Hello! If you're seeing this page, you've read all that I wrote for this story. Thank you so much!
Unfortunately, I have decided I am not going to finish this story. There are a few reasons for this.
1) I was writing this story to help myself understand my feelings about something that happened to me. I have since processed this and moved on.
2) This was going to take a long time to finish. I loosely planned where I wanted the characters to be and I didn't have time to write it all out.
3) Trying to write beyond what I have down makes me remember what happened over and over. It's hard to stay excited about a piece when that happens.
So what was the inspo for this? I used to roleplay Leonora on tumblr, but she had a falling out with her Palom which lead to the people behind the writing to split ways. It was not a friendly split. In a different life, I may have said "both sides were doing their worst," but that is simply not true. I was a person who always tried to compromise with others even if it broke me. My roleplay partner was nice, but wanted me to play Leonora a certain way. They gently tried to push me many times into their image of Leonora, which amounted to a manic pixie dream girl type. I like this trope when there is depth, but the depths I added made my roleplay partner feel insecure. They began to behave passive aggressively about it, and even admitted it once, but later accused me of being manipulative, which I was not. What happened then was that our characters ended up in an emotionally abusive relationship which was not good for either of them.
I don't believe in dragging people's reputations through the mud. That person may have grown up and realized they behaved unjustly toward me because they had some growing to do. At the time, I cut them off clean and wanted to keep Leonora's story without blaming them for what happened. I would not reset her character development simply because someone else decided to stop playing dollies. I believed the kind thing to do would be to write a Palom whose personality and demeanor was different, whose beliefs were different, while staying true to the story and also staying true to the roleplay events. I did not want to repeat the events and implicate this person over and over. As you can understand, this was a big project.
So this story was going to have Palom be a little bit more of a direct type. He was also supposed to be a very human person, someone you could understand, but someone whose actions weren't always healthy. Following Leonora around accidentally and on purpose was supposed to be a funny version of that. But it's still harmful and creepy irl. I wanted the story to continue like this. Leonora finally has her love accepted by Palom, but the basis of their relationship is already unhealthy. Palom has significantly more power in the relationship by having taught her. She could be easily influenced by him. In a perfect world, he would encourage her to be more independent and it would not have been unhealthy. But instead, he is so arrogant that Leonora's independence threatens him, and so he attempts to influence her mostly because he can't deal with his insecurities.
That's how it comes to be "When I Love You Isn't Enough". There would have been lovely moments between them, but there would also have been smaller tragedies mixed in. Not the normal sort, but the kind that explain why people should respect one another in a relationship.
I'm not sure what more there is to say. Thank you again for supporting me. Maybe someday I will write happier stories about these two, since those events are so far in the past. Final Fantasy IV is one of my favorite titles and inspirations, so I can't imagine never writing for it again. Maybe if I ever take a break from FFXIV!
Good luck your future endeavors!
