FINAL FANTASY KISS BATTLE 2022!!!
well HELLO FRIENDS????? after MUCH delay which is MY OWN FAULT, i am here to present to you the tiny fandom event of the year: Final Fantasy Kiss Battle 2022!!
This event is open to everyone, even if we aren't DW circlefriends! (feel free to friend me too; i promise i'm not crazy that's a lie but at least i'm sometimes funny). If you aren't on DW, you can still play via anon or OpenID!
The Kiss Battle is simple. Players leave prompts in comments under each specific fandom, using generalized fandom nomenclature: a relationship of some sort, and a concept to inspire other players.
- For romantic relationship kisses, we use X / Y
- For platonic relationship kisses, we use X & Y
- Absolutely open to relationships with more than 2 people involved! X / Y / Z (/ A / B ...) welcome to this party!
- Prompts can be a word, a sentence, an image, a song lyric; it's a suggestion, rather than a request
- it's a kiss battle! there will be smooches!
Players then go looking for smoochin' prompts they'd like to fill. Fills can be fic, art, interpretive dance, whatever you're inspired to; they can be filled in a responding comment, or as a link (to AO3, tumblr, etc). FILLS GOTTA HAVE A KISS IN 'EM. IT'S A KISS BATTLE. What counts as a "kiss" is up to you, though -- you can be creative!
- Fills should use the comment header to let people know what the fill is; please use a format like "X / Y, (title), (rating), (any content warnings that might apply)"
- "Aerith/Tifa, memorial, G"
- "Cloud/Squall, just in time, R (blood)"
- Prompts can be filled multiple times! Don't worry if someone got there first; we love Two Cakes up in this event! The more kisses we get, the better!
- You can fill as anon if you want/need for any reason
- You can of course crosspost anywhere you'd like
It's a very simple game, and is meant to be played in good faith without anybody being a shitbag about pairings or characters. We're all too old for this.
FANDOM LINKS Fandoms with compilations and expansions should fall into their titled macrofandom. For example:
- FFXIII also includes FFXIII-2 and Lightning Returns (FFXIII-3)
- FFX also includes X-2
- FFIV includes the After Years
If you need to specify a certain microfandom / singular canon, please do so in the prompt or in the comment header!
FINAL FANTASY I
FINAL FANTASY II
FINAL FANTASY III
FINAL FANTASY IV
FINAL FANTASY V
FINAL FANTASY VI
FINAL FANTASY VII
FINAL FANTASY VIII
FINAL FANTASY IX
FINAL FANTASY X
FINAL FANTASY XI
FINAL FANTASY XII
FINAL FANTASY XIII
FINAL FANTASY XIV
FINAL FANTASY XV
FINAL FANTASY TACTICS
FINAL FANTASY TYPE-0
FINAL FANTASY RECORD KEEPER
FINAL FANTASY BRAVE EXVIUS
BRAVELY DEFAULT
OTHER FINAL FANTASY CANONS
FF CROSSOVER PROMPTS
FF / OTHER CANON CROSSOVERS
MAKE FRIENDS! If you're interested in meeting more FF fandom people, this comment thread can be used as a friending meme! Tell us a little about yourself, which FFs you've played, favorite characters/ships, and look around for new friends! FF FRIENDING THREAD
You can also join the Final Fantasy Old Folks Home Discord and come gripe about those kids on our lawn and the old days where you had to level grind by hand lmao. Open to all FF fans! -- EDIT Discord link has been updated!
AO3 COLLECTION
If you're posting your work on AO3, add it to our collection here!!!
BLITZ KISSINS
If you already know what smooches you want to write, you don't need to wait for a prompt -- just comment into the relevant fandom thread with your kiss!
REMEMBER
It's only fun if everybody plays, so if you leave a prompt, try to fill someone else's!
COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS??
Hit up this thread and myself or ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lassarina will help you out!
SHARE
just copy and paste the following line anywhere you like!
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Re: FINAL FANTASY XIII
Asymptotic, Lightning &/ Hope, PG
The first time Hope sees Lightning, two months after—well, the whole l’Cie thing, all of that—she comes to his family’s home in Felix Heights for dinner.
It’s awful. He tries to tell his dad he’s just going to hang out with a friend, but his dad asks all these questions—before, the sudden interest in his life would’ve just annoyed him, but now, he sees the worried lines on his brow and just feels tired—and when his dad realizes that the friend is that Lightning, Lightning Farron, Lightning-who-saved-his-life (his assumption; Hope’s never talked about it), he insists on making a whole thing of it. Insists on hosting her at their place, has their cook make a whole five-course meal, lays out all the nice china, and probably says to Lightning “thank you for everything” like fifteen times. Lightning keeps staring at the forks like she’s expecting one of them to be booby-trapped. All he wants to talk about is their time as l’Cie, but he can’t, not with his dad there, but he can’t stand the idea of inane banter about school and family and the neighborhood either, not with Lightning there. So mostly his dad blathers and the other two say very little and very often lapse into silence.
The only moment they’re alone is when Lightning’s on her way out. Hope slips through the door after her, stops her just outside the far gate on the other end of the garden, and says, “Sorry about all that.”
Lightning gives him a funny look. “Don’t know why you’re sorry.” She tips her chin toward the house. “I’m glad he made it.”
Then she’s gone.
After that he doesn’t see her for two years. And why would he? She’s a soldier again, after all, and soldiers have got plenty to keep themselves busy these days: with the fal’Cie gone, everyone’s scrambling to build new sources of fuel, till new fields, find some way to make Cocoon thrive. And that’s the easy work, relatively speaking—carving out a place in Pulse is a lot of monster-slaying and brick-laying, from the sound of it. He can imagine Lightning doing that. Can imagine her being good at it.
He thinks about joining the Corps himself. He knows he’s good in a fight. But with his eidolon and his magic gone, well… not that good. Without a l’Cie brand, he knows exactly what he looks like: some kid. Come back in a few years. We’re not that desperate yet.
So he goes to school. Because his dad wants him to (and his dad looks so worried; sometimes it’s like Hope’s caring for him instead of the other way around), and because he doesn’t know what else he can do. He goes even though it feels fake, compared to life on the run. He’d never exactly been a social butterfly, but now, whenever a classmate’s going on about some teacher’s fashion faux pas or the latest on who-likes-who, it just washes over him completely. Once he wonders if his hearing is going, when some girl has to repeat the same thing three times just for him to understand. But his ears are fine. He just doesn’t care about whatever she’s saying.
His grades improve, though. Why had he struggled with this stuff before? You just sit down and do it. (Not a question of can or can't. Lightning's words.)
So the schoolwork’s not bad, exactly. It’s just that it doesn’t feel real. He says as much to his dad, once, when his head’s feeling full and foggy and he’s trying to explain, and his dad’s face gets all tight and he asks if he’d like to talk to someone, and that question is so horrible and awkward and loaded that he never brings it up again.
He thinks about trying to get everyone back together again, for—what? a reunion? and it sounds stupid even as he thinks it. If he were older, he guesses he could meet up with them at a bar after work, or something, however adults hang out—maybe they’re already doing that.
(Except, even then, maybe it wouldn’t be so easy. Maybe Lightning went back to hating Snow’s guts. Maybe without Vanille holding everyone together, they’d be all prickly to be in the same room for more than five minutes. Maybe they were only ever meant to be a team for those few short days. But when Hope thinks about that, his throat gets all tight, and he firmly decides to stop thinking about that for a while.)
Two years later he’s finally able to drop out. Well, graduate early, rather, to become a junior researcher at the Academy. Not that he has the credentials for that kind of job, exactly—he’s the youngest one on the staff by years—but, well, his dad’s got connections. Calls in a favor. (Hope hates using that. But he hates the sleepwalking feeling of school even more. And maybe his dad senses that, too, because he’s the one who suggests it. All Hope has to do is say “yes,” and it’s done.)
He makes up for his inexperience with “the kind of work ethic I thought kids didn’t have anymore,” as his PI so gracelessly puts it. He doesn’t really think of it that way—work ethic implies there’s some kind of principle behind it, rather than a sort of blindly-chugging-forward-on-the-rails—but on the surface he guesses it’s the same. He crunches the numbers for experiments that everyone else finds too tedious to touch, reads all the papers for the colloquium talks three times over so he’s sure he understands, and comes in early and leaves late. At least this is real, he tells himself, and it is. They’ll need this science, if they’re going to power Cocoon without the help of fal’Cie. It’s just hard to make himself believe it.
(He still dreams about being l’Cie. Fragments, mostly. Gripping a dagger in his hand like it’s his own beating heart. Breathing the air on Pulse. A healing spell, cool between his fingers. When he wakes he always tries to go back to sleep but it never, ever works.)
A couple months into the job, he runs into Lightning—at a dingy 24-hour convenience store of all places. He’s shocked to see he’s nearly as tall as her. Then he’s shocked to see her in Palumpolum at all.
“Hey,” he calls out.
She turns and mouths wow when she sees him. “Hope. You’ve sure grown.”
“I thought you were on Pulse these days.”
Lightning shrugs. “Temporary posting. Reactor here needed a little extra elbow grease to keep it running, so.”
Silence. They both stare at each other. Panic rises in his throat, hot and fast. To tamp it down he blurts the first thing he thinks of: “I’m a researcher at the Academy.”
“Really?” she says, and her eyebrows shoot up with interest. “Didn’t take you for the bookish type.”
Hope feels himself flush. “Yeah, well.”
“That’s good. Great.” Then something on her wrist beeps; she checks the color and swears under her breath. “One of my lieutenants. Swear he’ll burn the place down at this rate. I’ve gotta run. See you around.”
Gone as quick as she came. Hope wishes, suddenly and irrationally, that he could punch something.
For the next year he thinks about that chance meeting, off and on. Way more than is normal, he knows. Thinks about being almost as tall as her, and wonders what it’d be like to be taller than her. It feels like some threshold, some crossing that would change everything, though what would change, exactly, he couldn’t say. A curl in one of the lab tech's hair, or a sudden thunderstorm, will remind him. Sometimes the other researchers go out together in the evenings, but of course, they wouldn't want him tagging along. Or maybe he's said "no" so many times they've stopped bothering.
When he runs into Lightning a year later, he actually is taller than her. By like half an inch, but still.
She’s standing in the center of Palumpolum Gardens, the little park the city made after it became Cocoon’s capital. Pulsian landscaping has become in vogue, even among those who still cling to shuddering Cocoon over Pulse; the grass is patchy and thin but it’s still the most greenery for miles. And it's a weekend; there's hundreds of people out here. It's pure chance he's able to pick her out in the crowd at all.
“Temporary posting again?” Hope asks, sneaking up behind her.
“Hope!” She looks him over, and he can see her eyes wrinkle when she gets the measure of her height—just for a second, and then it's gone. “And, yes, just for the week. Your reactor’s acting up again.” She tilts her head, looking toward the skyline. “I really should remember that you live here. I’ll call ahead next time. How’s the Academy?”
Hope shrugs, hoping it comes across like pretty good instead of hell if I know. Her answering nod says he got the balance right.
Just then, some guy with a frisbee crashes into Lightning, nearly knocks her over—she casts him her dirtiest look, for all the good that does; he only barely mutters “sorry” as he saunters off. She looks back to Hope: “It’s my day off. I was hoping to get some space to clear my head, but, nothing doing.”
“There’s a hiking trail,” Hope ventures. “Not far from here. It goes through some of the land that’s gone to seed since the Nutriculture Complex collapsed.”
“Really?”
“I could show you. If you’re interested.”
“You kidding? Anything to get away from all these people. C’mon.”
So he leads her northwest, where a battered little trailhead points the way forward. Wordlessly, he falls back to point. It doesn't look like much; the first crest is pockmarked with weeds and bits of debris. But up top, the view's so nice that even Lightning gives a low appreciative whistle, and there's miles more to go.
They keep going. Their conversation is a familiar, utilitarian thing—a warning tossed over a shoulder, about some loose gravel underfoot, or a moment shared scrutinizing some passing shadow overhead. There's a few words for catching up (Sazh seems good, he piloted a supply run Lightning was on a few weeks ago; Hope saw on the news that Snow's New Bodhum is working out), but only very few, and nothing about themselves—the Academy or the Corps. Mostly it feels like Gapra Whitewood again. Like the Peaks again. Sure, they can’t leap around the way they used to—no brand—and he’s lagging behind even more than he used to, out of breath before they even hit the first mile marker. But that wordless sense of connection, the thing he’s missed for three years now, is pulling him along the whole while. Real, and close, and potent.
The trail ends—peters out, more like, turns from bits of gravel to dirt and then back to scrap metal—but Lightning just keeps going, and Hope's not going to be the one to suggest they turn back. He follows wordlessly, as she dips through rusted metal containers, over a wall with only half the barbed wire chopped off—
When Lightning leaps from a dizzying tall ledge onto some concrete below, he finally calls out, "Wait up." She pauses; he peeks over the edge as far as he dares. "Can you—can you spot me, or something?"
"It's not far," Lightning says, with a teasing note. But she waits for him, a careful distance just to the left of where she'd landed.
He closes his eyes as he jumps. He lands with a thud and a few shuddering steps forward—the landing went all the way through his back and straight to his jaw, but it's jarring more than it actually hurts.
"You alright?" Lightning asks, a hand on his shoulder.
"Yeah," he says, and when he turns to look at her, her face is close to his, and—before hsi mind catches up with what he's doing—he leans forward and kisses her.
It just happens—no. Of course that doesn’t just happen. He did it, wanted it, went for it. His first kiss, he realizes as he pulls away, with a mix of elation and embarrassment. Except he hasn’t even felt real enough to be embarrassed in so long that even that part’s a little thrilling. This is real. He’s spent so long wanting to be her but maybe it’s that he wants her, actually—the thought just leapt there but now that it’s there and it feels right and—
“Kid,” Lightning says, and her tone alone says everything he doesn’t want to hear. Just a kid. But then she adds, “Hope,” more softly, like she’s correcting herself. “You know there’s other people, right?” She’s giving him a long, steady stare. “The world didn’t end when Cocoon nearly fell. Which means our lives didn’t, either.”
He has to work to keep his voice steady: “What are you saying?”
“I mean,” she says, and a wry little smile’s flickered over her face, “we’ve been out here for hours and you haven’t told me a single thing about that Academy of yours. Tell me there’s someone else you’ve kissed in the meantime.”
“I don’t… What’s that got to do with anything?”
“I just think you should give it a try. Make sure this isn’t just you trying to hang onto something.”
Now that embarrassment’s starting to sting. “It’s not like you’ve told me anything about the Corps, either,” he flings back.
But Lightning just grins. “Ha. Now it’s like old times again. Me preaching what I don’t practice. Remember when I was going on and on about tearing down the Sanctum and leaving everyone else behind? Absolutely insufferable.”
He laughs with her. It even takes away the sting a little. But he also says, “You weren’t so bad as that.”
Lightning winks. “And that’s exactly why I said you should get out more.” She leaps onto the next crag—how can she still do that, she makes it look so easy—then turns around and holds out a hand over the edge. “C’mon. Let me help you up.”
Which is no, he knows, but his chest only tightens up a little. When he grabs her hand, he clambers with his feet while she pulls him up easy. And as they hike back home, there’s still that faint electric warmth crackling between them, even if the space they keep between each other is ever-so-slightly wider than it was before.
He let her down easy. His life didn't end. He'll figure it out eventually.
Re: Asymptotic, Lightning &/ Hope, PG
I love this!!! Hope's listlessness and the way he holds onto those moments from before are both perfect, as is Lightning's casual unaffectedness. She cares, but he'll always be Hope, the angry boy who needed someone to acknowledge him. Even when they're in the same city, they're on two timelines, but there is a connection nonetheless. I love that you kept it as nuanced as in the game, too.
Thank you so much! and if you post to AO3 please let me know so I can bookmark.
Re: Asymptotic, Lightning &/ Hope, PG
i'm not sure whether or not i'll throw this on AO3, but if I do, i'll reply to your comment here so you'll get a notification of it for sure <3 thanks for requesting these two!