#75 Legacy: Canon Divergence and Conflicted Feelings
Originally posted here on July 13, 2022.
Wow, hi, Research here! I'm back. Been awhile since I answered a prompt, oops. Semester kicked my ass and then we've just had life circus after life circus, but hey, whatever! Prompt time.
Does your fictomere have an active legacy? If not, what do you/they want to be remembered for?
Oh boy does he.
For those who might not know me, my fictotype is Gordon Freeman, from the Half-Life games. I'm canon-divergent--Half-Life 2 never happened. After killing the Nihilanth, I escaped Xen back into Black Mesa and managed to get out with a group from the Lambda complex, escaping into a world forever changed, but never ravaged by the Combine's world-dominating Seven Hour War.
I've got a couple of legacies, both in canon, and in
my version of what happened.
Anyone familiar with the Half-Life games will know the legacy of canon Gordon Freeman, but I'll touch on it anyway, because I've got some thoughts and feelings on it and not everyone's familiar.
Basically, after ending the portal-and-alien crisis that he inadvertently caused, canon Gordon Freeman basically totally disappeared. Shortly afterwards, the world was invaded and enslaved by aliens known as the Combine. Since Gordon had fixed the last alien crisis, which had directly caused this one, people began to hope that he would return and save them. In canon, in Half-Life 2, he did. He took on this messianic quality and everyone began to believe that he was basically this superhuman savior figure, and the narrative supports this to some extent.
I think that's nuts and I'd hate it.
Hi, newsflash, Gordon Freeman is just some guy! Yeah, okay, he gets called the "One Free Man" and shit, but he's a theoretical physicist who managed impossible feats because he's observant, clever, quick-thinking, and happened to be wearing the Hazardous Environment Suit--basically Baby's First Power Armor. He's not a superhuman, he's not special, he's just the one who managed to pull it off. I'd find that kind of treatment really, really weird and off-putting, especially since in Half-Life 2, the NPCs are kind of... flat, for sure, and their main character traits are "oppressed by the Combine" and "totally in awe of Gordon." It's really hollow and weird, and between that kind of treatment and my lack of connection to the events of the second game, I don't really ever play it.
For me, though, in my "canon?" The version of events I have noemata for?
Yeah, sure, I get regarded as a bit of a hero. I did go to the alien borderworld Xen and kill their nasty bitch making the portals and sending beasts through. But at the end of the day, people still understood that I'm just a mute theoretical physicist in the right place at the right time who got really lucky and plenty of help. It was a team effort to take down the Nihilanth, to get me to Xen to kill it in the first place--it's just that I was the only one who could go in. It was too dangerous for anyone without an HEV suit, and, well, we only had the one, the one I'd been wearing for what felt like weeks but was probably only a handful of days.
My legacy, there, was as an unlikely hero, the face of an organization that fucked up so badly that it changed the world (mostly negatively) forever--we still got the occasional natural portal and some of the aliens moved in permanently, although in the case of the intelligent vortigaunts, it was pretty okay--but tried to make it right, and did everything they could to fix their mistakes. Black Mesa was ruined, of course, but Gordon Freeman and his team of heroic scientists and security guards and one janitor had saved the day.
So, yeah. Probably a "write about in history books" kind of guy, a "can I get an autograph" guy, but not a "SIGN MY BABY AND BLESS OUR LIVES" sort of figure like people would probably be like towards Gordon and his/my legacy as depicted along the canon timeline.