Trabia Garden

I'm enjoying having a website!

Before I made it, I was concerned that maintaining a website might feel unrewarding, given that it's not really a format that encourages feedback. If you update your website, it can be hard to tell whether anyone saw the update at all.

But it feels good to have somewhere I can just talk as much as I like about Final Fantasy VIII! I've added a few new pages since I first mentioned the site here, and it's fun to watch it grow, even if there's no way of knowing whether anyone else is seeing the new additions. As perhaps evidenced by the fact that I've kept up this blog for twenty years, I just like talking about things I enjoy!

(If you're curious about what's changed, though, there's a rundown on the updates page!)

Just the fact that I have this site is encouraging me to think about new projects related to Final Fantasy VIII, too. The first romance fic I ever wrote - and, in fact, the first fic I ever completed - was I Need You, a short and terrible Squall/Zell fic I penned at the age of thirteen. Maybe it'd be fun to attempt to rewrite it now that a couple of decades have passed.

I'm trying to resist rereading the original until I've finished my rewrite, but I remember the concept made absolutely no sense. Here is the plot of my first ever attempt at romance:

- Zell creepily watches Squall while he sleeps, going ':( oh no I love him but he's got Rinoa'.
- Zell tells the sleeping Squall aloud that he loves him and kisses him on the forehead.
- Zell SUDDENLY PASSES OUT ON SQUALL'S BEDROOM FLOOR FOR NO REASON.
- Squall wakes up, finds Zell sleeping on his floor, goes 'seems normal' and puts Zell in the bed with him.
- As he drifts off again, Squall half-remembers Zell BEING CREEPY and murmurs, 'I think I love you too.'

Absolute nonsense. It's a real challenge to write something that follows a similar trajectory but actually feels in-character and halfway plausible. Dear thirteen-year-old Riona: if you want a character to fall asleep on the floor, there should probably be a reason!

I'm also having fun revisiting my old silly projects relating to this game. I managed to dig out my old homemade Triple Triad cards and post scans of them on the Triple Triad page. Please enjoy my ludicrous attempt to draw a Geezard, or the made-up card where I just drew a Neopet and gave it devil horns.

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.

A friend mentioned she'd seen a comment about Light Yagami on a video about Shakespeare.

Riona: I suddenly and desperately want to see Death Note as written by Shakespeare.
Mori: Be the change you want to see.

I apologise for the results. This soliloquy is set during this scene from the first chapter of the manga (read the manga pages from right to left).

I... don't think I'll write any more of this? I very much hope I'm not going to write any more of this.


LIGHT:
Two men lie dead because I wrote their names,
A monstrous act - but wait, were not those men
Of monstrous acts themselves both culpable?
And yet the second weighs upon my soul;
His acts were grave, yet, to be met with death -
Before my eyes, a swift and brutal sight -
The penalty I dealt the man was steep;
Too steep, perhaps, for me to justify.
But - no. Why should I lie awake in bed
With visions of these ghosts within my mind?
What right have they to torment me like this?
The world is better off without their kind.
I'll wield my pen and cleanse the world of sin:
My right, my duty. Come now, let's begin.

As I seem to be on a Supermassive horror game kick at the moment, I've watched theRadBrad's Let's Play of The Quarry, the spiritual successor to Until Dawn!

The trouble with Supermassive games is that Until Dawn offered me Mike Munroe, the perfect character, and Mike/Sam, the perfect pairing, and no characters or interactions in subsequent games have quite been able to measure up. Mike's an obnoxious but basically good-hearted guy who makes horrible mistakes and struggles with guilt over them; he fights desperately to save his friends; he befriends a wolf; he has chemistry with pretty much anyone he interacts with; he gets his hand caught in a bear trap and cuts his own fingers off; what more do you need in a character?

While I did have more investment in Mike and Mike/Sam than in any aspect of The Quarry, though, I do like the Quarry kids! I took a quick liking to Abi (she's quiet, she's compassionate, she seems reasonably level-headed, she has cute little bat wings on her backpack), and over the course of the game almost all of them won me over. I didn't passionately love any of the characters, but I was invested in their survival.


( Thoughts on The Quarry. )


I enjoyed The Quarry a fair bit! Supermassive continues to be a great videogame developer if you like stories about a bunch of people going through bizarre and traumatic experiences together, even if I find their games too stressful to play them myself.

I'm not experiencing the drive to write fanfiction right now, but I'll think about it; the ending was a little abrupt and it definitely felt like there was room to follow up on the characters.

A couple of people mentioned Lost while I was watching Person of Interest, as another show produced by JJ Abrams and starring Michael Emerson. I've vaguely wondered whether I should watch Lost for a long time; I've got a weakness for stories in which a group of strangers are thrown into strange circumstances and forced to bond under high pressure.

Plus, hey, maybe it would distract me from how much I miss my murder boyfriend John Reese!

I started up the first episode.

Lost: Hey, we heard you like guys in suits who are around forty, have close-cropped dark hair and are desperately trying to save everyone!

It did not distract me from how much I miss my murder boyfriend John Reese.

A few thoughts on the first three episodes, written while watching:

I feel that Lost goes all in on Jack/Kate too hard and too early. The very first episode is crammed so full of significant looks and instant closeness that their dynamic doesn't really have room to breathe and work out what it actually wants to be. There's so much obvious determination in the writing to make this a romance that I feel like the characters are being held at gunpoint. Honestly, Kate and Charlie instantly feel more shippable just by virtue of interacting without the narrative trying to force them together.

The pilot of Lost feels like it has relatively little dialogue; it's far from silent, but there are a lot of stretches without much talking. I wonder if that's more to do with the show itself (they had a lot of cool scenery; maybe they wanted to show it off!) or the time it was made. Nowadays, when a lot of people watch things with half an eye on their phone, it's harder to have long stretches of largely visual storytelling.

Okay, I'm more willing to give Jack/Kate a fair shake as of episode three, now that she's gone 'I think you should murder this guy' and he's gone 'what, no.' Murder remains the key to enhancing any fictional romance.

The marshal tells Jack 'no matter how she makes you feel, don't trust a word she says' and then asks 'she got to you too, huh?', and I am fascinated by the implications that the marshal fell for Kate. I am fully in favour of how quickly the show goes the Jack/Kate route if the explanation is 'Kate is intentionally seducing Jack for her own ends'.

The marshal asks Kate to kill him? Sorry, Jack/Kate, but Nameless Marshal/Kate is where it's at; it's got higher-stakes conflict and higher-quality murder content.

(Apparently the marshal has a name; it's Edward Mars! I looked this up mainly so I could check whether there was any Kate/Mars fanfiction on AO3. No, alas, although Lost's heyday was pre-AO3, so I suppose that doesn't necessarily mean I'm the sole person who's interested in their dynamic.)

As with The X-Files, it's interesting to watch an influential show for the first time long after it's left its mark on television (and launched various actors' careers!). I could see Supernatural in The X-Files, and now I can see The 100 in Lost.

I haven't yet decided whether I'll stick with Lost; the concept seems interesting, but none of the characters have really grabbed me yet, and right now it's hard not to resent anything I try to watch for not being Person of Interest. But I thought I might as well record my early thoughts, either way!

I've watched approximately half the Taskmaster in existence, and it has been the best televisual experience I've ever had.

I'm familiar with the part of London where Taskmaster is filmed, which makes for some disconcerting moments. I've walked past that old bandstand so many times, and now it'll always be the place where Frank Skinner and Tim Key tried to make a bed while holding hands and then climbed into it together.

I sometimes find myself thinking about how I'd perform Taskmaster tasks myself, but I suspect I would be terrible at almost all of them.

Below the cut are some notes I've made here and there while watching. I started out on series twelve, dragged my housemates into it and then jumped back to watch from the beginning; we're now halfway through series six.


( Notes on assorted series of Taskmaster. )


It turns out I really don't know what to do with myself when I'm not in the fandom for something I love. Taskmaster's perfect on its own; I don't need or want to write fanfiction. But then... what am I supposed to do when I'm not watching episodes? I've got all this passion for Taskmaster and nothing to spend that energy on!

How do normal people who aren't in fandom enjoy things? I don't understand how they survive.

Once again, I find myself compelled to ramble about something nobody's heard of, just when my journal was in danger of becoming accessible. A seventeen-year-old fic should do it.

Ginger: Are you okay? You've spent a lot of today just lying in bed, staring at your phone.
Riona: I've been reading a fic I loved as a teenager! It's about a guy falling into a reluctant friendship with a serial killer while arguing with the dark reflection of himself who lives in his mind.
Ginger: ...yes, that does sound very you.

It's strange to go back to something you loved at a formative age and realise how much it influenced your tastes.

I've been rereading zarla's Vargas, a Johnny the Homicidal Maniac fic I first read when I was fifteen. I have never read so much as a page of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac itself. But I read this fic, and I loved it intensely.

And, on this reread, I've noticed a lot of themes that I've been drawn to in fiction ever since. The self-loathing protagonist has an intense, unhealthy, antagonistic, sexually tinged relationship with a duplicate of himself who may or may not be imaginary; there are so many things I love in that one sentence! (Other fictional themes I love in here: intense relationships with a constant undercurrent of distrust or fear, massive levels of repression, a strangely thin line between love and murder.)

(Just as a heads-up if you're checking it out: the fic is long, violent and unfinished, and it was written between 2003 and 2015, so there's some of the natural development of style you'd expect from a fic written over the course of twelve years.)

Vargas really had an impact on me, I've come to realise. It didn't seem right that I'd never mentioned it here. So I thought I'd give it a quick salute in this entry. THANKS FOR SCREWING ME UP, ZARLA.

And now I've got to resist the temptation to write about Scriabin, because writing fanfiction about someone else's OC for a canon I've never consumed would be ridiculous.

I mean, yes, I technically have done that before. Shhh.

I'm curious now: what are the works of fiction you'd consider particularly influential in forming your tastes? In my case, apart from Vargas, the biggest ones are probably Animorphs, Life on Mars and Silent Hill 2. Animorphs also had a heavy impact on my writing style.

(I've asked the same thing over at fictional_fans, a general fandom discussion community, if you'd prefer to answer there.)

th_esaurus: Hey, do you want to see The Book of Mormon in the West End?
Riona: I suppose it might be fun to watch a stupid, fun, offensive musical I've got no chance of getting emotionally invested in.
The Book of Mormon: It's time for a stupid, fun, offensive musical about friendship, and the power of stories, and a naïve, self-absorbed, overwhelmed teenager who fucks up and falls apart and struggles with guilt and questions everything he believes in!
Riona: oh goddammit

I didn't know anything about the musical going in beyond 'it's fun and offensive and about Mormons'; I wasn't expecting it to have as much heart as it did, and I really wasn't expecting Elder Price to be perfectly calculated to hit all my fictional-character weaknesses. I just wanted a mindless, enjoyable evening out! I had no intention of caring!

I don't think I'm going to write fanfiction for The Book of Mormon, but I will admit that as I watched I caught myself trying to come up with ideas.

The guy who played Elder Price, Dom Simpson, was absolutely perfect; he managed to strike just the right balance of arrogance and earnestness. I've heard that the likeability of Elder Price can vary a lot depending on the actor, so I'm extremely relieved we saw a likeable one. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to see it again, because it wouldn't feel right seeing anyone else in the role.


A recent conversation with my mum:

Riona: I've been doing some work for a men's grooming website.
Mum: What??
Riona: A men's grooming⁠—
Mum: (scandalised whisper) You mean - grooming men for sex?
Riona: ...no, I mean they sell razors.

(Another thing my mum said to me recently: 'I don't like how they're producing cocaine for cats.'

It turned out she was talking about Felix soup; she was very concerned that the illustrated cat on the packet looked 'completely addicted'.)


I've just remembered that we once went as a family to a Chinese restaurant - I think it was in Manchester - and we noticed that some items on the menu had asterisks next to them. We checked to see what the asterisk meant, and we found this:

* Not recommended

I've watched eight episodes of The 100, and eleven members of the Hundred have died; they were confirmed to be at ten losses in episode seven, and an eleventh died in episode eight. This is not a sustainable rate. I want to keep up the count, because I'm really curious about whether they'll accidentally end up killing off more than a hundred of the Hundred.

I like that Raven's great. They could have gone 'oh, no, the guy the protagonist likes already has a girlfriend! And his girlfriend obviously isn't as good or worthy of him as the protagonist.' But no; his girlfriend is Raven, who is, let's be honest, way better than Finn. I'm still not into this love-triangle storyline, but I do like the way it's being handled in that respect, at least.

Episode five, 'Twilight's Last Gleaming', was VERY UPSETTING and the writers owe me an apology for making me sad.

Episode six was pretty good for my fondness for intense, unhealthy sibling relationships. So far, I'm not really 'shipping anything, and the only potential pairing that's made me go 'I could develop an interest in this' is horrible Bellamy/Octavia. Trying to work out what siblinghood means must be tricky in a society where nobody has a sibling.

...I wrote that 'not really 'shipping anything' bit before watching episode eight. 'Yeah. Uh... that's good. Uh, watch and learn.' That close-up shot of Bellamy's hand on Clarke's shoulder, when he was teaching her to shoot, was pretty transparently 'we want you to 'ship this' and I went 'ah, you'll have to do better than that', but then Bellamy was slightly distracted afterwards, he was just as aware of the intimacy as the camera was, and okay, fine, I could go for this. I've been sort of resistant to the idea of Bellamy/Clarke just because I know it's hugely popular and I'm contrary, but I'm definitely starting to see where it comes from.

I don't expect myself to end up writing fanfiction for The 100 - right now it's just an enjoyable watch, rather than something I'm hugely invested in, and I'm not especially attached to any of the characters - but I know I've said 'I'm not going to write fanfiction' about other things and I have invariably been wrong.

(EDIT FROM THE FUTURE: not even a week later! Not even a week!)

More adventuring through my fandom history! All three of my real-person fandoms are in this instalment, so it's easy to skip if RPF makes you uncomfortable.


Scrubs

First saw this when I was seventeen. I don't remember exactly how I got into it, but I think maybe my brothers were watching it? I was surprised by how little fanfiction there was at the time.

I haven't revisited Scrubs in a very long time. I'm curious to know how it would hold up.

Previously I'd mainly written angst and introspection, but in this fandom I took tentative steps towards writing more dialogue and humour. I enjoyed it a lot. (I've sort of fallen back into angst and introspection nowadays! And I didn't entirely escape angst with Scrubs; I wrote the inevitable Silent Hill crossover, after all.)

Favourite character: Dr Cox! Very angry, very sarcastic, very unprepared to engage with his feelings. I had a lot of fun writing him.
Favourite pairing: JD/Cox. I'm pleased to look back and realise my taste in pairings has always run towards the slightly unhealthy. I also enjoyed Cox/Ben and was strangely taken with Elliot/Janitor, although I never wrote fanfiction for the latter.
Number of words written: 35,548.

Snippet: I once wrote a JD/Cox fic where JD was handcuffed to a radiator, then a sequel, then a retelling of the first fic from Dr Cox's point of view. This was going to be the Cox-perspective sequel to that.

( Scrubs unfinished snippet. JD/Cox, 2006. )


Top Gear

thegreatesthits/gayjunglefever was the first online friend I ever met in person (we went to see the Silent Hill film on our first meeting; she was not familiar with Silent Hill and was incredibly confused). One day, when I was just about to turn eighteen, I went to her house, and she enthused about Top Gear, and I went '...that's a show about cars, isn't it? I'm not really interested in cars.'

She showed me the episode where they make their own amphibious vehicles.

I spent the next year and a half writing fanfiction.

Top Gear fandom was an absolute blast. I found a lot of lasting friendships (hi, guys ♥). I found a housemate! I met up with a whole bunch of you in real life to have adventures in London, which probably did a fair bit to help me overcome my extreme shyness. I owe a great deal to Jeremy Clarkson, which isn't good, perhaps, but it's true.

This was the first real-person fandom I wrote for, and Richard Hammond had his jet-car crash right after I started writing fanfiction. A lot of people in the fandom felt really guilty for writing stories about car crashes beforehand. It shaped my personal approach to RPF; if I'm writing about real people, I cannot write about anything terrible happening. (Well, anything plausible and terrible, at least. Going to Silent Hill is still fair game.) After an even worse 'something horrible happened right when you were getting really into these guys' experience with Linkin Park, I doubt I'll ever pick up a real-person fandom again. But the ones I've been in have been a lot of fun.

Favourite character: Jeremy Clarkson. Extremely obnoxious, extremely fun to write.
Favourite pairing: Jeremy/Richard. I think James/Richard was the most popular pairing in the fandom, but I just wanted Jeremy Clarkson being obnoxious all over the place, and it was particularly fun if he was being obnoxious at Richard, because Richard was worse than James at enduring it.
Number of words written: 90,357.

Snippet: Jeremy and James discuss how to deal with the fact that Richard Hammond is a werewolf.

( Top Gear unfinished snippet. Werewolf Richard, circa 2007. )


Supernatural

One of two shows I got into because I had a dream about them and went 'I'm going to take this as a sign I should watch this show' (the other was Atlantis, although I never wrote for that). I started watching this when I was nineteen. (I can't believe it's still running.) The first episode I saw was Faith, which definitely caught my interest. The second or third was Malleus Maleficarum, which was so revolting I almost stopped watching then and there. Fortunately, I persevered!

I got extremely invested in Supernatural. Fictional siblings! Unhealthy coping mechanisms! What a great combination. The only fandom I've ever attended a convention for.

Favourite character: Dean Winchester. What a mess.
Favourite pairing: I don't think I 'ship anything in Supernatural much, actually. I dabbled a bit in Sam/Dean when I first got into Supernatural, back in season three, when Sam/Dean was pretty much all that existed, but I ended up concluding I preferred them as brothers. I do have a certain strange fondness for Castiel/Bobby. (There's barely any fanfiction, which perhaps isn't a surprise. I read a couple of Castiel/Bobby fics recently and went '...actually, this feels not entirely unlike Hank/Connor.')
Number of words written: 52,383, although this is counting the finished-but-never-posted Derren Brown/Doctor Who/Supernatural fic chapter (see below).

Snippet: I wish I'd finished this Supernatural/Pushing Daisies fic.

( Supernatural unfinished snippet. Supernatural/Pushing Daisies, 2008. )


Derren Brown

How did I get into Derren Brown? I was twenty years old. I think I caught his stage show Something Wicked This Way Comes on the television. He temporarily deprived himself of oxygen, then lay down on a bed of broken glass and made a man stand on him. I'll be honest: it was hot. I promptly created derrenbrownfic. It never got hugely far off the ground, but people did write a few things, which is impressive given that there was only one 'character' involved.

Derren Brown is the only celebrity to whom I have sent a ukulele in the post. He sent back a very nice letter.

Favourite character: There is literally one character.
Favourite pairing: Derren Brown/the Tenth Doctor from Doctor Who, which obviously makes vast amounts of sense.
Number of words written: 27,206.

Snippet: From the Supernatural chapter of my and moogle62's overambitious Derren-as-the-Doctor's-companion project. The chapter was going to be called 'In Which Derren Is Shot, and Things Get Worse from There'. I actually finished writing the entire Supernatural chapter, but we had a couple of other chapters planned to come before it, so I never posted it!

( Derren Brown unfinished snippet. Derren Brown/Doctor Who/Supernatural. )


British Comedy

British comedy is obviously a fairly expansive fandom, but I was in the Charlie Brooker/David Mitchell corner of it. I'd liked Mitchell for a while (I first became aware of him when Joseph introduced me to Peep Show), but I only got into British comedy as a fandom after discovering Brooker at the age of twenty-one.

This fandom was great, great fun. As with Top Gear, many of the members lived in London, so we met up and hung out a lot. Even better: a lot of comedy shows are recorded in London, and you can apply for free tickets! I went to twenty-something comedy recordings with other members of the fandom and wrote them up on my 'recording recaps' tag. It was great.

This entire fandom manifested at the start of 2010, thrived for six months and vanished pretty much overnight when Brooker got married, but it was a lot of fun while it lasted.

Favourite character: Charlie Brooker. Crude, hilarious, self-deprecating, surprisingly soft-hearted, worryingly attractive.
Favourite pairing: Charlie Brooker/David Mitchell. I also loved David Mitchell/Victoria Coren and was ecstatic when they got married. First time an RPF 'ship of mine turned out to be canon!
Number of words written: 20,435.

Snippet: This was a work of Charlie Brooker/David Mitchell romantic angst that I never finished because it seemed like more fun to write about them training Pokémon.

( British comedy unfinished snippet. Charlie Brooker/David Mitchell, 2010. )

I don't know why I've ended up writing such a huge entry on a game none of you have played, but, er, here you go. (The last few paragraphs of the entry still concern Until Dawn but may be of more general interest to people who play videogames.)


I ended up spoiling myself for just about everything in Until Dawn, because I was far too freaked out to keep watching when I didn't know what was going on, and it's amazing how much of a difference it made. Every QTE was terrifying when I was unspoiled; every decision felt like a matter of life or death. Once I'd looked things up, I was absolutely fine; I could just watch and enjoy this story about a group of flawed teenagers in a horrible situation without being constantly on the verge of dissolving into petrified sobs.

In a way, I do regret robbing myself of the opportunity to play the game blind, making my own bad decisions and seeing who survives to the end. On the other hand, even if a first playthrough is probably a powerful experience, I feel it wouldn't be an experience I'd enjoy.

It's really interesting to see the way the game's situation brings out certain qualities in its characters. Mike and Sam are at their absolute best when they and their friends are in mortal peril (even if Mike screws up sometimes). Emily very much looks out for herself, but she's able to stay focused and keep going. Ashley doesn't do well under pressure at all, although, to be fair, she's put in really horrifying situations. You might die! You might not! It's completely up to the person who's weighing your life against something else, and all you can do is wait helplessly!

I think an Animorphs AU for Until Dawn could work really well: it's a similar 'hey, teenagers, here's an awful situation you've suddenly been thrown into, you're going to have to think strategically to not die, good luck!' concept, and I'd love to see how the Until Dawn characters would handle it. Given that there are eight characters involved, though, it'd probably be too ambitious a project for me to attempt.

(Would Mike be the leader? Sam? Maybe Mike's the leader in name and Sam's actually the one who keeps things together.)

I don't think I'll be writing any more Until Dawn fanfiction, although admittedly I thought that after my first Until Dawn fic, and indeed after my second. But I've written 'Mike and Sam are miserable and make out', 'Mike and Sam are miserable and don't make out' and 'Mike wants to make out with everyone (and is miserable)'. Where else can I go? I can't just write endlessly about Mike being miserable, but it's the only thing my heart is interested in.

(I got a review on my Mike/everyone fic that said 'THIS WAS SADDER THAN I THOUGHT IT WAS GONNA BE. ;A;', which I'm pleased with because it is exactly according to my evil plan. The summary is 'Mike Munroe has a lot of attractive friends, and he'd make out with all of them if he could.' Hey, this'll be silly and fun! NO. NO FUN. MISERY. IT'S UNTIL DAWN.)

If I could write sex, I'd probably write a fic where Mike and Sam are the only ones left alive, they're still trapped on the mountain, and they end up banging unhappily because they're probably going to die anyway and it's the only thing they can think of to do. Alas, it's not in my skillset.


I've been skipping around and watching bits of a lot of different Until Dawn Let's Plays, and not just because I could watch Mike cut his own fingers off all day. I really like watching people slowly warm to Mike. He makes such a bad first impression (the first two things he does are 'participate in a cruel prank' and 'jumpscare you'), and I love the way a lot of players gradually progress from 'who's this arsehole?' to 'actually, I'm really invested in this arsehole's survival.'

Something I found interesting: at one point, when ChristopherOdd was playing as Mike, Jessica called to Mike for help. ChristopherOdd commented on 'the sheer terror in her voice, calling out our name'. When you play as Mike, does Mike's name become your name as well? Referring to playable characters in the first person is common enough; if Nathan Drake falls off a cliff when I'm controlling him, I'll usually say that I fell, rather than that Nate fell. Referring to yourself and the playable character together as 'us' isn't unheard of; you might say, 'Come on, Mike, let's see what's over here' (I'd never say 'we fell off a cliff' in the Uncharted example, though). But thinking of the name of the character you're playing as 'your' name strikes me as unusual.

Then again, if you saw me playing Silent Hill 2 and asked what was happening in it, I feel I might say that I'm looking for my wife. I don't know why names are specifically the point at which I feel a barrier falls between me and the playable character.

Are there any studies on when people refer to playable characters in the first person? Does it happen more with customisable protagonists, with silent protagonists, with protagonists that share the player's gender? Does having more than one playable character in the game affect it? (I feel I don't generally use 'I' in Final Fantasy games, for example, where you can usually control the actions of multiple characters.) Does whether the player likes the protagonist affect it? It's a difficult subject to Google, unfortunately. I don't want to know about first-person videogames; I want to know about people talking about videogames in the first person!