JESUS TAPDANCING CHRIST and also FFVII fanpoodling and other stuff.

[la_belle_laide]

To begin with, gacked as usual from skitty_kitty:



Kung Fu was its usual awesome release tonight. Don't know what I did to make my left hand feel tight and weak but it does, so please disregard and excuse any typos. It just can't seem to keep up. Maybe I kept my fist too tight.

After work on both days this past weekend, I sat down with my entire novel in hopes of tightening the pace and striking as many passive phrases as I could find. (There are a few. I still have some bad habits.) I also re-did the entire first and third chapter. I swear, I feel like I'm back at square one every few months, and this novel has been with me since forever. The good thing is that every time I make a huge change like that, I like it even more. It feels daring, to shake it up like that, and I have a better time re-reading it.

Is a novel ever complete?

Ummmm fangirling out for a few paragraphs here, this is a good example of what I love about FFVII and its fandom. FFVII fandom is conspicuously low on wank—or maybe I just missed most of it over the years—and I wonder if that's because the story is so damn complicated, subtle and full-on creepy that we're all just too caught up in it (thirteen years later) to start plastering the ceiling about who's banging whom or whatever. For the link-wary, it's a post from ff7_oldschool in which a fan pulled apart one of fandom's favorite scenes to pull apart, the Wall Market arc:

The first half of the game spends its time building Cloud up into the cocky, aloof hero we later find out he isn't, and while we do see cracks showing through very early on and they serve to make Cloud immediately interesting and mysterious, it's not really until Wall Market that Cloud gets blatantly humiliated.



The first half of the game spends its time building Cloud up into the cocky, aloof hero we later find out he isn't, and while we do see cracks showing through very early on and they serve to make Cloud immediately interesting and mysterious, it's not really until Wall Market that Cloud gets blatantly humiliated.

Obviously dressing him up as a girl is an attack on his masculinity, but I don't think it's that simple - it also reinforces his masculinity. Characters comment repeatedly on how they can't imagine a 'tough guy' like him dressing as a girl, and unless you're willing to work really hard Cloud doesn't get to pass as one more attractive than Tifa. But more on the drag act later - this bit is going to be about the Honeybee Inn.
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What's more obvious and more effective is the content of the rooms. There's no way of getting Cloud to have a positive sexual encounter or even witness one.

QUEEN ROOM

This one's probably the most recursive of them all. In the Queen Room, we see President Shinra - and he's doing a fantasy role play. Not only that, but the dialogue he's reading out resembles FF7 too closely for comfort, predicting Aeris's death and Cloud's failure to prevent the Black Materia being delivered to Sephiroth. It's usually interpreted as straight foreshadowing, but I have to think about the context - we're seeing a character play the same role playing game we are playing, and it's presented as part of a creepy sex game being played by a generally awful guy who cheats on his wife, with the people participating in the roleplay complaining about being involved. It's surprisingly blatant about what it thinks of the player.


&$#% ROOM

The Group Room at least has its mystery about it, but the &$#% Room is obviously for players who just want to &$#%. You go in.

Cloud does get a kiss, with the floaty spectral hallucinatory version of himself. And passes out. When he comes to, the other characters mock his naivite, he doesn't understand why he's given underwear as a free gift ("What? This rag? For me? I just don't get it...") and OH YES DEPENDING ON HOW YOU WANT TO INTERPRET IT HE MIGHT EVEN HAVE BEEN MOLESTED WHILE UNCONSCIOUS BY A GAY MAN

He even breaks the fourth wall to shrug at the camera.

It's weird, not so much because of the subject matter (weird for a JRPG, but not for FF7), but because of the sudden emotional ping-pong. This is the first time we hear the dischordant 'Cloud's mad' music cue - "Who Are You", my OST says it is - in the whole game; what the hallucination tells the real Cloud is a fairly poignant statement. "You shouldn't be in a place like this." "You think problems will go away just thinking about them?" Why are you doing an optional sidequest for sexual titillation when your friend is in danger? Getting attacked by your character's 'conscience' for doing a sidequest in a genre which is all about pausing while the world is destroyed to go and race birds is pretty subversive, I think. Of course, it doesn't change the fact that you DO end up pausing while the world is destroyed to go and race birds, but it's still interesting that it lampshades it.


I adored that, so I replied:

All very interesting! Let's not forget that other room, where you can watch Reeve's parents trying to get it on (or not trying,) in the room their son rented for them, while their son's freaky ass catbot watches them from the corner. WTMFF?
...

This whole scene struck me as really taking the piss, because Cloud does come across (finally) as the emotionally stunted adolescent that he is, fundamentally misunderstanding human relations and being overwhelmed by sexuality. His reaction to peeking into the keyholes is a 12- year-old, "WOOOOOW."

It's a safe bet at this point that Cloud, having been kidnapped at 16 and having spent his formative years as a test subject up until the beginning of the game, has never seen any kind of female hoo-haa (all manner of fanfic aside.) Homeboy gets out of captivity, girls throw themselves at him, and his first real sexual experience comes from about ten dudes in a tub with him. ("Not to be rude or anything, but could you go do someone else?") What goes on in that goddamn tub? Why does he complain that it hurts? O_o And why is it played for giggles?

I've also always found it really intriguing that this is our boy's first real collapse, and, like you mentioned, the music. (Depending on which room you chose, you can choose Cloud's collapse and the participants' various reactions.) The scene gets some laughs out of you, then forces you to re-evaluate the hero as a total effing psycho an unreliable narrator, and asks you to pity him and mistrust him at the same time.

This is why I love Cloud and why I love this fandom. ^_^

Seriously, I should just get the entire game tattooed on my back. It's too bad they can't tattoo entire games. You know what's funny too, speaking of tattoos, I keep having this weird reality-slip in which, while listening to a favorite song, for a moment I'll think, "What a perfect tattoo idea! This song means so much to me, I'll tattoo it on my shoulder!" Then it takes me a full second to remember that you can't tattoo songs.

And I believe I've babbled enough nonsense for tonight.

Tomorrow: Doing an Asian Bodywork massage for high School Homeboy (my friend from Kung Fu who went to HS with me,) then taking Sano and probably Haku as well to the animal dermatologist (this rash of his won't quit, and now Haku is itchy, too,) studying for a little while, then the Gold Dragon is coming by after dinner for a bit.

Wednesday, longass school day and HUGE TEST.

Presently: Going to Mom's to watch TV and probably Dexter DVD. ^_^