#HD remake of The Ride for HD trauma when!!!!!!!!!

[pigspeetsandhooflikefeets]

So different anon but i too experienced the unsentimental and tasteless ending...when I was 15. It was rated teen and that scene genuinely scarred me (me and my girlfriend like to joke that it's the real reason why i'm now a lesbian)

Anon I say without a shred of irony that this is so fucking funny and I love you. Thank you for being here.

[endeavorsreward]

Vaan (Reprise)

You know, this is a full-time Ivalice blog, but the reason I reblog Vaan defenses isn’t because he’s my favorite character, or however we’re phrasing that this week. I mean, I like the character, I think Vaan’s good, but that isn’t it. Vaan isn’t real and doesn’t need me to “protect” him.

The reason I’m always promoting defenses of the character of Vaan, and this is something I wrote about in that somewhat-oft-reblogged “defense” of FFXII, is that the contingent of people who are adamant about hating Vaan - the ones who will join a discussion about a literal separate topic to bring it up, or who can’t mention liking the unit in a spin-off game or a phone game without making it clear they hate him in his original game, is that hating Vaan is emblematic of a larger problem.

[And I don’t mean “not caring about him” or “he was fine I guess,” or “He’s okay at first but the second half of the story doesn’t give him as much to do” or “He’s Luke Skywalker dressed as Aladdin and I was hoping for something a little less easily-mapped to other very obvious pop culture references” or “the original release had those wonky abs that you all made a meme out of and they’re really distracting” or any number of legitimate criticisms - you know full well to what I refer...]

I’ve said some of these things before:

Vaan was made, at least in part, to appeal to women more than men, and certain men hate that

Vaan doesn’t provide the exact and very specific sort of power fantasy, power-through-agency, that these people demand from their RPGs, and video games are supposed to cater only to their specific demands

People have constructed an imagined, idealized FFXII that conforms to their desires and see Vaan’s somewhat-late addition as the blame for the game not meeting this illusion -- whatever game led by an adult male they imagine, assuredly sidelining Ashe in the process, would be the “serious, mature” Final Fantasy title that would let them feel superior about... something or other.

I’ve taken to calling these people “Delitawasrighters,” because they’re usually people who claim Matsuno’s games are better (they are) but then ignore Matsuno’s social conscience, his previous young protagonists, that even the “evil church” game didn’t decry faith, and any other number of inconvenient facts to fit a version of his games that they played at thirteen years old, somewhat abetted by a poor localization that didn’t help with subtleties.

[There’s a venn diagram of these people and certain other types of men on the internet with significant overlap, but I don’t think all of these guys are inherently in the other category, even if they’re impressionable in the same fashion - sometimes enough people repeat something that you just start thinking it’s the way things are.]

FFXII is far from perfect (and indeed, the same is true of Matsuno’s other games - I’m an unabashed fan, obviously, as I have this theme blog, but each of his works has their issues), but the “version we got, with Vaan” fits the Matsuno criteria - it has things to say about imperialism through Vaan the way that we see things about class through Ramza or nationalism through Denam, and yeah, even things about escapism through Marche. Typically the structure resembles a standard hero’s journey but has the climax in a weird place - Ramza’s arc climaxes when he opens the sluice gate despite all of the game remaining, and Vaan’s arc ends through Ashe at the Pharos, because he deliberately hands off his fate to her in Jahara.

People love to talk about FF games being good because of their stories, but it seems like only rarely do people actually seem to understand the stories. To take a game I’m much, much less fond of, for instance, FFVII’s impression upon the wider audience resembles the film Advent Children, with its brooding and flying around, but the game is the story of a scared young man covering up trauma, a frequently goofy dude who’s desperate for friendship. People heard about the FFVII remake and started asking how they’d handle Wall Market, which you can headcanon however you want but was put into the game as a series of offensive, gross jokes - but my first question was, “is Cloud going to ride a dolphin?” Because that’s the kind of thing that, rendered in HD, this sort of fan is going to absolutely hate, is inconsistent with their view of that game despite it, y’know, being IN the game.

Vaan isn’t and hasn’t ever been the problem. The problem lies in a particular skewed (& masculine) view of FFXII, and games as a whole.