flemmings | Some whiskey in that fantoddy?

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anime

Some whiskey in that fantoddy?

Advent Children gives me, yes again, the fantods. It's the colours, mostly, and the shimmery grey skies, *so* like the polluted sky of Tokyo in 105F July. (reminiscent shudder) Remember I saw it first without exposure to what

luxetumbra calls the Lego people of FFVII in their brite primary colours, so there's no sense of a corrective happening. It's creepy, and the idea of writing fic about it is creepier still. (I'm not saying it isn't beautiful. But it's creepy. And full of sulky children, which to someone of my profession is not a plus.)

The anime is more to my tastes. But if FFVII in all its avatars looked like the anime, would it be as popular as it is?

I've now seen a background short's worth of Lego people, and my reaction is largely bwah-hah-hah-hah-hah! (Aerith's design especially scores high for painful and silly) followed by deep admiration for the djka who somehow derived recognizable people from those graphics. Perhaps not so difficult when you cut your teeth on the deformities of shounen manga but quite a feat from *my* POV.

However if I ever had any doubts about the batshittery of the gaming mullahs' 'You must play the whole game in its entirety before you can even think of writing fic for it'- which, on a parallel with manga fandom, I was willing to consider- it's been put to rest. Waste 24 hours of my life making robot-people shoot things so I can explore the character dynamics between one or two of them? Hell no. If Weiss and Eroica can run entirely on fanon, so can gaming. In fact gaming probably runs better on fanon, since so much of the canon is completely useless to the stories one wants to write. This fact is perfectly clear to the Japanese, who created the thing in the first place, but gaming in Japan is a pastime, not a religion.

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Well if you ever needed or wanted to get to that point of canon whoresque, there's an easy way to cheat since there's at least two different transcipts of the entire FF7 Script floating about on the internet and it's so much easier to "Ctrl+F" and type in a name than it is to play through the game over and over again. X_x

I think I want a game that lets you do Ctrl+F within it to get to the good parts. You can skip pages and fastforward videos: why are RPGs the plodding linear exception?

You can skip pages and fastforward videos: why are RPGs the plodding linear exception?

Because the people who make RPGs are under the dellusion that you can freely explore the world just within the constraints of their storyline. ;-)

But you're probably looking for something like this: Final Fantasy VII Complete Movie (http://cgi.ebay.com/Final-Fantasy-VII-7-Complete-DVD-FMV-Anime-Movie_W0QQitemZ9111527193QQcategoryZ617QQtcZphotoQQcmdZViewItem) which will let you watch/read all the dialogue, skips all the random encounters and most of the fights. (It also skips some of the subquests though, notably the Wutai one that focuses on Yuffie and the Turks.)

Honestly, if FF7 came on an "easy" or "cheat" mode you'd probably like it a lot more. Surprisingly, there is a lot of body language even with the blocky Russian doll sprites from hell. If you're not big on video games, then you're probably smart to pass however, if they are your thing then I do think it's worth it if you're really into the fandom. Although it's not the best video game ever, especially since it's about nine years old. A lot of the fans rabidness is the nostalgia value. (Because I don't think anyone would yell at you to play FF8 before writing the fic.)

Not even from a canon mindset, but there's a lot of sentimentality you can get while playing the game. You grow attached to the characters simply because you're forced to watch them hours on end. You truly get annoyed and frustrated with the villians, etc, etc. Also, strange as this sounds, but the cinematography is gorgeous. The camera angles aren't static and there are some kick ass positioning throughout the game. Of course, you're also suffering through 640 resolution to see this so it's not as cool as it should be. Plus, the music does play a big theme in FF7 because so many characters are defined by their themes. Plus the in-jokes are more amusing if you've had to hear the victory fanfare 4 billion times or if you've experienced the seething frustration and hate of Chocobo breeding. (So maybe there's a little mutual suffering clique going on too. ^_~)

It's probably... probably the closest example I can think of is watching the anime for a series and knowing it like the back of your hand but never reading the manga. It's close and it's similiar but there's always those few tiny details to be found?

(So trying not to be argumentative. ^^;;;)

Hmm. The movie sounds like something I'd be interested in. Thanks.

Thing is, I came at FF7 backwards, via those thick stacks of photocopied doujinshi Fearless Leader used to send me in the late 90's. Rather like Kenshin- I knew the artistic versions long before I got to see the anime. Kenshin at least *is* an anime. These games- I may know half (no, given FL's tastes, half a dozen) of the characters, but I can't view their source. Frustrating.

A game sounds like a long novel series, with the added plus of visuals and music. So I can see the sense of having lived with the guys and feeling nostalgic when they're gone, and the way that *all that time* translates into a feeling that if you haven't spent *all that time* you don't really know what the game is about. It's just... I can waste time with the best of them, but doing it powering up reminds me that I don't have as much time to waste as I used to.

(Nothing wrong with being argumentative. It's the way my family discusses things. But you're still at the level of discutative, if that's a word, which the OED seems to think it isn't.)

Hmm. The movie sounds like something I'd be interested in. Thanks.

No problem. I had a friend who isn't big on playing video games and kept getting confused but she still wanted to see the source material. It's not perfect but it's probably as close as you can get without playing and more enjoyable than reading through long transcripts. (Also, I should note it's more than just a collection of cut scenes/FMV so you will get the story.)

And I definetly feel your pain about a time sink especially when free time is pretty hard to come by. The last thing you want to do is devote mindless hours playing a never ending game. But yeah, reading summaries is most likely akin to reading only the CliffsNote's or movie adaptation of Shakespear just on a really inflated timescale. (Although I will say that most of fandom only centers on about six characters while the actual game gives every playable character their own backstory. Red XIII's backstory is personally one of my favorites and no one writes fic about him.)

I will caution that FF games sort of reminds me of Tolkien's LOTR triology in the sense that while you're playing it you don't quite realize just how badly constructed the dialogue is or how extravagant and meandering the plot is and that's mostly because the game is so long. The sheer length eventually makes your mind filter out the uninteresting parts but there's still enough cool moments that the entire series leaves you looking at it through rose colored glasses.

And yeah, going backwards graphicswise will probably be painful. Although I will say Squeenix's redesign of Cloud is more to my taste than J-fan art versions where he looks tiny and twelve. But that's probably just me.

Watch Advent Children and the OVA, sure, but I think in this case, playing the game itself would probably distract from the business of exploring character dynamics with all the walking in circles and fighting random monsters. There are transcripts of all the game dialogue available, if you want?

I was under the impression there was proper art for the characters that weren't lego blocks, though - like these?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Final_Fantasy_VII_characters
(click on main character pages to see full body image.)

walking in circles and fighting random monsters

All that. I don't want transcripts, actually. I want a female-friendly edited version of the game where I don't have to fight random monsters-- because killing things is a raelly boring way of spending 24 or 48 hours-- but do get to meet these people doing their thing. Are there in fact no adventure games where you get to talk to people, befriend them, work with them, do anything but fight them, in order to get to whatever goal you're after?

Sort of. Harvest Moon falls into that category. You can accomplish that game without having to do much farming at all.

(grin) Harvest Moon was what I wanted to avoid. Much too domestic- sounding. Hot men, complex backstory, plot twists, angst, wangst, emotional conflict, no waving about of gignormous phallic swords. Is that doable, I wonder?

~~You could try a dating sim~~ ahaha, I'm not really much of a gamer - I think there were some adventure games without fighting, like Myst, but they're less common these days - more action adventure blends. Maybe you could try one, it should be less combat and wandering than straight rpgs like Final Fantasy.

(grimace) Dating sims being exactly what the market thinks females want. And when they make the anime the female charas are left out because what women want is hot guys angsting together.

Probably what I'm thinking of is a playable version of Angel Sanctuary. I'm surprised that *doesn't* exist, actually, because now I think of it that's what it reads like. With alternate plotlines where Setsuna doesn't wind up with Sara.

One could even argue that it's the cases (such as games, or Weiss) with the least useful canon that get the most useful fanon. Well, if one wanted to. :)

Can't help feeling there's some connection here to those illustration books people put out with their beautiful, deeply resonant and utterly contextless groupings and expressions. They seem to mean so much- they hint at glorious things- but there's no structure or narrative to work with at all. The mind has to supply it holus-bolus. Games, and Weiss certainly, give you characters and pictures that ought to mean something-- and then, I suppose, politely step aside to let you project your own fantasies onto the thing without the inconveniences of, you know, plot or coherence or consistency...

Indeed. And nobody to tell you that you've got it right or wrong. On the one hand, this can come up with very interesting constructions (style over substance?). On the other hand, is the structure necessary for a good story? (I'd argue yes, but . . .)

Style over substance is what Japanese aesthetics are about, though the experts keep telling me that the style *is* the substance, which I've never quite got my head around. Maybe- the pretty pictures are enough, you don't need to provide an explanation or even a context for them. Look, enjoy, don't extrapolate.

Fic isn't like art, though poetry and vignettes may be. A story does rather need to be something more than impressions. And a fanfic in particular, being a derivative work, needs something solid to derive from. (Supposing we're catually talking about the same thing here...?)

I would agree with you that fiction has to have some sort of structure, or -- well, or it's not fiction. It's something else. Fanfiction may borrow elements (even out of place or confusing elements) and make something constructive with them, but it has to have the building blocks to work with in the first place.

But as for building blocks-- doujinshi need no more than the look of the characters. The djka take it from there, often in totally unlikely ways. A purely print attempt to do the same thing leads you to-- well, WK and Eroica fandom. The characters don't talk like that and wouldn't talk like that but it's the confirmed belief of the fen that the characters *ought* to talk like that, even if they don't in canon. Thus canon exists to provide the look of the charas and a few superficial details: and the rest is fannish correction of a canon that's generally felt to be unsatisfying.

(But of course that's the source of bad!fic as well. The secret agents, hired killers, Gundam pilots or psychotic cannibals fail to be romantic mushballs in canon, yet certain fen believe they *ought* to be romantic mushballs cause they'd look so good being it: and that's what they write. Because the canon is unsatisfying to *them*.)

Now I'm cross-correlating this with roleplaying sourcebooks, where the players and the GM are _expected_ to take what they want and then work with it, and encouraged to adapt it to suit the particular needs of the campaign. Cross out some characters, alter others, make a third into a secret spy or hired killer or romantic mushball, all for the needs of the mutual story being created.

Of course, the authors of the sourcebooks have to keep to the big book of canon, but all the readers are encouraged to take what they want and run with it. (I'm always quite pleased when I hear that someone's actually kept something that I wrote more or less as it was.)

There's no real need to play the game to write fic per se (though you'd likely want a plot tape and a script for a Square Enix-style RPG - not all the storytelling happens in "cut scenes"), but what people mean when they say that is that you're not experiencing the work the creators intended. The game is a game, not a movie or a manga, and "the thing itself" is the gameplay - writing from plot tape is comparable to watching an anime with subs on, sound off and screen set to black and white.

As for how serious this is... well, from personal experience you get a different "feel" for the characters when you control their actions and follow their perspective for 50-odd hours (including how they dress, what abilities they exercise, their dialogue with sometimes long-ranging effects on the course of the game - in FF7 you can choose whom to take on a date, but there's at least one RPG where you choose whom to marry and thus what descendant becomes available as a POV character in the next round). You own them more, it makes it easier to see BL possibilities among other things. One's fanon can just as well be another's canon, because you're not actually playing identical games. But you don't need much of any canon for BTN yaoi, and that holds for games as well as other genres of entertainment. XD

(A thought that just occurred to me. A lot of RPGs are set up precisely so you go through several hours of fighting and solving puzzles in order to get hold of one extra bit of character building: that's the carrot, the gold star. That's probably why a dedicated gamer who sees someone write from plot tape gets a strong feeling that they're "cheating" - it's a bit like buying an Olympic medal off Ebay instead of winning it in a race. "It can't be the same, it can't be as meaningful.")

you get a different "feel" for the characters when you control their actions and follow their perspective for 50-odd hours

You get a different- and much more accurate- "feel" for the characters when you hear them speaking their own language rather than an English translation, but somehow no one thinks you have to be fluent in Japanese before writing fics for Japanese manga, anime or RPGs.

go through several hours of fighting and solving puzzles in order to get hold of one extra bit of character building: that's the carrot, the gold star.

Then the fighting and problem solving aren't enjoyable in themselves. So why do it? Pain as a necessary prelude to pleasure? 'I suffered to get this, dammit, so you must too.' Now you mention it, that *is* a common attitude amongst that set. Only somehow they never apply it to things like learning the language their anime is spoken in, or even paying for the anime itself. Nope, sorry, not convinced. Puritanism would be bad enough, but selective and convenient puritanism is more usually called hypocrisy.

somehow no one thinks you have to be fluent in Japanese before writing fics for Japanese manga, anime or RPGs.

Sure, no one will argue this, but it's a perfectly argue-able position. :P

Then the fighting and problem solving aren't enjoyable in themselves. So why do it? Pain as a necessary prelude to pleasure?

*scratches head* Are sudoku or crosswords enjoyable activities in and of themselves, or does one do them for the satisfaction of having solved the puzzle? It's a bit chicken and egg. One wouldn't do them if one knew one couldn't solve them, but there's no point to being told the answer either.

Anyway, fighting in turn-based RPGs rarely comes close to the experience of... well, fighting. There are other types of games that do that sort of thing (and some of them even have good stories, of the John Le Carre type). The excitement one derives from it tends to be more along the lines of timer chess.

Crosswords may be a bit of both, but if someone looks up the answers then by me they've missed the *pleasure* of the crossword. My reaction isn't OMG you cheated how dare you quote that acrostic when you didn't do it yourself, it's-- what's the point? If dedicated gamers truly enjoy the endless hours of fighting bumpf why isn't their attitude puzzlement that someone else skips it, rather than mouth-frothing outrage?

I'm not even sure whom you're talking about here so I can't say. XD My personal reaction is indeed puzzlement - it's a bit like being told "Why don't you just tell me the plot of the anime/manga so I can write fic for it without having to watch/read the thing." "Er, okay... If you're sure..."

(I have actually had this conversation. I'd guess it happens a lot more often if you replace "write" by "read". But I'm one of those people who have no interest in reading fic if I'm not into the canon, and these days my need for twenty-chapter slash epics is not so great that I would get into a series purely so I could read the fic. XD)

Anyhow people online get outraged over all sorts of things. A lot of it being hyperbole from the first.

As

xsmoonshine suggested above you might like the Myst series, if you don't find it too... fantoddy. Except there is no real point as there are no hot ambiguous men in Myst either (how I wish there were ^^;;).

I'm not even sure whom you're talking about here so I can't say.

You have a mercifully short memory.

Oh P.S., I should've mentioned this in my original comment but forgot - Midgar is fantoddy even in the game. It's supposed to be. The point of it is everyone is living in the bowels of a giant nuclear reactor. At least in AC you can see the sky. XD;;

(As for the primary colour chibis - they used to be even more primary coloured and 2D to boot. XD One's mind fills the blanks, almost as if one were reading a book. Part of what impresses gamers so much about AC and the other CG "updates" Square does is that it looks exactly like what people see in their heads all along.)

the batshittery of the gaming mullahs' 'You must play the whole game in its entirety before you can even think of writing fic for it'

Gaming mullahs, hee. XDDD

Not much of an addition to what other commenters have said, but it never fails to surprise me how the ~~waste~~ investment of 60 to 70 hours in playing an rpg can transform even the most incoherent plot into a well-crafted work of narrative genius. Final Fantasy X, for example (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/11/06).

I am convinced that the primary reason they put the story digest on the dvd was so the faithful could mentally replace the lego people with the movie avatars and so occupy themselves until Square comes out with a remake. XD

(http://pics.livejournal.com/luxetumbra/pic/00092a0t)

......Okay, I'll bite, where did Cloud-inna-dress come from? XD

Enjoy. (http://forums.daeya.org/showthread.php?t=1449) XD There's more photoshopping in that thread, but this is the best of them.

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Some whiskey in that fantoddy?

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Devil's advocating

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Gratuitous Cloud-In-A-Dress Comment

Re: Gratuitous Cloud-In-A-Dress Comment

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