Final Fantasy IX Part #40 - Tourist 5

Part 40: Tourist 5 - Lindblum

Oh, yes. I love marking up the price to people I don't like, too. It was beers in college, and in boarding school...

It was strange that I was a fatty in boarding school because my friends and I were very active. We'd slink around campus at night playing Ninja as young'uns do, we'd go on these ridiculous downtown adventures where we'd get completely lost because none of us were from Oahu, and once, we went to Chinatown. We walked all the fucking way from Kapalama. But we caught the bus back, nobody is stupid enough to do 12-13mi uphill in late Spring afternoon weather.

So anyway, we roll down to Chinatown and buy some Chinatown goodies. You know, the usual: manapua, ninja stars, and a $20 novelty plastic crossbow. We get back and dick around a little bit, see how it works. We made quite a holey bible that afternoon, and that was all rather exhilarating, but the novelty soon wore off. So we went to the resident loser in the dorm and sold it to him for twice what we bought it for. Truly, we were entrepreneurs.

He's now in the Air Force, and we are unemployed, except for the fireman.

"Staying here is pointless now that we have the Falcon Claw."

Oh look it's that Justin fella.

I didn't do the back-and-forth, but it's pretty apparent from this alone (he later says, "even if I have to fight Nicole...") that Nicole is the Alexandrian Soldier. It's all a rather sad state of affairs.

We can't get to Lindblum Castle, and the Industrial District was completely destroyed, so our only options on the aircab are the Business District and the Theater District.

I had this ridiculous napdream the other day in which I was wandering around town. I knew I had something on my agenda, but I couldn't quite remember.

I ended up at this grand building and went inside. I heard a very simplified version of Terra's Theme from FF6 with just a harp running the melody and a low-octave violin sort of keeping a moving accompaniment, and I suddenly remembered that I was going to see a play of FF6. No, not the opera, but like a play of the entire thing. I thought this was really awesome, so I just had to ask myself, "Is this, y'know, really real?"

I stretch my cheeks and make a face and I tell myself, "Yup. This is definitely really happening. This is THE BEST"

So I go in and take my seat, and the curtains draw, and then I woke up. It was all rather disappointing. Yes, I am fully aware in my conscious state that a play of FF6 would be utterly ridiculous.

can love bloom on the battlefield?

"I'm too big of a star for a sleepy town like Alexandria, but that's okay.
I'll share my talent with those uncultured people."

"OOGA BOOGA BOOGA did you pee them now"

I think it's both strange and wonderful that FF9 shows a terrible side and a human side of the invading Alexandrian soldiers. It's like video games almost achieved a certain state of social awareness at the turn of the century, and then everything suddenly fell apart when Squaresoft got bought out. In FF12, NPCs are either Super Oppressed (everyone in the underground slum), Super Rich Assholes (everyone else), or both pointless and unaware of their contextual surroundings (that Bangaa who counts the floor tiles). There's no in-between, and no humanity in that kind of NPC design.

I read a children's book like this once. It was interesting and weird, I think it was by some French guy and translated, probably not an American book. It was about this soldier who lived in a trench and was taught to hate the enemy forever, because the enemy will destroy him and everything he knows. He is paranoid all the time and can never stop keeping watch, but finally, he decides to crawl out of his hole and put a letter in the other soldier's trench asking for a truce. He goes into the other guy's trench and sees that The Enemy, who is out of his trench as well and probably had the same idea, has a family of his own and people he loves and wants to protect from The Narrator. It's very... thought-provoking. But kids these days are illiterate anyway, so it's wasted.

When I become A Storyteller, more than anything else, I want people to enjoy what I write. And of course I want to make money. But more important than the money, possibly less than the enjoyment, is that I want people to be fucking literate. It's just not an Important Skill anymore. Literacy isn't a Desirable Quality in an employee and won't help you get a better job these days; all that matters is ingenuity and business sense, otherwise you may as well be doing any sort of menial grunt work. And this is what is projected on children by their CEO parents, or their zombified white-collar parents; otherwise, their unemployed or absent or paycheck-to-paycheck or illegal or jailed or otherwise-disgruntled parents teach them that Reading Is For Rich Assholes (this occurs far too often in the impoverished part of the Hawaiian community because reading is what fuckin' white people do, and if there's anything a Hawaiian hates more than white people, that's news to me, and it makes me very sad to see us like this).

Literacy will set you free... but being wealthy or separate is more important than being free, isn't it.