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Oct. 1st, 2006 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
person4You know, one thing I really love about video game fandoms (especially in RPGs with lots of minigames, and sidequests, and hidden scenes, and the like), and which is pretty much unique to them, is that every person in them has their own personal version of canon that's a little different from everyone elses.
Everyone has the same main plotline, of course (unless it's a game with a branching plot where the branches are actually wildly different from each other), but what you do while following that plot can make the way you view the characters, or the world, subtly different than the way someone else would.
Sometimes these can be pretty big changes. If you never even realize a secret character is there you're definitely going to have some different memories of the canon than someone who keeps that character in their party for the entire game and hunts down every bit of character development for them ASAP. But a person who writes a post-FF7 fic showing what each of the main characters is doing five years later is perfectly within their right to not have Vincent so much as mentioned if they never bothered to get him. His only role in their canon is as the subject of a mysterious note in the Shinra Mansion that the characters never bothered to investigate, or maybe even read.
But, even small things can make a difference. Like I said, something as simple as minigames could do it. My post-FFX-2 Yuna, for instance, is a digger. I spend hours sending Yuna into the desert when I'm playing. I love it. So, because within the canon as I play it Yuna goes on hundreds of digs, my Yuna loves it too. And I've probably gotten more plotbunnies about her digging, or other character's reactions to it, than I have from anything else in the game. But most people wouldn't have that view of her. Most people (in my experience) don't even like digging, so if I said to them that I think Yuna would be happy to spend the rest of her life excavating machina they'd probably look at me like I'm crazy. Maybe someone on the other side of the screen is doing that to my words now!
Anyway, I'm just babbling (and possibly not much with the sense-making, since I'm just letting myself type which is a sure invite for my fingers to get ahead of my brain). But this is something that really interests me, almost as much as my weird obsession with working out how much time I think probably passes for the characters in games if they were living in real time.
Everyone has the same main plotline, of course (unless it's a game with a branching plot where the branches are actually wildly different from each other), but what you do while following that plot can make the way you view the characters, or the world, subtly different than the way someone else would.
Sometimes these can be pretty big changes. If you never even realize a secret character is there you're definitely going to have some different memories of the canon than someone who keeps that character in their party for the entire game and hunts down every bit of character development for them ASAP. But a person who writes a post-FF7 fic showing what each of the main characters is doing five years later is perfectly within their right to not have Vincent so much as mentioned if they never bothered to get him. His only role in their canon is as the subject of a mysterious note in the Shinra Mansion that the characters never bothered to investigate, or maybe even read.
But, even small things can make a difference. Like I said, something as simple as minigames could do it. My post-FFX-2 Yuna, for instance, is a digger. I spend hours sending Yuna into the desert when I'm playing. I love it. So, because within the canon as I play it Yuna goes on hundreds of digs, my Yuna loves it too. And I've probably gotten more plotbunnies about her digging, or other character's reactions to it, than I have from anything else in the game. But most people wouldn't have that view of her. Most people (in my experience) don't even like digging, so if I said to them that I think Yuna would be happy to spend the rest of her life excavating machina they'd probably look at me like I'm crazy. Maybe someone on the other side of the screen is doing that to my words now!
Anyway, I'm just babbling (and possibly not much with the sense-making, since I'm just letting myself type which is a sure invite for my fingers to get ahead of my brain). But this is something that really interests me, almost as much as my weird obsession with working out how much time I think probably passes for the characters in games if they were living in real time.