About the Dreamchaser Timeline

This timeline came about from a need to make some sense out of my own fics, rather than from any grand ambition. This is part of the difficulty with writing one-shots, vignettes, or poetry--several months into the Final Fantasy VIII fandom I hadn't archived that many words, but I had six different stories that I was beginning to have trouble keeping track of.

Also, by this time I had a basic idea of what I'd like to happen to Seifer during the course of my stories, his parents and their deaths, the time he came to Edea's orphanage at the age of four, to what he was like at age fourteen, his summer with Rinoa when he was seventeen, his life after Ultimecia, his return to Garden, and so on and so forth. However, I found it impossible to consolidate all this into one long narrative. Not only had I dreamed up thematically and structurally diverse stories, but writing all this material in order would require a huge amount of discipline, diligence, and time, none of which I had much of.

Compounding the difficulty were the facts that a) not all of my planned stories revolved around Seifer, and b) not all of my planned stories followed my "main" timeline. There were stories in which Seifer died, got amnesia, or got whisked off to different dimensions, for instance, at the same time that he was going back to Garden, meeting white SeeDs, etc., in my aforementioned timeline.

To preserve sanity I finally decided to name my main timeline and categorize my stories according to that. Some stories would follow that timeline, and be mainly about Seifer; stories about characters other than Seifer, such as Squall, Selphie, Zell, and so on, would be compatible with this timeline for convenience's sake, since they would rarely even touch on Seifer's timeline; and completely incompatible stories, where Seifer dies, travels through time, and dates people other than Quistis(shudder) and so on, would be kept separate. Poetry would be treated independently, since they're independent of any specific sequence of events.

Now to give a name to this timeline, or universe. The single thing that struck me most about Seifer was his inability to satisfy himself with the way things are. Through ambition, escapism, or simple stupidity(take your pick) he's always reaching for something just beyond the horizon, a reality invisible except to his imagination. Here is one who refuses to adapt to the world, but tries to adapt the world to suit him. With tragic results, obviously, but I nevertheless found his "dreamer" persona interesting.

I was therefore going to use the name "Dreamcatcher," but seeing how overused the word was, including the old title of my site, I used "Dreamchaser" instead. And anyway it was more suitable, since Seifer never does fulfill his dreams--but he sure doesn't seem the type to stop trying. Maybe he's older and wiser now and wouldn't charge after childish delusions headfirst, but that doesn't mean he'd be any more accepting of the status quo.

After a search, I found that "Dreamchaser" was pretty damn prevalent, too. Sigh. Well, I can't be bothered to come up with something better. The ol' brain cells have suffered enough. And the Google search for "Dreamchaser" is seventy-six pages long, compared to eighty-four for "Dreamcatcher."

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