Trabia Garden

It's the first birthday of my Final Fantasy VIII website today! Happy birthday, Balamb Garden.

I've had such a blast working on this site, writing down all my rambling thoughts about this game and then hiding them all over the place like a mad squirrel. Drawing stupid doodles, gradually uploading my terrible teenage fancomic, having conversations with myself on Garden Square. Watching everything become steadily more sprawling and unnavigable. It's deeply impractical, but I'm having a great time.

I'm really touched by the messages I've received on the guestbook! (The 'guestbook' is actually a Dreamwidth entry, because guestbook providers tend to have adverts, and I really want to keep this website advertisement-free.) I really thought this project would only be of interest to me and possibly my friends who are into Final Fantasy VIII; who's looking at personal websites in the mid-2020s? But apparently people have actually stumbled across and enjoyed it! I'm delighted.

Absolutely terrible thought I had recently: it would theoretically be possible to create a similarly structured fansite for Silent Hill. Wandering around the town, stumbling across all of my intense feelings about James Sunderland.

Please don't let me create this. I do not have the time or the psychological resilience to build an online replica of Silent Hill. I beg someone to steal this idea from me so I no longer have it in my hands.

I've seen a couple of you posting ways to reflect on the year that looked fun, and I'm going to steal them for this post!

Firstly, doreyg posted this entry about favourite characters from the year, both new discoveries and returning champions.

I'm going to do something similar; I'm going to take a quick look at the longstanding favourites who've particularly occupied my mind this year, and then I'm going to comb through my 'first impressions' tag and give my favourite character from each canon I first posted about in 2024. (If no favourite character comes to mind, I'll skip the canon.)


( My favourite characters of 2024. )


My favourites are disproportionately male, I note, but my favourites are also disproportionately the main character, so perhaps the issue here is that the main character is disproportionately male. I'm pretty easily won over; I often just end up liking the character I spend the most time getting to know!

And that's the end of the character rambling, but APPARENTLY I STILL HAVE MORE TO SAY.

walgesang posted an entry on the three canons that had the largest impact on him in 2024. Here are the three that had the largest impact on me!

Our household gave Severance a try back at the start of the year, and it's one of the most compelling shows I've ever watched. We were all silently riveted to the screen. The concept - what if, when you're at work, you can't remember anything of your life outside the office? - is fascinating, and it's executed so well. The second season is expected to come out early in 2025; I'm looking forward to it!

Omori was a real rollercoaster of a game! Sometimes it's charming and whimsical; sometimes it's unsettling; sometimes it fucked me up so badly I had trouble sleeping. It's hard to think of another canon that haunts me in quite the same way. I finished it in May and haven't stopped thinking about it since.

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley captivated me when I played it in November. It didn't have quite the same 'wow, this is really cleverly executed' factor as Severance and Omori; it just went 'hey, I know what you want' and dropped a catastrophically fucked-up sibling relationship into my lap. And, yes, it turns out that this is exactly what I want.

Honourable mention to Metaphor: ReFantazio: I loved the hell out of it, but I don't think I can say it really impacted me. I had a great time while I was playing it, but I don't expect it to linger with me in the way these three canons do.


There are six minutes of the year left, so I suspect this is going to be my last post of 2024. Happy new year! I look forward to discovering what fictional characters I'm going to be weird about in 2025.

It's time for the end-of-year fic meme! Once again, I've become impatient and filled out this meme right at the start of December. I'll feel like a fool if I write anything else before the year is over.


Number of fics written in 2024: twenty-six. You can find them on my AO3 account: Riona. (EDIT: Wild Lands and Two Become One bring this up to twenty-eight!)

Fandoms: Severance, Erased, Scrubs, In Stars and Time, If We Were Villains, Danganronpa, Danganronpa 2, Death Note, Ace Attorney, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Omori, The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, Life Is Strange 2, and assorted Final Fantasy games: VII, VIII, XIII, XV and XVI. (EDIT: And Divilethion and Better Half!) Thirteen (EDIT: now fifteen) videogame fandoms, two television fandoms, two anime/manga fandoms, one book fandom. A roughly even balance of new fandoms and ones I've written for before.

Two crossovers: Always Believe (Ace Attorney/Death Note), in which Phoenix Wright defends Light Yagami in court, and Crossroads and Crosshairs (Life Is Strange 2/The Coffin of Andy and Leyley), in which Sean runs into Andrew and Ashley and ends up in a great deal of trouble.


( End-of-year fic meme, 2024. )


I always feel bad for the fics that don't get mentioned when I make these entries! Sorry, guys.

It's time for one of those posts where I ramble about an aspect of videogames! I've been thinking about how videogames guide the player to where they need to go.

My first experience with videogames, if I recall correctly, was the Sonic the Hedgehog games we had for our SEGA Master System II. Working out where you're supposed to go in a 2D Sonic the Hedgehog game is pretty simple. There are two directions: left and right. When you start the level, Sonic is facing right. Go right.

'The character is facing in the direction you need to go' is simple and clear. You'll see it in a lot of sidescrolling platformers, such as the Donkey Kong Country series and early Mario games. Unfortunately, as environments become more complex, 'just point the character in the correct direction at the start of an area, and the player can just continue in that direction until the area is finished' becomes less helpful.

I was eleven years old when I played Pokémon Red. It was my first RPG. It wasn't sidescrolling; you could move in four directions. But, to start with, I was able to deduce where I needed to go.

In Pokémon Red, you start in your bedroom, which has one exit. Great; obviously I left the room. You talk to your mum, who says that Professor Oak, next door, is looking for you. Perfect; I know where I'm supposed to be going. I left the house and went to the building next door, which, according to the sign outside, was Oak's research lab.

In the lab, Oak's grandson told me that he wasn't there.

I was extremely confused.

Was I... was I supposed to wait for Professor Oak?

What you're supposed to do is try to leave town, at which point Oak will show up and tell you it's dangerous. The game designers had assumed the player would want to explore, and would naturally end up taking the road out of town. But they'd made the mistake of giving me a clear but unachievable goal: meet Professor Oak in his lab. Professor Oak was not in his lab. Therefore, I concluded I was expected to wait for his return.

I just checked whether the FireRed remake changed this sequence at all. The answer: it doesn't change the dialogue, but it does make a small visual change to the path out of town - removing the long grass for the first couple of steps - to make it clearer that it's a path, and Oak now shows up just before you actually enter the grass, rather than just afterwards. If you're playing the original for the first time and don't know how to interpret the 'long grass' texture, you might not realise you can walk on it at all.

It's easy to slip up when you're trying to guide the player, particularly if they're a new player and not yet fully acquainted with the conventions of games! But there are a lot of tools developers use to tell the player where to go next, both obvious and subtle. For example:

- The character faces the direction you need to go, as mentioned. This tends to be most useful in 2D games where the possible directions are tightly limited.

- You're told where to go with an icon on a map, or overlaid onto the environment. This is common in open-world games, where the environment is vast and freely explorable. If 'run two hundred miles away from the objective and do something else' is an option, you need to make sure the player will always be able to track the objective down easily, regardless of where they are in the game world. This is a very reliable way of making sure the player can get where they need to go, but it can be immersion-breaking, so some games, such as Assassin's Creed or Horizon Zero Dawn, come up with an in-world explanation for why these helpful 'your destination is here' icons exist.

- You're told where to go through dialogue. This is pretty straightforward. For example, at the start of Final Fantasy VIII, Quistis tells you to go to the Fire Cavern and that it's 'east of here'. Unfortunately, there's no way to double-check this instruction; if the player gets distracted exploring the nearby town, they might forget where they're supposed to be going. I once had to restart Final Fantasy VII from the beginning because I'd set it down for too long and I had no idea where I had to go next. Final Fantasy IX is the first Final Fantasy game that really accounts for the possibility that the player will forget their destination; if you visit any marsh in the world, you can ask the moogle there for directions.

- A companion indicates where to go. You'll see this in the Uncharted series, where the protagonist is often travelling with allies. Sometimes your ally will travel ahead of you, so you just need to follow them. Sometimes they'll just stand near where you're supposed to be going, as a way of drawing your attention to it. Occasionally, if you've lingered in the same area for too long and the game concludes you're not sure where you're meant to be going, your companion will call to you to point out, for example, a ladder.

- You're told where to go using light. This is a useful one for dark sequences. If you shine a light on the door the player needs to go through, the player's attention will be drawn to the light and they'll notice that, oh, hey, there's a doorway there.

- You're told where to go using bright, eye-catching colours. When you're looking around an area in The Last of Us, the way out is often marked with yellow, e.g. you'll need to pass through a gate that has torn yellow caution tape attached to it. In games where you're expected to climb, climbable ledges on a dark wall or cliff face will often be white to contrast with the background. As with the use of light, the goal is to catch the player's eye and make them realise there's a way to progress over here.

- You're not told where to go. The player is expected to explore with minimal guidance until they stumble across their destination; they may be given a map that fills itself in as they explore, so they can check where they haven't yet been. You'll see this in survival horror games, which are designed to keep the player uncertain and off-balance. It works best in enclosed environments, such as a building; if an environment is too large and open, it can be frustrating and confusing to try to find where you're meant to be going. In the case of Silent Hill 2, I can navigate the hospital or the hotel, but I often get lost when I'm in the streets of the town.

Those are the player guidance methods I can think of! Let me know if you have any to add.

There are definitely things I haven't covered here. For example, I'm sure game designers have clever ways of indicating 'this is a surface you can stand on' versus 'this is just part of the background', but they're so clever I can't pin them down. I suppose Spyro games will visibly put gems in out-of-the-way places to indicate to the player that it's possible to get there; I wonder what strategies less collectible-heavy games use.

abyssal_sylph did this fandom meme over the summer, and I thought it looked like fun! The full list of questions was originally compiled by trobadora and can be found here. To keep my entries to a reasonable length, I'll just do a few questions at a time, rather than posting the entire thing at once.

What's changed about your fandom life in the last 365 days?

The biggest change is that I've got a website now! It's great to have a space on the Internet I can just talk about Final Fantasy VIII as much as I want (I say, as if I didn't already do that in this journal).

Your newest fandom.

In Stars and Time, maybe? I've written a couple of fics; does that make it one of my fandoms? It's a time loop game with a lot of charm; I had fun with it, but I don't really think of myself as in the fandom.

The last thing I got into and ended up thinking about a lot is Omori, a game that absolutely haunts me and will probably do so for a long time. I haven't actually written for it and don't have any fic ideas, but I found it fascinating and I often find myself seeking out fanart.

The last thing I got into so heavily that it qualified for a 'my fandom history' writeup was Severance, back in February. Such an interesting concept! One of the most absorbing shows I've ever watched.

Writing-wise, this year has been more about revisiting older fandoms than launching into new ones, now that I think about it.

You've got your OTP, you have to throw a third into the mix (from the same fandom), creating an OT3. Who is the OTP, and in your opinion, why would they make a perfect third for them?

The first pairing I thought of was Nate/Elena from Uncharted, and the ideal third - Victor 'Goddamn' Sullivan, the third point of their adventure trio - is so obvious that I've actually written that threesome already.

Some potential thirds for assorted other pairings that came to mind, discounting pairings (e.g. Sora/Riku) where the third is so obvious it goes without saying:

- Jeff/Annie from Community: I think Britta would probably be the best fit, but I strongly prefer Jeff/Annie on its own. Their chemistry is so weird and intense!

- Light/L from Death Note: Misa, obviously. Or some weird thing with Ryuk, where L is unaware that there's a third entity in their relationship. That had not occurred to me before this instant, but I'm sort of fascinated by the idea now. Ryuk joins Light and L in the bed, forcing Light to suppress his reactions in order to hide the fact that he's having a threesome when, from L's perspective, only the two of them are there. Someone please write this; it's not in my skillset!

- Kane/Abby from The 100: Jaha is the only option coming to mind. This could either sort of work or go very badly, depending on the point in canon that Jaha is coming from.

- Jack/Kate from Lost: Sawyer? Probably Sawyer, as if Jack and Kate don't have enough potential to crash and burn on their own. For less guaranteed disaster: Charlie. For even more guaranteed disaster: Locke.

- Hinata/Komaeda from Danganronpa: I know Hinata/Komaeda/Nanami is popular, but I think I might be more interested by the thought of Hinata/Komaeda/Kuzuryuu. WAIT, NO: there's a correct answer here, and it is Makoto Naegi. Hinata/Komaeda/Naegi would be incredible; Hinata/Naegi would be very cute, and then they'd both desperately have to try to cope with the presence of Komaeda.

- Travis/Laura from The Quarry: Max or Ryan, I suppose? I prefer Ryan, but Max has the fun 'Travis kept me imprisoned' aspect. Travis and Laura aren't great candidates for an OT3, though; they're at their best when they're isolated and weirdly fixated on each other.

- Keiji/Sara from Your Turn to Die: hard to envision, because Keiji has zero interest in anyone who isn't Sara. Maybe some sort of fucked-up situation with Sou?

- Yosuke/Yu from Persona 4: Chie's probably the most obvious candidate, but I think adding Kanji to the mix here would be very funny. Yosuke and Kanji are both disaster boys with a lot of anxiety about their sexuality; it'd be fun to throw them together!

- Zell/Squall from Final Fantasy VIII: Rinoa! Rinoa, no question. This would be adorable.

- Beatrice/Battler from Umineko: oh, God, there's no good answer here. Jessica? Shannon, Kanon? Ange??? (Teenage Ange, to be specific, which by no means prevents this from being a fucked-up relationship but does at least make things a little less fucked up.) There's a huge amount wrong with Beatrice/Battler already (I say, with deep fondness), and adding any possible third would only make things worse.

- Utena/Anthy from Revolutionary Girl Utena: again, there is no good answer here. I think the only way out is to accept that and pivot to choosing the worst possible answer: Akio. An Utena/Anthy/Akio scenario, focusing on how the girls eventually manage to escape him. Wait, that's just Revolutionary Girl Utena.

Oh, wow, I have gone severely overboard on this question. It's an interesting one to think about, though! Feel free to share your own answers in the comments, if you'd like.

Sorry to post another dream roundup entry so soon after the last one! I've been having a lot of vivid dreams lately.


( Dreams from September. )


Interesting that this batch has multiple instances of me waking up from a dream during the night and then going back into the same dream when I fall asleep again! I often wake briefly in the night, but resuming the same dream is unusual for me.

Before I went through this entry to format it, it hadn't occurred to me that I've also had multiple dreams about zombie apocalypses in the past few weeks. Huh.

I'm still updating my Final Fantasy VIII website here and there! Somehow, though, it's only just occurred to me that I could also reproduce some of the pages on here. I've been having fun just rambling into the void, but I also love talking about this game with other people, so it might be worth occasionally putting some of my ramblings on my blog.

Here's a short essay I put up on the site today, about the psychological effect of most of the characters of Final Fantasy VIII being child soldiers. It's an interesting topic to think about, but it feels a little underexplored by the game itself!

If you'd prefer to read the version on the website, here's the link.


( It's Our Nature: Child Soldiers in Final Fantasy VIII )


I haven't yet decided whether I'll also end up making entries for some of the existing pages on the website, e.g. the one on the game's animation or the one about Squall and Seifer's relationship. They've been up on the site for a few months already, so it's possible anyone who might be interested will already have seen them, but it could still be fun to open them up for discussion here. We'll see!

For each of my major fandoms, I do a short writeup talking about how it fits into my fandom history. A fandom qualifies as 'major' if I've written five fics for it, or ten thousand words across at least three fics.

I wasn't sure at first whether to count Final Fantasy XIII, as most of my wordcount for it comes from With These Signs Upon Our Souls, a Final Fantasy VIII/Final Fantasy XIII fusion that only actually features any XIII characters in the last couple of chapters. But I've just remembered that I did a writeup for Animorphs, which also qualified mainly based on fusions, so here we go!

I'm going to steal part of this writeup from the Final Fantasy XIII page I recently added to my Final Fantasy VIII website.

('There's a part of me going, Hey, if you added the Balamb Garden flight deck, you could let visitors fly to locations from other Final Fantasy games. Please stay calm, Riona; let's at least try to keep this project on a reasonable scale.' rionaleonhart, 16 April 2024)


Final Fantasy XIII series

I was really excited by the early trailers for Final Fantasy XIII. It looked so gorgeous! Lightning seemed so cool!

Before the game came out, though, I read a scathing review of it, which deflated my enthusiasm. The news didn't get any better once the game was actually released; the fans seemed to hate it. It was a real shame, but the universal opinion seemed to be that this game was terrible. Maybe I wouldn't play this one.

Half a year later, squeemu played Final Fantasy XIII and summed up their reaction as 'holy crap, possibly my new favorite Final Fantasy?'

I was surprised and intrigued. This didn't fit anything I'd heard about the game! By all accounts, Final Fantasy XIII had no redeeming features. But Squeem had enjoyed it, and I respected Squeem's opinion more than I respected a bunch of strangers on the Internet.

I first experienced Final Fantasy XIII at the age of twenty-two. I didn't have a PS3 at the time, so I watched a playthrough on YouTube.

I loved every moment of it. I loved the characters, the concept, the music, the visuals. I felt silly for letting other people's opinions discourage me; I love Final Fantasy VIII, after all, and that's a game that gets a lot of criticism as well!

My favourite aspect was the character dynamics. The game really takes the time to build up different relationships within the party. It's also fun to have negative dynamics within the party as well as positive ones; I haven't played many RPGs in which some party members outright hate others!

As soon as I got a PS3, I played Final Fantasy XIII myself, and I still loved it just as much with a controller in my hand. It's a game with a tightly limited scope; it's pretty much all battles and cutscenes. But they're great battles and they're great cutscenes, so I had a great time.

I don't love the sequels as much as the original, alas! Final Fantasy XIII-2 was fun, but I felt it did everything slightly worse than the original: the removal of stat caps made battles less strategic, the two-person party meant you couldn't have the fun variety of character dynamics, the non-linear story meant that relationships couldn't develop in a satisfying manner. I wasn't really a fan of Lightning Returns, which not only stripped away the party completely but made the protagonist dull by removing her emotions, although I did hugely enjoy how ridiculous the ending was.

Favourite character: Not an easy choice! Even if there are individual characters I love more from other titles, Final Fantasy XIII has my favourite overall cast of characters of any Final Fantasy. But I think it's probably Sazh. He's a nicely balanced character - warm-hearted with a cynical streak, funny without being reduced to comic relief - and his plotline with Vanille is one of my favourites in the game.
Favourite pairing: Serah/Hope, but only in Final Fantasy XIII-2. When Hope first sees Serah after she travels to the future, he's so excited, and then he gets embarrassed about his own excitement; it's pretty cute! I like the weirdness of Serah going from a world where Hope is younger than her into one where he's older, too, and it could be interesting to see her dealing with the complicated emotions of developing feelings for someone else while her fiancé is missing.
Number of words written: 30,547, technically, although most of those words don't actually feature any Final Fantasy XIII characters! If I count only the parts of my writing that include characters from the game, the wordcount comes to about 7,000.

Snippet: For a while, I toyed with the idea of writing a series of ficlets about Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy VIII characters interacting, set after With These Signs Upon Our Souls. I never got far, alas.

( Final Fantasy XIII unfinished snippet. FFVIII/FFXIII, Zell and Snow, 2018. )

When I have a fic idea, I’ll usually scribble it down in the back of my diary. It’s time to switch diaries again, so it’s time for the annual fic concept roundup!

This post lists all the fic ideas at the back of my 2023-24 diary. If I’ve written the fic, I’ll include a link to it. If I’ve started the fic, I’ll share a snippet. If I haven’t started it, I’ll write at least a hundred words on the spot.

First of all, here are the fics I’ve written in full. Fandoms: The Quarry, Death Note, Severance, Final Fantasy VII Remake. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.


( Written fics from my 2023-24 diary. )


Next, let’s look at the works in progress (or at least the works that were started; I’m not sure they’re actively progressing). Fandoms: Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 (2023 game), Severance, Final Fantasy VIII, Final Fantasy XV, Uncharted. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.


( In-progress fics from my 2023-24 diary. )


Finally, it’s time for the fic ideas I haven’t touched and now have to write something for. Let’s see if I can do this.

Fandoms: The Quarry, Persona 4/Spider-Man (?), Kingdom Hearts/Silent Hill 2 (??), Final Fantasy XIII-2, In Stars and Time, Death Note. There may be spoilers for these canons below the cut.


( 2023-24 fics I hadn't started... until now. )


As ever, I have no idea whether any of these will end up becoming full fics, but I’m glad to have written at least a little for each concept!

This fic is a very loose reworking of I Need You, the first fic I ever completed, which I wrote at the age of thirteen. I was interested to see how different the fic would be if I wrote something similar as an adult, two decades later. To ensure I wouldn't copy it too closely, I didn't reread the original before writing this.

The original fic was highly implausible and didn't make much sense, so turning the concept into something workable was a real challenge! You can find it here on my Final Fantasy VIII website if you're curious, but be warned that thirteen-year-old me had very little grasp of a) characterisation, and b) human behaviour.


Title: Wake Up
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Squall/Zell
Wordcount: 3,100
Summary: Squall comes back unconscious after the final battle. Zell is definitely spending a totally normal amount of time by his bedside.


( Wake Up )