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"Canon", "Lore", "Timelines", Those Things Don't Matter. "Fandom" Sucks And Shouldn't Be A Thing

Banshisenkou is probably gonna be both a sequel and a prequel to Fuukasetsugetsu and also it doesn't matter. Plus random thoughts on Genshin clones, Gundam, etc.

a g quax screenshot with the text "imagine hiring TakeGOAT in 2024 and not make her design a single black main character. Common Bamco L.

Asalam aleikoum how's it going.

Big rant. Maybe I shouldn't have written all that. Poorly edited because I'll never publish if I want to edit this text into something more professional. I'll feel too cringe and stop midway. Forcing myself to publish now rather than keeping it in drafts forever.

So ever since Fire Emblem Banshisenkou got announced, there's been people talking about whether it'll be a sequel or a prequel, etc. I think it's both. It's a quite common thing.

This isn't spoilers or anything, just a guess. I haven't played the game. I sadly didn't get hired to review/guide it. I didn't want to spoil myself so I haven't watched any of the preview videos from Famitsu, Dengeki, etc released these last few weeks. In fact while I retweeted on Bsky a lot of previews to support people I like, I didn't read any to avoid spoiling myself too much. Be it in English, French or Japanese. I barely watched any streams since release either. There's just a single impressions line I happened to see by chance from a certain preview. I'm not gonna say what it was but that line pissed me off, but at least thanks to that I wrote these two articles:

Anyway, this is a difficult subject because I don't wanna sound too much like "you're playing with your toys the wrong way actually", but I think lot of people these last ~10 years got way too Canon(spike)pilled, LoreAccurate(kkamanblade)pilled and fandom(inanodo)pilled. To the point it's actively detrimental to how people understand things.

Canon doesn't matter

I believe stuff like the Marvel Cinematic Universe are to blame. There's also how the anime and games industries changed these last 15 years. Anime became mainstream too fast with the start of the Netflix era. People can easily level up the Anime Watcher class to 99 but without learning anything on the anime otaku skill tree and without unlearning their biases and racism. Plus the fact that certain genres like fighting games have declined in global popularity and are more misunderstood than ever. Meanwhile sociage (gacha games) especially Genshin clones are growing.

A lot of people are wondering how come Banshisenkou could be a sequel to Fuukasetsugetsu seeing Fuukasetsugetsu has different routes and endings. This actually doesn't matter. It's not the first time a game with multiple endings gets a sequel. Stuff like fighting games have been doing it for decades. You can mix various parts from each ending to start the sequel with. You can make up a brand new ending that wasn't in the game and start from there, etc. It doesn't matter.

"Timelines" don't matter

Next, people think that if Banshisenkou is a prequel, then it'll have to make sure that everything in it fits with what happens in Fuukasetsugetsu. Again this isn't necessarily true and not necessarily how it works. It's also extremely common in Japanese pop culture to have a sequel that's taking place before the previous thing. So it's important to keep that in mind.

(While release order is generally better for everything, ultimately you shouldn't get shackled by these things. It doesn't matter which order you do things, just do it if you want to. And don't if you don't want to. But stop making up excuses like "i wanna find the best place to start" instead of just saying you're not interested and moving along. And if you watch/play something "out of order" you can always go back to something released before . You can just start with what you seem you'll enjoy right away at the moment.)

I’m often asked whether FINAL FANTASY VII REVELATION connects directly to Advent Children, but that’s not something I’ve ever explicitly confirmed. The Remake trilogy has been developed to embrace the wider FFVII universe, incorporating the lore and worldbuilding of various FFVII spin-off titles, including Advent Children, Crisis Core, and Dirge of Cerberus. As for how it all comes together in the end, I hope players will experience that for themselves.

It's so funny Hamaguchi Naoki had to make a tweet stating he never said whether FF7R3 will be directly connected to Advent Children or not. Because apparently people are going "FF7R3 will end exactly THIS way to fit Advent Children", while other people are going" FF7R3 will end with whatever the way FF7R3 ends".
I'm part of the latter category, but in the first place, this kind of thought didn't even cross my mind. It's like people don't understand anymore that a story can be changed, especially when we're talking about a company milking a franchise. I can guarantee you no one at Nintendo actually cares about the "Zelda Timeline" logic, if it means they can just cook something on the Cool Spot for another game. Especially since Nintendo and so many companies believe that remakes are a good way to "preserve" or "replace" the original game.

Ultimately you can just make your own canon and your own decisions. Personally if I don't like the story of Banshisenkou and what it brings to the table regarding Fuukasetsugetsu, I'll just consider it non canon. It's a simple as that.

Big Lore Isn't Necessarily Better

I also hate how this became such a widely used word and how people say "lore" all the time instead of just saying "background" "story".

Lot of people playing Genshin, its clones, or other popular free to play games like roblox barely ever played other games before. For a lot of people born these last 20 years, unless they had the curiosity or the external influence to look around more, these games are sadly the only things they ever knew, perhaps on top of some gun and ball games. (As an ESL I only truly mastered this expression a few months ago, I like it despite its heavy USA roots).
I think this is incredibly messed up and sad (Roblox specifically, seeing its exploitation and moderation issues but that's only tangentially related to the subject).

Back when I was covering Genshin on a daily basis, on top of writing guides for it, I've seen tons of people for whom it was the first anime-styled game, the first RPG they played, or even the first video game they played period.
I've seen countless incredibly bad and ignorant opinions related to games from English-speaking (and sometimes Japanese) Genshin players. People saying "gacha games are good because you never know what you'll get next and it keeps the Excitment going. Why should I play a gachaless action RPG like the Ys series?". Etc.
That's one reason why these games are so popular as the advertising campaigns on release in the US and Western EU were huge. Most of the young fanbase don't have anything to compare Genshin to and to realize it's not that good, and don't know the original anime and archetypes getting recycled. If you stick to ongoing Netflix seasonals hyped up by famous anime youtubers and tiktokers, you end up like that imo.

(This is extremely funny because Genshin and other similar games are regularly accused of plagiarizing famous recent mainstream anime and games, tracing their Opening Animations, action or fighting scenes, etc. So I guess most of the developers on these games are similarly Netflix-pilled as they only copy recent anime. Meanwhile, if they traced from (way better) 70-to 2000s anime openings and scenes, not only they'd get better results, way less people would notice since their younger playerbase won't get out of Netflix current hype anime).

Kids love information and tends to believe tons of info=good. Genshin and all its clones most notably put a huge emphasis on "lore" and having tons of information. It also has to do with it being a Chinese developed game (go read any Chinese shonen jump inspired manga like Wu Dong Qian Kun(I actually like this series), then compare it to an USA superhero manga, and a Japanese manga and you'll see what I mean).

Fighting games, with their intricate and deep storylines sometimes told in only a few lines of dialogues, were among the many things kids were playing in the past, but now it's all free to play stuff like Roblox and Genshin. So nowadays lot of people don't realize that bigger script does not equal better.

And all that "lore" is malleable. Especially in sociage (gacha games) ESPECIALLY in a game like Genshin which has all its business model built on releasing new characters. And on top of that is a travel story. Meaning the story will always focus on some new jingling keys character Hotaru/Sora (MCs) meet in their new travels.

Genshin's story at the end of the day is purely made to make money. And I'm saying this as someone who actually likes the story in Genshin (especially unvoiced side quests as they have way more time to polish them since they don't have to set them in stone probably at least 15 months before their implementation in the game so the popular fully-booked seiyuu can record them in time)
I've always said the story is the most worthwhile thing in Genshin. I hate the battle system and how it's all substats and DPS, player skill is irrelevant. The most worthwhile thing along the story is the exploration and its level design, which will probably take a nosedive when areas designed with LLMs will inevitably start getting implemented. Hoyoverse made it clear they're full LLM brained so this will be fully reflected in the game at some point. I assume it'll get really evident once the Teyvat story chapter ends. That's when I'm planning to dip from the game in 1-2 years insha Allah.

I'm still in shock after learning the existence of the word "multifandom"

I think it's been a bit more than a year since the first time I saw the word "multifandom". I didn't really believe it at first. It's kinda like the first time I read "yuribait" and didn't understand why the word existed.

The fact the word "multifandom" even exists and that people are using it is so insane to me. People got such social media brained that they need to justify liking more than one thing and daring to retweet fanart of a different series than the one they're known for. Pressuring yourself and slowly turning yourself into a sociopath. Like, imagining feeling the need to tell others "I'm a human being who eats, please be wary if you like me for that, as I also sleep and urinate every day".

I guess it's also the consequence of soccer club mentality spreading to anime these last 15 years. "Who's stronger between Phoenix Ikki and Trunks Blanco" debates have always been a thing, but social media brought forth an ever stronger constant need for approval and having the superior opinion on the internet. Constant need to put something down in order to show your other thing is good, instead of just liking both.

Fandom Brain and Fire Emblem's Scirocco

All the barely edited thoughts above lead to this. The real reason why I started writing this article some weeks ago. Over these last few months, counting down to the release of Banshisenkou, the Japanese Fire Emblem Twitter has been sharing a new character from the game every day. (I think the Nintendo News App shared them in English but I never checked). Anyway, at some point a few weeks ago, they revealed a character named Scirocco.

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Scirocco in Zeta Gundam op 2

Purple hair, bard, likes to charm women, literally named Sirocco. It couldn't be more obvious this dude is a reference to Scirocco from Zeta Gundam.

While I tend to avoid fandoms and fan discussion especially English discussion, I ended up seeing some regarding this character. And yeah I know I shouldn't make conclusions out of that. I know Twitter and social media aren't an accurate reflection of reality I know.
But like, those discussions were mainly people trying to guess which past Fire Emblem character he's inspired from, like past bard characters like Lewyn from Seisen no Keifu. Or trying to guess if he could be related to a Fuukasetsugetsu character.
And then it struck me. Some fans nowadays are so infested by "fandom" mentality that they only think in the confines of the "fandom" they know. It doesn't even cross their mind that a character could be referencing something outside that "fandom". They don't really understand how Japanese pop culture works in how everyone copies anything that gets popular, and how EVERYTHING is filled with Gundam references for the past 40 years.

(Also the people saying that maybe FE Scirroco is inspired from Lewyn is really funny to me because I've always thought that Lewyn was inspired by Masaki in Super Robot Wars, something heavily linked to Gundam).

And yeah it's kinda like, people don't realize "fandom" sucks and shouldn't exist. You can like multiple things. You can think about how Series A is influencing Movie B even if they're not in the same genre or anything. That's how art always worked. But sometimes it feels like some people don't realize that anymore. There's a loss of knowledge transmission from old to newer anime fans. (And it's not an issue limited to anime or games. It feels that way even for super mainstream stuff like movies).

And yeah this is all linked tot he Netflix brained, only watching new stuff mentality. I guess at least in Japan there's like a decent transfer of knowledge when it comes to something as major as Gundam at the very least. Even someone who haven't watched any Gundam series will still know iconic lines like "Solomon I have returned" or recognize Scirocco.

This lack of knowledge transfer is also due to how difficult it can be to watch older series. Old stuff regularly gets removed from official streaming services. Plus how companies act as if piracy is the ultimate evil, even though it's often the sole way to watch certain series. Some of them not even that old (like there are regularly series that are less then 10 years old getting removed from streaming services).

Anyway. I just hope people get more curious and keep trying to discover new things instead of staying in the confines of what they're feed by algorithms and popular tiktoks.

Thanks for reading.