#corpsebrigadier

8. The character with the greatest wasted/unexplored potential

There are a lot of characters in FFT who go unexplored, but that doesn't surprise me since the plot is fairly tight and focused in. As for wasted potential... I feel like Alma's a gimme, since she is critical to the plot but we don't see very much of her at all and she's kidnapped for like at least a year. Teta also, I wish we'd gotten more from her outside of "Delita's sister and she's sweet."

But there's one particular character (& relationship) that I feel was really wasted, and it's Malak/Marach. One of FFT's most important themes is family and that, for better or worse, you can't change where you come from. There are so many rich and complicated familial relationships in FFT, and even the ones I wish we'd seen more of, like Meliadoul & Izlude, have these important emotional arcs. Rapha & Marach have that, sort of, but we mostly see it from Rapha's side, and Marach's side issss....

Look, I just really didn't like that our understanding of their relationship opened with him hitting her. That sucks. I'm not saying that he couldn't have picked up the language of violence from Duke Barrington--I think that's maybe exactly what this plot is getting at--but uh. In terms of like... Greater narrative themes. Not a lot of family members hit each other, in this game. I can't remember if Folmarv hits Izlude or not, I might be misremembering, but if he does, that happens shortly before he kills him. Marach and Rapha are our recruitable protagonists who are notably darker skinned than the rest of the main cast, so the fact that their sibling relationship opens with an act of direct, intentional violence does not sit well with me. I don't even think the idea of that plot is terrible on its own, i.e. a family relationship marked by deliberate violence instead of subtle and implied (in contrast to say the Beoulves), but I honestly don't think Marach was the right character to do this with. Rapha's backstory is already SO violent (which I have mixed feelings about for similar reasons) that I don't think Marach needed to add to it outside of the innate conflict of brother hunting down sister. I wish his attitude towards her had been softer, I guess. Something like "don't leave, I need you here"--which tbh I think is what's actually communicated in this plot, but there were other ways to do that with him, I feel.

That being said, the moment where Rapha revives him with the stone is still one of the most moving scenes in the game.

13. The non-canon pairing I find the most intriguing

rules: answer the questions and tag 9 people (or however many u want) you want to get know better/catch up with.

tagged by: @corpsebrigadier, @faejilly

tagging: @chyrstis, @hunnybadgerv, @rosewaterhag, @gatticus, idek, whoever wants to do the thing.

three ships: Jackie/V, Faris/Butz, Hawkeye/Riesz

last song: Life, in a Nutshell, by the Barenaked Ladies

last movie: Johnny Mnemonic. Back in January.

currently watching: Nothing. There are a bunch of things I'd like to watch, or re-watch, but I haven't been watching much of anything lately.

currently reading: Nothing I'm in between pages on, but I do have A Stack of fanfiction bookmarked to read if that counts. ;;>_>

🐷 Junk food you can never get enough of

pizzaaaaaaaa, idk if pizza is junk food, if it's about food + ketchup then I dislike everything cos I don't like ketchup

☠ Something that angers you

everything angers me, I'm full throttle 24/7

🌼 Fave flower

ahhhh. yesssss.

the character i least understand: after dissecting this game from childhood, i think i have a very clear picture of the motivations, goals, and emotional profiles of most of the entire cast. there are some characters where their motivations are inherently funny to me, but there are none i feel like i don't understand. the closest might be loffrey, because he's not even a lucavi but he seeks to ascend among them anyway, but i think his fascination with it, while alien to me, is a very interesting character trait, and he sticks out to me for that

interactions i enjoyed the most: delita/ovelia is a gimme. hmmmm. i'll reference a tiny interaction i adore: the conversation rapha and ramza have in that dirty, secluded alleyway, where she finds him incredibly brave and heroic and he deflects. "you mistake me for a better man"

the character who scares me the most: folmarv has retroactively become quite frightening to me. when i first played through the game myself, i was much like zoe, where the sudden shift from political drama to hidden monster cult was stark and terrifying, and would've cited cuchulainn as the guy who changed the game. folmarv was kind of a weird non-entity to me. but after thinking about it, reviewing his enormous web of deceit and manipulation, and thinking about his attitude of humans--even, or especially, his children--as ants, i find him chilling. it's the war of the lions, but the lion we need concern ourselves with isn't larg or goltanna. it's folmarv.

the character who is mostly like me: ovelia.

i have never in my life felt so powerfully about a video game character as i do ovelia. i have found very few fan interpretations of ovelia that match what i think are her core concepts, and those concepts are namely:

that she is not revenge-focused, that she is, in her heart of hearts, a pacifist who chafes against the station forced upon her;

that when she stabs delita, it is not out of spite or vengeance, it is out of fear, and fear can be just as dangerous as fury;

that she is ruled principally by such powerful anxiety and misery that she is driven to labor in inaction;

that her principal sin is sloth, that she does not act until it is too late;

that she is not wholly a victim at delita's hands, that, despite the complications of being set upon the board as a pawn for other men to play, she actually has more structural power than delita does until he has risen to knight commander, and even, arguably, until he has risen, through her, to king;

that she knows this, and so does he, and they both pretend they do not.

i relate so much to ovelia's anxieties and fears, and also find deep meaning in how those anxieties and fears are not just points of sympathy, but also what finally make her dangerous--to delita ultimately, and to herself; i do not believe for a second she expected to survive her attempt on his life. she is a sheltered girl whose family, essentially, does not love her, and that's horrible, and it's terrible she's been used the way she has, AND ALSO she represents the contradictions of monarchy like no other character does, that the aristocracy will cannibalize itself to keep itself in power, that she is not just a waifish victim standing by as the system kills people in her name, but an inextricable part of it. and because ovelia cares about people, because she is conscientious and kind, she will never, ever, ever reconcile herself with this. she could never. it's why she's blatantly suicidal over the course of the game.

she is one of the few characters in media i have ever seen dissect the very concept of "princess," that "princess" doesn't just mean "any girl," but a particular and highly unethical social role.

anyway. my life is nowhere near as "important" as ovelia's, but her emotional profile, the doubts and fears she struggles with, are very, very poignant and relatable to me.

(in the meantime, i'm listening to baby birch by joanna newsom, and thinking about ovelia thinking about the real baby ovelia who might've lived and died a long time ago. this is the song for baby birch / though i will never know you / and at the back of what we've done / there is the knowledge of you)

hottest looks character: i'm a lesbian but i'm not going to say agrias actually. meliadoul. i lovvvve meliadoul

one thing i dislike about my fave character: ovelia stewing in doubts and worries is deeply relatable, but it can also be my biggest point of frustration with her. it's why she's a good character imo

one thing i like about my hated character: i think at this point i hate zalbaag GHSDNFHSG. he doesn't step far enough out of the "cool liberal brother" role for me, i wish we actually fought him legitimately like we do dycedarg, not just zomibified. anyway. i like the scene he has with the chemist boy at his father's grave a lot.

a quote or scene that haunts me: the whole game??? ah man how am i supposed to choose. i'll just use this as another excuse to bring up psx's ovelia little "ha, ha... amusing, isn't it?" i wish they'd kept her rueful laugh in for the wotl translation. also delita's line "you and i are the same, miserable people forced to live false lives" is a classic. and of course one of my favorite lines of the game: "tough. don't blame us. blame yourself, or god"

a death that left me indifferent: i honestly care a lot about most of the deaths in this game, even the characters that i'm usually kind of indifferent about (isilud comes to mind). even funebris's death is kind of sad, the knights templar just stab him and leave him there. like the fact that he's still alive when ramza enters the room and ramza doesn't immediately notice because he's weak from bleeding out gets to me, even though i don't give two shits about the actual guy. i realize i sort of answered the opposite of this question ghsdfnsg. how about confessor zalmour? least interesting character, like that delita is just instantly like "okay you saw me i'm gonna kill you," but the death itself doesn't matter to me

a character i wish died but didn't: lou mentioned this too but matsuno said in an interview that ovelia didn't die in that scene, but died later of unrelated complications?? way to undercut your own ending dude. i don't usually advocate for female characters dying, but this one was like... what the entire B plot of the game was building towards. it encompasses the themes of the game so completely. and it's like. a tragedy. it's not supposed to feel like a win, it's supposed to feel like a miserable, horrible loss.

zoe and i often say that we don't blame delita for stabbing ovelia there--she did stab him, he reacted in self-defense, we don't agree with people who think this was in any way premeditated, he loved her and wanted to live happily ever after with her, which was impossible given everything he'd done--but we do blame him for killing her, 'cause of everything he did (while profoundly sympathetic) to lead to this conclusion. (that being said, there's every chance ovelia would have died much earlier in the game had delita not involved himself... but anyway.)

I MEAN. I will talk about her all day, she's fun, I just figured not a whole lot of people are into listening to me talk about her all day. XD

High Seas Piracy!

Koi No Yokan: The feeling upon meeting someone that falling in love with them is inevitable

Ultima (Savage Empire); Aiela/(f!)Avatar, Ensemble; PG-13

What was the first fandom and/or pairing that you wrote fic for?

I cut my teeth writing crack RPF about post-punk bands of the 70s and 80s (shoutout to everyone who's still here from way back when), and I also made up a Tomb Raider self-insert OC when I was about nine and feeling trapped by life in the middle of rural bumfuck nowhere.

Do you write fics from start or finish, or jump around?

I almost invariably write from start to finish. I may end up shuffling things around during the editing phase, but I've had better results with believable character development when I'm following their arc as it happens. It's also way too easy, at least for me, to hurry to write all the scenes I'm most excited for and have the moments in between feel rote and dry as a result; whereas, if my journey with a character feels continual, I'm finding something to breathe life into every scene.

A Hollywood producer tells you that they want to film just one of your fics. Which fic would you want it to be?