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Tidus as an Answer to Toxic Masculinity
This morning I came across an interesting and well-argued essay defending Tidus...
http://femhype.com/2015/10/13/tidus-video-games-answer-to-toxic-masculinity/
What bothers me about Tidus, however, is not that he displays emotions, but rather the intense focus that the game places on him. "This is my story," he says at the beginning, but it's not; it's actually Yuna's story. Sure, Tidus is in a difficult situation, and I understand that he's hurt and confused, but so is Yuna. Lulu and Rikku are going through incredible trials of their own; but, like Yuna, we don't get to see their stories from an inside perspective. By placing Tidus and his trauma at the center of the story, the game is mandating that we care about his pain and emotional development more than we care for the female characters. Because the player-protagonist characters of Final Fantasy VII through XII are also male, it's difficult not to view the privileging of Tidus over the female characters as being representative of a broader privileging of the emotions of men over the emotions of women.
Meanwhile, I apparently somehow still care about Final Fantasy X fifteen years after its release.
http://femhype.com/2015/10/13/tidus-video-games-answer-to-toxic-masculinity/
What bothers me about Tidus, however, is not that he displays emotions, but rather the intense focus that the game places on him. "This is my story," he says at the beginning, but it's not; it's actually Yuna's story. Sure, Tidus is in a difficult situation, and I understand that he's hurt and confused, but so is Yuna. Lulu and Rikku are going through incredible trials of their own; but, like Yuna, we don't get to see their stories from an inside perspective. By placing Tidus and his trauma at the center of the story, the game is mandating that we care about his pain and emotional development more than we care for the female characters. Because the player-protagonist characters of Final Fantasy VII through XII are also male, it's difficult not to view the privileging of Tidus over the female characters as being representative of a broader privileging of the emotions of men over the emotions of women.
Meanwhile, I apparently somehow still care about Final Fantasy X fifteen years after its release.
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The story does gain something from following Tidus's perspective -- he's the newcomer, which allows for slowly feeding the player increasingly worrisome details about Spira before delivering that big reveal. It still doesn't quite work for me. I'm more interested in how Yuna feels than I am in how Tidus feels about how Yuna feels, and Yuna doesn't voice how she's feeling for a long fucking time. One can only fill in the blanks to a certain extent.
(Tangentially related: the dating sim-ish aspects were just bizarre.)
Thinking about the other titles in the range you mentioned. VII's unreliable narrator thing works for me, and a lot of VIII is dependent on being so firmly embedded in Squall's headspace. IX, like VI, flits around a lot between perspectives, but Garnet would have made a more fitting player-protagonist.
XII has it worst out of the lot, and I feel like posting irritably about it seven-or-so years after the fact, but my feelings on the matter aren't anything that hasn't already been said a thousand times. (Short version: Ashe, Basch, and Balthier are all at the center of things, and given how the story plays out, Ashe would make the most reasonable player protagonist.)
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