ADVERSARY: COMMENTARY

Okay, this is corny but I have a stupid sense of humor and/or reality, so, whatever. I feel that there needs to be some clarifications and appendices to this big-ass-monster of a fanfic that's taken me FOUR AND A HALF YEARS to finish.

Yeah, that's correct. I started this bitch in April of 2000, back when I was a wee 'lil high school freshman, brand new to the world of Fanfiction. There's probably no excuse for this thing to have taken a decent writer more than a year or year and a half at most, but I'm a lazy fucker, so there.

But it's not that simple. There's a story behind this story that you may or may not find amusing. If you hate me for it, we'll totally set up a martial arts match for which I may or may not arrive in person. Whether you like it or not you're going to hear it. Bioch.

I've always wanted to be a writer without being a writer. WTF, you say? Well, I can't and will never be able to bring myself to write a real full-length book. I hate it. It's so antiquated IMHO. However, I still love to read books, and write things, but just not long stories and/or books. Comprende? This led me to envision stories about stupid things like action figure battles and all that other crap that productive young kids think up. Back in elementary school, when girls were icky, I picked up Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger for the SNES. I love those games like I now love Rosario Dawson.

So I made up stories about them, wrote them down. I think my first game story was a mega man X game. And seriously, you may be like "okay, you wrote fanfiction. So what?", but it wasn't like that at all. I totally thought to do this shit on my own. I was writing Mega Man X stories BEFORE Al Gore invented the internet and Fanfiction. I was fucking oldskool.

Nevertheless, these little adages into X and Zero's totally hardcore adventures in whoopassville never lasted more than four notebook pages. I became characterized by never finishing anything that was not assigned to me through school. Fast forward to eighth grade. I broke my leg and thus spent an entire summer on the internet. Surely enough I came across and was like "holy crap there are wacko's out there just like me who write stories about videogames!" I messed around for a year with ideas. I never had something that went more than five pages.

Ninth grade. I had an idea. I would cure my inability to write the even simplest thing by writing the BIGGEST MOST FUCKING GREAT FANFIC EVER! I chewed my English partner's ear off daily about it. It would be a mashup of FF7, CT, and FF6(3). I was so psyched.

I then found out what I wanted to do was called a Crossover. In the world of Fanfiction, people hate you for writing these. You needed the best reason in the world to mix up games, unless, of course, you were writing a Lemon in which Tekken's Jin Kazama totally bangs Tifa Lockheart, entitled "Karate Fighters do it with their gloves on". Those are acceptable.

I spent the next three months in my room writing. Finding no way to thread FF6 into the story, I quickly narrowed it down to just FF7 and CT. I called it Adversary, although now I'm not sure why I did that. I wrote like, ten chapters in those months.

It was then that I returned to my first love: music. I joined a band, playing drums. We called ourselves "Mastering The Hook" after a few gutterballs at the bowling alley. We rocked out on Blink 182 and Green Day covers, but soon, our Freshman minds clashed, and we fought for creative control. Angered, I left the band. With nothing to occupy my time, I began writing again, after my three-month stint in the band.

Sophomore year, 2002. The band reforms. We are now sorry, and promise not to fight like that any more. We write lots of music. We play local shows. We meet lots of cool people/groupies (no, groupies do not classify as people). My writing goes down the toilet.

From that point until graduation, I begrudgingly write one chapter per several months, determined not to give up on an old dream. I bring the fic up to 25 chapters, and do not write any more for ONE YEAR.

Junior year, 2003. Our band is now known around the school. We are the coolest motherfuckers in town. People actually walked into school with boomboxes playing our music. We were so touched. I was living the best year of my life. Writing was nowhere in sight.

Senior year. This year. I am suddenly bandless. We stay together in spirit, but the other two bad brothers in my band go off to college, leaving me, the youngster, still in my last year of high school. Unable to ride the ghost of our popularity, I begin to come to terms with my own need to create. I listen to a Saul Williams cd. I am breathless. I, the rock star, fall in love with Slam/Def Poetry and Hip-Hop.

I write like a fiend. I Slam the hell out of everything. Every school project I encounter I transform into an oratory for my verbal slickness. The sun shines. I have found my place in the writing world.

Until the nagging ghost of unfinished business rears itself in the back of my mind. I begin to run out of gas. I cannot think clearly. I feel as if I am multitasking and leaving things undone. I know what it is. I just don't want to face it. I stop writing. I take a hiatus from the band. I degenerate into a Soul Calibur 2 addict. All is forever lost. And then.

July, 2004. Interim between high school and college. I get off my ass, and get a job. I realize that if I do not finish what I have spent so many years on, I will die in flaming gooey stuff, most likely. Or be a waiter for the rest of my life (which would be cool, but still). I write, then stop, and then LAST SUNDAY I begin writing like a crack addict until it is done. Speaking to you live from my computer at 5:58 PM on Saturday, December 18, 2004, I have just finished my story. It's over. I am finally free. So. Time for more pointless detail.

Q: What's with the variances in the expository style? It's like different people wrote this.

A: I wrote it over four and half years. My writing has changed many times.

Q: Why do I occasionally find a modern song title mixed in with the text?

A: I originally thought it would be SUPER BAD ASS if I put songs in with the scenes to heighten the mood. I then realized I was using really obscure music, so took most of it out. Some things missed my hawk eyes. Anyway, here were some more notable songs on the "soundtrack."

Opening scene/Angsty Crono – Deftones, Change In the House of Flies

Sephiroth Escapes Limbo – Tool, The Grudge

Crono and Yuffie get aquainted – Deftones, Around The Fur

Cloud and Crono's pointless fistfight – Godsmack, Whatever

Yuffie poisoning Crono – The Crystal Method, Murder

Crono vs Chi – Lunatic Calm, Leave you far behind

Crono vs Cloud at City Hall – Ludacris, Get the Fuck Back

Crono vs Sephiroth – Juno Reactor, Samurai

The End Scene – System of a down, streamline

That's pretty much all I remember. Other ones were not important or bad or forgotten. If you want to know what song inspired a scene that was not listed here, feel free to rack my small brain.

Q: You offended my fanatic obsession with such and such a character. That never would have happened.

A: OKAY. This is a hard one. First of all, I designed this fic to really take the hero characters for a dark, stormy turn in their lives, and make them out to be more realistic people, with gaping flaws like we all have. If a character acts OOC, it's probably because I wanted to show that character's less rosy, less heroic side. Nobody's perfect. Except Taki from Soul Calibur. And her breasts. Mmm. STFU if you disagree.

Q: I suppose I get that. But your Aeris and Sephiroth pairing is UNACCEPTABLE.

A: Yes. I agree. I thought it would be some kind of paradoxical, cool union of opposites, but it came out as stupid and unbelievable. I have yet to see this pairing work, but I believe it could, in some alternate reality. It would require pages of miracles and reversals and such to build chemistry between them. I did it in about five paragraphs. Oh well. You live and learn.

Q: Speaking of Sephiroth, WHAT THE FUCK WAS HE TRYING TO DO! WHAT WAS HIS PLAN?

A: Yeah, I apologize. First of all, let me advise all the writers out there to OUTLINE things. This way they add up at the end, and you spend your end chapters blowing shit up instead of frantically tying up loose ends. Now, in a nutshell, Sephiroth's plan.

Sephiroth is put in Limbo after fucking up the Planet. He then rips a hole in the universe, flies up to heaven, gets Aeris for NO GOOD REASON, and falls with her into the Negative Energy Plane, where (if you play D20 tabletop you know that) time passes slowly. So he porks her and has two sons which serve minimal importance to the plot except one is kind of funny and the other is a total pussy.

He then gets bored in the Shadow Plane, and rips (how does he do this!) a hole in the universe. The only way to get back to Midgar, is on top of Guardia. This is so he can fight Crono at the end, because I always thought that them fighting would be so cool. He then makes a deal with the super OOC King of Guardia to capture Crono in turn for a piece of land. He will make an empire or some shit on this land. I did not think that far ahead.

The party tries to blow Sephiroth up. They think they succeed but they FAIL. Sephiroth then captures Yuffie, turns her into an assassin thing, and has her totally seduce Crono, poisoning him (making her think she kills him) then wiping their minds clean for Mako Treatment. I had just seen the Bourne Identity (which is also bad fucking ass, don't you disagree with me) so a lot of that is visible in these scenes. They hang out and commit crimes for Sephiroth. He locks Aeris in a stasis tube because she suddenly returns to character and realizes she actually hates him.

With guardia, Yuffie, and Crono under his control, he kills the president of Midgar and has his son shapeshift into a presidential look-alike. He tries to kill the Strife family, but fails. Cloud frees Crono. Crono escapes, now hooked on Mako, and goes back to the mansion, and other things happen.

NOW Sephiroth starts a war between Guardia and Midgar, using his son and his Guardia influence to sway aggression mutually. They fight. He plans to rise above the wreckage and become the king of both worlds. Things don't work out so well for him. Did that explain everything?

Q: Why does Crono kick more than he slashes ? Did you even play CT?

A: Yes. The first year it came out. And kicking things is bad ass, so just shut up, fanboy.

Q: Leon was so pointless.

A: Yes, but he was fun to write. Every good story has a pointless surprise turncoat. Read some Dan Brown if you disagree.

Q: There are many mistakes in your expository.

A: I did not revise or edit a single chapter. Everything you read is straight off my copy of Word 2000, like a virgin, or something.

Q: Why such a sad ending?

A: If you must know, I changed the end to what it is now at the last minute, before I wrote it. I had planned for Crono and Yuffie to get airlifted to safety, and kiss passionately in the sky, or something. Everything would have returned to being hunky-dory and the last scene was probably going to be Crono introducing Yuffie to his mother. Looking back, I'm glad I chose the ending I chose.

It's a matter of taste for me. The story is dark. The characters are much darker and flawed (sometimes too out of character, but hey, we live and learn) and frankly, a Happily Ever After ending would have just been unsatisfying for me. I believed their sacrifice/death really showed the essence of being a hero in a realistic situation, and the sad truth of what often happens to people in their places.

Q: Right, okay, its artsy, I get it. But what happens at the end? It's really cryptic.

A: You figure it out. It just came out that way. It's something about them realizing the totality of everything and the fact that their bond surpassed their own lives. They accept death, and no longer try to fight it. Something along those lines. Interpret it however you like.

So, after all this time, I'm proud to say I have finished my first independent work, which, ironically, is really long. I don't like it. I would change much of it, but I firmly decided to keep it as a first draft, something to always learn from, but I am finally satisfied with it. I can sleep easier at night. I can move on to better things.

Yes, I am done with fanfiction. I have written my requiem from this strange and creative world where thousands write just for the sake of writing. It was my birthplace as a real author, and I shall always honor it, but I gots to move on, yo.

I have my poems, songs, two bands, screenplays, art, and other things which are writing without writing too much to satisfy my writing needs.

My band, Mastering the Hook has put together a demo. It rocks. Check it out at to see me some time on television somewhere. Maybe getting arrested for mail fraud or something, but I guarantee you'll see me at least once, for one reason or another.

I may continue my Le Cliché de RPG list at some point. I have another one half-done. I've forced myself to admit that many of them weren't that funny, but your sense of humor always evolves, and all you can do is move on.

And that's essentially what this stupid story has taught me. It's not going to be perfect, but it will teach you something about yourself, and you'll feel an odd sense of accomplishment afterward. So use your talents, whatever they might be, because if you don't, you will wake up one day and be like "shit, I wasted my life and I suck." I think that's basically it.

Thank you so much for your support and emails. Feel free to talk to me anytime. I welcome it. XStreetSamuraiX

Triad.