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While perusing What We Learned From the Movies (believe it or not, I was using it and its associated materials in service of the reason they were on that server in the first place), I ran across this:
Remember Mary, from Tales of Destiny? She was the burly warrior redhead; wasn't connected to a Swordian*, so she was the one who ended up with all the "dumb" swords you find laying around. At the end of the game, she's probably the best call of the four or so auxiliary characters you can take. Anyway, her character arc, which wasn't really an arc at all but more of a short straight line with an arrow-thing on the end, hinged on a completely stale and cliché amnesia plotline, resulting, naturally, from head trauma during an event you find out about later.
Thing about Mary, though, was that you could actually believe she'd sustained enough brain damage to cause memory loss. She could be vague, daffy, was severely ADD, and sometimes took a bit longer than everyone else to figure out what was going on, on both an intellectual and an emotional level. She also tended to wander off whenever the whole team was doing something non-critical—in particular, I'm thinking of that great scene with Irene, where she disappears and then shows up five minutes later with ice cream. And if I'm remembering right, she was also quicker to resort to violence than anyone but Stahn and Khang, and Stahn was only the way he was because of a severe case of Don Quixote syndrome. (Khang, of course, had terminal testosterone poisoning, and counts even less than Stahn does.)
What you start with is a recipe for a total cipher: Amnesia is stale beans, and there's not much else in her actual backstory informing her actions. What you end up with is someone you genuinely like and sympathize with: Not only has she lost her memory, but her personality has been subtly altered; parts of how she's supposed to act are just dead, and she's had to learn how to route around them, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Even once she learns who she used to be, she's not going to magically be the same as she was; she'll always be a little bit slower, a little bit weirder, a little bit more frustrated.
And this doesn't just hit the emotional kicks, it helps explain some of her motivations in the story. Like the fact that she's traveling with Rutee at the beginning: If I was recovering from personality-altering brain damage, I'd feel a whole lot safer traveling with someone who had an obvious plan. Or, more poignantly, her optional reunion with the party late in the game. The stakes are now high enough that she's got a decent chance of dying, and she's just recently been united with her long-lost and presumed-dead husband. Hell, she's taken up cooking again. Fate of the world or no fate of the world, why in the FUCKING FUCK do you charge off to the Æthersphere with a bunch of basket cases and a passel of suicidal, emotionally crippled weaponry?
Well, how does it feel to be back with your husband again? He's just the same as he ever was, but... you're a little bit slower. A little bit weirder. Always a little bit more frustrated. Maybe you're a bit more comfortable with the people who only know you as you are, never knew you as you were. Maybe "Charge the castle and kill the immortal tyrant" is a hell of a lot less scary than "Re-learn what your lover is like and try to build a new life for yourselves."
_____
* Intelligent swords. Sounds bogus, but it actually worked out interestingly; effectively, you had an entire second party traveling along with your primary characters, and each of them had their own old grudges and baggage. Kind of like the 倧ζΆιγin Tales of Eternia, but with a bit more edge, since they were originally humans and got sacrificed instead of being gods from the get-go.
89. A slight blow to the head can cause total amnesia, but neither that nor a blow sufficient to knock a person unconscious is enough to cause concussion or other brain damage.
Remember Mary, from Tales of Destiny? She was the burly warrior redhead; wasn't connected to a Swordian*, so she was the one who ended up with all the "dumb" swords you find laying around. At the end of the game, she's probably the best call of the four or so auxiliary characters you can take. Anyway, her character arc, which wasn't really an arc at all but more of a short straight line with an arrow-thing on the end, hinged on a completely stale and cliché amnesia plotline, resulting, naturally, from head trauma during an event you find out about later.
Thing about Mary, though, was that you could actually believe she'd sustained enough brain damage to cause memory loss. She could be vague, daffy, was severely ADD, and sometimes took a bit longer than everyone else to figure out what was going on, on both an intellectual and an emotional level. She also tended to wander off whenever the whole team was doing something non-critical—in particular, I'm thinking of that great scene with Irene, where she disappears and then shows up five minutes later with ice cream. And if I'm remembering right, she was also quicker to resort to violence than anyone but Stahn and Khang, and Stahn was only the way he was because of a severe case of Don Quixote syndrome. (Khang, of course, had terminal testosterone poisoning, and counts even less than Stahn does.)
What you start with is a recipe for a total cipher: Amnesia is stale beans, and there's not much else in her actual backstory informing her actions. What you end up with is someone you genuinely like and sympathize with: Not only has she lost her memory, but her personality has been subtly altered; parts of how she's supposed to act are just dead, and she's had to learn how to route around them, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Even once she learns who she used to be, she's not going to magically be the same as she was; she'll always be a little bit slower, a little bit weirder, a little bit more frustrated.
And this doesn't just hit the emotional kicks, it helps explain some of her motivations in the story. Like the fact that she's traveling with Rutee at the beginning: If I was recovering from personality-altering brain damage, I'd feel a whole lot safer traveling with someone who had an obvious plan. Or, more poignantly, her optional reunion with the party late in the game. The stakes are now high enough that she's got a decent chance of dying, and she's just recently been united with her long-lost and presumed-dead husband. Hell, she's taken up cooking again. Fate of the world or no fate of the world, why in the FUCKING FUCK do you charge off to the Æthersphere with a bunch of basket cases and a passel of suicidal, emotionally crippled weaponry?
Well, how does it feel to be back with your husband again? He's just the same as he ever was, but... you're a little bit slower. A little bit weirder. Always a little bit more frustrated. Maybe you're a bit more comfortable with the people who only know you as you are, never knew you as you were. Maybe "Charge the castle and kill the immortal tyrant" is a hell of a lot less scary than "Re-learn what your lover is like and try to build a new life for yourselves."
_____
* Intelligent swords. Sounds bogus, but it actually worked out interestingly; effectively, you had an entire second party traveling along with your primary characters, and each of them had their own old grudges and baggage. Kind of like the 倧ζΆιγin Tales of Eternia, but with a bit more edge, since they were originally humans and got sacrificed instead of being gods from the get-go.
