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I wrote thus one about selphie from ff8 because i really like her. I think shes kind of cute and i wanted to write about her before she went to balamb but i couldnt think of good names for her firends can anyoen help? I wrote it a few months ago bit fixed it so it was the same as eveyrone had said i should have made hunting in the woods.

selphies training

Selphie was a student at travia garden training to be a seed. Seed were a special group of soldiers who fought for whoever hired them and they were a powerful force. Selphie was only 15 just now but se had been at garden for ten years. Like a normal school she had learned to reed and write but she had been taught how to fight as well and now it was a big week for her because she would get to finally pick what weapon she would train with. But just now it was Sunday and she would spend a week training with all sorts of weapons to see what she was best with. Since it was Sunday and because they were picking weapons the next week they had no homework so she was in her friends room talking with her and another friend.

"what weapon do you want to use selphie?" her friend asked. "I don know maybe the ak47 or the .44 magnum because it’s the most powerful handgun in the world what about you?" "I was thinking about the cobra assault rifle or m16 or mp5." The other friend spoke "I was thinking about trying to use the SOCOM because it can have a supressor and isn't as noisy as the famas." "But the AKs74u can have a suppressor too and so can the mp5." Selphie said to her "yeah but they look weird"

An instructor came and told the other two girls to go back to their rooms now because it was time for the lights to go out.

The next morning she woke up early and rushed to get dressed. She was about to run to the dining hall to get breakfast when she realised she hadn't had a shower. "oh no" she said and quickly undressed and put a bathrobe on before she went to the showers. She washed and went back but since she rushed so much she forgot to put her tie back on.

She was about to go into the dining hall when an instructor stopped her, Mr Smith. "Miss Tilmitt, stop running in the corridors!" he shouted, and she tripped up in surprise and fell flat on her face. "And where is your tie, Miss Tilmitt?" he asked. He had been a seed for a very long time and had seen a lot of awful things so he did not really care if she had hurt herself landing on her face. "I forgot to put it on." She said picking herself up and standing in front of him. "Well go put it back on and then you have a choice either do extra lines now or have to go to the training area after your class and fight monsters until it is dinner time." Selphie was worried if she did the lines now she would miss breakfast but she wanted to go skiing on the mountain tonight. She decided to do the lines, and when she had her tie on sat in the back of Mr Smiths classroom writing the lines out. She only had a hundred done when it was time for her to go to the weapons training class but Mr Smith told her the instructor there was informed she may be late. She sighed and kept writing even as the class of seeds who were revising for their written test came in.

"What is this weapon and what does it do?" Mr Smith asked, putting a picture of a gun on the projector screen. Selphie looked up and saw a tall blonde girl answer "It's the AK47 assault rifle, range 1 mile, 556 caliber " "Very good, Miss Treepe." He said, before he put another picture up "And this sword?" A boy selphie could not see answered. "It's a masamune, a long samurai sword that some people think is an excellent weapon but it is too long for anyone to use properly and it is very overrated." "Correct, Peter. Oh, Miss Tilmitt, finish your lines and stop looking at the board or you will get them doubled. Selphie panicked and looked down because she still only had 200 done. In any other school, the older pupils would have all laughed but in a garden they were better trained and so they all ignored her.

She made it out and went to the range to meet her instructor who was annoyed mr smith had punished selphie. "selphie, weve been using some assault rifles today, the rest of the class just finished using the m16. Do you want to wait at break to catch up?" Selphie said ok and took an m16. She aimed at a target and when she fired she was nearly thrown out of the room it was so powerful. "Okay, maybe that’s too strong for you. What about the m4?" Selphie tried that and though it was still powerful she could deal with it. But she couldn’t aim it very well and only a few bullets hit the target.

By the end of the day she had used twenty assault rifles and none of them were any good, not even the ak47 because it jumped about too much as she fired it. "Don’t worry selphie, none of us picked a weapon yet" her first friend said. "Its pistols tomorrow, maybe you can find one then?" her other friend said.

The next day, selphie was much less excited, as she was worried the .44 would be too strong for her as well. Mr Smith was doing the pistol training and they tried the 9mm pistol first. Selphie managed to aim it well, but she didn’t like it. She tried a few other guns like the desert eagle and the socom before she tried the .44 and was upset when it was too strong.

"Selphie, I noticed you were having trouble with the guns being too strong" mr smith said, and she nodded. "if you want any help with them just ask." But she didn’t

The next day it was machineguns, and selphie found a gun she thought she might like, the Scorpion. She went to bed that night a lot more pleased. The next day was weapons like swords and whips, and she found she liked a pair of very large nun chukkas, because she could take the dummy targets heads off almost every time.

The Friday was when they got to use a few weapons from every type again to pick one, and Selphie was wondering what was better. Even after a day using both, she could not decide, but her instructors helped, telling her she was better with the large nun chukkas than the machinegun.

After she had started to train with them she started to learn for her written test and 2 years later went to Balamb to do her field exam and passed that too, and became a seed along with her new friends. When trabia was bombed she found out her old friends had been killed but her training meant she blocked it out and kept going.

Okay, yeah, it's unusual to see an FF8 fic here, but I'm afraid even the novelty value of that won't escape the fact that Selphie is a character I really hated, that you got nearly everything about guns you mentioned wrong, and that in general this wasn't very good at all.

First off, the plot idea is an intresting one, that SeeD trainees have to select whatever weapon it is they specialise in. However, it seems extremly laboured, as if you didn't really have anything beyond that concept to use in the fic.

Second, spelling and grammar are not too hot. Your characters lines are mixed up in amongst the rest of the fic. Your capitalisation seems random at best and I presume you've typed words that sound the same but mean different and assumed since your spellchecker didn't flag them up, it was correct.

Third, the actual speech and story itself feels simplistic because your grammar fails you at points, that and the fact it doesn't exactly use a wide vocabulary.

Fourth, though I admit it's nice someones giving FF8 some real weapons, it's a shame they actually ARE real. And wrong. If you need a weapon in a fictional setting that didn't already exist, invent it. I shudder to see FF characters holding Armalites and Kalashnikovs. Incedentally, the AK is a 7.62 x 39mm assault rifle, it CAN hit something at a mile if you're lucky, but it's around 300 yards normally before you start missing.

Fifth, showing students materials they should really know inside out before they even reached high school equivleancy in a military school like SeeD, never mind the final exams, seems a bit odd to me.

Sixth, I don't know where you got the idea from that an M16 is "more powerful" than an M4, but they fire the same bullet because they are the same gun. I know where you got the ".44 = most powerful handgun in world" thing, and Dirty Harry was wrong very shortly after it was made. The trend towards huge handgun bullets has gone nuts since the 80's and now there's about half a dozen different .50 handgun bullets.

Seventh, the ending feels a bit lacking. There's no real resolution, just a summary, just that Selphie's decided to use her comedy oversized nunchaku and that she blocked out the death of her friends.

So, sorry, I have to be honest and say I'm glad we have no FF8 section here if this is the kind of FF8 fics that emerge.

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"Only the dead have seen the end of their quotes being misattributed to Plato."
-George Santayana

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here..."
-Abraham Lincoln, prior to the discovery of Irony.

This was utterly pointless. You wrote this like it was the character's journal, and like she has no sense of what might be important in her life and just jots down every single activity in sequential order. You don't know how to use punctuation or line breaks in fiction writing, you don't have any idea of how to build a story...and you chose to write about FF8. Try again, but try in private. Not here.

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Veni, vidi, dormivi.

I think people may be a bit harsh! Even if you dont like it, it takes guts to put it up. I think its interesting, maybe reworking in some of the ideas metioned without taking too much of the negativity to heart might help.

This post has been edited by Basch on 14th November 2006 19:58

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This is my story...

I will never be a memory

whats wrong with ff8 anyeay? sure squall wasnt a good character but everyone else was good and it was fun. and whats wrong with selphie?

i'm sorry i got a stupid thing that doesnt mater wrong. why cant i just say that the guns in ff8 are different from the real ones?

and an m4 isnt te same as an m16 its much smaller and i'm pretty sure tehy fire a differnet bullet

thanks for being polite basch.

Quote (Green Mage @ 15th November 2006 18:28)

whats wrong with ff8 anyeay? sure squall wasnt a good character but everyone else was good and it was fun. and whats wrong with selphie?

i'm sorry i got a stupid thing that doesnt mater wrong. why cant i just say that the guns in ff8 are different from the real ones?

and an m4 isnt te same as an m16 its much smaller and i'm pretty sure tehy fire a differnet bullet

Lets ignore the failings of FF8 and all content within and focus more on this fanfiction.The reason you can't say they're a different firearm from the real model is that to explain that would damage the story. If a character says "It's different from the real life one" it breaks the fourth wall, IE they know something that they as fictional characters should not. To explain it as a footnote or even in brackets kind of detracts from the story too. If you were to just randomly slap a letter and number like R1 down that would be better, because now you have a gun that could be anything at all and can create it to work however you want, rather than confusing it with a real one.

The M4 is a carbine variant of the M16, the standard issue assault rifle of the US Armed Forces, and both fire the 5.56 x 45 round.

But really, I think you should apply the advice I gave you in the other thread to this as well, and in addition try and expand this and also find a better purpose: Karasuman is right to say it reals like it's just a journal, and Selphie already had one of those in FF8, and it was boring as watching paint dry.

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"Only the dead have seen the end of their quotes being misattributed to Plato."
-George Santayana

"The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here..."
-Abraham Lincoln, prior to the discovery of Irony.

Quote

The M4 is a carbine variant of the M16, the standard issue assault rifle of the US Armed Forces, and both fire the 5.56 x 45 round.

Actually, they are replacing all the m16s and its varients with the m4 or m4a1 (a close varient). As it turns out the m4 is setup to allow only semi auto and a three round burst fire, and the m4a1 allows auto fire in replacement of the three round burst (I suppose they want you to learn how to burst fire on your own.) However they do fire the same round. The m4a1 particularly is often seen with a quadrant sight to allow more precise fire at a range. Also it turns out the m4 and m4a1 are closer related to very early m16s (which were indeed much smaller) the few m16s that are in service today are again being replaced.

Anyways, I think that Del S has a point though, you might want to look it up. I would suggest wikipedia, googling it, and last checking the armys and navys websites out. Im sure they want you to see all the cool guns they got. If you do end up revising it I'd like to read it.

Edit

Is this the fake Green Mage?

This post has been edited by Basch on 27th November 2006 03:37

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This is my story...

I will never be a memory