[Final Fantasy VIII] Liberi Tenebri

[Bjorn]

I'm feeling whimsical and a little cruel today, so I thought I'd haul out this beauty.  This review is dedicated to Dracos, who I'm sure will just love this story.

The question that Liberi Tenebri sets out to answer is: what would happen if you swapped the genders of everyone in FF8?  The answer is: you'd have more angst, more creepy sexual overtones, a lot more psuedo-scientific explanations for things, and it would make less sense.

On the good side of things, the author has obviously put a lot more thought into the whole Sorceress system than the creators of the game did.  The parts of the fic that essentially are just explanations of the things that made no sense whatsoever in FF8 actually manage to be fairly clever and thought-provoking.

Unfortunately, to balance things out, this fic is just about the epitome of the slashfic.  Angsty internal monologues, bizarre behaviour that has no justification other than the creation of melodrama, everybody wants everybody else and goes about it in the worst of soap operatic tradition.... Believe it or not, the cleverly-renamed Tempest is in many ways less likeable than the original protagonist, Squall.  At least Squall strove for the apathetic coldness that let him get things done, rather than being weighted down by insecurity.

For discussing the quality of fics, I like to use the Ornstead (Os) units, where Mirrors Multiplied is 1 Os, anything by Ranma's Girl is about .1 Os, and aa really excellent would weigh in at the nano-Ornsteads region.  This fic's decent grammar and brave attempts to make sense of FF8 continuity earn it a milli-Ornstead rating.

Unfortunately, there is no current archive of this fic.  You can read chapters 1-85 here; for the current chapters (currently up to 96), you'll need to wade through this forum thread.

[Dracos]

...You bastard.

You absolute bastard!

I SHALL REMEMBER THIS!

Dracos