After last week’s teaser, fave number two finally became playable in DFFOO yesterday morning, and I spent a good hour in a hotel room in Poland diligently maxing him. Once again, I have a lot of unnecessarily pedantic quibbles with the actual storyline of the chapter, but will save those for the conclusion of this thrilling saga (a fascinating read, I’m sure) – this post is just a few notes on Braska as a playable character.

It’s a good time to be a FFX fan who plays FF mobile games, because not only have I spent many hours over the past few days playing WotV in an earnest attempt at maxing ✨My Boy✨, but also over in DFFOO it’s finally time for BRASKA!!! Or, I guess not, as apparently he’s still not playable yet, even though the events of the chapter literally make reference to him fighting alongside Jecht and Auron … looks like I’ll have to wait another week.

The Final Fantasy Wiki says the following about the Al Bhed:

A mechanic called Alb created a race called Bedohls, humans who could not use magic but excelled at wielding machina … The surviving Bedohls became known as the Al Bhed, a corrupted mesh of their original name and their creator's name.

Ok, so you know how a lot of priests in FFX wear weird white semi-fingerless gloves? Do they not vaguely resemble the kind of gloves people would wear to treat arthritis?

Started reading FFX-2.5: Le prix de l'éternité, aka the novel that everyone hates. I think I did skim over the extremely sub-par English translation a while ago, but seeing as the French version is a properly translated one and, er, I can actually read French, I realised that was not the optimum way forward.

There are a couple of places online that list Auron, Braska and Jecht’s lines from the final battles in FFX-2, but nowhere seems to have the complete list, and the lists I’ve seen have a number of lines that are misattributed. It must be really difficult to transcribe them from the game, where there are all sorts of other noises going on and the lines are only triggered by specific conditions. Going through the actual sound files (is clearly overkill but) gives a much clearer impression of who says what, so obviously, that’s what I did.

More headcanons about Braska, less unremittingly Sad and in fact somewhat tongue-in-cheek featuring just a little bit of angst (because, a. me, b. Braska) – by the time he starts his pilgrimage, he hasn’t had his hair cut by a professional for at least eight years because everyone in Bevelle goes out of their way to snub him, and this for some reason includes the, er, barbers’ guild, all of whom are devout followers of Yevon I guess? Anyway, the reason Braska keeps his hair completely covered up isn’t because of some kind of religious thing, it’s because he’s been cutting it himself for years and he’s terrible at it. (fun fact I say this as someone who has been cutting their own hair for the last three years because going to ladies’ hairdressers as a GNC person is an extremely uncomfortable experience, and … let’s say it’s an adventure)

I stand by my interpretation that Braska goes on the pilgrimage because he’s suicidal. Nobody makes reference to this ten years later, but why would they? Everything everyone (except Auron) knows about Braska’s motivations comes from two sources: Yevon’s official narrative, and Yuna’s memories of her father. Given the nature of Yevonite society I don’t think it’s a huge leap to suggest they would be highly offended by the mere notion of depression and suicide and would want to sweep that under the carpet as soon as possible. As for the other, Braska surely wouldn’t have been telling his seven-year-old daughter about how much he wanted to die. Not to say there’s no truth in “my father wanted to make Spira’s sorrow go away”; I’m sure that’s a valid reason for his pilgrimage as well. I just think going through with it allowed him to achieve that while also fulfilling the personal goal of putting an end to his own existence. He’d been disgraced and rejected by his people for the sake of his marriage, and now even his wife was gone, and … he was a very lonely and miserable person, who decided that becoming a summoner would be the most profitable way of ending his life.

Do you like slash? Do you like suffering? Do you like celebrated but old videogames that are no longer especially present in public discourse? Then read on, friend, I’ve got a ship for you!

There are a lot of lines in FFX that are meant to add tasty bits of backstory to the experience, but sometimes they just don’t work.

The lines from this part of FFX are “It’s all right. It’s been long enough. This is your world now.”, while the official subtitles from the kabuki are “I’m fine. I’ve kept Braska waiting for ten years. The world belongs to you all.” The first and third of those sentences aren’t significantly different between the two versions, so I used the lines from the game for those because they sound a bit more elegant and are better known; the kabuki’s version of the second sentence was the reason I made this gifset in the first place! Tfw your OTP’s shippiest moment in canon isn’t technically canon and only actually involves one of them in person … sigh.

Two characters, one description

This is some kind of fansite, I guess? It’s just a place to keep stuff of various kinds about Auron, number one blorbo since 2021. Maybe one day I’ll try to articulate why I like him so much; until then, here are some miscellaneous things.

A page for the game The Second Reformation by Q. Benson.

Here is all my fanfiction! Much of it is also archived at AO3 under the name ovely.

2023 note Context: I was having a slightly shite time living abroad, doing a job I didn’t really like, and couldn’t wait to go home for Christmas, so I busied myself with finding a nice piece of Christmas music every day of December. I actually went home on the 22nd, so this playlist has only 21 tracks in it because after that I stopped relying on it as the sole sustainer of my mental health.

Nearly all of these are choral music; one is jazz, but that’s the furthest from classical that it gets. Quite a lot of them are things I’ve sung with various choirs; some are additionally ✨meaningful to me✨ (shoutout to the Boar’s Head Carol towards the end there).