#kuja ff9

[freesiavacadoo]

genomes

[kujaroth24]

Official illustration of the collaboration between Final Fantasy IX and Another Eden

Titled Memories of Another Sky

[friendly-tanuki-girl]

I know it's ooc but like what was Kuja thinking when he made this lil guy

[dippiesque]

Legitimately have not been drawing anything except for. Except for fun and fantasy NINE

[krzchn]

Kuja ✸

prints

[newsiegacademia]

kuja

[hmzerotwo]

i've been thinking they're the same character for a month now

i can't be the only one who sees that right

[halogenwarrior]

Having finished Final Fantasy 9 last night, I think Kuja is really interesting and ultimately tragic in how his self-involvement and double standards for injustice against himself vs. others aren’t just traits formed in a vacuum because he just arbitrarily doesn’t see the purpose of life is in helping others. This is a character who must have raged against the injustice of his circumstances and how fragile a tool his life was considered by the person with complete power over him. But since the continuation of his life rather than being killed as a failed vessel was dependent upon him bringing war and inflicting huge amounts of violence on others, extending his rage empathetically to the many others in the story who are used and die (either in similar circumstances as created tools or those who were not created for a specific purpose but whose lives as still constantly snuffed out) would be suicide, to give up on hurting them would be to give up on his only path of escaping and his own life meaning anything. So I think to defend against the guilt and dissonance of this he builds a mental defense that there must be something special about him. That all those others are just common lives who die all the time and so are worth nothing, or who are stupid and plodding in fulfilling their assigned purposes so they don’t deserve to escape from it.  That way he can express his rage and desire for freedom while dodging the paradox of how he is thwarting others’ desire for the same. 

And to justify why he is something different and thus destined to be the wheat who rises above the chaff, he can’t just rely upon the typical privileges of society, because he is not one of those privileged, only a tool who isn’t even the exalted special tool that Zidane is. So he feels he has to create his own unique aesthetic (by necessity not moral) justification for existence and superiority, and this leads to him to be constantly obsessed with cultivating an aesthetic, from his appearance/character design to quoting plays. Some of this aesthetic has nothing to do with war and strength, in fact is counter to the stereotypical image of it in being feminine and poetic, which hints to how he wants to justify himself with something gentler than just war even though war is all he’s been given, even peppering these lines and appreciations of beauty in the middle of the violence. But because war and power has to be a big part of his life and he’s adapted his whole sense of self around it, it’s still always going to be woven into his view of the world, so his vision of independence still involves rulership and power. 

So I think the tragedy of the character is that he’s insufferable and selfish, but then he so easily could have turned his same strength of will and anger at the world towards solidarity had he not been put in a position where that would be nearly psychologically impossible.