My Unified Theory of Seymour
May. 8th, 2017 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingWhen it comes to video game villains, there's a certain amount of puppy kicking that you have get past in order to figure out what's going on with them. Nintendo villains tend to not kick a lot of puppies, especially compared to Final Fantasy villains, who routinely have puppies positioned directly in front of their waiting feet.
Seymour is especially bad in this regard. He doesn't particularly come off as insane, but the game gives him so many puppies to kick that it's hard to understand who he would be if he weren't a video game villain. He hardcore creeps on Yuna and then tries to kill her, he murders multiple highly ranked members of Yevon (including his father), he orchestrates the mass slaughter that is Operation Mi'ihen, and his ultimate goal is to become Sin so that he can end human suffering by destroying every person in Spira. I define all of this as "kicking puppies" because it's over-the-top evil behavior that doesn't really serve any narrative purpose aside from establishing the villain as the bad guy. Seymour is difficult to understand because, once you take away all this puppy kicking, there really isn't that much there.
In the Japanese version of the game, a lot of the heavy lifting is done by Seymour's voice actor, Junichi Suwabe, who is quite prolific and especially known for playing characters who are brilliant but slightly unhinged (such as, most recently, Victor in Yuri!!! on Ice). Suwabe's voice basically sounds like liquid sex, which goes a long way toward establishing a seductive quality to Seymour's character, thus offering a partial explanation as to why he would have risen so high in Yevon. In Japanese, there's a strong social positivity attached to the sort of highly formal and "soft" speech that Seymour uses, which is supposed to give us an impression of him being cultured and intelligent and every bit the summoner and scholar everyone makes him out to be.
I think this is the key to understanding the real conflict that Seymour represents, which has more to do with Yevon than it has to do with him. In Spira, Yevon controls absolutely everything. Although tradition and religious faith comfort the people, Yevon is thoroughly corrupt and does nothing to actually protect people from Sin. The high-ranking clergy know that Sin can never be defeated by summoners, but they still take advantage of the people's faith for political and economic gain. Because Yevon's power is so deeply entrenched in the culture and society of Spira, only an outsider would be able to resist it.
As a the child of an interracial couple who lived in exile for most of his life, Seymour had the potential to be that outsider, but he devoted all of his energy to becoming an insider. He rose high in Yevon, which is, after all, what his father and mother wanted him to do, both of them hoping that he could prove instrumental in easing the racial tensions that were exacerbated by Maester Mika's integration policies. As one of the members of the esoteric inner circle of Yevon, and as someone who has witnessed the horror of what it means to be a Fayth, Seymour has access to information that most people in Spira do not, but he is not able to do anything productive with this knowledge and insight.
Seymour resists the myth that Spira can be saved from Sin, but he has also bought into it so deeply that he has begun to embrace the original purpose of Sin, which was to protect Spira from complete annihilation by blasting its level of technology back to a preindustrial level. Seymour could have become a radical, but he is way too invested in the system. Essentially, his "evil" is that he has assimilated.
Tidus is a true outsider, which is why he gets to be the hero of the game. Still, Seymour is correct in his understanding that everything in Spira is a "spiral" of death from which it is incredibly difficult to escape. If Sin is not defeated, people may suffer at some undetermined point in the future; but, if Sin is defeated, everything will change, and people will suffer right now. Basically, change is hard, even if it's beneficial in the long run. If the system changes, people will lose things that are important to them. Tidus is clueless about all of this, and so he questions and undermines and breaks the system without really thinking about the larger consequences.
In the end, however, neither Tidus the radical nor Seymour the reactionary is a sustainable position, and it's actually Yuna, the compassionate young women who can understand both positions, who survives and addresses all of Spira after both Tidus and Seymour are gone.
I think Final Fantasy X is a very political game, and I get the sense that what is being critiqued by its story is Japan's Imperial system. With strong references to Okinawa and hip hop fashion, Final Fantasy X draws on the culture of Japan's "lost decade" of the 1990s, when people desperately wanted to see change in their society. Japan can't escape the dark legacy of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War if it doesn't change, but it can't transform itself if it doesn't let go of the Imperial system, which is difficult to reform or dispose of. The older Seymours are too invested in the system, while the radical inclinations of the younger Tiduses fade like a dream. Someone like Yuna, who is both an insider and outsider and possesses the empathy to see the problem from multiple viewpoints, needs to step forward and save Japan by uniting disparate groups of people with a message of hope and a vision of an alternate future.
And that, as they say, is that. Or not?? To be honest, I'm still thinking this through.
Seymour is especially bad in this regard. He doesn't particularly come off as insane, but the game gives him so many puppies to kick that it's hard to understand who he would be if he weren't a video game villain. He hardcore creeps on Yuna and then tries to kill her, he murders multiple highly ranked members of Yevon (including his father), he orchestrates the mass slaughter that is Operation Mi'ihen, and his ultimate goal is to become Sin so that he can end human suffering by destroying every person in Spira. I define all of this as "kicking puppies" because it's over-the-top evil behavior that doesn't really serve any narrative purpose aside from establishing the villain as the bad guy. Seymour is difficult to understand because, once you take away all this puppy kicking, there really isn't that much there.
In the Japanese version of the game, a lot of the heavy lifting is done by Seymour's voice actor, Junichi Suwabe, who is quite prolific and especially known for playing characters who are brilliant but slightly unhinged (such as, most recently, Victor in Yuri!!! on Ice). Suwabe's voice basically sounds like liquid sex, which goes a long way toward establishing a seductive quality to Seymour's character, thus offering a partial explanation as to why he would have risen so high in Yevon. In Japanese, there's a strong social positivity attached to the sort of highly formal and "soft" speech that Seymour uses, which is supposed to give us an impression of him being cultured and intelligent and every bit the summoner and scholar everyone makes him out to be.
I think this is the key to understanding the real conflict that Seymour represents, which has more to do with Yevon than it has to do with him. In Spira, Yevon controls absolutely everything. Although tradition and religious faith comfort the people, Yevon is thoroughly corrupt and does nothing to actually protect people from Sin. The high-ranking clergy know that Sin can never be defeated by summoners, but they still take advantage of the people's faith for political and economic gain. Because Yevon's power is so deeply entrenched in the culture and society of Spira, only an outsider would be able to resist it.
As a the child of an interracial couple who lived in exile for most of his life, Seymour had the potential to be that outsider, but he devoted all of his energy to becoming an insider. He rose high in Yevon, which is, after all, what his father and mother wanted him to do, both of them hoping that he could prove instrumental in easing the racial tensions that were exacerbated by Maester Mika's integration policies. As one of the members of the esoteric inner circle of Yevon, and as someone who has witnessed the horror of what it means to be a Fayth, Seymour has access to information that most people in Spira do not, but he is not able to do anything productive with this knowledge and insight.
Seymour resists the myth that Spira can be saved from Sin, but he has also bought into it so deeply that he has begun to embrace the original purpose of Sin, which was to protect Spira from complete annihilation by blasting its level of technology back to a preindustrial level. Seymour could have become a radical, but he is way too invested in the system. Essentially, his "evil" is that he has assimilated.
Tidus is a true outsider, which is why he gets to be the hero of the game. Still, Seymour is correct in his understanding that everything in Spira is a "spiral" of death from which it is incredibly difficult to escape. If Sin is not defeated, people may suffer at some undetermined point in the future; but, if Sin is defeated, everything will change, and people will suffer right now. Basically, change is hard, even if it's beneficial in the long run. If the system changes, people will lose things that are important to them. Tidus is clueless about all of this, and so he questions and undermines and breaks the system without really thinking about the larger consequences.
In the end, however, neither Tidus the radical nor Seymour the reactionary is a sustainable position, and it's actually Yuna, the compassionate young women who can understand both positions, who survives and addresses all of Spira after both Tidus and Seymour are gone.
I think Final Fantasy X is a very political game, and I get the sense that what is being critiqued by its story is Japan's Imperial system. With strong references to Okinawa and hip hop fashion, Final Fantasy X draws on the culture of Japan's "lost decade" of the 1990s, when people desperately wanted to see change in their society. Japan can't escape the dark legacy of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War if it doesn't change, but it can't transform itself if it doesn't let go of the Imperial system, which is difficult to reform or dispose of. The older Seymours are too invested in the system, while the radical inclinations of the younger Tiduses fade like a dream. Someone like Yuna, who is both an insider and outsider and possesses the empathy to see the problem from multiple viewpoints, needs to step forward and save Japan by uniting disparate groups of people with a message of hope and a vision of an alternate future.
And that, as they say, is that. Or not?? To be honest, I'm still thinking this through.
no subject
Date: 2017-05-09 03:00 am (UTC)I don't have enough context (outside the game itself) to critically engage with the idea of the politics and the critique it's engaging but I love the points you make about Seymour. You're utterly right that he could have been the Tidus if he'd chosen that path, but the way he entrenched himself into the power structure makes that impossible for him to even see as an option. it's interesting to think about the possibilities (AU ahoy!) where he doesn't assimilate and become complicit in Spira's, and by extension his own, oppression by Yevon.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-06 03:43 pm (UTC)Kinoc is secretly a fitness buff and not-so-secretly very gay for Auron, Kelk is secretly a summoner otaku and will not shut up once someone gets him talking about trivia, Mika is secretly addicted to dirty magazines and loves off-color dad jokes, and Tromell is basically himself.
In an alternate universe where I have both time and talent, I would have drawn a series of gag comics about this, and the running joke would have been that over the course of the game it becomes increasingly difficult for Yuna to pretend to be polite and respectful in the face of the Seymour Squad's ridiculous villainous shenanigans.
Gay Auron is not a joke though; Auron's doomed love for Braska fucking destroys me. Every. Single. Time. I'm actually really surprised that there isn't more fic of this on AO3...?
no subject
Date: 2017-06-07 02:15 am (UTC)I would read this AU I'm just saying.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-15 09:15 pm (UTC)I have played all of about five hours of FFXV, which is just long enough for me to have fallen down this rabbit hole...
no subject
Date: 2017-06-16 12:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-05-10 01:42 am (UTC)I can't think of too many other games that advocate a "middle way," Yuna's way, to the extent that FFX does. Most media tells you to smash the bad system and never look back. FFX though...kills off its main character because he smashed the system. Makes you think!
no subject
Date: 2017-06-06 03:18 pm (UTC)So like, FFXII is essentially about how godlike beings called the Occuria guide Ashe to become a Dynast-Queen, a politically powerful figure who has the ability to unite humankind in times of war and usher in an age of peace and cultural flourishing. The Occuria intend for Ashe to use a powerful magical weapon called nethicite to either defeat or destroy two great empires, leaving ruin and bloodshed in her wake, thereby leveling the political playing field for a new order. Considering her experience with the total destruction of her husband's home country of Nabradia, Ashe is understandably conflicted over using nethicite to attack the empire against which she has formed a resistance movement, especially since the fall of this empire will undoubtedly lead to the rise of the continent's other empire, which she will have to fight in turn. At the end of the game, Ashe decides that she will not allow herself to become a harbinger of war, as the human costs of military conflict outweigh the historical benefits. She therefore destroys the Sun-Cryst, which is the source of nethicite and one of the primary means by which the Occuria shape human destiny, thus freeing the Ivalice continent from the influence of these beings.
...am I getting that right? I hope so lol. Anyway.
According to Final Fantasy Tactics, everything went to shit a few generations after the events of FFXII. Several religious movements began to gain land and capital, and shortly thereafter there was a nasty series of battles between secular and religious powers that resulted in something FFT refers to as "the Cataclysm," which wiped out most of the human population of Ivalice and sent the land back to a literal stone age in terms of culture and technology. All of the gorgeous cities and architecture and human diversity and environmental splendor that the player experiences in FFXII, gone forever, and only so that there could be even bloodier wars in the distant future.
Which makes me think that maybe Ashe should have listened to the Occuria after all.
Or maybe she could have found some sort of middle way?
I luuuuuvs me some Ivalice
Date: 2017-06-06 07:53 pm (UTC)Almost every FF game that I've played (1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, Tactics) of seems to comment on the responsibility that comes with power, and there's usually a strong rejection of the really dangerous, world-ending mystical whatsit...but at the same time, the hero has to step up and use whatever scary/weird/alien power that's been given to them. I think we see this most clearly in FF6, when Terra is explicitly given a choice on whether to become a symbol of hope for the Returners or not. In a way she and her pals do try for the middle way when they start cooperating with the Empire...but all of that backfires and Kefka rips the world apart O_o Kefka and/or the Empire probably would have destroyed the world eventually anyway even with Terra/the player's help, but clearly the middle way has its own risks.
Man, now that I think about it, a lot of the FF worlds sure go to hell in a handbasket. We win the game but the people left in those worlds have to live with some pretty terrible aftermaths. I wonder what an FFXII-2 game would look like? Probably war with Rozarria somewhere in there, since we never actually got to see that country do anything, and Ivalice games need to have politics (except the Advance games).
...And now I'm getting a bit down about diplomacy and nukes and power in the real world -_-
Re: I luuuuuvs me some Ivalice
Date: 2017-06-15 09:29 pm (UTC)This is the truest sentence that has ever been written about Final Fantasy.
I love all of this meta, THANK YOU. I don't have anything to add except to say that I am getting extremely hyped about FFXII. Everyone on Tiwtter is still processing the E3 news blitz, while I'm like, No I have all the news I need, I'm just waiting for July 11 thanks
and maybe one day we'll get more news about FFVII.