A Shot At Life: chapter 1 commentary

Three Travellers (chapter 1 of 49, 6818 words)

Auron and Braska meet Jecht at the jail in Bevelle. While Braska spends a final night with his daughter, Auron takes Jecht to the armoury.

Read here on praze.net or here on archiveofourown.org, or read the whole fic so far as a PDF or an EPUB.

So … yes, this is the start of that very long fic about Braska’s pilgrimage that I’ve been working on for nearly four years. I’ll be posting the chapters along with this unnecessarily detailed commentary every Saturday; before I get into the specific notes on this first chapter, I should note that the main page on my site for this fic is here. That page already displays the titles and summaries for each chapter, as well as detailed (spoilery) content warnings and some other stuff (including my extensive justification for calling this a canon compliant fic huhuhuhu). I’ll repeat significant warnings in the notes of any chapters for which they’re relevant. These weekly commentary posts are entirely for the purpose of indulging myself in this fic as I send it out into the world, but given that I also enjoy minutious discussions of Braska’s pilgrimage (what a coincidence, gosh) and of the writing process, feel free to comment on them if you happen not to be me!

For a not-that-spoilery overview of what goes on in this fic, the metadata I’ve put on the AO3 version will probably be a good guide:

As this is the first chapter, quite a lot of it is mostly for the purposes of setting the scene, establishing the characters’ appearances, etc. I want the fic to be readable as a standalone piece without requiring readers to be familiar with FFX, and as a result this chapter is probably more exposition-heavy than a typical fanfiction opening would be. I actually submitted an earlier version of the chapter to /concrit_x back in 2022 and at least one of the two readers thought the amount of exposition was unnecessary; this was one of many things I didn’t particularly want to change, so I had to accept the fact that I’m unable to write this fic in any way other than how I specifically like it. I suppose that makes sense when I’ve been working on it for so long and I’m so enamoured with FFX. Probably not everyone would agree with the narrative and stylistic decisions I’ve made, but in the end, the fic can’t be a reflection of anything but my own personal reaction to the game. ( … and that’s one of the reasons why I never thought about soliciting a beta for the rest of the fic, lol, apart from long-suffering ~lissajous who kindly read through an earlier version and gently persuaded me to rethink some of my more egregious syntactic decisions.)

There are various references in this chapter to an ordeal Auron has recently suffered; more details about this will gradually emerge over the course of the story. It won’t be discussed openly in the narrative until chapter 46, but by that point it should be pretty clear what happened to him and why. But Braska’s pilgrimage hasn’t even begun and Auron already has a tragic backstory! This is partly because I love him and therefore enjoy it when terrible things happen to him, but also partly to explain why he’s so irritable and to shape the decisions he makes in the story. We also get a few references to the state of Braska’s mental health (it’s … not good), but this won’t be properly explored until the next chapter.

Auron had thought everything was ready – he had busied himself in the last few days by triple-checking the plan, making sure the temples they were to visit were those that best suited Braska’s lineage – but Braska had called him here for a final meeting before their departure.

I’ve gone with the interpretation that there are more settlements and temples in Spira than just the few we see in the game, mostly as an attempt to increase the population a bit. Other summoners may not gain exactly the same aeons that Braska and Yuna do, but the general idea is that a summoner needs to master at least five aeons before being considered worthy of trying their luck with the Final Aeon. I’ve also decided that the precise temples one needs to visit are somehow connected with one’s bloodline as an excuse for making Braska visit exactly the same temples Yuna does. My focus in this fic from a worldbuilding point of view is “making the stuff we’re told in canon fit together as coherently as possible” rather than “adding a whole load of new stuff that takes things in a completely different direction”, so I wanted to stick with the aeons we meet in the game, as fun as it would have been to introduce some other FF summons.

I don’t copy all the dialogue from the canon scene in this chapter, although I do tend to do this for the later examples. There was quite a lot of it in this one, and I thought it would be less time-consuming and more valuable to show Auron’s frustrated thoughts while the other two are talking. I did see someone saying that canon dialogue should never be reproduced in fic the other day; given that I’m intending to make this readable without knowledge of canon, though, it definitely has its purpose, and the omniscient narration additionally means we can see inside the characters’ heads during these scenes and get a bit of insight into (my interpretation of) why they say the things they do.

“Your copy of the sphere, sir,” she said to Braska.

Two things puzzled me about video spheres: firstly, they’re actually hemispheres, so why do people call them spheres; secondly, why do all the spheres from Braska’s pilgrimage end up scattered carelessly around Spira when it appears that Braska and Jecht are using them for some quite heartfelt messages? My explanation for this is that a sphere somehow splits into two halves once the recording is finished, so two people can hold identical copies of the same footage. In a lot of cases that won’t be necessary, so a tradition has arisen whereby people bury the spare hemisphere in the ground as some kind of casually superstitious gesture. (The Spiran people presumably haven’t benefited from anti-littering campaigns.) This also sort of explains why the Gullwings and others can make a business out of sphere hunting in FFX-2 – although not why they seem to have changed colour from blue to red.

Jecht is actually trying to be nice in this chapter; he really does want Auron to tell him about his new duties, even though Auron is sure he’s up to something and isn’t inclined to respond in good faith. Auron thinks Jecht has to be bad because he’s got a tattoo and scars and he’s been drinking, but he (A) doesn’t realise that he (A) is actually jealous of him (J) for suddenly getting to butt in on what Auron thought would be his sole responsibility, and for putting paid to his dream of several weeks of alone time with Braska!

Any time I refer to Jecht “beaming” (I do so three or four times throughout the fic) it’s a silly reference to his Jecht Beam move we see in the final stages of the game.

He couldn’t deny it had felt wrong to say, though; he felt fairly certain that he would never find himself using the phrase Sir Jecht again.

Some of the things Auron is certain about at this point in the narrative are untrue, but this is not one of them.

“You must be fast, then. That works perfectly: Sir Auron’s more about power and precision, so you can supply the speed.”

I debated making Auron the fast one at one stage during the writing process, with the intent of having him become slower after what happens at the end of Braska’s pilgrimage (aka piling on the trauma), but it was quite late on and would have needed quite a lot of changes to be made. It’s nice to have Jecht be the fast one anyway, because it means his combat style is more similar to Tidus’ (they’ll even learn the same type of magic further down the line), and also matches his reckless personality, while slowness is a good fit for logical, cautious Auron. I also suspect this scene was inspired by the wand shopping scene from the first of the terf wizard books, which, as much as I hate to admit it in this stage in the global narrative, have had a lot of impact on my writing style given that I read them so many times as a child.

I’ve decided that scars are seen as a great offence against Yevon, just to increase the Tragedy.

The sword Jecht receives at this point is the “gift from Jecht” that Auron gives Tidus at the beginning of FFX. When we see Jecht fight in the game (and in his character art), he has a different sword, which we’ll meet later in the story. We don’t see Auron’s new armguard in the sphere recordings and flashback scenes; I’m taking liberties with this one.

It may be clear from Coultan’s demeanour (and Jecht’s evaluation of him) why Auron knows he’s a safe person to interact with. Or if not immediately, it may become clearer once we learn more about Auron and about why he was recently disgraced.

The sphere of Auron’s meeting with Kinoc was recorded just before the start of the fic, i.e. the morning of the same day. Most chapters will cover the span of one day, although a few days are split into two chapters, and towards the end, there are a couple of chapters that each cover a span of several days. At this point, going by the contents of the sphere, Auron and Kinoc appear quite friendly; when they meet again in FFX, Auron doesn’t trust Kinoc anymore, despite the fact that they seem not to have met in person in the intervening time (“ten years, is it?”). The fic will explore this.

it was just like Kinoc to show undue sentiment

Hence his fantastically awkward hug with Auron in the scene discussed in the previous paragraph.

Seymour refers to “the Code of the Guardian”, with capital letters, at one point in FFX, although this is the only time it comes up in formal terms. Here, Auron is absolutely certain that he won’t need to die for Braska, despite the Code (in Seymour’s words, “protect the summoner even at the cost of one’s life”). As the most skilled young warrior monk in living memory, Auron has a somewhat hubristic view of himself: something he has in common with Jecht, as much as he would be loath to admit that the two of them share a single similarity.

I wondered about how beds might work in Spira, but scenes in travel agencies and the Crusaders’ Lodge in Besaid show that western-style beds definitely exist, certainly in hospitality contexts. It made sense to me that the warrior monks might use a more traditionally Japanese-style system of mats and futons, and it emphasises Auron’s relative asceticism here as well as Jecht’s being accustomed to luxuries.

I should point out that everyone being attracted to Auron is a sort of running gag. Jecht is very much included in “everyone” (might Braska be as well?? My lips are sealed). I think this is what they call “write what you know”.

A general note that I wanted to make before posting the rest of the story: there are three central questions/conflicts that define the relationships between each pair of main characters, although those questions are more significant and of a more philosophical nature in the pairs involving Auron, which I suppose fits his being the de facto main character. Here they are:

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