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Fan Service and Luke fon Fabre
Jul. 25th, 2014 04:12 pmI love Tales of the Abyss, but there are two things about Luke’s character design that always bugged me: the mullet and the crop top.
I see both as indicative of Luke’s position as an ornamental captive at the beginning of the game. When Luke finally begins to understand the truth of his situation, he undergoes an important haircut to demonstrate his new-found independence and desire to do something meaningful with his life. For some reason he keeps the belly shirt, though.
Very few characters in Tales of the Abyss, male or female, bare extraneous skin, so it’s striking that Luke spends the entire game running around like a princess from a Disney movie. I tend to think his clothing is supposed to act as a symbol of Luke’s relative immaturity and his ontological status as an object. Luke’s "open" costume also serves to distinguish him from Asch, who is armored both physically and emotionally.
All that being said, Luke’s unfortunate haircut and embarrassing clothing, combined with his incessant petulance, rendered him as an almost entirely unsympathetic protagonist for me, and it took me years to get into Tales of the Abyss after starting and then abandoning it several times. Even now I wish there were a spinoff of the game that allows you to play as Asch in the way that some of the Kingdom Hearts games allow you to play as Riku.
I see both as indicative of Luke’s position as an ornamental captive at the beginning of the game. When Luke finally begins to understand the truth of his situation, he undergoes an important haircut to demonstrate his new-found independence and desire to do something meaningful with his life. For some reason he keeps the belly shirt, though.
Very few characters in Tales of the Abyss, male or female, bare extraneous skin, so it’s striking that Luke spends the entire game running around like a princess from a Disney movie. I tend to think his clothing is supposed to act as a symbol of Luke’s relative immaturity and his ontological status as an object. Luke’s "open" costume also serves to distinguish him from Asch, who is armored both physically and emotionally.
All that being said, Luke’s unfortunate haircut and embarrassing clothing, combined with his incessant petulance, rendered him as an almost entirely unsympathetic protagonist for me, and it took me years to get into Tales of the Abyss after starting and then abandoning it several times. Even now I wish there were a spinoff of the game that allows you to play as Asch in the way that some of the Kingdom Hearts games allow you to play as Riku.
