Let’s talk about Rufus Shinra.
This time, I’m not going to sugarcoat or be nice about it.
“Rufus is a bad person because he steps onto the scene talking about how he’ll rule the world through fear” is a braindead fucking take, and you should feel unintelligent every time you say it. It’s a stupid person’s idea of insightful analysis.
If you make this judgement call about Rufus, you must also make the judgement call that Cloud is a horribly selfish person because he says, “It’s not my problem. The only thing I care about is finishing this job before security and the Roboguards come” to Barret at the start of the game. You must also make the judgement call that Cloud doesn’t care about the planet, because he says, “Let Barret and his buddies do something about it. It has nothing to do with me” to Tifa also at the start of the game.
Seriously, that’s how stupid you sound.
By making this judgement about Rufus, you’re basically making the statement that character arcs don’t happen, don’t matter, and that every single character that’s ever existed in media is flat, static, and should be taken wholly at face value just from their very first scene.
And I highly doubt that any of you actually feel that way, so I’m not entirely sure why I keep seeing this pop up around Rufus Shinra specifically.
Here’s an exhaustive list of actions that Rufus performs following his “rule the world through fear” statement:
+ Personally embarks on a journey to hunt down and stop Sephiroth (despite the fact that he has a literal actual army at his disposal that he could send out instead)
+ Tells Tseng to stop pursuing Aerith
+ Yanks the choke chain on Heidegger and stops the active pursuit of the main party – and in fact, gives them an additional party member through Reeve/Cait Sith
+ Turns around halfway through his own escape and goes back to save the lives of the entire playable party at the North Crater (minus Cloud because he’s MIA)
+ Willingly lets the playable party go even despite having them in his custody following his rescue of them
+ Provides Tifa with medical care during her week-long coma
+ Orders the shittiest-produced public execution of Barret and Tifa ever, to the point where it’s fairly obvious to anyone who’s looking that it’s an attempt to flush Cloud out of hiding because he’s needed for the final confrontation against Sephiroth – and then does not pursue Barret or Tifa during or after their escape, despite the main party stealing the fucking Highwind from him
+ Uses Shinra’s resources in an attempt to blow up Meteor
+ Kills Diamond Weapon AND destroys the barrier around the North Crater so that the main party can get to Sephiroth – and stares his own death in the face in order to do it
+ Develops a fully comprehensive plan to rebuild just outside of Midgar so that the refugees have somewhere to go post-Meteorfall
+ Openly decries the practice of torture
+ Carries the sick and dying in his arms during a flood
+ Murders the next would-be Hojo
+ Develops painkillers and medication for Geostigma patients and mass-produces them so that people can get the help they need
+ Funds clinics treating Geostigma patients
+ Uses what’s left of Shinra’s resources to hunt down Jenova’s remains so that they can destroy them and disallow Sephiroth from ever returning – which he succeeds in doing
+ Gives Cloud backup in the form of the Turks during the confrontation with the Remnants in AC AND gives him important information about Geostigma, despite Cloud turning down his proposal to work together
+ Funds and very probably secretly runs the WRO
+ Asks for nothing in return from the public at large – not even a “thank you.”
That last point is bolded because it’s important. Rufus’s biggest weakness and flaw as a politician is that he doesn’t care about what other people think of him. He’s not interested in PR campaigns – and, in fact, thinks of them as a colossal waste of time and money. But they’re not. They’re a part of the political process. This has always been his biggest flaw, to the point where his father literally calls him out on it in Before Crisis:
Rufus: “Ridiculous. Your way of doing things is far too wasteful. Under my rule, the company’s profits would increase ten-fold."
President Shinra: "You’re too naive. You can’t run a company on theory alone.”
Rufus is a policy wonk. And in this case? President Shinra was right. You could be the biggest policy wonk in the universe, but your platform and your detailed policy outlines don’t mean a thing if you don’t have public opinion on your side to enact any of it.
This is a lesson that Rufus had to learn the hard way post-OG when he tried and failed to rebuild Shinra. Rufus cared far too little of what the people thought of him and assumed that just doing good things would be enough, and it isn’t. That’s how politics works, unfortunately. It didn’t matter what all he did to help people post-Meteorfall – they all still hated him, and he could never go full-force on his bigger projects as a result.
His “rule the world through fear” speech wasn’t expressed from a desire to be a Trump-ian dictator. He literally just sees PR stunts as a waste of time and money, and he would rather tell people the truth instead because it’s easier and more cost-efficient. Rufus is expressing the frugal nature of his character more than anything else with that speech – and it’s that very frugal nature that gets challenged throughout his character arc, as he’s forced to throw more and more money at efforts to help save, protect, and heal the planet and its populace at large.
So. Yeah. What a bad guy. A real, real, real bad guy. A true bastard of a villain. Wholly irredeemable. He should’ve just stayed dead like we thought in OG. It’s what he deserved.
Give me a fucking break, guys. Rufus Shinra is a good person at heart. That is simply the truth, whether you like it or not.
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