*lift voice* going up

I suspect there is some scholarly literature out there that deals with the position of the player character as subject in video games; it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently regarding Rise Of The Ronin. There are a lot of games where you follow the player character from behind, like every 3D final fantasy game; then there’s the subset of games where you can finely customise that character’s appearance; then there’s the subset of games where that character doesn’t have a canonical name and barely says anything, so pretty much all the conceptualisation of the character is the responsibility of the player.

Playing any third-person single-protagonist game puts the player in that weird space where in some ways you are the character and in other ways you’re not. It seems natural to say things like “I just called my horse” or whatever to describe the character’s actions, but equally natural to refer to the character with a sentence like “he’s not in a good way” at the same time. I think there’s then an extra layer of complexity when the customisability of the character allows them to be based on another person from another piece of media. I can think of my character as myself, in that I’m the one making the decisions about what he does and reacting to the situations he ends up in; I can think of him as the titular rising ronin who has no particular meaning outside the context of this specific game; at the same time I can think of him as that legendary guardian guy from that other game I have some interest in, what’s it called, final … imagination?

My dark fandom secret is that for the most part, I am deeply uninterested in OCs. I can get used to them in the context of a long fanfiction where their role is to interact with canon characters with the result that the latter are put into new and interesting situations, but that’s about it. I’ve seen very little Rise Of The Ronin fanfic, but most of which there is seems to be centred on the protagonist, which makes sense! There’s not much depth to any of the characters in the game, they don’t interact with each other that often, and when they do the protagonist always has some involvement. But because the protagonist is such a blank slate, without even a canonical name or gender, in these fics they always come off as an OC to me. My preferred way to write about the protagonist is to insist on using a descriptor such as “the Veiled Edge” instead of a name, and to theythem them in the way it’s done in the game. It’s actually quite nice to be playing a game set in the nineteenth century and see everyone being very woke about gender, even though it’s clearly just a result of the original being in Japanese.

I find /threesentenceficathon a nice way of testing out new fandoms for fic writing – it’s where I wrote my first tiny FFX fics all those (four) years ago – and I wrote a few Rise Of The Ronin fics for it a couple of weeks ago. I found myself defaulting to a second-person perspective for protagonist-centred stories because it’s a convenient way of not having to come down on any side of the fence regarding their name or gender, but now I’m wondering what that says about the assumed relationship between the protagonist and the player. Am I implicitly suggesting that due to the blank-slatacity of the character, they’re more an avatar of ourselves than, say, Tidus would be? I suppose there’s potential for that to be the case, but it’s not as if it has to be. And maybe related to this is the fact that when I write fic about the Rise Of The Ronin protagonist, I am very definitely not writing it about that aforementioned legendary guardian guy, you know the one, Alex or something. I seem to have no desire to bring him into another world where fic is concerned.

Something I do enjoy doing in fic writing is thinking about how to incorporate game mechanics in a logical way, and Rise Of The Ronin certainly has some pretty unrealistic game mechanics: nothing that’s particularly egregious by today’s gaming standards, but, er, you can completely change your appearance at will, and after a certain point, travel back in time to redo previous missions. I think this could definitely feed into a fun fic thing of some kind, although I don’t think I’d be able to bring myself to call it canon compliant.