#ffx explained

[auronlu]

By the way. The biggest baddest badass in Final Fantasy X?

Wears red, but it probably isn't who you think.

With apologies for the photo-of-a-TV-screen crapitude:

Yes, Auron. You totally are about to get shoved off a cliff. Like so:

A LOSER IS YOU.

But wait! Does that mean this boss will be munching chocobos along the Highroad for the rest of the game?

Nope.

[Elma on her chocobo, in case you can't see the caption: "Oh, I took care of that fiend for you."]

All by herself, apparently. Whereas at this stage of the game, it requires several party members.

[auronlu]

I’ve been thinking about Tidus’ “This is my story” line in the Zanarkand Ruins, and I noticed that the other big one at the end of the game is when he’s about to disappear. So do you think that the former line might be more related to Tidus’ state of being than we normally give him credit for?

Yep, I think you’re quite right to pay close attention to that quote. It isn’t just Tidus being selfish, except at a very fundamental level: he’s trying to preserve some memory of himself.

Spoilers…

The key thing to remember, which we don’t know on first playthrough, is that the opening “This is my story” prologue scene is a flash-forward. It actually takes place near the end of the pilgrimage, right after Tidus has learned who and what he really is by falling into the Fayth Wall on Mt. Gagazet. 

He’s just come to the realization that if the Fayth Wall is sent as they’ve asked him to do, he’s going to fade out of existence— probably die when Yuna does. So on the one hand, he’s putting off going to Zanarkand and ending both their lives. On the other hand, he’s trying to review their whole lives— their last chance to look back, and have their friends remember them.

For him, the memory of friends is vitally important. The Fayth hint that it might be a way for him to outlast the summoning of Dream-Zanarkand and become a “real boy.” 

Let me back up. I posted about this in my Velveteen Rabbit Boy post, which I’ll reblog.

[auronlu]

Do you think Yuna's crisis of faith impacted her rejection of the final summoning in Zanarkand? If so, how much, and if not, why?

Yuna’s crisis of faith was resolved by the time she started across the Calm Lands. She was badly shaken by her Seymour/Bevelle betrayal, but she regrouped and went on.

THINKY THOUGHTS...

Auron had given her the answer to her crisis of faith right after they killed Seymour the first time:

Auron: Our immediate concern is Yuna’s pilgrimage. Are you willing to go on?Yuna: Yes. But then, do you think Yevon will allow it?Auron: The fayth are the ones that give power to the summoners. Not the temples or the teachings. If the temples try to stop us…then we will defy Yevon if we must.

She wasn’t ready to accept his counsel then, so she and Lulu and Wakka decided to go to Bevelle to plead their case before Yevon. There, Yuna discovered all the Maesters, not just Seymour, were hypocrites.

After escaping Bevelle, she toyed briefly with the idea of abandoning her pilgrimage and going with Tidus to see “his” Zanarkand, but she said, “I can’t.” She returned to the others after their Macalania Springs date and reaffirmed her intentions: 

Yuna: Um… Sir Auron? Wakka? Lulu? Kimahri? Rikku? Everyone, we leave at dawn. 

When Belgemine recapitulates Auron’s advice in the Calm Lands, Yuna has by this time accepted their conclusions: one can be a summoner even if one is cast out of the temple. After all, her father was a heretic, too. 

Belgemine: (Chuckles) Ah, you shouldn’t take what the maesters say too seriously. For summoners, destroying Sin is everything. We are no tools of Yevon, understand?Yuna: Yes.Belgemine: So, are you up to the task?Yuna: I do not know, but I will do my best.

So that when the Ronso bar her path on Mt. Gagazet, she’s adamant.

Yuna: I have cast aside Yevon! I… I follow the temple no more!Kelk: Then you will die by those words!Yuna: So be it. Yevon has warped the teachings and betrayed us all![…]Yuna: We have no regrets.[…]

Kelk: You have been branded a traitor, but still you would fight Sin? Lost to the temple, hated by the people, yet you continue your pilgrimage? Everything lost! What do you fight for?Yuna: I fight for Spira. The people long for the Calm. I can give it to them. It’s all I can give. Defeating Sin, ending pain…this I can do.Kelk: Even sacrificing yourself? (Ponders a while.) Ronso, let them pass! Summoner Yuna, your will is stronger than steel.

She won’t stop. She’s ready to sacrifice herself to bring the Calm.

Yuna changes her mind only when she learns the answer to this question: 

Yuna: Might I ask something first? Will Sin come back even should I use the Final Summoning to defeat it?Yunalesca: Sin is eternal. Every aeon that defeats it becomes Sin in its place… And thus is Sin reborn.

That is what causes Yuna to change her mind: she realizes that summoning the Final Aeon will simply create a new Sin.

Yuna: … I live for the people of Spira, and would have gladly died for them. But no more! The Final Summoning…is a false tradition that should be thrown away.

Yuna discards the Final Summoning as a lie, just as she’d learned to discard the Church of Yevon as a lie, an obstacle and not an aid to her pilgrimage.

Yunalesca: No. It is our only hope. Your father sacrificed himself to give that hope to the people. So they would forget sorrow.Yuna: Wrong. My father… My father wanted…to make Spira’s sorrow go away. Not just cover it up with lies![…]Yuna: I don’t know when it will be but someday, I will conquer it. And I will do it without…false hope.

If anything, Yuna’s crisis of faith in Bevelle prepared her for this moment. Young!Auron was caught offguard and reacted in a sucidal rush. Yuna’s clashes with Seymour, Mika and Kelk had tempered her from a dutiful 17-year-old girl meekly protesting religious authorities to a steel-willed rebel.  Remember how she’d dithered and wavered while confronting Seymour back in Macalania? This time, she defies Yunalesca with no hesitation, no regrets. 

...so yeah. Now that I think about your question, her crisis of faith really helped.

[auronlu]

bottom: xnalara ff x aeon models by twinlightownz

These model rips are imported straight into a model viewer, so presumably they’re all to scale? (Not guaranteed, but they look about right.) Therefore, yes, I agree Anima’s the biggest, apart from Jecht’s aeon.   Note that the Anima aeon requires two different models, with the mummy half sticking up in the model viewer instead of down.

pmog’s translation has Yuna’s height at 161 centimeters (5′3), and Shiva is a little? taller — perspective makes it difficult to tell, but to judge by Belgemine Shiva looks to be abouyt  6-7 feet, maybe? 

[Original question from moredibell: Okay, this is possibly way too esoteric. Do we have any ideas of aeon heights, beyond "just on what we see of Anima makes her the biggest judging by how small Yuna is relative to Anima vs Yuna relative to other aeons"?]

[auronlu]

Can an unsent become a fayth? Seymour seems to think so but on the other hand lulu does specifically say 'still-living bodies' in kilika temple

Short answer: We don’t know. Possibly Seymour is just “totally nuts.” Or possibly he has reason to know that unsent can become Sin. He has after all witnessed the process that creates a Final Aeon, which is more than most summoners have done. 

Speculative Answer: 

I’ve sometimes wondered if that’s what the Fayth of Sin is: a fayth housed in the body of an unsent, instead of in a temple statue. Yevonites can create fayth statues, but only Yunalesca knows how to create the fayth of the Final Summoning, which seems to be something a little different than a standard fayth. 

There are flashbacks of both Jecht (clip) and Anima (clip) which take place after they’ve met with Yunalesca and been converted into the fayth of the Final Summoning. In the latter clip, Seymour’s mum says she “doesn’t have much time left.” Either she was terminally ill before they came to Zanarkand, or Yunalesca has done something to her that’s going to kill her soon. I.e. She needs to manifest as the Final Aeon before an expiration date.

In Anima’s case, Seymour eventually bound her fayth into a statue so he could continue using her longterm. But Jecht’s fayth never entered a statue, as far as we can tell. Who’d build one? 

Normally, fayth are created when a soul is ripped from a still-living body and bound into a statue by esoteric rites. The summoning process draws the fayth out of that statue, temporarily, to manifest as an aeon, but it only lasts for a short time. Then it has to return to its statue. 

Yu Yevon, however, was a “peerless” summoner, able to do much more than an average summoner. I think he’s continually summoning Sin, the “unholy armor” which he crafts around the fayth of the Final Summoning. It’s almost like Sin is both a ginormous aeon and a fayth statue keeping the fayth imprisoned within its own shell. Eventually we meet Jecht, the fayth of Braska’s Final Summoning, inside Sin. He’s still there. He hasn’t dissipated, even though he doesn’t have a statue to anchor him.

Did Yunalesca “rip his soul from his still-living body” to make him a fayth? Is his body still living, or is it dead, persisting in a pyrefly-woven form like an unsent? Is he starting to lose his self-identity (he says it’s getting hard for him to hear the hymn) in the way that unsent gradually lose their grip on who they were and become fiends? 

I’m not sure. I have the suspicion that the fayth of the Final Summoning is basically an unsent, or else that they normally “die” when the Final Aeon is summoned out of them, but that Yu Yevon preserves them after death somehow, much in the same way that unsent are stabilized and persist past death.

[auronlu]

Do you know whether or not Yuna knew that the Guado intended to fire the rest of the party as guardians once she and Seymour got married? Seems like it would be a deal breaker for her even considering all the pressure she was under to say yes, from herself and the rest of Spira. Then again Seymour brought up being her Zaon and they way she said goodbye to the party before the crawler fight is a little ambiguous.

That’s an interesting question! And it has triggered lots of thinky thoughts, so let me make a cut.

TL;DR: I don’t think Yuna had thought it through very clearly: she was so focused on the confrontation that she wasn’t really thinking about her guardians at that point, as Seymour had intended.

This is a side effect of the power imbalance in her interactions with Seymour. I think all she was thinking about is what am I going to say to him? OMFG I’m planning to confront… a MAESTER?! That’s a 17-year-old girl challenging the Pope, or at least a bishop. It’s a gutsy thing to do, especially for someone who lived by the teachings. She was out of her depth. (She grew up quickly, though: look at her calling out Maester Mika during the trial and standing up to Maester Kelk on Gagazet).

Look at what Yuna says when she’s made up her mind to go meet Seymour in Macalania Temple:

Yuna: I have one question, if I may, sir.Tromell: My lady?Yuna: I want to keep journeying, even if I marry. Do you think that Maester Seymour would let me?Tromell: But of course, my lady. Lord Seymour wishes nothing else, I’m sure.

That’s an astoundingly submissive thing for Yuna to say. She’s spend years planning to sacrifice herself for this pilgrimage, she was determined to follow her father’s example, she’s been utterly committed to being a summoner, and then suddenly, she’s meekly asking if Seymour will allow her to continue her pilgrimage. As if it’s his call.

Holy hells, he’s manipulated her.

Seymour had stoked the same insecurities that caused Yuna to apologize to Tidus for being “overconfident,” as if it were her fault he’d blundered into the Cloister of Trials in Besaid. They were the same insecurities that caused her to ask Lulu, “I hope I did… okay?” in Kilika. She was starting to overcome those insecurities on the Mi’ihen Highroad:

Shelinda: But you don’t understand! The Crusaders won’t even listen to me. And it’s all because I’m just a lowly acolyte.Yuna: Don’t say that.Shelinda: (Gasp) Yuna: Well, I haven’t been a summoner for very long myself, you see. Still, I can’t put myself down every time I fail. People are depending on me. They’re depending on both of us!Shelinda: Yes! Yes, you’re right, my lady. Absolutely right!

But then Seymour came along and did his best to teach her the opposite of the lesson she’d just taught Shelinda.

Yuna: Why does he want to see me?

Yuna: What could it be? Oooh…¬[I hope] I haven’t done anything to make him mad.

We saw Seymour undermining her in every interaction. He opened the Crusader Checkpoint to her as a special favor, reframing her pilgrimage as a favor he bestowed on her. He told her that she was “too weak” and that “she can’t” fight Sin during Operation Mi’ihen. Afterwards, when she was traumatized by a massacre that would shellshock a generation of soldiers, he impressed upon her that she could only succeed as a summoner by taking him as “her Lord Zaon.” While she stayed up all night tending the dead and dying of that horrific battle, his words were probably playing over and over in her head.

It’s not clear that Yuna got any sleep from that time until Seymour summoned her to his mansion (the perfect stage to impress/intimidate her) in Guadosalam. There he dazzled her by showing her Zanarkand, the place she was making a pilgrimage to see, coopting Tidus’ promise to take her there. Maybe the rumors had already filtered back to him that she was traveling with a boy from Zanarkand (Seymour certainly knew who Tidus was later on, whose son he was and where he was from). Again, after overwhelming her with a powerful experience and reminding her that Yunalesca whom she was named for depended on Zaon, he popped the question.

He’d done everything he possibly could to knock her off-balance.

Dona, supposedly a bitchy rival, saw what Seymour was doing and told Yuna to try “standing on her own two legs” for a change. Unfortunately Dona also told her that she couldn’t rely on her guardians during the final showdown with Sin.

Seymour gave Yuna the same message, undermining her bond with her guardians, to the point that she hid Jyscal’s sphere from them and didn’t consult them. He’d even driven a wedge between her and Kimahri:

Kimahri: Kimahri not like Maester Seymour.Yuna: Aa! Shhh!¬Kimahri: Kimahri speak no more.

(Kimahri does not speak in her presence again for a very long time.)

(Tromell trying to lead Yuna away the INSTANT she arrives in Guadosalam!)

Not that she’s turned her back on her guardians completely, of course. But she’s keeping them out. She’s “too quiet.” She won’t confide in Lulu. She runs away from Tidus in the Thunder Plains Inn. She can’t tell her guardians what’s on her mind until she’s talked to Seymour about it first:

Yuna: For Spira’s future…and Yevon’s unity. I thought it would be the best thing to do.

Wakka: Yuna, just one question. Can’t you just talk to Maester Seymour? You’ve got to marry him?Yuna: I don’t know. But I think it is the right thing to do.

Yuna is really, really mixed up. On the one hand, she’s half bought into Seymour’s B.S. about taking him as her Lord Zaon, “for Spira’s future.” On the other hand, his murder of his father is a threat to “Yevon’s unity”:

Yuna: I wanted to confront Maester Seymour about his father, Lord Jyscal. I wanted to convince him to turn himself into Yevon’s judgement.Lulu: In exchange for marriage?Yuna: Yes, if that’s what it took.

She’s torn between following Jyscal’s final request to “stop my son” or Seymour’s insistence that she marry him and bring hope to the people of Spira. Somehow, she’s trying to do both.

Either way, she is just not focusing on what this means for her guardians. Look at the following exchange, in which it’s Tromell, not Yuna, dictating where they’ll go. She can only stammer, apparently at a loss about what to tell them, what they should do, what's going to happen to them, or even when she’ll be able to talk to them again:

Yuna: I want to keep journeying, even if I marry. Do you think that Maester Seymour would let me?Tromell: But of course, my lady. Lord Seymour wishes nothing else, I’m sure.Yuna: (Smiles and bows head to guardians) Goodbye.Tromell: Well… We must follow Guado tradition. (to guardians) I’ll have to ask you wait here a little while longer. I’ll send someone to escort you. (Leaves)Yuna: (Hangs back) I…Auron: We’re all with you. Do as you will.Yuna: Thank you. (Leaves)

She is no longer with them. Seymour played her like a puppet.

This isn’t to dump on Yuna. Auron’s right: “Make mistakes. That’s what youth is for, after all.”

She learns from her mistakes and is soon standing up to the maesters and casting off the entire Church of Yevon when it gets in the way of her pilgrimage, just as Auron had urged. But that was not an easy thing to do. It makes her crisis of faith and her character growth far more compelling than if she’d blithely blown off the church and the maesters like Tidus did, right from the start.

[auronlu]

Does Spira have Valentine's Day? Or alternatively, is there any reason why they couldn't have something like it?

TL;DR: There’s all kinds of holidays on Earth, so a parallel to any one of them might exist on another planet.

However, I have a lot of thinky thoughts about this question. I’m not sure this particular holiday is a comfortable fit for this particular fantasy world. Here’s why…

Valentine’s Day as it currently exists evolved from an English tradition that may have its roots in Chaucer, who first linked the saint’s day with the notion of romantic love. (There were lots of saint’s days, and traditions often grew up around them that reflected events in the natural world at that time of year, such as birds pairing up). By the 18th century, people (mostly the middle and upper classes?) exchanged hand-made love notes, and later printed cards. It seems to have been widespread in England and the U.S. by the 1850s, with Hallmark making it even more commercially successful starting in 1913.

Valentine’s Day didn’t kick off in Japan until the end of the 1930s, when western confectionary companies started marketing the holiday to westerners living in Japan as a way to sell chocolate. Several successive marketing campaigns appealed to the wider Japanese public, so that Valentine’s Day had caught on there by the 1960s. (Which to me is recent history, the way the 1990s probably are to you).

So what? 

Well, there’s something very special about Final Fantasy X.

“For Final Fantasy VII and VIII, the setting was sci-fi, and many players responded by saying that they preferred a simple fantasy world. ‘Fantasy’: they seemed to have a fixed notion of what fantasy means to them, and to them, it consisted of a medieval European world. I wanted to change that idea. I wanted to expand the definition of what the players thought the word “fantasy” implied. Going back to a medieval European fantasy didn’t seem to help us advance. So while I was considering different world environments, Nojima proposed the idea of trying to create a fantasy world that incorporated Asian elements.”—Producer Yoshinuri Kitase

That’s from a fascinating behind-the-scenes video where several of the creative team talk about how they deliberately tried to infuse Spira with Japanese and southeast Asian (Thailand, Okinawa) elements. It was medieval fantasy, but medieval Asian fantasy instead of medieval European.

Valentine’s Day is a 20th century holiday that stems from medieval European roots. Suggesting it as a holiday for Spira sounds to me like our tendency to impose “fixed notions” from western culture onto fantasy worlds.

Not that the game design abandoned western notions entirely: see Blitzball. But I’d be tempted to brainstorm uniquely Japanese or Asian holidays and adapt them to Spira, instead. 

However, there’s one reason why I can almost see something like Valentine’s Day taking hold in Spira, after FFX is over and done.

It feels to me like FFX-2 is in some ways a parable of the way Japan changed after WWII, when the older culture’s institutions and traditions broke down, giving way to chaotic modernity. The Spira of FFX-2 appears to be a little more open to the east-west fusion culture that is so vibrant in modern Japan. Therefore,  I could imagine some sort of romantic holiday starting to take hold along with all the other innovations we glimpse in X-2 (perhaps with some Rin-backed company selling flowers, foods, or other gifts to be exchanged as part of the new holiday).

[auronlu]

what even is the process to make a final aeon? why does the summoner die when he summons the final aeon? why can't i get the final aeon in game and get some revenge on t man for what he put me through?

Oh, fun question. SPOILERS AHOY.

Lulu: The fayth are people who gave their lives to battle Sin. Yevon took their souls, willingly given from their still-living bodies.Lulu: Now they live forever, trapped in statues. But when a summoner beckons, the souls of the fayth emerge once again. That’s what we call an aeon.

Conventional fayth are still-living souls canned for all eternity in fayth statues, which serve as spiritual hard drives. The statue stores and concentrates their emotions, their will, their passion, their compassion, their anger. I don’t think it’s an accident that the fayth statue is housed under what looks like a giant lens: it focuses those energies when it projects them as an aeon.

Summoners serve as a sort of portable projection point (or thumb drive!) for this process. They absorb a piece of the fayth into themselves during prayers to the fayth statue, and then, using a summoning spell, they can call forth the fayth’s powers and energies to manifest near them as an aeon.

There’s a few problems with standard summoning.

The fayth statue is at some distance from the summoner. Does all the spiritual power stored in the statue manifest in the summons, or just part of it? (We do know another summoner can’t call on that particular aeon while someone else has summoned it.)

The strength of the summons depends on the spiritual bond between the soul of the fayth and the soul of the summoner. Over time, with use, that bond can increase and make the aeon more powerful. But the summoner and fayth are two co workers trying to get along on a project; they’re not necessarily besties.

The fayth is preserved for hundreds of years in a statue, caught between living and dying. Temple rituals probably sustain it, but does it atrophy over time?

So, when Yunalesca grants the Final Aeon to a summoner, she does something else.

Yunalesca: You must choose the one whom I will change…to become the fayth of the Final Summoning.

She rips the soul from a guardian, someone loyal to and devoted to a particular summoner. But instead of canning that soul in a fayth statue, she kills the guardian (I think?), preserves the guardian as an unsent (because the unsent are dead souls so driven by a purpose they can’t rest), and then the guardian becomes a walking fayth statue.

I’m just guessing here, mind you, but Jecht appears to be unsent when they meet him again. And we see him clench his fists and summon the aeon out of his own body.

Note that it’s possible to take the fayth of the Final Summons and can them in a fayth statue for long-term preservation. Seymour apparently did that to his mother. I suspect that’s what the Magus Sisters are: Belgemine’s sisters, whom someone housed after she died in an unsuccessful Final Summoning.

Yunalesca: For once you call forth the Final Aeon, your life will end.

It’s not stated explicitly why the Final Summoning kills the summoner. I used to assume that the actual summons of the Final Aeon is so powerful that it tends to squish or nuke the summoner standing at ground zero. The more powerful aeons tend to have more dangerous summons, flinging Yuna into the air, cracking the ground, crawling out of the abyss and planting a skyscraper-sized sword.

But there may be a more sinister reason for the summoner’s death. Yunalesca says you only get a Final Aeon if the spiritual bond between the summoner and guardian is extremely strong.

Yunalesca: There must be a bond, between chosen and summoner, for that is what the Final Summoning embodies: the bond between husband and wife, mother and child, or between friends. If that bond is strong enough, its light will conquer Sin.

Remember how Yuna is affected whenever she acquires a new fayth in the Cloister of Trials. We see her stagger out of the inner sanctum, fall to her knees, fall down a flight of stairs. And when Tidus actually witnesses the fayth of Bahamut fusing with her, he sees her pass out and fall to the floor. (It’s possible the reason Yuna was in Valefor’s Chamber of the Fayth for so long wasn’t because she was having a hard time convincing Valefor to join with her, but rather, she fell unconscious from the shock of the fayth’s soul joining with hers).

And that’s a regular fayth, the soul of a person she’s not particularly close to. Presumably, when the summoner accepts the fayth of a loved one, joining their souls together, the fusion is a lot more soul-deep. That’s the bond Yunalesca describes. It’s not long-distance; it’s incredibly intimate, in terms of both physical distance (the guardian is beside the summoner) and spiritual distance (the guardian and summoner are soul-mates). So when the Final Aeon is called forth, it may be a great enough shock to the summoner’s soul to kill her.

Or— this wouldn’t be Yunalesca’s only lie of omission— it may be that the Final Summoning is technically not what kills the summoner, but rather, the summoner dies when Yu Yevon possesses the Final Aeon, ripping the guardian’s soul away from the summoner to which she’s bound.

Lulu: If one of us has to become a fayth…I volunteer.

So if Yuna had acquired a Final Aeon, she would’ve had to do it by sacrificing Lulu. Or, possibly, TIdus, though he seemed disinclined. And then Jecht would’ve died, but Yuna’s Final Aeon would’ve become the next Sin.

The thing is, the pilgrimage is not actually designed to destroy Sin. It’s a way for Yu Yevon to lure in the most powerful summoners, those most likely to be able to defeat Sin, and eliminate them. Worse, it does so by stealing and coopting their most powerful aeon (and loved one) to rebuild Sin. I’ve always wondered if Sin grows more powerful over time, since its core is a Final Aeon strong enough to defeat the previous model.