| Throughout the universe there are certain laws of causality which always hold to be true-- the universal gravitational constant, for example, and the basic laws of physical motion. There is another, less commonly known principle which also holds to be universally true and has withstood every test thrown at it by amateur observers, although mainstream science has yet to explore it in depth. This is the infamous "90% of everything is crap" law. Generally, of every ten pieces of fanfiction written for any given game or series, at least half of them will be close to incomprehensible, of approximately the same caliber as what might be produced by a monkey randomly pounding on a keyboard. Two or three of them will have either decent underlying premises sabotaged by horrible writing, or decent writing sabotaged by a ridiculous underlying premise. The last one will have some redeeming quality, though it may not always be apparent. Now, Final Fantasy 9 fanfiction has proven itself no exception to this rule. For the most part, I've learned to gracefully accept the fact that most fanfiction is crap, much in the same way I try to gracefully accept the existence of ingrown toenails and intestinal parasites. However, I don't think I can keep my mouth shut about this issue much longer-- at least, not without taking my frustrations out on the world in a manner involving heavy explosives. It's not the sheer quantity of crappy fanfiction, or the pointless and gratuitous self-insertion fics, or the really twisted hentai fics pairing up people like Brahne and Steiner (okay, I've never seen it, but I'm sure it's OUT THERE SOMEWHERE). It's how the characters are distorted, mangled to fit the authors' absurd little fantasies until they have absolutely no resemblance to the original game. More specifically, it's how they write Kuja, and how stupid fangirl twinks are bloody well dragging him through the mud. Let's start with Assumption 1 that most of these people make: "Kuja is gay because of the way he dresses." Now, as someone who's written fics with m/m pairings before, it would be absurd of me to have any problem with gay characters. I have no problem with that. However, there is no indication whatsoever in the game that Kuja has any particular inclination towards either sex. Hell, he could be fond of farm animals for all the information the game provides us. (Okay, I don't really want to think about that possibility all that much, but it's the principle of the thing.) The only person whose physical attractiveness he EVER comments upon is Garnet, who is quite female. The only line of reasoning behind this seems to be "Kuja looks feminine, so therefore, he MUST be gay!" Uh-huh. Suuure. Because, as we all know, ALL gay males look and dress like women, have jobs as hairstylists or makeup artists, and collect Barbra Streisand limited edition plates. First off, Kuja isn't even human. Zidane looks pretty bloody feminine too, so it's not unreasonable to assume it's just a general species trait, and if I ever actually run into anyone who genuinely believes that Zidane is gay, I think I'm just going to laugh in their face. Kuja is also not what one would call perfectly sane. Kefka of FF6 wore considerably more makeup than Kuja did, and I don't see anyone prancing around insisting that Kefka is gay. Pretty boys are ubiquitous in Japanese games, TV series, and rock bands. It's just a general principle of life. If it's from Japan, there will be pretty boys in it. Many of them are in fact shown to be perfectly straight. The disturbing part is that 90% of the time, when authors assume Kuja to be gay, it's for the express purpose of pairing him with Zidane. (I'll talk about the other 10% later.) I'm sorry, but... this is just stupid. (They also conveniently seem to forget that there's a category called bisexual, into which over half of all people fall to some degree, but that's several pages' worth of rant in itself.) The only logic behind this seems to be, "They're the cutest guys, so they would look soooo hot together!" Not only is Zidane quite determined to stay with Garnet by the end of the game, but Kuja just strikes me as being somehow uninterested in relationships. The aforementioned 10% of pairings (discounting the few self-insertion attempts I've seen) disturb me even further. Now, I've thought of some decidedly twisted things in my lifetime, but I never once seriously considered the possibility of Garland and Kuja having a sexual relationship. This is, however, what the remaining 10% of fangirls seem to genuinely believe-- and that it was not consensual on Kuja's part. To paraphrase a conversation I had with my friend, Garland does not exactly strike me as a strapping paragon of masculinity, or indeed as anything other than the exact antithesis of someone who should be in a yaoi fic. In fact, what immediately strikes me when I see the words "Garland" and "yaoi" juxtaposed is that given his age and looks, he'd need a friggin' IV of Viagra to be even REMOTELY functional. Garland is not cute. He is not bishounen. He violates every damn general premise of yaoi-couple selection. So why, given all of that, do fangirls still insist upon writing him into S&M situations with Kuja? More to the point, why is he inevitably portrayed as some sort of dirty old leather freak who habitually beats and insults Kuja? I'm extremely confused about where in the game this was even remotely hinted at. Aside from the "Garland's bitch" fics, fangirls seem to be fond of either making him act the perfect part of the prissy, effeminate gay guy who takes it up the butt from anyone (including characters from other games and anime series), or a crude, horny pervert who chases Zidane around like an overly-hormonal dog trying to mount someone's leg-- neither of which is even remotely in keeping with his character in the game. They think, "Oooh! Pretty boy!", and then proceed to paste his name and face onto some cardboard whore who can act out their fantasies. What makes me ill is that they profess to love Kuja, gush over Kuja and babble about what a "wonderful tragic" character he is, yet they're not writing about Kuja. They're writing about some pretty image whom they've pasted his face onto, one who bears no resemblance to the one in the game. And Kuja isn't the only bishounen sort to suffer this sort of defamation of character in recent years-- Sephiroth from FF7 is another prime example-- but the Kuja fanfics really incense me because he's a character I like and relate to. It's like seeing someone stick your favorite character in a clown suit, smear silly makeup all over their face, and then proceed to show them off and declare, "Isn't he just soooo cool?" While we're at it, let's also dispense with the ridiculous notion that simply because a fic is full of angst, this by default must automatically make it "good." Angst can be very good if done properly. It can also be horrifically bad if done wrong. Angst does not bestow any inherent redeeming value on a story. "Rape angst" (which is like the name says: a character gets raped, and spends the rest of the fic angsting over it) is one of the worst, because it treats the subject with such inherent flippancy. The rape is put in solely so that the author can have the self-gratifying feeling of having written something "deep" and "meaningful" (though in 95% of cases it is neither). The rape itself tends to be just one more pointless, blatantly unrealistic sex scene in many cases. There's a rather nauseating underlying feeling that the author is patting herself on the back throughout the fic for having written something so "sensitive" and "tragic." I hate it because I like the character. I do not like him for the way he looks. I like him because I sympathize with him and I like the way his mind works, and I hate seeing him mis-portrayed in this manner. I do not want people to read the rubbish that's been spawned in his name and think that this is who Kuja is, what he's like. It almost makes me wish there was some sort of legal defense organization for characters who've been grievously maligned by fanfiction (though Kuja would have to share waiting list space with Sephiroth from FF7, Xellos and Zelgadis from Slayers, Krelian and Id from Xenogears, and a host of others), hence the title. The worst part is that I keep telling myself I'm going to stop looking at it, for the sake of my own sanity; that I'm never going to look at a single Kuja yaoi fanfic again, but then I find myself doing it anyway. I'm not sure whether it's because I have a taste for masochism, or because some part of me wants to know exactly what horrors are out there. One of these days, I ought to just handcuff myself to my chair so I won't be able to indulge my propensity for Train Wreck Syndrome any longer. |