A Shot At Life

• Death of major and minor characters. Two of the three main characters canonically die, and the third undergoes a transformation considered equivalent to death. (Two out of these three “dead” characters still functionally exist at the end of the story.)
• Mental health themes. One of the main characters is depressed and suicidal, and often has trouble eating. Another has recently experienced a traumatic event and shows signs of PTSD, mostly manifesting as a fear of bodies of water; this becomes more of a problem as the story goes on, and results in several panic attacks. The third has a drinking problem at the start of the story, but this is resolved in the early chapters.
• Bigotry in the form of institutional homophobia, which has had significant negative consequences for one character.
• Partial/stereotypical representation. The three main characters are all men. Two of the three most prominent “villainous” characters are women. A (male) bisexual character is in an open relationship and depicted as sexually promiscuous; this character also subscribes to elements of the ideology of “toxic masculinity”.
• Vomiting in chapters 9, 15, 22 (offscreen), 30, 35, 37, and 43.
• Morally objectionable behaviour, much of it among the protagonists, including the following:
  • A “good” character being forced to kill people.
  • Brief discussion of underage sexual activity.
  • Misogynistic and homophobic language.
  • Prostitution.
  • Recreational drug use.
  • Hunting animals (for food), and use of firearms.

This fic is m/m.

The main ship is Auron × Braska. The exact nature of this relationship remains ambiguous. While Auron is in love with Braska, Braska’s feelings towards him are unclear, even to himself. They grow more intimate as the story progresses, embrace and kiss a lot, and share a bed on two occasions.

Most sexual content in this fic concerns Auron × Jecht; they develop a “friends with benefits” relationship in the later chapters.

Jecht also pursues women at a couple of points, and has sex with one of them (offscreen, but discussed briefly in a later chapter).

I consider this to be a canon compliant fic. There are a few potential exceptions to this, but here I offer attempts at justifying those.

• Yevonites basically speak with British accents. I actually have no justification for this one other that I’m British myself, and it seemed like a good way to emphasise the cultural differences between mainlander Yevonites and other characters such as Jecht and the Al Bhed. Some linguistic differences between the UK and USA have been operationalised here as differences between Spira and Jecht’s Zanarkand, as well as a couple of other things (although it’s the Spirans who use imperial measurements, and Jecht who uses metric).
• Some people have survived the Via Purifico. According to Kinoc in FFX, “no-one thrown into the Via Purifico has ever survived.” I suggest that a small number of people have survived, but the Yevonites do their best to cover this up because they don’t want to admit that their court’s judgement is fallible. When Kinoc says this in the game, he’s just repeating a lie that powerful Yevonites tell themselves and their followers.
• Auron doesn’t have a daughter. Chuami in FFX-2.5 -Will- claims to be Auron’s daughter, although other characters dispute this. I agree with these characters. (The canonicity of -Will- is also disputable because of its making a big deal of there being two shoopufs, when we see two shoopufs in the original game without any issues.)
• Jecht doesn’t teach any cactuars to play blitzball. There’s a fiend tale in FFX-2 International that suggests this very implausible thing happened. Fiend tales are generally quite nonsensical and cause problems for existing lore, so I’m just rejecting them entirely.
• The Calm can be a few years long. I believe Ultimania says the Calm is always just one year long. I tend not to assume everything in Ultimania is canon, partly because it comes close to contradicting information established in the game, and partly because a lot of this information is only available in Japanese, which seems largely irrelevant to a reading of the game based on the English version. I take inspiration from Ultimania for things like characters’ ages, but I don’t feel the need to follow it to the letter.
• Besaid is further from Kilika than Kilika is from Luca. The in-game map shows the opposite, but I’m suggesting that the map is based more on vibes than on reality. Besaid seems particularly remote, so I think it makes sense to have it geographically further away. The relative time taken to get from one place to another in the fic probably also doesn’t always match up with what’s on the map.
• You can’t use save spheres to heal or teleport. Integrating game mechanics into fanfiction is always difficult, and while potions are an important part of the story, I think having waypoints that instantly restore everyone’s health is too implausible. Most of the spheres in the actual game are removed from the story setting; some remain with a different function.
• The characters are carrying items that we don’t see in the game. To give an obvious example, they do a lot of camping outdoors, so they need a tent, but of course we don’t see this in the game itself. This sort of thing is common even in the graphically far superior games of today, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to make reference to various items that aren’t physically depicted in the source material. I tend to be quite vague about the practicalities of how these things are actually carried; everyone has very deep pockets, I guess.
• Minor appearance changes over the course of the story. The principal thing I can think of in this category is the presence of the tassel on Auron’s robe, which he doesn’t acquire until very late in the narrative. This could also be blamed on the limitations of the game, which has more important things to use its resources for than signalling very slight alterations to characters’ appearances.