Meta Essay: Final Fantasy IX and the Illusion of Choice
Due to some recent interest, I was reminded to share my revised and updated copy of this essay. I went through last month and decided to close off my work on it by creating a formalized copy with works cited and more rigorous editing and refinement. Thanks again to those who've reached out, reblogged, or commented. And for any new readers, please do not take this as any sort of hatework - FF9 is one of my favorite games, but I think it's important to examine and consider the messages and themes of media as well as enjoying it for entertainment value.
Abstract
A critical examination of Final Fantasy IX's philosophically dishonest handling of its primary antagonist. Through exploring how the narrative frames Kuja to serve the game's larger thematic interests, and comparison to other media like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Pink Floyd's The Wall, it argues that the game fails to offer Kuja the existential agency or grace it grants its protagonists, presenting him instead as a tragic figure trapped in a deterministic narrative. This failure collapses the existential premise upon which the game claims to be founded.
You Are Alone: Final Fantasy IX and the Illusion of Choice
Even among the philosophically ambitious Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy IX is frequently praised for its exploration of existential themes. While its cartoonish, chibi-style visuals and initially JRPG-typical adventure premise suggest a whimsical story without much philosophical substance, the later stages pivot sharply toward heavier questions of mortality, identity, and grief. By its climax, the game positions itself as a meditation on finding meaning despite death and embracing one’s existence in the face of inevitable loss.
The problem arises at the point where, as is characteristic of RPG structure, a villain must be solidified both as a character and as an opposing ideology in preparation for the final confrontation. While Final Fantasy IX succeeds in positioning Kuja to fill that role structurally, it fails grievously in integrating his transgressions and moral position into the very themes it has seeded. When framing a hero versus villain story through existential philosophy, it is crucial for the narrative’s intellectual integrity to justify why the villain has failed existentially, not merely morally. Here, Final Fantasy IX falters. The logic breaks down, and in doing so, the entire framework of its existential posturing begins to unravel.
If existential messages surrounding mortality and self-prescribed meaning are to hold weight, they must be applied fairly and consistently, regardless of who occupies the role of hero or villain within the story’s structure. Final Fantasy IX, however, fails to apply its own existential logic to Kuja. Of all its characters, he alone is positioned without a win condition under the philosophy the narrative claims to uphold. His struggle for meaning, unlike those of his peers, is denied validation not by necessity, but by flawed narrative design.
Protagonist-Centered Existentialism – Also Known As Determinism
Although all major characters in Final Fantasy IX grapple with existential burdens, from coping with grief to defining themselves in relation to social roles, two characters are presented by the end of the story as the clearest representatives of its existential thesis. Zidane, the protagonist, faces a serious crisis of identity in the final arc when he is confronted with his artificial origins. Yet in his darkest moment, the narrative offers compassion: his friends intervene, leading him away from self-destruction and affirming his worth beyond his intended purpose. Likewise, Vivi, grappling with his artificial nature and severely limited lifespan, comes to terms with his mortality through acceptance. He chooses to find joy in fleeting experiences and creates meaning through his relationships and legacy, particularly among his Black Mage kin. Both characters are framed as noble, and their choices are celebrated as radical acts of existential courage.
Fittingly, Kuja, who is poised to serve as the final antagonist, checks many of the same circumstantial boxes and is thus framed as their negative foil. Like Zidane and Vivi, he too is of artificial origin and ultimately forced to confront his own mortality. Yet while they are met with empathy and existential grace, Kuja is left to face his impending end alone and unprepared. The narrative establishes him early as arrogant and cruel, but only later will his fear of death, and his refusal to submit to oblivion, become his defining sin and solidify his role as villain.
This is where the narrative’s existential logic begins to slip. A subtle yet insidious false dichotomy is created, and it is one the player is not immediately prompted to question. By the time Kuja and the heroes are headed toward confrontation, Zidane and Vivi’s sympathetic backstories are well-established. Both were designed as weapons, yet abandoned before that fate could be realized. Instead, they arrived as children in the company of loving and supportive adults. Zidane’s closeness to his found family in Tantalus, under the guidance of his surrogate father Baku, is given significant focus early in the story. Vivi, too, often recalls the brief but meaningful care of his adoptive grandfather, Quan. Both experience formative bonds that provide emotional intelligence, self-worth, and the ability to trust others.
Kuja, by contrast, receives no such privileges. Only late in the story, during Garland’s terse and easily overlooked exposition, do we learn of his origins. Created as an adult, he was designed without the capacity for growth, bonding, or social integration. Garland openly identifies Kuja’s flaw as being “too strong-willed” (Final Fantasy IX, disc 3), but official supplementary material in the form of Final Fantasy IX Ultimania clarifies directly that the lack of learning and growth gained through biological aging also plays a major role in Garland’s choice to deem him a failure (42-43). Within the world’s lore, stunted emotional capacity is directly connected to the inability to attain the powerful Trance state, thus making Kuja inferior outright comparable to his successor Zidane.
The implications of this exposition do not receive much consideration, and indeed the key circumstantial detail regarding Kuja’s creation, as provided only much later by Ultimania, is not made explicit in-text at all. The narrative does not invite the player to reflect on how this frames Kuja’s ability to parse his impending mortality when it will soon become key to the plot. Instead, it quietly seals his fate, recasting existential failure as moral failure and, worse still, retribution. Where Zidane and Vivi had clear paths to "success" via connection, love, and legacy, Kuja was never offered a viable route. His design left him fundamentally unequipped to process mortality through trust or acceptance.
Here, the narrative offers no grace. Kuja’s downfall passes without reflection or pause, his suffering treated not as a matter of horror or tragedy, but more as a narrative catalyst toward a necessary final battle. The player is not encouraged to linger in his terror or view him with pity; instead, the story permits his dehumanization, leaving his existential breakdown unacknowledged beyond its consequences for the player party. By the time Kuja resurfaces later, resolved to destroy existence itself, the groundwork has already been laid. What began as despair is retroactively reframed as villainous defiance, and the story prepares to frame his annihilation as the rightful punishment for daring to desire personhood on his own terms.
Zidane and Vivi are allowed to succeed because the narrative gave them the tools, the time, and the love to do so. This is not unique to them: nearly every major character is offered some measure of safety or healing. Garnet is orphaned as a child but later adopted and loved. Eiko is given the protection of her eidolon and family of Moogles. Even Beatrix, a former antagonist, is met with understanding and camaraderie and her wrongs are treated as misguided rather than immoral. By contrast, Kuja is denied any avenue for meaningful connection, and punished for breaking under the weight of its absence.
What the story presents as existential triumph is, more often, the reward for narrative palatability: for characters whose pain is familiar, whose redemption is expected, and whose arcs align cleanly with the moral structure laid out for them. Final Fantasy IX does not uphold the ideals of existential freedom it celebrates, rather, it withholds them and calls the outcome justice. By failing to acknowledge inequality of circumstances in any meaningful sense, it becomes difficult to view the narrative’s message as anything but an appeal to fate. This is not existentialism, but rather its antithesis: determinism.
A Foregone Villain – Or, ‘He Was Asking For It’
Having already failed to apply its existential framework consistently, Final Fantasy IX compounds that failure by manipulating the player’s emotional stance toward Kuja through selective framing and symbolic shorthand. His downfall does not simply play out, rather, the justification for it is reverse-engineered. Even before his motivations are fully revealed, Kuja is coded as untrustworthy and his design and behavior coded to discourage compassion and invite moral judgment. The game’s framing of him seeds player expectations in advance to ensure they will not foster empathy or understanding toward him that could jeopardize his use as a target of moral outrage.
Trauma-Coded Villainy
From his very first scene, Kuja is constructed not to evoke empathy, but to deflect it. He is theatrical, self-isolating, and emotionally unstable, traits the story attributes not to trauma, but to ego and cruelty. Yet from a psychological standpoint, these behaviors are not evidence of malice. They read instead as maladaptive coping mechanisms: the classic survival strategies of someone denied attachment, stability, and any concept of safety. Kuja does not behave this way in spite of his origin story, but because of it. His emotional patterns are consistent, tragic, and entirely predictable, yet the narrative treats them as signs of an inherently corrupt nature. Worse still, it frontloads this interpretation so thoroughly that it preempts any honest evaluation of cause.
Across the field of psychology, childhood is consistently identified as the most critical period in the development of healthy adult relationships, emotional regulation, and a cohesive sense of self. In Attachment and Loss, psychologist John Bowlby notes that the relationship between personality formation and secure attachment can be observed in young childhood via the distress and soothing response when a child’s mother is removed or returned to them (27). Bowlby frames this as a biological phenomenon, a particularly important point to note given the narrative circumstance of Kuja as someone deprived not just of an attachment source but of the biological development that childhood entails.
Trauma during the childhood period is widely understood to produce long-term social dysfunction, often manifesting as withdrawal, aggression, and the construction of a false self to protect against emotional abandonment — consistent with compensatory self-structures described in psychoanalytic literature such as Kohut’s The Analysis of Self. Parental rejection, echoing attachment theory's logic, is among the most damaging forms of early trauma, compromising the child's ability to feel safe, wanted, or willing to risk the friction of connection. In such cases, survival takes the place of growth, and emotional needs are buried beneath whatever persona can endure the abuse.
Every one of these conditions is present in Kuja’s construction. He is created with full awareness of his artificiality and utility, fashioned not as a person but as a weapon. His only paternal figure, Garland, shows no affection, no acceptance, and no intention of treating him as anything more than a tool to incite war and eventually discard. His survival depends entirely on performance, with his role comparable to that of a child soldier. Worse still, Kuja appears to have lived for some time without sentient peers, precluding even basic social interaction and development. He is thus denied not only biological childhood, but the development upon which self-image and emotional maturity are founded. More tragically still, this leads to a continuation of that abuse through Kuja’s creation and dehumanization of the Black Mages and their prototypes, mirroring a common pattern of generational trauma.
Bearing in mind that the character’s willingness to act immorally is a key aspect of the narrative’s psychological framing of him as villainous, it is fair to question what moral faculties are reasonably expectable from someone cultivated in his circumstances. The conditions of Kuja’s creation largely account for his sense of morality and empathy within the narrative, yet it is in a capacity that is not readily legible — indeed, a being installed with intellect and absent the process of biological childhood presents a challenge of audience relatability. It can be observed, however, that Kuja largely operates within the pre-conventional stage of Kohlberg’s moral stages of development, which comprise the stages of obedience and self-interest (Kohlberg, 17). While the player is not afforded a great deal of access to Kuja’s motivations, he can notably be observed to be fearful of Garland’s ability to reclaim his soul during the scene in which Garnet’s eidolons are extracted, indicating a fear of punishment typical of pre-conventional moral development. In this same scene he expresses indifference to Garnet’s death if it is necessary to avoid his own, again evidencing moral development that is confined to self-interest. This self-interest underpins virtually all of his moral decisions within the narrative, with even his final destructive act being motivated by spite and despair against his own demise.
One particular line of dialogue does suggest a sense of moral understanding in him, and it is tellingly confined to a framework of survival: “The weak lose their freedom to the strong… it is the providence of nature that only the strong survive” (Final Fantasy IX, disc 2). This form of reasoning is, again, typical of early moral development that preempts the conventional stage of social contract, let alone the post-conventional stage of moral reasoning on principle. It would also not be especially speculative to deduce that this philosophy is emergent, at least to some degree, from his own history of survival contingent upon servitude to a figure of authority, rather than an intrinsic personality trait. That Kuja's moral position never advances beyond this stage is not evidence of an inherently corrupt nature — it follows logically both from his developmental history and the environment from which he came. Furthermore, it builds upon the profile of Kuja as a character psychologically arrested in a childlike emotional state.
While it should be stated clearly that one's position as a victim of abuse or trauma does not imply freedom from moral judgement, it is also worth examining the fact that Final Fantasy IX largely reserves allocation of understanding or sympathy toward victims for the most sanitized cases. The race of Black Mages who form a village, for example, are former weapons by whose hand many people died within the story. However, they are permitted sympathetic framing within the context of having been under a trancelike state at the time, removing the question of true culpability. This also is reflected in other entries in the series, such as Final Fantasy VI, where its protagonist Terra Branford is largely sheltered from a morally complex or uncomfortable form of victimhood by virtue of violence done under mind control. Consequently, Final Fantasy as a series often avoids engaging with these nuanced situations, or does so in very limited capacity.
Through a more rigorous psychological lens, Kuja's alienation becomes legible not as simple villainy, but as a profile emerging from biological, developmental, and social deprivation. His disregard for life, need for attention, and emotional instability all follow from his history and circumstances. The story codes such expressions primarily as evidence of corruption without consideration for cause. In reality, they are textbook indicators of someone who was never given the materials to build a stable self, much less a morally commendable self. In the end, this means that Kuja is not punished merely for his monstrous actions. He is also punished for responding to trauma in a way the story refuses to read as even remotely sympathetic.
What Are You, A Virgin?
While framing trauma psychology primarily through the frame of moral indictment already reveals a troubling standard for what constitutes acceptable suffering, the narrative of Final Fantasy IX takes this a step further by extending its judgment into the realm of gender and intimacy. It is no coincidence that Kuja’s presentation of masculinity stands in direct opposition to that of his protagonist counterpart, Zidane. The contrast between them is stark and deliberate. Zidane is portrayed as emotionally and sexually available, extroverted, physically expressive, and quick to form bonds, especially through romantic and flirtatious behavior. Kuja, by contrast, is detached, intellectual, aesthetically composed, and resistant to uncurated social contact.
Throughout the game, Zidane’s approach to intimacy and masculinity is consistently validated. His aggressive advances toward Garnet are largely framed as comedic and charming, even in moments of questionable consent — many of their earliest exchanges involve persistent uninvited flirtation. His ease with touch, romantic pursuit, and social confidence are treated as signs of emotional health and leadership. Even when he falters, such as during the “You Are Not Alone” sequence late in the game, his vulnerability is portrayed through a familiar, culturally sanctioned model of masculine grief: the man who becomes withdrawn until coaxed out by friendship. Though his story follows something of a coming-of-age trajectory and does not entirely idealize him, nearly every aspect of Zidane’s emotional and physical fluency is either valorized or gently redeemed.
Kuja, in contrast, offers a radically different model of gender expression and intimacy. He is feminine-coded in both design and behavior: delicate in appearance, stylized in movement, and disinterested in physicality as anything other than performance. His sensuality is passive and constrained in comparison to the traditional male role of pursuer that Zidane exemplifies. From a JRPG archetype standpoint, his association with magic further distances him from normative masculinity. Across the Final Fantasy series, magic-primary roles are overwhelmingly assigned to female characters — Aerith, Yuna, Terra — while male magic users are confined to narrow exceptions: children like Vivi and Palom, elderly sages like Strago, or villains like Kefka and the Emperor. At the time of Final Fantasy IX’s release, virtually no positively framed adult male characters occupied this role within the series. Therefore, Kuja's placement within it carries an implicit judgment about masculine legitimacy.
From a social perspective, the narrative strongly implies that he maintains no genuine connections, only strategic alliances, and there is no textual suggestion of romantic or sexual engagement. Indeed, the player does not observe any interactions between Kuja and other characters outside of a functional or business capacity. And where Zidane’s grief is stoic and rescuable, Kuja’s is explosive, uncontained, and ultimately fatal, coded feminine in its intensity, and dismissed as dangerous rather than tragic. Echoing the misogynistic tradition of the “hysterical woman” stereotype, what Showalter termed the historical pathologization of feminine emotional expression as madness (Showalter), this coding is used to undermine the seriousness of his pain and encourage the player to view it as excessive and disdainful.
By the game’s conclusion, the story explicitly affirms Zidane’s mode of existence as the ideal one. Kuja’s deathbed concession to Zidane reads as narrative decree: a verbal endorsement of the idea that true personhood comes from social ease, physical availability, and emotional legibility. Troublingly, this implies that models of selfhood rooted in restraint, boundary, and non-normative masculinity are not just atypical, but result in a regrettable lack of legacy and unfulfilled life potential. The story does not treat Kuja’s boundaries as a valid form of self-protection or self-authorship, but instead chooses to read them as defects.
Perhaps most telling in this regard is the epilogue’s final emphasis on heterosexual pairing and reproduction as a measure of existential success. Of the characters whose resolutions are shown, these factors are foregrounded as significant or required for the majority of them. The protagonists, Garnet and Zidane, enjoy a romantic reunion, as well as future romantic potential shown for secondary characters such as Beatrix and Steiner, or Freya and Fratley. Notably, even Vivi, who is both an artificial being and coded as a child in maturity and essence, receives legacy not merely through his impact on those he left behind but through inexplicably present offspring in the final scene. Taken in totality, this structure further drives home a portrait of existential triumph through the lens of heterosexual reproductive success — something Kuja is shown to exist outside of.
The Aesthetics of Evil
Continuing beyond its efforts to frame Kuja as condemnable in disposition, the narrative further encodes his damnation in advance through motif and symbolism. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his visual and allegorical parallels to a distinctly Luciferian archetype, particularly through the tradition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. This is not a new motif used within the Final Fantasy series, with Final Fantasy II’s Emperor Mateus alluding heavily to this archetype via his palace of Pandemonium, but Final Fantasy IX is faithful to the tradition of Miltonic Lucifer to a much greater degree. In Kuja, this is first asserted through his appearance: androgynous beauty, emotional detachment, and the arrested quality of eternal youth, all of which are traits typically associated with angels in Western myth. The divine aesthetic extends into his magic, which is tied to celestial phenomena: stars, cosmic forces, and apocalypse. Even the unmistakable serpent is echoed in his affinity with dragons.
These themes are showcased most explicitly in the Desert Palace, a sanctuary of exile constructed in the image of a profaned cathedral and adorned with stained glass and holy architecture that suggest corrupted divinity. His role as villain is likewise aligned with Satanic iconography: the deceiver, the warbringer, the manipulator of kings. His bestowed title, Angel of Death, makes the connection textual, and his jealousy and replacement by Zidane complete the picture of a classic fallen figure. His envy of his successor is framed as cowardly or childish through Garland’s expository voice, and his refusal to submit agreeably as transgressive in that he is then exiled from Terra.
Under scrutiny, this myth does not hold true to the character’s reality: Kuja is not divine. From his inception, he was denied both agency and any sense of dignity as an individual, a far cry from the Luciferian origin mythos of a beloved archangel beside the throne of heaven. Unlike Lucifer, Kuja was never given a place of glory to fall from. He was born apart, manufactured into disgrace, and denied even the most basic conditions of acceptance. His rebellion can thus be interpreted not as the overreach of ambition, but the desperation of someone attempting to rise above the role of slave. He does not oppose Garland as a rival to goodness or divinity, but as someone demanding the minimum required to be a person.
Another subtler but clearly deliberate piece of aesthetic coding appears in the proverbial peacock, a symbol of shallow vanity that seeks admiration. This motif is embedded through his ornate design, flowing garments, performative grace, and feathers. For a Japanese-speaking audience, the connection is textually explicit, as his name can be derived from the Japanese word kujaku, meaning peacock. The unintentional but sad irony in this indictment of ego is that in nature, birds do not display for praise or personal satisfaction. Their behavior is inherently social, with its purpose in courtship and pair bonding a widely understood phenomenon both from a zoological and cultural standpoint. Kuja is, by design, a bird without a flock, and this metaphor underscores his isolation with a cruelty disguised as flavor. Still, the metaphor becomes crueler: birds in literature and in captivity often serve as symbols of tragic imprisonment. Final Fantasy IX makes ample use of this metaphor in regards to Garnet’s coming-of-age arc, seen as early as the first cutscene as she gazes longingly at birds flying past the confines of her bedroom window, but seems to overlook its more poignant application to Kuja.
The final symbolic insult lies in how the narrative weaponizes Kuja's own theatricality against him. Throughout the story, his infatuation with drama and myth is not mere flourish — it is his chosen method of survival. For a being who cannot control his own story, the emulation of fantasy is a shallow but understandable substitute for agency. It is precisely at his lowest moment that the narrative turns this coping mechanism into spectacle. His defeat is staged as his final performance: not a moment of introspection, but a humiliation ritual. This effort to present suffering as punishment is a profoundly anti-existential posture to take — it treats pain as something fate inflicts upon those who do not play by its arbitrary rules, recasting despair as sin and Kuja not as a victim of design, but as someone who deserved divine retribution.
Nowhere is this more explicit than in the moments following Kuja's defiance of Garland. He has just killed his maker, rejected his role, and seized his first real moment of autonomy, only to be told it is too late. Garland's voice returns from the void not to warn, but to mock. He delivers one last message to Kuja that the end of his life is close at hand, a limitation placed upon him at creation. By this point the player has been thoroughly primed to receive this revelation as a justified outcome, and is thus expected to readily accept a master’s final spite toward his slave as a fitting punishment. Beneath the dramatic irony that the audience is invited to delight in, the message becomes clear: failure for Kuja was ensured long before his crimes within the narrative took place. This framing, which makes no attempt to account for what success would ever have looked like for Kuja, is not existentialism. It is a clear invocation of determinism, deployed in a narratively satisfying but philosophically dishonest fashion.
Suffering as Existential Dignity, Not Spectacle
Having constructed a portrait designed to foreclose sympathy — through aesthetic coding, symbolic indictment, and the framing of trauma as temperament — the narrative arrives at its most damning failure: its treatment of suffering itself. Within the field of existential thought, suffering is not viewed as a cudgel to punish those who fail to follow a prescripted moral code. Rather, it is seen as inevitable, and it is through suffering that man asserts his will by defining himself not by it, but in spite of it. As Kierkegaard famously posited in The Sickness Unto Death, it is an inescapable consequence of consciousness itself (65).
Final Fantasy IX appears to understand this principle, at least in part. Characters such as Garnet and Freya experience the death or detachment of loved ones and must choose how to process grief in ways that allow for growth, healing, and movement forward. For Freya in particular, her character arc is shaped by unavoidable tragedy: the destruction of her homeland, and the slow heartbreak of being forgotten by the one she loves. Yet the narrative treats her sorrow not as a failure or a flaw, but as something worthy of dignity. Her suffering is honored; not erased, mocked, or framed as condemnation.
Although the narrative thoroughly establishes Kuja as a character whose circumstances preclude anything but futile suffering in a life he cannot meaningfully control, it nonetheless decides that his pain is unworthy of regarding as dignified or honorable in any sense. It offers no room for reflection, no suggestion that his struggle might hold value beyond failure. The tragedy of Kuja is not simply that he suffers, but that he attempts to create meaning from that suffering, and the story refuses to recognize it.
Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, defined the last of the human freedoms as the ability to “take a stand toward the conditions” of one’s existence (153), even when those conditions are cruel, unjust, or inescapable. Kuja does precisely this. In the absence of love, safety, or hope, he builds identity through performance, mythologizes himself to survive, and asserts control as a fragile form of meaning-making. His suffering, though unwitnessed and unacknowledged, is both human and a testament to the will to endure. He is not passive in his despair. He resists it, in the only ways left to him.
Yet, the narrative does not acknowledge this as a choice at all. His acts of defiance are reframed as arrogance. His attempts at self-definition are cast as ego, his pain stripped of dignity, his coping read exclusively as villainy. Every tool Kuja uses to survive is retroactively entered as evidence against him or proof of inherent corruption and cruelty. In refusing to acknowledge the existential value of his struggle, the story violates its own philosophical premise: it punishes the act of taking a stand.
Frankl warned of the very crime the narrative is guilty of commiting against Kuja: “No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same” (68). Zidane does eventually echo this very idea, but only after Kuja has already been neutralized. His empathy arrives too late to offer grace, and serves less as a reckoning than as a moment of personal growth. It is a moral realization for the protagonist, not a vindication of the condemned, and consequently does little to mitigate the indifference the narrative has already shown toward Kuja’s circumstances.
Notably, Frankl also addressed the topic of culpability, stating, “No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them” (112-113). The problem lies in the fact that Kuja’s tragedy is not that he acted without consequences, rather it is that the story never asked the question Frankl posed first. It judged him without imagining what it took to survive as him, and in doing so, refused to let his suffering mean anything. His suffering is repurposed to serve the winners, only when he is already defeated and dying — denying him any existential merit in his own right.
Comparative Media – It Didn’t Have To Be This Way
While this essay has thus far demonstrated why framing Kuja as both a deserving and inevitable villain is dishonest by design, this line of critique can be taken a step further. Not only is a lack of empathy not a necessary treatment for such an archetype, it is in fact countered with humanity and grace in other media that wrestle honestly with existential questions of selfhood, connection, and trauma. Where Final Fantasy IX sterilizes and selectively applies these themes, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Pink Floyd’s The Wall confront their weight head-on, presenting these struggles as universal, uncomfortable, and deeply human.
Neon Genesis Evangelion
A critically acclaimed piece of existential media that predated Final Fantasy IX by only a few years, Neon Genesis Evangelion shares not only thematic ground but a cultural zeitgeist with the game. Aimed at a similar demographic, the series initially presents itself as a sci-fi mech anime, complete with high-stakes battles and a genre-typical “monster of the week” format. Yet, much like Final Fantasy IX, it gradually transforms from popcorn entertainment into a terrifying exploration of loneliness, trauma, and maladaptive coping in the face of social vulnerability and identity anxiety. As the narrative unfolds, the characters’ flaws are brought further into focus, and the viewer is gently, then relentlessly, invited to inhabit their fear and pain under increasingly unbearable psychological conditions.
The crucial difference between Evangelion and Final Fantasy IX’s handling of these topics is that Evangelion never seeks to lead the viewer into condemning its characters. Conflicts are given space to breathe, with appropriately timed pauses and respectfully framed glimpses into each character’s inner life. This creates an intimacy with the viewer that often borders on the voyeuristic. Rather than moral lecturing, the narrative’s goal is to invite the audience into the same mental and emotional space as the characters themselves. Silences, glances, and lingering still shots emphasize the solemn nature with which their suffering is portrayed.
Unlike Final Fantasy IX and its treatment of Kuja, Evangelion considers deprivation not only a point worth examining, but a central component in each character’s ability — or inability — to integrate into the world around them. The viewer bears painful witness as the characters self-sabotage, isolate, or construct false personas to either draw others in or push them away. Notably, Evangelion does not shy away from engaging with the suffering of characters who are not conventionally sympathetic, and makes no attempt to minimize flaws in its cast. Instead, it asks the viewer to sit in discomfort with those whose unhappiness and identity crises are difficult to disentangle, whether as self-inflicted wounds or as logical outcomes of their circumstances.
Shinji Ikari, the character most closely followed by the narrative, is not presented as a typical protagonist in the shounen genre. He is soft-spoken, hesitant, and his responses to conflict are unromanticized and revealing. Rather than serving as a vessel for wish fulfillment, Shinji is shown to behave in ways that may frustrate or unsettle the audience. Within the first episode, we witness his estrangement from a cold and distant father who manipulates him into becoming a child soldier, exploiting Shinji's desperate need for acknowledgment and approval. His growing need for validation, coupled with his inability to connect meaningfully to others, gradually isolates him until he begins to withdraw entirely into himself.
Both Evangelion and Final Fantasy IX culminate in a metaphysical confrontation with the death drive, a psychological and existential impulse to dissolve the self in order to escape suffering. In Evangelion, this takes the form of Instrumentality: the merging of all souls into a formless unity where pain, rejection, and individuality cease to exist. At the heart of this process is Shinji Ikari, positioned not merely as a participant but as the narrative’s avatar for this dilemma. It is through his inner world and conflict that Instrumentality unfolds, and it is his choice alone that determines whether the world continues.
What makes Shinji's choice so narratively courageous is the depth of his despair at the moment he is asked to make it. By the climax of The End of Evangelion, Shinji is isolated, grief-stricken, and emotionally wrecked. He believes himself irreparably broken, unloved, and unworthy of existence. His lowest moment is not minimized — it is depicted with unbearable honesty, including a scene of sexual violation that frames his shame and alienation without absolution. And yet, the story still asks him: do you want to keep living?
The answer is yes — not because anything has been resolved, but because Shinji chooses to embrace the uncertainty of life. He accepts the reality that refusing the possibility of suffering, via non-existence, also removes the ability to ever experience joy or connection. The movie's conclusion honors this decision not with triumph, but with quiet, haunting openness. That possibility — that someone who believes they are beyond saving can still be permitted a future — is what elevates Evangelion's treatment of despair into something remarkably humane.
In Final Fantasy IX, Kuja arrives at a similar psychological and metaphysical threshold. He has endured the burden of an artificial existence, been used and discarded, deprived of connection, and finally confronted with imminent death. He too lashes out in nihilistic despair to destroy the Crystal, a symbol of the origin of life, in a final act that mirrors the logic of the death drive. But unlike Shinji, it is only Kuja’s despair that gets to play a role in the story’s climax, and indeed the narrative does not center him in the resolution of his own crisis. Instead, it introduces Necron, a faceless embodiment of oblivion, to articulate the philosophy Kuja never gets to fully realize. Necron appears to the player party to deliver the logic of the death drive, interpreting Kuja’s despair as representative of mortal inability to endure suffering, and thus positioning them in the role to symbolically defeat despair via success in battle. This framing is particularly incoherent from an ideological perspective. Shinji’s despair both catalyzed and resolved the confrontation with the death drive, refusing the ease of passing existential victory to a less broken character, while Final Fantasy IX avoids having its most despairing character engage with the resolution at all. Kuja is left to die offscreen, only being permitted a general sentiment of regret before exiting the narrative.
While Shinji represents a human and familiar exploration of despair and identity acceptance, Evangelion also examines the experience of engineered humanity and instrumentalization. This is a theme embodied but never truly explored in Kuja’s origins. Rei Ayanami exemplifies the concept of a being created to serve no purpose of its own, destined only to be a tool. The parallel here is strikingly specific. Unlike Kuja, Rei spends much of her arc teetering on the edge of human connection, only to repeatedly fall back into fatalism and detachment. Through her growing bond with Shinji, and through observing his choices and pain, she begins to assert her own desires as the series reaches its climax. This culminates in a moment that mirrors Kuja’s confrontation with Garland almost exactly: Rei strikes out at her creator, Gendo Ikari, and finally seizes independence from him. Unlike Kuja, however, Rei is permitted to fully reclaim herself from Gendo’s manipulations and initiate Instrumentality on her own terms.
Although Rei’s role ultimately serves to help resolve Shinji’s arc, she is never relegated to a prop or dehumanized in the process. Her quiet questions and subtle emotional shifts create a space in which Shinji can examine his own beliefs without being cornered by a moral binary. Crucially, Rei never dictates his path — she simply aids him in finding it. Because Shinji arrives at his decision through internal reckoning rather than narrative coercion, his choice to live feels sincere, not prescribed. Rei does not remain in the world after this, her role completed, but her absence is profound. The viewer is left with the impression that she has departed on her own terms, having fulfilled her chosen role of guide and protector to Shinji. Rei’s final arc allows her a self-chosen legacy, contrasting Kuja’s conclusion which offered him no meaningful opportunity to choose and a legacy only decided upon by third parties posthumously.
Impressively, Evangelion even resists the temptation to tie up loose ends by punishing a designated antagonist for narrative catharsis. Even Gendo Ikari, the character arguably most responsible for the suffering of others, is not reduced to a stock villain. His emotional sterility, manipulations, and cowardice are not excused, but they are made legible. In his final moments, he is not indicted, but revealed: a man who, in shielding himself from pain, ensured he would never know love. His downfall is that of exposure, and the story offers no omniscient judgement beyond a glimpse of his final regrets spoken in his own words. This stands in stark contrast to Final Fantasy IX, which treats Kuja’s destruction as both inevitable and sufficient closure, not an opening for reflection.
Aside from its presentation of the characters, the contrast is starkest in the way these stories ask the viewer to internalize their central message about choice. In the original television ending of Evangelion, Shinji’s decision to accept himself and continue existing is met not with grand triumph or resolution, but with a surreal and symbolic chorus of “Congratulations”. Every major character appears to him and smiles, not because his pain is gone, but because he chose to live in spite of it. The moment breaks the fourth wall: the viewer is not just witnessing his decision, but being asked to affirm it. It is not treated as narrative reward, but existential validation, providing a message of hope to the viewer that they, too, may make the same choice Shinji has.
Final Fantasy IX offers a parallel in its “You Are Not Alone” sequence, in which Zidane, after discovering the truth of his origin, spirals into despair and isolation. One by one, his friends come to his side, refusing to let him give up. It is a powerful moment of emotional rescue that players often cite as the scene that left the greatest impact on them. Although the party doesn’t fix his crisis, they refuse to leave him in it, and re-anchor him at a moment when his identity is most in jeopardy of collapse. The player is invited to feel this support alongside Zidane, and the message is clear: his pain is real, but he does not face it alone.
The problem is that Kuja receives no such moment. Though he undergoes an existential collapse even more severe, the shattering realization of his mortality and disposability, the narrative has already ensured that no one can reach him. While Zidane is pulled back from despair, Kuja is left to act on it, and his final gesture of help is acknowledged only in passing. The story frames one character’s vulnerability as worth saving, and the other’s as a footnote — consequently, the message is not “you are not alone”. Rather, it reads more as “you must already be chosen to be saved”.
Pink Floyd’s The Wall
Speaking to the universality of the themes explored in both Evangelion and Final Fantasy IX, Pink Floyd’s The Wall provides a powerful Western counterpart. Released decades earlier and in a completely different medium, The Wall is a concept album-turned-film that traces the psychological deterioration of a man who isolates himself emotionally from the world through a self-imposed barrier. Like Kuja and Shinji, the protagonist, Pink, grapples with abandonment, emotional suppression, and the dehumanizing weight of being instrumentalized — in his case, by war, education, fame, and societal expectation. What emerges is a portrait of suffering not as villainy, but as the slow suffocation of the self.
A striking parallel emerges in the album’s opening track, "In the Flesh?", where Pink first introduces himself to the listener not with sincerity, but with bitter showmanship. He performs himself like a role, commanding lights, action, and spectacle, while simultaneously indicting the audience's ignorance of the truth behind it: "Tell me, is something eluding you, sunshine? / Is this not what you expected to see?" (Pink Floyd). It is an accusation of both resentment and disappointment. Still, the track does not end on this note but rather invites the audience into the album as a means to uncover that truth: "If you want to find out what's behind these cold eyes / You'll just have to claw your way through this disguise". From here the album leads the audience through the slow construction of the metaphorical wall, approachable and human in its themes of familial trauma, troubled romance, and the double-edged sword that is fame. As Pink descends into the bombastic villainy of authoritarianism, the horror of it is treated not with simple condemnation, but the haunting question of its inevitability.
At its climax, The Wall offers something that Final Fantasy IX withholds from Kuja: the chance to be held accountable without being discarded. Pink’s internal trial is harrowing and surreal, but it grants him narrative subjectivity and a chance to confront his own role in his suffering without reducing him to a cautionary tale. Kuja, by contrast, is never offered this reckoning. Though his breakdown is grand and operatic, the story does not allow him to participate meaningfully in his own redemption. He is given no trial, no mirror, no honest path through his despair. His suffering, like Necron’s philosophy, is positioned as something to be defeated, not examined. Where Pink’s wall is torn down, closing the album with both the pain and liberation of exposure, Kuja’s is buried with him.
These works, Neon Genesis Evangelion and The Wall, demonstrate that suffering need not be sanitized, punished, or overwritten to be meaningful. They allow despair to speak, not for the sake of moralizing, but to honor the complexity of those who endure it. That Final Fantasy IX chooses instead to isolate and condemn its most tragic figure is not a necessity of genre or audience. It is a narrative decision, and one that stands in opposition to how these other stories approach the existential weight of suffering with nuance, respect, and grace.
Conclusion
In the end, Final Fantasy IX does attempt to gesture toward meaning, but only after it has already erased the character most in need of it. In the game’s epilogue, Mikoto offers Kuja a eulogy: “What you did was wrong… but you gave us all one thing… hope” (Final Fantasy IX, disc 4). Her words attempt to retrofit the very grace the story refused to extend while he lived — a concession offered only once his challenge to the narrative has been resolved and cleaned up. This again invokes a sense of deterministic conclusion, all but admitting that his death was a necessary prerequisite for granting him existential recognition or dignity.
This contradiction reveals the core failure of Final Fantasy IX’s philosophical framework. If a story claims to examine mortality and self-prescribed meaning through an existential lens, it must allow all characters, even the antagonist, the conditions to choose meaningfully. Kuja is denied this by virtue of a narrative structure that could not afford for him to be nuanced or morally legible. It instead plays a sleight of hand trick by allowing for grace only after death, a choice directly in opposition to the “the meaning of life is its living” philosophy its “Melodies of Life” musical theme claims to celebrate.
By contrast, works like Neon Genesis Evangelion and The Wall allow despair to unfold in its full, unbearable complexity, and still offer the possibility of grace. They do not withhold meaning until it is convenient, nor erase characters in order to maintain ideological neatness. They extend the philosophical courtesy of subjectivity to those who need it most. In doing so, they affirm that even the most broken, isolated, or antagonistic figures may still be allowed to choose and to be witnessed. Final Fantasy IX claims to ask what gives life meaning, but in the end, it answers that only some lives ever get to find out.
Works Cited
Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1, 2nd ed., Basic Books, 1982.
Final Fantasy IX. Directed by Hiroyuki Ito, Square, 2000. Sony PlayStation game.
Final Fantasy IX Ultimania. Studio BentStuff / Square Enix, 2000. pp. 42-43. Translated by The Lifestream, thelifestream.net/lifestream-projects/translations/1908/. Accessed 4/10/2026.
Frankl, Viktor E. Man's Search for Meaning. 1946. Washington Square Press, 1985.
Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death. Translated by Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press, 1941.
Kohut, Heinz. The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders. International Universities Press, 1971.
Kohlberg, Lawrence. The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral Stages and the Idea of Justice. Harper & Row, 1981.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. 1667. James R. Osgood and Company, 1877.
Pink Floyd. "In the Flesh?" The Wall, Columbia, 1979.
Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. Penguin, 1985.
