In the interest of honesty, I like the character Squall, from the video game Final Fantasy 8, that I alluded to the notorious moodiness of in a previous item.

However, I am aware of the popular criticism that he is a self-centered and terrible hero and I think it is funny. I think it is funny but ultimately it is someone else’s joke. “Maybe I’m a Lion” is not something that Squall ever says but it is the title of some music that plays during one of his heroic moments near the end of the game, possibly based on the composer misreading Squall’s last name “Leonhart” as “Lionheart.” Although Squall also can acquire a replacement sword-gun that is called Lionheart. You’d have to be a complete nerd to know what any of the music is called, of course; even somebody who knows his last name is Leonhart and that his sword is Lionheart and that welsh rarebit is his favorite type of rarebit wouldn’t necessarily have studied all the backstory on the soundtrack, so anyone I want to think I am clever probably does not.

Popular culture commentary in illustrated form is never going to be for me since I take too long to draw things and do not reach the right conclusions that will have people know what I am trying to say, unless I personally do not agree with those conclusions, which means I will not be properly invested. And while on this occasion I managed to care enough about the biggest movie of the year while it was still in theaters, I tied it to something else from 15 years ago and even worse, offered a criticism, which means fans, the only people who would care, would not,

unless they missed my point, meaning they would be uninterested in anything else I did that couldn’t be interpreted as a dumb fandom homage, and I should not have bothered if I wasn’t getting money, and I wasn’t. This was by far the most popular “art” I ever put on the crumbumblr website, and yet it still wasn’t all THAT popular, and didn’t lead to any engagement with my other pictures. It won’t mean anything unless I keep drawing star wars junk, and the more I do, the less of me there will be in it and the less of me there will be in anything. The same as happened when I got conscripted into the “furry” gang. Nobody cares about thought or effort, just well-polished compliance. And as a result I became an angry person incapable of being positive or making friends, and even my compliance was shunned, and with it having no personal meaning to me, I only got more angry, and probably have written the same thing here about twice a year since 2011, which I forget, because I only write it to stop thinking about it, which means if the topic comes up again it will be fresh. Fandoms are a trap. And there is less immediate incentive to free one’s self from a fresh trap than an obviously old and sour trap.

The same person who forwarded my picture also forwarded this. I cannot well coexist with the 50 thousand people (assuming most of them both “like”d and “reblog”ged, therefore accruing a score over 100,000) for whom a drawing of chummy, angle-bodied, out of costume, ostensibly star wars characters but who knows, in a void, doing nothing, was the best thing they saw all week. This might as well be the cast of Streptococcus Paiella. Hey how about the next Star Wars movie is just a 3 hour Dawson’s Creek reunion, would you like that? You, as a fan of interesting characters, thought the ideal course of action was to reduce them to boring fans of themselves. That is to say, boring but POSITIVE, socially COMPLIANT fans of themselves. And an army-sized group agreed with your decision despite the mumbling fake-humble introduction you gave it. More people openly endorse turning interesting into mundane than the entire population of Monaco. How am I losing to this? I lose because I seek approval from people who approve of rubbish. IT’S A trap, I say!

Hey it’s okay, man.
Back to my main afterthought, dismissing Final Fantasy 8 just because one character is moody and noncompliant misses the whole point of why the game doesn’t work. I did own and use a copy of the game when it was newish, unaware of the criticisms of others, and discovered afterward that mine, while numerous, differed. Alright, so why am I letting them control how I refer to it in retrospect?

Even people in the game complain about how moody Squall is! Which doesn’t excuse it, but that means, if that is your sole criticism, you need to say more than that. His whole character development is that he learns to stop being as much of a jerk but without making any implausible leap of temperament or pretending to be happy in his miserable video game sword murder quest. So him being a jerk is not the reason the game is dumb, and ultimately not even true!

I think Squall’s less conflicted “friends” are lacking in emotional depth and send mixed messages. They hassle him to go on unusual journeys and then complain when he does. He tries to leave them behind, and they they know it, and instead of stopping him they magically get in front of him and mock him for leaving, and drag him back into their toxic psychological abyss. They would toss Squall in a ditch and laugh if he wasn’t good at murdering. Also I suddenly have an odd premonition that I should warn you I named Squall “Cupcake” on my most recent play-through.

Or Quistis would, anyway. Quistis is the most manipulative and entitled person around. In recognition of that, the game’s writers gave Quistis a fan club. In recognition of rubbish, Wikia writers wrote about it.

And through that I have learned that there are actual Quistis fans, and it shocks me that they can’t find a real person to treat them so poorly.

Thanks for standing back and telling me I FAILED, you who has never tried anything that looks challenging, such as putting that word into a sentence. I’m sure dresses made out of salmon meat are actually very trendy where Quistis comes from so I doubt she is standing against a crowd with that fashion decision. At least her crony, Zell, (the one in the middle) legitimately wants to be helpful and just lacks any personal ambition, but Quistis is a wretch.

But again, bad characters aren’t at fault. I was looking through my old screenshots for this and it just reminded me of QUISTIS everywhere. The fault is on the hokey writing, that would be funny if the characters were not supposed to be more realistic than previous games in the series. But I can live with them. The problem with the game is that it is a big glossy box of unfulfilled promises that somebody clearly intended to fulfill at some point in the process. I can see a framework for a very good game, and having that frame so empty in the end is more frustrating than something that is just lazy, like its contemporary Legend of Dragoon, and more likely to have a player dwelling on it 15 years later. Of course it helps if that player is out of touch with games that came afterward and looks for any opportunity to connect a new experience to it in an attempt to grasp some sense of belonging in a culture they hate but bafflingly want to be liked by, so long as they don’t know what else the likers like.

It looks as if I compared my dissatisfaction with final fantasy 8 to my dissatisfaction with Star Wars in one of my oldest existent website entries, and without clarifying, so apparently I need to do that now or risk writing something even longer than this when I am 45ish. And it looks like I, again, went with the crowd and blamed everything on a few characters, Jar Jar Binx and whiny bowl haircut Anakin, even though fault truly lies with bad writing, running time that exceeds content time, and the few good things being promptly forgotten or killed. And I more than likely knew that when I wrote that. But I lacked the foresight to consider “15 years from now none of the people pretending to like me, that I pretend to be likable by them for now are still going to bother.” Eh I thought I would be comfortably wealthy and widely respected for my bold opinions on current topics and uniquely profound artwork by 2006.

Finally, somebody who UNDERSTANDS me!

more of this!