Fanfic: Ghost Stories

[athenemiranda]

I did just enough research for this fic to start hating on Portugal. Sorry, Portugal. :/

Huge thanks to saphrawn for beta-reading and being German. (All German and Portuguese text has an English tool-tip translation if you put your mouse over it). While I'm at it, thanks to EVERYONE who left me comments on INTRUDE: you guys put a spring in my step

Comments

[trolljima]

It seems a bit silly to comment on something written two years ago now but... Well, here I am, commenting!

I was trawling for Gray Fox-related posts and when I saw this - a fic concerning the part of MGS canon that affects me quite deeply and personally - I was surprised and very curious.

(A bit of backstory - my grandfather was a captain in the Portuguese army during this war, and my father fled Portugal after being conscripted to fight in the same. My grandmother worked as a nurse for the Portuguese military and was posted to Mozambique at this time too.) About your note on hating Portugal a bit after researching this war: I really, honestly don't blame you. The more I read of it, and from what little my grandfather would speak of it, the more I understand how bad it was. It's a part of MGS canon that I've always been sort of fascinated and horrified by, because it overlaps with my life, and the lives of my family so closely, so it was interesting to see someone else's take on it.

ANYWAY ENOUGH ABOUT ME! The fic! It's beautifully written - I really liked Big Boss's characterisation, and Frank ;A; Their interaction is lovely. Just how I imagined it to be. The disquieting atmosphere of the whole thing as well... I can't even pick out one thing that I love most about it... brb filing this away into my headcanon.

[athenemiranda]

hahaha, no worries; when I first joined this comm I know I left comments on stuff that was 5 years old at the time. ;_; Archive-diving is amazing. So, np, and thanks very much for commenting ;_; though ack I can see so many clumsy lines in this fic now.

YOU HAVE MGS IN YOUR IRL. That is truly amazing. <3 What I want to know is, why does Kojima dig the Portuguese Colonial War? It's a recurring theme in MGS, especially when it comes to the Hunters (my two favourite characters). I'm not sure about the way he uses it, which is essentially as a backdrop for his characters to have dramatic/horrifying interactions with each other, without him ever touching on the war itself much - anyway, I wish there were more fics about it. (I once got into an edit war on the MGS wiki with someone who was claiming that tiny!Frank had been an anti-communist guerilla...brb crying at the existence of people who are so insecure they would rather REWRITE IRL HISTORY than admit that their cyborg ninja hero was a commie when he was ~12 years old. Been ignoring the wiki ever since. :/ )

[trolljima]

I've wanted to write a fic about Big Boss and the Portuguese colonial wars since I wandered in to the MGS fandom and found out that a lot of my IRL kind of overlaps. I've just never been sure of how to handle it without getting too involved. My initial reaction to learning that BB was in the Mozambique war was 'AWESOME SOMETHING I KNOW ABOUT THAT I CAN WRITE FIC OF' but then I kind of got cold feet wondering about how my grandfather would have felt knowing that I was writing little stories about something he suffered through unwillingly (and was eventually imprisoned because of.)

Was Naomi caught up in the colonial wars too? ... I'm getting the feeling that I'm forgetting something major here but it's 4am so my memory fail may be somewhat justified herpderp.

I think I may have found a few reasons why Kojima has a thing for the war in Mozambique at least? For a start it's another example of a war between differing ideals, communism vs. capitalism and such... It also seems that Che Guevara offered to fight for FRELIMO (an offer which they rejected) which may be what interested him to begin with? Of course, it's possible that he also chose it because it was set in a convenient period of time for his needs in terms of plot. I have many more thoughts on this based on historical TL;DR because I can't leave well alone, but this comment is reaching astronomical proportions =I

... I... I don't even XD was this person in the edit war trying to say that the Portuguese were communists, or that the Portuguese army used guerilla tactics? Because both are so wrong I don't even know what to say =/ WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?