...ngl, most of what I've read in FFXIII fandom has been femslash. I mostly skip over the slash and the het because I can get that anywhere and yes hello lesbians please. It's the only fandom I've ever been in that could seriously be described as a femslash fandom. Love love love.
That said, the best fic I've read in the fandom is also the gen buddyfic you are looking for. It exists, and this is it. It's also almost all there is for Sazh. I think the fact that he's so much older than the rest of the cast puts him out of the running for most of the shippy action, though I have seen some Sazh/Vanille (there needs to be more of this).
Please let me know if you find any of that awesome badwrong Hope/Snow knifeplay, because I want it in a very wrong way.
I love the way they handled Vanille. I wound up really enjoying hating her, which I think is what this game is going for with most of the characters. I love that she's an unreliable narrator. I love that she's surface-level faking at being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl/perky female white mage, when really she's a saboteur and a lesbian and the only person who knows what the hell is going on. I would love to see more fic of her as the loneliest extrovert.
ETA: I also like Vanille/Serah kind of a lot, because reasons. augh ;___;
ETA2: meant to say, I feel like the Farroncest undertones stem from a persistent problem about female game protags with sisters; everyone knows that game protags are butch and aggressive, and everyone knows that the sisters of game protagonists are attractive, feminine people who probably need rescuing or something. Because of this, game protagonists can very easily develop a butch-femme vibe with their sisters. I first noticed this while playing female characters in Baldur's Gate II and in Dragon Age: Origins's Dwarf Commoner story - I seriously don't get how you could play the latter and not play your character as lesbian, because there has to be some reason why everyone simply accepts that the sister is all about dolling herself up for social advancement and you're not. tl;dr this happens because of the default-male assumptions about videogame characters, but we may as well enjoy it as best we can.
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That said, the best fic I've read in the fandom is also the gen buddyfic you are looking for. It exists, and this is it. It's also almost all there is for Sazh. I think the fact that he's so much older than the rest of the cast puts him out of the running for most of the shippy action, though I have seen some Sazh/Vanille (there needs to be more of this).
I'd also like to point you at my favourite post-game kinda-Fang/Lightning everything-is-wrong shortfic.
Please let me know if you find any of that awesome badwrong Hope/Snow knifeplay, because I want it in a very wrong way.
I love the way they handled Vanille. I wound up really enjoying hating her, which I think is what this game is going for with most of the characters. I love that she's an unreliable narrator. I love that she's surface-level faking at being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl/perky female white mage, when really she's a saboteur and a lesbian and the only person who knows what the hell is going on. I would love to see more fic of her as the loneliest extrovert.
ETA: I also like Vanille/Serah kind of a lot, because reasons. augh ;___;
ETA2: meant to say, I feel like the Farroncest undertones stem from a persistent problem about female game protags with sisters; everyone knows that game protags are butch and aggressive, and everyone knows that the sisters of game protagonists are attractive, feminine people who probably need rescuing or something. Because of this, game protagonists can very easily develop a butch-femme vibe with their sisters. I first noticed this while playing female characters in Baldur's Gate II and in Dragon Age: Origins's Dwarf Commoner story - I seriously don't get how you could play the latter and not play your character as lesbian, because there has to be some reason why everyone simply accepts that the sister is all about dolling herself up for social advancement and you're not. tl;dr this happens because of the default-male assumptions about videogame characters, but we may as well enjoy it as best we can.