Oh, *yeah*, Square Enix?

WELL YOU CAN’T STOP ALL OF US

I’m being serious. My reaction to that was to get even more inspired about MY BRILLIANT THING. I looked at the screenshots and thought, “you know, I should probably look around and see if people have posted example game files using Ruby, to get an idea how flexible that is,” and also had an idea about the sprite problem. I might be able to use Magus’s glide animation! I suffer from persistent self-destructive behavioral patterns!

See, the thing I don’t get is why they don’t care about normal fanfic. Okay, so there are two things I do not get, because I also don’t understand why they care at all - but given that they clearly do, I don’t see why it shouldn’t extend to all forms of derivative creative works.

Or, rather: maybe I do see why they care, in the abstract. I haven’t gotten to it yet, but I’ve read that Square Enix rewrote the ending of the DS port of Chrono Trigger to make it more consistent with the sequel, Chrono Cross. This was not popular with a lot of the more old-school fans, who frequently prefer to think of the events of Chrono Cross as being non-Chrono Trigger-canonical. (Spoilers: Chrono Cross puts Lucca in a refrigerator.)

The impression this gives me is that someone on the Square Enix creative team is one of those people who identifies so strongly with the story they want to tell that they feel a literal sense of trespass when other people play around in it.* (See: Jo Walton**.) They feel that they have suffered an injury; and the present state of copyright law appears to validate them in this. So, they use it to attack the people whom they perceive as having hurt them.

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* Which is a FASCINATING position to take when the canon in question is 1) a video game, with 2) a plot predicated on the existence of alternate realities. Okay, guys. I'll be over here ON THE INTERNET

(my Squeenix love is so very conflicted)

** I can't link to the original comment because I've kind of, uh, blocked Making Light in my HOSTS file. So I'm sometimes capable of fighting off the self-destructive impulses, when artificial aids are available.

*** I suspect that I might even be more sympathetic to all this if I didn't have some deep-rooted, stubborn conviction of Square Enix's own creative dishonesty, because they did something with their story that seemed wrong to me.

**** I wonder to what extent the evolution of fanfic in its current form coincided with the evolution of franchise television and comics. (Were radio dramas usually written by a bunch of different people, or was there usually just one writer?) The way people relate to fanfiction seems to me something that couldn't have developed in a time when you weren't exposed to narratives that both 1) had a clear and inaccessible source and provenance (aka, the TV station or publisher), and 2) changed hands.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)