Coming out of my cage like Seamus Heaney*

• Byron and Clive’s reunion, when Byron has a vision of fifteen-year-old Clive and is so overcome by emotion that he literally falls to his knees.
• Wade’s goodbye to Clive at the end of the final Wade-related sidequest. I just really love Wade!! Points at icon enthusiastically!!
• The line on Vivian’s chart between Clive and Jill saying “in love”. Like with the FFX lake scene, I’m always … secretly enamoured with the canon het couple, lol.

I’m not usually a fan of the “Dion and Terence adopt Kihel” take, although ~lavendre’s recent fic  T   ☉   ♂  7k+ kind of changed my mind on that? It’s gorgeous, anyway.

… I did genuinely worry that Dion/Terence might take over, but there’s no contest. That said, I enjoy having two ships that currently loom large in my consciousness because of the differences between them: A/B is the “tragic because it’s probably unrequited and at least one of them dies” pairing, D/T is the “definitely requited and it’s not actually all that clear whether either of them dies” pairing. The similarities are probably why I like both, but the differences mean they’re both really appealing to think about for different reasons. Like, if I want to imagine a scenario that’s angsty because of miscommunication and uncertainty, give me A/B, but if I want two boys who are in love and know they are, it’s D/T. If it’s “yep, at least one of us is going to die at a specific point in time”, it’s A/B, but if it’s more of a “we may indeed die tragically at any moment, who knows” … etc.

When I was eight, I made a friend who now goes by the name R online, and was more like me than anyone else I’d met before. We went to different secondary schools a few years later but still hung out a lot, which is pretty remarkable when, as noted above, I’m terrible at keeping friends. When we were about thirteen, we began hanging out on the internet a lot. R’s dad was actually a web developer, back in the noughties when I guess people just wrote raw HTML all the time (??), and R knew a lot about computers and internet culture, and in tandem with this developed an intense obsession with FF7 and particularly Sephiroth. This was not long after Advent Children had been released.

I didn’t have a PlayStation and was never really interested enough to find out anything about FF7 myself, but for a few months, R talked about it so much that I osmosed a few things. We used to listen to the Piano Collections and particularly One-Winged Angel, and I downloaded that track from some dodgy website and kept it in my iTunes and succession of iPods for years afterwards. (Tangent: I was really into Apple products for a while! My dad bought himself an iMac in 2001, quickly realised it was incompatible with most stuff he needed for work, and then passed it on to me; I had a great time. Mac OS X 10.1 is an Experience. I continued to be mostly a Mac user until 2018 at which point I became a FOSS neckbeard.)

I moved away for university and gradually fell out of touch with R afterwards (possibly the biggest regret of my life? but what can you do), and embarked upon my normie era: made a couple of very face-value friends, was mostly into choral singing (still am, but more … critically?), had a big normie boyfriend for a short time (the fact that we were mostly long-distance probably prolonged that time, tbh; also I can’t believe I went out with someone several inches taller than me! why would anyone do that), quite possibly didn’t develop any weird fandom obsessions at all for two or three years. I even considered myself a straight woman for a while, which is baffling. During this period, though, I met the above ficster28 and was drawn back into that life by … jealousy, I guess? Nothing but healthy emotions here.

So Gina is one of those people who has two separate online personalities. I kind of am too, in that I have a professional website and used to use twitxter for work, under my legal name, and then I also have my fandom persona on the Dreamwidth and on my website, where I try not to make it obvious which of the eight billion people on this earth is actually me. Gina makes the split in a different place: she’s content to associate most fandom stuff with her offline identity, but her RPF side is completely separate from that, which I guess is fair enough when all your family know your Tumblr URL. I met Gina through her main online identity (where she goes by her legal name), and didn’t come upon the Gina side of her until after our holiday together, when I was fascinated to find that there was a whole swathe of stuff I hadn’t been aware of before (including a fic she wrote in which the two of us appear  G   ♂  9k+). Most of it related to Dan and Phil; I was like ok, whatever.

Then about eighteen months later (let me pause here both to apologise and to promise this is still relevant to Final Fantasy), I was on Gina’s Tumblr and found myself getting kind of interested in Dan and Phil. I had been into much more problematic RPF previously (looking at you, coalition government) and had no qualms about getting invested in these lads, particularly when I found out about all the secrets and drama about a certain deleted video. At this time a new Dan and Phil forum was being set up and I was intrigued by the audacity of its members in starting a forum in 2016. I joined and became pretty active for a while. At that point in my life I was doing a master’s degree and was quite lonely, and my daily schedule soon became the following: morning: engage with Dan and Phil content; afternoon: write my thesis.

I had many years’ worth of Dan and Phil videos to catch up on, and noticed some familiar music in their early material: back in the day, they used to use a lot of music from FF7. The soundtrack of the infamous deleted video used Tifa’s Theme, and I had an “I know you” moment (kind of similar to that moment in FF16 where a certain Dominant is visited in his tent by … ok I’ll stop). After that I sought out the rest of the FF7 soundtrack, and came across the sheet music for the Piano Collections, and as soon as I attempted to play One-Winged Angel, I was like, oh. It’s this. It’s my childhood. My implicitly weebish teenage years that I suppressed! They’re back!

At around that time, after some uncertainty about my future, I discovered I’d be moving to the city in which I now live (the worst-kept secret on this journal, lol, I might as well just post my address at this point). I looked online to see if there were any orchestras I might join once I got here, and one of the top results on Google was for an orchestra that specialised in the music of video games. At this point in my life, I wasn’t much of a gamer beyond having occasionally borrowed R’s Pokémon games years earlier and going on Kongregate a lot as an undergraduate, but I knew about the FF7 soundtrack and therefore I knew game music was good.

It took about a year after I moved here for me to actually join the orchestra, because how do socialise, but once I did so I found that, shockingly, there were more people like me in the world, weird awkward nerds in their (then) early twenties. The orchestra itself turned out to be … not that good and pretty badly run, and there was eventually a lot of Drama, but they were fun people to hang out with, and back in the pre-Drama days we used to go for a drink after rehearsals. There was this … idk, this nerdy young IT man, haha, who lived in the same direction as me so we used to walk home together afterwards. I sometimes saw him on his way to work in the mornings and was like “oh! it’s my friend!”. At the time I was living in my own after a year of Social Anxiety Houseshare, and loved it. Anyway … not what this story is about, but a couple of months later we eventually got together, with some encouragement from a mutual friend in the orchestra who also got together with another girl in the orchestra at around the same time (they’re engaged now), and, yeah, now there’s this cute creature sleeping beside me!

A lot of the music we played in the orchestra was (often badly) arranged by members of the orchestra itself. I became very into orchestration for a while, and made a few arrangements; some of the pieces on my VGM page were originally written for the orchestra. The first arrangement I did was Tifa’s Theme; the peak of my Dan and Phil phase had passed, but it was a meaningful piece of music for me nonetheless. I then discovered that the original PC release of FF7 had had a MIDI soundtrack, and that this soundtrack was available online, so I started a project to convert all these MIDIs into nice-looking, playable sheet music (god, I started this in … 2017? and I still consider it an ongoing project … I’m actually really near the end, but One-Winged Angel is intimidating enough for me not to have touched it for several years). Around the time ~lissajous and I got together, he bought himself a Nintendo Switch, and a year later when we moved in together I at last experienced the joy of being A Console Gamer. A year or so after that, I discovered FF7 was available on the Switch, and it was pretty clear that I had to play it after all these years of its being an important thing in my life.

I had no idea what was going on. I got maybe a third of the way through the game, realised I lacked most of the equipment and materia that would have made it somewhat playable, and then started following a walkthrough to the letter. Even though I lost my free will in the process, I ended up pretty much 100%ing the game because it was unlike any experience I’d had before. At this point it was early 2020, and I was finishing my PhD with a huge amount of uncertainty about what was coming next, especially given that it was, as stated, early 2020. I finished FF7 and then threw myself into playing Crisis Core on an emulator on my phone, probably as a coping mechanism. I briefly made a terrible career decision and moved to England, only to find the following day that there was an (at the time temporary) post available at the university I’d just left, and because of the vagaries of the recruitment process it was mine if I was happy enough to leave my new non-academic and probably slightly dodgy job in a new city where I didn’t know anyone. So obviously I accepted that right away.

Anyway, everything was very traumatic but fortunately I’d bought myself the GBA version of FF6 just before moving and consoled myself by playing it constantly on my Nintendo DS, and writing fic for the first time after a three-year break. I was amazed to find that FF6 took an even more vicelike grip on me than FF7 had. Everything about it was absolutely sublime. Like with FF7, I barely knew what I was doing and ended up gluing myself to a walkthrough halfway through, but this thing took hold of my brain for several months (and then I met FFX … they just get better!!).

When I returned home, I was adamant that I now needed to play every other Final Fantasy game in existence. That’s something I’m still working on, but … yeah, in conclusion, I hope this story has demonstrated that although I didn’t start playing these games until my mid-twenties, they mean an indescribably huge amount to me! Crikey. If you read all that … sorry again. How embarrassing.

“IS THIS THE CHILD YOU MADE WITH THE EMPEROR?!”

(Ben Starr delivers his lines so well and I found this to be a standout example!)