Can you believe

Can you believe I'm still fucking doing these?
I thought for sure I'd have gotten bored after like week two.
Who rules?
Me.
Anyway here's some cunt who writes fanfiction about video games no one plays.
Are you a big fan of Fire Emblem?
No?
Well I'm not really surprised.
But if you are then you might want to avoid this entry.

I have a self-portrait and some formidable studying to get done before tomorrow morning, and a research paper and take-home final to complete by Thursday.

Yeah and I'm teaching chorus tomorrow.
We all have our challenges to overcome.
If you had ask me 10 years ago "hey do you think you'll be leading a chorus class in your life?" my answer would have been "no" and I'd have been wrong 3 times over.

Instead, I have written three pages of meta in the last two hours.

I think this is a good time to give a jovial little "FML."

You say this like it's something that happened to you. Like when my car blew a spark plug and needed a 400 dollar repair.
No, you knew you were supposed to study and instead you wrote some insufferable "meta" (whatever the fuck that is) and now you're updating your blog like LOOK WHAT SHIT HAPPENED TO ME TODAY.

I came to a fandom epiphany a couple of months ago and have been wanting to write about it, but like everything else, it needed a bit of time to stew before I got it into words.

Wow a fandom epiphany holy shit count me right the fuck in!
It's only 8 paragraphs.
I have time to read all these words.

There are multiple ways to approach being a fan of something. You can approach it like a diner: just sit back and enjoy, let the work wash over you and just react to it in the moment.

AKA what sane people do.

You can approach it like a scientist: take it apart to see how it works, make observations, and come to conclusions after a period of study.

That's the nerd approach but equally acceptable.

You can take the approach of a historian and determine where it came from and the sort of effect it might have. 

Generally a part of the second one but all right.

You can look to defend it without question or rip it to shreds in the name of love. I think everyone takes a different approach depending on the work, or even just how they're feeling at the moment.

As for me? I tend to approach FE as a performer. What are my lines, and more importantly, what can I do with them on stage?* My impetus for writing meta and fanfiction is to explore what we're given and, with all due respect, do something interesting and at least a little bit unexpected with it. It's about potential for me. This is why I look at things with, for lack of a better term, a sort of optimistic overanalysis. I like making connections and revealing hidden depths and opening up characters or situations for other people. I love it when other people love characters and write about them at length, because it opens them up for me in new ways. 

Fire Emblem, for those of you uninitiated in obscure Japanese turn-based tactical RPGs, is a series well known for its political drama and not so much its deep characterization.
So keep that in mind as this bint rattles on.

(*The other metaphor I've given for fanfic in particular is that the source material is like a coloring page. We all get the same black-and-white lineart. Most people are going to color it similarly based on the sort of colors things are generally supposed to be, give or take the odd artist who turns it into a whacked-out Lisa Frank mural or something, but even among the similarly-colored pages, there will be differences. An unclear line might yield a leaf for one person and a bird for another. The leaves could be spring-green or autumn-orange-- neither one is wrong! There's going to be a few artists who rise above the crayon-and-marker crowd and turn in, say, a gorgeous watercolor piece that doesn't even look like it was a coloring page in the first place.)

There is no metaphor to give for fanfiction because it's straightforward. It's a bunch of self-important cunts who think they're better than most people because they happen to like something and write at length (poorly) their own misguided interpretation of it.

This is also why I tend to get bristly about author intent. I totally understand the purpose of looking at it, and I definitely don't think it should be discounted from the wider conversation. It just doesn't help me as a fan or as a writer to look at things that way most of the time. The idea of looking at things that make sense as probably being slipshod and things that don't add up as being dead ends is frustrating to me. 

You don't like author intent?
You don't like the reason the author created something?
Look your idea might be better than theirs (not true in your case but it can be true) and if that's the case maybe you should tell your own story because clearly you have this better in hand than the author of the thing you're a fan of.

To once again be clear, I'm not claiming Death of the Author: that author intent doesn't matter because ~it's all relative, maaaan.~ There's stuff we don't know because it's left ambiguous, and then there's stuff that, yeah, we don't technically know, but come on.

The characters in Fire Emblem are supposed to be blank slates that make way for the political intrigue and double dealings and the tactical game play.
The author does not care about your dumb fanfiction about how two characters might be gay together. You are not some great artist for concluding this. Literally anyone can do it.
Literally everyone does do it if the typical fanfiction writer's blog is to be believed.

tl;dr, take this for what it's worth: a long-ass reflection on why I react weirdly in discussions and why I (don't) write (enough).

With that off my chest, I'm gonna go write something.

• Current Mood: liberated

 

No one cares.

Thing I just now realized after playing FE for eight years

I'd like to point out in a previous post she mentioned she only played 6-8.

I don't even give a shit about Fire Emblem and I've beaten 6 and 7.

So in 8 years you've managed to beat exactly one more Fire Emblem game than I have.

"Mt" stands for Might.

I was always so confused at that abbreviation. In my head I read it as... 'mount of damage.

... 'mount of damage?

I'm not going to make a big deal about this because I've thought of really stupid meanings for abbreviations before but that's especially dumb.

This isn't the big post I was planning on opening with (that one's still in progress because I talk myself into corners), but it's the first one I finished.

You don't hear a lot about pets in FE-- pets that aren't mounts, that is.

Thank fuck because if I had to hear about that dumb bitch's pegasus one more fucking time I was going to quit.

I can't imagine dealing with that and a dog.

Because I need some form of incentive to write my jillion-and-a-half essays.

Give me a series to cross over with Fire Emblem, and I'll give you as plausible a summary as I can think of.

Shin Megami Tensei.

The entire cast of Fire Emblem gets sacrificed to Pazuzu. End of fanfic.

I'd read that.

Apparently she can barely trudge through Fire Emblem.

Fire Emblem, it bears noting, is legendary for its difficulty and in fact has a mechanic where if a character dies they are gone forever.

Naturally people who write fanfiction are a little more used to the flash game side of gaming instead of serious games like this so I appreciate her lack of progress.

Oh, I finished FE9, fiiiiinally. Overall I was quite pleased with it, despite some lackluster elements. Of course, as with most FE games, it's part of a bigger picture, so I started up FE10 shortly afterwards. Verrrry happy with this one. Aside from the disappointing way the supports were handled, everything else is fantastic. I've had a lot of "wait, what!" moments while playing-- in a good way. I played through Part 1 and about halfway into Part 2 before I got frustrated with "Geoffrey's Charge" and went back to FE7 for a while. I'm surprised people were so hard on Part 1! Granted, I'm playing on Easy mode, but I didn't have trouble with the battles, 

"I don't get why people complain about a hard game while I'm playing on easy mode."

People who play Fire Emblem look for a challenge and so typically play on hard.

Easy mode is for baby's first SRPG.

Day 17 - Which stat is your favorite?

Hmm, tough pick between Speed and Defense. I think I'd have to go with the latter, though, just because I'm not very good at FE and I need all the protection my units can get! If you can get both in one unit, though, they'll pretty much be a powerhouse. 

Might and defense I believe are mathematically the one and two most important stats in any Fire Emblem game. I remember I had this big fuck off dude with a spear who would win entire levels by himself.

This blog kind of degenerates into lists of garbage no one cares about.

What the fuck is happening?

How long do I have to tolerate this?

Oh.

Well that's her first entry so I guess that's how long I have to tolerate it.

Wow that was something.

Since this was a highly video game-centric post and I'm feeling FUCKING RAGE after reading this I think this is appropriate for the song of the now.

Enjoy 30 minutes of Streets of motherfuckin' Rage 2.

One of the best soundtracks in video games I feel.