Who gets to be a fan, anyways?
It’s not a question I often ask. If I enjoy a novel, a game, a band, or anything else, I’ve always assumed that makes me a fan of it, even if I don’t express it loudly. Two weekends ago, a performance at the Chan Centre posed the question to me with a little more nuance; the show was A New World, an orchestral tour celebrating Final Fantasy’s 35th anniversary.
The performance had no setlist, making its contents a surprise, but as I listened to the performers tune their strings and woodwinds from the Chan’s third floor, I thought I knew what would come next.
I should first establish that I’m a fairly casual player of the franchise’s games. Of the fifteen numbered instalments, I’ve played only the fourteenth, but there are musical themes which are well-known or recur throughout the franchise. These are the songs I’ve come to love, and at an anniversary celebration I expected to hear most of them.
The first arrangement played of the night, though, caught me off guard. “Chaos Shrine,” a deep cut from the franchise’s first game, received an enthusiastic round of applause.
It certainly demonstrated the skill of the conductor and the players: the original song is less than a minute long, designed like many game soundtracks to play on a loop for as long as necessary, but their performance preserved the original melody while varying its dynamics and emotional depth from moment to moment.
Captivating as the song was, it was also unfamiliar — I had never heard it before, and began to wonder if I was in the right place.
This, it turned out, would be the model for the rest of the evening. Because no-one in the audience knew what would be played next, the moments before a song was announced created a feeling of tense excitement in the crowd, like each of us were holding a lottery ticket.
“Decisive Battle,” a theme from the sixth game, received a thunderous cheer before the first note was played; a pair of fans of the eleventh game went wild for “Heaven’s Tower”; and we were clearly short on fans of the twelfth game, as “Sorrow” got a muted response.
I clapped politely for each one, but the sense that I was missing something never went away. That feeling, and the accompanying worry, is difficult to escape in gaming spaces.
For as long as the internet has existed, games have been notorious for endless debates over who qualifies as a ‘real’ fan, often strictly limiting membership to those whose voices are loudest. My own experience has never been so hostile — I fit the straight white guy mould pretty neatly, and Final Fantasy’s community is better than most — but I found myself keenly aware of how contested fandom can be as I struggled to find something familiar in A New World’s music.
I won the song lottery only once that evening. I had been expecting “Answers,” the main theme of the fourteenth game, or “Eternal Wind,” the legendary and often-reused theme from the third game, but instead was blindsided by “Insatiable,” a battle theme from late in fourteen’s progression.
It was brilliant, of course: I have hours of memories tied to pushing my own limited skills to get in position before the next attack lands, and mixing that nostalgia with the wonder created by hearing its piano melody live lets everything but the music fall away. But when the song ended, I was reminded that I hadn’t felt that for any of the other arrangements — and that most of the songs surrounding it came from early enough in the franchise’s 35-year history to be older than I was.
It took another song I didn’t know to alter the course of my evening. Before launching into “Serah’s Theme” from the thirteenth game, conductor Eric Roth paused for longer than usual: long enough to pick up a microphone. With his baton in his other hand, he sang as he conducted, then turned to us and excitedly announced that this was his first time doing this for an audience.
That excitement brought things into focus. The conductor, who had all night been alluding to the franchise’s long history, loved each of its songs as much as anyone else in the room. The performers and audience members each knew exactly why their favourite songs were worth a trip to the Chan, and by gathering there they made that knowledge available to the rest of us. The songs that had already passed me by felt different in hindsight; joy is infectious, even when it comes from a personal connection you haven’t experienced for yourself.
As it turned out, the concert closed with an encore that gave me exactly what I’d first expected — an acoustic rendition of the franchise’s main theme. It was lovely, but I would still have been happy without it. I may not be the best-equipped fan of Final Fantasy, but what I don’t have is easily borrowed.