BAHAMUT IS NOT YOUR FRIEND
Aug. 22nd, 2012 12:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
auronluI was just pondering Justira's Clarion yet again — mobile version looks lovely on iPad Kindle reader — and was once again struck by how much more unseelie, sinister, callous is her view of FFX's Bahamut than my more naive view.
I fixed on Bahamut's "don't cry" and "I'm sorry" to Tidus at various moments in the story, making me see Bahamut as a gentle, tired, perpetual-divine-child figure who wants things to end but exhibits compassion for Tidus. But Justira is right too: Bahamut is a manipulator. He's dangerous. And FFX's Bahamut is about the most benevolent incarnation in the franchise.
In sum, Bahamut usually seems to be a supremely powerful force gone rogue, often loosely on the side of good but coopted by the Big Bads for destruction. Usually targeting the Home the party is fighting to defend.
I am vaguely reminded of Godzilla/Gojira in his less campy incarnation: a monster created by nuclear fallout, yet sometimes a defender of Tokyo, albeit a very destructive one. I can't quite put my finger on how Bahamut embodies Japan's ambivalent fear of nuclear energy, but I have a feeling Bahamut and flare are yet another manifestation of this common mythic theme in anime and Japanese video games.
I fixed on Bahamut's "don't cry" and "I'm sorry" to Tidus at various moments in the story, making me see Bahamut as a gentle, tired, perpetual-divine-child figure who wants things to end but exhibits compassion for Tidus. But Justira is right too: Bahamut is a manipulator. He's dangerous. And FFX's Bahamut is about the most benevolent incarnation in the franchise.
- FFVI...er... need to start over, I forget
- FFVII... various scary-ass summons. Like Justira's Jecht says, B always seems to resemble a dragon that had an accident with an airship.
- FFVII:AC... Bahamut summoned by villain to terrorize
MidgarEdge. - FFVIII: Dangerous dungeon to reach it. This Bahamut seems a little more benevolent than usual, less scary than the often equally-scary-ass Odin (another figure from RW myth who has morphed into his own unique FF archetype.) Tellingly, VIII's Bahamut says, "Using my powers... It is you humans I fear." If that's Yoda word order, then this B is concerned about how his powers may be turned to evil.
- FFIX: Originally Garnet's Eidolon, but Queen Brahne extracts him and uses him to wipe out the Great Tree. Then Kuja hijacks/rides Bahamut and uses him to wreck further havoc, threatening to destroy Alexandria.
- FFX: Creepy kid. Manipulator. Aeon of BEVELLE, capital of lies, manipulation, and control under the guise of religion.
- FFX-2: Dark Bahamut appears in a heartwrenching scene where Yuna has to fight an aeon. Real B. later apologizes to Yuna, revealing the aeons have been dragged into darkness by the Big Bad and are now "no better than fiends."
- FFXII: Bahamut is an airship, but more than an airship: it feeds on Mist, is awakened by the terrible explosion at Pharos, is coopted by the Big Bad as a doomsday weapon, and nearly destroys Rabanastre.
- FFXIII: Eidolon of Fang, who almost plays the usual role of Bahamut HERSELF.
- FFXIII-2: Same Eidolon bound/fused with a Guardian who has gone so far towards the defender-of-his-
summoner-seeress side of things that he's now a Big Bad.
In sum, Bahamut usually seems to be a supremely powerful force gone rogue, often loosely on the side of good but coopted by the Big Bads for destruction. Usually targeting the Home the party is fighting to defend.
I am vaguely reminded of Godzilla/Gojira in his less campy incarnation: a monster created by nuclear fallout, yet sometimes a defender of Tokyo, albeit a very destructive one. I can't quite put my finger on how Bahamut embodies Japan's ambivalent fear of nuclear energy, but I have a feeling Bahamut and flare are yet another manifestation of this common mythic theme in anime and Japanese video games.
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Date: 2012-08-22 10:21 am (UTC)It occurs to me, though you didn't mention it, that FFIV treats Bahamut as intensely alien, as well. He's far more hostile than any of the other eidolons, and expressly states that siding with Rydia is the first time he's ever allowed someone to summon him. And then he's tied in with Kain through his sidequest dungeon, after one of the more mindscrew-y manipulative sequences in the whole storyline. (Given Caius' look is a major Kain throwback, I doubt that's coincidence, though I haven't played XIII-2 and thus can't really say for sure.)
It's definitely a trend that continues throughout the series, and I think the take in Clarion reminds me of a collective take on all of it.
/creepy weird comments from strangers!
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Date: 2012-08-22 01:55 pm (UTC)Very intesting about IV! I started with VIII and have been playing my way back, but I've only got the ipad III and PS1 V and VI, so still waiting to fill out my knowledge of other early games (but I know a little of Kain and Rydia's stories from fanfic.)
I'm betting you're right on the slight Kain/Caius connection, although I must defer to lassarina on that (she's played both.) I see very subtle -- Lightning & Serah = Faris & Lenna -- and not so tenuous -- Orthos and Glgamesh in the Arena -- reflections of classic ff in XIII, not so much exact parallels as attempts to tap into old tropes to make the game feel more ff-like or at least moe successful.
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Date: 2012-08-22 04:10 pm (UTC)Fandom, meta, and GEEKING!
Date: 2012-08-22 04:21 pm (UTC)I sooooo miss ff_press. The volunteers who did it were INSANE, but it was this lovely digest of all the ff-related meta posts, fanfics, fanarts, icons, and other fanworks posted each day on LJ, DW, and other places.
Only it relied on De.lici.ous' old tagging system to organize all its entries (tagging by game, characters, pairings), and when Del.ici.ous mutated, it killed ff_press.
BUT STILL. FANDOM NEXUS. WE MISS IT.
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Date: 2012-08-24 03:54 am (UTC)(psst you should play FF4 it's awesome)
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Date: 2012-08-24 03:53 am (UTC)Woo!
Date: 2012-08-24 04:27 am (UTC)(If only more people were VA obsessed, we could have such FUN with crackfics where the same VA meant it was really the same character. NOOJ = SEPHIROTH WOO HA! (And Lucil is really Summoner Dona? Er, wait.)
Re: Woo!
Date: 2012-08-24 01:28 pm (UTC)Re: Woo!
Date: 2012-08-25 06:02 am (UTC)Dear old Snow.
I am a sucker for deep voices as well, but female. (Paula Tiso/Lulu/ANYTHING, and whasername who did Lightning, and FANG MY GODS).
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Date: 2012-08-22 04:09 pm (UTC)Bahamut is an avatar but not one that can be summoned by anyone player or NPC alike (and I believe he's the only avatar who falls into this category). He's a powerful and ancient force who lives isolated from the rest of Vana'diel, and prophesizes the apocalypse. But it's also implied that he's also made a pact with one of the ancient races and prevented the world from ending at one point.
(Someone on tumblr is doing a wonderful favor of recapping the FFXI storylines, and I'm going off her recaps and vague memories, basically he's a super-powerful and irritable source of information thus far)
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Date: 2012-08-22 04:17 pm (UTC)I'm seeing a slight Ragnarok-Bahamut connection here, or maybe I'm imagining it. (For that matter: ODIN. Hm. Weird not-quite-manifest mythic stuf.)
I love the way FF doesn't usually repeat itself in terms of world, characters, AND YET, it's built up all these mythic archetypes which it feels free to modify and ring changes on in each incarnation of FFdom. So very Jungian!
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Date: 2012-08-23 04:01 am (UTC)Anyway, what FF does I think is take those fundamental archetypes (for example pretty much everyone who plays FF knows what Shiva or Bahamut is) but it changes the creation myths and the worlds that created those archetypes, and also what at the core they are. FF10's Aeons were all real humans at their core at one point, FF11s are either sleeping celestial gods or terrestrial guardians (depending on the avatar). FF12...the fact that the airships are given the archetypical avatar names and the actual summons given new (newish?) names speaks a lot about the popular imagination in Ivalice. FF13 the eidolons are actually a part of the l'Cie make up that come out in a moment of duress. Fundamentally Bahamut is a dragon and Shiva is an ice goddess, but that concept of what they are and what they come from changes.
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Date: 2012-08-23 04:20 am (UTC)Bahamut is not really much like Mesopotamian Bahamut (although, like much of early FF, he's really based on the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual which invented the Platinum Dragon thing... but Square took "platinum" and thought" metal = technological and added Flare and Nuclear Power and ran with it, turning him into this fey thing).
Shiva is, of course, similar to Hindu Shiva in only one respect: blue skin! My hunch is that originally the sprite was based on a typically androgynous image of Shiva, and someone didn't realize he was (usually!) a he, and then they decided blue = ice, an 8-bit convention, and Shiva changed from a Hindu fire god to a ... sexy ice goddess.
Odin is a little more like the original Odin, but he's a young(er) warrior, not an old Gandalf-like figure.
Gilgamesh has become a comical sword collector who's a legend in his own mind.
And so on. They're all loosely lifted from world mythologies, but within FF, they represent something else, and have a different flavor. Each has a new, FF specific archetype. But there's some coherence in that archetype; like a real mythological figure, it changes a little each time a new story is told with that figure, but it's recongizably similar; all Shivas and Bahamuts are like other Shivas and Bahamuts in the same way that real-world Athena is Athena even if sometimes she's Minerva and other times she's Pallas.
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Date: 2012-08-23 04:41 am (UTC)Bahamut is actually one of the less powerful of the avatars, as he's born of Vana'diel rather than a god himself. On the other hand the untameable aspect of him remains. He's awake and active whereas the technically more powerful celestial avatars remain asleep in their crystals.
More so, his title is Conquerer of the Skies, which is a quite more violent role than the other terrestrial avatars (i.e. Carbuncle, Bringer of Rainbows) and yet he's as much a guardian of the world as any of the others, just a distant, untameable one with lots of dragons at his command.
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Date: 2012-08-23 06:36 am (UTC)That reminds me a little more of the old Bahamut, King of Dragons from D&D.
I know so little about FFXI and FFXIV. It's like gates I haven't yet unlocked. Ditto for all the Tactics games. But I love worldbuilding, and they certainly have that! I'd have leapt at FFXI if I hadn't weaned myself off of "be on tonight by 6:30, and we'll be RPing until 2AM because BIG BATTLE!!!!-- we're depending on you, so you have to come!" type roleplay.
(And I just looked up Bahamut to refresh my memory: in Arabic myth, it's a giant primordial fish supporting the Earth. D&D altered it, and Square played with Bahamut even further.)
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Date: 2012-08-22 05:36 pm (UTC)Even though we quite often get to control him, and if we don't, someone else does!
But Bahamut, somehow, never stops giving what I often think of as the Aslan impression: not a tame lion. Bahamut isn't a tame summon, and no matter how mechanically reliable he is, the sense remains that as a character/mythic figure, he's nothing of the kind. Even when he's not rogue or suborned, or when you don't have to fight him {and you do fight Bahamut before summoning him more often, I think, than any of the other standard-rotation summons, and he's the toughest fight of the bunch when you do}, he always give the impression of great destructive power just barely under control.
That's an important thing to retain, I think, when video games always run the risk of breaking their own sense of danger and power. Somehow Bahamut never stops being fearsome.
But he's not a tame summon. Oh, no, not at all.
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Date: 2012-08-22 08:18 pm (UTC)The Aslan-analogy of not a tame lion is very true, although Bahamut seems just a little more alien, less human to me. (Strange to say, but then Aslan is really You Know Who).
Also, "fey." Yes yes yes. I've always caught a whiff of unseelie in Bahamut's persona. Not so much evil or dark, but with an ethical code very different from our own which may appear capricious.
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Date: 2012-08-23 02:24 am (UTC)And with Bahamut, as with faeries, he's never quite so terrifying as when he's helping you. Mostly because he does it by e.g. showing up to either kill you or knock you out of your funk, and it's all one to him which. Or, alternatively, he asks you to promise to summon him...so that you'll kill him when he gets taken over.
STOP HELPING ME!!!
INTERESTING COMMENTS ON LJ
Date: 2012-08-23 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-08-23 07:25 am (UTC)In FF6, he's an Esper that can be obtained by defeating an optional boss. It's probably his least interesting, and weakest, appearance -- he's not the strongest Esper you can obtain and he has no backstory whatsoever.
I can't remember how he shows up in FF5 or FF3, although I'm pretty sure in both games, he's an optional boss that becomes a summon after beating him.
Looking at the trend of how summon creatures are handled over the series is interesting. With the exceptions of FF4 and, to a lesser extent, FF6, pre-FF8 summons are basically cool looking monsters that you can use, and they have little in the way of backstory or impact on the main plot. From FF8 onwards, summon creatures become more fleshed out as characters/plot devices.
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Date: 2012-08-23 11:20 am (UTC)*looks it up* Oh, that's right, there's this menacing dragon shape in the sky who sends a mysterious "words on the screen" message to seek him out and fight him, and you can go on an optional sidequest to duel him later.
Not much of a plot, but then nothing in that game is TOO deep on plot, and it's a hint of things to come.