Icing on the Cake: Female Leads of Final Fantasy

Months ago, I locked my keys out of my car. Fortunately, I was very close to a friend’s house, and called them immediately. Having a warm place to wait for the AAA locksmith turned into me staying for dinner and cocktails, and that turned into me coming back the next week at the same time for another Tuesday dinner. I kept going back for more Tuesday dinners.

Then, last month, my birthday (March 27th) fell on a Tuesday, and my friend (who is also a chef) went wild.

That was my birthday cake. A five layer lemon cake with raspberry filling between each layer. I believe the icing is cream cheese frosting. But, despite my pleas to my friend for them to give me the recipe (to share with you of course, not for my own selfish gain! Not at all!), I was told I may have the cake whenever I wish, but I may not have the recipe.

So here are my half hearted attempts to find something similar on the internet, since I can’t give you the real recipe. If you feel like making everything from scratch, this one is for you. If you’re more interested in a less skill-intensive version, here’s one that involves a cake mix but should still turn out delectable. And here’s a guide on making cream cheese frosting.

Now, speaking of wonderful things I’d like to have all of the time but are really only available to me when the people in charge of it feel inclined to give them to me, let’s talk about the female leads of the Final Fantasy franchise.

I’ll be focusing on Terra from Final Fantasy VI, Yuna from Final Fantasy X and X-2, and Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII and Lightning Returns.

One of the most interesting things to me about Final Fantasy titles that feature women as main characters, is that they often share that role with other people throughout the game. When Final Fantasy XIII was being marketed, it wasn’t only Lightning that was on posters and promotional material. Snow appeared alongside her consistently. Lightning also isn’t the character the player is forced to play as. The story jumps around—much like Final Fantasy VI does—allowing the player to control every party member individually at different times. The only two Final Fantasy titles where the player isn’t allowed to switch away from the main female character are Final Fantasy X-2 and Final Fantasy: Lightning Returns, neither of which are main title Final Fantasy games.

When I used to complain (before the release of Final Fantasy XIII) that there was no main title Final Fantasy where a woman was the main character, all of my friends (who were male gamers) told me to play Final Fantasy VI. At the time, I was resistant. I had seen gameplay footage from Final Fantasy VI, and the footage I had seen featured Sabin’s battle with the Phantom Train (which has an all male party), and Locke’s separate rescues of both Terra and Celes. Knowing nothing else, I had written the story off as one like Final Fantasy X—where a woman was the most important character in the game, but it was not she who was the player character.

How wrong I was. While it is true that the player can choose not to play as Terra for a good part of the game, she’s also the most valuable character in the game—both as a party member, and within the story’s narrative. By end game, my Terra could dual cast and did maximum damage with every one of her attacks. No one could stand up to her. And, in the final battle, it is she that speaks to Kefka:

Everyone else is there to back Terra up when she tells Kefka they have something to protect:

To the point of making Kefka visibly ill:

It was Yuna in Final Fantasy X that held the role of a female main character who was not the player character. It’s Yuna’s summoner abilities in the game that drive the narrative forward—and without her, Tidus (the character the player actually controls) would have no purpose. In a way, Final Fantasy X takes the trope of female narratives that center only around a man, and flips it on its head.

In X-2, however, we end up with an interesting subversion of that trope. Yuna, free of her duties as a summoner, becomes a sphere hunter. Her motivations for doing so? She found a sphere that held footage of a man that looked like Tidus—meaning he might still be alive after the events of Final Fantasy X. Her motivations for becoming a sphere hunter revolve around her lover from the previous game, yes, but Final Fantasy X-2 is one of the Final Fantasys out there to have multiple endings. While the player can choose to reunite Yuna and Tidus at the end of the game, the player can also choose not to.

If the player selects “It’s better this way,” the context of Yuna’s game suddenly becomes about her dealing with her grief over losing Tidus as opposed to letting her life be defined by him. Due to that, it’s arguable that Yuna’s choice to become a sphere hunter was never wholly about Tidus to begin with, but rather finding something new to do with her life now that she’s done being a summoner—and that small detail adds so much more agency to Yuna in the story. As she says in the good ending without Tidus, this is her story, and it’ll be a good one.

It is perhaps Lightning’s main characterness that is most like that of other traditional Final Fantasy protagonists: she just happens to get mixed up in events in the right way at the right time. If her sister had never become a L’Cie, she never would have taken the first step towards bringing down a Fal’Cie in Final Fantasy XIII. Then, in Final Fantasy XIII-2, she just happens to disappear from time and space—leading her sister, Serah (the only person who remembers her) to lead her own personal X-2ish quest in pursuit of her sister. Lightning Returns is yet another example of this—where a god of the crumbling world just happens to choose Lightning as his messenger.

While Terra is the halfling child of an esper and a human who is one of the only people left in the world able to control magic, and Yuna is the orphaned child of the previous High Summoner who is expected to do great things as a summoner herself, Lighting is just a girl in the military that loves her sister.

Lightning fighting for Serah at the beginning of Final Fantasy XIII

Serah and Lightning reunited after the events of XIII-2

Serah as Lightning’s strength in Lightning Returns

Lightning’s portrayal was a breath of fresh air—because she didn’t have to be anything special to be a female main character.

May we have many more great female characters and many more amazing lemon and raspberry cakes in our futures!

Sugar, Spice, and a Lack of Hot Sauce

I don’t like sweets. My mother brought us up without dessert, and I never developed a sweet tooth. I like savory food much more. Salty, spicy, and sour have always been my cup of tea over sweet.

The Japanese don’t agree, however. My host mother is never stingy with sweets after dinner, parading everything from fruit, to pudding, to chocolate before me, offering quantities of each until the volume of sweets rivals the volume of the meal I just consumed. I was forced to learn how to politely decline because eating so many sweets in one sitting is actually liable to make me sick. I also learned how to express my love for other tastes, since the beloved sweetness pervades even things I would normally think of as savory—seriously, everything from cocktails to burgers. I’ve had some success with finding things that are sour and savory, but the taste that eludes me most heavily is that of spice. While it IS possible to find spicy food in Japan, it is difficult, and more often than not when I receive a recommendation and try it out, the food is well seasoned but lacking any true hint of face-melting fire.

For those of you living in Tokyo, there is a delightful truly Mexican restaurant—and by that I mean you can get chimichanga and real hot sauce, not that it’s the true food of Mexico, but rather the Mexican food you know from the United States. Take the train to Harajuku station, proceed down the garish main street, and take a turn at Cute Cube, and walk down the dark alley until you see Chiles Mexican Grill and Cantina! There you will find an array of Mexican food that pleased even the skeptical Southern Californian we had with us. And if you’re looking for hot sauce, allow me to recommend their red habañero salsa. Whatever you want, salty, sour, hot, or even sweet, you can find it on this menu.

Which leads me to this week’s media tie in: real and diverse female characters that embody the full spectrum of humanity (tastes and all).

It’s true that in Japanese anime, there is usually a good representation of types of women. Sometimes these archetypes can be a little too strict, but more often than not I find that has to do with the quality of the anime as a whole rather than just the quality of the character representation. The reason so many different kinds of women show up in anime is simply this: there are more women included in the stories of anime and manga. When more women are included in a story, it allows for more diverse interpretations of them because no one woman is responsible for being the flagship representation of all womankind within the story. This too often is not the case with western media.

There have been two great examples of blockbuster movies recently that have broken this pattern. I speak, of course, of Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. These two films pass the Bechdel test with flying colors, and also featured two very real and diverse female characters. Unfortunately when I say “diverse” in this context I can’t refer to much diversity of race. The Force Awakens does manage to portray many women who are of differing race—if not species, because this is a galactic setting after all—amongst its extras and bit parts, but when I use the word “diverse” to describe Furiosa from Mad Max and Rey from Star Wars what I mean is that they are not characters that embody the stereotypical heroine of Hollywood. Since Rey and Furiosa are surrounded by other female characters, they are allowed to be more than one type of person: they are allowed to come from a damaged background, to be afraid, to be angry, to be rash, to make mistakes, to be hurt and everything else a normal human might experience during their life time—without it coming off as a generalization about all women. So when I say that Rey and Furiosa are “real” and “diverse” as characters, it is because they are human—and humans are not always stuck in one mood or type of behavior.

Furiosa is a child that was stolen from her family, a woman who lives in a society where her gender is forced to be breeders or nutritional providers, and a person with a disability who uses it to her advantage—did you see how useful and versatile that mechanical arm of hers was in the movie? In the face of all of these things, she has managed to secure a position that allows her to help other women escape from their lives as kept wives. But, although Furiosa is obviously a very powerful, skilled, and brave woman, there are moments when she is allowed to break down and mourn. Furiosa’s plan for getting her charges to safety is to return to her childhood home, known as “The Green” within the narrative. When they arrive at the place that used to be The Green, it is gone; used up and infertile. At this point in the narrative, Furiosa—understandably—grieves. Not only has her plan failed, but she has lost a home that she hoped to regain. And, because she is surrounded by other women, she is allowed to do this without it being because she is a woman. The other women do not mourn with her, making her show of emotion about the failure of her plan and the loss of her home rather than an emotional sensitivity that comes with having a vagina. The presence of more women makes her grief more powerful.

The presence of other women also allows the partnership that Max and Furiosa develop to be devoid of the gender dichotomy of which gender is superior at something. There is a moment when a target must be hit for the group’s escape to The Green to continue. There are only three bullets left for the gun that can make this shot. Max shoots two of these bullets and misses both times. Furiosa carefully approaches him but says nothing. She extends her hand, and Max gives her the gun. Furiosa then lines up the shot, using Max’s shoulder as a stand, says “Don’t breathe,” and shoots. She hits the target. Now, if Furiosa had been the only female character in this story, the power of this scene would have been polluted with gender politics. Since she was not, the scene represented instead the level of trust Max now has in Furiosa and how skilled Furiosa as an individual is.

Rey is afforded the same freedoms as Furiosa due to the presence of key characters like Maz, General Leia, and Captain Phasma— not to mention the female storm troopers, spies, and resistance personnel. Rey also breaks new ground for her franchise.

Although the original screenplay for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi included Leia becoming a Jedi too, Carrie Fisher was too physically dependent on cocaine at the time. Because she was physically unable to fulfill the role, Star Wars fans had to wait until The Force Awakens to see a main female character become a Jedi—and Rey isn’t quite all the way there yet canonically, but it would be silly of Disney to keep her out of the Jedi club now, considering her evident connection with the Force and the way she took down Kylo Ren in that lightsaber fight.

What was great about Rey’s freedom as a character was her relationship to the Force and all things Jedi and Rebellion. With Maz and Leia being the biggest patrons for the Force, the Rebellion, and the lightsaber itself within the narrative, Rey was free to have the possible return of her family matter more to her than getting involved in a galactic war or even flying away with Han Solo without it meaning that women weren’t meant for the Force. She cared for her family, she was afraid of the lightsaber, she lost to Kylo Ren the first time he encountered her in the woods… And then she was put in a stressful situation that forced her to utilize her connection to the Force and become comfortable with it. And none of her reactions could possibly be construed as motivated by her gender.

Just goes to show that the more flavors you have available, the more freely everyone can behave. Now pass the kimchi, please.