A good tragic antiheroine is hard to find

[mobiusstripper]

I swear, Lucrecia is the most exhausting character I've ever written. I keep wanting to write a longer fic from her POV but every time I try, I am BONE-FUCKING-WEARY after like 500 words. And then it becomes hard to keep writing because I'm so sure that the reader will also be bone-fucking-weary after 500 words that I can't imagine them wanting to keep reading.

Yes, it was my decision to make her an absolute mess. Scratch that. It was my decision to lean into her existing characterization as an absolute mess and heighten it up to 11. Because I need to make readers understand what would drive a person to do what she does, even if they hate her for it. I need to elevate her to tragic anti-heroine. I need to create a version of her that stays with people, whether they like her or not, and makes them wonder what they would do in her place. But I don't want people to read two paragraphs and go, "Damn. I'm tired of this bitch."

Comments

[mobiusstripper]

>There is a lot of fun in taking the more casual (or downright nonsensical) design choices Square made and trying to turn them into something that makes sense.

Yup! I love taking advantage of the unmined potential of things in canon. Also, when I'm dealing with things that are controversial in the fandom or where there is a lot of fanon, I go out of my way to play with that, too. There's a LOT of this when it comes to the Jenova project, so I'm having fun. For example:

- Hojo and Lucrecia doing drugs together was my "take that!" to the "Hojo drugged Lucrecia" take I see now and then, which always irritated me for reasons I can't fully articulate. Okay, fine. He *did* drug her, but it was completely consensual and doesn't detract from her agency in participating in the project. And then later on, he keeps her under sedation against her will, so now it's double-subverted.

- Everybody has a violent opinion about who Sephiroth's biological father is, but honestly I don't really care. I am much more interested in the implications of Vincent knowing there is a possibility that Sephiroth is his son and having to come to terms with the fact that he will probably never know, and of Hojo recognizing that Sephiroth might *not* be his son and convincing himself he doesn't care, and of Lucrecia not knowing for sure but changing her mind about which she *wants* to be the father of her child based on her present circumstances, than I am in actually answering the question. Questions are often much more interesting than answers.

- I never reveal Hojo's first name, although I have written about why he doesn't use it. Again, this is a case of the circumstances around the question being more interesting than the answer. Deliberately avoiding the name because of the character's visceral hatred of it just seemed like more fun than...making up a name.

>Also bet you can then have a lot of fun writing AUs of your own fic where they meet at different times...

You know, I've never really been one for AUs. I don't mind different interpretations of events or stories that play fast and loose with canon, but the whole "what if things were completely different" never interested me that much. Maybe it's my fatalistic tendencies. That said, I *do* love timeline fuckery and parallel universes in fiction (Dark and The OA are two of my favorite shows), although I've never felt the desire to extend that to fanfic for whatever reason. I'm probably missing out.

[purglepurglepurgle]

> Hojo and Lucrecia doing drugs together was my "take that!" to the "Hojo drugged Lucrecia" take I see now and then, which always irritated me for reasons I can't fully articulate.

Mine would be that it's too easy an answer and kind of a boring design choice. It's a challenge to make that lead somewhere interesting. A fic with a plot that hinges on that is going to need something else to do the heavy lifting. Though:

> Also, when I'm dealing with things that are controversial in the fandom or where there is a lot of fanon, I go out of my way to play with that, too.

Same; I like to try taking fanon I dislike or find boring and twisting it into something I find more interesting, or treating it with a ridiculous degree of realism, or parodying or subverting. One silly little thing I noticed when browsing around Vincent fic was how much of it involves him cleaning his gun. Why is everyone so fucking obsessed with him cleaning his gun? Why does he never do anything else? So I put a few things in to mock that. Sometimes I feel like half my writing is just me snickering behind my hand with myself at jokes that aren't even recognisable as jokes and are definitely not funny.

> You know, I've never really been one for AUs.

Ah I guess I'm using the term broadly since I think of anything that diverges from canon as AU. I'm generally not too interested in them for established characters, but for some reason I like them for my original characters. I even daydream timetravel crossovers for my own fictional characters every so often. It's pure self-indulgent trash. Anyway at the point where I've fucked around with an established character so much they might as well be original, I do have fun with it. Just shit like 'a scene where Lucrecia introduces Vincent to her parents'. It's mostly about having conversations happen that couldn't happen otherwise so I can hoover up everyone's emotions like a weirdo.

[mobiusstripper]

>the point where I've fucked around with an established character so much they might as well be original

I think it's fun that characters like Lucrecia and pre-hibernation Vincent don't actually have a ton of canon-bestowed characterization, so every writer has a radically different version of them, but none of it is ever OOC no matter how much it varies. I've seen so many different versions of them, and it's honestly fucking cool. I've seen Lucrecia as a naive idealist and as an absolute sociopath and plenty in between. I've seen her written as a blushing virgin and a femme fatale. I've seen Vincent written as a dashing ladies man and as a maladjusted loner. Even Hojo's characterization can vary a lot because there is so little information provided to us about the nature of their marriage - was it coldly professional or was there more to it than that? Is Hojo capable of romantic love, and how would that look coming from him? What the fuck even IS Hojo? What the hell happened there? (Obviously this is a question I greatly enjoyed answering - or not answering.) It seems like everyone who writes these characters puts a lot of work into crafting their own versions of them and becomes very attached to those versions. I like it because it reminds me of theater and how many different things can be done with the same script.

[purglepurglepurgle]

Yep! This is something that draws me to that arc; you have all the worldbuilding done for you and the drama taken care of and then the characters are basically blank slates. Hojo's great fun! I may end up falling a long way down that rabbithole sometime; I like a lot of contradictory versions, and writing Jenova Project fic does tend to pull you toward the subject of Hojo...