i learned some wild Final Fantasy 13 facts this fine evening

[queenlua]

courtesy of this random article i stumbled upon, which i do not endorse in its entirety, but did bless me with these random game development tidbits, so it's good for that much at least:

Now, the Accidentally Lesbians.

There was a point in this two-year development cycle when the character of Fang was some other character. This character had had a romantic relationship in the past with Vanille – and the change to Fang was done with minimal change to Vanille and her dialogue with some lines not even being rewritten, and, according to some sources, not even being rerecorded (which, if true, suggests they were recording game audio before the story was finalised). Fang was going to be a dude, and Lightning was going to be flirty, and they decided to change that by putting the lines from Lightning into Fang, making Fang a girl, and then giving Fang a need to protect Vanille.

All of this resulting in Fang and Vanille being coded as extremely gay, the kind of gay that’s so comfortable and present that nobody remarks on it, creating a sort of gayness-beyond-gayness, punching through the normal representational boundary and standing on the other side in a world where heterosexuality is so much not the default that it is literally unremarkable to find that default abrogated. Now, you may be a big fan of this, and if you are, cool, go team lesbian, but this was absolutely a complete accident and budget constraints, and not a byproduct of this mythos creating a space to wave the lesbian flag.

god, that's so good. i say this as a huge fang/vanielle fan. you're telling me we got that ship due to a late-game "whatever let's just genderswap this bitch" development snafu? hell yes gimme more game design clusterfucks like that lmao

also, far much less momentously but still entertainingly:

Did you know back in the original design combat was meant to be seamlessly integrated with the live map and Lightning was meant to have anti-gravity powers that let her transform the battlefield?

god. amazing. amazing!!! i love this big stupid game!!!

Comments

[pauraque]

Ha, I love that. Something a bit like that happened ages ago with a World of Warcraft quest where you're healing some NPCs. They programmed in some random lines the NPCs could say, including something like, "If I don't make it, tell my wife I died in glorious battle." Then after that, someone noticed the quest was only spawning male NPCs and 'fixed' it so it could spawn men or women, resulting in a quest where, if you're lucky, you save the life of a mighty sword lesbian so she can get back to her wife.

(WoW does have Intentional Gays now, but this was a long time ago.)

[lavendre]

This is literally one of my favorite bits of lore in the game that I think about all the time, re: the hilarious genderswap for Fang resulting in the most accidental gay maneuver ever.

Frickin' love FF13 man. I need to do a replay.

[scytale]

Amazing!

[queenlua]

would absolutely watch a replay of yours with INTEREST... it's suuuuuch a good game...!!!

[queenlua]

isn't it :D

[queenlua]

if you're lucky, you save the life of a mighty sword lesbian so she can get back to her wife.

may we all be so lucky, hahaha. love lil tidbits like this~

[lassarina]

I knew that Fang had originally been designed as a dude character and I loved what that did to the characters and their relationship.

[queenlua]

some rando decided to switch the gender bool on one character, instantly made them 500% hotter and made "all-lady FF party" not only possible but just like. kind of the default. hell yes

[lassarina]

I remember being surprised that both Lightning and Fang were so.....aggressively not "JRPG women," they were just amazing characters who happened to be women. I think it did the game a lot of favors and I really have to wonder who chased Nomura out of the room long enough to get it done, because it's so very anti-Nomura (until he just starts killing them all off, as he does.)

[queenlua]

ohhh i HUGELY endorse this plan. plot picks up hugely around that point iirc!!! (and fang is... very attractive to me personally lol)

[littlewolfteeth]

I had no idea about any of this but I love that pairing regardless, what a wonderful tidbit of info :D