They Said Minors Aren't Allowed To Play In The Casino! Booo!

[rionaleonhart]

Still immensely enjoying Tales of the Abyss! This entry has spoilers up to Grand Chokmah (which, incidentally, is an absurdly beautiful city).



Luke: Guy... hated me... but he never showed even a hint of that... Maybe there was something when we were kids, but if he wanted to kill me, he could've done it any time he wanted to...

I initially misread 'maybe there was something when we were kids' as 'maybe there was something when we kiss'. Possibly because I was thinking, Well, he obviously resents you because of your failure to realise he's in love with you.

(I was so charmed when Guy went 'no, maybe he's not the "real" Luke, but he's the Luke I care about' and came back for Luke.)

Unrecognised love is not, it turns out, the explanation that the game gives, but I'm still happy with the explanation that we got. Guy originally became a servant to the fon Fabre family with the intention of killing Luke, and then gradually came to care about him instead! This is so interesting! I half-want to write fanfiction about Guy's gradual progression from 'I'm just waiting for the right moment to murder this brat' to 'oh, no, I'm having feeeeeelings'.

The ages involved might make things tricky, though. I don't know how old Guy was when he actually became a servant (I'm reluctant to research it for fear of spoilers), but Luke is seventeen now, and Guy is twenty-one, so Luke was kidnapped when he was around ten and Guy was around fourteen. I imagine Guy looking after the memoryless Luke would be a turning point in their relationship, so any fic would need to deal with that period, but I don't think I'm capable of writing a character who's ten years old and has no memories and still feels like Luke. (I don't know if I'm capable of writing a character who's ten years old at all. I'm not good at writing kids!) Writing a fourteen-year-old, revenge-driven Guy who's still recognisably Guy might also be tough.

Stupid young JRPG parties. If Luke and Guy were just a few years older, this would be so much easier!

Come to think of it, was Luke able to speak after the kidnapping, or did he have to learn that as well? Might the replication process have transferred over his linguistic abilities, even if he didn't keep any memories? People comment on Asch and Luke having some similarities in personality, and they're certainly similar in fighting style (although that might just be because they had the same training), so Luke probably wasn't an entirely blank slate. He speaks more fluently than I'd expect of someone who didn't learn any languages before the (physical) age of ten.

I am definitely, definitely overthinking this. He could probably talk.

(Maybe he had the grammatical structures wired into his brain, and he just needed to plug the vocabulary in? I really don't need to think about this - nobody will blame me if I write fanfiction and go 'yep, language abilities transfer over, this is not a fic about Guy teaching Luke to speak' - and yet I can't stop!)



I notice this entry is entirely about Luke and Guy. Sorry, other characters; I like you too! These two just happen to have a lot I enjoy in their dynamic.

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

There are different kinds of memory, and it's actually pretty common for people with retrograde amnesia to retain procedure memories (how to do things) and some degree of semantic memory (general factual knowledge) while losing large portions, or indeed all of their autobiographical memory. So language being retained is extremely plausible! (More complete memory loss, including loss of language, is also possible, but much rarer.)

[alwaysbeenasmiler]

WELCOME TO THE DARK SIDE!

WE HAVE COOKIES!

Probably cookies that Guy made-- since he's not the one in that game that can't cook. I think Natalia holds the title of worst cook in that game.

I also remember the time I had to make those Jade/Luke icons for someone, oh gods THAT MADE ME CRY! (especially since I am a feverent Jade/Peony and Guy/Luke shipper)

[squeemu]

You should definitely write that fic, or at least portions of it if you can't bring yourself to write the whole thing.

I've always had problems with the ages of characters in JRPGs, by which I mean specifically FFVIII. I no longer remember exactly how old they are, but I feel like I wanted them to be just a couple of years older than claimed. (Especially Quistis!) I think I just sort of ignored their technical age and wrote for what I felt like their emotional age was, which, uh, in some of their cases may have been younger than stated. I guess it becomes especially tricky though when you're working with 10 year olds versus, say, 13 year olds. There's a fairly big change there.

AND YES, thank you. I was always bothered by the implication that Luke came with nothing and had to learn it all from scratch. I can only hope that he picked it up quickly -- maybe it was more a matter of "his muscles haven't been used yet, so he needs to build up more strength and muscle memory" as opposed to just not knowing how to walk at all.

[thebaconfat]

I half-want to write fanfiction about Guy's gradual progression from 'I'm just waiting for the right moment to murder this brat' to 'oh, no, I'm having feeeeeelings'.


I desperately want to read this. I immediately when looking for fanfic as soon as I'd finished the game and found very, very little. And even less than that for Jade/Guy, my favourite ship. (My headcanon, of course, is that Jade is gay for Guy and Guy is gay for Luke, because obviously Guy being gay for Luke is a basic, essential truth about his character.)

[thenicochan]

Yeah, sure, everyone's great and all, but focusing of Luke and Guy is kind of hard not to do, y'know? It helps that they are prime shipping material.

From a few other bits and pieces we get throughout the story, it seems replicas are born with the ability to speak, a semblance of the original's personality and (sometimes) necessary motor functions. But even that varies based on the few replicas we see.