FF fans get dumber and dumber as the years go on.

the last time this fanbase showcased any kind of intelligence was during the XIII’s trilogy’s reign. it was all downhill from there.

square enix let ffxv loose into the world and allowed that misogynistic game with terrible gameplay and no story rot y’all’s brains. not me though. i was smart enough let my hatred begin when they announced lunafreya and tabata took over as director.

and honestly, i attribute a lot of my recent disdain towards this fandom to the obtuse shitheads, who are unfortunately a very LOUD vocal minority.

this recent discourse i feel is less about a “lack of women” because there’s plenty of women in final fantasy games, and they are often the most beloved characters of their games. the problem is there is a GLARING issue of none of these women are being treated WELL by the writers

[ignoring the sequels for now] out of xv mainline entries, two are led by women, and only one of these two has an ensemble of female characters as well-written as their male counterparts, and that’s XIII. we all love vi’s story, but terra and celes are the Bare minimum.

the women in these games are hardly given the same treatment as the men. cloud is portrayed and taken seriously as a character with serious mental illness and heavy trauma. tifa is reduced to pure fanservice, hardly any character development, and plays nanny in AC lol.

i could go on and on about how lunafreya had the potential to be such a moving character (because she has the personality traits, drive, and potential to be one) but nothing is executed well. and then she’s slapped and stabbed by ardyn and dies off screen lol.

ix was actually the first ff game where All the women stood on equal footing with the men in terms of character development, interactions and how interesting they were. the game actually took them seriously and didn’t bench them because there’s only room for Just One Hero

ffxii was without a doubt ashe’s story before anyone elses, but she’s not the one leading the game. it’s vaan. xii has arguably the best story in the series but somehow has a very weak (yet charming) main cast because hardly any of them develop? lol.

love ashe. love fran. i’m not gonna dwell on this any longer bc at this point, i’m just ranting. this doesn’t have much to do with xvi and the women we’ve seen so far, but rather how the fandom thinks the women in this series are consistently portrayed as equals when they’re not.

and that’s the problem. it took square enix TWENTY years to get aerith and tifa right in the remake, and you know what??? they stole the show As They Should.

the women in xiv are so... back and forth. either they’re excellently portrayed (heavensward) or they all get bodied back to back (stormblood). at this point, i’m whatever. this thread long as hell. lemme wrap it up and say square enix is not the pinnacle of great representation.

i was about to go off (again) about the wishy washy poc rep in ffxiii games, but remembered i already ranted about how brown/black people are treated in final fantasy games. https://twitter.com/noxfleur/status/1306778981115584512