#without me having to handwave everything and take sledgehammers to canon

[elfyourmother]

Can I ask you something trivia Tuesday related? When you let Gisele make the jump into another universe, did you as a writer ever feel the need to change something about her to better fit the new environment? Or did you just roll with it and let the different circumstances influence her?

Sure! This is pretty funny though because (as usual) I never intended for it to happen in the first place. When I finally decided to give FFXIV a shot, I didn’t want to open a new can of worms so to speak, so I had the idea that if I just used an existing character as a placeholder of sorts, I wouldn’t be so invested in it or attached because of how my brain works. I’ve never been an AU person because I always have a very firm sense of what’s “right” for a character’s story, which is also why I’ve never been the type of person to make more than one PC in a game. ME is Imani’s story, DA2 is Marisol’s etc. any attempt to go through with another is weird and offputting and deeply upsetting to me. So I thought making Gisele my FFXIV protagonist would be “safe”, because surely I could never see her as anything but the Heroine of Ferelden who went on to save Amaranthine, marry Alistair et al and become Queen of Ferelden, have children, then later on form the Inquistory Triumvirate with Mari and Khedira? I could never, my brain doesn’t work that way, it never has.

[insert that ronald mcdonald clown wig meme here]

Anyway once my brain started being like “lol what if Gisele really was the Warrior of Light? She always did have a close relationship with a spirit, what if it wasn’t actually a Fade spirit but Hydaelyn???” and crack started becoming real, there really wasn’t anything I felt like I had to change as far as story, except the obvious thing that she skips performing the Dark Ritual with Morrigan and thus makes the Ultimate Sacrifice and dies to the Archdemon, which is the impetus for her soul being yeeted into this other world. I love fish out of water stories, I love the amnesiac hero trope, like there’s nothing about any of the fundamental premise of her FFXIV story that isn’t stupidly fun for me, which is why I got so obsessed with it.

As far as Gisele’s characterization...she’s still fundamentally the same kind of person. I didn’t feel the need to change her to fit the new setting. If anything, it’s the opposite: I feel like she’s finally reaching her full potential as a character, because if I’m really honest, Gisele fits way better into a Final Fantasy setting than she ever did in grimdark ass Thedas. All of my OCs are informed by a childhood growing up on FF games and JRPGs in general. Even when they’re not meant as intentional pastiches (my Revan, half my Warcraft OCs), those influences seep in subconsciously. And in DA, I always felt constrained with Gisele, hemmed in by certain stylistic conceits and design decisions. Gisele is an over the top high femme magical girl-esque heroine with crazy high power level who runs on the Power of Friendship and I always felt like she stuck out like a sore thumb. As one silly point she has white hair, ffs, and nobody did in those games besides Fenris. Meanwhile in Eorzea it’s easier to name the people she knows and loves who don’t have white hair. But the basic power fantasy I had in mind with her was always fundamentally a Final Fantasy one and not a Bioware/western RPG one. And I didn’t realize it until I put her into a Final Fantasy universe.

BioWare not knowing wtf to do with Arcane Warrior is a huge example of that, because the gishy spellsword archetype I had in my head was totally at odds with what was possible in the game. Then I saw the XIV version of Red Mage and it was spot on.

In general, FFXIV it feels like she came home in a sense, the same way I did on a meta level.