![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sarasa_cat2. If you, as yourself, were the lead writer for your fandom’s canon, what would you integrate into the existing storyline?
FFXII: Ronsentwins exposition.
FFXII gives us a complex political plot full of twists, turns, backstabbery, frontstabbery, and “yes, the gods really are crazy,” and each character in the main party of six has a backstory that motivates them … except one of those six backstories was cut from the script. ARRRRGGGHGHHHHHGHGHGHG.
Supposedly the original plan for FFXII was to have Basch as the lead character but he failed market testing in Japan and then a couple of new characters were created (or so the story goes). AND IT SHOWS.
Let me turn this around by looking at each of the main six characters in turn. Ashe has a major plot conflict with personal complications that she deals with throughout the game. We understand why Ashe is motivated to do what she does and we watch her struggle and grow. She is motivated. Enough said. Vaan is fighting a similar battle as Ashe although whereas Ashe shows us the story from the side of royalty, Vaan shows us the same story for the side of the common people. We learn a lot about Vaan’s backstory and, just like Ashe, we watch him struggle and grow. His motivations make sense. Balthier has a motivation and a backstory that is revealed during the game’s events. Once we see the whole picture, he and his motivations are clear and his story conflict makes sense. Fran left the Wood for Reasons(™) and when we visit her village and deal with side plots related to her sisters, Fran’s side-story conflicts and reason for being in the party generally make sense. We see how she fits into the story and see the value her point of view adds. One might argue that Penelo is a little less developed (I disagree) but we still understand her backstory and her motivation, and she provides a point of view that fits into Ashe’s and Vaan’s twin storylines. Penelo also symbolizes Hope and, perhaps, Peace (and all of this could be the subject for some future meta) and this is very important in the story, so her role and motivations make sense too. And then there is Basch.
We see just enough of Basch’s story in the game’s prologue to see why he might feel motivated to join our ragtag team of rebels but, as the story continues, we learn about his brother and how there was a deep disagreement between them. For the rest of the game the two of them tapdance around what that disagreement was without ever fully explaining it. The closer we get to the end of the game, the more this ghost of a Major Backstory Conflict hangs in front of you but whenever you try to reach for it -- POOF -- your fingers grasp at thin air. All of this reeks of a story that was part of the Original Big Idea but then it was never written into the script when management decided to push Basch out of the protagonist role and into a support cast.
I would fix this. :)
There are enough hints in the script to make a few guesses and, tbh, the very first fanfic I felt motivated to write was FFXII from Basch’s POV such that his motivations (and his brother’s motivations) were restored to the game.
DA2: Wow. Where do I even begin.
Across the entire canon DA’s strength is character-driven storytelling inside a sprawling, imaginative fantasy setting. Yet, DA’s biggest weakness is purposeful character-driven storytelling that explores the complexity of the conflicts within the sprawling, imaginative fantasy setting. Herein is the recipe for an endless series of fandom clusterfucks that just keep on fuckng. sad sigh.
The canon is so big, so sprawling, and so subjectively relativistic that it is really easy for anyone to identify with a single character and adopt that character’s POV as Gospel Truth because the evidence for opposing arguments/POVs is found somewhere else in canon, like in the DLC you did not play or in another game or book or comic that is a completely different piece of media or, of course, even in the very same game you are playing but that piece of lore was inside a missable dialogue that is only available for certain characters who make certain choices under a specific unnamed phase of the moon.
I have to admit that the armchair historian in me loves DA’s canon and loves how one needs to sift through characters’ tellings of their lived experiences plus various documents written from various biased points of view and it is all so wonderful. But making sense of it all is a lot of work. Adding to the issue, the writers at Bioware failed to coordinate their efforts in making their story arguments crystal clear. This is something they could have done if they had deliberately juxtaposed alternate points of view side-by-side in DA2 (or, arguably, in any of their media). Because of this failure at Bioware’s end it is very easy for a player/fan to be accused of cherry picking an argument for or against a particular in-world conflict. In fact, I’d say that even though the canon is purposefully crapsack grey-on-grey, the presentation of canon, especially in DA2, encourages people to cherry pick their evidence for supporting any particular side and it encourages players to interpret conflicts through a very selective lens that ignores important aspects of the larger canon.
So, if I had been lead writer for DA2 (not touching the whole series here, just DA2), I would have made sure that the main path through the vanilla version of DA2 clearly showed what was at stake while Kirkwall tipped toward becoming the flashpoint for the mage-templar war. First, all of the content in Sebastian DLC would have been shipped inside the game because, among other things, his Act 3 quest with Leliana’s appearance as “Sister Nightingale” provides much needed context for the depth of the problems in Kirkwall, how the rest of the world sees Kirkwall, and what is at stake if Kirkwall has a mage rebellion. Second, a hell of a lot of Gaider’s lecturing about mage lore, templars-who-are-useful, and the diversity of how circles are run would have been in DA2 rather than a series of BSN posts, a “You People Misread My Canon Screed” called Asunder, and the endless hammer over your head in Haven and the Hinterlands in DAI. Third, yes, I have always thought that Anders is an incredibly interesting, complex character but he needed another character who counterbalances his extreme point of view and Fenris absolutely fails to provide this. One solution is to add new content to Fenris’ storyline. Another solution is to add an additional party member with their own companion quests and have them serve that purpose. Finally, I would have made executive-level magic happen such that Bioware had just enough time to flesh out the Act 3 content such that the end of the story did not feel so rushed.
Anything more I have to say on this really requires a giant fanfic as a fix, although I am certainly interested in having a discussion about this. The first DA2 fanfic epic I felt motivated to write was one that addressed some of these issues by upgrading an existing NPC to someone who joins Hawke’s ragtag team.
