Rydia's Last Cure

♥ Part One: Childhood Ends ♥

Welcome to Rydia's Last Cure, my fanfiction novella based on Final Fantasy IV, my favorite roleplaying game from childhood summers in front of the Super Nintendo.

I'm an older millennial who's loved virtual realities and sci-fi/fantasy blend stories since I was little—and if you'd like, you can check out my sci-fi novel, Emergence No. 7, or my fantasy novel, A Shapeshifter, Cyborg, & Wisp, for my contributions to this storytelling aesthetic—but you're here looking for Final Fantasy, so let's talk about that more.

Why Final Fantasy IV?—So many options open up when I think "fanfiction"! So why did I choose Final Fantasy IV, instead of Lufia or Soulblazer (and that's just to name two other beloved SNES universes...there are so much more)?

In my mind, Final Fantasy IV was a turning point in not only my appreciation for sci-fantasy stories, but for sci-fantasy stories within video game culture; without Final Fantasy IV, we wouldn't have reached the wonders of Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, or Phantasy Star IV—or the enormous success of Final Fantasy VII, which helped pave the way for EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and other sci-fantasy successes—so in this sense, I see Final Fantasy IV as a real cornerstone for the RPG video gaming community.

Of course, if Final Fantasy IV hadn't set that cornerstone, another game eventually would've done it; but would that other game's legacy look the same as what we have now? The flavor of Final Fantasy—elemental weapons, godlike monsters, and arcanepunk machinery—could have very well taken a different turn, had the cornerstone not been set just so.

Which is why, when I heard Wattpad had a thriving community of quality fanfiction, I felt I simply had to write a FFIV story. Some 33-yro-crone's got to represent this classic, right?

Why fanfiction?—A lot of writers, especially of my age and academic background, look down on fanfiction.

Of course, just as many applaud it as much as I do!

The way I see it, any writing helps practice writing, regardless of if it's a grandiose, original, and fantastic universe—or a borrowed slice of a world someone built before—so given I'm not planning on any monetary gain from Rydia's Last Cure, (just the joy of celebrating an old epic,) writing this story feels no different than writing any other story...

Sexuality as a theme in a coming-of-age story—Since Rydia's journey from Leviathan's wreck, up to the point she meets Cecil, is definitely a coming-of-age story—she's a child when she exits the first part of Final Fantasy IV, then she reemerges in the story as an adult!—I decided, in addition to playing with the beauty of this sci-fantasy world, I'd also explore bisexuality and asexuality.

It worked out marvelously, since I wanted to celebrate WattPride 2018.

I figure these themes are easy to extract from the Final Fantasy IV world, and if our society wasn't as oppressive as it is, we would have already had bisexual and asexual characters in more of our stories. So why not add that element to the story, here and now, as I explore FFIV's world through my lenses?

♥♥♥

Original Prelude

[Saved for curation's sake. Feel free to skip or peruse.]

I have three favorite video game characters, and two of them are from 1990s JRPGs. I decided to write three fanfictions for them:

♥ Rydia from Final Fantasy IV;

♥ Jerin from Lufia & the Fortress of Doom;

♥ & Tyrande Whisperwind from World of Warcraft.

For June's #WattPride, I wanted to explore Rydia's bisexuality and Shiva's asexuality.

I identify bisexual, and I've had close friends who identified asexual, so I thought it'd be worthwhile to explore these fringed identities in the safe space of fanfiction, where setting and character are provided from the get-go.

Everything in this story is entirely fabricated; that said, I try to ring true to Rydia's personality, so if you fall in love with my interpretation of her, and you haven't already played Final Fantasy IV, this classic game is available in several variations... find a version of it, and give it a playthrough!

♥♥♥

Original Description

[Saved for curation's sake. Feel free to skip or peruse.]

In the 1991 Super Nintendo JRPG Final Fantasy IV, Leviathan swallows Rydia and brings her to the Land of Summoned Monsters, where he and Asura raise her as their own. Once Rydia reenters FFIV's main plot, she's lost her white magic, (and she gives her old friends little explanation why,) but over a good meal, she tells her friend Rosa the buried love story between her, Sylph, and Bahamut...

♥♥♥

First draft: July 18

Second & third drafts: August 18

Fourth draft: September 2018

Word count: third 238 / fourth 799