Nailah Wrote:I have been wondering about how people's relations to the canon lore is, and specifically how far outside of it you go with your characters. Are you fine with bending it a little, do you just do as you please no matter what, and how do you go about it?Thanks for making this topic.
I don't often make drastic departures from the main storyline, but I do bend quite a lot of plot points to suit how I imagine my character, Lyland Battersea, to be growing within the official lore. He started out as an arcanist, but is now a summoner, the only one of his kind in Eorzea at this point in the story.
As for how I go about doing this, it mainly depends on two things:
1) My personal reflections on the key themes, as presented by Square-Enix.
2) How I believe Lyland would react to key developments, based on his own beliefs and values, as I imagined them. My character is a part of me, no doubt, inspired by my personal experiences, but he does also have a "life" of his own. And his "thoughts" may not always be the same as my own.
Nailah Wrote:What drives you or could drive you to go outside of the canon?To fill in the details that are essentially left open to interpretation. As someone else pointed out, there are a great many things that are left open to us within the main storyline, and there's where our imaginations are free to run wild.
Our characters' backstories, for example, as left to us to fill out. And to make these back-stories fit, it's sometimes necessary to finesse some of the details. To me, it's more important to get the "feel" right, rather than to stick pedantically to the official story. In other words, I'll do whatever it takes to make my character "work", without breaking the official story.
Nailah Wrote:Feel free to mention examples if you want to, I am genuinely curious on what people have done/are doing that might be considered dubious/sketchy/grey-zone like.It'll be a huge list, haha! I'll keep it to a couple of examples.
(1)
Lyland is from the Ciedalaes. It's not entirely clear whether the Ciedalaes is a part of Limsa Lominsa. Canonically, the Lominsan Navy does have a squadron named after the Ciedalaes, and this suggests the archipelago may be under the thalassocracy's rule. But there's very little in the story itself to corroborate this. The Ciedalaes are usually mentioned in a very off-hand manner that doesn't seem to suggest Lominsan sovereignty over the islands. Rather, the archipelago seems to be under very loose control, and appears to be the hideout for various pirate gangs.
So, I imagine the Ciedalaes to be under Lominsan "protection" instead. It lies within Limsa Lominsa's sphere of control, but isn't actually under direct rule. And this allows me to explain how Lyland is a foreigner, despite being fairly familiar with Lominsan culture.
(2)
I've largely departed from the Anima weapon questline as it's presented within the game. There's too much background to go through. In short, though, the quest to build Lyland's Draconomicon is not driven by Ardashir, but rather by Lyland himself. Lyland has come to a point where he realised that he needed a better way to control the chaotic primal essences that now reside within his aether, and Ardashir's quest to create an artificial soul provided the means to achieve this.
The anima (which Lyland has named Saravasna) currently acts as a counter-balance to the roiling primal aether within that was coming close to overwhelming him, especially after he learnt to tap Bahamut's power through the Dreadwyrm trance.
More pertinently, Saravasna is essentially a "filter" that's helping to reduce the primal taint on his soul, allowing him to stay in control of his growing power without being consumed by it.
It pleases me that, despite this major deviation, there are elements in the official Anima weapon storyline that dovetail nicely with my own interpretation of events. Take for example, the latest revelation that the anima is sustaining itself on its user's aether. Well, that's basically what Saravasna is doing as well.
And if later developments in the canon were to throw up some kinks, I guess I'll have to manage by making further bends along the way. :p
