What Does 'Junction Magic' Mean? I'm Sure It's Not Important.

[rionaleonhart]

alwaysbeenasmiler asked this question, and I thought it was interesting, so I've stolen it to ask here: who was your first favourite fictional character? Who was the first character you really loved? Is there a story behind that love?

I won't go into too much detail because I've talked about this before, but Squall Leonhart of Final Fantasy VIII was the first character I really connected with. I was an insular, awkward, confused thirteen-year-old, bad at interaction, bad at reading people, and suddenly I found I wasn't alone in any of that; here was a guy who was just like me, only he had a cool gun-sword and fought dinosaurs. I was so excited.

It's a good thing I loved Squall so much, because I was terrible at playing Final Fantasy VIII, and he was the reason I happily persevered with it.

Unsurprisingly, I hate the popular theory that Squall died at the end of Disc 1 and the other three discs were ~just a dream~. It's not interesting; it just makes most of the game feel like a waste of time! Also, Squall is my favourite, so he's alive. Solid reasoning, I think you'll find.

My preferred answer to the question 'why does Squall wake up without a wound after being impaled?' is 'Seifer begs Edea to save him. NOT THAT SEIFER CARES OR ANYTHING. Obviously he just wants Squall to live so they can interrogate him. Obviously. Edea is so amused by this that she heals Squall.'


I'd forgotten how messed up the Second Hand of Time arc in DN Angel is. A young woman is reunited at last with her lost love! Her lost love is a sword that romantically impales her through the chest. DN Angel, you seemed to be a romantic comedy when you started out.

I always resented the fact that the Second Hand of Time arc went 'oh, it's a school play! Satoshi and Daisuke have been cast as the romantic leads! Oh, no, wait: we've set up this classic slashfic premise, but now Daisuke's out of action and Dark has to pretend to be him, so you don't actually get Satoshi and Daisuke acting out romantic scenes together.' But, on this reread, I will concede that Satoshi and Dark trying to get through a romantic scene when they loathe each other is pretty hilarious.

(Speaking of classic slashfic premises: the manga is better than the anime in many ways, but the anime does has an episode where Satoshi and Daisuke are locked in a freezer and have to huddle for warmth.)


It's only just occurred to me that we say dial to mean 'enter a person's number on a telephone' because of the dial on rotary phones. What an odd linguistic fossil.

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

Ooh, good question!

"They died and it was only a dying hallucination" is only ever true if it makes the story better! Otherwise it can't possibly be the case! That's the rule!

...lost love is a sword? That's impressively messed up.

I think the first fictional character I was fannish about was Wolverine? They had that old X-Men cartoon, and I'd just hit the turbulent middle school years, so "Short, growly, constantly angry, and can stab you at any time" was hugely emotionally appealing. (I had this awful Mary-Sue in my head I'd run though while riding the school bus. She had claws and pyrokinesis and she grew wings. I don't actually remember her name, but I'm sure it had way too many syllables.)

[zabimitsuki]

Of course, Seifer doesn't care about Squall. Why, it's perfectly normal to tie your supposed enemy up and start talking about your romantic dream, right? :D And that theory is the worst. Let the game have a happy ending, damn it!

I'm really not sure who the first character I was fannish about was, but the one that's stuck around the longest is definitely Cloud. I have a soft spot for the chocobo-haired ones?

[magistrate]

[My preferred answer to the question 'why does Squall wake up without a wound after being impaled?' is 'Seifer begs Edea to save him. NOT THAT SEIFER CARES OR ANYTHING. Obviously he just wants Squall to live so they can interrogate him. Obviously. Edea is so amused by this that she heals Squall.']

...man, I literally just always assumed that Edea hit him with some kind of ethereal ice which caused some kind of magical damage that didn't actually appear on the physical body, and never even considered that there were alternate explanations available. Typing that out now, I have no idea why this seemed perfectly reasonable and self-evident. I can barely explain it in a way that makes sense.



[I'd forgotten how messed up the Second Hand of Time arc in DN Angel is. A young woman is reunited at last with her lost love! Her lost love is a sword that romantically impales her through the chest.]

...were you the person who wrote the short bit with Utena having a conversation with some other anime character (who I can't remember because I never watched that particular anime) about pulling swords out of people's chests? Or was that Patrick? Or someone else? Is swords-in-chests some kind of recurring Japanese cultural note? Inquiring minds want to know!

Inquiring chests want not to be stabbed with swords.



[It's only just occurred to me that we say dial to mean 'enter a person's number on a telephone' because of the dial on rotary phones. What an odd linguistic fossil.]

Cultural fossils are so cool! Linguistics are so cool!

I'm waiting for the day when phone receivers vanish utterly, rendering the common-use symbol for phone more nonsensical than it already is. Like the common-use symbol for "save". All these young'uns running around clicking on save icons, having never seen a floppy disk...

Though, who knows, those icons may go the way of actual floppy disks, and be replaced. And then I'll have to find some other thing that's fossilized in common use that know the origin of and younger people don't to feel all clever about.

[orcofnewyork]

Wow, I can't even remember if I got up to that arc in the DN Angel manga before I stopped reading. DN Angel, so much potential, and then...

You're making me want to re-read it, but I know that will end in frustration (why can't Daisuke see that Satoshi loves hiiiiiiiim?).