A lot of people complain about how Kairi's character is handled, which is 1000000% fair, however they fail to mention that Kairi herself acknowledges multiple times how she's treated as a damsel and how she's trying to get stronger to fight.

Based on the false Naminé memories, it can be assumed that she didn't really play fight/fight with wooden swords growing up and instead watched Sora and Riku. This means that she was starting later than they did in terms of training, plus she and Axel didn't even have a wielder teaching them, they had Merlin, a wizard. This also explains why she couldn't get out of Xemnas's hold. Merlin probably focused more on magic than physical training. However, thanks to MoM, we know she's gonna train with Aqua, which means she should be able to get the physical combat training she lacked.

Basically, the way her character was treated sucked, however it seems that Nomura is turning that into motivation for her character. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but people complain about it without ever really bringing up the fact that Kairi herself acknowledges it and also she's literally a fifteen year old with very little training who was forced to fight in a war.

Also Yen Sid sent three kids to war without telling their parents, I feel like he should get Sora's mom angrily busting down his door, at the very least, because if that.

Anyway, I just had a character analysis thing pop into my head and I wanted to share it with you.

Thanks for sharing!! I think you do have a good point. We can all go back and forth discussing how Nomura’s (and the rest of the writing team, I’m sure he wasn’t alone) treatment of Kairi isn’t great, and it sure as heck could be way better. But at the end of the day, I agree that her feeling inadequate is a canon, central part of Kairi’s character and she tries to grapple with that on many occasions, especially most recently in Melody of Memory. Not every character has to be an adept warrior right from the get-go, and I think it’ll be interesting to see how she grows over time, and how she hones her other forms of strength

Happy maid day remember what we could have had but square enix doesn’t like to let us have fun

I LOVE LOVE LOVE XV's aesthetics and the characters are great but so much of the story and the world building choices are just so teeth grindingly confusing at best and awful at worst.

It's been ages since I played xv and I'm so hazy on the details of it, but I remember having so much fun doing side quests and camping and seeing the characters interact, it was great!

And then I got to the endgame (which felt more like it was gonna be the middle of the game to me lmao) and watched the plot go down and I was just like?? That's it?? Spent like 35 hours fucking around and having fun thinking soon enough the plot would become more and more prevalent and next thing I know I was thrust right into the last 10 or so hours 😭 it's like someone took a meal out of my hands before I could finish it

I wouldn't say it was a bad game, I sure had a LOT of fun with it, ffxv was just VERY poorly handled and filling the blanks with so much dlc was kinda insulting lmao

Honestly not sure if u like FFXV but mayyybe Draw Noctis? PLEASE 🙏

My opinions on ffxv may be mixed, but my love for noctis is absolute 😤

been one of those weeks, pass the old man yaoi

Ooooh we've talked a bit about how interesting it would be if lightning, serah or vanille were in kh, but can you imagine how perfect it would be for LUMINA to be in it???

The tidus and yuna laughing scene being talked about as just a cringe meme is an absolute travesty

I feel bad for shipping Fang with Lightning more than with Vanille 😭

They're a badass sexy power couple with flirtatious banter and a healthy dose of tension, I fully understand 😤

⚡️💙✨

A little Fangrai to Soothe the Soul

042324

Yeul from FF13 <3

Doodling bisexuals this fine evening 👌🏼✨

LIGHTNING RETURNS: FINAL FANTASY XIII (2013)

"The crystal age is just a legend from before the world was born. And it ended, before you were born."

I've been thinking of cecil as the first ff character to have a personal arc of some kind but I just realized it's technically leon wtf

In Valhalla, your sister gave me a chance. She gave me hope. The future can be changed. That’s what she told me, and I believe her.

FINAL FANTASY XIII-2 (2011)

M-miss Farron...

oh absolutely, if we're talking about who's more revolutionary as a female protagonist of a male-dominated game franchise, lightning is 100% the one we should be looking at! she challenged male players so much that even to this day, they're still throwing tantrums whenever someone so much as mentions her lmao

i just think it's a shame that even women feel the need to base part of our opinion of a female protagonist on "well what do the men think of her?", even if it's for the sake of challenging them

men definitely found serah's character easier to digest because she's more "male-friendly", soft and feminine, but i don't want my own perception of her to be affected by what they think, and it hasn't! her arc was a lovely deconstruction of the damsel in distress trope, her unwillingness to act on her own and her heavy dependence on lightning and snow was rightfully treated as an obstacle she had to overcome so she could find her own strength and agency, and many (cough, pretty much all of them) women in the franchise don't get that same kind of liberation. in that sense, serah's arc is very much a part of the revolutionary feminist-driven narrative we love in ffxiii, but a very overlooked one on the basis that she's feminine. i've seen takes that she's just a "girly version of lightning", which completely misconstrues both characters

unfortunately her development gets swept to the side by men, maybe even more so than lightning's development since, to them, an overly dependent female character isn't seen as a character flaw, and that sucks ass. they still see her as a damsel, despite how her arc was specifically about her growing into her own person, so to see women (no one in particular in mind, just takes i've seen here and there) ignore her development too, again because she's softer and panders to the male gaze more than lightning (putting aside the fact that lightning's design most definitely panders to men as well), is frustrating to me. the growth she went through and the depth behind her character gets downplayed because of something on the surface that, if we lived a perfect world where the topic of femininity wasn't poisoned by misogynistic men, shouldn't matter

my gripe with people comparing lightning and serah is that i personally don't feel like they're meant to be compared, at least not on a question like "but who's BETTER" (especially not when that dicussion is led by men, holy shit does that get predictable). they complement each other a lot, what one lacks at first, the other might have in excess (bad or not), when one is missing, the other yearns to see her again, one is feminine, and the other is more masculine. but more than that, our opinion on who is the stronger protagonist shouldn't have to be affected by what men like. i know that's something we have to take into account when we look at their differences from a feminist perspective, which frankly fucking sucks because in doing so it almost feels like we demonize femininity, and i know that's not actually the case, but it's hard to shake off that feeling as one of those people who grew up hating pink or the idea of learning to cook for example for fear of not being taken seriously by fellow women

i want to base my understanding of lightning and serah and how they differ from each other from the perspective of their personal growth and the roles they have in the story of each game, not what roles they have among the kind of people that hated lightning for breaking out of the female ff character archetype. those people can keep shitting puking crying over it for all i care. at the same time, i'm aware that it's men that were behind both characters and that their biases bled into both of them, serah in particular. going from having lightning as a protagonist to serah can feel like a step down from progression, and in a way it was! that's beyond frustrating, but i would've personally hoped that in our own little non-male-dominated fandom space, we could look past men's perception (unless feminism is at the center of the discussion, of course) so we could actually appreciate both serah and lightning based on who they are on their own

Every time I stumble across someone trying to argue on whether lightning or serah is the better protagonist I wanna bang my head against the wall