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[FF MEME] Days 14 & 15
Jun. 16th, 2011 08:09 amDay 14 – Favourite Final Fantasy male character.
It is really hard for me to pick a favorite male character, and honestly it's because I relate so much harder to the female characters - and that's interesting to me. Mainly because the fans I spend time with in fandom seem to have fallen - and fallen hard - for many male characters, and so many female characters get ignored or get a bad rap or just don't get written for whatever reason; and yet it's the ladies who speak to me. I am pretty firmly a cisgendered lady, but plenty of cisgendered ladies like writing the dudes and the slash, so I wonder what it is about myself that means the female characters have so much more of a draw on my interests.
It isn't that I'm not interested in the men (and, uh, I certainly like me some M/M too), but when I think about favorites in general - when I think about characters who interested me, spoke to me, meant something to me - it's almost always the ladies.
So to cut this ramble short I'm going to pick two favorite dude characters: Irvine Kinneas and Laguna Loire, from FFVIII.
Irvine was probably the first male character I felt for. Which is really funny, because he's portrayed as a playboy, a womanizer, a skirt-chaser - and wow, does fandom latch on to that one! - so why would someone who is so usually interested in the ladies herself like somebody like Irvine? I think it's because I almost instantly saw through the facade - because it is a facade; it's a game - and there's a lot of complicated feeling underneath, in regards to finding out who you are and where you come from and what you're gonna be. For some reason it meant a lot to me to see that, and I pretty instantly fell for Irvine. I love that he's funny and goofy and casual and supportive and serious and helpful and sincere all in one, that he really just seems to want to make other people happy, that there's so much going on in his memories and yet he's a competent SeeD - and yet he has these lines everyone else seems to have crossed, this line of basic humanity - all of it together makes an awesome character, and I'll claim him as a favorite because of it.
Laguna is, basically, just awesome. He's the kind of person I want to be my BFF. I want to go have beers with Laguna after work, basically forever, put everything else in the 'L' folder and let's play darts. I love him. No other characters are quite as great as Laguna.
Day 15 – Favourite Final Fantasy female character.
This one's hard for the opposite reason; I love so many of the FF ladies! For so many reasons! But there are two obvious choices here and I'm just gonna lay them out: Rydia from FFIV and Quistis Trepe from FFVIII.
Rydia's been a favorite since I was 8 years old, playing FFIV for the first time (as FFII, on SNES!). As a young girl with a serious fantasy bent and an imaginative magic obsession, I'm not sure you can imagine just how awesome it was to see an offensive lady mage: she does damage! She nukes! She is the nuker in that party. And I loved her character too: her entire story, the tragedy in Mist and her experience in the Land of Summons and the way she comes from two worlds and yet can see beyond them both to the bigger picture, overlooking the things that happened in the past to fight for the future. She's optimistic and spunky and driven, brave as hell and spirited, yet still sensitive and emotional and young. I loved everything about her as a kid and I still love her now, the complexity of a character in 16-bit sprites.
And I have never related to a character as much as I do to Quistis Trepe. She's not only a favorite in a gameplay aspect, she's a character of personal importance, in a way. A young girl told all her life that she's a prodigy, a genius, she's special, only to grow into her role almost too fast and continually be striving to make personal connections with the people around her; always feeling separate, too old for friends but too young for the work she's been thrown into; always feeling like she's missed something vital with her life and yet feeling the pressure to be responsible, to be mature, to continue to put her energies into things that are not her; never feeling like she gets the credit she deserves for making the responsible boring choices, and always feeling less-than: not good enough, not exciting enough, not important enough -- is it obvious how much I can relate, or am I just showing my ass here. Anyway. I find Quistis fascinating within the FF world too - her Blue Magic, where does it come from? who decided to make a 17-year-old girl an Instructor? her relationships with Xu, Squall, Rinoa, etc - and ever since FFVIII she has been a favorite of mine, and fandom just makes me love her more.
( 30 Days of FF Meme )
It is really hard for me to pick a favorite male character, and honestly it's because I relate so much harder to the female characters - and that's interesting to me. Mainly because the fans I spend time with in fandom seem to have fallen - and fallen hard - for many male characters, and so many female characters get ignored or get a bad rap or just don't get written for whatever reason; and yet it's the ladies who speak to me. I am pretty firmly a cisgendered lady, but plenty of cisgendered ladies like writing the dudes and the slash, so I wonder what it is about myself that means the female characters have so much more of a draw on my interests.
It isn't that I'm not interested in the men (and, uh, I certainly like me some M/M too), but when I think about favorites in general - when I think about characters who interested me, spoke to me, meant something to me - it's almost always the ladies.
So to cut this ramble short I'm going to pick two favorite dude characters: Irvine Kinneas and Laguna Loire, from FFVIII.
Irvine was probably the first male character I felt for. Which is really funny, because he's portrayed as a playboy, a womanizer, a skirt-chaser - and wow, does fandom latch on to that one! - so why would someone who is so usually interested in the ladies herself like somebody like Irvine? I think it's because I almost instantly saw through the facade - because it is a facade; it's a game - and there's a lot of complicated feeling underneath, in regards to finding out who you are and where you come from and what you're gonna be. For some reason it meant a lot to me to see that, and I pretty instantly fell for Irvine. I love that he's funny and goofy and casual and supportive and serious and helpful and sincere all in one, that he really just seems to want to make other people happy, that there's so much going on in his memories and yet he's a competent SeeD - and yet he has these lines everyone else seems to have crossed, this line of basic humanity - all of it together makes an awesome character, and I'll claim him as a favorite because of it.
Laguna is, basically, just awesome. He's the kind of person I want to be my BFF. I want to go have beers with Laguna after work, basically forever, put everything else in the 'L' folder and let's play darts. I love him. No other characters are quite as great as Laguna.
Day 15 – Favourite Final Fantasy female character.
This one's hard for the opposite reason; I love so many of the FF ladies! For so many reasons! But there are two obvious choices here and I'm just gonna lay them out: Rydia from FFIV and Quistis Trepe from FFVIII.
Rydia's been a favorite since I was 8 years old, playing FFIV for the first time (as FFII, on SNES!). As a young girl with a serious fantasy bent and an imaginative magic obsession, I'm not sure you can imagine just how awesome it was to see an offensive lady mage: she does damage! She nukes! She is the nuker in that party. And I loved her character too: her entire story, the tragedy in Mist and her experience in the Land of Summons and the way she comes from two worlds and yet can see beyond them both to the bigger picture, overlooking the things that happened in the past to fight for the future. She's optimistic and spunky and driven, brave as hell and spirited, yet still sensitive and emotional and young. I loved everything about her as a kid and I still love her now, the complexity of a character in 16-bit sprites.
And I have never related to a character as much as I do to Quistis Trepe. She's not only a favorite in a gameplay aspect, she's a character of personal importance, in a way. A young girl told all her life that she's a prodigy, a genius, she's special, only to grow into her role almost too fast and continually be striving to make personal connections with the people around her; always feeling separate, too old for friends but too young for the work she's been thrown into; always feeling like she's missed something vital with her life and yet feeling the pressure to be responsible, to be mature, to continue to put her energies into things that are not her; never feeling like she gets the credit she deserves for making the responsible boring choices, and always feeling less-than: not good enough, not exciting enough, not important enough -- is it obvious how much I can relate, or am I just showing my ass here. Anyway. I find Quistis fascinating within the FF world too - her Blue Magic, where does it come from? who decided to make a 17-year-old girl an Instructor? her relationships with Xu, Squall, Rinoa, etc - and ever since FFVIII she has been a favorite of mine, and fandom just makes me love her more.
( 30 Days of FF Meme )
