#when you could have defining friendships that skirt the line of devotion and loyalty and dedication

[dwellordream]

“A theoretical abstract of what I call “the plot of female amity,” by which I mean the interdependence of female friendship and the marriage plot, would run as follows. The plot begins by contrasting female friendship to the courtship relationship between a man and a woman. Lovers when first meeting often have false first impressions and only declare their love hesitantly, after overcoming many misunderstandings and obstacles. The bond between female friends, in contrast, is either established before the novel begins or coalesces almost instantaneously, intensifies almost effortlessly, and can be expressed clearly and openly. The relative stability of friendship makes it the motor rather than the subject of plot; it generates enormous energy without itself moving much or melting down. 

The tendency of female friendship to remain constant over the course of a plot is a sign both of its narrative weakness (not much happens to the friendship) and of its narrative strength (because of its stability, friendship makes things happen). In the middle phases of the plot of female amity, one friend expresses love for the other by helping her to realize her marriage plot. This can take the form of mediating a suitor’s courtship, giving a husband to the friend or the friend to a husband, or helping to remove an obstacle to the friend’s marriage. This phase can also take the form of one friend assuaging the other’s wounds and bolstering her subjectivity to make her more marriageable. 

The plot of female amity does not substitute for the conventional marriage plot, since the friend usually does not seek to replace a husband; when she does, the plot of female amity is displaced by the female marriage plot (see chapter 6). In the plot of female amity, marriage and friendship are inseparable, and the woman who promotes a friend’s marriage to a man is a forceful agent of the closure achieved once friendship and marriage have become parallel states and the future husband and wife have attained the harmony that already prevailed between female friends. The plot of female amity is the Victorian novel’s purloined letter, hiding in plain sight in the genre’s every permutation. The remainder of this chapter makes that point through sustained readings of a few major works, but to give an idea of the plot’s range, let me first rapidly survey a sensation novel, a silver-fork novel, a political roman a clef, and a novel of provincial life. 

Sensation novels, which characteristically emphasize occult powers and deceptive social ties, make female friendship an equally baroque narrative force. In Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife (1870), for instance, the attachment between two female friends, Blanche and Anne, is all that can disentangle a marriage plot mired in complex wills, obscure legal loopholes, and vindictive relatives. One friend’s “resolution to reunite herself” with the other ultimately enables each woman to be united with a loving husband. Blanche makes her refusal to “give . . . up” Anne a condition of marriage when she tells her suitor: “There’s time to say No, Arnold—if you think I ought to have no room in my heart for anybody but you.”

Anne marries a man she hates in order to secure the legality of Blanche’s marriage to the man she loves: “She kissed her— looked at her—kissed her again—and placed her in her husband’s arms” (525). As so often happens in the plot of female amity, marriage makes female friends kin when Anne is freed of her villainous first husband and marries Blanche’s uncle, who learns to love Anne through the loyalty she arouses in his niece: “‘The woman must have some noble qualities,’ he thought, ‘who can inspire such devotion as this’” (246). 

In Frances Trollope’s silver-fork novel The Widow Barnaby (1839), which combines sentimental fiction with a portrait of high life, a generic preoccupation with virtue and good taste inflects the plot of female amity: the narrative defines the heroine’s innate gentility by showing that she can captivate virtuous, well-born women as well as men. One young woman’s “enthusiasm” for Agnes, the heroine—whom she finds so attractive “it is with difficulty that I keep my eyes away from her”—shows her good taste, which in turn reflects Agnes’s true worth (117). Agnes’s responses to other women similarly display her good judgment and capacity to feel desire. 

The Victorian marriage plot required heroines to be chaste, yet sufficiently ardent and aware of their desires to marry for love. The plot of female amity circumvents the paralyzing effect that this paradoxical demand might have on the marriage plot by using female friendship as a vehicle for depicting a heroine’s erotic excitability while skirting, so to speak, the strictures on female heterosexual assertion. When Agnes first meets the “tall, elegant-looking woman” whom she does not yet know is her male beloved’s sister, her “whole attention seemed captivated” (228). 

Once she identifies the woman as the sister of the man she loves, Agnes goes into a paroxysm, “trembling from head to foot with her eyes timidly fixed on the beautiful countenance of Colonel Hubert’s sister. . . . [T]here was timidity certainly in the pleasure with which she listened to the voice and gazed at the features of Colonel Hubert’s sister; but still it was pleasure, and very nearly the most lively she had ever experienced” (249–50). Within pages, she and Hubert’s sister have exchanged the embraces and kisses that are the novelistic sign a happy marriage will soon help their budding friendship bloom, and Hubert’s sister approves her brother’s choice, exclaiming, “I too am very much in love with Agnes” (342). 

Trollope can so graphically represent the erotic delight women take and inspire in each other for the obvious reason that the “lively . . . pleasure” of female homoeroticism poses no phallic threat to virginal virtue. But she can also depict their attraction so floridly because a woman’s susceptibility to another woman defined rather than defied femininity— because even the most erotic bond between women could sustain opposite-sex desire. As a final pair, consider George Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways (1885) and Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839). Although both novels explore community, vocation, and rumor, nothing could be further from Martineau’s expository, prosaic didacticism than Meredith’s elliptical, quicksilver sophistication. 

Yet both novels conclude with scenes that demonstrate the inseparability of marriage and female friendship. In Meredith’s novel, the eponymous heroine, nicknamed Tony, marries only when her best friend, Emma, proposes on a suitor’s behalf. The novel’s last sentences describe Emma’s “exaltation” as she “held her beloved in her arms under the dusk of the withdrawing redness.” That “beloved” is the female friend who has just returned from her honeymoon, and the novel’s last lines focus on the women’s reunion: “They sat embraced, with hands locked, in the unlighted room, and Tony spoke of the splendid sky. ‘You watched it knowing I was on my way to you?’ ‘Praying, dear... [t]hat I might live long enough to be a godmother.’ There was no reply: there was an involuntary little twitch of Tony’s fingers.”

The stock scene in which a wife obliquely confesses to her husband that she is pregnant takes place here between female friends: the “involuntary little twitch” of Tony’s fingers is a telegraphic signal that Emma’s wish is already reality, a displaced sign of the fetus’s movement within her, and a response whose involuntary corporeality underscores that a clearly consummated marriage has not dimmed the romance between female friends. Deerbrook also ends at dusk, an erotic threshold that blurs light and darkness, public visibility and shaded privacy, in which day tremulously balances night and finality seems momentarily suspended. 

The plot of female amity is aptly timed to conclude at evening, for it achieves closure by evenly distributing narrative attention and the heroine’s affections across friendship and marriage, rather than forcing a choice between them. Deerbrook thus ends not only at twilight, but also “on the eve” of Margaret Ibbotson’s happy, long-deferred marriage to Philip Enderby, which she chooses to spend with her friend Maria. Margaret and Maria have both loved Philip, but as the plot of female amity dictates, their shared love has brought them closer instead of driving them apart. In the novel’s final scene, they sit together in Maria’s house until they hear Philip’s horse, and Maria gives her friend away by telling her to “go and give Mr. Enderby the walk in the shrubbery that he galloped home for” (523). 

The novel’s final sentence displays the conjugal couple in the light of female friendship: “Margaret kept Philip waiting while she lighted her friend’s lamp; and its gleam shone from the window of the summer-house for long, while, talking of Maria, the lovers paced the shrubbery, and let the twilight go” (523). The reader infers that Margaret leaves Maria’s side, but the narrator does not describe her actual departure; instead, she leaps paratactically from a first clause that places the two women in the same room to a second clause that depicts Margaret walking with Philip. 

That second clause bends over backwards to give the participial phrase “talking of Maria” priority over the clause’s grammatical subject, “the lovers,” but what the sentence loses in fluency it gains in meaning, since that reversal embodies how Maria presides over Margaret’s union with Philip. The passage’s articulation of space and vision makes the moment between friends persist in the lovers’ walk, for Margaret and Philip are illuminated by Maria’s lamp, which Margaret has lit. The novel’s final tableau allegorizes the social links that the plot of female amity forges between marriage and female friendship, which appear as closely connected as adjacent moments, cottage and shrubbery, or a light source and the object it illuminates.”

- Sharon Marcus, “Just Reading: Female Friendship and the Marriage Plot.” in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

[the-cryptographer]

wrapped up playing final fantasy ix

yeah, idk, at some point it became clear to me that the game wasn’t really heading in the directions i wanted it to. that was... a while ago, lol. but i’m usually committed to finishing these things once i start them, even if they’re less than what i’d hoped.

on the game side of things... it’s a final fantasy game. it’s got all the regular final fantasy stuff going on. for this one in particular, i guess i like this type of ability system. otherwise it’s your standard, mostly-mindless turned based combat. summons take way to long to play. as usual i tend to favour physical combat interspersed with a healer that can cast holy. but i ended up relying a lot on Frog Drop and Dragon Crest, heh. my favourite team is something like Eiko and pick 2 {Quina, Freya, Amarant}.

Also this final fantasy gets credit for finally getting me to like moogles. they are... so cute in this. Stiltzkin is pretty great, as was Mogmi and Moguta being silly in love, but my absolute favourite was Moorock, who gets so gd excited about writing a letter and loudly exclaims ‘I love Mognet!’ even though he’s never heard of it before. why are he and Mozme not on disk four tho?! tell me they made it out okay D’x  Although, hmm, I’m not sure why we trusted Artemicion with more superslick at the end there. Since he apparently he got high snorting the last bottle. god, don’t trust the addict with more of his substance.

idk, I guess I’ll go through the story characters. and just... kind of hope I cover everything that way.

Quina

I... love them. And I tend to like gag characters but... I love them. Such ambition... to eat everything. So cute. So silly. So relatable. I also really like the nightgown/smock kind of thing going on. Need more characters dressed like granny that are trying to eat us out of house and home.

Amarant

Um... there seemed to be a lot going on in this sector of the story that kind of... needed more time. Or otherwise needed cutting out, probably. I find it conceptually interesting, at least: loners being confronted with the boundaries of their... determination to be alone. So I like him in spite of myself. But Zidane’s played a pretty shitty trick on him, once upon a time, and it’s a little hard to justify the kind of devotion Amarant has in lieu of that. Because... yes... it is devotion... somehow. And it’s a little hard to buy the way he becomes so easily enamored with how Zidane’s mind works with so little development.

Eiko

Mmm, again, there was some interesting stuff here about her growing up alone, and the way she immediately clung to Zidane as a way to escape that loneliness. But her crush on him is taken a bit too seriously by the narrative, like she’s really in love with him, and that gets a bit creepy, imo. The stuff with Mog is interesting, but kind of too much trying to tug on the heartstrings when the heartstrings haven’t been wound and tuned, if you know what I mean. I suppose, at the end of the day, I didn’t end up liking her all that much. But feel like I could have and should have if they had written her even a little better.

Freya

I love this aesthetic... so much. Kind of a mix of red mage and dragoon, both of which I love individually, plus rat person. She is one of my faves on this basis alone. In terms of her actual personality... it’s so sparse and inconsistent. Ah, there are some landmarks I like - the kind of quiet and sternly professional bits, the loyalty to her homeland, she has some good moments deciding to fight after the destruction of Cleyra, and talking with Amarant too. Just- I’m left feeling like she was never pushed to a workable extreme anywhere in the narrative, and so she doesn’t really have any clear, defining personality characteristic. It’s more like... a lot of shit happens to her, and she’s sad but not too sad, and strong but not too strong. And it’s kind of lacklustre at the end of the day.

Steiner

I don’t really know how to say this except to say it. He’s funny and sweet at times. Overly distracted by rules and decorum, of course. But he also veers hard into being rather annoying to watch at times. He is... not a practical person. Overall, I’m kind of impressed with his bit in the story, though. Even if it fades as the narrative progresses. His relationship with Beatrice was kind of a bright spot in the narrative as a whole for me. I maybe... can’t help but like the fact that this hypercompetent, beautiful lady falls for his bumbling ass. Beatrice in general strikes a neat line between being chilly and needy and, really, way too good for anyone else in the cast.

Vivi

A great character and... ultimately a huge copout. There was a lot of build up to Vivi dying and, ultimately, it felt rather unsatisfying. It felt like they were trying to rob the sadness out of it by limiting what they showed us of him in the epilogue to his breed of offspring. But, even before then, they touched on so many themes about him in a way that really attempted to distance itself from the fear of human mortality. Like, this isn’t something that only happens to weird artificially constructed lifeforms. Human being sometimes find out they only have a couple months or a year left to live, and have to come to terms with that. Hell, all of humanity is on a timer - and not once did anyone really say to Vivi, ‘yeah, it’s true for all of us. We could all die at any moment. We’re only going to last so long, whether it’s a year or ten or a hundred.’ Kuja came kind of close to communicating some of this ‘i’m going to die, just like the Black Mages’. But never in a way that emotionally impacted Vivi, which ws kind of shitty writing, imo.

Dagger/Garnet

I don’t know. She’s rather generic. Which... doesn’t necessarily preclude my attachment in of itself. But, yeah, she’s generic in a way that doesn’t resonate with me, heh. She leans super hard on Zidane the whole narrative, and it’s really not even a little fun. There was some interesting stuff with Ramuh, and with Eiko and her being from the same summoner clan, and her relationship with her mother was great as well. I liked that Dagger got to be sad about Brahne - because let her be sad about losing the people who loved her and who she loved. But... Brahne herself is such a conundrum. I don’t dislike her character and her design as a whole. But I don’t like the game’s ‘fat and ugly are evil’ vibes. And I also don’t like the way she’s immediately forgiven in the public eye, and the eyes of the narrative, once she dies. She... literally destroys cities and kills thousands of people. That’s not really forgivable.

But, regarding Garnet... I started liking her a bit more once she cut her hair and started smiling in her in-game portrait. so, if nothing else, we know I am very shallow.

Zidane

Aaaaand, if I wasn’t already, this is where I start really running into problems. When you don’t really like the main character. When you’re not invested in the main character’s romance that is front and centre of the story and its ending. When you really don’t believe the strength of the emotional connections between the cast that the game is attempting to sell you on... It just makes it really hard to enjoy things. Zidane often seems dismissive, in his own head, and even shallow in the way he attempts to relate to the rest of the cast. It’s everyone else that has to come around to his way of thinking and learn from him, rather than the narrative making much of an effort to teach him about how to actually empathise with others. and it’s kind of grating then that we hear them praise him so casually.

I think, then, combined with the womanising aspect of his character... I don’t know, because I’m certainly not opposed to somebody wanting to sleep with all the ladies. That is an A+ relatable feeling. But, for someone that’s so casual about cozying up to every woman he runs across, I was left feeling like the only woman he had any kind of legitimate connection to was Garnet. (The game tells us he’s good friends with Freya, but does it really show us why? or how?) Which is... I suppose why Garnet, and not Ruby and Freya, was propped up as being Zidane’s major romance. But... idk, it feels a little too much like entitlement. He’s allowed to hit on all the ladies and look good while doing it, while he has a serious relationship developing with Dagger and she’s arguably right there to see him hit on other women, and he also has basically no interest in providing any kind of emotional support or developing any kind of connection with pretty much any woman (except maybe Dagger). Combine this with Cid cheating on Hilda and then she jealously turns him into a beetle - but, wait, this is a happy marriage, the game tells us. and the fact that the game’s major villain is pointedly described as ‘not a skirt chaser like you’... it’s just deifying an entitled straight boy ‘boys will be boys’ kind of attitude when that’s already an accepted social norm. and it’s kind of disgusting. I think there are better ways to talk about infidelity and promiscuity and the desire for the ladies, ones that are still sympathetic to all the parties involved. I think the final fantasy series /has/ talked about it better. With Edgar, who wants to get with all the ladies, but who lets Terra and Celes into his protection and the bounty of Figaro castle without touching either of them, and who is pointedly single even though he’s the sole heir of a kingdom and pushing thirty. And with Tidus, who had a power fantasy dream where Yuna and Rikku are hanging off each of his arms as they roast his father, but that’s before he gets to know each of them better as people. once he does the objectification wanes. I’m not saying that Edgar and Tidus are perfect heroes and wonderfully written, but I think this aspect of them was delivered with more nuance and a more critical eye, and it makes a huge difference.

Also... Are you a team player, Zidane? Or are you just a team player until you’re angry, or decide your pride is on the line? For a kind of ‘friendship is everything’ message, it certainly gets muddled everytime Zidane’s in a snit. Running back into Ispen Castle alone was a weird moment when we’re just getting done telling Amarant not to run around alone. Only okay when I do it(tm) And when he’s being kind of an insufferable bastard at the end of disc 3... just... why are you chasing after him guys? and why, after all that hoopla about accepting his friends’ help, does he deny it when going after Kuja at the end? I'm not saying that there aren’t things one needs to do alone just- why is Zidane always right when he says he needs to do things alone, but everyone else is wrong when they say the same thing? it’s a terrible case of protagonist-centred morality, and it’s really terrible and trite.

idk, I just- I understand why people are sick of the angsty final fantasy heroes after Cloud and Squall (the former I love, the latter I don’t). But I feel Zidane basically fell short in every way that wasn’t being upbeat and energetic, and I’m not sure what everyone sees in him.

Kuja

I can’t help but like this flamboyant bastard. God, he... soooo did not need a tacked on redemption arc. Again, mass genocide isn’t really forgivable. He is a terrible person. full stop. But I’m irrationally pleased he got some sympathy from the narrative anyhow. He’s just... I never liked Sephiroth, but Kuja has convinced me I could have liked Sephiroth if Sephiroth had even a fraction of a personality in ff7.

other than that... the wind/earth/water/fire shrine part of the game was weird. give me real dungeons, devs. also the coffee sidequest is nigh impossible to complete and then the game guilted me, and i hate that.

in the end, i suppose i feel the game was messy. the tone whip-lashed quick between whimsy and pure horror - which should be my jam but, idk, it didn’t work here for me. and a lot of the major characters and storylines lacked depth, or otherwise lacked nuance, or otherwise lacked payoff. it’s kind of hard to watch so much effort and so many good ideas flop so hard, but it flopped hard for me. i don’t get the hype about this game.