Lightning is not Hope's mother and some of you really need to stop infantilizing Hope
Lightning is not Hope’s surrogate mother and I’m so sick of people saying she is. Doing so is a disrespect to both their characters and shows you do not understand them at all.
Lightning’s initial trauma comes from having to become a surrogate mother figure to Serah. She was fifteen when their mother died and she was left to raise her sister. She changed her name to Lightning and joined the Guardian Corps as soon as she could in order to support the two of them. She cut off her emotions and refused to rely on others, thinking it would make her strong.
And in doing so, she hurt both herself and her relationship with Serah.
She’s just barely turned 21 years old at the start of XIII and for 6 years she has been sacrificing her own identity to become a provider, a protector, and a parent. Her character arc is about learning that she doesn't have to keep living that way. About learning to be Claire Farron again, to be a sister and a person, to not have to be a mother figure and to be more than just a soldier. To let people in again, and not shoulder everything herself.
It is not, “I didn’t do a good job raising my sister, I’m going to raise this teen I just met instead and do a good job with him instead.”
When she first met Hope, she saw him as an annoyance. She was struggling to take care of herself, she didn’t want a tag along that she would have to take care of as well. It was only after the fight with Odin, she decided to give up on the idea of leaving him behind and that she would help toughen him up instead.
Not that she was going to protect and take care of him, that she would make him stronger. She did not tell him to hide behind her while she fought, or that she’d take care of everything, she expected him to stand on his own two feet. He was treated like a soldier, he was not coddled. She expected him to become capable rather than dependent. She taught him to use a goal to keep himself going, let him fight with her and let him take point. If you saw someone as your child, and they said “Let me take point against the enemy” you wouldn’t say yes.
Most importantly, she repeatedly frames them as partners.
Partners.
Not guardian and child.
Not mother and son.
Partners.
You do not tell someone that you treat as your surrogate child that the two of you are partners.
She doesn't call him her partner to make him feel better. She calls him her partner because that's genuinely how she sees him. The language she chooses matters. If the devs wanted us to see Lightning as Hope's surrogate mother, they had countless opportunities to frame their relationship that way. Instead, they repeatedly have Lightning reject hierarchical language in favor of equality. She gave him her survival knife. She opened up to him just as much as he opened up to her. She listened to his ideas. She trusted his judgment. Everything about their relationship moves toward equals, not parenthood. And even once she realized that she had been lashing out blindly in anger and had inadvertently dragged Hope down the same path, she didn’t suddenly turn maternal. She still treated him as a partner. She tried to reason with him and convince him to change his mind rather than treating him like a child who needed to be ordered around. She does not take back the knife, she does not forbid him to go after Snow. Instead, she argues with him, because she recognizes that the decision is ultimately his to make. She had softened yes, but because Hope was changing her just as much as she was changing him. Their growth is mutual. That's part of being partners. And when Hope finally did let go of his revenge, yes she hugged him and promised to protect him, but she still never treated him like a child, let alone her child. They were friends and partners, and that’s something she continues to emphasize throughout the whole series.
Fragments Before expands on this, explicitly having Lightning say she saw Hope as a burden at first but came to see him as a trusted ally. Again, not a term you use for someone you are treating as your child.
And on Hope’s end, his mother died just barely before he met Lightning, something he does not ever fully get over for the whole series. In XIII-2, one of his main wishes when he first learned about time travel, was to find a way to bring his mother back. He might have given up on that wish once it became clear it wasn’t feasible, but all it takes is to pay attention to the look on his face when he’s given the chance to be reborn with his parents in LR. He longed to be with them,
There is no point ever where he was looking for a new mother, and even if he had been, Lightning would be the last person to fill that role. At that point in the story she's emotionally distant and deliberately keeps people at arm's length. Vanille, on the other hand, is openly nurturing and has been comforting Hope the whole time. But does he stick with her?
No, he follows after Lightning and he specifically is stated to have gone after her because he believes he’s strong, and hopes he can learn to be strong from her.
That's a desire for mentorship. It is not a child looking for someone to replace his mother.
People often point to Lightning protecting Hope as proof that she became his surrogate mother. But protecting someone isn't an inherently parental act. Friends protect each other. Mentors protect the people they're teaching. Soldiers protect their comrades.
Do we claim that Snow is Serah’s father when he protects her?
Do we claim that Fang is Vanille’s mother or vice versa when they protect each other?
Are Snow and Lightning suddenly Fang’s parents because they stood between her and Bahamut?
What about Vanille? Is she Sazh’s mother because she stood between him and Byrnhildr?
The focus shouldn’t be whether Lightning protected Hope, but what the narrative says that protection became. Tracers of Memory addresses this directly.
“What sort of person was Lightning?” “…She is a strict, but gentle person. And because she was so kind, she didn’t spoil me, but firmly watched over me.” “So she protected and guided you. Was she like a caretaker to you?“ “At first, I only depended on her. I simply thought she was a strong person. But in reality, she was also lost and suffering. The moment I realized this, I knew that I didn’t want to only be protected by her. I wanted to protect her too.” “You became ‘partners’ that faced the same trials together.” “Yes. We all came to support each other and we managed to overcome a variety of obstacles.”
When Hope is asked whether Lightning was like a caretaker to him, he doesn't simply agree. He acknowledges that he depended on her at first, but once he realized she was hurting too, he desired to protect her as well. The story makes it clear that the relationship began with Hope relying on Lightning, but explicitly frames its destination as partnership, not motherhood.
We see the exact moment in the game where he makes this decision, right after they fight the Ushumgal Subjugator in Palumpolum and Lightning promises to protect him. He promises to try and protect her as well. A promise that Lightning does not reject.
The partnership between them and the way Hope learns to stand on his own two feet continues through the end of XIII. Then XIII-2 takes that development and doubles down on it.
There is an unfortunate tendency in this fandom to freeze Hope at fourteen forever. (Seriously, do some of you think you're Bhunivelze?) but the fact is that Hope is a grown adult when we meet him in XIII-2. We only ever see him as an adult, and he’s 24 the first time we meet him in 10 AF, and the head of the Academy.
We also learn through the game and the novellas that he skipped grades, joined the Academy at 17, and became its head at 19. He isn't someone defined by dependence anymore. He's the person everyone else depends on. As head of the Academy, he's one of humanity's principal leaders, directing the reconstruction of civilization and the effort to build a future free from the fal'Cie.
As was mentioned earlier, Hope is still grieving his mother in XIII-2. He specifically says when you meet him in 01X AF:
“I wanted to change history, make things better. Not just bring Lightning back. But Vanille, and Fang...and my mother.”
Notice that even after all these years, Hope never transfers those feelings onto Lightning. They are listed separately. His mother is still his mother. She's still someone he desperately wishes he could save.
The motivation for wanting them back are fundamentally different. Hope wants his mother back because she's his mother. He wants Lightning back because she's Lightning. The story never conflates those relationships, and neither does Hope. Blurring those lines insults his actual grief.
Fast forward to when we meet Hope in Academia 4XX AF. He mentions that while he was in the time capsule, Lightning spoke to him in a dream and told him he was on the right path. The path that Hope was on then? Building the Ark as a new home for humanity, a monumental responsibility that the very survival of humanity depended on.
This isn't a mother reassuring her child. It's one leader affirming another leader's decisions. She doesn’t visit his dream because he’s a child who needs a mother to emotionally comfort him, she reaches out to him because he's carrying the future of humanity. She isn't comforting him over scraped knees or giving him life advice. She's validating the course of action taken by the man responsible for rebuilding civilization.
That's not a parent-child interaction. That's two people bearing enormous burdens recognizing one another.
Despite existing in different realms, Lightning never stops treating Hope as her partner who she trusts. The circumstances have changed, their responsibilities have grown, but the trust and partnership between them has only grown stronger.
Something that is stated again and again in XIII-2, is that Hope is being looked to as the architect of the future. Serah and Noel might be fixing the timeline, Lightning might be fighting in Valhalla, but it’s Hope’s actions that they are counting on to make everything work in the end and ensure humanity survives.
Not a single person in the game treats him as a child, not the Academy members, not Serah, not Noel, not Sazh or Snow, and especially not Lightning.
He is trusted, relied on and respected as a grown adult with many responsibilities. In many ways Hope’s arc echoes Lightning’s but in a different direction. While Lightning’s arc had her growing out of being parentified, with Hope we see him taking on more and more responsibility from a very young age until he becomes a foundational piece of the world.
The start of this is apparent even back in XIII, where after he lets go of his anger, he rapidly becomes one of the most mature members of the group. He is the one that pushes them forward, that encourages them when things are getting tough, that gives the big speeches.
Snow has the thought in Before Fragments that Hope’s childhood ended when he became a l’Cie and that is backed up by the rest of canon. Like Lightning, he stepped into a role that someone his age should not have had to fill, and we see even once he’s an adult that more and more weight is added on top of his shoulders.
This becomes especially apparent once the Chaotic Era occurred. We learn in Tracers of Memory that even in the New World, there are many people who Aoede interviewed who remember Hope as having been their leader and who they relied on during that time.
“Actually, it’s more than that. When I interviewed the people, your name was mentioned many times.” “My name?” “For example, ‘Hope led the people and saved us. Hope was the one who supported Cocoon.’ Hundreds of people recognized their leader as an individual named ‘Hope’. This is why I have looked forward to talking with you today. I felt that, if I listened to your story, I would be able to uncover a major key in this mystery.”
We also are told in Tracers that when Hope disappeared, the people fell apart.
“However, one day, Hope suddenly disappeared. The people fell into utter chaos. Sazh and Noel were already falling away into despair. Snow tried to collect and lead the people as Hope did, but he failed. He couldn’t be a leader like Hope.”
Hope was the backbone of society, he filled a role that no else could. Those are not shoes that a child who is dependent on others could fill, they belong to a grown and reliable man. The irony is that the fandom often treats Hope as if he remained the dependent child of XIII, while the actual canon spends XIII-2 and the novellas showing that he became someone entire populations depended on.
Tracers also gives us yet more proof that Lightning is not Hope’s maternal figure (not that we need more by this point), in the rose haired phantom.
Bhunivelze sends a rose haired phantom to torment Hope, wanting to break him.
“Soon, Hope also began to see strange visions and shadows. It was of a rose-haired woman. He couldn’t tell exactly who it was because the phantom would disappear before he could see it clearly. It would fade before his voice reached it. And when he would begin to dismiss and forget about it, the vision would suddenly appear before him again. This continued for a long time. Hope was determined to ignore the phantom. Even if he saw it, he wouldn’t mind it. But trying to ignore the vision caused him to become more conscious of it. It resulted in the opposite effect. His feelings were only dragged in deeper.” “Very soon, Hope could only think about the shadow. Then, his thoughts turned to Lightning and he could only think about her. Because of this, his dreams were filled with the events that happened in his past.”
Bhunivelze deliberately chooses Lightning as the person through whom to torment Hope. That's a significant choice. He didn’t choose Nora, and we know from the fake Serah that he created that he is fully capable of making imitations of the dead. We also know from the way Bhunivelze used Serah as leverage to get Lightning to become his Savior in LR that, even if he cannot see human hearts and does not truly understand human emotion, he is not oblivious to the connections people have or the interactions that shaped them. Lumina even confirms this in LR:
“It’s true God can’t see into human hearts... But he can read your face and tone just like anyone else and make his own guesses.”
Bhunivelze does not need to fully understand human relationships in order to manipulate them. He only needs to recognize which people matter to someone and what those relationships look like.
This is exactly what we see with Hope and the rose haired phantom.
“And the rose-haired phantom began to appear in his dreams too. And she would speak to him in the same way Lightning would.”
The phantom is specifically said to speak to Hope the way Lightning did. For that to be possible, Bhunivelze had to be aware of the interactions they had shared and the nature of their relationship. We have already clearly established that Lightning treated him as a partner and equal, not as her child, and it is that established dynamic that Bhunivelze used to try and break Hope. Not the dynamic of parent and child.
And break him he did.
“Eventually, Hope could no longer tell Lightning and the phantom apart. He couldn’t even tell apart dreams from reality. He thought that his imaginations of Lightning were a true part of his past. On the other hand, some of the real past he experienced with Lightning began to seem like his imagination. He couldn’t tell the difference. Lightning’s voice would even remain in his ears as well, long after he awoke from his dreams with her. Hope knew that it was Bhunivelze. Hope knew that the god was using this method to mentally and spiritually break him because Bhunivelze could not see souls. He had created the phantom to shatter human sanity for him. Bhunivelze was searching for the perfect vessel. Hope knew this was Bhunivelze’s plan, but he could no longer resist. One night, the rose-haired phantom appeared before Hope and beckoned him towards her. She led Hope away from the city, unnoticed, and Hope could only follow. Hope was led to the deserted New Cocoon, and there, he was confined. He became aware of the role of the “savior” and suddenly realized that Lightning was chosen. He fought for his consciousness and managed to type a message into the computer for Snow and the others. “Lightning will return as the savior. But beware of the false Lightning-“ However, before he could write more, Bhunivelze took control and Hope lost all consciousness. And for 169 years, 13 years repeated 13 times, Hope was molded by the god. He was made into the perfect vessel for Bhunivelze.”
The fact that Hope was molded by Bhunivelze is very important. His body may physically appear fourteen in LR, but his memories, experiences, and identity are those of someone who lived a full lifetime of responsibility. Multiple in fact, as he led for 331 years before being taken by Bhunivelze. And he is treated as such by Lightning. In fact LR places a very heavy emphasis on them being partners and equals.
During the cut scene where we first meet Hope in the Ark, Lightning says:
“Hope Estheim. Once long ago, we fought side by side, bound by a common destiny. He was just a boy then, kicked around by fate, scared and angry. But we became friends, and then...he grew up. He was going to be humanity’s great leader, the one who’d lead us all to a brighter future”
Friends. Not ‘He became like a son to me’ Not ‘He was someone I raised’
It’s ‘We became friends.’ Lightning very clearly establishes what their relationship is from the very start of the game.
And the game continues to establish that their relationship is that of equals and partners. While Lightning serves as the Savior, Hope serves as her guide. He provides the information, the resources, and the plans that allow her mission to succeed. Lightning is the one who fights on the front lines, but Hope is the one supporting her from behind the scenes.
And it’s clear that Lightning craves this partnership, when they’re figuring out how to use the play to get into Snow’s palace, we get this exchange.
Lightning: I guess I’ve got to keep moving. “Keep your eyes front, right?” Hope: That’s the spirit. Lightning: Hope...Does that mean you’ll be watching the rear? You’ll have my back? Hope: Of course I will. That’s what I’m here for.
A loading screen specifically addresses this conversation.
“It’s a daring plan. The walls around Snow’s palace, where he has hidden himself away, are too high to scale. So Hope wants me to use the elaborate stage design of Yusnaan’s theater to build a bridge. I don’t know whether to call it brilliant or insane. Either way, it seems unlike Hope. “Keep your eyes front.” That’s what I told him once, hundreds of years ago in Cocoon’s Gapra Whitewood. But when I tried to remind him of that conversation, his blithe answer betrayed no memory of the past, of what we once shared, and that filled me with a strange sorrow. Hope, have you really forgotten the bonds that once held us together?”
Lightning worries that Hope no longer remembers the bond they had. Her fear is not that Hope has forgotten a time when she cared for him. Her fear is that he has forgotten that they stood beside each other.
There’s another loading screen that also addresses their relationship.
“The savior of souls-that is what I am called now. I fell from soldier to l'Cie, from l'Cie to Etro’s knight. Now it is the almighty god, Bhunivelze, who has brought me back from crystal sleep to him. My duty: to guide the people so that they will be reborn in the new world of his making. My partner in this great task is Hope Estheim. Once he was my ally and my equal, a man destined to lead the people of Cocoon in their time of need. But now he appears before me as a boy once again. He says he will lead me on my journey through this ageless world. The clock is winding down. The countdown has begun. The last days of Nova Chrysalia are now.”
How does she refer to Hope? As her ally and equal. Someone who was meant to lead, and who even now that he’s been returned to the appearance of a boy, leads her. Everything I have said so far, every moment I’ve pointed to that shows them as partners and equals, has been directly confirmed by Lightning in words.
Hope is not a child she has raised. He is her equal. Her ally. Her partner.
Over and over this is emphasized through the games. Always it’s friend, partner, ally and equal. Never once do the games frame Hope and Lightning's relationship as one of mother and son, in fact the games shut down the idea of that hard.
So the question remains: why, when the games are so clear about the nature of their relationship, do people still insist otherwise?
There are, of course, the obvious explanations. Some people want to shut down a ship. Some simply prefer found family dynamics. Others played through the trilogy without paying attention and just parrot back what others claim. But if we look at the way fandom consistently treats Hope and Lightning's relationship compared to Hope's relationships with other characters, another pattern starts to emerge.
Let’s look at Hope and Sazh for a moment. Sazh is the only actual parent in the group. He comforts Hope, worries about him, offers him advice, and looks out for him whenever they interact. If anyone in XIII naturally slips into a parental role toward Hope at times, it's Sazh.
And yet, when was the last time you saw someone insist that Sazh is Hope's surrogate father?
What about Snow? Snow spends the entire trilogy trying to protect people. It's one of his defining character traits. He tries to protect Serah. He tries to protect Cocoon. He tries to protect Hope before he even realizes he’s Nora’s son. Snow displays many of the behaviors fandom points to as "parental" when Lightning does them.
And yet, you do not see people refer to him as Hope’s surrogate father either.
When an older male character and a younger male character have a close relationship, they're often allowed to simply be friends, mentor and protege, or even brothers. But when an older female character develops a similarly close bond with a younger male character, fandom is remarkably quick to reduce her to a maternal role. Even when their interactions repeatedly present a different dynamic, it is insisted that the relationship between them must be that of a mother and child.
It does not matter what the female character's personality is. It does not matter whether motherhood is something she actively wants, whether it fits her character, or whether her story is explicitly about escaping a parental role. She is a woman who cares about someone younger than herself, therefore she must be his mother.
I'm not saying everyone who interprets the relationship this way is consciously motivated by sexism. For many people, I suspect it's an ingrained assumption rather than a deliberate one. But unconscious biases are still biases, and they're still worth examining.
The obsession that some people in the fandom have with refusing to accept that Hope grows up, and treating him eternally like a child, may come from a similar source for some.
The role Hope occupies in the story that doesn't conform to the traditional masculine archetype. He isn't the powerful swordsman or the loud, brash hero. He's a healer, a scholar, someone who leads through compassion and intelligence rather than physical strength. Hope is also unusual within the Final Fantasy series itself. The role he occupies in the narrative is one that the series has almost exclusively been reserved for female characters. He is the healer. The emotional heart of the group. The brilliant strategist rather than the front line warrior. The one burdened with saving the world through knowledge, compassion, and self sacrifice. Someone like Aerith, Yuna or Lunafreya. The fact that he occupies a role the series usually assigns to women, combined with the fact that we first meet him as a frightened and weak fourteen year old, seems to make it unusually difficult for some fans to recognize the adult he becomes.
And if Hope is eternally a child, then in the minds of many, that means he needs a caretaker.
Just as Lightning is pushed into motherhood despite her arc being about escaping parentification, Hope is pushed back into childhood despite his arc being about growing into adulthood and responsibility. In the end, the only way the idea that Lightning is Hope’s surrogate mother can work is by flattening both characters, disregarding their character arcs, and ignoring the actual details the trilogy gives us. It is an interpretation that treats them as accessories for a preferred dynamic rather than as well rounded characters with their own journeys, struggles, and development.