A Minor Variation

Laguna in Dissidia 012 Duodecim: hell yes.

I hope to see him pester Squall to no end.

Finally making a bit of progress on that speculative FFVIII AU that I've had notecarded forever. And discovering in the process that I'm terrible at managing scenes with more than about three people in them.

( Also, Laguna amuses me forever. )

Observation:

If Team Cosmos in Dissidia: Final Fantasy were the Justice League, the Warrior of Light would be Superman... and Squall would be Batman.

I'll have more useful comments on Dissidia later, but right now I'm too busy preparing to beat up Ultimecia in Shade Impulse.

Stolen from infinitepryde:

Inspired by Doctor Who's "Turn Left:" Pick one of my stories and tell me a point in the tale that you'd change. Something tiny (e.g. "and then Fay chose silver glitter instead of gold") or big (e.g. "and then Rose was arrested instead of Jack") and I'll tell you how that one difference would have altered the course of the entire story.

Since I usually write shortfic which doesn't especially lend itself to this sort of thing, I will expand "story" to include RP and canon. Have at.

I'm channelling my renewed inspiration for Final Fantasy VIII fanfic into finally trying to get somewhere with "With Good Intentions," my grand ambitious multi-chapter For Want Of A Nail plot.

For variety, I'm trying the notecard method, which at first blush seems to be working nicely. The main obstacle at the moment, aside from my perpetually short attention span, is that so much of the plot involves politics, a subject on which I am mostly in the dark and which I can't just flagrantly ignore because Rinoa is my viewpoint character and she's interested in that kind of thing. That it's the politics of fictional nations only helps a little, but I am making some progress in sorting out exactly what's going on there.

The other problem I'm noticing is that Ellone is pretty much a nonentity throughout the storyline, but in fairness, that's true in canon as well. I'll have to figure out ways to involve her in more scenes, but it's difficult to bring myself to give her things to do that I could give to Raine or Laguna instead, since I like them so much more.

Title: Persistence of Memory
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Wordcount: 1405
Warnings: None particularly.
Summary: Squall, Irvine, and Selphie in a fireside interlude in front of the Tomb of the Unknown King. Would it be better to simply be forgotten?

( One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one makes. )

I have been tagged by dragonsquee to explain some of the interests in my LJ profile, so here they are:

Alone time: I am a firm believer in the value of time alone. I'm a pretty introverted person, so being social, even if it's with people I like and I'm enjoying myself, drains my energy. I need time by myself to recharge, or I start getting twitchy and irritable. Fortunately most of my family is pretty good about understanding that.

B movies: I love cheesy B-grade movies, especially cheesy B-grade sci-fi/fantasy movies. Red Sonja. Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time. The first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Clue. Big Trouble In Little China. Weiss Kreuz, which is basically a cheesy B-grade anime series. Mystery Science Theater 3000. And the A-list movies that pay homage to B movies by just not taking themselves too seriously, like The Fifth Element and A Knight's Tale. They're just fun, and I ♥ them, because entertainment does not have to be all serious business all the time.

Damaged heroes: As mentioned in my last post. My favorite heroes are broken. I do not know why this is, really. Maybe it's something about how a genuinely flawed character is more interesting to watch than a character who's got it all together; the broken hero has more to overcome. He (or she) isn't just struggling against the antagonist; he's got to struggle against himself too. I like them emotionally and socially retarded, because while emotionally balanced, socially adept characters will mostly follow socially accepted patterns, each damaged character will come at things in his or her own damaged way, and we get to watch them learning to overcome their damage as they go along. Plus, watching emotionally stunted characters trying to figure out their own emotions is just neat.

Magnetars: It's a musical instrument! It's an alcoholic beverage! Actually it's a star with an immensely powerful magnetic field. No, really. And by immensely powerful I mean ridiculously powerful. Could strip the information from a credit card's magnetic strip from more than 190,000km powerful. Stretches hydrogen atoms into spindles powerful. This is relevant to my interests because I play Magno of the Legion of Super-Heroes on The Brave and the Bold, but what makes it really entertaining is that the name they used is so fantastically lame. Magnet - star - magnetar. It's so lame it's epic. And to make matters even better, when I tried to use "Magnetar" as a character name in City of Heroes, it was already taken! I have no idea who else would voluntarily be that lame, but I would really like to know.

Rinoa is awesome: Because she is. She's practically the antithesis of a Mary Sue: she's intended to be kind of annoying. She's immature, inexperienced, and pushy, but she's also idealistic and highly motivated; her biggest flaws and her biggest strengths are ultimately sides of the same characteristics, and yes, she's naive and a bit overbearing, but she's seventeen years old and grew up sheltered and wealthy and she voluntarily abandoned that to join a resistance movement against her own home nation, and that's pretty damn cool. And it puts her in direct contrast to the other major characters, who are mercenaries less concerned with right and wrong than they are with getting the job done and getting paid. She dovetails beautifully with Squall's damage - she's an optimist, he's a cynic; she lives in the now while he dwells on the past and works to plan for the future; she's motivated, he's apathetic - and they both have the same sense of responsibility to other people and the same fundamental refusal to give up once they've set their mind to something, and most importantly of all she gets him and she tells him what he needs to hear as no one else does. And yet she gets almost no respect in fandom and it makes me sad. Thus the inclusion in my interests. Rinoa is awesome. I have preached it.

Spike Spiegel school-of-repair: AKA percussive maintenance, AKA "my ship works better when I kick it." The way Spike Spiegel of Cowboy Bebop fixes everything. I find it amusing.

Unconventional love stories: Closely related, no doubt, to my love for damaged heroes. I don't like pat love stories nearly as much as I like the ones that are skewed somehow. Reversal or twisting of standard gender roles is a big A+; I have a firmly established weakness for relationships in which the guy is the more emotionally needy and/or submissive partner. Complicated power dynamics are also for the win. Endings don't have to be tied off into a tidy happily-ever-after bow. It's better when it's messy.

If anyone would like to expound about some of their LJ interests they may comment and I will pick some out from their profile for them to explain.

Trying to write at work is horribly frustrating. I keep getting calls which interrupt my train of thought as I'm trying to -

call

- build -

call

call - "If she has time she'll call, and if not I've done what I could," he says. There is one thing I could tell him he could do that he has not done: try not being an asshat.

Ahem.

Anyhow, you see what I mean. Trying to write at work is frequently more trouble than it's worth, unless it's a slow day. Which today is not. Which is obnoxious because one of those Andy/Murrue fics has just about come together in my head and I want to get it written and argh.

On the other hand, I can still occupy the time between calls, such as it is, by going back through old stuff. Which is kind of cool, because now and again I find some unfinished thing that really came out well. Like this, the opening to the rewrite of "After the Storm" which I swear I am going to finish.

( In which Garden's policies are REALLY CREEPY, and Rinoa doesn't like to drive. )

That pairing meme, stolen from annwyd and a few others.

( Ohshi, spam and fangirl squee. )