rionaleonhart: revolutionary girl utena: utena has fallen asleep on her schoolwork. (sort of exhausted really)
I posted a meme over on Tumblr, which I’m going to reproduce here:

Give me any two (or more) characters I’m familiar with, and I’ll tell you how they would cope in an ‘oh no, there’s only one bed’ scenario!

I got a good number of requests on Tumblr, and I had a blast with all of them. There’s a surprising amount of scope for variation in an ‘only one bed’ situation, and it’s interesting to think about how different character combinations would react to it! My responses exist on a spectrum from ‘general thoughts’ to ‘tiny ficlet’.


Danganronpa: Makoto Naegi and Mukuro Ikusaba )

FFVII/FFVIII: Cloud Strife and Squall Leonhart )

Silent Hill 2/Death Note: James Sunderland and Light Yagami )

Final Fantasy X: Auron and Jecht )

Final Fantasy VIII: Seifer and Zell )

Ace Attorney: Ryunosuke and Kazuma )

Danganronpa 2: Hinata and Koizumi )

Pandora Hearts: Oz and Elliot )

The Last of Us: Ellie and Jesse )

Lost: Sayid and Jack )

Ace Attorney: Edgeworth and Gumshoe )

Doctor Who/The Mentalist: the Ninth Doctor and Patrick Jane )

The Good Place/Doctor Who: Michael and the Master )

The World Ends with You: Joshua and Neku )

Final Fantasy VII: Barret and Cloud )

Final Fantasy VII: Barret and Tifa )

Lost: Jack and Kate )


If there are any characters you’d like to see confronted with a one-bed situation, feel free to make requests in the comments!
rionaleonhart: top gear: the start button on a bugatti veyron. (going down tonight)
It feels good to be able to make polls again! It's been a long time.

I usually don't include 'I can't answer this' options, because they can drown out other responses. I've included them for question three, though, because I'm curious about how many people aren't answering because they don't know the characters versus how many people aren't answering because they don't like the characters. You can still submit the poll if you haven't responded to all the questions, so feel free to skip anything you can't answer.


Poll #31611 The best sort of poll is a poll where you can vote for Squall Leonhart twice.
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 36


Who's your favourite Final Fantasy protagonist of the main-series games I've played?

View Answers

Cecil
1 (3.6%)

Bartz
0 (0.0%)

Terra
3 (10.7%)

Cloud
4 (14.3%)

Squall
5 (17.9%)

Zidane
4 (14.3%)

Tidus
0 (0.0%)

Vaan
0 (0.0%)

Lightning
4 (14.3%)

Noctis
6 (21.4%)

Clive
1 (3.6%)

Choose a starter Pokémon from the original three.

View Answers

Bulbasaur
10 (30.3%)

Charmander
11 (33.3%)

Squirtle
12 (36.4%)

Who's your favourite of these five characters I love? (This was a meme going around Tumblr a month ago, and I'm going to reproduce it here.)

View Answers

Ellie (The Last of Us games)
2 (5.7%)

Jack Shephard (Lost)
0 (0.0%)

Light Yagami (Death Note)
7 (20.0%)

Squall Leonhart (Final Fantasy VIII)
12 (34.3%)

Yuna (Final Fantasy X)
10 (28.6%)

I don't know any of these characters!
3 (8.6%)

Your taste is terrible. Please don't make me vote for the characters I know.
1 (2.9%)

Write a mini-fic (up to 255 characters) incorporating as many of your previous answers as you can. If you couldn't answer any of the previous questions, just write a mini-fic about any character you love!

QUIZ TIME! WHO COULD HAVE PLAYED UNTIL DAWN?

View Answers

A COCONUT
19 (57.6%)

AN OLD MAN
14 (42.4%)



The final question is based on a dream I had a while ago, in which it was a meme to make one-page 'fact sheets' about canons. These fact sheets always ended with 'QUIZ TIME!', a simple question in allcaps, and the answer options 'A) A COCONUT       B) AN OLD MAN'.

'Who could have played Until Dawn?' was the only question I remembered from the dream, and I felt compelled to bring it to life.
rionaleonhart: kingdom hearts: sora, riku and kairi having a friendly chat. (and they returned home)
I've been replaying Bravely Default on and off, and I really enjoy the closeness between the party members. It builds gradually, but the party really feel like friends by the end of the game. I can easily envision them remaining close friends long into the future.

This led to a thought: once the world has been saved and the dust has settled, would the parties of other RPGs I've played stay in touch?


RPG parties: do they remain friends after canon?

Bravely Default, Bravely Default II: yes, absolutely. One of my favourite things about these games is how intensely the parties bond over the course of their adventure.

Persona 3/4/5: I think these all fall into the category 'the group stays in touch, but some characters are closer than others'.

Final Fantasy VI: there are so many characters! A few will probably drop out of contact, but I think Locke, Terra, Sabin, Edgar and Celes will remain friends, and Sabin might stay in touch with Cyan and Gau.

Final Fantasy VII: I think the two party members I'm most confident will stay in touch are actually Barret and Tifa, but you can probably add Cloud to that. I'm less sure about the others.

Final Fantasy VIII: I think the whole party might manage to remain friends in this one! At some point Selphie and Irvine are going to have a breakup that seems at first like it's going to be really messy. In the event, though, Selphie just pouts for two days and then decides that they're friends again.

Final Fantasy IX: Zidane and Steiner will definitely stay close to Garnet and, by extension, will see a lot of each other. I think the party as a whole will get together occasionally, rather than being a consistently large part of each other's lives.

Final Fantasy X: I think the party will remain friends, largely because they all gravitate around Yuna. Kimahri might spend a lot of time off doing his own thing, though. Paine would stay friends with Yuna and Rikku, but I don't know if she'd bond with the others.

Final Fantasy XII: not really. The party will split off into the Ashe-Basch, Balthier-Fran, Vaan-Penelo pairs, two of which already existed before the party was actually formed. This is part of the reason XII ranks relatively low in the series for me; I never felt like the party really bonded, and I think that's a shame!

Final Fantasy XIII: maybe! I mean, if you ignore the sequel making half the characters disappear. These guys bonded pretty strongly over the course of their journey; they wouldn't all necessarily be the closest people in each other's lives, but I think they'd probably stay friends.

Final Fantasy XV: yes. Yes, obviously. Yes.


Compiling this list, I notice that my favourite Final Fantasy games - VIII, X, XIII, XV - are the ones that lean more towards 'the bonds of the party are strong enough for it to be easy to imagine that they'll all remain friends afterwards'. It's evidently a good way to win me over!

If you have your own thoughts on whether the party of a particular game would remain friends after canon - or whether the central characters of your favourite canon would stay in touch, videogame or not - I'd be interested to hear them! And, of course, feel free to argue against any of my thoughts.
rionaleonhart: final fantasy x-2: the sun is rising, yuna looks to the future. (hope is all we have)
It's time for a roundup of recent dreams, running up to the weird nightmare I had last night!


A handful of recent dreams. )


I don't usually write down my nightmares, because I'm not especially keen to preserve my memory of them, but I was so fascinated by the way this one ended that I had to make a note of it.
rionaleonhart: kingdom hearts: riku, blindfolded and smiling slightly. (we'll be the darkness)
Tem and I are currently playing through Kingdom Hearts II! We've just left the Pirates of the Caribbean world. Tem was very unhappy about the effort to render photorealistic humans alongside cartoon characters in PS2 graphics.

Tem referred to Kingdom Hearts Fujin as 'girl Riku', and I'm struggling to process this.

Axel: You can't turn on the Organization! You get on their bad side and they'll destroy you!
Roxas: No one would miss me. (walks away)
Axel: That's not true! ...I would.
Tem: (cocking head to one side) ...do I ship this?

I'm pleased that Tem is shipping Axel/Roxas, because this will enhance xyr experience of 358/2 Days, or possibly make xyr experience of 358/2 Days considerably worse. Either way, I'm looking forward to it.

Roxas's story still breaks my heart. This poor kid. He just wants to spend time with his friends; he didn't ask for any of this!

Can't believe the imperial Chinese army will let a duck, a dog and a foreign teenager join up, but they draw the line at a woman.

That said, I think the most unrealistic thing about Kingdom Hearts is the fact that nobody ever responds to Donald with 'what the hell did you just say?'

Auron laughs quietly after Sora refuses his offer of guardianship. I wonder if Sora reminds him of Tidus.

To clarify, Auron is offering to guard Sora, in the Final Fantasy X sense of being a guardian. He is not offering to be Sora's legal guardian. But, now that I've accidentally put that thought into my own head, I want to read that fic.

I cannot handle Auron urgently calling Donald Duck's name while healing him. I just can't. This was never supposed to happen.

'I see what we're doing,' Tem commented, at the start of Atlantica. 'We're doing the plot of The Little Mermaid. Because that's what we're doing in this game: we're just going through the plot of Disney films, only truncated and worse, and also Donald Duck is there.'

Sora's a little awkward on encountering Ariel again. I think, now that he's fifteen, he's a bit selfconscious about having his nipples out in merman mode.

The animators do really impressive work making the Organization XIII members feel distinct even when they're dressed in identical face-obscuring coats. The animation in Kingdom Hearts is great all around, actually; it's really striking me on this playthrough!

For the benefit of anyone who's interested in videogame animation, incidentally, I'm really enjoying the New Frame Plus Animation of Final Fantasy series on YouTube, in which professional animator Dan Floyd takes a game-by-game look at how Final Fantasy's animation has changed and developed over the decades. He's up to Final Fantasy V, and I'm looking forward to future instalments!
rionaleonhart: final fantasy x-2: the sun is rising, yuna looks to the future. (hope is all we have)
A couple of people responded to my question about male love interests in videogames by saying they were having trouble thinking of games they'd played with female protagonists. So, in case anyone's interested, here's the list of games I've played in which the main playable character is female!

In cases where control is split between two or more characters, I've taken who's presented as the protagonist into account. Final Fantasy XIII, for example, has you controlling different characters at different times, but the protagonist is definitely Lightning, whereas, although you could argue that Sam is the main playable character of Until Dawn or that Mizuki is the main playable character of AI: The Somnium Files: nirvanA Initiative, those cases aren't clear-cut enough to be listed here. I haven't counted games in which you can choose the protagonist's gender; these are games that were specifically designed around a female main character.

I've listed these games in alphabetical order and included some brief notes about each one, in case anyone's wondering whether to pick any of these games up. I've put asterisks next to games I particularly enjoyed. (Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy the others; there's only one game on this list I'd actively advise against playing (spoiler: it's Beyond: Two Souls).)

I've also only included games I've played myself, not games I've experienced through Let's Plays or watching friends play them, which is why I've omitted Assassin's Creed: Liberation, Danganronpa Another Episode, Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, We Know the Devil and The Zodiac Trial. But then I changed my mind and included We Know the Devil anyway. You can't tell me what to do.


Videogames I've played with female protagonists. )


I noticed while writing this how often I used the phrase 'young woman' in the game descriptions, so I took a moment to work out who the oldest protagonist in this list actually was. The results were slightly discouraging. By a long way, the oldest of these female protagonists is Chloe of Uncharted: Lost Legacy; I'm having trouble establishing her exact age, but I think she's around forty when the game takes place. I think second place goes to Red of Transistor, at the grand old age of twenty-seven.
rionaleonhart: kingdom hearts: sora, riku and kairi having a friendly chat. (and they returned home)
A question for the Final Fantasy players among you: what's your preferred party for the games you've played that let you choose your own party? Did you choose that party for gameplay reasons, are they characters you like, or do you want particular characters in the party because you think that makes most sense for the story? Or do you not have a usual party; do you switch it up on different playthroughs, or swap members in and out throughout the game?

Here are my answers:


Final Fantasy VI: This game has too many characters! My usual team is Celes, Sabin, Edgar and Locke. Celes and Sabin are my favourite characters; I like Locke a solid amount; I'm not particularly into Edgar as a character, but I find his Tools function useful in battle, and, as Sabin is already on my team, it seems fitting to include his brother.

Final Fantasy VII: My first playthrough was Cloud, Cid and Vincent, but nowadays Cloud and Yuffie are always in my party. Cloud's compulsory, of course, but I like him a lot, so I'd probably have him in my party anyway. Yuffie's fun, and her ability to attack from a distance is extremely useful.

I don't really have an established third member. If I were using my favourite characters, it would be Aerith, but on a practical level she's not an ideal party member. I used Red XIII on a recent playthrough, and I thought he was a solid member of the team; I think I might stick with Cloud, Yuffie and Red XIII.

Final Fantasy VIII: Squall, Zell, Rinoa. This is simple enough: they're the characters I like the most.

I've experimented with different parties in Final Fantasy VIII. Squall and Zell are always in my party, but I've done Squall-Zell-Selphie and Squall-Zell-Quistis playthroughs, because Rinoa is unusable for a large portion of the story and I thought I shouldn't get used to having her as a member. (In my first playthrough, I started out with Squall-Zell-Rinoa and then used Irvine in Rinoa's absence, just because he had the highest level.) Eventually, though, I decided I wasn't going to let Rinoa's patchy availability prevent me from using my favourite party; I use Rinoa whenever she's around. When she's not an option, my third member is usually Selphie.

Final Fantasy IX: On previous playthroughs, it's been Zidane, Garnet, Freya and Amarant. I like Zidane, Garnet and Freya; I'm not that interested in Amarant, but my Chocobo Hot and Cold addiction always makes him into a powerhouse, so he's too practically useful to give up! On my most recent playthrough, though, I developed an unexpected fondness for Steiner and swapped Freya out for him.

Final Fantasy X: Yuna, Auron and Rikku. Yuna and Auron are my favourite characters, but, honestly, that's largely coincidental; the main reason I use these three as my party is because they're the three characters I can get the Celestial Weapons for. All the others are impossible! Yuna, Auron and Rikku are manageable, which means they end up doing ridiculous amounts of damage while everyone else is capped at 9999. I level everyone up pretty evenly until I reach the point at which I can get the Celestial Weapons, at which point I start focusing exclusively on these three.

Final Fantasy XII: I actually don't have a party for this game. Because the 'you can switch characters out mid-battle' mechanic means it's beneficial to have strong backups, I level up all the characters evenly, constantly swapping them out, like they're a Pokémon team. On a practical level, all the XII characters are pretty much the same, so I suppose I'd use my favourites if you made me pick a party: Balthier, Fran and Ashe.

Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning, Sazh and Fang. This party doesn't have a great medic, which is a slight gameplay drawback, but overall it has a good balance of roles, and I like the characters a lot. If I were just using my favourites, it might be Lightning, Sazh and Snow, but I think Snow is best in small doses (even if I'm very fond of him), and I don't want to give up Fang's ludicrously high Strength stat.


BONUS QUESTION: how do you feel about your favoured party as an OT3/OT4/OTX? Let's see if I'd ship mine.

Celes/Sabin/Edgar/Locke: I could go for this? I could go for this. The sibling incest might complicate things, but honestly that's the main thing making me go 'this could be interesting?' rather than 'no, get Edgar out of there'.

Cloud/Yuffie/Red XIII: n-no. I do not ship these guys in any combination. The mercenary made entirely of psychological problems, the bratty sixteen-year-old and the lion? I don't think that would work, and it wouldn't even explode in a fun way; it would just be confusing for everyone involved.

Squall/Zell/Rinoa: yes, absolutely! This is a ship I've actually contemplated before. Squall/Zell is my favourite Final Fantasy VIII pairing; Squall/Rinoa is canon; Zell/Rinoa would be extremely cute; Squall/Zell/Rinoa would be great, although Squall would occasionally need to lie down in a quiet room to recover.

Zidane/Garnet/Steiner/Amarant: this is fine until you get to Amarant. Remove Amarant and then we'll talk. Steiner being confused and alarmed by this EXTREMELY IMPROPER arrangement would be great.

Yuna/Auron/Rikku: ooh, I could go for this. Yuna/Auron could be fascinating. I think Yuna/Auron is the main draw for me here, and I'd probably prefer the pairing on its own, but adding Rikku doesn't ruin it. (I don't imagine relationships between cousins would be considered incestuous on Spira; it's relatively rare for them to be considered incestuous on Earth.)

Balthier/Fran/Ashe: this is a great idea, yes! The only problem is that I feel this threesome carries a risk of ballooning Balthier's ego to dangerous levels.

Lightning/Sazh/Fang: huh! Hadn't occurred to me, but I'd be up for it. Maybe a V-shaped arrangement focused on Lightning; I think I'm inclined towards interpreting Fang as a lesbian, so I can see Lightning/Sazh and Lightning/Fang more easily than I can see Sazh/Fang.


If you'd like to, feel free to answer the 'what's your usual party and would you ship them together?' questions for other party-based games, not just Final Fantasy!
rionaleonhart: final fantasy viii: found a draw point! no one can draw... (you're a terrible artist)
I've been replaying Final Fantasy IX on and off over the last year or so, and I'm starting to approach the end. Here are some notes!

I'm too used to the canonical names to rename characters in Final Fantasy VII or VIII, but I can't play Final Fantasy IX without renaming Zidane to Rakuni and Vivi to Rikku. It just doesn't feel right otherwise. I can call the protagonist Zidane in my Dreamwidth posts without any trouble! But, when I'm actually playing the game, he has to be Rakuni.

I was very confused when Final Fantasy X actually included a character named Rikku, having previously given Vivi that name when I first played IX. It's possible that I saw the name in a magazine review of X, it stuck in my mind and I gave it to Vivi, having forgotten where it came from.

I wouldn't have minded having Blank as a permanent party member. His dynamic with Zidane is fun. I like the weird amicable hostility of their conversation when Zidane leaves Tantalus; it's basically just 'lol, fuck you, don't die, bye.'

You know, I've never really questioned the fact that tents are a single-use item in most Final Fantasy games. Yes, of course you need twelve tents if you want to spend twelve nights in the wilderness.

I'm really liking Steiner this time around! I wasn't expecting this at all! Steiner never caught my attention before, but I really like his unwavering devotion to Garnet, and his conflict between the loyalties he's sworn and what's right.

Huh! I left off playing for a while and resumed during my current Death Note phase, and Kuja actually reminds me a little of Light Yagami in some ways, which had never occurred to me before. They're both so dramatic and spiteful! They both think they're so great. Kuja's just more open about being a villain.

The problem with this game is that I love Chocobo Hot & Cold too much. I keep getting frustrated when I'm forced to progress the plot, because I just want to get back to the minigame! I wasn't able to calm down and focus on the game's story until I'd found all the Chocographs and was no longer constantly thinking 'when am I going to get to dig up more Chocographs?'

This game has a (very annoying) status effect called Virus. Is this a virus native to Terra? A lot of Terran enemies inflict it, whereas the only enemies that inflicted Virus on me on Gaia were Zorn and Thorn. Did Zorn and Thorn come from Terra, maybe?

I love how aggravated Zidane is by the discoveries he makes on Terra; it's interesting to see another side of him. 'I don't care about all this Terra and Gaia stuff!' he snaps, as the game tries to throw yet more bullshit plot revelations at him. He doesn't want to be a pawn in some stupid planet takeover plan; he just wants to spend time with his friends!

Zidane: Hey, Amarant. Can I ask you something?
Amarant: No.

I snorted aloud. I used to find Amarant dull, but on recent replays I've found myself enjoying the fact that he thinks he's really cool. (Too cool for victory poses!) Extremely funny. He would not be pleased to hear that that's why I've warmed to him a little.

I love that Garland divulges his plan to use Zidane to create war and goes 'you should now be aware of the meaning of your existence' and Zidane's response is 'yeah, I'm aware of ALL THE FRIENDS I'VE MADE, SCREW YOU.'

And then there's the 'You're Not Alone' sequence! When your protagonist has spent the entire game being upbeat and friendly, it hits hard when he finally snaps and yells at everyone.

A lot of Final Fantasy games fall apart slightly as they approach the end, I think. Final Fantasy IX is notable in that, late in the game, it actually gets stronger.

That's not a criticism of the early parts of the game; it's strong all the way through! But some of the most memorable and effective scenes take place late in the story. There's no point in Final Fantasy IX where I go 'oh, boo, the best part is over', whereas, as much as I love Final Fantasy VIII, I'm always a little disappointed when I hit disc three.
rionaleonhart: final fantasy xiii: lightning pays intense attention to you. (speak carefully)
In everything but the eikon battles, which are big on visual spectacle, Final Fantasy XVI feels like a toned-down Final Fantasy. The character designs, the characters' personalities, the body language, the environments: everything is more muted and more realistic than I tend to expect from the series.

I think the more realistic body language is very cool, but I have mixed feelings on everything else. I'll be honest: I've never picked up a Final Fantasy game because I'm in the mood for realism. That's not a problem with the game, exactly - there's nothing wrong with trying something new, especially in this series, which is famous for constantly reinventing itself - but it does cause Final Fantasy XVI to jar slightly with my expectations.

I'm in the mission 'Onward', looking for a trader's pass to cross a border.


Notes on Final Fantasy XVI. )


Even if I think Final Fantasy XVI could afford to be a bit more ludicrous, I'm still enjoying my time with this game! From the trailers, I wasn't sure whether it would be my thing at all; I'm glad I gave it a chance, even if I don't imagine it'll end up ranking among my favourite Final Fantasy games.
rionaleonhart: final fantasy x-2: the sun is rising, yuna looks to the future. (hope is all we have)
And here's the final instalment of these posts listing my ten favourite characters, in no particular order!

For anyone who missed them, here are the previous instalments: one (Elena Fisher, Joshua Kiryu, Squall Leonhart, Light Yagami), two (Ellie of The Last of Us, James Sunderland, Jeff Winger).


Hajime Hinata, Danganronpa 2


Who is this character and why do you love them? A lot of my favourite characters are ordinary people struggling to cope with a bizarre and terrible situation, and Hajime Hinata is a great example. He's a very normal person in the midst of a colourful cast, but his relative groundedness means he interacts well with everyone else, without those interactions becoming overwhelming. He could easily have felt bland, but I don't think he does at all. Hinata has enough personality to feel real and present; he's compassionate, he's sarcastic, he's insecure but unafraid to speak his mind. He genuinely likes and cares about most of the people he's trapped with, but he's naturally struggling with the paranoia of the situation, which is a fun internal conflict. He also seems like he has a mild crush on everyone he interacts with, which is a trait that always delights me.
Do you ship this character with anyone? I ship Hinata with pretty much everyone, but particularly Komaeda, Koizumi and Kuzuryuu. Hinata and Koizumi, both strong-willed and relatively level-headed, would probably have the occasional argument, but I think they could ultimately work out well and be very cute. Kuzuryuu is short-tempered and clashes with everyone else at first, but he and Hinata build a mutual respect over the course of the game, which I think could form a strong foundation for a relationship. Hinata and Komaeda would work absolutely terribly, but that's the fun of it. Komaeda adores Hinata and expresses it in horrifying ways; Hinata, appropriately horrified, spends every second he's forced to be around Komaeda wishing he were anywhere else. It's great.
What's your favourite fic you've written about this character? Probably Humanity's Hope, an AU inspired by The Last of Us. Hinata has to deal with zombies and Komaeda, and frankly Komaeda might be worse. Their dynamic is always a lot of fun to write; I love the way Hinata finds Komaeda simultaneously repellent and fascinating.
Are there any similar characters you love? Danganronpa protagonists tend to come from a similar mould, and I love all of them. I've also generally got a weakness for ordinary, good-hearted, slightly sarcastic teenage boys who love their friends and go through absolutely horrific experiences. Bonus points if they cry. Other examples include Sean Diaz of Life Is Strange 2 and Keiichi Maebara of Higurashi: When They Cry.
Anything else you'd like to say about this character? Some of the characters on my favourites list are more-or-less unique characters who won me over as individuals; some are just great examples of character types I have a particular weakness for, and Hinata falls into the latter category. He'd be slightly wounded to hear that, given that he has a lot of issues about being ordinary and not really standing out. Sorry, Hinata. You're still a standout character in my heart; you don't have to be unique for me to like you enormously. I realise that this probably isn't making you feel any better.


Patrick Jane, The Mentalist


Who is this character and why do you love them? Patrick Jane is a cheerful, playful, affable façade stretched thinly over a terrifying void. Sometimes he's brightly arranging a picnic. Sometimes he buries a man alive. Sometimes he's just being cheerfully obnoxious. Sometimes he kills someone in cold blood. He sleeps in the room where his family was murdered, under the calling card of the murderer, drawn in their blood, which he's never had cleaned off the wall. He's fucked up. I think he's fascinating.
Do you ship this character with anyone? I firmly believe that Jane is in love with his entire team - Lisbon, Cho, Rigsby, Van Pelt - and also with Hightower, for good measure. But he'll never admit it to himself. If he accepts that he's in love with them, that also means he's forced to face the fact that Red John could hurt him by taking them away.
What's your favourite fic you've written about this character? Compass Points, a fic exploring my conviction that Jane is in love with all of his colleagues. This fic still gets a handful of kudos every month, even five years later; I was pleased to realise there are a lot of Jane/everyone fans out there!
Are there any similar characters you love? The Ninth Doctor of Doctor Who. Externally playful and cheerful, deeply traumatised, scarily ruthless, kind of dead inside. Develops very intense attachments to specific people and is prepared to go to alarming lengths for them.
Anything else you'd like to say about this character? I think Patrick Jane was a more interesting character than The Mentalist was prepared to handle. I ended up dropping The Mentalist at the end of season six, when it became clear to me that the show was set on maintaining the tone 'oh, Patrick Jane, what a scamp' and I wanted 'oh, Patrick Jane, what an absolutely horrifying man'.


Yuna, Final Fantasy X


Who is this character and why do you love them? Yuna is one of the few characters on this list who isn't a complete psychological disaster, although she's on a quest to sacrifice herself for the good of the world, so she's still got a fair few issues to deal with. I'm often drawn to weakness in characters, but I really admire Yuna's strength. She's a little awkward, but she's brave; she's determined; she's prepared to fight against everything she believed in when she finds that it was founded on false principles. She wavers sometimes (which is a good thing; wavering is interesting!), but she's always prepared to grit her teeth and push past her doubt and her fear. And, below all the impossibly heavy responsibilities, she's just a teenager; she wants to have fun, she wants to spend time with her friends, she wants to live. She's been my default icon on here for fourteen years.
Do you ship this character with anyone? I like Tidus/Yuna a solid amount - I think they work well together - but I wouldn't say I actively ship them. The character I ship Yuna with most might actually be Squall Leonhart of Final Fantasy VIII; I once saw someone mention that Noel of Final Fantasy XIII-2 looked like he could be Squall and Yuna's kid, and I found the idea deeply intriguing. They aren't from the same world, of course, but I think Squall and Yuna would interact interestingly. Squall's afraid of relying on others because he thinks it's a weakness; Yuna, who travels with guardians and fights by summoning, has always viewed others as her strength.
What's your favourite fic you've written about this character? Binding Contract, a Final Fantasy VIII/Final Fantasy X crossover in which Squall is Yuna's guardian-for-hire.
Are there any similar characters you love? Possibly Utena Tenjou of Revolutionary Girl Utena? They're different in demeanour, but they're both compassionate and brave and unshakeably determined; they both have a tendency to take more responsibility upon themselves than they should; they're both prepared to throw themselves away for the sake of others.
Anything else you'd like to say about this character? Of all the characters on this list, Yuna's the only one who didn't establish herself as my favourite the first time I experienced the canon. At first, my favourite Final Fantasy X character was Auron, but I came to appreciate Yuna more and more on later playthroughs.


And that's it! My ten favourite characters of all time, or at least the closest I've ever managed to get to a definitive list. I've enjoyed talking about them!

A couple of people have asked if they can borrow this format to talk about their own favourite characters. Borrowing this format is welcome and encouraged! I'd love to hear other people talk about characters they love.
rionaleonhart: final fantasy viii: found a draw point! no one can draw... (you're a terrible artist)
Over the past few years, I've noticed a pattern where I go into a spiral of writer's insecurity after posting certain types of fic. These are usually little ficlets, or fics made up of thematically connected scenes.

Basically, the fics that set off my insecurity are fics that don't have a story; they're little pieces of character introspection or interaction that don't really go anywhere. I worry that I'm wasting people's time with them.

This is extremely silly for a number of reasons, among which are:

- I don't judge other people for writing similar things at all! Why would I? If it's something I'm not interested in, I don't have to read it; if it's something I am interested in, I'll be delighted that it exists.
- Fics made up of thematically connected scenes are extremely common! The '5+1 Things' format is an entire fanfiction genre devoted to it, and there are 32,000 works with that tag on AO3.
- My fanfiction is not taking up vast tracts of space on the Internet that could otherwise be used for more 'worthwhile' writing. AO3 isn't going to run out of space to host someone's novel-length masterpiece because I posted something frivolous.

Anyway, in an effort to be less silly about this, I thought I'd attempt some low-pressure frivolous writing. Therefore: am I actually going to post a fic request meme? I haven't done this in over a decade!

Tell me a fic concept you'd like to see me write, and I'll attempt to write a few lines of it.

If you're not sure which fandoms I'm familiar with, the fandom list on my AO3 account is probably a good place to start. If you have multiple ideas, feel free to make multiple requests and I'll pick which one(s) to write.

There are a handful of things I'd personally prefer not to write, e.g. suicide, sexual content involving characters under fifteen, Teddie from Persona 4. If you're not sure where my boundaries lie, though, you're welcome to suggest your idea anyway; I can always just opt not to write it.

Also, if someone else in the comments posts a concept that appeals to you, feel free to write it yourself!
rionaleonhart: final fantasy viii: found a draw point! no one can draw... (you're a terrible artist)
A while back, I revisited and annotated my earliest fic, Rachel's Pokémon Journey, for a project I called Old Fanfiction Book Club.

None of my other early fics were quite as ambitious as Rachel's Pokémon Journey, but I've got a few other embarrassing works of youthful fanfiction under my belt. Here's a one-off Old Fanfiction Book Club for Trapped in the Game, the Final Fantasy X self-insert I started at the age of thirteen and got exactly three chapters into before I abandoned it. (I think the title may actually have had an exclamation mark: Trapped in the Game!)

I've lost the original author's notes for this, but I remember assuring the readers that I wasn't actually planning to make it a Tidus/Riona fic. I was aware of the concept of a 'Mary-Sue' and deeply afraid of falling into that trap. Apparently, my technique for not creating a Mary-Sue was making my self-insert make a prat of herself at every opportunity.


Trapped in the Game, Chapter One, with annotations. )


This is a very embarrassing experience. Let’s plough on!


Trapped in the Game, Chapter Two, with annotations. )


My original author's note at the end of chapter two: 'Whaddya think? OK, so not much is happening. And it’s short. Um, I’ll try to change that. For now – review! Reviews are my inspiration.'

I did not change that.

And now to chapter three! By this point I would have been fourteen.


Trapped in the Game, Chapter Three, with annotations. )


And that's all that exists of Trapped in the Game! I sort of wish I'd written more; I'd love to know how I would have portrayed Yuna at that age.
rionaleonhart: final fantasy xiii: lightning pays intense attention to you. (speak carefully)
I've been having a good time with the Final Fantasy Kiss Battle!

I've received some great responses to my prompts. [personal profile] necrophilia wrote me Edea/Seifer, and [personal profile] requiems wrote me Serah/Hope. ([personal profile] necrophilia and I actually both prompted Edea/Seifer at the same time, because we are both terrible people with great taste.)

I've also written a couple of ficlets myself. Here they are!


Debts, Final Fantasy XV, Prompto/Ignis, 800 words )


Across the Distance, Final Fantasy VII/Final Fantasy X, Aerith/Yuna, 900 words )


('Riona, did you name your Aerith/Yuna fic Across the Distance after Celene Dion's "My Heart Will Go On"?'

N-no. No. No, of course not. No.)
rionaleonhart: final fantasy x-2: the sun is rising, yuna looks to the future. (hope is all we have)
I picked up my neglected Final Fantasy X replay and finished it at last!

Even though I never actually played it at her house, I associate this game so strongly with visiting my grandmother when I was a teenager. I remember daydreaming about it in her garden.


Spoilers for Final Fantasy X. )


I always spend hours getting Auron, Yuna and Rikku's ultimate weapons and training them up to do comical amounts of damage, complaining all the time about how tedious it is, and then I go all surprised-Pikachu when I kill all the final bosses in two hits. 'Grinding is a pain' and 'there's no challenge in the final fights' have exactly the same solution, but will I ever learn? Absolutely not.
rionaleonhart: final fantasy viii: found a draw point! no one can draw... (you're a terrible artist)
I invited people on Tumblr to ask me questions about videogames; here are my answers!

As these answers were originally written for an audience that didn't necessarily read my Dreamwidth, I may repeat some sentiments I've already expressed here.


Questions from [archiveofourown.org profile] th_esaurus:

Hardest game you’ve played?

Probably Celeste! It was worth the struggle. I crawled through the main storyline, inch by inch, with ferocious determination, and then I replayed it three times afterwards because I was so delighted to see how much I'd improved.


And lots more rambling about videogames. )


Finally (we're still on [personal profile] keltena's questions):

If you could immerse yourself in any game for one day, which game would it be? What would you do?

A lot of my favourite games would be too dangerous to visit personally, I think! Or I love them on the basis of their characters, and I'd never actually manage to have a conversation with those characters if I spent a day there. Final Fantasy VIII? Good luck talking to Squall Leonhart. Final Fantasy X? Yuna would absolutely talk to me if I approached her, but she's a very private person, so it'd never get beyond surface-level polite conversation about the weather.

Fortunately, I have the perfect answer to this question! I would go to the Pokémon world and admire all the Pokémon and maybe cuddle a Bulbasaur if I'm lucky.


If you have any videogame-related questions of your own, feel free to ask in the comments! It may surprise you to learn this, but I like to talk about videogames.
rionaleonhart: final fantasy x-2: the sun is rising, yuna looks to the future. (hope is all we have)
[personal profile] thebaconfat's been replaying Final Fantasy X, which has inspired me to get back to the replay I abandoned about a year ago. It's a slightly weird experience; I was last playing this game when I was writing my 'Squall is Yuna's guardian' fic, so it's really disconcerting that Squall isn't there and there's some guy called Tidus instead.

(I'll get back to my Final Fantasy VIII replay at some point!)

The Cloisters of Trials are deeply tedious. Whose idea was this? Who went, 'Ah, yes, let's include trial-and-error puzzles where the player character has to physically run long distances in order to try things out?'

Auron never explains anything. Just makes cryptic statements and does his own thing.

Loved this exchange when the airship's attacked and Rin tries to sell you supplies:

Wakka: We gotta pay? If we lose, you die too, buddy!
Rin: I have faith in your victory.

Given Kelk Ronso and Seymour Guado, do all the human characters in this game just have the surname 'Human'? Maybe appending your species to your name is just a maester thing.

Spoilery notes under the cut! Yes, I'm cutting spoilers for a twenty-year-old game. (Yes, Final Fantasy X is twenty years old.)


Spoilers for Final Fantasy X. )


I think Tidus/Yuna is probably my favourite canonical Final Fantasy pairing. The characters click somehow. I wouldn't say I'm particularly invested in it - I wouldn't seek out fanworks - but it's endearing.

There are definitely canonical pairings I love and am invested in, but none of them are in Final Fantasy games, which is a little surprising when I think about it. There aren't even that many non-canonical Final Fantasy pairings I love. There's Celes/Sabin, Squall/Zell and Serah/Hope, and then you hit Final Fantasy XV, where I suddenly ship everything.
rionaleonhart: final fantasy x-2: the sun is rising, yuna looks to the future. (hope is all we have)
Rei and I were looking for a new television series to watch. We came up with a few things that had short episodes, so we could watch one episode each and see if anything clicked, and then we went to Netflix to put our plan into action.

Netflix immediately scuppered our plan for the evening by going, 'Hey, want to watch a show about a teenage girl who starts a band with three ghosts?'

It had not hit us until that exact moment, but we had wanted to watch a show about a teenage girl who starts a band with three ghosts for our entire lives.

Anyway, that's how we ended up watching Julie and the Phantoms. Julie meets the ghosts of three young musicians who died in the nineties! She's the only living person who can see them, except when they play music with her! They start a band!

Is it a ridiculous concept? Yes. Did it genuinely get me emotionally invested and make me cry? Also yes.

Julie and the Phantoms is silly, it's true, but it's also both a much better show and a much more emotionally devastating show than I could have anticipated. I realise what I'm about to say may show a lack of foresight, but I thought this was going to be a fun story about dead teenagers; I didn't sign up to be sad!

There's a moment in the final episode in which (spoilers, highlight to read) the ghost band members think they're going to, er, ghost-die, so they just lie down and cuddle up and wait to stop existing. This is the sort of thing that gets me straight in the heart, and it is also not at all what I'm prepared for in a show by the director of High School Musical.

Here is my favourite clip, in which Julie performs a song for her best friend Flynn in order to prove to Flynn that she has ghost friends who are only visible to other people when they perform music with her. I can't believe this is this show's concept. I can't believe I love it unironically. I can't believe I'm surprised by this, because this is exactly the sort of stupid thing I enjoy.

There's currently one series of nine episodes. Fingers crossed for a second.

I do not feel I have a solid enough grasp of the characters to be able to write them, but if I did I would probably be working on some ghost OT3 fanfiction. (There's a terrible part of me going 'you should rewatch the stupid ghost band show straight away to solidify your character voices'. No!!)

(I can't believe I posted this entry at first without using my icon from Final Fantasy X-2, a game about a woman whose clothes are haunted by a ghost who only appears when singing with her.)
rionaleonhart: final fantasy x-2: the sun is rising, yuna looks to the future. (hope is all we have)
Finally finished the Squall-as-Yuna's-guardian fic! I've wanted to write this for so long.

I can't believe I've got fics titled Warranty Terms, Tenancy Agreement and Binding Contract.


Title: Binding Contract
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII/Final Fantasy X
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: slight Squall/Yuna hints
Wordcount: 3,100
Summary: Squall is contracted to be Yuna's guardian.


Binding Contract )
rionaleonhart: top gear: the start button on a bugatti veyron. (going down tonight)
One of the reasons I'm so interested in videogames specifically, of all the storytelling formats available, is that I've grown up alongside them. There have been changes in television and film storytelling in my lifetime (television in particular, with the shift in expectations from 'you'll probably watch one episode a week and may miss some here and there' to 'you'll probably watch the whole thing from start to finish and may watch several episodes in a session'), but I've watched huge changes happen in videogames, and it's fascinating to watch this storytelling medium deciding what it wants to be.

Even 'becoming a means of telling stories' is a change that's happened largely in my lifetime. Games with stories did exist before I did, but over time I've seen more and more emphasis placed on the storytelling side. Our first household console was the Sega Master System II, which didn't get much more intricate plot-wise than 'TAILS HAS BEEN KIDNAPPED; FIND TAILS.' At the time, I couldn't have imagined anything on the level of, say, The Last of Us, either in storytelling or in gameplay complexity.

I still remember reading Ender's Game in the Game Boy era and being unable to comprehend the scene where Ender, offered two glasses by a giant in a videogame, chooses not to drink; instead he kicks both of them over, climbs up the giant's face and burrows into his eye. Videogames only had two buttons to me; one was the 'jump' button and one was the 'everything else' button. I couldn't get my head around the idea of having that sort of freedom.

There have been some obvious changes in games over the last twenty-odd years, such as the improvement in graphics. (I remember seeing a Final Fantasy X trailer for the first time and being absolutely stunned by the graphics. The characters looked exactly like real people! I could never have imagined a game looking this good! Surely this was the pinnacle of visual achievement? It's sort of hilarious to look back at it.) But here are some other shifts I've noticed over time.

A note: there are consoles I've never owned - in particular, the Xbox line - so these observations are going to be skewed by my personal experiences, which are mainly on Sony consoles and Nintendo handhelds. I started playing games in earnest in the late 1990s, with the Game Boy. I didn't actually play our Sega Master System II, because I couldn't take the pressure of being responsible for Sonic's life; I just made my brother play so I could watch.


- It's now much easier to pick a game up if you've drifted away from it for a few months. I once had to restart my playthrough of Final Fantasy VII because I'd set it down for too long and forgotten where I was supposed to be going. If that happens in Final Fantasy VII, you're absolutely screwed. If it happens in XV, you'll be fine; the 'quest' menu will tell you what you're doing and set a map marker to help get you there. (Final Fantasy IX was the first in the series to take pity on forgetful players; you can go into Qu's Marsh and ask the Moogles for directions if you're not sure what you're supposed to be doing.)

- When you start a new game nowadays, it'll probably tell you what you're supposed to do! Silent Hill 2, for the PS2, assumed you'd read the manual in the game box and already knew what the controls were; woe betide you if you hadn't. On a replay, I was flailing around frantically as the first monster approached before I worked out I was supposed to hold R2 and press X to attack.

- Games are more forgiving, on the whole. There's an understanding that, once a player has shown they can do something, there's no need to force them to do it again. I replayed PS2 game Jak II recently, and the checkpointing was a nightmare; I'd have to play through a lengthy sequence tens of times because I kept dying and having to restart from the beginning. If that game came out today, those sequences might still be tricky, but they'd probably let you restart from later, rather than making you replay segments you've already done to get to the part you can't get past.

- On a related note, I expect modern games to respect my time more than games did in the past. Forgiving checkpoints are an aspect of this, but I also expect to be able to save when I need to, and to be able to pause or skip cutscenes. The addition of a 'skip cutscene' option was a very noticeable change between Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2.

- I no longer expect games to become progressively more difficult. There may be a slight increase in challenge, but I don't expect the game to get near-impossible by the end if I'm doing fine at the start.

- Limited lives are rarely a thing nowadays! If you fail, you can retry as many times as you need to. Life systems feel like they were probably a holdover from arcade games, which have limited lives so they can prompt you to enter more money; there was never any real need for them in consoles. Jak and Daxter was the first time I saw a platformer without a life system, and I remember reading a magazine review that considered it extremely noteworthy.

- The earliest platformers I experienced, Super Mario Land for the Game Boy and the Sonic the Hedgehog games for the Sega Master System II, had limited lives AND NO SAVE SYSTEM. You were expected to beat the entire game in one sitting, and if you ran out of lives you had to start the entire thing from the beginning. It was awful.

- There's been a really noticeable increase in female protagonists. When I really started getting into videogames, around the turn of the millennium, Lara Croft and Samus Aran were the only female game protagonists I knew of; they weren't the only ones who existed, but the number was still very small. I've now played over twenty games where the main playable character is female, although male-led games still dominate hugely.

- There are no longer the PS2 era's lengthy delays between US releases and European releases, which I appreciate!

- Some genres have almost disappeared; some have flourished. There used to be so many colourful, child-friendly collectathon platformers in the PS1 era; those were fun, but you rarely see them nowadays! The first open-world game I ever played was Red Dead Redemption on the PS3, and since then open-world games have become very common. (I suppose you could say Shadow of the Colossus was the first one I played, actually, but it's very different from modern open-world games.) There's been a rise in games that focus solely on story, without any combat, or at least a rise in those games being available in Europe: 'walking simulators', choice-based narrative games etc. Games by small developers seem to have become more widely available.


There are developments I'm not a particular fan of. I miss the days when you could put a disc in your PS2 and start playing immediately, without hours of downloading/installation. DLC often feels like an excuse to hold content back for extra money, and, while the ability to patch is obviously useful, it means that sometimes developers can rush an unfinished game out of the door and go 'we'll fix it later'. Microtransactions are dreadful. But it's been really interesting to watch the ways this medium has evolved, the good and the bad. I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.

If anyone else has thoughts on how games have changed, please share!
rionaleonhart: final fantasy viii: found a draw point! no one can draw... (you're a terrible artist)
Pokémon Go was the only mobile game I'd previously played, but [personal profile] jecca_mehlota mentioned Dissidia Final Fantasy Opera Omnia, and I thought I'd check it out. It's not that heavy on the story - it's designed to be consumed in small bursts, so both cutscenes and battles are brief - but it does have some cute interactions between assorted Final Fantasy characters, and characters from different Final Fantasy games interacting is something I have a huge weakness for. Here are some things I've liked:

- Cloud reminds Sazh of Lightning. 'Looks like other worlds also have their fair share of strongheaded soldiers who take on way too much alone.'

- Hope giving Vivi reassurance and courage and then being taken aback when Vivi says 'thanks, mister!' (Hope, being fourteen, probably isn't used to being called 'mister'; Vivi, being nine, probably doesn't think anything of addressing him that way.)

- Vaan running up to go HEY YOU GUYS HAVE A REALLY COOL AIRSHIP and Sazh going 'finally someone gets it!'

- 'I don't like the look of you. You remind me too much of... someone I know,' Seifer says to Cloud.

- SEIFER WANTS TO BE YUNA'S KNIGHT. You should have been born in the Final Fantasy X universe, Seifer; being a guardian would really suit you! Well, I mean, you'd like the idea of it. You wouldn't necessarily be good at it. But you'd like the idea.

- Everyone goes 'hey, Seifer, come with us and save the world' and Seifer goes 'no, screw you, I'm going on ahead of you and I'm going to save the world first.' Seifer's the worst and I love him.

- Zidane: (speaking of Yuffie) Must've been hard to work with someone as flighty and brash as her.
Cloud: Yeah. She's just like you.

A story detail I found interesting: they come across ruins and assume people had to have lived here at some point, and Mog explains that, no, this world was constructed based on their various worlds, so these ruins were just... built as ruins, without history behind them. There's something fascinatingly creepy about that.


The Kingdom Hearts Let's Play we've been watching as a household has just hit 358/2 Days, and my housemates can't get over the fact that every member of Organization XIII seems to be flirting non-stop with Roxas.

Ginger: It's not helping that the 'dialogue advancement' icon is a literal fucking heart.
Axel: (to Roxas) You have to look around. Sometimes what you're after is sitting right under your nose.
Rei and Ginger: OH COME ON.

Rei, who is gay and always on the lookout for queer fiction, is increasingly outraged that the Kingdom Hearts series is not considered a staple of gay culture. 'Nobody ever told me how gay these games are! You've all failed me!'