Marichat isn't "secret meeting where we're secretly best buds" it's "chance meetings that happen once every 5 months but everyone thinks we must meet privately because we have no idea how to turn off friend-mode even when we logically should not be friends"
listen i know theres like, hot debate or whatever abt which is the best party for chrono trigger - do you go with double/triple techs? with individual power? do you focus on flat out damage or strategy? do you have a healer or do you only care about items? do you even consider melee attacks?
but none of that matters
because the best party is magus/frog/ayla simply for the VIBES.
frog - a chivalrous knight with a moral core of steel, honor-bound to his queen, duty-bound to save the world, the heir to the great sir cyrus' legacy, cursed forever in the slimy squat body of a frog-person, but still he carries the legendary sword Masamune, a sword made of the legendary rock dreamstone, with a deep and millennia-old history, host to two bright wind-beings. he is tormented by his past choices, but he cares deeply about his comrades and the fate of the world.
magus - the morally-questionable mage who killed sir cyrus without hesitation and cursed glenn to his frog-form simply on a whim as a joke. he has spent the first third of the game as one of the big villains, and it was he who gathered the fiendish army against the guardian kingdom. villainous and cold - except he has a truly tragic backstory that just keeps hitting, and a deep love for his sister, and in the end its hard not to at least empathize with him, since all he wanted was to save his genuinely Good(tm) sister. (also u could totally make a case for fiend-kind not actually being evil...)
the two of them have a cool 'tragic hero vs tragic villain' vibe going on. you have to consciously choose not to kill magus!!!! and if you dont, youre sticking the dude who LITERALLY ruined frogs ENTIRE LIFE and also his family and his kingdom right up next to poor frog! and magus like. has to face all the shit he did as he strode blindly to his goal! the drama! the pain! the emotions!
and THEN THERES AYLA
a fucking cavewoman with a 24-pack of abs, a Very revealing fur bikini, a loose grasp on personal pronouns, no preference for the gender of her sexual partners, and no sense of tact or personal space. she doesnt really understand anything going on at all. im not convinced she quite even grasps the idea of time travel. she just wants to punch things. ll
like.... you can go do sir cyrus' ghost sidequest with frog, and magus can somehow ALSO BE THERE, and frogs like. making his peace with the ghost of his mentor and best friend, and cyrus is all "magus ruined everything and shit but like i gotta move on" and magus is awkwardly standing right behind frog, and everyones super uncomfortable even cyrus' ghost, and theres ayla behind them both, loudly munching on a chicken bone because a big ghost isnt any weirder than a sapient evil technicolor AI named mother brain who has a hard-on for controlling equally sapient robots and recycling human flesh. there she is. vibing. in her fur bikini.
I still don’t get how tumblr spent a decade bitching every time JK Rowling opened her mouth, then jumped down Neil Gaiman’s throat for radically embracing death of the author and saying that any Word of God he might utter is just his headcanon.
Like. This is the better option, guys.
Neil Gaiman is the anti-Rowling and that’s very sexy of him
Honestly I love his approach to headcanons and stuff, because it encourages creativity in the fandom and that’s wonderful
This one gets it.
What he’s saying isn’t “your headcanon is wrong.” He’s saying “I didn’t write that part, but feel free!” And that is the healthiest attitude toward fandom I’ve seen in years.
Including from fandom.
It’s also avoiding a lot of the stuff that’s pissing people off about Marvel:
If it’s not in the finished product, there is no canon about it. There are no interviews about things that happened off-screen that weren’t even alluded to. What happens on the screen (and maybe in the script book) are the grand total of the show canon. And everything else considered, even his ideas, are just headcanons.
And that’s amazing.
But, here’s a good chunk of the fandom backlash against him headcanoning instead of delivering the Word of God:
Without being able to seek the approval of Fandom God, there is no Word of God with which to smack down the infidels who have the Wrong Headcanon. Because surely they can be proven wrong… except they actually can’t, and that ambiguity can be 1. too much to handle or 2. not satisfying enough when you only want it as a tool in an argument. Thus, it becomes time to lash out against Fandom God for abandoning us or withholding from us in our Crusade To Be Right.
Goes without saying that all of this is amazingly appropriate, given the subject matter of the work.
Look, Good Omens is the Great Plan, okay, but NOBODY knows if it’s the Ineffable Plan.
