in the Gardens) but killing people, even killing people he knows or might have been on good terms with...no.
That was about it with my beef with the game, but I spent some solid years having issues with the fandom. Specifically, the Rinoa-haters. I still have a beef with the Rinoa-haters, frankly. That girl had NONE of the training of anyone else on the cast. The best she had going for her is her dad's a general, so she probably picked up a few things just growing up around a military mind. But she keeps up. No training, no mental safety nets, she keeps up and her decisions are frankly not wrong ones, even if they are teenage-dramatic ones. But oh did the fandom ever hate her guts! So many fics of Rinoa being a screechy whiny possessive bitchfreak who drives Poor Sensitive Squall away, to the arms (often) of Seifer, which is one pairing that even many years down the line just makes me twitch. Or Zell, or Irvine...invariably a yaoi pairing. Kill Rinoa off or make her a screaming psychobitch so Squall can be with a guy. This drove me NUTS. I was fine with the fics that didn't deal with "but where's Rinoa/what happened to that relationship" at all and just wrote the pairing they wanted to write. The fics where Squall had to break up with Rinoa first almost always had it being her driving him away or driving him nuts. I never felt she deserved that kind of hate; sure she's flawed, but frankly Squall is equally flawed. It is in fact their flaws as much as their strengths that make them work well together as a pair, and if they exploded it would be as much his fault as hers.
I don't write much for FF8 anymore, but I rather suspect that if I did I would wind up writing a long series about Rinoa coming into her own as a sorceress, and learning not to be afraid - not of herself, nor of her power, nor of what any twerp happens to think of her.
Favorite characters...
Well, honestly, my first playthrough I spent the entire first disc hoping someone would shoot Squall in the head, please please, and when Seifer was torturing him I was frankly rooting for Seifer to kill him. And rather disappointed when he lived. It wasn't until after that, when Rinoa started actually getting through to him (along with everyone else) that I started liking Squall at all. I actually don't remember how I felt about the rest of the cast at first - really, my dislike of Squall was pretty well all-pervading, and then finally engaging and wondering about the character.
By the end of the first playthrough, I was more than willing to say that Squall and Rinoa deserved each other. Which is not to say that I particularly liked either of them, but I could see in them the potential - not actually realized in the game - to be a formidable and likable pair. However, I could also see that they had at least a fifty fifty shot of exploding in massive drama and tears within the first three months. Neither of them were all that self-aware, neither of them were all that good at communicating. So while they meshed sometimes, it was often completely by accident.
AND THE STORY DID NOT END RIGHT. I mean yes you have the Ultimecia time loop and all that. But the point of the game was the romance, it took up most of the freakin' run time really, and it wasn't resolved. They weren't an OTP and they hadn't broken up. They'd only gotten as far as Squall admitting to her conscious face he cared about her and vice versa. That's the START of a relationship, it's not the actual thing itself.
...Essentially, FFVIII launched my habit of fanfiction because damnit, the story wasn't finished. It had to be finished. And my first and still longest fanfic, Griever, was basically me going "okay, so, you COULD work well together, and you WANT to work well together, so what would it take to actually make that happen and not grief and tears after a month?" and sticking a plot around it, much as the game itself had done.
So...I'm a Squall/Rinoa shipper first and foremost, but not because either character was my favorite; rather, I liked who the two of them became when they managed to click.
In the course of my fanficcing over this game, and meeting people who liked it (this was my first fandom, you realize) I started really liking Zell, and how Zell fit into the whole. And on replays I kept going "wow. This guy is camp. I mean I can buy that he's straight and clueless, but I can TOTALLY see why people would say he's gay." Except I couldn't actually make that leap myself; I never really managed to see Zell as carefreee gay, but rather a clueless and very camp kind of guy who neither knew nor much cared how his words and actions would be perceived.
This started my perception of Squall/Zell as a UST; Squall being attracted to Zell's general free spiritedness, but Zell being ...pretty well clueless that Squall's patience had another element to it.
The AU of my own headcanon let the three of them - Squall, Rinoa, and Zell - be together as a triad, because the world needs more bi love and I didn't (and don't) think it's necessary that Squall choose.
Over time I grew to love the whole cast of the game about equally, really, which I suppose is a nice reversal from where I started. They're all flawed, and they're all engaging in their own way. The pairings I am mentally stuck with are Squall/Rinoa/Zell, Irvine/Selphie, and Quistis+Seifer (as a more sibling pair than lovers, which would be ew to me).
What did I enjoy about the game? The cast, in the end. The very flaws that I'd hated when I started playing wound up making the game so much more interesting as the team picks up the shards of its memories and figures the story out. I liked that Laguna was basically a decent guy who just couldn't catch a break with an automated break-catcher. I liked that Squall and Laguna didn't have a Disney Moment but that the plot left that whole tangle unresolved, because that tangle would've taken a whole game on its own to resolve. I appreciated that the game was essentially about isolation and the need for communication (even when it's poor communication), the need to reach out to others even when you suck at it or just plain don't know how.
What did I dislike? That the game world created essentially a horror show and then flat out refused to address the horrors it had created. SeeDs are child soldiers. Not a member on that team is older than 17 at game start. All of them have spent their entire lives in training for combat, and IN combat. This world takes its war-orphaned children, steals their memories, and then sends them to fight new wars. What. The. Actual. Fuck. The crises Squall's mentally whinging about through the first half of the game are very normal teenage crises - but he's not a normal teenager, and he's not in a normal world. The crises he's having, given his background, should've been hitting him at like age 12 or something. By 17 he might be lost when it comes to love (as really, I can't see there being a lot of love-without-strings in the Gardens) but killing people, even killing people he knows or might have been on good terms with...no.
That was about it with my beef with the game, but I spent some solid years having issues with the fandom. Specifically, the Rinoa-haters. I still have a beef with the Rinoa-haters, frankly. That girl had NONE of the training of anyone else on the cast. The best she had going for her is her dad's a general, so she probably picked up a few things just growing up around a military mind. But she keeps up. No training, no mental safety nets, she keeps up and her decisions are frankly not wrong ones, even if they are teenage-dramatic ones. But oh did the fandom ever hate her guts! So many fics of Rinoa being a screechy whiny possessive bitchfreak who drives Poor Sensitive Squall away, to the arms (often) of Seifer, which is one pairing that even many years down the line just makes me twitch. Or Zell, or Irvine...invariably a yaoi pairing. Kill Rinoa off or make her a screaming psychobitch so Squall can be with a guy. This drove me NUTS. I was fine with the fics that didn't deal with "but where's Rinoa/what happened to that relationship" at all and just wrote the pairing they wanted to write. The fics where Squall had to break up with Rinoa first almost always had it being her driving him away or driving him nuts. I never felt she deserved that kind of hate; sure she's flawed, but frankly Squall is equally flawed. It is in fact their flaws as much as their strengths that make them work well together as a pair, and if they exploded it would be as much his fault as hers.
I don't write much for FF8 anymore, but I rather suspect that if I did I would wind up writing a long series about Rinoa coming into her own as a sorceress, and learning not to be afraid - not of herself, nor of her power, nor of what any twerp happens to think of her.