Why did I post? Because it's amusing and somewhat interesting to observe. That the thread is still alive. That's all. So I chime in. I think I'm being harmless, personally. It's nothing.
Generally speaking, I'm curious about fan fiction/concepts in general... and why it evokes passion. I tend to take entertainment more at face value and I'm not a fan like this myself, so I'm sort of picking brains here as well. I don't really understand it. And I don't just mean Dragon Age.. I mean everything really. I have different ways of keeping an ongoing interest in shows/movies/games.
I like the dynamic too, but I don't see romance. I like the conflict between the two. If anything, I kind of view Varric as the final glue that seals the Quizzy/Cass romance.. he's sort of an indirect matchmaker to me.
I can only speak for myself but I certainly had not really thought about this pairing before DAI. I know Cassandra and Varric interact in DA2 but it's considerably less and on quite different terms, where the player is set up to not know what Cassandra's interest or endgame is - is she friend or foe? I also don't really follow anything outside the games, e.g. the comics, the novels, etc. so I can't speak beyond that.
For me, what sparked my interest was some of the little interactions between them in Inquisition - Varric's increasingly good-natured (to my mind) teasing; Cass sassing Varric about 'wanting the Divine to see the chest hair for herself'; the fact she secretly loves his books and is a romantic; her not-always-successful attempts to apologise for what happened in Kirkwall. Combine that with conversations you can have separately with them where they almost inadvertently reveal some respect for each other's personalities (he envies her decisiveness and she recognises that 'his heart is virtuous' in spite of his lying and roguery), and that sort of sealed it for me. I'm not obsessively invested in it; I just think they'd be an interesting pair.
I'm struggling to think of other examples of things where I've felt an interest in stories outside the 'canon', so to speak, although there are of course lots of things I watch or read or play where I like the thing on the whole, but there are little things I personally would change or don't like. Take Warehouse 13, for example (and spoilers, if anyone is planning to watch it): I felt that the time reversal in Season 4 (?) was an irritating retcon because to me it erased all of HG's character growth. I wasn't happy that she had died, but it felt like a satisfying, redemptive end to her arc. To then undo all of that and not really explore her any further as a character was annoying. Now, I haven't written or drawn anything about how the show might have been different if they'd kept her dead, but it makes sense to me that it's an idea other people might want to explore.
Same with any stories where perhaps two characters are set up as star-crossed lovers, or destined for each other, but perhaps the actors don't have a lot of chemistry or it's written in a way that makes some people think, 'well they're no good for each other, X seems like s/he'd be better off with Y since they have more in common' or what have you. To take another WH13 example, I know that a significant proportion of viewers were hoping Myka and HG would become a couple, but instead Myka and Pete get together at the end of the series. Personally, I liked their sort of sibling/platonic friends dynamic better, although I don't hate them as a couple.
It's...it's imagining alternate universes I guess, all the myriad possibilities of 'what ifs' that we don't really have the luxury of indulging in real life where there is only one universe (that we can access, anyway), no save and reload, no extra life if we die. That's one of the beautiful things about fiction, I think; comics would probably have died years ago if people didn't keep rebooting and retconning and finding new ways to tell stories about the same people.
Why does fiction evoke passion? I think good fiction speaks to truths about reality, creates personalities that we can 'believe', psychologically, even though they aren't real. It feels natural to me to have feelings and opinions about fictional characters we like or dislike or care about in some way, the way we do with real people, because we see humanity in them and want them to be happy (or suffer, potentially!) And we want to see stories play themselves out in a setting where there's that get-out, maybe, that none of it is really real and there isn't pain and mess and tedious mundanity unless we will it there, and nobody is really hurt because when you close the book or shut down the game or turn off the film they stop. I love RPGs and MMOs and such but I would be less than useless in a real-life fight, I imagine. But I enjoy playing out that fantasy of being strong and noble and virtuous, better than I am, in fiction.
This is rambling nonsense now, but I guess it boils down to 'some people just like it', in that same unquantifiable way as some people love orange (me!) and some people loathe it. It's not the most satisfying explanation, but it is what it is.
(Edit: Great googly moogly this turned out to be rather long. I am not so good with the short pithy stuff these days. I think I don't talk to people enough and then all my thoughts come out at once like the river Angren at the last march of the Ents. /dork)
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, but then again I bet both mince pies and sticky toffee pudding are a staple in Thedas
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Can't forget the cheese wheel!
Retour en haut
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