silveradept | Sunshine Challenge 2023 #7: Zinnias for good friends and absent friends.

Prompt 7: Zinnia
While Zinnia has many different meanings, it is usually associated with friendship, endurance, daily remembrance, goodness, and lasting affection. The Victorian meaning of Zinnia are thoughts of an absent friend or a friend you haven't seen in a while.

Bonus Prompt: Red Rose

With Red Roses in my head, probably because I've changed my alarm wakeup to the version that's in Guide My Way, I have what might be the most easily recogniable leitmotif of RWBY in my head, which provides additional duty as the shorthand personality for the four characters of team RWBY.

Red, like roses, fills my dreams and brings me to the place you rest
White is cold and always yearning, burdened by a royal test,
Black, the Beast, descends from shadows,
Yellow beauty burns gold.

Ruby Rose (Red) is chasing the memory of her mother, Summer, and wants to become great because her mother was great. (Maybe after her adventure in the Ever After, she's going to start actually believing that she doesn't have to chase Summer's memory so much, nor take on all the burdens of leadership and morale herself. Weiss Schnee (White) is dealing with being outside of a bubble for the first time and seeing not only how messed up her family dynamic has been, but that the family company she's associated with has repeatedly been at the center of very evil actions. (She needs a family to accept her and to correct her, and the one she has by biology won't ever be able to achieve this.) Blake Beladonna (Black) knows full well what living a life where you're seen as subhuman is like, and the lengths that someone will go to in trying to protect yourself and seize enough from the majoirty to be able to live your own life. At the same time, she has a stalker who hasn't learned how to respect anyone's no, much less how to have a functional and happy relationship with them. Yang Xiao Long (Yellow) was abandoned by her mother and raised by Summer and Taiyang, her father, and she constantly believes she has to prove herself to others, either as the capable big sis, or the strongest in the room. It means she's constantly angry and her temper can explode at the touch of a hair. What Yang needs is unconditional love and someone who can be relied on to be there for her, even when she's not there for herself.

(There wasn't a Black Rose in the rose alternates for this year, so we don't have all four represented here, but we have three of the four.)

But I also want to talk about the zinnia. Friendship, endurance, daily remembrance, goodness, and lasting affection. Which, combined with the absent friends idea, is giving me an earworm. Specifically, "To Far Away Times" and "Epilogue (To Good Friends)," the two final themes of the SNES-era game, Chrono Trigger, (The Internet Archive offers the soundtrack of Chrono Trigger for you to listen to, although their tracks are out of order) and also "Life ~A Distant Promise~" and "Fragment of a Dream" from the sometimes-unacknowledged sequel on the Playstation 1, Chrono Cross. (The Internet Archive also has the Chrono Cross soundtrack.) The Chrono Series is worth playing for the music, although, as you might guess, the original is much better-beloved than the sequel game is. (The sequel is also less directly tied into the events of the first game. The links are there, but unless you're interested in exploring all the lore of Chrono Cross, you won't find them quite as easily until the very end, where the most obvious links finally appear, and even then, only when you manage to perform the Golden Ending path.) What resonates in the Chrono series, in addition to the main theme of changing fate and fighting back against what would seem to be the inevitable fate of the world, is the way that the cast of characters all form friendship bonds with each other throughout the narrative of the game. Even to the point where characters that are antagonistic can join up or be helpful to the main character in various ways to fight the eventual true villain. (Musical detail, both "Epilogue (To Good Friends)" and "Fragment of a Dream" are played as music box tracks, are the respective final tracks of their game on the Golden Ending path, and are of major or main themes of their respective game.)

In Chrono Trigger, the playable cast is assembled from entites of different eras of the history of the planet, from a Flintstones-esque period where the humans are in a struggle with the dinosaurs for dominance of the planet all the way to a far-future post-apocalypse world where there are very few humans left and a whole bunch of robots, many of whom are actively hostile to humans. Chrono Cross instead chooses to stay in basically one time period, but warp back and forth between two versions of reality, one where a key linchpin of fate lives from a panther attack and one where he dies, and therefore most of the recruitable cast has a counterpart in the other world that can be talked to (and often has to be talked to by their counterpart to unlock their third-tier unique attack.) The two games have some similar narrative beats in them, where the protgaonist is given the choice between the childhood friend and the new stranger (who turns out to be more than she appears) and there's always the implication of the protagonist having to choose between the two of them, even if by the end it becomes clear there never actually was a choice between them (usually because one of the two never declares an actual romantic interest in the protagonist.) And there's always at least one Greater-Scope Villain whose true nature is revealed over time until it becomes clear what the actual plot and the players are in the game.

Past that, however, because the games are both about setting right an event that's gone terribly wrong in time, when that event has finished, on the Golden Ending path, it comes time for the cast of characters who have bonded in friendship and battle to disband and return to their own times and places to live out the remainder of their lives. None of them make any decisions to stay together out of time, or to go visit someone else's time to live out their existences, or decide they'd rather stay in the other world than the one they were born into.To some degree, it's portrayed as the world healing itself, and having someone out of time or out of dimension would make that impossible, but it's also interesting how all of the characters essentially say they have their responsibilities to get back to, whether that's being a ruler, or protecting the ruler, or searching for their sister who was lost in time, or going back to a future that may no longer exist and trying to fit back into what is there, or their musical careers, or the lives they were living before the protagonist came through and disrupted them so severely.

It's a good set up for New Game +, where the game can be seen as one cycle of many, and the player gets to explore the timeline and choose when they want to fight the final boss and trigger the ending and see what happens with that particular cycle when the entire story is not played out before the end of the game. Unsurprisingly, most of those options end up with an aborted story or a story that has gone completely off the rails from what it needs to, since the threat of the real villain is no longer there to drive the party's actions throughout the game. (Final Fantasy XIII-2 also takes on this particular idea, since their entire conceit is about time-travel, but not just time-travel, but occasionally being shunted into alternate timelines as needed to progress the story. By rewinding the timeline and pursuing alternate paths where the final boss is defeated early, or a superboss is defeated by characters that are strong enough to beat them when they weren't intially, all of the alternate paradox endings are unlocked and played through, most of which show that the story stalls in one place or another and the characters are no longer able to complete their quest. Which culminates nicely in a final extra post-credits scene where the primary antagonist points out how the characters have explored all the alternate timelines and possibilities and have seen how futile each of them is, and therefore have done exactly what needs them to do so that he can be freed from the curse that keeps him alive and repeating his tragedy throughout all of time.) It's interesting to see that in all of the endings where the characters defeat the final boss early, it's not just a question of how the timeline is altered, but the results usually provide a commentary on how the friendships and relationships that are present are changed or altered by whether or not various events have happened, or whether certain characters have met the party or not. (Except the joke ending where it's the women characters commenting about how attractive the men characters are.)

New Game + also gives the players the opportunity to experience the story again, to see how the friendships play out differently, to take other choices, and to spend more time with the characters we've grown to enjoy through our playthroughs. Which stands somewhat differently to the Loot, Die, Repeat loop that accompanies most roguelikes and roguelights, in service of learning how to play the game for longer and more effectively on each run until there is a complete victory. (And then, in Hades' case, cheekily deciding to kill off the main character on the flimsiest of excuses anyway, just to make him try again.) It's kind of like getting the opportunity to do an officially sanctioned fanfic of the story from within the confines of the game. And, of course, for games and shows and other properties that aren't making anything new any more, the community of fans and the ways they remix the story and the gameplay and sometimes create even more interesting ways of experiencing the game and its characters keep people coming back to the friends they've made through their journeys, and they make new friends from fellow fans through replaying, speedruning, fic-writing, vidmaking, fanart, and all the other ways that people bond with each other over fictional characters. And I've heard of a lot of friendships that have been over shared fandoms, even as the fandoms change over the years, which is always fun, or they stay with a specific fandom for a very long time and take adantage of anniversaries and other things to bring in new people and relive things with them. It's a lot of our social impulses at their best. To Good Friends.

The absent friend meaning has resonance for me, as well. Part of having variable attention stimulus trait is that sometimes, if there is't a prompt or a reminder about someone, they sort of slip into the past and we lose contact for a while. I can return to it like there hasn't been any time lost if I'm prompted to reach out again or someone else does, but there are some things that just sort of fade out, not because I don't want them to, but because my brain doesn't do great with remembering to talk to people unless I'm prompted on something they would be interested in, or because they reached out first. (It can cause anxiety about being a bad friend because I didn't contact someone, and didn't even remember them in a conscious manner until they jumped back into the forefront of my mind. If you know someone who's like that, if you reach out to them, they'll probably be grateful for the contact and the reminder. And possibly embarrassed about how long it's been since you last had contact. If you want to talk to them regularly, schedule regular contact with them and get it into their external memory and calendar situations. That will make it much more likely they will show up at the right time and place for contact. Or at least will let you know if something has come up and they can't attend.) Absent friends reminds me of the people that I used to hang out with before I moved away from all of my support structures because there was a job that could pay back my loans. It's not that they're gone, it's that they're absent. Same with some of the friends that I've made while I'm where I am, although it's been harer to do that and keep those friendships going in the current times. So I'm one of those people who's made most of their friends through being terminally online, rather than someone who made a lot of friends in person. I like the online people - you're all smart and witty and funny, or serious and cool and doing all kinds of things that I wouldn't have dreamed of or been brave enough to do. And while several other platforms have gone away in the interim, and each time they happened, I've lost some people and not rediscovered them, or they haven't come back to a different platform, or, in some cases, they're no longer alive to follow us to another platform or to deiscover a new thing, it's always a situation of "to absent friends," the people who are no longer here with us.

But if some of you are still here and you've rediscovered me and you want to get back in touch, have fun. And if you're new, and what's going on here seems like something that you'd want to keep following (even though I do most of my talking about fannish things in other people's comments or in AO3 works), welcome, it's nice to meet you.

That's the last of the prompts for this

sunshine_challenge. There will be an outro post in a few days at the community, where the mods and the people who do the heroic job of reading trhough and commenting on all of the entries that come in will get to say what it's been like with us for the month, and then we'll wait once again for the winter-side (at least, for my hemisphere) version of it when

snowflake_challenge reappears in January.