A Final Fantasy (et al) post to welcome you to the glory of Friday (if you don’t have weekends off then may this hopefully brighten the midst of your work week) with more located here!
I was planning on posting the other “half” of last week’s best dressed question, but today is the Shameful Narcissist’s birthday, and she is going to be shamefully narcissistic and give you the chance to join in the (hopefully harmless) narcissism, too! I figured it was appropriate to post a more introspective question on the day I celebrate my existence (So. Much. Cake.)
What character do you identify with most?
I’m going to try to keep this light, but Final Fantasy brings up some really deep and involved emotions with me. There are two characters I most identify with in the FF universe, one more than the other. Ironically, the character I most connect with is male and the other one is female, but the reason is similar.
Left picture is entitled “Lucrecia and Sephiroth…2″ by roman-ranman. I’m hoping the picture of Garnet is accurate for my memory. It’s supposed to be when she sees Bahamut attack Queen Brahne’s fleet.
With Seph I can 100% understand why he was pissed off and fucked up, because “mommy issues’ will do that to you (I really detest that phrase, but I can’t come up with a better one), especially when whom you think is your mother died in childbirth, but turns out not to be dead, but is instead hooked up to a reactor in the town your employer (whom you hate) sent you. Yeah, that would ruin anyone’s day.
I never have simple emotions. If I’m angry, I usually feel guilty about it, and if I’m sad/depressed, there’s almost always some anger beneath it. The reason Sephiroth snapped makes perfect sense to me, because even the strongest person has their breaking point, and people who are really aloof and standoffish usually are for a reason. They’ve more than likely been emotionally manipulated/abused and they’ve learned to contain their emotions because they’ve been used to hurt them before. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really help you deal with them, it’s just a way to suppress/push them down, which means they’ll just ignite in a torrent later. I know some people could say I’m reaching, but that’s what I took from that situation partnered with the fact that he thought his mother was an alien eldritch abomination that’s known for its manipulative abilities and mimicking loved ones. Yeaaaaah, because my brain works the way it does, I’ve thought of scenarios and had lots of horrifying nightmares, but I still love VII, because it speaks to me on that desperate, despairing come wrathful level.
With Garnet, there’s, well I don’t want to say “not real mother” paradigm because if you adopt a child, you are their real parent. I guess it’s more of the combination of her losing her birth mother and having her adoptive mother become a stranger to her. Brahne was the only one she knew, and before she was influenced by Kuja, the assumption is that the queen was loving and responsive. It’s…kind of the opposing situations to VII. Brahne was the one that was influenced by an alien mind whereas Sephiroth was influenced by an alien mind he thought was his mother.
Either way when Garnet sees her mother die on the beach and is unable to speak for an undetermined amount of time after that, it really got me, because something similar happened to me. Granted, my silence only lasted for about an hour, but I understand what it means to be too shattered to speak. When I read reviews about IX castigating the character of Garnet for being “useless” during that time in the narrative, I knew it came from people who were more concerned with gamplay than what Final Fantasy is really about. If I happened to use Garnet when she would often miss-cast a spell due to concentration issues (which I often have), I was never annoyed about it. One, you can always use Eiko, and two, for fuck’s sake, she saw her mother die on a goddamn beach!
So hopefully my two most identifiable characters weren’t too much of a downer.. One who exemplifies rage, the other silence in revealing the mechanisms of despair.
Alright, I’m very curious which characters you most identify with and why. Let’s discuss in the comments and you can go as deep or as shallow as you like! If you identify with someone because they’re technically minded and you’re a techie, too, let’s hear about it!
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Back when Mario was merely Jump Man and Pauline was a kidnapping victim, long before she was the mayor of New Donk City, there was this arcade classic. I was better at this than Pac-Man; I’ve always been better at platforming than avoiding random enemies.
