#ff6 headcanons

[deprecated-ivvvihours]

Planning a fic for FF6, as you do. I start to scrutinize the World of Balance map regarding the Lethe River System since it features pretty heavily at a certain portion of the story. ...I should not have done this.

Above is the Lethe River System in-game (portion of a map from KeyBlade999 on GameFAQs). Okay, it does that thing a lot of fantasy river systems do where there's a lot of splitting that isn't occurring in likely places for such to happen (e.g. low-lying coastal deltas), but we'll just. Work with that. That's fine. That's not a problem, we can just gloss over that. This is the problem:

This roughly is the path that Banon, Edgar and Terra ultimately take to escape from the Returners' Hideout northwest to Narshe. In-game they are clearly traveling downriver, with the current, and the speed of such travel is part of the point as they're trying to quickly escape. …but. By all accounts that river should be flowing largely southeast, emptying into the sea near Nikeah.

What the hell. I brought up my woes to a friend and they joked that obviously the topology down around the Returners' Hideout and north of Nikeah is WILD. ...okay. Alright. Let's do this. I'm no hydrologist, but let's roll up our sleeves and edit the map a bit and Frankenstein ourselves a solution that lets us have a downriver trip at least most of the way toward Narshe.

So basically we wind up with three separate river systems; the one in red is isolated and basically dumps right out to sea. The yellow one is likewise isolated and empties out into the sea northeast of Nikeah. The pink/orange/coral system is the actual Lethe River System which all empties out at one place only, where Sabin washes up. This is horrific. I'm tracking down my seventh-grade Earth Science teacher and apologizing to them directly. I can only blame this affront to geomorphology on the Warring Triad.

[lirillith]

Headcanon I can’t really figure out how to put into a fic, but....

According to Gau’s character profile, his most treasured possession is a teddy bear he had when he was abandoned.  Now, I know his father talks like he abandoned Gau right after birth, and I suppose it could be that when Gau’s mother died, the father just threw all the baby things in a basket along with the baby so he could chuck them out on the Veldt and never see them again.  But Gau’s father is not the most reliable narrator.  And Gau seems to have vague memories of him -- he thinks the pub in Vector smells like him -- and Gau having some ability to talk also suggests that he was raised by humans for at least a while. 

So I tend to think that Gau’s mother didn’t die right away. Maybe it was traumatic enough that she never fully healed, or maybe her husband blamed the birth for her eventual death even though it had other causes; maybe he blamed the baby, who came out with pointy ears and hair that ended up almost green (distant Esper ancestry, though none of them know it.)  Maybe he wasn’t fully crazy then; maybe he had paranoid thoughts about changelings or monsters late at night when he couldn’t sleep, or when the baby was teething or sick or just wouldn’t stop screaming and no one could sleep, but in the daylight hours he couldn’t resist that delighted baby giggle, the grin with four little teeth.  Or maybe he muttered and glared and kept his distance while his wife raised the child.  I like to think it was the first one.  But Gau was raised by at least one loving parent for a year or two.  He was learning to walk and talk, to make the animal noises in whatever the FF6 world’s equivalent of “Old McDonald” was, to chase bubbles and throw a ball.  He had a favorite teddy bear.

And then his mother died, and his father blamed the demon child who’d been sapping her life force ever since he was born.  So he grabbed the baby, who grabbed his teddy bear, and dumped his sobbing child on the Veldt and ran off.  And Gau grew up with exactly one thing to hold onto and vague memories of being happy and safe and loved.

[deprecated-ivvvihours]

Listen. I'm writing this letter to you from the fanfic-writing war front. I'm not sure I'm going to make it out alive. I don't know how much more I can take. I've seen things — characters I have to write interacting with normal-ass human beings but their ding dang heads are as big as the rest of their ding dang bodies and they're 4 feet tall and do you realize how much that would weigh. Do you realize? The images haunt me in my sleep. If someone comes home to you from this war, it won't be me.

I love you.

[deprecated-ivvvihours]

Some days, you're sick and trying to write up some quick notes about how a couple different characters in your FF6 fic are going to approach learning magic (if at all) and you wind up writing entirely too much for all the final cast.

On the one hand, it made me realize I have to think about what role magicite will play in the story, exactly how conscious and communicative I consider the Espers embodied by said magicite to be, and what is going to happen to the magicite collection the party collects over the course of the Cataclysm. Obviously in gameplay that last one is answered by "your inventory carries forward, don't worry about it"; but that may not be what I wanna do in a fic.

Anyway, an example Approach to Magic / Esper Teachers run-down for Celes Chere, per my notes (complete with headcanons relevant to my fic maybe someday):

Approach to Magic

Being the magic-infused soldier of the team, Celes learns sixteen spells naturally by leveling up. She learns a couple basic white spells early on (●Cure and ●Poisona); the ○Blizzard / ○Blizzara / ○Blizzaga chain; and at high levels, ○Holy, ○Flare and ○Meteor. She also learns a variety of “gray” magic, including debuffs (◎Imp, ◎Confuse), buffs (◎Protect, ◎Haste, ◎Vanish, ◎Hastega) and two that are harder to categorize (◎Libra and ◎Berserk). Compared to Terra, the general’s spell selections are more tactical.

She was trained to use her magic to the best ability the Empire could offer, which presumably included a lot of experimentation; this may be part of why she learned to seal magic with her sword. It’s not really a proper inheritance of a magical tradition, but she’s got clear aptitude for and experience with it as borne out by her high bonus MP, Magic Power, Magic Defense and Magic Block stats. 

I’m sure she’d take to learning magic from magicite readily, and diversify her spell knowledge easily. This would be especially critical in the World of Ruin where, post-coma, her physical abilities would have deteriorated.

Probable Esper Pals

Arguably, Celes has a connection to all of the Espers that escaped or are “rescued” from the Magitek Research Facility. One or more of them were directly siphoned for her magical ability, and symbolically all of them were. She obviously regards Ramuh talking about the Magitek Research Facility in a way that seems personal. This, at minimum, represents a link between her and Ramuh, Kirin, Siren, Cait Sith, Ifrit, Shiva, Unicorn, Maduin, Catoblepas, Phantom, Carbuncle, Bismarck, and Seraph. Golem and Zone Seeker only appear in the Jidoor auction house after that event so they may be implied to have been sourced from the Magitek Research Facility as well. 

Other than that, let’s take a look at particularly significant Espers from her to learn from:

Ramuh is of course the Esper that made her realize what the Empire was up to, and where her power came from. It’s an awkward connection, but I think one that Celes would take seriously. A source of ○Thunder, ○Thundara and ○Poison.

Given the spells that Celes learns naturally, Shiva is quite probably the source of her magical ability, or at least a major source of such. While Celes naturally learns three of the spells she offers and Zone Seeker is a superior teacher of the remaining two (,◎Rasp and ◎Osmose), I can see her spending some time with Shiva’s magicite.

A tenuous connection, but Quetzal washes up for some reason on the shore of Solitary Island, where Celes fished for Cid and (assuming Cid’s death) encountered the bird that inspired her to keep living and search for her friends. The Doylist answer is that it’s just a reward for backtracking to a place you’ve got no narrative reason to return to; but one could easily devise a Watsonian explanation as well. Celes naturally learns ◎Haste and ◎Hastega at levels 32 and 52 respectively, but Quetzal can still teach her ◎Slow, ◎Slowga and ◎Float.

While Phoenix is obviously most strongly tied to Locke, Celes is not unrelated to the story entirely. If nothing else, Rachel gave her life to restore Phoenix and wanted Locke to be happy with Celes. A source for powerful life-giving spells like ●Raise, ●Araise, ●Reraise and ●Curaga, as well as ○Firaga.