Just wondering how people handle this in fic. I tend to be pretty lazy and have people say things like “God!” or even “jesus” despite it being rather unlikely that Gaia has ended up with the same deities (though I think the script may feature both used like that? Don’t have it to hand, guess I’ll edit later…). Years ago I used to do the fanon thing of using summons as curses but now I think that reads really weird unless they’re comedy extended phrases. I see some people use “planet!” but that never feels right to me. Wondering if people have any other suggestions?
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I use “God”. In English, it’s a pretty generic exclamation. I wouldn’t use “Jesus” or even “Jeez”. Also the recent novel Traces of Two Pasts by Nojima confirms they had a god-worshipping religion in the past implied to be somewhat like Christianity; according to Ifalna its followers built the Sector 5 church. So, just as people nowadays continue to say “God!” or “Omigod” despite have 0 religious faith or even knowledge, I can see it being a lingering exclamation in their world.
I quite like more elaborate phrases such as “Ifit’s fiery balls” and “Shiva’s frosty tits”. Rewordings of Earth phrases, e.g. “Fuck me sideways on a chocobo” are something I appreciate when I come across them.
I don’t call their Planet Gaia. I don’t think that’s its official name, though I know a lot of people like to call it that and obviously if that’s what you like you should do it. I just call it “The Planet”. We, after all, don’t really have a name for our planet. It’s just “Earth”, “World” etc…
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I think I took up Gaia because of Gaia’s Cliff? I don’t remember. It’s always been Gaia to me.
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Yes, it’s a really favoured name for the planet in the fandom. I think it probably did come from Gaea’s Cliff and also from Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis which may have informed the concept of the Planet as a living organism.
Now I’m googling it and I see most of the websites that come up state that the Planet was retrospectively named Gaia officially, but I just have a feeling that’s not true. I’ve never seen it referred to as Gaia in anything SE has put out, and none of the characters in the Remake call it Gaia, either. They just call it “Our planet.” I think Gaia a name fandom kind of agreed on. However, I could well be wrong.
Gaia is the name for the main planet in FFIX, the other one being Terra.
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Yeah, I think my calling it Gaia predates any involvement in fandom, but I really don’t remember. I like it, though. Familiar but a little different. Suspect my spelling changed from Gaea to Gaia thanks to fandom, though. Maybe I’ll change it back. I like the weird.
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I haven’t had to deal with the issue yet, but I think if I do, I’d probably use “god” or “gods.” Several characters use the former in the script across different locations, and Leviathan is called the water god in Wutai, which suggests to me they have/had other types of gods there as well.
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