Someone asked me recently which FF7 characters I find to be the most interesting, and which I find least interesting.
Most interesting to me were: Lucrecia, Vincent, Tseng, Reeve, Hojo. Least interesting: Cait Sith.
They asked me to justify my position, of course. How could I “like” those characters? Why didn’t I “like” Cait Sith? How could I find Reeve interesting but Cait Sith boring?
These questions do not make sense to me.
Let me identify a thing that I think happens here. When we talk about “favorite characters,” there seems to be an assumption that we have to agree with them as people. I’m not saying Cait Sith was an asshole; I’m saying I found him to be a dull character. I’m not saying I think Lucrecia, Hojo, and Tseng are moral paragons; I’m saying they intrigue me.
“Liking” the villains is not an uncommon thing; Sephiroth and Reno are amongst FF7’s most popular characters. But adopting a villain as one’s “fave” often comes with excuses. “Oh, but I headcanon that he was being mind-controlled by Jenova’s will and he’s actually not a bad person.” “Oh, but I headcanon that it gave him lots of grief to drop the Sector 7 plate on all those innocent people and anyway it wasn’t his fault because he was following orders.” “Oh, I like Sephiroth in this AU I have where he comes back from the dead and turns good so I pretend that’s canon because I like it better.” “Oh, the Turks really become good guys in the end, though!” Like, why can’t we just let the villains not necessarily be good people, and still like them as characters? Why do people find this to be so contradictory?
I don’t think I hand-wave Lucrecia’s faults (although I am very against people headcanoning new ones onto her and disliking her on the basis of their own imaginings, so it may seem like I do when I point that out). I certainly don’t hand-wave Hojo’s, I find Vincent and Tseng to be far more interesting characters when their Turk crimes are not hand-waved, and for that matter Reeve is far more interesting to me when I think of the possibility of him actually being a lot shadier and more manipulative than he probably is meant to be in canon.
I do not agree with these characters’ life choices. I don’t have to. They still fascinate me, perhaps for that very reason. And they still have admirable traits among their bad ones, too.
Absorb that. People can do things you hate, and still have admirable qualities. People can do things you hate, and still deserve to be respected as human beings. People can do things you hate, and that doesn’t even make them objectively wrong, because you are not the center of the universe’s compass for moral rightness. I very much mean this to apply to real life as much as it applies to fictional characters. Your political enemies, the people you know in real life who have done deplorable things, that person you’re arguing with on the internet and calling “human trash who doesn’t even deserve to live” because their ideologies differ from yours— they are all people who are a mixed package of good ideas and bad ideas and things they’ve gotten right and things they’ve gotten wrong, just like you are.
So instead of condemning people—and fictional characters! I truly believe these abilities are intertwined—you disagree with, why not try understanding them? Shit, yeah, that’s difficult, because they seem so wrong that their sense of rightness is absolutely alien to you, but I posit that that is what makes them interesting.
Give me all of the problematic faves. Those are the ones I’m interested in. Don’t give me the good guys who get an entire damn story about justifying their moral position; Give me the ones who are still left flailing in uncertainty because the lines that guide them aren’t as clear cut as the standard societally-prescribed guidelines of right vs. wrong. Give me the ones who forge a new path and have to figure it out on their own. Give me the ones who get it wrong, and how they deal with that.
Those are the characters who interest me, and the interesting ones will always be the ones I enjoy the most.
