sanity is not statistical

AO3: fauxpromises

[scribeherself]

“they never explicitly looked at the camera and said ‘i am experiencing immense grief’ so how was i supposed to know??” i don’t know what to tell you, man. if a story doesn’t spoon-feed you the character's internal emotional state like a jar of mashed peas, you guys just willingly starve. subtext is not a myth, i promise it won't bite you.

[kikyoist]

i was telling this to someone the other day, but i think that what makes kikyo so hauntingly good and more selfless than any other character in the story of inuyasha is that she really had nothing to look forward to from life anymore, out of all the characters in the story.

sure, ridding the world of naraku was everyone's goal, but everyone had lives to go back to after this, plans - miroku straight up told sango to marry him "once everything was over", so everyone were protecting a possible future, and it was a huge deal that kikyo chose kohaku's life over naraku's death. she chose life, she chose to prioritize life, but she had no life of her own to look forward to.

kikyo is ultimately the wisest and strongest character (to me, as a concept) because the expectation of her character is to let go of life. she's going through this journey of having to let go of life through the entire story, even as inuyasha passionately tells her to let him protect her and that "you told me my life is yours, so your life is mine, too!" she was pulling away. she was cherishing those feelings by embracing him and promising him fidelity ("not letting another man touch a single hair of her head"), but she was still pulling away, and pushing him towards his friends, "life".

kikyo is expected to wisely accept her time on earth is halted and finite and despite the ongoing insistence of separating kikyo and kagome due to their very different personalities, there's already someone else destinated to live her life. wear her clothes, live in her village, do her duty, live alongside the man she had loved. there's a direct correlation in kagome's "chosen" life and the one kikyo didn't get to live. kikyo's expected to let go of the one person that represented ridding herself of loneliness (while she lived) and accept death, and in the end she does.

it can't be easy for ANYONE to let go of life. we don't see all the pain it must've taken for her to do that, rumiko says herself in a segment we never get to see her show "weakness", so we never see her openly crying or raging the unfairness of her situation. we get glimpses, parallels, her telling saint hakushin "it was not shameful to want to live" is a perfect example and foreshadowing of her situation.

by tropes alone, kikyo is not the heroine of the story, she's deemed "too serious" for that role, no comedic relief during her scenes, just tension, so it's maybe natural people are not drawn to someone like her, but her expected acceptance of her fate, which was death, was key for many characters of the story to have their own happiness, and preserve their lives, at the stake of her own. selfless, kind, gentle, wise. so many things to her... petty shipping discussions aside, really the best character in inuyasha.

[fauxpromises]

I know I'm replying to an old post here, but was perusing the tag after some recent discussion about this topic and I think your final paragraph here is really touches on the fact that the role Kikyou is meant to be play, especially in contrast to Kagome, really has some unfortunate implications about what a "good" woman is/should be.

Shipping discourse about the two characters has always from what I've seen devolved into misogynistic insults and bickering, but I think structurally the characters themselves create that discourse by virtue of the situation they're placed in. Though those who like Kikyou can observe all the things you've mentioned about her character, her ultimate role as a woman is to let go of the life and future she was robbed of and relinquish that future to a less burdened and damaged woman.

It just doesn't sit right with me that the narrative is comfortable exploiting her pain for an emotional reaction from the viewer, but also comfortable with reducing a woman who was brutally murdered to a tragic past that needs to be let go of so the main leads can properly get together. The original relationship alluded to between Inuyasha and Kikyou involved them connecting over a shared, non-gender-specific experience of loneliness and isolation, while by contrast Kagome's role is more to serve as a patient fixer who 'graciously' tolerates Inuyasha's flaws and grief while teaching him kindness and acceptance in a traditionally female role. She is allowed anger at times but pretty much only insofar as it relates to her jealousy of Kikyou and therefore is read as justified and proof of love and devotion. In contrast to Kikyou, she faces very little existential tension that does not revolve around Inuyasha.

The fact that, as you point out, Kagome ends up stepping directly into Kikyou's unrealized role in life, just makes the discomfort of the situation for me even more egregious. Again, the woman that the narrative deems to receive the gift of a future and happiness is the more conventionally girlish, unburdened woman with no substantive past or traumas to overcome in her own right. It's not that I am saying such a character is objectively bad, but when placed into a dichotomy with a character like Kikyou, it definitely hits a certain way.

It left a poor impression on me as a young viewer and even moreso now. I understand why people can enjoy that sort of relationship, but I just can't help but find it distasteful the way complex women such as Kikyou largely are designed to exit the narrative and allow for the happy future of less damaged characters. Such characters always have left the biggest impression on me, but it nonetheless disappoints me that they are an afterthought to the happy ending of the 'more important' protagonists.

I think you've articulated well why the character is impactful to many people, but it's hard for me to say it isn't still a framing that is exploitative of the pain of a very deeply wronged character.

[fauxpromises]

Saw some people in an anime group I'm in talking about the Inuyasha love triangle today. One thing I continue to not understand about peoples' perception of the Inuyasha and Kikyou relationship is the idea that the two of them 'falling for' the betrayal is somehow proof that they didn't trust each other or weren't right for each other. People act like Naraku preyed on their 'distrust of each other' when what he really preyed on was their shared internalized belief that no one could possibly love or understand them. That was both of their deepest insecurity, not distrust of each other specifically.

Let's look at that same logic applied to the relationship between Inuyasha and Kagome, or even Sango and Miroku. Kagome's major insecurity throughout the series is Inuyasha's lingering attachment to Kikyou. For Sango with Miroku it is often about his pervertedness or apparent unsuitability for a monogamous relationship. So what would have happened if a literal shapeshifter posed as Inuyasha and went and did something intimate with Kikyou, or the same with Miroku and some woman? You're telling me if Kagome or Sango saw their love interests doing the very thing they're fearful and insecure about, that their first thought would be 'that couldn't be him, it must be an unknown shapeshifting enemy I was previously unaware of'.

Spare me. It really reeks again of the need to invalidate Kikyou and her relationship with Inuyasha in an attempt to fluff up the relationship with Kagome. If Inuyasha and Kagome's relationship is contingent upon Kikyou being a bad, failed relationship partner I question the value of it on its own merits. Imagine dating someone whose spouse died and insisting they must have never had true feelings for that person, or the feelings must be lesser.

[edlingsbjorkman]

Noticing that both Kuja and Ultima are mistreated hypocritically by their source material. Other characters are allowed to explore and heal their chronic loneliness, but not the "villains" we're clearly supposed to hate - despite the fact that they have similar trauma to the others. In other words, Kuja and Ultima each get the shorter end of the stick of a double standard.

(This is very much also how the COD fandom treats the villains as opposed to the heroes.)

It's... ugh. I don't like it. This is what I use my fix-it fics for - to allow them the space and love they need too, because villainy is just a construct.

@callofdutyhater (anyone else apply to this?) @fauxpromises

[fauxpromises]

I think the larger problem is just how victims are treated in media which is itself a symptom of how victims are treated in real life. Victims are palatable to society at large when they don't implicate society's own role in creating them. A good example of that point being called out is the 2018 Joker movie - the character is an isolated, socioeconomically disadvantaged mentally ill man who spends the first half of the film doing what society would prescribe for victims - working a job, going to therapy, putting in extra work to appear harmless despite his 'creepy' personality tics (aka mental illness). But the jobs he is given are menial and degrading, he is victim-blamed when his ability to do them is maligned by bad actors, and his 'therapy' is basically medication management with a social worker who has no real investment or ability to help him improve his circumstances (and even that is eventually taken from him by funding cuts).

By the end of the film, after watching his assailants be mourned by a society who cares more about protecting its conventionally valuable members (in this case rich young white men), Arthur comes to the conclusion that many victimized villains do - if society has no interest in protecting me when I ingratiate myself to it and suffer on its terms, then why be good? Why uphold a society that punishes me and protects victims selectively? And then the conclusion becomes - if I am invisible to and hated by society's values, then I will be disruptive instead.

So this goes back to your back and to my point about Kuja that I was making in my essay - there is no psychologically realistic path he could've taken that would have made him an appealing victim. Zidane and Vivi are deemed appealing victims because they get handed the framework to be 'good' victims. They never hurt anyone, they never face moral situations where it's their life or someone else's, they never reflect really on their counterparts (we don't ever see Vivi think about the lot of the Black Waltzes, who are Kuja's generational trauma incarnate).

Victims are only useful to audiences when they validate their own moral perspective. And Final Fantasy as a series shies away from reflecting on such victims. Celes is probably the closest we get to someone's trauma and indoctrination being taken into consideration. FF largely prefers victims who are highly sanitized. I have not play FF16 but given the pattern seen in the earlier games in the series I would expect the same logic to be applied.

[edlingsbjorkman]

As ever, you put this issue into words so well! Bless your heart <3333. I’ve noticed this both in media (Final Fantasy especially….. ugh) and in how mental illness is perceived as a whole; sanitized/more ‘palatable’ victims are preferred since they’re easier for neurotypicals to digest. But everyone deserves the support they need.

[fauxpromises]

Honestly aside from that point I think one of the bigger reasons FF9 treats Kuja with so little compassion for the disturbing history of slavery and dehumanization he experienced... is misogyny. FF9 is an extremely misogynistic game.

All female characters' arcs revolve around a man in some capacity, even Freya and Beatrix who are ostensibly the more independent and capable women of the cast. Garnet is almost entirely dependent on Zidane for her development, Beatrix, Freya, and even fuckin' Eiko who is barely past a toddler have their arcs resolve with standard hetero tropes, and the only woman who is explicitly punished by the narrative is Brahne who the game belabors to us is ugly and uses that to help frame her as repulsive.

So the reason that relates to Kuja is that despite his main villainous tool being very masculine-coded - operating through strategy and intellect - virtually everything else about him is feminine-coded. Physically, of course, which is faithful to his angel motif, but also by virtue of the fact that the violence he enacts never involves actually bloodying his own hands in battle. And it's most evident with regards to how his despair and anger at the injustice of his life is framed. Absolute stock-standard pathologizing of female-coded despair and emotional expression as 'hysterical and excessive' regardless of how deep his pain ran.

By contrast Zidane does the standard 'I'm a stoic withdrawn man, leave me alone' until his friends rally around him. Masculine-coded grief gets rewarded by the narrative as appropriate.

I really feel like the whole thing reeks of misogyny to the roots when you look at it in totality.

[edlingsbjorkman]

Noticing that both Kuja and Ultima are mistreated hypocritically by their source material. Other characters are allowed to explore and heal their chronic loneliness, but not the "villains" we're clearly supposed to hate - despite the fact that they have similar trauma to the others. In other words, Kuja and Ultima each get the shorter end of the stick of a double standard.

(This is very much also how the COD fandom treats the villains as opposed to the heroes.)

It's... ugh. I don't like it. This is what I use my fix-it fics for - to allow them the space and love they need too, because villainy is just a construct.

@callofdutyhater (anyone else apply to this?) @fauxpromises

[fauxpromises]

I think the larger problem is just how victims are treated in media which is itself a symptom of how victims are treated in real life. Victims are palatable to society at large when they don't implicate society's own role in creating them. A good example of that point being called out is the 2018 Joker movie - the character is an isolated, socioeconomically disadvantaged mentally ill man who spends the first half of the film doing what society would prescribe for victims - working a job, going to therapy, putting in extra work to appear harmless despite his 'creepy' personality tics (aka mental illness). But the jobs he is given are menial and degrading, he is victim-blamed when his ability to do them is maligned by bad actors, and his 'therapy' is basically medication management with a social worker who has no real investment or ability to help him improve his circumstances (and even that is eventually taken from him by funding cuts).

By the end of the film, after watching his assailants be mourned by a society who cares more about protecting its conventionally valuable members (in this case rich young white men), Arthur comes to the conclusion that many victimized villains do - if society has no interest in protecting me when I ingratiate myself to it and suffer on its terms, then why be good? Why uphold a society that punishes me and protects victims selectively? And then the conclusion becomes - if I am invisible to and hated by society's values, then I will be disruptive instead.

So this goes back to your point and to my point about Kuja that I was making in my essay - there is no psychologically realistic path he could've taken that would have made him an appealing victim. Zidane and Vivi are deemed appealing victims because they get handed the framework to be 'good' victims. They never hurt anyone, they never face moral situations where it's their life or someone else's, they never reflect really on their counterparts (we don't ever see Vivi think about the lot of the Black Waltzes, who are Kuja's generational trauma incarnate).

Victims are only useful to audiences when they validate their own moral perspective. And Final Fantasy as a series shies away from reflecting on such victims. Celes is probably the closest we get to someone's trauma and indoctrination being taken into consideration. FF largely prefers victims who are highly sanitized. I have not play FF16 but given the pattern seen in the earlier games in the series I would expect the same logic to be applied.

[fauxpromises]

I've struggled to find a permanent home for this essay... Reddit is a failure for that, as any subreddits related to Final Fantasy do not tolerate literary critique. Thus, I will probably only keep this (very rigorous) essay here for now.

You Are Alone: Final Fantasy IX and the Illusion of Choice 

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.

Even among the often-philosophical 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 “friends on an 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 “heroes 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 this as Kuja’s flaw: his design limitation, and ultimately, his narrative failing. He was not nurtured, but manufactured and discarded. 

The profound implications of this are brushed aside unceremoniously, and 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 tragedy, but as an inconvenient obstacle on the path to the heroes’ triumph. 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. 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. It rewards those born into meaning, and condemns those who must invent it. 

This is not existentialism. This is in fact the complete opposite: determinism. 

Post-Hoc Condemnation – 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 is not simply written, 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 treatment of him relies not on clear ideology, but on a slow aesthetic and psychological indictment that erodes the possibility of sympathy before it ever begins.

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. Trauma during this 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. The most damaging trauma often comes from parental rejection, which compromises 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 eventually be discarded. His survival depends entirely on performance. Worse still, Kuja appears to have lived for some time without sentient peers, precluding even basic social interaction. He is denied not only childhood, but the development upon which self-image is founded. He does not grow into emotional maturity, he is simply installed with intellect. The result is a being who suffers the tragedy of a child’s volatility trapped in an adult’s body, and who was never given the chance to become anything else. 

It is therefore no surprise that Kuja exhibits the profile of someone shaped by deep alienation. He performs cruelty, but cannot connect. He controls others, but cannot have a place among them. His flamboyance, detachment, and need for control are not tools of dominance, but rather they are stage dressing hiding a disrupted identity. The story codes these traits as villainy, but they align exactly with the psychology of someone wounded, hollowed out, and desperate to maintain some semblance of dignity. 

Kuja is not punished for being monstrous. He is punished for responding to trauma in a way the story refuses to read as even remotely sympathetic. 

What Are You, A Virgin?

While condemning mismanaged trauma already delivers a troubling message about what constitutes morally acceptable self-expression, 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 framed as harmless flirtation, even in moments that violate consent, such as groping her during a compromising situation early in the story. 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 framed through a familiar, culturally sanctioned model of masculine grief: the man who becomes withdrawn until coaxed out by friendship. 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, never rooted in pursuit or participation. His use of magic, a role most often assigned to female characters within JRPG convention, further distances him from normative masculinity. Socially, he maintains no genuine connections, only strategic alliances, and there is no textual suggestion of romantic or sexual engagement. 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.

By the game’s conclusion, the story explicitly affirms Zidane’s mode of existence as the “correct” one. Kuja’s final 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. More troubling still, this implies that models of selfhood rooted in restraint, boundary, and non-normative masculinity are not just atypical, but incorrect. The story does not treat Kuja’s boundaries as a valid form of self-protection or self-authorship. It reads them as defects. 

The Aesthetics of Evil 

Unsatisfied with merely portraying 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. This is first asserted through his appearance: androgynous beauty, emotional detachment, and the arrested quality of eternal youth, which are traits associated not with mortals, but 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 clearly 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 this 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, and his refusal to submit agreeably as transgressive. 

Under scrutiny, this myth does not hold true to the character’s reality. Kuja is not divine. He is not a being cast from grace. He is not a prince of heaven whose pride drove him to ruin. He is an engineered and profoundly vulnerable creature, a mortal in the false guise of a god. 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 is not the overreach of ambition, but the desperation of someone who has always been consigned to the role of slave. He does not rise against Garland as a rival to the divine. He rises as someone pleading for 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. 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, serving as a means to bond, to be chosen, and to belong. 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 longing for freedom — something beautiful that was never meant to be caged. In Kuja’s case, the symbolism is inverted: his splendor does not invite liberation, but signals his fate as something ornamental, confined, and displayed only to serve someone else's design.

The final symbolic insult lies in how the narrative weaponizes Kuja’s own love of drama and myth against him. Throughout the story, his infatuation with the conceit of theatrics is not mere performative flourish, but his chosen method of survival. For a being who can neither control his own story nor feel genuine emotion, the emulation of fantasy is a shallow but understandable substitute. It is precisely at his lowest moment that the narrative cruelly turns this coping mechanism into spiteful irony. This defeat is staged as his final performance; not a moment of introspection, but a humiliation ritual. The true crime lies in the fact that presenting suffering as punishment is profoundly anti-existential, as it treats pain as something fate inflicts upon those who do not play by its arbitrary rules. This reframes despair as a sin, and casts Kuja not as a victim of design, but as someone who deserved divine punishment. 

Indeed, 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. Kuja’s time is up, his body is finite, and his soul will soon be forfeit. The message is not that he has failed, but that he was never allowed to succeed. This is not a reckoning between equals, but rather a master speaking down to his creation — a final assertion of control disguised as truth. His struggle, his pain, even his desperate grasp for legacy are all waved away by a voice that condemns with the cold finality of the hand of justice itself.

This is not existentialism. It is yet another invocation of determinism, deployed in a narratively satisfying but philosophically dishonest fashion. 

Suffering As Sacred, Not Spectacle 

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. 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, not mocked, not 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, 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 no less human and no less sacred. It is not monstrous nor hollow, but rather a testament to the will to endure. He is not passive in his despair. He resists it, in the only ways left to him.

And 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 is stripped of dignity, his coping read as villainy. In doing so, the story violates its own philosophical premise: it punishes the act of taking a stand.

Frankl also warned, “No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.” Zidane eventually echoes 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.

Notably, Frankl also maintained, “No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.” But Kuja’s tragedy is not that he acted without consequences, but rather 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. It is repurposed to serve the winners, not to elevate the dead.

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 and deliberate, 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 piece of highly 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 reverent 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. 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. From this moment onward, the narrative remains unflinching, exposing Shinji not only to physical threats in battle, but to the far more insidious internal danger of emotional starvation. 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 has witnessed the brutal deaths of those around him. 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, in that moment, the story still asks him: Do you want to keep living?

The answer is yes, not because anything has been resolved, but because he chooses to embrace the uncertainty of life. He rejects the obliteration of self. He allows the world, and himself, to continue. The movie’s conclusion honors this decision not with triumph, but with quiet, haunting openness. In choosing life, Shinji reclaims it. That possibility, the 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. 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. The party defeats Necron in combat, and Kuja is quietly allowed to die off-screen. His existential pain is not interrogated, it is contained and erased.

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 initiates Instrumentality not as a tool, but as an act of will, guiding Shinji’s journey of self-determination.

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 holds the door open. 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 fulfilled, but her absence is profound. She leaves the viewer with the impression of someone not erased but sanctified, an almost holy figure who departed on her own terms.

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 not vengeance but exposure, and the story offers no judgement beyond the ache of imagining what he might have been, had he chosen differently. 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 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 narrative reward, but existential validation: fragile, strange, and sincere.

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. The party doesn’t fix his crisis, but they refuse to leave him in it. 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, no one follows him. No one answers his isolation with affirmation. 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. The message is not “you are not alone”. It is: 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?" 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 villainy of authoritarianism, the horror of it is treated not with 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 pain, like Necron’s philosophy, is positioned as something to be defeated, not understood. Where Pink’s wall is torn down, Kuja’s is buried with him.

These works, 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 a quiet postscript, Mikoto offers Kuja a eulogy: “What you did was wrong… but you gave us all one thing… hope.” Her words attempt to retrofit the very grace the story refused to extend while he lived. It is not redemption. It is not reflection. It is a concession offered only once it is safe to grieve him, and once his challenge to the narrative has been resolved and cleaned up.

This contradiction reveals the core failure of Final Fantasy IX’s existential framework. If a story claims to examine mortality and self-prescribed meaning, it must allow all characters, even the antagonist, the conditions to choose meaningfully. Kuja is denied this. His pain is not explored. His rebellion is not contextualized. His collapse is not mourned. His arc is not allowed to mean anything beyond its narrative utility. And then, when it is too late, the story tries to reclaim emotional ground with a eulogy it never earned.

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. They do not erase characters in order to maintain ideological neatness. They extend the philosophical courtesy of subjectivity to those who need it most. 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.

[edlingsbjorkman]

Yes yes yes YES this all of this. Since getting into FFIX last year this has always bothered me — Kuja does not get a real second chance nor an opportunity for freedom or redemption, while everyone else in the main cast does. It also bugs me that Kuja feels neurodivergent coded and they are not granted the agency they need to heal… that’s a convo for another time though.

Double standards & hypocrisy my BELOATHED.

[edlingsbjorkman]

I also want @callofdutyhater to see this sometime

[fauxpromises]

Hey, glad you enjoyed! And a big yes on the neurodivergent point. When I get a chance to expand on this work someday I'd love to touch on that point more as well. I recently did post an updated and expanded version of this essay that elaborated on the psychology and gender/sexuality points but my own view of him definitely includes a neurodivergent interpretation.

It's slightly harder to defend that opinion within this work, at least, since I tried to avoid opening up any claims that require more steps to defend logically, but I'm glad to hear someone else voice that opinion because I agree wholeheartedly.

[fauxpromises]

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.

[fauxpromises]

I've struggled to find a permanent home for this essay... Reddit is a failure for that, as any subreddits related to Final Fantasy do not tolerate literary critique. Thus, I will probably only keep this (very rigorous) essay here for now.

You Are Alone: Final Fantasy IX and the Illusion of Choice 

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.

Even among the often-philosophical 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 “friends on an 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 “heroes 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 this as Kuja’s flaw: his design limitation, and ultimately, his narrative failing. He was not nurtured, but manufactured and discarded. 

The profound implications of this are brushed aside unceremoniously, and 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 tragedy, but as an inconvenient obstacle on the path to the heroes’ triumph. 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. 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. It rewards those born into meaning, and condemns those who must invent it. 

This is not existentialism. This is in fact the complete opposite: determinism. 

Post-Hoc Condemnation – 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 is not simply written, 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 treatment of him relies not on clear ideology, but on a slow aesthetic and psychological indictment that erodes the possibility of sympathy before it ever begins.

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. Trauma during this 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. The most damaging trauma often comes from parental rejection, which compromises 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 eventually be discarded. His survival depends entirely on performance. Worse still, Kuja appears to have lived for some time without sentient peers, precluding even basic social interaction. He is denied not only childhood, but the development upon which self-image is founded. He does not grow into emotional maturity, he is simply installed with intellect. The result is a being who suffers the tragedy of a child’s volatility trapped in an adult’s body, and who was never given the chance to become anything else. 

It is therefore no surprise that Kuja exhibits the profile of someone shaped by deep alienation. He performs cruelty, but cannot connect. He controls others, but cannot have a place among them. His flamboyance, detachment, and need for control are not tools of dominance, but rather they are stage dressing hiding a disrupted identity. The story codes these traits as villainy, but they align exactly with the psychology of someone wounded, hollowed out, and desperate to maintain some semblance of dignity. 

Kuja is not punished for being monstrous. He is punished for responding to trauma in a way the story refuses to read as even remotely sympathetic. 

What Are You, A Virgin?

While condemning mismanaged trauma already delivers a troubling message about what constitutes morally acceptable self-expression, 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 framed as harmless flirtation, even in moments that violate consent, such as groping her during a compromising situation early in the story. 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 framed through a familiar, culturally sanctioned model of masculine grief: the man who becomes withdrawn until coaxed out by friendship. 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, never rooted in pursuit or participation. His use of magic, a role most often assigned to female characters within JRPG convention, further distances him from normative masculinity. Socially, he maintains no genuine connections, only strategic alliances, and there is no textual suggestion of romantic or sexual engagement. 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.

By the game’s conclusion, the story explicitly affirms Zidane’s mode of existence as the “correct” one. Kuja’s final 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. More troubling still, this implies that models of selfhood rooted in restraint, boundary, and non-normative masculinity are not just atypical, but incorrect. The story does not treat Kuja’s boundaries as a valid form of self-protection or self-authorship. It reads them as defects. 

The Aesthetics of Evil 

Unsatisfied with merely portraying 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. This is first asserted through his appearance: androgynous beauty, emotional detachment, and the arrested quality of eternal youth, which are traits associated not with mortals, but 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 clearly 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 this 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, and his refusal to submit agreeably as transgressive. 

Under scrutiny, this myth does not hold true to the character’s reality. Kuja is not divine. He is not a being cast from grace. He is not a prince of heaven whose pride drove him to ruin. He is an engineered and profoundly vulnerable creature, a mortal in the false guise of a god. 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 is not the overreach of ambition, but the desperation of someone who has always been consigned to the role of slave. He does not rise against Garland as a rival to the divine. He rises as someone pleading for 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. 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, serving as a means to bond, to be chosen, and to belong. 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 longing for freedom — something beautiful that was never meant to be caged. In Kuja’s case, the symbolism is inverted: his splendor does not invite liberation, but signals his fate as something ornamental, confined, and displayed only to serve someone else's design.

The final symbolic insult lies in how the narrative weaponizes Kuja’s own love of drama and myth against him. Throughout the story, his infatuation with the conceit of theatrics is not mere performative flourish, but his chosen method of survival. For a being who can neither control his own story nor feel genuine emotion, the emulation of fantasy is a shallow but understandable substitute. It is precisely at his lowest moment that the narrative cruelly turns this coping mechanism into spiteful irony. This defeat is staged as his final performance; not a moment of introspection, but a humiliation ritual. The true crime lies in the fact that presenting suffering as punishment is profoundly anti-existential, as it treats pain as something fate inflicts upon those who do not play by its arbitrary rules. This reframes despair as a sin, and casts Kuja not as a victim of design, but as someone who deserved divine punishment. 

Indeed, 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. Kuja’s time is up, his body is finite, and his soul will soon be forfeit. The message is not that he has failed, but that he was never allowed to succeed. This is not a reckoning between equals, but rather a master speaking down to his creation — a final assertion of control disguised as truth. His struggle, his pain, even his desperate grasp for legacy are all waved away by a voice that condemns with the cold finality of the hand of justice itself.

This is not existentialism. It is yet another invocation of determinism, deployed in a narratively satisfying but philosophically dishonest fashion. 

Suffering As Sacred, Not Spectacle 

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. 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, not mocked, not 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, 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 no less human and no less sacred. It is not monstrous nor hollow, but rather a testament to the will to endure. He is not passive in his despair. He resists it, in the only ways left to him.

And 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 is stripped of dignity, his coping read as villainy. In doing so, the story violates its own philosophical premise: it punishes the act of taking a stand.

Frankl also warned, “No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.” Zidane eventually echoes 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.

Notably, Frankl also maintained, “No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.” But Kuja’s tragedy is not that he acted without consequences, but rather 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. It is repurposed to serve the winners, not to elevate the dead.

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 and deliberate, 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 piece of highly 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 reverent 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. 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. From this moment onward, the narrative remains unflinching, exposing Shinji not only to physical threats in battle, but to the far more insidious internal danger of emotional starvation. 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 has witnessed the brutal deaths of those around him. 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, in that moment, the story still asks him: Do you want to keep living?

The answer is yes, not because anything has been resolved, but because he chooses to embrace the uncertainty of life. He rejects the obliteration of self. He allows the world, and himself, to continue. The movie’s conclusion honors this decision not with triumph, but with quiet, haunting openness. In choosing life, Shinji reclaims it. That possibility, the 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. 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. The party defeats Necron in combat, and Kuja is quietly allowed to die off-screen. His existential pain is not interrogated, it is contained and erased.

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 initiates Instrumentality not as a tool, but as an act of will, guiding Shinji’s journey of self-determination.

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 holds the door open. 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 fulfilled, but her absence is profound. She leaves the viewer with the impression of someone not erased but sanctified, an almost holy figure who departed on her own terms.

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 not vengeance but exposure, and the story offers no judgement beyond the ache of imagining what he might have been, had he chosen differently. 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 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 narrative reward, but existential validation: fragile, strange, and sincere.

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. The party doesn’t fix his crisis, but they refuse to leave him in it. 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, no one follows him. No one answers his isolation with affirmation. 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. The message is not “you are not alone”. It is: 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?" 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 villainy of authoritarianism, the horror of it is treated not with 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 pain, like Necron’s philosophy, is positioned as something to be defeated, not understood. Where Pink’s wall is torn down, Kuja’s is buried with him.

These works, 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 a quiet postscript, Mikoto offers Kuja a eulogy: “What you did was wrong… but you gave us all one thing… hope.” Her words attempt to retrofit the very grace the story refused to extend while he lived. It is not redemption. It is not reflection. It is a concession offered only once it is safe to grieve him, and once his challenge to the narrative has been resolved and cleaned up.

This contradiction reveals the core failure of Final Fantasy IX’s existential framework. If a story claims to examine mortality and self-prescribed meaning, it must allow all characters, even the antagonist, the conditions to choose meaningfully. Kuja is denied this. His pain is not explored. His rebellion is not contextualized. His collapse is not mourned. His arc is not allowed to mean anything beyond its narrative utility. And then, when it is too late, the story tries to reclaim emotional ground with a eulogy it never earned.

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. They do not erase characters in order to maintain ideological neatness. They extend the philosophical courtesy of subjectivity to those who need it most. 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.

[anthropos-metronff]

I like the implication at the start here that this is a viable space not just for this level of analysis, but also for this type of argument about Kuja. (I got called a probable apologist for real-world atrocities on here, simply because I said Kuja was justified in rebelling and rejecting Garland, while saying his ultimate methods in trying to further that pursuit ultimately made him as bad as Garland)

But to deal with the actual argument here, and not pointlessly gripe about Tumblr: I do agree with a lot of this, with some quibbles. I think I mostly have differences of emphasis.

The fact that so much of the fandom thinks that Kuja was trying one huge Notice Me, Daddy! with everything... *groan* I don't want to give the fandom a bye on that, because it does fly in the face of what is actually presented in the game, (Kuja saying his goal is to "bury" Garland etc) but I think it also does speak to bad/confused writing in the game on that issue that it's such a widespread interpretation.

One thing the above piece doesn't mention (Er, I think, it's a long essay) is the moment of Deus ex Garland descending onto the stage over Alexandria and saying, 'lol, nope!' I think that moment trivialises so much of Kuja's story and plays into the above fanon interpretation so much.

It makes Kuja look credulous, stupid, easily-foiled, and easily reined-in. Child-like. Yeah it's not too surprising that a lot of the fandom get this idea of opposing Garland just being a big hissy-fit/attention-grab.

Which, incidentally, plays into the gender stereotyping point. Now the gender section above is accurate, but I think it's unduly limited by not using the analysis framework of the phenomenon it's actually describing: queer-coding.

Kuja is off-the-scale queer-coded. How off the scale, I hear you ask, dear reader? Well, how about a character's death being queer-coded?

Oh yes indeed. Kuja has a truncated lifespan. Zidane apparently does not. Nor do, seemingly, any of the other Genomes. "Now look AM, you can't just say that because 'gays die young' (probably of AIDS) is a trope..." No - well hang on a minute, I have more on that. I mean apart from all this being built on every other aspect of Kuja's queer-coding which I think are much more apparent, consider not only Zidane's very pointed straight-ness, but also the game ending with Kuja dying and Vivi 'living on' by reproducing.

Yeah I'm afraid there is some deeply bad messaging going down in the implications of FFIX once you start thinking about it.

("But AM, what about the way Kuja acts to Garnet?" Well, yes, that is a very good point to bring up, but queer-coded villains menacing the protagonist's love interest is also a very old queer-coding trope. (You'll note that probably the major instance of this is when Garnet is unconscious.) "But how does that make sense?" Well, it doesn't, chief, it's prejudice. The prejudice of dead men from the 1930s.)

(I don't think the AIDS metaphor point is actually that much of a stretch when you consider that Genesis Rhapsodos is pretty much a Kuja reskin, and his life is coming to a premature end for most of Crisis Core because of "biological degredation". Again, not something suffered by Zack or Sephiroth.)

I'm afraid I don't think there's too much messaging in Kuja's palace, I think most of it is just Japanese media-which-uses-western imagery staples. (Fun fact, it's subtitled as "The Palace of Immorality" in the Japanese version of the game. Yeah I'm not even going to bother going back to the queer-coding in any depth on that one.)

I know nothing about Pink Floyd or Neon Genesis Evangelion so I can offer nothing on those.

As a post-script, I think a big part of the problem with how the game frames Kuja's narrative stems from us knowing fuck-all about Garland when he is lowered onto the stage and more or less still fuck-all about him when he plummets off of it.

[fauxpromises]

I can't quite tell if you actually read the full essay so I will just reply to the specific points made here.

(I got called a probable apologist for real-world atrocities on here, simply because I said Kuja was justified in rebelling and rejecting Garland, while saying his ultimate methods in trying to further that pursuit ultimately made him as bad as Garland)

They are fundamentally the same because both Garland and Kuja are acting outside of conventional moral frameworks. Garland is an automaton tasked only with reviving Terra. Kuja is an engineered being given no circumstances under which morality or stable emotional seflhood could develop. Neither of them ever had the conditions to be anything but what they were. Trying to apply a moral framework to their paths is anti-existential within a story that seems to attempt to say you can choose your own path. While only highlighting examples of character who had that freedom. It doesn't matter whether what they did was wrong when the question to me is whether the outcome was a force of any meaningful agency from either of them. My major gripe is that Garland seems to largely not take much flack from the narrative, even basically acting in the end as the player's (as Zidane) spiritual guide in the quest to go put down Kuja.

The fact that so much of the fandom thinks that Kuja was trying one huge Notice Me, Daddy! with everything… groan I don't want to give the fandom a bye on that, because it does fly in the face of what is actually presented in the game, (Kuja saying his goal is to "bury" Garland etc) but I think it also does speak to bad/confused writing in the game on that issue that it's such a widespread interpretation.

Not sure if you are directing this at me or fandom at large but I'll bite - 'notice me daddy' is an oversimplification and not what I was getting at nor what is supported by the game's framing. Kuja's origin as a creation of Garland set him up to be unable to develop in a way that would have put him on a path to any sort of healthy emotional or existential position. While the lack of positive influence from the only sentient figure he had formative experience with is a developmental factor, by the time Kuja is rebelling he is acting as a slave trying to overthrow a master. The specific point as he himself states in the script is that if Garland wins, Kuja and the other genomes become overwritten with Terran souls, effectively killing them. Nobody can seriously take Kuja's actions as a cry for attention in the reductive sense - it isn't supported in any way by what we see. He viewed his goal of defeating Garland as his means of asserting his personhood.

One thing the above piece doesn't mention (Er, I think, it's a long essay) is the moment of Deus ex Garland descending onto the stage over Alexandria and saying, 'lol, nope!' I think that moment trivialises so much of Kuja's story and plays into the above fanon interpretation so much.

I didn't address this because it had no bearing on my thesis which was whether the game provided a viable path for Kuja to be anything other than a villain, while simultaneously glorifying the concept of agency via Vivi/Zidane/Garnet etc.

Which, incidentally, plays into the gender stereotyping point. Now the gender section above is accurate, but I think it's unduly limited by not using the analysis framework of the phenomenon it's actually describing: queer-coding. Kuja is off-the-scale queer-coded. How off the scale, I hear you ask, dear reader? Well, how about a character's death being queer-coded? Oh yes indeed. Kuja has a truncated lifespan. Zidane apparently does not. Nor do, seemingly, any of the other Genomes. "Now look AM, you can't just say that because 'gays die young' (probably of AIDS) is a trope..." No - well hang on a minute, I have more on that. I mean apart from all this being built on every other aspect of Kuja's queer-coding which I think are much more apparent, consider not only Zidane's very pointed straight-ness, but also the game ending with Kuja dying and Vivi 'living on' by reproducing.

Queer-coding could be an entire topic unto itself and would likely require its own essay entirely. Frankly as I extensively argued already, his coding aligns more with asexual, Western-mythology coded femininity and alienation than a queer reading. The angel parallel is in fact explicitly assigned to him and his role as a Luciferian figure is beyond undeniable. Femininity in men is not viewed critically by Japanese audiences, nor are explicitly queer characters, but more rarely are asexually coded men viewed well by either gay or straight audiences. There is far more to support an asexual reading of Kuja than either same or opposite sex attraction. Queer readings of him lean heavily on superficial traits that equate gender presentation and neurodivergent traits with queerness. He's other-coded for sure, and in that sense queer, but queer is contemporarily used far more often in analysis to refer to sexuality.

I'd be inclined to agree with you if your use of queer-coding didn't seem to be limited to gay rather than including asexuality and gender nonconformity.

I'm afraid I don't think there's too much messaging in Kuja's palace, I think most of it is just Japanese media-which-uses-western imagery staples. (Fun fact, it's subtitled as "The Palace of Immorality" in the Japanese version of the game. Yeah I'm not even going to bother going back to the queer-coding in any depth on that one.)

People sure like to handwave away deliberate use of Christian symbology when it comes from Japanese creators, as if other cultures are unable to utilize mythology. This image that you see in the battle environment is far too specific to be flavor.

These are two very particular images. The one on the left is very likely the fall of Lucifer as illustrated by Gustav Doré in Paradise Lost. The one on the right does not have a specific reference in mind to my knowledge, but it is a clear depiction of the Annunciation, right down to the positioning of the angel and Mary. Considering this location is the one most explicitly associated to Kuja within the game, it is almost inconceivable for the symbology used here to 'accidentally' depict the juxtaposition of banishment (as Kuja was was banished by Garland from Terra) and the announcement of the 'chosen redeemer' (Jesus in myth, Zidane within this game).

I already extensively went into the Luciferian parallels within the essay... considering it's even more overwhelmingly shown than even some of the Gnostic/Jewish stuff used in FF7 for example, I hardly believe it's incidental.

[anthropos-metronff]

Pretty embarrassing that it took me months to reply to this but it is what it is. Or rather real life is what it is. (Still not as bonkers as someone taking years to reply to me on what was a serious albeit very short reblog of one of their posts...)

Had to reply as it's important to me most of this is addressed because of the queer issues/Kuja. I did consider just removing the first half because I'm much more interested in the queer issues but, eh, didn't feel quite right.

Anyway, let's go.

I can't quite tell if you actually read the full essay so I will just reply to the specific points made here.

Admittedly, that first reply of mine was short, really too short, but no I read (and-re-read) the entire thing. I just heavily skimmed the Pink Floyd and Neon Genesis parts because they're not relevant to me.

Garland is an automaton tasked only with reviving Terra

[Dubious - discuss]

This is the biggest tangent of the post, because I don't find Garland interesting and he's extremely under-cooked as a character, but I felt that this^^^ was such a loose assertion I had to tackle it.

I think whether Garland is an automaton is somewhere on a spectrum between up in the air to pointing towards him very much not being an automaton.

Garland repeatedly makes moral arguments in pursuit of what he's doing, so he at least has moral awareness, if not agency. But he waxes philosophical, he ruminates. Here is part of his dialogue in his very first scene:

"Kuja did well. If only he had lasted longer... I never imagined he would choose to end his remaining days on Gaia... Perhaps, this was his fate, set in ages past. I, too, cannot escape my fate; someday, I must face your counterpart..."

Self-awareness, regret, awareness of mortality, of history, of fate, and all in one paragraph? This really is not the talk of an automaton. (I should point out, incidentally, that this entire section is a soliloquy) And we have in-universe depictions of automatons in the Black Mages pre-self-awareness. Garland does not at all behave like them, not remotely.

I think it's clear Garland is an artificial or quasi-artificial lifeform, (I think the Ultimania says he's a Genome, which yeah, totally makes sense - if we accept that, then honestly this whole section becomes superfluous, but I realise there's room for disagreement with the ultimanias) but that isn't synonymous with being an automaton. In this canon, quite literally so: not for Kuja, not for Zidane, not for the Black Mages. The characters, themes, and in-universe lore point firmly away from artificial beings being automatons. It would also be thematically odd if Garland is an automaton.

I'll discuss Kuja and the moral frameworks part below.

My major gripe is that Garland seems to largely not take much flack from the narrative, even basically acting in the end as the player's (as Zidane) spiritual guide in the quest to go put down Kuja.

I agree with this. But given you seem to believe Garland and Kuja have no moral culpability I'm not sure why any of this matters to you.

Not sure if you are directing this at me or fandom at large

Fandom at large. Thought that would be obvious given the 'Notice me, Daddy' reading is extremely widespread (I've seen it a lot over the years) but ultimately I am at fault here for not making this clear. Sorry for the ambiguity.

They are fundamentally the same because both Garland and Kuja are acting outside of conventional moral frameworks .... Neither of them ever had the conditions to be anything but what they were. Trying to apply a moral framework to their paths is anti-existential within a story that seems to attempt to say you can choose your own path.

Kuja's origin as a creation of Garland set him up to be unable to develop in a way that would have put him on a path to any sort of healthy emotional or existential position. While the lack of positive influence from the only sentient figure he had formative experience with is a developmental factor, by the time Kuja is rebelling he is acting as a slave trying to overthrow a master. The specific point as he himself states in the script is that if Garland wins, Kuja and the other genomes become overwritten with Terran souls, effectively killing them. Nobody can seriously take Kuja's actions as a cry for attention in the reductive sense - it isn't supported in any way by what we see. He viewed his goal of defeating Garland as his means of asserting his personhood.

I broadly agree with this lower paragraph, but all this seems contradictory to me. Either Kuja couldn't morally reason, which is what you've just argued earlier, or he could, which is why he objected to genome slavery.

It seems like you're being very selective to frame Kuja in the best possible light by eliminating his moral culpability for the bad things he does while praising his slave rebellion. Feels like a woobification.

As you yourself outline in this paragraph (but not in the top paragraph) Kuja did have moral agency, even if it was diminished by abuse. Neither he nor Garland are some kind of olympian supermen who we can't judge. That's an extremely strange reading of FFIX to me given it's a game which is mostly not shy in demonstrating consequence - it encourages judgement on these things and has a strong moral tone.

I didn't address this because it had no bearing on my thesis which was whether the game provided a viable path for Kuja to be anything other than a villain, while simultaneously glorifying the concept of agency via Vivi/Zidane/Garnet etc.

You didn't think one of the biggest deus ex machinas, which is tied directly into Kuja's character arc, had any bearing in an essay which talked a lot about villain determinism? Okay.

I think deus ex machina as are heavily deterministic - the pursuit of any means to keep a character on a certain path and limit their scope for action.

I think it massively impacts on Kuja's villany.

Queer-coding could be an entire topic unto itself and would likely require its own essay entirely. Frankly as I extensively argued already, his coding aligns more with asexual, Western-mythology coded femininity and alienation than a queer reading.

The fundamental problem here is that all those things you're setting apart from queer-coding.... are just queer-coding. That's why I talked about what I did, because it was just an extension of what you talked about. You wrote an essay which was mainly about queer-coding and are now chafing about people taking you at your word!

In the essay you talk about, among other things I'm probably not remembering, gender, sexuality, intimacy, lack of affirmation, "presentation of masculinity", "building identity through performance", parental rejection, Kuja being "feminine-coded", and alienation.

All of this of course obviously has no bearing on queer-coding or the queerness of the character. Uh huh. Sure. Of course. Yup. Gender and sexuality, the two big mainstays of Not Queer Analysis.

To me the fact that you talked in the essay so much about queer issues while refusing to accept he's queer-coded really shows how overpoweringly queer the character actually is. But more on that later!

Asexuality - a surprising amount to talk about from your use of that one word. One, most obviously you didn't argue that Kuja is asexual, and in fact you never actually once used the term in the essay, so I'm assuming this is a headcanon which has somehow crept in. You did note that he has no evidence of a partner or romantic intimacy in the small timeframe of the game, but that alone is not an argument for a character (or indeed, real life person) being asexual. (Equally, having a partner is not evidence for a person being not asexual) This is also not an exceptional quality in a villain. Most villains aren't allowed intimacy, because it obviously risks making them sympathetic, or providing queer representation. (And a lot of villains of course are queer-coded)

Two, asexuality is not amputated from queerness to me in the way you set it up above. You do know that a lot of asexual people are non-binary, have same-sex partners, etc etc, right? I personally don't think Kuja is asexual (Though to be clear I'd be more than happy to hear serious arguments/analysis on that) but even if he is, that doesn't mean he's not queer. If my experience with asexual people is anything to go by, if anything probably the opposite actually.

You're extremely keen to talk about Kuja's lack of affirmation without speculating on any motive or framing for that, and then also talk about how Kuja is contrasted with Zidane's aggressive heterosexuality, while being seemingly either unaware or unwilling to address the fact that the game validating Zidane's aggressive heterosexuality is precisely why it would never explicitly validate a same-sex relationship for Kuja and why it is devoid of any such explicit affirmation for anyone else.

The angel parallel is in fact explicitly assigned to him and his role as a Luciferian figure is beyond undeniable.

Not... entirely sure why you brought this up deep within a paragraph devoted to talking about queer-coding. They're not something which prove or disprove queer-coding or really have any bearing on it at all.

Or are you saying that Christian symbolism is mutually exclusive to queer-coding? Well if you're talking purely in terms of symbolism, then no, that's not true. Actually quite strongly not true. From Derek Jarman to people five centuries ago saying 'David had his Jonathan', there is a long and deep history on that stuff.

I'll come back to the (non-)importance of the whole "Luciferian" stuff to Kuja's character later on.

Femininity in men is not viewed critically by Japanese audiences, nor are explicitly queer characters, but more rarely are asexually coded men viewed well by either gay or straight audiences.

I've read this sentence multiple times and I'm still not 100% confident on what you're trying to say, and I'm not confident tackling a point where I don't know what is being said. I also doubt it would be pertinent/accurate even if you are saying what I think you're saying. This might all be connected to the fact that I'm not Japansese and I don't get the sense you're Japanese either. So us talking on what Japanese audiences think feels like bald people arguing over a comb territory.

In this instance of the Japanese perspective we can just cut out the chaff and go straight to heart of the matter. With reference only to developer quotes and the Japanese queer traditions those quotes directly touch on, I think it's possible to effectively prove Kuja is both queer-coded and same-sex sexuality-coded.

(Excerpt from "FINAL FANTASY IX 20th Anniversary Special Interview Vol. 2" with character designer Mr. Toshiyuki Itahana, as hosted on the Final Fantasy Portal Site)

I'm not going into a complete history of the Oyama tradition (As you say, another essay entirely, and this reply is already too long) but the history of cross-dressing on the Japanese stage has a long history which is heavily tied into same-sex male sexuality, and broadly was until things started diverging with the Meiji Restoration. There is art from the later Tokugawa period (I'm not going to post it on here, because you know, Tumblr) showing cross-dressed actor-prostitutes having sex with clients.

This^^^ quote proves that a Japanese queer tradition was in the minds of the character designers. And while Itahana-san rather carefully says he "doesn't know how the lore on that ended up," I think it's a fairly logical extrapolation that this proto-Ruby who was an Oyama was repurposed and re-tooled elsewhere.

I suspect Kuja is a character drawn out of the Oyama tradition.

That we know as fact that the character designers had in their minds a male character who was gender non-conforming/female-presenting, (Like Kuja) was rooted in the theatre and theatrical traditions, (Like Kuja) and tied into a Japanese queer tradition which was historically-rooted in a way which mirrors FFIX being a pre-modern setting - well, I think the evidence is pretty damn strong, pretty persuasive.

Queer readings of him lean heavily on superficial traits that equate gender presentation and neurodivergent traits with queerness.

Superficial as in relying on developer quotes, or superficial as in relying on minor background art in one battle environment for major understanding of the character?

Some self-awareness, pls.

While I understand what you're trying to say here, this rather spectacularly misses the point that queer-coding is, indeed, superficial. It's coded - it's presenting certain surface traits and then being confident that the audience will fill in the blanks, because they're such obvious, loud markers of queerness that it doesn't need to be explicit. Gender non-conformity is the biggest stereotypical trait of gay men and lesbians, so that is usually what queer-coding of them leans heavily into.

And while lesbians and gay men being gender non-conforming is a stereotype - some of us, but by no means all of us are gender non-conforming - it does also have a near-universal linkage with queerness which is not just contemporary but historical as well. I've already touched on the Oyama tradition in Japan - drag is an obvious facet of that in the contemporary west, but if you go back three hundred years in the west you just as reliably find gender non-conforming queer people.

Queer-coding of villains has usually not been subtle, because it requires even the most obtuse member of the audience to get the message. So while there is what you might call degrees of gender non-conformity, it's usually off-the-scale with queer-coded villain characters, and that's certainly true with Kuja. On a one to ten scale of gender non-conformity, he's about twenty-five. The intent is not subtle.

So yes, Kuja's gender non-conformity is a core part of his very extensive queer-coding but also his queerness.

I've not heard of any arguments on Kuja and neurodivergence but would be interested to know more.

I'd be inclined to agree with you if your use of queer-coding didn't seem to be limited to gay rather than including asexuality and gender nonconformity.

Heavens to Betsy! A gay person talking about one of the most heavily queer-coded characters in video gaming history in gay terms! Good lord, what fresh horrors will the internet witness next?

I talked about Kuja in gay terms because he obviously is queer-coded, and to my mind in same-sex sexuality terms - see above this section for the context to that - and I am gay so obviously I wanted to talk about that. Not that difficult to figure out.

Him being gender non-conforming is obviously foundational to a queer and same-sex sexuality reading. I didn't talk about Kuja being gender non-conforming because it is so overwhelmingly obvious that he is that it really doesn't need to be said. But I'm realising here that stuff that the vast majority of the fandom receive as obvious isn't obvious to everyone, or maybe people just want to ignore it, so to do a quick overview of Kuja's gender non-conformity: He is a twink character with long hair, long nails, (In Dissidia at least; but in the original game he seems to wear more makeup than in Dissidia) who wears a quasi-skirt, who covers his mouth when he giggles, has a large feather in his hair which in real life you would never see worn outside of a drag show or by a carnival queen, and when most of the internet discuss him they begin with 'When I was nine I thought he was a girl lol'.

Because his gender non-conformity dances naked on a piano singing 'gender non-conformity is here again' I took it as read anyone reading the post would be aware of him being gender non-conforming and talked about the parts which are more subtle.

Of course all of Kuja's extensive gender non-conformity is a foundational part of why he is so heavily queer-coded. (Again, see other sections of this) It just doesn't (usually) need to be gone over in huge detail in terms of pointing it out because it is undoubtedly the most starkly obvious part of his whole character design.

People sure like to handwave away deliberate use of Christian symbology when it comes from Japanese creators, as if other cultures are unable to utilize mythology.

I don't think it's handwaved, just that most people have an awareness that most of this stuff isn't profound - Japanese or western. You seem to view literally everything cultural that you consume as profound as far as I can tell. That's fair enough if it works for you, but it doesn't ring true for me. These games can have profound moments, and can say profound things, but they are still mass-market games.

Final Fantasy is a series which ripped off it's initial bestiary from Dungeons and Dragons. Final Fantasy II is a thinly-veiled re-telling of Star Wars. Biggs and Wedge feature as recurring characters. Mayor Domino of "that &^#$# 'pizza'" is a character in FFVII. There are western-derived references in these games, but mostly not at what you would call a highbrow level. It is only really with FFVI that the series started saying anything serious at all.

Sure, there are some mythological inspirations in Final Fantasy. But the word that keeps springing to mind to me on how to locate their importance in the series is 'facile'. It's surface-level stuff. Sephiroth's name comes from Kabbalah. Cool. Also tells us absolutely nothing relevant about him as a character. Hell, the EEK EEK EEK in One-Winged Angel being a straight transfer from Psycho tells us more about the character design than that. (Another western pop-culture reference)

It's all just rule of cool.

I wouldn't remotely expect a western game to have any ultra-deep understanding of Japanese mythology, and I'm not extending the same expectation in reverse to Japanese games. Believing that Japanese game developers would have a knowledge not only of certain western texts but also highly specific engravings that go alongside certain editions, and then place a reference in minor background art in a battle environment... yeah, far too much heavy lifting there.

These are two very particular images. The one on the left is very likely the fall of Lucifer as illustrated by Gustav Doré in Paradise Lost.

I probably spent far too much time on this than I should have done.

I did wonder if I might be googling wrong, but I tried every search variation I could think and looked over every Gustav Dore image I could find, and no, there's no obvious comparison to me with any Gustav Dore image. There's some minor stylistic similarities with some of the Dore images in the wings, but that's it. And how many different ways are there to draw humanoid wings, really? Not that many.

There's also a pair of crossed scythes behind the figure. I didn't see any image that had that motif.

I also tried zooming in on the game image, and just to be absolutely sure on this I looked at it in editing software and... no. I didn't find see a match.

In fact the game image doesn't look anything like something you'd see in an engraving at all, the style looks more contemporary to me - like it could be from an album cover or fan art.

The one on the right does not have a specific reference in mind to my knowledge, but it is a clear depiction of the Annunciation, right down to the positioning of the angel and Mary.

Not sure how you can be certain of this when there is no clear reference and given angels visiting humans - saints and monarchs and other godly and powerful people particularly - is so widespread in this kind of art. As you would expect it to be incidentally, given some saints within their own lifetimes claimed they were receiving images or messages from angels. Joan of Arc would be probably the most well-known example of that, the whole revelations of Fatima is another example - knowledge of that is probably more specific to observant Catholics though. The point being it's a very widespread trope.

I definitely don't think it's directly drawn from anything specific given the lack of halos and the way the angel has those Mary Jane shoes. (They're probably a bad artist's impression of sandals) Or at least they have seem to have on the right foot, not the left...

Yeah... I think the quality level is kind of crappy on both of these images, which again, leads me to believe that both are not references to anything. It's almost like they're background art that the player wouldn't see very often, and so nobody spent a lot of time on them.

Somewhat reminded of a discussion I once had with a monk when I was staying in a monastery. I asked him about about the significance of some stained-glass on one of the building's bay windows. He told me it was just all random stuff that the previous owner of the building had installed in the fifties.

But more importantly than whether any of these images tally with a specific reference point, I don't think any of this matters. If we transpose it fully into the game then Garland becomes god and Kuja becomes Satan, and Kuja is not Satan and Garland is not god - their character arcs, goals, and outcomes are totally different. It's self-evidently limited in terms of understanding the game.

But... oh wow, at the end here I re-read your original post just to make sure I hadn't missed anything important, and I most definitely had. I'd missed this part, where despite that quote from earlier in this reblog where you produced a non-sequitur to just pop in the fact that "his role as a Luciferian figure is beyond undeniable", you yourself state that it doesn't amount to a damn thing:

Under scrutiny, this myth does not hold true to the character’s reality. Kuja is not divine. He is not a being cast from grace. He is not a prince of heaven whose pride drove him to ruin. He is an engineered and profoundly vulnerable creature, a mortal in the false guise of a god. 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 is not the overreach of ambition, but the desperation of someone who has always been consigned to the role of slave. He does not rise against Garland as a rival to the divine. He rises as someone pleading for the minimum required to be a person.

Yeah, I agree with you in this paragraph. Looking at Kuja through a "Luciferian" lense is junk analysis. It leads nowhere. As apparently at least some part of you has already discovered. Being reminded of this section at the end of this really made me feel I'd wasted my time replying to any of this.

Christian imagery and mythology are not the royal road to understanding Kuja or Final Fantasy IX.

[fauxpromises]

Before I say anything, it's really troubling that your responses have basically amounted to 'any analysis that is not through the critical lens of queerness that I care about doesn't matter'. You are entirely welcome to write your own essay and analysis fully focusing on the topic of queerness with Kuja if that's the area you feel you can speak to. It's honestly reeking of gatekeeping that you came onto my essay to tell me I can't perform any analysis on the character that doesn't center the topic of queerness. It's even more insane that you accuse the essay of being 'mainly about queer-coding' when in fact you just didn't read the majority of it, including the thesis, zeroed on a small section about gender, and then demanded I agree to change the foundation of my essay about it.

It's just outright disrespectful to come onto someone's work that they put a lot of time and research into and essentially hijack it into talking about the topics you prefer. You could easily have discussed these issues on your own blog without involving my work. I certainly wouldn't have come onto your blog to tell you that you shouldn't be allowed to express your opinion. I'm open to critique for sure but you have engaged very little with the actual content of my essay and mostly used it as a springboard for your own pet issues.

Also - if you just skipped through and don't care about the NGE/Pink Floyd aspects of my essay I'd really have preferred you just didn't engage. Those sections were the foundation of my point that existential media by its nature isn't a moralizing form of storytelling. The fact that you then turn around and accuse me of woobification without actually looking at or caring about my point that characters can be held accountable and understood without being moralized in a vacuum and then thrown away... you basically just disregarded my thesis and then complained about the conclusion. My point was that contriving an unfair situation and then condemning the outcome is not an honest way to demonstrate the concept of choice. That is literally my thesis.

I guess I'll reply to a few of your points.

Garland repeatedly makes moral arguments in pursuit of what he's doing

Doesn't really change his nature as an artifical being that seems to exist outside normal psychological constraints. AIs in fiction routinely exhibit moral reasoning, that doesn't make them human, it just means they are applying a form of logic. Without more elaboration on what makes Garland a Genome, I can't speak to what the Ultimania means by that. He is clearly biologically immortal as he's existed for millennia, and appears unaffected for the most part by a period of isolation that would render anyone with normal human neurological equipment a mess. The 'waking up' phenomenon is virtually unexplained so how black mages and genomes and whatever else can conceivably just stop existing in a state of mental stasis is never explained. Garland even less so. My point was he clearly seems to have been given a prime directive by the Terrans that he cannot deviate from - would you personally, as a dying civilization, hang your hat on a biological entity that could get bored and decide your civilization's revival isn't worthwhile.

We can argue on the term automaton but my point is largely salient that he is likely unable to deviate meaningfully from the plan to revive Terra. A hyperadvanced civilization not putting that measure in place seems comically absurd.

I broadly agree with this lower paragraph, but all this seems contradictory to me. Either Kuja couldn't morally reason, which is what you've just argued earlier, or he could, which is why he objected to genome slavery.

He didn't object to genome slavery. He objected to his own treatment in that context. The ability to be upset that one has been wronged, versus the ability to apply that moral reasoning broadly to others, is not at the same stage of moral development. Kohlberg's theory of moral development puts self-interest at a very early stage and social contract/law and order much later, with 'on principle' at the very end of development. It is extremely hard to argue that Kuja does not display the emotional and moral maturity of a child, regardless of if he was granted the intellect to dress that up nicely.

As you yourself outline in this paragraph (but not in the top paragraph) Kuja did have moral agency, even if it was diminished by abuse. Neither he nor Garland are some kind of olympian supermen who we can't judge. That's an extremely strange reading of FFIX to me given it's a game which is mostly not shy in demonstrating consequence - it encourages judgement on these things and has a strong moral tone.

...Which is exactly what my essay was arguing against. The idea of using an existential framework to apply a deterministic moral tone. Existential storytelling famously does not analyze the actions of its characters in a vacuum and apply moral reasoning on that ground. You can make whatever personal judgement you want but more intelligent analysis would generally conclude that the conditions to make either Garland or Kuja care about the value of life simply don't exist. Their existences were cultivated in a setting that had completely different moral values. I condemn the idea that FFIX celebrates Vivi and Zidane coming to the 'right' moral endpoints because they were offered every possible opportunity to do so - they were raised by people and in societies that valued life. Even Vivi. His earliest experiences were with a loving adoptive parent. His next stop was with friends who encouraged him at every step when he began to doubt. While these make for a feel-good story they aren't heroic existential outcomes, they are more or less to be expected. Endorsing immoral actions and pointing out that the conditions were put in place to make those outcomes all but inevitable aren't the same thing and it's irritating that you seem to want to put those words in my mouth.

To me the fact that you talked in the essay so much about queer issues while refusing to accept he's queer-coded really shows how overpoweringly queer the character actually is. But more on that later!

I said the analytical angle I chose did not forefront a queer reading. I don't have any objection for anyone wanting to read him that way. My essay was about existentialism. I briefly brought up the topic of gender as it related to my point that the narrative uses multiple means to frame him as deviant compared to Zidane and the other characters. We can clearly observe gender presentation in him. Extrapolating that to sexual attraction is another topic that was not within the scope of my essay or what I was trying to accomplish. Again, I feel you're bothered that I did not include the issue you care about in my essay, and insist on such a monolithic reading of the character as primarily queer to try to force me to acknowledge that as the whole of his character and disallow me from discussing any other aspect of him from a storytelling standpoint. Beginning to speculate on what sexuality his gender presentation points to is not only hard to prove in a persuasive formal context, it's also routinely taught in gender/sexuality theory contexts to be presumptive. 'Gender expression does not equal sexuality' is an extremely fundamental tenet for queer readings in the first place. I did not make a conclusive assumption based on his gender presentation. Period.

As far as the asexual issue, there is no textual evidence at all of sexual attraction in any real capacity so whether he likes men, women, both or neither really doesn't matter to me. It's just odd to me that you want to make asexuality something that is either inherently queer-coded or unable to be discerned, but essentially keep routing the conversation back to an indisputable gay reading. I'm curious at this point if you'd object to asexuality or gender nonconformity in the character if his actual preference turned out to include opposite sex. Bi/pansexual readings of him are what many people land on ultimately.

This^^^ quote proves that a Japanese queer tradition was in the minds of the character designers. And while Itahana-san rather carefully says he "doesn't know how the lore on that ended up," I think it's a fairly logical extrapolation that this proto-Ruby who was an Oyama was repurposed and re-tooled elsewhere.

I suspect Kuja is a character drawn out of the Oyama tradition.

No, I'm sorry, but that doesn't follow to me. I guess we're just going to have to disagree here. "Doesn't know where the lore on that ended up" reads clearly to me that it could be possible that Ruby is still an oyama within the lore if the early traces of that were never removed, the lore on 'that' pretty clearly refers to that plot/character point. I don't see at all how you interpret that to it meant they repurposed the concept elsewhere. The most we get in canon lore on Kuja's outfit is that it's an elaboration of the outfit the male genomes wear in Bran Bal. I think it could be fairly speculated that embellishing it/restyling it was his way of showing defiance symbolically. That's speculation of course but it's no more speculation than your point.

Superficial as in relying on developer quotes, or superficial as in relying on minor background art in one battle environment for major understanding of the character?

LOL. 'One minor background in a battle environment'? I'm really believing at this point that you really didn't read my essay and just used it to reblog your own thoughts. There is an entire section on how the mythology lines up. It is literally textual - 'angel of death'. It's shocking to me how dismissive you are of mythological allusions when FF is absolutely rife with them in major plot-related ways, like FF13 with Valhalla or various gnostic/kabbalistic mythology in FF7. Those fandoms discuss those allusions routinely. It's often even included on wiki and other referential sources.

So yes, Kuja's gender non-conformity is a core part of his very extensive queer-coding but also his queerness.

I can't believe we're at the point where gender nonconformity dictates sexual attraction. I did discuss gender nonconformity. Your objection at this point largely comes from me not specifying sexual attraction as part of that and gatekeeping gender presentation.

Heavens to Betsy! A gay person talking about one of the most heavily queer-coded characters in video gaming history in gay terms! Good lord, what fresh horrors will the internet witness next?

You are welcome to write your own essay about this topic. I will maintain that I'm in the right to defend my choice of what topics to include in my own essay that is about existentialism, not gender and sexuality.

You seem to view literally everything cultural that you consume as profound as far as I can tell. That's fair enough if it works for you, but it doesn't ring true for me. These games can have profound moments, and can say profound things, but they are still mass-market games.

Then don't read an essay that's a deep literary analysis.

I did wonder if I might be googling wrong, but I tried every search variation I could think and looked over every Gustav Dore image I could find, and no, there's no obvious comparison to me with any Gustav Dore image. There's some minor stylistic similarities with some of the Dore images in the wings, but that's it. And how many different ways are there to draw humanoid wings, really? Not that many.

So it has to be completely identical to be valid. But for the oyama topic we can point to a concept that was considered for a different character entirely and cleanly assume it was repurposed.

Yeah, I agree with you in this paragraph. Looking at Kuja through a "Luciferian" lense is junk analysis.

My whole point was he was framed as a Luciferian figure in the villainous sense without regard to whether that myth aligned with his actual moral context. And the connection to Paradise Lost is not something so obscure that no Japanese developer could possibly draw on its influence... Pandemonium is literally derived from Paradise Lost. The Emperor from FFII is also obviously a Luciferian character, that is literally what he becomes at the end of the game. It's actually staggering that you go to such lengths to dismiss using literary sources as valid analysis but I am expected to accept that you can choose to look at the media through the lens of your own personal experience and then it becomes objective fact.

This is such an exhausting conversation. I truly don't understand why you don't just write your own essay. I feel you are just arguing in bad faith because I didn't cover the issues you feel are important. It was never the topic of my essay. I can view the character beyond an icon of queerness and sexuality. I wanted to analyze how his humanity was treated and the fairness of depriving someone socially, developmentally, and emotionally and then expecting them to succeed morally or existentially. If you want to write an entire essay on his queerness, please go ahead and just do so yourself.

At this point I think just blocking is in order. Please do not engage with me in the future. I'm just straight up not going to tolerate being berated into making my content and analyses align with someone else's preferences and interpretations. I don't owe it to anyone to endlessly entertain bad faith arguments that pretend at obtuseness to avoid addressing what I'm saying and substitute in strawmen.

[fauxpromises]

I've struggled to find a permanent home for this essay... Reddit is a failure for that, as any subreddits related to Final Fantasy do not tolerate literary critique. Thus, I will probably only keep this (very rigorous) essay here for now.

You Are Alone: Final Fantasy IX and the Illusion of Choice 

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.

Even among the often-philosophical 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 “friends on an 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 “heroes 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 this as Kuja’s flaw: his design limitation, and ultimately, his narrative failing. He was not nurtured, but manufactured and discarded. 

The profound implications of this are brushed aside unceremoniously, and 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 tragedy, but as an inconvenient obstacle on the path to the heroes’ triumph. 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. 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. It rewards those born into meaning, and condemns those who must invent it. 

This is not existentialism. This is in fact the complete opposite: determinism. 

Post-Hoc Condemnation – 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 is not simply written, 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 treatment of him relies not on clear ideology, but on a slow aesthetic and psychological indictment that erodes the possibility of sympathy before it ever begins.

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. Trauma during this 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. The most damaging trauma often comes from parental rejection, which compromises 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 eventually be discarded. His survival depends entirely on performance. Worse still, Kuja appears to have lived for some time without sentient peers, precluding even basic social interaction. He is denied not only childhood, but the development upon which self-image is founded. He does not grow into emotional maturity, he is simply installed with intellect. The result is a being who suffers the tragedy of a child’s volatility trapped in an adult’s body, and who was never given the chance to become anything else. 

It is therefore no surprise that Kuja exhibits the profile of someone shaped by deep alienation. He performs cruelty, but cannot connect. He controls others, but cannot have a place among them. His flamboyance, detachment, and need for control are not tools of dominance, but rather they are stage dressing hiding a disrupted identity. The story codes these traits as villainy, but they align exactly with the psychology of someone wounded, hollowed out, and desperate to maintain some semblance of dignity. 

Kuja is not punished for being monstrous. He is punished for responding to trauma in a way the story refuses to read as even remotely sympathetic. 

What Are You, A Virgin?

While condemning mismanaged trauma already delivers a troubling message about what constitutes morally acceptable self-expression, 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 framed as harmless flirtation, even in moments that violate consent, such as groping her during a compromising situation early in the story. 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 framed through a familiar, culturally sanctioned model of masculine grief: the man who becomes withdrawn until coaxed out by friendship. 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, never rooted in pursuit or participation. His use of magic, a role most often assigned to female characters within JRPG convention, further distances him from normative masculinity. Socially, he maintains no genuine connections, only strategic alliances, and there is no textual suggestion of romantic or sexual engagement. 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.

By the game’s conclusion, the story explicitly affirms Zidane’s mode of existence as the “correct” one. Kuja’s final 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. More troubling still, this implies that models of selfhood rooted in restraint, boundary, and non-normative masculinity are not just atypical, but incorrect. The story does not treat Kuja’s boundaries as a valid form of self-protection or self-authorship. It reads them as defects. 

The Aesthetics of Evil 

Unsatisfied with merely portraying 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. This is first asserted through his appearance: androgynous beauty, emotional detachment, and the arrested quality of eternal youth, which are traits associated not with mortals, but 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 clearly 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 this 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, and his refusal to submit agreeably as transgressive. 

Under scrutiny, this myth does not hold true to the character’s reality. Kuja is not divine. He is not a being cast from grace. He is not a prince of heaven whose pride drove him to ruin. He is an engineered and profoundly vulnerable creature, a mortal in the false guise of a god. 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 is not the overreach of ambition, but the desperation of someone who has always been consigned to the role of slave. He does not rise against Garland as a rival to the divine. He rises as someone pleading for 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. 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, serving as a means to bond, to be chosen, and to belong. 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 longing for freedom — something beautiful that was never meant to be caged. In Kuja’s case, the symbolism is inverted: his splendor does not invite liberation, but signals his fate as something ornamental, confined, and displayed only to serve someone else's design.

The final symbolic insult lies in how the narrative weaponizes Kuja’s own love of drama and myth against him. Throughout the story, his infatuation with the conceit of theatrics is not mere performative flourish, but his chosen method of survival. For a being who can neither control his own story nor feel genuine emotion, the emulation of fantasy is a shallow but understandable substitute. It is precisely at his lowest moment that the narrative cruelly turns this coping mechanism into spiteful irony. This defeat is staged as his final performance; not a moment of introspection, but a humiliation ritual. The true crime lies in the fact that presenting suffering as punishment is profoundly anti-existential, as it treats pain as something fate inflicts upon those who do not play by its arbitrary rules. This reframes despair as a sin, and casts Kuja not as a victim of design, but as someone who deserved divine punishment. 

Indeed, 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. Kuja’s time is up, his body is finite, and his soul will soon be forfeit. The message is not that he has failed, but that he was never allowed to succeed. This is not a reckoning between equals, but rather a master speaking down to his creation — a final assertion of control disguised as truth. His struggle, his pain, even his desperate grasp for legacy are all waved away by a voice that condemns with the cold finality of the hand of justice itself.

This is not existentialism. It is yet another invocation of determinism, deployed in a narratively satisfying but philosophically dishonest fashion. 

Suffering As Sacred, Not Spectacle 

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. 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, not mocked, not 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, 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 no less human and no less sacred. It is not monstrous nor hollow, but rather a testament to the will to endure. He is not passive in his despair. He resists it, in the only ways left to him.

And 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 is stripped of dignity, his coping read as villainy. In doing so, the story violates its own philosophical premise: it punishes the act of taking a stand.

Frankl also warned, “No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.” Zidane eventually echoes 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.

Notably, Frankl also maintained, “No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.” But Kuja’s tragedy is not that he acted without consequences, but rather 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. It is repurposed to serve the winners, not to elevate the dead.

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 and deliberate, 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 piece of highly 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 reverent 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. 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. From this moment onward, the narrative remains unflinching, exposing Shinji not only to physical threats in battle, but to the far more insidious internal danger of emotional starvation. 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 has witnessed the brutal deaths of those around him. 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, in that moment, the story still asks him: Do you want to keep living?

The answer is yes, not because anything has been resolved, but because he chooses to embrace the uncertainty of life. He rejects the obliteration of self. He allows the world, and himself, to continue. The movie’s conclusion honors this decision not with triumph, but with quiet, haunting openness. In choosing life, Shinji reclaims it. That possibility, the 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. 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. The party defeats Necron in combat, and Kuja is quietly allowed to die off-screen. His existential pain is not interrogated, it is contained and erased.

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 initiates Instrumentality not as a tool, but as an act of will, guiding Shinji’s journey of self-determination.

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 holds the door open. 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 fulfilled, but her absence is profound. She leaves the viewer with the impression of someone not erased but sanctified, an almost holy figure who departed on her own terms.

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 not vengeance but exposure, and the story offers no judgement beyond the ache of imagining what he might have been, had he chosen differently. 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 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 narrative reward, but existential validation: fragile, strange, and sincere.

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. The party doesn’t fix his crisis, but they refuse to leave him in it. 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, no one follows him. No one answers his isolation with affirmation. 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. The message is not “you are not alone”. It is: 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?" 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 villainy of authoritarianism, the horror of it is treated not with 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 pain, like Necron’s philosophy, is positioned as something to be defeated, not understood. Where Pink’s wall is torn down, Kuja’s is buried with him.

These works, 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 a quiet postscript, Mikoto offers Kuja a eulogy: “What you did was wrong… but you gave us all one thing… hope.” Her words attempt to retrofit the very grace the story refused to extend while he lived. It is not redemption. It is not reflection. It is a concession offered only once it is safe to grieve him, and once his challenge to the narrative has been resolved and cleaned up.

This contradiction reveals the core failure of Final Fantasy IX’s existential framework. If a story claims to examine mortality and self-prescribed meaning, it must allow all characters, even the antagonist, the conditions to choose meaningfully. Kuja is denied this. His pain is not explored. His rebellion is not contextualized. His collapse is not mourned. His arc is not allowed to mean anything beyond its narrative utility. And then, when it is too late, the story tries to reclaim emotional ground with a eulogy it never earned.

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. They do not erase characters in order to maintain ideological neatness. They extend the philosophical courtesy of subjectivity to those who need it most. 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.

[anthropos-metronff]

I like the implication at the start here that this is a viable space not just for this level of analysis, but also for this type of argument about Kuja. (I got called a probable apologist for real-world atrocities on here, simply because I said Kuja was justified in rebelling and rejecting Garland, while saying his ultimate methods in trying to further that pursuit ultimately made him as bad as Garland)

But to deal with the actual argument here, and not pointlessly gripe about Tumblr: I do agree with a lot of this, with some quibbles. I think I mostly have differences of emphasis.

The fact that so much of the fandom thinks that Kuja was trying one huge Notice Me, Daddy! with everything... *groan* I don't want to give the fandom a bye on that, because it does fly in the face of what is actually presented in the game, (Kuja saying his goal is to "bury" Garland etc) but I think it also does speak to bad/confused writing in the game on that issue that it's such a widespread interpretation.

One thing the above piece doesn't mention (Er, I think, it's a long essay) is the moment of Deus ex Garland descending onto the stage over Alexandria and saying, 'lol, nope!' I think that moment trivialises so much of Kuja's story and plays into the above fanon interpretation so much.

It makes Kuja look credulous, stupid, easily-foiled, and easily reined-in. Child-like. Yeah it's not too surprising that a lot of the fandom get this idea of opposing Garland just being a big hissy-fit/attention-grab.

Which, incidentally, plays into the gender stereotyping point. Now the gender section above is accurate, but I think it's unduly limited by not using the analysis framework of the phenomenon it's actually describing: queer-coding.

Kuja is off-the-scale queer-coded. How off the scale, I hear you ask, dear reader? Well, how about a character's death being queer-coded?

Oh yes indeed. Kuja has a truncated lifespan. Zidane apparently does not. Nor do, seemingly, any of the other Genomes. "Now look AM, you can't just say that because 'gays die young' (probably of AIDS) is a trope..." No - well hang on a minute, I have more on that. I mean apart from all this being built on every other aspect of Kuja's queer-coding which I think are much more apparent, consider not only Zidane's very pointed straight-ness, but also the game ending with Kuja dying and Vivi 'living on' by reproducing.

Yeah I'm afraid there is some deeply bad messaging going down in the implications of FFIX once you start thinking about it.

("But AM, what about the way Kuja acts to Garnet?" Well, yes, that is a very good point to bring up, but queer-coded villains menacing the protagonist's love interest is also a very old queer-coding trope. (You'll note that probably the major instance of this is when Garnet is unconscious.) "But how does that make sense?" Well, it doesn't, chief, it's prejudice. The prejudice of dead men from the 1930s.)

(I don't think the AIDS metaphor point is actually that much of a stretch when you consider that Genesis Rhapsodos is pretty much a Kuja reskin, and his life is coming to a premature end for most of Crisis Core because of "biological degredation". Again, not something suffered by Zack or Sephiroth.)

I'm afraid I don't think there's too much messaging in Kuja's palace, I think most of it is just Japanese media-which-uses-western imagery staples. (Fun fact, it's subtitled as "The Palace of Immorality" in the Japanese version of the game. Yeah I'm not even going to bother going back to the queer-coding in any depth on that one.)

I know nothing about Pink Floyd or Neon Genesis Evangelion so I can offer nothing on those.

As a post-script, I think a big part of the problem with how the game frames Kuja's narrative stems from us knowing fuck-all about Garland when he is lowered onto the stage and more or less still fuck-all about him when he plummets off of it.

[fauxpromises]

I can't quite tell if you actually read the full essay so I will just reply to the specific points made here.

(I got called a probable apologist for real-world atrocities on here, simply because I said Kuja was justified in rebelling and rejecting Garland, while saying his ultimate methods in trying to further that pursuit ultimately made him as bad as Garland)

They are fundamentally the same because both Garland and Kuja are acting outside of conventional moral frameworks. Garland is an automaton tasked only with reviving Terra. Kuja is an engineered being given no circumstances under which morality or stable emotional seflhood could develop. Neither of them ever had the conditions to be anything but what they were. Trying to apply a moral framework to their paths is anti-existential within a story that seems to attempt to say you can choose your own path. While only highlighting examples of character who had that freedom. It doesn't matter whether what they did was wrong when the question to me is whether the outcome was a force of any meaningful agency from either of them. My major gripe is that Garland seems to largely not take much flack from the narrative, even basically acting in the end as the player's (as Zidane) spiritual guide in the quest to go put down Kuja.

The fact that so much of the fandom thinks that Kuja was trying one huge Notice Me, Daddy! with everything… groan I don't want to give the fandom a bye on that, because it does fly in the face of what is actually presented in the game, (Kuja saying his goal is to "bury" Garland etc) but I think it also does speak to bad/confused writing in the game on that issue that it's such a widespread interpretation.

Not sure if you are directing this at me or fandom at large but I'll bite - 'notice me daddy' is an oversimplification and not what I was getting at nor what is supported by the game's framing. Kuja's origin as a creation of Garland set him up to be unable to develop in a way that would have put him on a path to any sort of healthy emotional or existential position. While the lack of positive influence from the only sentient figure he had formative experience with is a developmental factor, by the time Kuja is rebelling he is acting as a slave trying to overthrow a master. The specific point as he himself states in the script is that if Garland wins, Kuja and the other genomes become overwritten with Terran souls, effectively killing them. Nobody can seriously take Kuja's actions as a cry for attention in the reductive sense - it isn't supported in any way by what we see. He viewed his goal of defeating Garland as his means of asserting his personhood.

One thing the above piece doesn't mention (Er, I think, it's a long essay) is the moment of Deus ex Garland descending onto the stage over Alexandria and saying, 'lol, nope!' I think that moment trivialises so much of Kuja's story and plays into the above fanon interpretation so much.

I didn't address this because it had no bearing on my thesis which was whether the game provided a viable path for Kuja to be anything other than a villain, while simultaneously glorifying the concept of agency via Vivi/Zidane/Garnet etc.

Which, incidentally, plays into the gender stereotyping point. Now the gender section above is accurate, but I think it's unduly limited by not using the analysis framework of the phenomenon it's actually describing: queer-coding. Kuja is off-the-scale queer-coded. How off the scale, I hear you ask, dear reader? Well, how about a character's death being queer-coded? Oh yes indeed. Kuja has a truncated lifespan. Zidane apparently does not. Nor do, seemingly, any of the other Genomes. "Now look AM, you can't just say that because 'gays die young' (probably of AIDS) is a trope..." No - well hang on a minute, I have more on that. I mean apart from all this being built on every other aspect of Kuja's queer-coding which I think are much more apparent, consider not only Zidane's very pointed straight-ness, but also the game ending with Kuja dying and Vivi 'living on' by reproducing.

Queer-coding could be an entire topic unto itself and would likely require its own essay entirely. Frankly as I extensively argued already, his coding aligns more with asexual, Western-mythology coded femininity and alienation than a queer reading. The angel parallel is in fact explicitly assigned to him and his role as a Luciferian figure is beyond undeniable. Femininity in men is not viewed critically by Japanese audiences, nor are explicitly queer characters, but more rarely are asexually coded men viewed well by either gay or straight audiences. There is far more to support an asexual reading of Kuja than either same or opposite sex attraction. Queer readings of him lean heavily on superficial traits that equate gender presentation and neurodivergent traits with queerness. He's other-coded for sure, and in that sense queer, but queer is contemporarily used far more often in analysis to refer to sexuality.

I'd be inclined to agree with you if your use of queer-coding didn't seem to be limited to gay rather than including asexuality and gender nonconformity.

I'm afraid I don't think there's too much messaging in Kuja's palace, I think most of it is just Japanese media-which-uses-western imagery staples. (Fun fact, it's subtitled as "The Palace of Immorality" in the Japanese version of the game. Yeah I'm not even going to bother going back to the queer-coding in any depth on that one.)

People sure like to handwave away deliberate use of Christian symbology when it comes from Japanese creators, as if other cultures are unable to utilize mythology. This image that you see in the battle environment is far too specific to be flavor.

These are two very particular images. The one on the left is very likely the fall of Lucifer as illustrated by Gustav Doré in Paradise Lost. The one on the right does not have a specific reference in mind to my knowledge, but it is a clear depiction of the Annunciation, right down to the positioning of the angel and Mary. Considering this location is the one most explicitly associated to Kuja within the game, it is almost inconceivable for the symbology used here to 'accidentally' depict the juxtaposition of banishment (as Kuja was was banished by Garland from Terra) and the announcement of the 'chosen redeemer' (Jesus in myth, Zidane within this game).

I already extensively went into the Luciferian parallels within the essay... considering it's even more overwhelmingly shown than even some of the Gnostic/Jewish stuff used in FF7 for example, I hardly believe it's incidental.

[fauxpromises]

I've struggled to find a permanent home for this essay... Reddit is a failure for that, as any subreddits related to Final Fantasy do not tolerate literary critique. Thus, I will probably only keep this (very rigorous) essay here for now.

You Are Alone: Final Fantasy IX and the Illusion of Choice 

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.

Even among the often-philosophical 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 “friends on an 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 “heroes 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 this as Kuja’s flaw: his design limitation, and ultimately, his narrative failing. He was not nurtured, but manufactured and discarded. 

The profound implications of this are brushed aside unceremoniously, and 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 tragedy, but as an inconvenient obstacle on the path to the heroes’ triumph. 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. 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. It rewards those born into meaning, and condemns those who must invent it. 

This is not existentialism. This is in fact the complete opposite: determinism. 

Post-Hoc Condemnation – 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 is not simply written, 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 treatment of him relies not on clear ideology, but on a slow aesthetic and psychological indictment that erodes the possibility of sympathy before it ever begins.

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. Trauma during this 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. The most damaging trauma often comes from parental rejection, which compromises 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 eventually be discarded. His survival depends entirely on performance. Worse still, Kuja appears to have lived for some time without sentient peers, precluding even basic social interaction. He is denied not only childhood, but the development upon which self-image is founded. He does not grow into emotional maturity, he is simply installed with intellect. The result is a being who suffers the tragedy of a child’s volatility trapped in an adult’s body, and who was never given the chance to become anything else. 

It is therefore no surprise that Kuja exhibits the profile of someone shaped by deep alienation. He performs cruelty, but cannot connect. He controls others, but cannot have a place among them. His flamboyance, detachment, and need for control are not tools of dominance, but rather they are stage dressing hiding a disrupted identity. The story codes these traits as villainy, but they align exactly with the psychology of someone wounded, hollowed out, and desperate to maintain some semblance of dignity. 

Kuja is not punished for being monstrous. He is punished for responding to trauma in a way the story refuses to read as even remotely sympathetic. 

What Are You, A Virgin?

While condemning mismanaged trauma already delivers a troubling message about what constitutes morally acceptable self-expression, 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 framed as harmless flirtation, even in moments that violate consent, such as groping her during a compromising situation early in the story. 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 framed through a familiar, culturally sanctioned model of masculine grief: the man who becomes withdrawn until coaxed out by friendship. 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, never rooted in pursuit or participation. His use of magic, a role most often assigned to female characters within JRPG convention, further distances him from normative masculinity. Socially, he maintains no genuine connections, only strategic alliances, and there is no textual suggestion of romantic or sexual engagement. 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.

By the game’s conclusion, the story explicitly affirms Zidane’s mode of existence as the “correct” one. Kuja’s final 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. More troubling still, this implies that models of selfhood rooted in restraint, boundary, and non-normative masculinity are not just atypical, but incorrect. The story does not treat Kuja’s boundaries as a valid form of self-protection or self-authorship. It reads them as defects. 

The Aesthetics of Evil 

Unsatisfied with merely portraying 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. This is first asserted through his appearance: androgynous beauty, emotional detachment, and the arrested quality of eternal youth, which are traits associated not with mortals, but 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 clearly 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 this 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, and his refusal to submit agreeably as transgressive. 

Under scrutiny, this myth does not hold true to the character’s reality. Kuja is not divine. He is not a being cast from grace. He is not a prince of heaven whose pride drove him to ruin. He is an engineered and profoundly vulnerable creature, a mortal in the false guise of a god. 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 is not the overreach of ambition, but the desperation of someone who has always been consigned to the role of slave. He does not rise against Garland as a rival to the divine. He rises as someone pleading for 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. 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, serving as a means to bond, to be chosen, and to belong. 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 longing for freedom — something beautiful that was never meant to be caged. In Kuja’s case, the symbolism is inverted: his splendor does not invite liberation, but signals his fate as something ornamental, confined, and displayed only to serve someone else's design.

The final symbolic insult lies in how the narrative weaponizes Kuja’s own love of drama and myth against him. Throughout the story, his infatuation with the conceit of theatrics is not mere performative flourish, but his chosen method of survival. For a being who can neither control his own story nor feel genuine emotion, the emulation of fantasy is a shallow but understandable substitute. It is precisely at his lowest moment that the narrative cruelly turns this coping mechanism into spiteful irony. This defeat is staged as his final performance; not a moment of introspection, but a humiliation ritual. The true crime lies in the fact that presenting suffering as punishment is profoundly anti-existential, as it treats pain as something fate inflicts upon those who do not play by its arbitrary rules. This reframes despair as a sin, and casts Kuja not as a victim of design, but as someone who deserved divine punishment. 

Indeed, 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. Kuja’s time is up, his body is finite, and his soul will soon be forfeit. The message is not that he has failed, but that he was never allowed to succeed. This is not a reckoning between equals, but rather a master speaking down to his creation — a final assertion of control disguised as truth. His struggle, his pain, even his desperate grasp for legacy are all waved away by a voice that condemns with the cold finality of the hand of justice itself.

This is not existentialism. It is yet another invocation of determinism, deployed in a narratively satisfying but philosophically dishonest fashion. 

Suffering As Sacred, Not Spectacle 

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. 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, not mocked, not 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, 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 no less human and no less sacred. It is not monstrous nor hollow, but rather a testament to the will to endure. He is not passive in his despair. He resists it, in the only ways left to him.

And 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 is stripped of dignity, his coping read as villainy. In doing so, the story violates its own philosophical premise: it punishes the act of taking a stand.

Frankl also warned, “No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.” Zidane eventually echoes 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.

Notably, Frankl also maintained, “No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them.” But Kuja’s tragedy is not that he acted without consequences, but rather 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. It is repurposed to serve the winners, not to elevate the dead.

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 and deliberate, 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 piece of highly 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 reverent 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. 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. From this moment onward, the narrative remains unflinching, exposing Shinji not only to physical threats in battle, but to the far more insidious internal danger of emotional starvation. 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 has witnessed the brutal deaths of those around him. 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, in that moment, the story still asks him: Do you want to keep living?

The answer is yes, not because anything has been resolved, but because he chooses to embrace the uncertainty of life. He rejects the obliteration of self. He allows the world, and himself, to continue. The movie’s conclusion honors this decision not with triumph, but with quiet, haunting openness. In choosing life, Shinji reclaims it. That possibility, the 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. 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. The party defeats Necron in combat, and Kuja is quietly allowed to die off-screen. His existential pain is not interrogated, it is contained and erased.

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 initiates Instrumentality not as a tool, but as an act of will, guiding Shinji’s journey of self-determination.

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 holds the door open. 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 fulfilled, but her absence is profound. She leaves the viewer with the impression of someone not erased but sanctified, an almost holy figure who departed on her own terms.

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 not vengeance but exposure, and the story offers no judgement beyond the ache of imagining what he might have been, had he chosen differently. 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 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 narrative reward, but existential validation: fragile, strange, and sincere.

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. The party doesn’t fix his crisis, but they refuse to leave him in it. 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, no one follows him. No one answers his isolation with affirmation. 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. The message is not “you are not alone”. It is: 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?" 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 villainy of authoritarianism, the horror of it is treated not with 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 pain, like Necron’s philosophy, is positioned as something to be defeated, not understood. Where Pink’s wall is torn down, Kuja’s is buried with him.

These works, 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 a quiet postscript, Mikoto offers Kuja a eulogy: “What you did was wrong… but you gave us all one thing… hope.” Her words attempt to retrofit the very grace the story refused to extend while he lived. It is not redemption. It is not reflection. It is a concession offered only once it is safe to grieve him, and once his challenge to the narrative has been resolved and cleaned up.

This contradiction reveals the core failure of Final Fantasy IX’s existential framework. If a story claims to examine mortality and self-prescribed meaning, it must allow all characters, even the antagonist, the conditions to choose meaningfully. Kuja is denied this. His pain is not explored. His rebellion is not contextualized. His collapse is not mourned. His arc is not allowed to mean anything beyond its narrative utility. And then, when it is too late, the story tries to reclaim emotional ground with a eulogy it never earned.

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. They do not erase characters in order to maintain ideological neatness. They extend the philosophical courtesy of subjectivity to those who need it most. 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.

[fauxpromises]

FFIX & Evangelion

I’ve long thought that Kuja’s arc in the narrative strongly resembled some elements from Evangelion... jokingly, I’ve referred to his snap after learning his fate as his Komm Susser Tod moment, but god damn, when I was watching some gameplay recently, I realized just how similar the conclusion to his story and the introduction of Necron is to End of Evangelion.

Here’s the conversation that Zidane has with Necron before the final battle:

Zidane "What the heck are you talking about?" "Why are you telling me all this?" "...Now, the theory is undeniable." "Kuja's action proves it. All things live to perish." "At last, life has uncovered this truth. Now, it is time to end this world." Zidane "Wh-What do you mean by that!?" "I exist for one purpose..." "To return everything back to the zero world, where there is no life and no crystal to give life." "In a world of nothing, fear does not exist. This is the world that all life desires."

This is a... very similar description of what Instrumentality is explained as. The “zero world” sounds a lot like the world of Instrumentality, a state of proto-existence where individual experience does not exist. It’s considered desirable to some groups like SEELE, who believe that the release from fear/insecurity is a form of evolution for man (and moreover, an escape from the fate of mortality). Necron even explicitly describes the world he will usher in as a place where fear does not exist.

What’s interesting about this is it pretty much plays directly to the interpretation I already had about Kuja’s motivations in attempting to destroy all life. It’s not a stretch to say he suffered as a severely emotionally underdeveloped character who put much of his time into trying to suppress his own self-hatred (much like Shinji, a young teen with childhood trauma and feelings of worthlessness), and once pushed to his breaking point, reaches the conclusion that not only would it be better for him to die, but also for all other life to die with him. And indeed Kuja was seeking his own death by the time he was going to destroy the crystal, he simply wanted to not be alone in doing so.

It’s some very interesting commentary on giving in to despair (after all, you fight Necron on the Hill of Despair). And Zidane, being Kuja’s counterpoint, confronts his own moment of despair before being joined by his friends for the “You Are Not Alone” moment. The fact that his friends were what saved him from this illustrates the importance of being with others in order to avoid falling into despair, a necessary part of the human experience that is enhanced by loneliness and lack of meaning. I think that is why it’s always irked me when people have taken Kuja’s desire to end all life as being purely out of spite, when I think it is actually an insight into the insurmountable despair that he likely felt. Being “not alone” is given attention in Zidane’s narrative, so I think it is likely that Kuja’s desire to not die alone was not merely a result of spite, but also of existential loneliness and fear.

Anyway, I could probably write a lot more on this topic, but I find it very very interesting that not only does Evangelion and FFIX share themes of despair, loneliness, and flaws borne out of self-hatred, but also that specific bit of lore with Necron and his zero world.

[fauxpromises]

I noticed this a while ago, but kept forgetting to share. Kuja’s armor in DFFOO:

Is just a straight up snake, lol. Given my previously posted analysis of why I think he was directly inspired by the angel Lucifer, a point I brought up mostly since I’ve never seen anyone talk about how deep the parallels run, I think it’s cool that they included this as what I suspect is a bit of a reference.

Egoist’s Armlet itself exists in FFIX but tmk I do not think it has an ingame model, so they specifically chose to represent it as such here. Of course, you can say that snakes are more generally representative of dishonest people, but that archetype still comes from the story of the snake in Eden.

[gk2nist]

Visit Original Link

Talking Heads - Crosseyed And Painless from the 1984 soundtrack to Stop Making Sense.

[fauxpromises]

Facts are simple and facts are straight Facts aren't lazy and facts aren't lame Facts don't come with points of view Facts don't do what I want them to Facts just twist the truth around Facts are living turned inside out Facts are getting the best of them Facts are nothing on the face of men

[fauxpromises]

Random musings about Talking Heads & Kuja

Been getting back to writing again and felt like it would be kind of fun to write down my thoughts on the artist and album that inspired some of my thematic ideas for my fic. Though realistically this is more of a general character analysis re Kuja than anything specific to my writing, lol.

Analysis below the cut!

Part of why I was inspired to write is, well, Kuja is one of my favorite characters in fiction and I feel that a lot of his most important themes and characterization go almost completely unexamined. Specifically, I notice fandom tends to focus on his characterization prior to his big change in trajectory. That trajectory results in his constructed persona being pretty much completely destroyed, and in the wake of that, I see his post-arc persona being much more muted and lacking in a solid foundation of identity. No longer the excessively theatrical, outgoing identity that he created in order to convince himself that he was unique and important (neither of which his origin would lead him to actually believe).

And that’s exactly why I relate Talking Heads, and more specifically Remain in Light to him as a character. It’s an album with the central theme of identity conflict, at times in a very abstract way, that I feel fits him as a character so entirely well. The actual style of music has either a chaotic, rapid “racing thoughts” tempo to it, or a subdued sound that nonetheless has feeling of looming dread to it. Sometimes they feel rather casual, but in a superficial way. But the theme is pretty consistent across the track list. Even the title “Remain in Light” and the album cover is meant to convey that something is being obscured and is attempting to come into visibility.

The narrative voice as performed by David Byrne is also extremely fitting. He’s good at conveying a personality that is eccentric and at times seemingly detached from the human experience. He makes quirky, coy observations and tends to muse on the state of humanity or others in ways that almost seem as if he excludes himself from that lot. You could call it somewhat dissociative, while still portraying a lucid train of thought; there’s often a difference in the degree of intelligence the narrator shows in his observations, and his ability to understand the emotions that they yield.

Of the songs on Remain in Light, I believe the ones that most relate to the identity disturbance theme are “Once in a Lifetime”, “Seen and Not Seen”, and the big one for me, “Crosseyed & Painless”. I give a shoutout to “The Great Curve” because it kind of informed the romance dynamic, which, while not supposed to be foremost to the character study, represent something Kuja as a character has almost no interaction with in his canon context (outside of Dissidia anyway) - a tangible connection with another person. That track really complements the theme of delusion that the album insinuates, as it’s a sort of fanciful love song describing an idealized, lofty portayal of a woman. It’s abstract and nonspecific, barely a love song in the conventional sense, but I like the idea that someone who is themself conflicted or deluded about their own identity would struggle to see others as they really are.

Anyway, “Once in a Lifetime” is probably one of the best known TH songs. It’s an almost comedic take on an existential crisis, the narrator reflecting on his uncertainty of the nature of reality to the point of questioning the basic objects he interacts with in his day-to-day (like his wife and his car). “Seen and Not Seen” is a much more obscure track that is an extended metaphor. The narration describes a man who is able to change his physical appearance at will, trying to make it match that of idealized others (like celebrities) or changing it to better suit his perception of himself. It’s a representation of how people shape their personalities and identities, and how they can err in doing so.

But really, I’d say “Crosseyed & Painless” is the song that really, to me, is Kuja’s character arc in a nutshell. I really love the live version from Stop Making Sense specifically for the extended and stylized intro. It starts with a really calm and casual instrumental and guitar line, which gradually (and disconcertingly) transitions into a really fast tempo and guitar which reminds me way too much of “Dark Messenger”. It’s pretty clearly a musical depiction of a descent into insanity as something rather incremental, but ultimately landing with force. It’s definitely something that has to be heard to be understood.

Lyrically, the narrator describes a feeling of identity confusion. Due to an unspecified cause, he feels like he is caught between an assumed identity and a true identity, pretty well explained in the first verse (Lost my shape, trying to act casual). It’s a cause of great distress as evidenced by the third line, “I might end up in the hospital”. And beyond that, the phrase “I feel like an accident” indicates something has occurred that is inevitable.

After the narrator explains his own predicament, to me it seems he turned his skepticism to the reality of everything else rather than admit that the delusion and conflict is within himself. It’s rather clever. He speaks at length about facts, as in the second verse: (I'm ready to leave, I push the fact in front of me/Facts lost, facts are never what they seem to be). Facts are something unavoidable and true by definition, but he focuses his attention on both lamenting their immovability and still trying to rationalize that he can alter them. There’s also talk of doubt, which I expect is related to the aforementioned conflict with facts - despite the denial of them, doubt always voices itself. The chorus in its various versions reaffirm this with the statement “the feeling returns whenever we close our eyes”.

The prominent refrain, however, is the “I’m still waiting” repetition. An annotation on the song on Genius.com sums up the meaning behind it very well:

“What I love about this refrain is that it seems to reconfirm a desire for facts or some kind of master signifier that will give order and meaning to the world, despite the song’s overall critique of facts. The repetition of “still waiting” ties in nicely with the line in the bridge that “Facts cut a hole in us.” This reminds me of what Jacques Lacan calls objet petit a – the object-cause of desire that our desires forever circle around without obtaining.”

If you care to give any of these songs a listen, I’d recommend the album version for all but “Crosseyed & Painless” which has a significantly better version in my opinion on the live album. There used to be an incredibly amazing downmix of the whole album on Youtube but it has since vanished, very unfortunately.

[fauxpromises]

Analysispost: The relationship between Kuja & Luciferian mythos

Hello to my followers! I’ve been mulling over this idea for a while and thought it might be of interest to my followers who follow me because of my work in progress.

As is evident in many Final Fantasy titles, various religious/folklore mythologies form the basis for storylines, characters, themes, locations, and other details. You have VII which draws from Jewish mysticism and Norse mythology, as does XIII for the latter, and elements of Buddhist thought in regards to pain/suffering and the nature of existence across multiple titles such as X and IX.

So, being that I’ve been writing Kuja for a while with my WIP…it occurred to me that there’s a severely underdiscussed/underexamined part of his character’s basis. That being, is he at least partially inspired by the biblical lore of Lucifer?

I think many of the elements of this argument are imminently clear. A brief look into the topic will present you with a lot of differing opinions on the actual nature of Satan within Judeo-Christian mythology, and to understand the analysis that follows, I will clarify that mythology concerning the character of Lucifer is dually referenced as both a king (of Babylon, and of Tyre in separate instances) and the typological angel cast from heaven by God.

Without requiring any kind of implied conclusions at all, the concept of angels is already presented in IX as a feature of the two (technically, three) souled genomes intended to subdue Gaia. Their creator designates them as angels of death, and like the mythological representation of angels, they are sent as representatives of another world to perform a task or communicate a message. Although all three of Zidane, Mikoto, and Kuja ultimately bear this title, the only one of the three who maintains a relationship with it throughout the story would be Kuja by virtue of his actions.

Interestingly, the Desert Palace also heavily contains what I would say looks to be European-style depictions of angels:

Note the presence of what appears to be demons here as well, which reinforces my belief of which mythos these statues are evocative of.

Beyond just the superficial use of the word angel, there are some pretty compelling similarities between Kuja’s backstory and the mythos of Satan. For context, let me clarify that there is some ambiguity in how the character of Satan/Lucifer is presented in various biblical contexts. One of the places this is found is with regards to the king of Tyre:

“Many scholars believe that though there was a human “ruler” of Tyre, the real “king” of Tyre was Satan, for it was he who was ultimately at work in this anti-God city and it was he who worked through the human ruler of the city.

Some have suggested that these verses may actually be dealing with a human king of Tyre who was empowered by Satan. Perhaps the historic king of Tyre was a tool of Satan, possibly even indwelt by him. In describing this king, Ezekiel also gives us glimpses of the superhuman creature, Satan, who was using, if not indwelling, him.”[1]

With regards to Kuja’s role in the story, I find it interesting that this pertains both to Satan manipulating a king into impure actions, and also because Satan could also be said to be acting as the king himself via some form of corruption or possession – interesting given Kuja’s alias of King.

Furthermore, this king is said to be: “…portrayed as having a different nature from man (he is a cherub, verse 14); he had a different position from man (he was blameless and sinless, verse 15); he was in a different realm from man (the holy mount of God, verses 13,14); he received a different judgment from man (he was cast out of the mountain of God and thrown to the earth, verse 16); and the superlatives used to describe him don’t seem to fit that of a normal human being (“full of wisdom,” “perfect in beauty,” and having “the seal of perfection,” verse 12 NASB).[1]

Do these descriptions not also seem appropriate? We are talking about a being that is fundamentally inhuman in nature, of a greater degree of intelligence/beauty than humans, was from a realm different than man, and was cast out of this realm for rebellion.

Additionally, we have the presence of jealousy as an impetus behind betrayal of God:

“Satan was once an honored angel in heaven, next to Christ. . . . But when God said to His Son, "Let us make man in our image," Satan was jealous of Jesus. He wished to be consulted concerning the formation of man, and because he was not, he was filled with envy, jealousy, and hatred. He desired to receive the highest honors in heaven next to God.”[2]

Again, I find this uncanny given the fact that Kuja’s open rebellion against Garland and his goals was ultimately brought to a head by the creation of Zidane.

Another interesting tidbit I noticed was these stained glass depictions in the Desert Palace library:

The image on the left appears to be the only humanoid depiction in the palace that has demonlike wings, whereas the other creatures appear as angels, regular humans, or gargoylesque demons. I would posit this is meant to allude to the fall of Lucifer, particularly this illustration done for Paradise Lost by Gustave Doré:

You can see here the imagery of stars. That would be because Lucifer can be interpreted as lightbringer or morning star. The latter is worth noting given that by the end of IX, Kuja’s primary moveset is pretty clearly alluding to stars and cosmic events.

(I’m less sure what the image on the right is meant to refer to. It looks like it could be an angel conferring with a figure that may be representative of God, but I’d be interested to know if anyone has a theory on that.)

Finally, the inclusion of dragons as Kuja's spirit animal of sorts also bears mentioning. Satan takes the form of a serpent in the earliest reaches of biblical lore, tempting humans with power (which sure sounds familiar), and is often referred to as a dragon. In fact, in Revelation, he takes the form of a large red dragon.

Anyway, just my stream of thoughts on the topic. What do you think? I’ve never once seen it discussed or mentioned but I’d like to know if anyone else has noticed.

(Edit: Someone mentioned in reply to my original posting of this that the righthand mosaic may be alluding to the Annunciation, that is, the announcement by the angel Gabriel that the son of God would be born. I think this appropriately juxtaposes with the fall of Satan pictured to the left - Kuja was basically cast from his creator’s favor with the arrival of Zidane, who in a similar way to Jesus was to be his creator’s chosen one to fulfill an important destiny on Earth).

My post was getting filtered out of tags for linking my citations, so I have to give them to you in text instead.

[1] How Did Lucifer Fall and Become Satan? Rod Rhodes. Christianity.com. 10/27/07. [2] When Did Satan’s Fall Occur? Ministry Magazine Archives. 01/59.

[rissynicole]

17 for the ask meme :)

17. are there any tropes you wished were used less often?

Okay, so I’m going to make this in relation to Invader Zim fanfic tropes specifically. Which... can very easily just turn into my own unpopular opinions. (Look, if you’re a fic writer, and you write these tropes, I’m not hating on you. It’s just not my cup of tea. Do whatever you want and be proud of it.)

I always get annoyed with Zim fics that have Zim just “getting over” the fact that his mission is fake in, like, a day. Or coming to the conclusion one day and being like “yeah, I kinda figured.” Like... no. I get that some ficwriters don’t want to write about Zim’s initial struggles to adjust following a discovery like that, but to pretend that a struggle never existed in the first place... I don’t know. It just doesn’t sit well with me. Zim has such complete devotion to his mission. I have a hard time believing he would just get over it that quickly. It’s not in line with what his race conditions him to value, and it most certainly is not in line with his own personality. It feels lazy at best and ooc at worst. 

Err... this second one is definitely going to be an unpopular opinion, especially because I have friends who love this trope, and it’s a pretty popular trope overall. I don’t really like Zim just embracing earth clothing immediately, even after he finds out his mission is fake. Maybe, over time, but I honestly don’t think Zim would be super quick to embrace a culture that he was conditioned to believe is inferior. I mean, this trope can be done well, and I’ve seen it written well. But... I’ve also seen plenty of occurrences where it just falls totally flat for me.

So, overall, a lot of tropes I’m not too hip on in this fandom mostly have to do with pacing. I don’t really like Zim’s character arc being rushed in “Zim finds out his mission is fake” stories. It just doesn’t feel natural to me. It feels very ooc. 

[fauxpromises]

I have a possibly more unpopular opinion related to both of those tropes...over the years I have seen most people who write a post-reveal Zim just dicking around on Earth hanging around after he finds out his life is a lie. It just seems really unconvincing to me that he would stay on Earth - there’s not much for him to do there, and eventually Dib would grow up so he wouldn’t be able to continue being rivals with him even. Without his mission there is literally nothing keeping him on Earth except conceivably an exile, which never stopped him before and would hardly stop him then.

I think it’s a lot more likely, assuming amicability between Zim and Dib once Dib is an older teen/adult, that they would probably go do shit in space. It would fulfill what both of them are more interested in doing in life - Dib doesn’t fit in on Earth and unless he found some other interest besides the paranormal/parascience, he wouldn’t have much to do with his life either (or more specifically he would continue to live on the fringes/not get the acceptance he wants). And Zim would probably want to go find some other trouble to get up to. I don’t see them casually chilling around on a planet neither of them are much at home with. At minimum, Zim would leave.

[fauxpromises]

Just noting here that it might be a little bit before I get an update on my fic. Wanted to be full disclosure, and my apologies for the delay. When I started, I was hoping to get an update every 1-2 months, but certain circumstances these past few months have set me back a bit.

Thanks again for sticking with me and I promise there will be more as soon as possible. :)