#oddeyesight

Oh god, you have triggered my trap card. I am FFXIII's number one feral defender.

My super extra spicy FF opinion is that the XIII trilogy is amazing. To truly trigger the FF nerds in the audience, FFXIII-2 is in fact my favorite final fantasy game in the entire history of the franchise. (I have played all FF games to date except XVI and the MMOs, because I cannot do MMOs due to mental ferret reasons.)

Lightning works as a character because she was written like a man.

Lightning works because she is the emotional driver of the entire trilogy and she's flawed. She's deeply unlikable at the beginning of XIII, prone to violence and overreactions, and she's the central screw keeping the tension in the Snow-Hope-Lighitning knot of emotions, feelings and relationships.

It is very clear her anger towards Snow is misplaced: Lightning is angry at herself, because she was the one who didn't listen, she's the one who alienated Serah, she's the one who was proud and stubborn and refused to bend even a little, despite the fact Serah and Snow were visibly and obviously working very hard to meet her on her terms. It's not her fault that Serah was turned into a l'cie (in fact, the whole overarching argument of the trilogy is that the fal'cie and l'cie system is flawed and broken and needs to be torn out from the roots to allow for a just, better world), but it is her fault that she found herself powerless to do anything about it, because she made the choice to prioritize her own pride over her sister's attempts to communicate.

And this crucial, because as Lightning comes to terms with the fact Snow did not do anything wrong - at least as far as Serah goes, you could argue about the effectiveness of NORA vs PSICOM trying to save the people being purged, etc, but I still think, in universe, we're primed to see Snow's actions as morally correct, because his whole deal is to be a callout for complicit inaction in the face of facism and genocide, which is totally not relevant in this year of our lord 2024 or anything, anyway! - it creates a lot of tension in her relationship with Hope.

See, Hope is fascinating, in XIII, because surface level, his bone with Snow makes sense. Snow got his mom killed! Hope wants revenge over that! He's an unstable, emotional teenager dealing with too much all at once! He latches onto Lightning because Lightning seems to be the only one who sees Snow for what Hope thinks he is: a loud, obnoxious try-hard that will get people killed in pursuit of his miopic idea of "good."

But Hope is wrong.

Demonstrably!

It wasn't Snow that killed his mother, it was the PSICOM and on a larger scale, the government that ordered innocents to be Purged. Snow acknowledged and enabled his mother's agency, but she made the choice to stand up and fight. She picked up the gun. Snow didn't throw a gun at her and told her to go kill people for the glorious revolution. Snow and NORA showed up to try and save people being unjustly and, one could almost say, unlawfully, executed for the grand crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Snow and NORA are there to do the fighting, and they enable people who decide to fight back themselves to do so. That was a choice Hope's mom made. She even cracks a joke about it. Hope is doing the teenage thing where he projects all of his rage onto Snow, because Snow is right there. Snow has a face and a name and was conveniently right there when Hope's mom died. Worse, Snow suffered similar injuries to her, but he survived, while Hope's mom didn't, and Hope is stewing on the perceived unfairness of that, as if survival was a tangible, physical thing that Snow had snatched away from Hope's mom to save himself.

So having Lightning acknowledge that it Snow wasn't in the wrong about Serah and come down from the murder-driven high leaves her purposeless and saddled with a volatile teenager that just wants to make the world make sense. Hope wants to kill Snow and pretend that will in fact return everything to normal. But it won't. It can't. It's an observable fact. Killing Snow won't fix anything and will in fact make everything just that little extra worse, just for kicks.

Here's where Lightning shines. Lightning is written like a man. Lightning does not take on a motherly role and sacrifice her own narrative to coddle Hope and teach him the power of forgiveness. Lightning doesn't defrost into a moe blob of soft, kind fluff and she doesn't get in contact with her femininity in the traditional, arguably stereotypical ways.

Lightning goes: New plan, which is Same plan, New target. Lightning is still going to fix the problem through tremendous amounts of military violence, because she is a soldier and that's how she fixes things. What she has gained, as her character arc progresses, is not thawing into non-violence, but rather, clarity of purpose. The game says, in every possible way: Lightning is good at violence and violence is what she's good at, and this is a good thing. The thing she had to overcome was being obsessed with the wrong target, blinded by her own unregulated emotions that did not allow her to see her real enemy and the true path to what she wants.

And this is further reinforced as she grows throughout the trilogy: in XIII, Lightning fights to save her sister, in XIII-2, Lightning fights to save reality, and Lightning Returns, she fights to preserve what she's come to understand as the essence of humanity: those bonds that would drive you to pick up a fight with god himself, and the myriad of complex, contradicting emotions that make life worth living.

Lightning works because she's right. Because no one ever looks at her and goes "oh boo hoo, little girl trying hard!" and there's no very special episode where we learn she's secretly very girly or that the true power is her soft femininity. Lightning is a broody bastard and she fixes all her problems with her sword, which, and this is true, is also a fucking gun.

When Etro hires her as a bodyguard, I promise you, it wasn't because she was uwu waifu material, it was because she looked at Caius casting Meteor at her and went: bitch, I've got a SWORD, that is also a GUN, and then parried that shit out of orbit.

Lightning just works, man.

And you know what's great? She's still no the coolest of the Farron sisters.

I got busy so I couldn't open the blog to read and reblog, but I still deeply appreciate how hard you work in making this easy to read ^^

Hi!! Thank you so much for the ask and the interest in my blog!

To be honest, I queued up all the posts, and then let the blog run on its own. Originally, I'd intended to reblog each part multiple times before the next part posted so people of all time zones could have a chance to read it, but it turns out this is tremendously hard for me. There was also a separate problem of not being able to link a part until it was posted, which I think made the overall reading experience worse. In the future I think I ought to post all the parts at once, link them, and then queue them, but these are logistics people don't need to worry about.

I've at least fixed all the links for the Communist Manifesto now, so all the parts should link to each other correctly, and for now I think I'll run it so that each part is posted 4 times a day, for 3 days, before moving onto the next part. A rerun of the manifesto, essentially!

I worry that it's going to get too spammy, so I think I'll try to put most of it under a cut, and whenever a reader wants to engage they can click to expand. But I'll have to go back and edit the posts some more. So it'll be a few more days before Communist Manifesto Daily will be running again.

I kept meaning to get back to this one and then forgetting and then going "oh I should answer that" and then going "but I don't want to be too bitchy" and then - and anyway that's why this took me like two months to answer.

basing this more on novel canon than cql, because that's where I tend to see the comparison being made more often, I think because they're more directly in contact in one specific scene.

so I think why people say this is basically because they see nie mingjue's "xue yang must be punished/killed" and xiao xingchen's "xue yang must be punished/killed" and also look at nie mingjue's relationship to jin guangyao and xiao xingchen's relationship to xue yang and go "oh so they're morally aligned and are parallel to each other :)" and that's just! not true!

for one thing, and I think this is something that gets lost a lot - xiao xingchen does not live within the hierarchy and structure of cultivation society at large, and is in fact not a huge fan of it. he and song lan are actively trying to do their own thing! that is part of xiao xingchen's problem specifically - he walks into great sect politics with the expectation of justice and runs headlong into, well, politics. and a big part of that is that he doesn't have a whole lot of respect for power if he sees that power as unjust or acting badly: despite pressure from the Jin, "neither coaxing nor coercion had budged Xiao Xingchen."

I think then people look at nie mingjue's showing up and arguing for the same and take those two things as equivalent, but they really aren't, because while nie mingjue is younger than jin guangshan and therefore owes him respect in that sense, he is also a sect leader and approaching from a far more equal position, which is why he can get away with actively threatening violence in a way that xiao xingchen...couldn't. nie mingjue has power, even if it ends up not working for him; xiao xingchen doesn't.

furthermore, I think another important distinction between the two of them is around the question of violence. specifically in the scene around xue yang's initial trial (ish), the distinction between xiao xingchen's bringing xue yang back to jinlintai to ask for him to be punished (by the sect whose responsibility he is), versus nie mingjue's attempt at direct personal execution, including an attack on jin guangyao when he doesn't get his way. again, some of this is likely based on power dynamics (nie mingjue, again, is closer to equal status and therefore has more allowance to step into jin guangshan's affairs), but I think some of it is a difference in approach, too, and inclination. I think it's also notable that (at least in translation) xiao xingchen doesn't specifically say that xue yang should die ("severely punished" is the phrase), as opposed to nie mingjue going for outright beheading.

so I think presenting them as similar/aligned in this scene, basically, is overselling it.

it's not that I think they would hate each other, or anything. I just don't think they'd be friends, or particularly see each other as allies. xiao xingchen occupies a space outside of the social order; nie mingjue, I would argue, is deeply wedded to the social order as it stands. xiao xingchen has a loose sense of the importance of traditional hierarchies of power; nie mingjue is very much embedded in those hierarchies of power and believes in upholding them.

furthermore, looking at the nie mingjue/jin guangyao dynamic versus the xiao xingchen/xue yang dynamic, I think the idea that they're narrative parallels really falls apart. nie mingjue is jin guangyao's superior officer and continues to perceive himself as an authority over jin guangyao; it is his job to correct his behavior and discipline him as he sees fit. xue yang is a criminal that xiao xingchen apprehends, and xue yang turns around and takes revenge on him for interfering. the latter are much closer to equals, at least in the way they perceive each other, and xue yang's revenge on xiao xingchen is considerably less motivated by self-preservation.

they're just not similar except in terms of very specifically both having the opinion "xue yang must be punished" and being willing to push against jin guangshan to do something about it, which isn't a lot to build on for a relationship of any kind, and I have a hard time seeing them vibe personalitywise.

I didn't mention it at the main post because I didn't think anyone else watched it + I barely remembered any of it either, but holy shit, someone does! Hallelujah!!

18. tell us about a character who’s very different than you who you love a whole lot

I feel like I don't have a lot in common with most of the characters I enjoy, maybe just one or two things at a time? But outwardly I think I don't have a lot in common with Tomix and I still find him very compelling.

22. talk about a writing experience that has pleasantly surprised you. or talk about several. seriously, writing is cool. you’re making up whole stories out of your brain, revel in that shit.

So there have been very few moments where I could look back o

So one of my favorite fics that I've written, "Let's (Not) Do That Again", was written over the course of literally 30 minutes and still holds up pretty well.

One of the first longfics I've ever completed, "A wish upon a fountain or a falling star", I had pretty much no idea where it was going but it eventually got to a conclusion I still enjoy. Sometimes I reread the comments or snippets I remember. Still good!

Had to think about this for my DF work, and I'm not entirely sure because I only just got back into the fandom this year, but for 2022 I think my favorite thing to happen was just... getting back into DF as a whole, talking to everyone about possibilities in fic over discord.

I went "Hey that sounds like Sigma" and then I remembered that Dostesvky has a novel called The Gambler, and Sigma is a casino manager, and Asagiri is intentionally vague about both Sigma AND Fyodor's abilities.

So here's a theory: what if Sigma is the original Fyodor Dostoevsky, and he used his ability of information transfer to erase his memories to give himself a new life while someone else takes the mantle of Fyodor Dostoevsky? What if the current Dostoevsky is the creation of Sigma's ability, but he hides his own origins by calling Sigma the artificial human?

I think Nikolai would be the only one who knows about this- which is why he saved Sigma and has conflicted feelings about Fyodor, since Sigma is the real Fyodor but "Fyodor" is Sigma's creation that was born after Sigma's metaphorical "death"

So, what do you think of this idea? As someone who's really familiar with Russian authors and literature, would it make sense?

I think this is a really interesting idea.

I've been thinking for how to answer this for a while, and... I really don't know. I read 'The Gambler' once, spaced out for a fair bit of it, generally didn't enjoy the experience, and now remember almost nothing about the story. So, on that end, I can't say much.

There's a main, BSD/Dostoyevskian themes reason I don't think this is likely to be the case, though.

For one, Sigma's Ability—as far as we know—only transfers memories. It doesn't transfer the capabilities of the mind.

Thanks I just wanted to see. :D