What is Final Fantasy?
One of the most popular and critically acclaimed series of video games ever made, Final Fantasy is a series easy to sink into. Something like thirty years ago, studio Square made something acknowledged to be one of the best of its kind ever made and have since made things that are a self-concious mixture of good and bad and strange in a way that can be compusive and consuming for the captive fan.
I was a big Final Fantasy fan when I was young; I played many of the main series games with my sister, side-by-side on the couch, some with my first girlfriend, and some by myself. My active Final Fantasy knowledge starts with the first one but extends only to 12. For the record, my favorite is 6; I'm just a sucker for that particular mid-ninties style of JRPG, and it helps that it has other elements I love, like a large number of party characters, a wildly diverse world map, a mixture of lineral and non-linear game play, and a STAGE THEATRE SCENE.
I still love the games and will replay on occasion, but I don't keep up with what Square's doing with FF anymore. I'm glued to Octopath instead for that, ha ha.
Links Out
Before I get to anything I've written, let me share some links to some other FF-themes websites and fan creators I love.
On some of my pages, I am scouring the web for any site dedicated to the thing I like... for FF, I'm being choosy and sharing things I think are fun, unique, and/or charmingly hand-made. There's so much FF content that I'd rather just share personal favorite or things that might get overlooked.
- First, I need everyone to check out Riona's Balamb Garden website, a fan website about FFVIII that is spatially organized on the map of Balamb Garden and lets you navigate the site contents by walking around the map. This is a gem of a website; what a treat. (Riona is a great writer, too.)
- Do you want to see a fansite? THIS is a fansite. LOOK at that. Look at the abundanc of graphics Final Fantasy Kingdom has. Look at the sheer stats they've collected. And by the timestamps ont his website, they were collecting and curating that retyping that information themself. THAT's the stuff.
- Another fantastic fan-made website is Red Crown, webmaster Larissa's aggregate of well-made shrines and fansites. Topics range but there are quite a few dedicated Final Fantasy sites. My favorites include her surprisingly entertaining overview and ranking website, a character shrine devoted to Squall, and especially the page devoted to the music of FFVI. I am just as obsessed with FFVI's OST as she is so this simple website brings me so much joy.
- But linking to Larissa's site reminds me that I should really put out some music links! I've lurked around OCRemix for genuinely most of my life. They gather high-quality video game music remixes and recruit for their own projects. They're done quite a few FF remix albums over the years; my favorites out of them are Balance and Ruin, SeeDs of Pandora, and Worlds Apart. (My favorite OCRmeix album is their Secret of Mana album, FWIW.) But even excluding the curated albums OCR has an aamazing backcatalog of FF music; search up a favorite game or track and enjoy.
- I would be remiss to talk about FF remix music without bringing up Erutan. She created incredibly high-quality vocal covers with lots of original instrumentation. I am particularily fond of Rose of May and You're Not Alone, both FFIX remixes. Rose of May in particular is just inspirational, its a favorite song of mine completely divorced from fandom. She hasn't posted in a while; I really hope life is treating her alright.
- Finally, FF8 Is The Best is legitimately one of the funniest websites I have ever read. We have to archive this.
My Fic
Still, as decades of fan obsession has proven, the FF ground provides fertile ground for fanfiction. I've written FF fic for as long as I've been an FF fan, though for some reason I never end up really sticking to FF fic. Everything here is either short or unfinished (or both), pick your poison.
For the record, the most recent and highest quality work is Timing; ironically, bad timing caused me to abandon it when it was getting good, something I still sigh about on occasion.
VI
Behold: A oneshot I initially wrote for a writing challenge about Terra learning to enjoy her freedom from mental slavery by watching the world fly beneath her from the captain's seat in the Blackjack.
Duet di Mezzo Carattere: Terra/Celes. Terra badly needs to practice her solo for the opera; Celes, who is allowed to be present for the opera scene in this alternate universe, realizes she already knows the part. In a dressing room, they sing a private duet. I wrote this fic long ago, and I can't consider it to be high-quality writing anymore, but I still have a soft spot for it.
VII
Unnamed Cid/Vincent Oneshot: An untitled and unfinished onshot in which Cid Highwind asks himself why, exactly, he just carnally destroyed the absolute biggest weirdo he has ever met.
Spirits of the Earth and Sky
VIII
Timing: Edea chooses death and the sorceress wars do not begin. Ten years later, Squall Leonhart is under the impression that life in Balamb Garden, where he is a GF expert, is the same that it ever has been. He learns when Deling declares war on a ragtag group of rebels with a supiciously knowledgeable and powerful leader that battlelines have been drawn in the sand while he wasn't watching. Seifer/Squall, polyship, slowburn, unfinished; Timing is the fic I genuinely regret not finishing. An original story ripped me away from it and I never came back.
Untitled Squall/Seifer Doc: From deep within the hard drive, I give you a document of slightly connected Seifer/Squall scenes I wrote many years ago. All of them were written at 1 AM or later.
On Squall/Seifer: A Section That Is Here
Hey, this is dumb as hell, but I tend to look through GameFaqs for images I can use for my webpages about video games, as I can reasonably believe the images hosted on GameFaqs will stay online, and while I was looking for images to use on a Squall/Seifer (that order) screed I'm going to link below, I discovered that someone has uploaded essentially the entire game to GameFaqs in the form of 37,754 screenshots.
What? What? What do those server costs look like?
Anyway, here's that Squall/Seifer screed, written much in the form of old slashship apologetica (you know, back when we had to explain in APA formatting with examples why we would dare suggest a character might be queer), except I'm not interested in convincing anyone else about this, I'm interested in understanding why I'm so compelled by this shit.