Final FANtasy

I decided to try my hand at some slash fiction about the video game Final Fantasy VII. In the video game itself, there is a relationship that exists between Cloud and Tifa, but in my story, I propose that really there was a relationship between Cloud and Tifa's younger sister Marlene, almost as if his feelings for Tifa were just a cover-up. So here it goes...

After a long day of training to be a legitimate member of the revolutionary group "Avalanche", Cloud found himself following a familiar path to a place he knew he could relax: his friend Tifa's house. It was not Tifa that he wanted to see, however; little did Tifa know, it was her 6 year old sister Marlene that he wanted to see. Marlene greeted Cloud with a warm smile as he entered the door. After briefly greeting Tifa, Cloud proceeded to talk to Marlene, about how her day was. He stayed and talked, with both Tifa and Marlene, for hours, but finally left to go home and sleep. On his way out of the door, he grabbed Marlene's hand and gave her a gentle kiss on her cheek, a secret symbol between the two of them of their love for each other. 

Okay, so I'm really bad at writing this kind of stuff. And it really took me a long time to just sit down and write the blog for this week; it's definitely an exercise designed to make you jump out of your comfort zone. It seemed like an easy assignment, but when I actually sat down to do it, it took a lot more time than I expected - and my entry isn't even that long! It was a different kind of awkwardness though than writing the Wikipedia article, number one, because I decided not to post my entry on a public site. It was really awkward because it felt strange to use someone else's story/characters to make my own, and also the ways in which I had to use them (i.e. in a non-heteronormative way). Talking about it almost seems easier than writing it down - at least something in conversation you can possibly take back, but once you author and publish something, it becomes your own work, and you feel then like it's supposed to be a reflection of yourself. This makes it easy to understand then why some people felt uncomfortable with this assignment, because they may not personally agree with some of the kinds of relationships they were challenged to write about. 

Wiki-post

I was very hesitant participate in this week's exercise, mostly because I felt a lot of pressure to"get it right". Knowing that more people would likely come in contact with a wikipedia site than my blog here, I felt I had to be extra careful, not only about grammar, clarity of sentence structure, etc. but also about the accuracy of the information that I decided to publish. It makes me wonder whether or not other authors put as much thought behind the words they choose to publish on sites. It reminds me of Schiff's idea that the key thing on sites like wikipedia is to provide accurate information, whether it's a 15 year old or a college professor, even if this gives no privilege to the people who really know what they're talking about. And I started to think, well, maybe if there is something that I said that isn't 100% accurate, or can otherwise be put more eloquently, then surely someone will eventually come around and edit my post, right? I mean, looking at the history of the changes made to the site, there are hundreds of edits that have been made in the past year or so. It would seem logical then that with increased collaboration, there would also be increased accuracy, but what if that's not necessarily true?