#xrebelxheartx | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lunamanar · 7 years ago

Note

dare I inquire how your opinion of Squall, Rinoa and/or Seifer might have changed due to recent external influence? :D

[PLEASE NOTE: There is ableist mental health language in this post. It was not intentional, and I do plan to edit/clarify it later. I have to go to work now, though, so for now, just be aware of one thing–people diagnose with sociopathy/psychopathy are NOT default dangerous/criminal/nonfunctional people. I don’t want to demonize that word, and while that wasn’t my aim in this, because I spoke in generalizations, that’s what ended up happening. I’m sorry, and I’ll do what I can to fix it as soon as I have time.]

If I’m right about who this is, you probably know darn well, haha. Sure, I’ll throw myself to the wolves bite, though.

For the longest time I had a fairly static impression of Seifer, in particular. And, don’t get me wrong, I still love (and to an extent, prefer) my original interpretation. But it felt solid enough to me that I was fairly sure I’d have trouble viewing him any other way, and that way is…well, it makes any pairing with him extremely difficult, let’s say that. Nothing made sense to me about him being intimate with anyone, main cast or otherwise.

That’s…changed, a lot, over the last year. It’s really hard for me to explain how, though, without first explaining what my perspective has been, ever since I first played the game. So, here is what I will do. I’mma hang myself out to dry by posting the entirety of an explanation I gave to @strane-stelle about a year ago in a private answer to her ask about Seifer. And then I will explain what changed.

So, below is the unaltered text I sent in answer to her ask last year:

Hrm. I flail and spit about Seifer in private discussions with friends because I feel very strongly about his character, but my perception is that I have a minority view on him, and I absolutely don’t want to start fights because I know a lot of people love Seifer and have ideas about him they’re very attached to. A lot of people like him, and there are a ton of different and popular “versions” of him floating around out there. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that he is at once a very strong character while also having relatively little face time in the game, so we’re left to fill in a lot of blanks. There are many ways you can take the behavior he presents, just because there’s a dearth of detail explaining it. I don’t talk about him openly a lot because I think the way I see him tends to fly in the face of how the majority does. I was thinking of doing a similar essay as I did for Squall but the fact is I don’t think my take on Squall is actually that far from the norm, so that wasn’t a very risky post by comparison.

So I hope you don’t mind, I’m going to answer this privately because frankly I am afraid of people getting defensive at me. I’m probably overreacting, but I worry a lot about hurting people’s feelings or making them feel they need to displace my ideas to defend their own. That’s not the sort of environment I want to foster and the way I feel about this, I’m afraid my tone could be problematic in a public post.

I have no issues whatever with people viewing Seifer as a damaged but ultimately redeemable dreamer who fell prey to Ultimecia’s power and was led around by his nose before being dumped on FH’s front doorstep. Or some variation thereof that lets him have connections and relationships.

My interpretation of him, however–and the interpretation I’ve had since the beginning–doesn’t allow for that. The key point is that most people seem to assume Seifer even desires meaningful human connection of any kind; and honestly, just based on how I view his dialogue and his actions, I don’t think he does. I’m not sure he’s capable of it. Love and friendship isn’t really in the cards for him: no Quistis, no Zell, no Rinoa, no Squall, no nothing. Despite claiming a romantic dream, Seifer wouldn’t know romance if it ran him over.

My base assumption is this: I do not think Ultimecia was ever, at any point, actually controlling Seifer. Showing him what he wanted to see, yes, manipulating, sure, but beyond that–it was all him. Right down to torturing Squall, casting off his two loyalists the moment they didn’t serve his purposes, and throwing Rinoa to Adel. He wasn’t insane with sorceress-muck in his head. Everything he said, thought and did was his own.

He has all the earmarks of a textbook high-functioning psychopath. Not a stabbity homicidal maniac, but more simply a total absence of what we’d traditionally understand as empathy. In his world, everything is either about him, or it's in the way. Unless someone can further his personal glory, they’re irrelevant. That’s the context of every social interaction he has. He is the end, and everyone else, without exception, is the means.

He doesn't think about things this way. He doesn’t think, “I don’t care about other people, I’m just going to use them to get what I want.” In fact, he’s not conscious of his own disconnect at all. He’s too focused on his ambitions, the next immediate step toward his dream, too wrapped up his own sense of greatness to waste time with introspection.

His romantic (read: heroic, epic, magnificent) dream solidified for him at a very early age, triggered if not defined by that ridiculous movie Laguna starred in (you’ll note, Seifer holds Hyperion the same way Laguna handles the Shear Trigger he was given on set). Seifer continued to self-insert himself into that role, eating up any and all variants of that story, including the book he regularly stole checked out from the library. But it wasn’t the romance of the story that interested him, per se; it was the fantastic victory of the knight, and the way he was (ha) lionized for the purposes of the legend. Yes, he served his sorceress, but the way the story told it, she didn’t really get the glory.

His dream does evolve as he gets older, but its premise remains basically the same. He gauges the worth of everyone he meets by how they fit into this story of his. Ultimecia was the only person who fit into the part of the sorceress he would champion. It wasn’t so much respect for her that made him willing to follow her as it was the allure of finally living out his own personal epic. Ultimecia, for her part, could see the unquestioning devotion to this ideal in his mind, and so was able to pull his strings with ease, both because he was not difficult to persuade and she saw some of her own grandiosity in him. I think she was later disappointed, but I digress.

Throughout it all, Seifer truly believes himself to be “the good guy,” without possessing enough of a moral compass to have any idea what “good” might be. He’s the good guy because he’s the hero. He’s the hero because he’s the Sorceress Knight. He was part of the disciplinary committee because heroes lay down the law. Nearly everything Seifer does is in pursuit of/acting out this ideal. Anyone who gets in his way is ruthlessly plowed down. (If you want to follow, that’s fine, as long as you don’t get in the way.)

To that end, Seifer doesn’t see tormenting people who are smaller or weaker than him as bullying. Again, it’s not a conscious thought process, “I’m gonna fuck with this person because it’s fun,” so much as he needs to constantly reassert his dominance in every situation. For all his undying belief in his own greatness, he cannot brook any suggestion that he is not the center of attention. That doesn’t mean he’s seeking leadership, specifically, but he’s not going to let anyone else have the spotlight, either.

This in mind, the “rivalry” take on Seifer and Squall’s relationship is, by my estimation, a gross misunderstanding of the actual situation. Even other characters in the game are guilty of misunderstanding it, and I think it's very evident that this is the case. I think it’s supposed to be clear that they’re not getting it, and it annoys Squall quite a bit, though by now he’s kind of used to it.

From where Squall stands, Seifer is not a bully, or a rival; he’s a monolith. He exists for Squall to test himself against, and he’s a consistent enough challenge that their “fights” continuously benefit Squall in his ongoing pursuit of skill-improvement. In addition, Seifer’s general blindness to the feelings of other people helped to encourage Squall’s distance from his own emotions. Where Seifer was concerned, they were irrelevant, and for Squall, that was actually quite a comfortable arrangement.

On Seifer’s end, Squall is probably the closest thing to human connection that exists for him, and only because of the major character role he plays in Seifer’s epic. A combination of the regular attention Squall pays him and the fact he takes Seifer seriously and gives him his full effort when they face off, not to mention the fact Squall can keep up, make him the perfect “counterpart” figure. I don’t think it is any accident that it is Gilgamesh who interrupts their final fight in the game. If you are familiar with the original Epic of Gilgamesh, there are just so many parallels between Gilgamesh and Seifer, and, conversely, Squall and Enkidu, it’s hard to imagine it’s coincidence. This “companion in his travels” motif is the sort of role I think Seifer originally envisioned for Squall, and having internalized that, even though ultimately the story was still about Seifer, it made it very difficult–if not impossible–for him to write Squall off when things started going south.

At the beginning of the game, Squall and Seifer clearly have an understanding, and Seifer is, if not friendly with him, excited by the prospect of Squall accompanying him to glory (only in his shadow, of course). Later, we watch Seifer scramble to rewrite the terms of his story, recasting Squall in various roles across from him, from villainous black knight to leader of a corrupt establishment (at least that one was somewhat correct). To everyone on the outside looking in, Seifer seems like he must be bitter or jealous of Squall (“Mr. Leader” and “I’ll show you who’s the better man”), and misinterpret this as part of an ongoing rivalry, but in my view it’s more simple frustration born from the fact Seifer is losing, and Squall is always there to challenge him at the apex of his grand summit.

(Squall, for his part, is pretty done with Seifer by the end of the game, feeling more disappointment, disgust, and yes, hurt than any sort of need to one-up him. Although I would not for a second call Squall’s connection to Seifer affectionate, the fact remains that up until Ultimecia, Seifer was, for all his unpredictability, reliable and familiar and, perhaps most importantly, there.

Without an ounce of fondness between them, Squall had gotten used to Seifer, and that made this subsequent downward spiral just one more example of someone Squall had come to count on leaving him high and dry.)

As for Rinoa, she’s no different to Seifer than anyone else. His interest in her had more to do with the potential for heroics as a SeeD returning triumphantly to take up the Forest Owls’ noble cause. In the entire game, his only mention of their “relationship” is in Galbadia Garden, if you happen to have Rinoa in your party when you fight him, and even then, it seems more aimed to taunting her as an enemy. Rinoa, SeeD, even Fujin and Raijin–Seifer’s dream takes precedence over all.

[Note: the following was in direct response to a post that had been going around about the orphanage kids having pets, which I had to bow out from because Seifer came up in discussion.] For this reason, the idea of Seifer having a pet makes me physically ill; as a child he would know no better but to do things to the animal just to see what would happen and what kind of reaction he could illicit. It’s not even strictly his fault, but when that came up in the thread I had to bow out. I just can’t. He’d torture it to death, not really having a clue he was doing so. Case in point: I don’t think he even imagined that what he was doing to Squall as torturing him, in D-district. Seifer was playing his role, and when Squall pointed out the role he was playing was torturer, he left, because his answer to any proof he’s anything other than the hero is to stop paying attention. He can’t stand to hear anything about himself that doesn’t directly support his worthiness for the role of the Sorceress’s Knight.

That’s the tragedy, of course: in the end, the only thing remotely “knightly” about Seifer is how noble he is–that is, as Helium. He can’t bond with anything.

That’s my Seifer: The Noble Psychopath. It’s not how most people see him, I know, and it’s probably terribly unsatisfying for a lot of Seifer fans because an incapacity for human connection precludes any chance for real romance with anyone, but at least to me, it makes sense and presents very interesting setup for character growth.

…Now that I’ve pinioned myself.

I think all of this is sound.I still hold pretty strongly that Seifer is borderline if not patently a sociopath…and let me be as clear as I possibly can be: I’m not saying he’s evil, “crazy,” or even malicious…when I use the word “sociopath” or “psychopath” here, I’m not at all precluding him from being a good guy. Yes, I know what the word sociopath means. I also know what it does not mean, and it doesn’t actually mean you become a horrible, cruel person. It means you have an emotional handicap. That handicap can facilitate behavior we’d call “evil,” but there is so much research at this point showing that it does not have to and I don’t think Seifer is doomed to it, in fact I think he has a unique character path towards avoiding it, post-game. And I love that about him. I will still write him that way, in any stories of my own.

However…since this above response, my perspective on what makes sense for Seifer has indeed broadened. I’ve been moved to think that there is another explanation for Seifer’s behavior in-game that doesn’t just involve Ultimecia controlling his mind and making him do things, although it does assume that she manipulates him quite heavily. Making him hallucinate, for one; in the Timber TV station, for instance, when Edea appears and begins speaking to him: who is he waving to? Not his former comrades, certainly. It’s the same motion he exhibits during the parade in Deling City, as if he can already see the adoration of the populace greeting him.

And, okay, but just because she’s making him hallucinate doesn’t mean the sociopath theory isn’t still in play. You can hallucinate and still have zero human empathy.

But…but. The other aspect of his behavior that I had not considered in this light, was his spiral. Yes, I still think it makes sense for Seifer to show greater and greater levels of desperation, denialism and self-delusion because of a sheer inability to concede that he is anything other than the center of the meaningful universe. But, taken in the context of hallucinogenic magic, it’s also the behavior of an addict. And the suggestion given to me for his spiral that I found fascinating, was that the ‘fix’ he was looking for wasn’t just glory…it was whatever euphoria Ultimecia was feeding him.

It was rather clear about halfway through the game, Ultimecia was rather…done with Seifer. She gave him one last task, to find the Lunatic Pandora, with the promise that she would provide him with “dreams” again. Hmm. Can you imagine, what sort of “dreams” those might be? Ultimecia oozes sultry seduction. And I kind of love how the idea of her literally drugging Seifer with magic…which would fit nicely as a cautionary theme with Guardian Forces and para-magic adversely affecting the minds of those who “use” them…changes the narrative. It turns his sociopathy into an addictive personality. Which also neatly explains a lot of his compulsive, thrill-seeking, seemingly careless behavior.

And yeah, it also means, instead of him being incapable of human connection, he more than likely craves it. But he craves it his way and most people just…don’t have what he needs, frankly. Not to mention, he just doesn’t really have a taste for subtlety, and so actually approaching someone to ask for anything is…bleh. Not his style. And that isolates him, which makes him want to get more attention, to show off more, get louder. Do anything to make sure people see him.

There are two people in the game who do see him, and take note. One is Rinoa. The other is Squall. Squall I’ve already explained. Rinoa has a bit less structure behind her connection with him, but the basic framework of a relationship is there (whether you believe it to be romantic or not, on which the game is pretty unclear, in my opinion). She and Seifer have a lot in common: they thing big. They often act before they think. They are human wrenches in eeeeveryone’s plans. They are dreamers, first and foremost, unbridled, and this very needful version of Seifer, those commonalities have great potential for connection, given a second chance. Meanwhile, Seifer and Squall have their History. They understand each other, and in an ideal situation, each serves a very important purpose for the other that cannot be replicated anywhere else. More than rivals, or even counterparts, in this scenario, they are brothers.

Therefore…I see no reason you can’t write a redemption/addiction recovery story for Seifer that involves Squall, Rinoa, or even both as potential friendship or even romantic options. “Both” is the most complicated, and the most interesting, so I like it the best. I won’t tell you it’s my OT3. It’s…not. But I like it. I like it a lot, if you can write it and write it well (and I know at least one person who can, ho ho).

This is actually an…oddly personal response for me, and the perspective one that’s important, I think, because this is the first day I have felt…semi-normal, after a long, hard week of detoxing from prescription pain meds. It sucked, haha. I’m glad to be rid of them, but god damn, sorry, that stuff is hard to ditch even when you’re taking it as prescribed. It makes me imagine just how messed up you could potentially get on either sorceress magic or heavy duty para-magic. Makes even more sense that there’s a class of para-magic that is simply called Forbidden. Not even because of its destructive effects, oh no…but because of its enhancing qualities. Could you imagine “para-magic detox”? Getting royally screwed up on Meteor and Death and Pain and Metldown and dear god Aura. Ultima? Apocolypse? That stuff’ll kill you, haha.

If I assume Hyne’s touch is like the world’s purest magical high, it rewrites 80% of what I see in Seifer’s actions, and opens up a very different set of possibilities between him and the other characters, for me.

That’s one of the reasons I’m here…the more perspectives I’m exposed to, the bigger this game’s universe becomes for me, and that’s so important to me. Coming across a game-changer like this is rare for me, but if I let my theories be the end-all-be-all, I will miss so many equally good ideas and I’ll have less, in the end, of this game to enjoy.

That’s not to say that any of this has to sit well with you. You can think both these theories are full of it, and that’s fine, haha. But…that’s my answer, to your question, “Anonymous,” (and one older one). I hope that at least as an explanation, it suffices, if not a pair of theories you particularly like, yourself.

#Anonymous #strane-stelle #ff8 #seifer almasy #asks #feature #xrebelxheartx #zesimi #ableism #ableist language #will fix later #apologies

19 notes · View notes