(Originally published Feb 25, 2016, at JRPGsaredead.fyi)
A thought I keep having lately:
What was the last Final
Fantasy game with a male hero?
I don't mean a male protagonist (Tidus) or a male viewpoint
character (Vaan). There's a difference, too, between being heroic and being a hero, and another between being a hero and being the hero. It's the last of these senses that I'm interested in
here.
I take 'the hero' of a story to be the character who saves
whatever it is the story centres on the saving of (or, more likely, the
character who leads whatever effort it is ultimately achieves that saving). A
possible alternative account would be that the hero is the character on whose
virtues and vices turns the saving
whatever is to be saved. These are necessarily imprecise and shouldn’t be taken
as 'definitions', just flexible guides to what I have in mind.
So, which Final
Fantasy[1] last had a male hero?
Whatever Snow might think, it's clearly not any of the FFXIII games. Taken as a trilogy, the
hero is clearly Lightning. There are cases to be made that Fang and Vanille are
the heroes of the first game, and Serah the hero of the second, though
individuating the games like this risks losing nuances of the wider project.
I've dug into FFXII's Vaan before. Suffice it to
say that, however important Vaan's presence is to FFXII as a complete work, there is no plausible reading according
to which he, rather than Ashe, is the hero. Similarly, Basch is too much Ashe's
follower, and Balthier altogether too superfluous, to displace her.
What about Tidus? FFX's
protagonist is certainly more important to his game's events than Vaan or Snow
to theirs. I think it's clear, though, that his metaphysical alienation from
the modern Spira limits his ability to actually save anything. He supports Yuna's effort to save the world,
definitely, and does so in ways that no other character does or could, but
ultimately Yuna does the saving, and so is the hero.
I think it's fairly uncontroversial to say that both FFVII and FFVIII have male heroes. I don't really know FFIX well enough as yet to make a judgement – I'm eagerly awaiting
the Steam release to rectify this oversight – but my impression is that things
are more balanced between Zidane and Garnet than between, say, Squall and
Rinoa. Even if hero duties ultimately fall squarely to Zidane, though, it's
been fifteen-plus years since Square/Enix released a Final Fantasy whose hero
was male.
I'm not saying this to attribute some great feminist virtue
to Square's developers (in fact the opposite could be argued), nor as a
simplistic defence of FFXV's all-male
central cast, though I do think it establishes a context that makes the latter
phenomenon more interesting. Instead I want to look at it as interrelated with
(either caused by, a cause of, or some mix of the two) a general shift in how Final Fantasy has presented and engaged
with the concept of heroism, and videogame heroism specifically.
There are multiple ways to state my underlying thesis, none
of them perfect:
- 'Heroism' is a male concept and in trying to create female heroes, Squenix designers had to develop a new concept of heroism.
- In trying to develop new, more critical notions of 'heroism', Squenix designers found it necessary to dissociate heroism from male characters.
- The way we relate to traditional notions of heroism is such that any female character placed in a heroic role will seem masculine.
- The way we relate to traditional notions of heroism is such that any female character placed in a heroic role will seem implausible.
I could go on, but I've made enough of a mess already. Some
of these claims require sociological or psychological evidence I'm not
qualified or trained to obtain. Others would at least require some journalism
I'm not willing or able to do. It is difficult to state a 'purely aesthetic'
thesis as such, though, particularly since nothing can be 'purely aesthetic' in
this sense; the use of socio-political signposts is inescapable.
Still, there are enough different approaches here that we
can do some triangulating. Clearly, the nature of (video game) heroism is
central to what I'm getting at. So is some idea of associations between aspects
of that nature and gender. Both the perspectives on gender held by specific
individuals – designers and writers employed at various times by Square/Enix –
and those that exist as more general patterns in our society[2] are called into
question.
Heroism
I've written before about the idea of 'hero
privilege', a distinctive way in which characters framed as heroes in
fantasy stories relate to the societies that they move through. It can be
summed up this way: because a hero encodes a normative value (i.e. heroism
requires or entails 'doing good'), if they come into conflict with society over
a question of value, the hero defaults to being morally right. If society
opposes the hero, society is in the wrong.
This means that things which we ordinarily value, like
democracy, self-determination, free agency and human rights, if they belong to
characters who are tokens of society in a heroic narrative, may be overridden.
The people (or at least people-tokens) who make up a society can be
comprehensively dehumanised purely because they stand between the hero and objectives
the hero has deemed necessary.
This pattern is found across a wide range of media involving
the heroic fantasy narrative (the most familiar example may be the police drama
where the hero 'goes rogue' in order to stop a criminal who has evaded the
legitimate methods of law enforcement), but it becomes particularly pernicious,
I think, in video games. In some ways, JRPGs are most at risk of this problem,
though the genre has also produced some of my favourite critical engagements
with it.
Video games generally, or at least single-player-centric
ones, naturally give a special place to one particular character or
character-token – the one controlled by the player. Often games do their best
to pretend otherwise, but characters in a game apart from those controlled by
the player are not fully-rounded human beings with agency of their own.
What values a game ultimately expresses, then, will be
shaped at least in significant part by the way the relationship between the
player character and others is handled. If the player character is allowed to
relate to the rest of their world's population as an abstraction only, a blob
of simulated humanity to be saved or ignored, it suggests endorsement of the
player character's 'specialness' – and possibly by extension treats the player
themselves as special. Lana Polansky has written persuasively about
how limiting this can be.
On the other hand, if other characters in the world are
allowed to challenge the hero, if the hero's rightness isn't guaranteed,
something much more nuanced can emerge. In 'real life', we have to deal with
clashes of value and conflicting interests all the time. Our art should be able
to engage with this, but it can't if one particular position or point of view
within the work is given huge special treatment.
JRPGs tend to represent society in more abstract ways than
most games[3]. Towns will be represented by a handful of NPCs, a couple of
houses and a shop which sketches a hint of an economic situation. Social
authority is often reserved solely for traditional authority figures – kings,
parents, teachers – while other characters are little more than walking
signposts.
This means that JRPGs are particularly susceptible to this
problem. The player characters are often the only ones able to travel from town
to town; they often become absurdly, economy-devastatingly rich; to add unimpeachable
moral authority to that is to completely dismiss any humanity that 'ordinary'
people in this fictional world might possess.
To their credit, narratively-focussed franchises like Tales and even Final Fantasy have done their best to engage with this. Still, the
iconic Final Fantasy heroes, Cloud
and Squall, certainly benefit from elements of this privilege. Cloud,
particularly, exists in a world where the only major authority, the Shinra
corporation, is clearly coded as evil. There is seldom any question over
whether Cloud is right to challenge them, and, apart from other playable
characters, he is seldom answerable to anyone else over whether or not he does.
Cloud and Squall are both presented as loners. The female
heroes of the 21st-century Final
Fantasy games, though, are more commonly seen in group contexts. Nowhere is
this more apparent than with Yuna; Tidus, the player's viewpoint, spends the
first third of the game watching Yuna interact with other people more than
talking to her himself. On Besaid, Lulu and Wakka keep Tidus at arm's length
while the locals crowd around to wish Yuna well. At Kilika, Yuna tends to the
traumatised community in the wake of Sin's attack, more a priestess than a
summoner.
It isn't really until the infamous laughing scene at Luca
that Tidus gets to connect with Yuna directly. After that, episodes involving
the Crusaders' Operation Mi'hen and Seymour's wedding continue to emphasise how
much Yuna is a part of Spiran society, how many different factions have an
interest in her and compete to determine her actions.
When Yuna and her guardians do finally turn against the
expectations of society, it's a much less trivial thing than Cloud's opposition
to Shinra. And the weight of their decision is reinforced by a sequel in which
the transformation of the religious order, and resulting schism in society,
dominate much of the plot.
For Ashe, as a princess trying to restore her kingdom, relationships
to society are even more complex. Much of Ashe's journey is concerned with not
just the fact but the legitimacy of her
throne. Initially, she seeks proof of her lineage in order to appeal to such
impartial authorities as Ivalice has, believing that if she can just establish
herself as the legal ruler she will be able to at least negotiate with the
occupying empire of Archadia.
When the Archadians reveal the extent to which they're
willing to use force regardless of any legal or traditional authority, Ashe's
quest switches to one for power. She seeks a weapon powerful enough to serve as
a deterrent to further Imperial aggression. Much of what happens thereafter,
though, from Vaan's presence to the devastated ruins of Nabradia, is structured
to reveal the absurd moral compromise that weapons of mass destruction entail.
To whatever extent Ashe actually earns legitimacy as a ruler
in the story, it comes from giving up such power; from not only throwing away
her own opportunity to wield it, but from working to dismantle and stop the
superweapons of others. The gods of Ivalice offer her the weapon she seeks, but
only after she refuses them and those
who seek to unseat them can she actually restore her kingdom.
With Lightning, things are twistier still. Lightning has no
great heralded societal place; she's just a soldier. Being a soldier, and being
the persona a woman – Claire Farron – has constructed in order to perform
soldierhood, she is already divorced from the kind of social ties that Yuna and
Ashe experience. By the start of FFXIII,
Lightning has also cast off military authority and is acting on her own.
In fact, Lightning's determined preference for acting alone
rings throughout the trilogy, right up until the final hours of Lightning Returns (about which I don't
want to say too much because the Steam release is still fairly recent). But it
does so because people keep placing demands on Lightning, not always without
justification.
When Lightning frees Sazh in the middle of the Purge at the
beginning of the game, she's obviously frustrated at his tagging along – but
what else can he do? The game makes clear that his options are go with
Lightning or fight and most likely die alone. Later, in the Vile Peaks, it's
Hope who becomes the burden, this time grounded in a vague idea of connection
between Lightning and Snow (of whom more later).
Lightning's old military organisation tries to lay claim to
her in its power struggle with other factions in Cocoon's government. And
there's the overarching question of which fal'cie power has claimed the party
and in doing so forced them together – Lightning spends a long time trying to
ignore her brand in favour of saving Serah.
So while Lightning definitely aspires to the solitary
freedom of the hero, Final Fantasy XIII
keeps finding ways to deny it to her. In the second game, Lightning gets her
solitude, at the expense of being totally narratively inert – literally trapped
outside of time – and having the focus shift onto her sister.
Serah, by the way, is consistently shown as deeply engaged
with communities and social ties. She's a teacher, she lives with a group of
close friends, her objectives in the game are always established according to
the needs of local communities, and her only 'heroic' motivation is the
restoration of her family, through getting Snow and Lightning back. The extent
to which she's defined by this signifiers of archetypal femininity is
heavy-handed, even clumsy at times.
Lightning Returns
crams Lightning into a cramped, closed-circle world stuffed full of individual
NPCs with distinct needs and objectives. Since the player can only raise Lightning's stats by
completing their sidequests, Lightning is forced to draw power from specific
social connections. Her only escape is to her base on the Ark, another place
outside of time and space where Lightning can be a demigod, but only
ineffectually.
LR also runs on a
fixed internal clock – as long as Lightning is outside the Ark, time flows and
cannot be clawed back. Sidequest-givers are only available at particular times,
and once missed may be missed for good. The need to be in specific places at
specific times to gain the power needed to complete the game is another way of
limiting Lightning through social connections, of making concrete the demands
society places on her.
Ultimately, the structure of the trilogy undercuts Claire
Farron's attempt to perform the 'Lightning' persona. Given that FFXIII director Motomu Toriyama specifically
asked Tetsuya Nomura to design Lightning as "a female version of Cloud from
FFVII", the effect is a reflection on that earlier construction of the
hero, and it shows just how far Final
Fantasy's heroes have come.
I don't want to sound like I'm dunking on Cloud – his story
is interesting. It's just the parts of it in which he is a hero, and the
subsequent cultural understanding which remembers
him purely as a brooding loner who fights Sephiroth, are among the least
interesting. The story of Lightning, who wants to be the brooding loner
fighting evil but is unable to deny the nuance demanded by her social and
societal connections, addresses exactly this blind spot.
Gender
It's possible to see this shift in Final Fantasy's heroes as a product of their various writers' needs
to break new storytelling ground – since at least Final Fantasy VII, Square Enix's devs have been under intense
pressure to take the lead in this area. The traditional construction of heroism
is familiar, sometimes to the point of tedium, and attempts to move beyond it
will almost inevitably require critical engagement with it. The switch to
female heroes could be a coincidence.
But we should be careful not to understate what it means to
be a coincidence. We needn't prove that a decision to change to female heroes caused the shift in narrative types or
vice versa in order to show that the two changes were connected. The link I want
to argue for may be much subtler than direct one-way causation, but still much
more substantial than coincidence.
Refining from my starting points, my claim is this: hero
privilege and the more general male privilege are similar enough that we – and
particularly the writers and narrative designers employed by mass-media
companies like Square Enix – struggle to conceive of a character having one
without the other. This is not to say that it's impossible, just that it's easy
to not do. Standard ideas of innovation aren't enough.
Try to imagine a male
hero coerced into a political marriage, as Yuna is. Male heroic characters can
have political and tactical marriages – FFXII's
Prince Rasler, for example – but because society still treats the 'husband'
role as the authoritative one, these cannot pose a threat to their agency in
the way that marriage to Seymour might subordinate Yuna's. To a male hero, a
political marriage can be a tiresome but necessary symbol; to a female hero, it
is by default an obstacle to be overcome, every bit as much as any boss fight.
Or consider the sequence in FFXII when Archadian officials steal the Dusk Shard from Ashe.
Judge Ghis tells her, "We
hold the proof of your royal lineage. A maid of passing resemblance will serve
our purposes now." Ashe's body and person are dismissed outright. It
is only Ashe-as-symbol that the antagonists are interested in, because no other
part of Ashe presents a threat to them. It's a very clear statement against
heroic actions that it's hard to imagine any but the youngest male heroes
encountering. A male hero would normally never be reduced to his 'passing
resemblance'.
There's another shift at work in the 21st-century
Final Fantasies, too. Each game invokes male heroism in characters who
ultimately prove ineffectual, or at least markedly less significant than their
heroines.
Tidus is an endearing goof, sometimes important for his
outsider's ability to think the unthinkable and sometimes important for the
party's morale, but Yuna would have succeeded at being some kind of hero
without him. Her place at the intersection of Yevon and Al Bhed cultures
contributes as much to that as anything Tidus does.
Balthier is a more pitiful spectacle; a pampered rich kid
playing at defiance and criminality as a flight from his troubled family
situation. His repeated wisecracks about being 'the leading man', in context of
the wider story, are a sad joke. Basch is a deeper character, but his narrative
role is as little more than a vector for exposition and context.
With Snow in FFXIII,
the franchise turned outright scornful. Snow is a childish fool whose playing
at heroism, the game makes abundantly clear, gets people killed. That his
gang's epithet is NORA – 'No Obligations, Rules or Authority' – makes him the
most pointed comment yet on the dangerous irresponsibility of hero-privilege
narratives.
Again, it's hard to imagine characters this ridiculous being
female. A woman in the place of Snow or Balthier wouldn't be tolerated by those
around her, or if she was would be regarded much more clearly as repugnant by
the majority of the games' audiences. In mass media, men – or at least men who
centrally benefit from male privilege, which is the group of men we see most of
- get away with behaviour which from anyone else would be unacceptable.
Critiquing heroism goes hand-in-hand with critiquing
masculinity, but that doesn't mean that there can't be better representations
of either. Both Sazh (despite the harmful way his race is presented) and Hope
in the FFXIII trilogy are given more
nuanced treatment, a broad range of emotional expression and strong non-sexual social
ties. Both are placed firmly in their social context and are answerable to
other human beings.
Which leads naturally to the question of where Final Fantasy is headed next – Final Fantasy XV, a game with an
apparently all-male playable cast, with director Hajime Tabata talking
about a 'boys will be boys' story, that lifts the curtain on 'what boys do when
girls aren't around'. Tabata's remarks are at best an awkward misstep, and
definitely troubling, but, well...
What if the game actually does offer an alternative? What if it gives us men who, at least in
character if not in identity, aren't like those we're used to seeing? Some of
the signifiers of hero privilege are present, like the
characters having the freedom to travel into the unknown, but the journey,
framed as a roadtrip, seems more aimless than many. So far it's unclear what
threatens the world, or how the characters' journey is supposed to help.
Taken on its own, another game with an all-male cast is a
tedious prospect. As inheritor of the modern Final Fantasy tradition (and, indeed, Tabata's record for games
that present healthier masculinities, like Crisis
Core: Final Fantasy VII), though, there is at least the possibility of something
more.
[1] I want to limit this to the 'major releases', but this
is increasingly difficult to define. 'Home console releases' is more precise
and I think captures what people mean when they muse about the trends, destiny
and/or fate of the franchise. Let's assume for now that the MMOs, FFXI and FFXIV, can be safely overlooked, as well as handheld and mobile
spinoffs. The Fabula Nova Crystallis (FFXIII)
sequence is so coherent as a trilogy that I feel justified including all three
games, though Type-0, as a handheld
spinoff that was later ported to home consoles, is a tricky one, and entirely
available as a gotcha against my pitch.
[2] It's vital to recognise that in certain crucial
respects, Squenix's staff have never been members of our society. This limits what I can say because, again, I am not
sociologist (or anthropologist) enough to have significant insight into the
construction of gender in Japanese culture. I can talk from my own experience
of our 'Western' (better: Anglo-American) culture, and I can speculate to an
extent on how Final Fantasy games
have increasingly been developed for an international market and audience, but
these don't entitle me to leap the cultural gap.
[3] And to do so more as a matter of conscious choice than
as a response to technological limitation, though certainly the traditional
abstractions of the JRPG started as a response to technological constraints. To
whatever extent 'the JRPG' is a coherent concept, it has always valued
'realism' (or 'literalism', or even just 'the concrete') less than western RPGs
and other genres.
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