Chapter Four
The Unreality of the Narrative
If interest is regulated by expectations about events and the reward of their outcome, it can be argued that the narrative construction of “reality” has a central role in regulating interest in FFX . After a review of Culler's (1975) categories of vraisemblance, this chapter will address FFX 's coding of unreality in terms of the “meta-genres” or “modes” of the “marvellous,” the “uncanny,” and the “fantastic.” It will be argued that FFX 's coding of unreality not only regulates players' curiosity, surprise and suspense, it also extends these emotions into wonder, fear, and/or anxiety. The major implication of this argument is that the disjunctive experiences of reality-status addressed in Chapter Two may be aesthetically recuperated as part of the game's meaningful experience through the ongoing hermeneutic concern with reality.
Vraisemblance
The narrative representation of reality is often addressed in terms of vraisemblance, the signifying processes whereby something is made to seem sensible and natural by the way it is placed in relation to existing conventions of discourse. Vraisemblance may be loosely identified with the operation of Barthes' (1975a) “ reference code,” which provides a basis of extra-textual reality by referring to authorised texts in a culture. However, while Barthes' reference code provides a general link between vraisemblance and intertextuality (Bakhtin, 1986; Kristeva, 1980), here we are better served by Culler's (1975) distinctions between types of vraisemblance: “five ways in which a text may be brought into contact with and defined in relation to another text which helps to make it intelligible” (p. 140). This chapter will focus on the first three of Culler's five categories: the “discourse of the ‘real',” the “cultural text,” and “generic vraisemblance.”
The discourse(s) of the real may be understood as including what Tan (1997) refers to as “ naïve physics,” “naïve psychology” and “naïve sociology” (p. 239), which constitute the “common sense” understandings of the world (see also Bruner, 1990; Bordwell, 1989) . In regards to naïve physics, we accept that objects exist in time and space and are bound by cause and effect. Much narrative information in FFX has the sole function of providing an impression of a real object-world: the waves at Besaid beach, the wind in the trees, smooth motion-capture for characters, as well as wandering monsters in their ecologically appropriate environments, all denote a world governed by familiar physical laws. In regards to naïve psychology, we accept a version of Bordwell's (1989) “folk psychology,” according to which people have minds and bodies, think and feel, and have traits and motives. FFX represents predictable psychological behaviour in this respect: Tidus wants love from his father; he shows romantic interest in Yuna; he defers to Auron as a surrogate father; the Al Bhed are hated and mistrusted because they are unknown; and Seymour 's madness stems from his previous persecution.
At the level of naïve sociology, we accept that people are sociable, and that when they come together they form institutions, such as religion and law, which govern their relationships with each other. In FFX , that people naturally seek out groups and community is represented by: the community of Besaid; the bond between the Guardians; and the communal effort to repair the docks after Sin attacks Kilika. That families are important to personal life and social organization is represented by: the family huts in Besaid; the family link between Wakka and Chappu; Tidus' and Yuna's ongoing concerns about their fathers; and the way Wantza carries on his brother O'aka's mercantile trade after the latter is imprisoned. That people form religious institutions through awe or reverence for natural or divine forces is evident in the Temples of the Fayth, the teachings of Yevon, and the authority invested in the Maesters. That people form institutions of work is represented by: the hotels or shops, such as Rin's Travel Agency; young Clasko's indecision to be a Chocobo Trainer or Chocobo Knight; and the ongoing mercantile efforts of O'aka and his brother. Lastly, that humans desire or need release and entertainment is represented by the institution of blitzball. In all these ways, FFX conforms to our “naïve,” or “folk,” understanding (or discursive construction) of “reality.”
Cultural vraisemblance is an extension of the discourse of the real that consists of “cultural stereotypes or accepted knowledge” (Culler, 1975, p. 141), including proverbs and maxims, and authorised “physical, physiological, medical, psychological, literary, historical” (Barthes, 1975a, p. 20) discourses. While ideology may permeate a textual transaction, Culler (1975) argues that this category may be explicitly linked to ideology in that it nominates a system of preferred values (p. 144). Texts usually assume that the reader recognises its values or proverbs and “draw[s] upon this fund of human knowledge [to] establish . . . action and motive, behaviour and personality” (p. 143). For example, in FFX players accept the presence of shops and/or merchants at the far reaches of the world, hidden hundreds of miles from other people, because they are defined as logical and normal by the ideologies of Yevon (the Summoners' require service on their quests), economics (people go where the money is), and tourism (Spira, being so exotic, invites adventurers).
However, texts sometimes provide their own explanation of otherwise inexplicable narrative facts or events, thereby stating their own maxims through a process that Genette (1966/1982) calls “unvraisemblance.” For example, Tidus (and perhaps the player) is amazed at how the folk of Spira accept Sin, and must be repeatedly told by Wakka that the people of Spira believe Sin is a punishment they must atone for. Tidus questions whether it is worth sacrificing so many lives to kill Sin for the twenty year peace of the Great Calm, and must be told by Yuna that the (to him) futile actions of the Summoners are necessary for a temporary respite and the maintenance of a hope that one day Sin will not return. That those who live in Spira accept this situation is not surprising, since naïve psychology tells us that people can learn to go on with their day-to-day lives despite terrible events (as during the protracted bombing of London in the Second World War). However, Tidus does not truly accept Sin, and this rejection conforms to two other tenets of naïve psychology: that people naturally resist oppression and that people are most happy when liberated. When Tidus learns of Yuna's choice to sacrifice herself for Spira, he (along with the Al Bhed) is unconvinced at the justification, and only continues with the quest after making a promise with Rikku to find a way to save Yuna. What drives the narrative, then, is a conflict between, on the one hand, the beliefs of Spira about Sin (cultural vraisemblance within the diegesis), and, on the other hand, a belief in the rightness of resisting oppression and freedom (naïve psychology in the discourse of the real).
Generic vraisemblance incorporates those codes that define “the range of possible speech acts which a literary text might perform” (Culler, 1975, p. 147); or, more accurately, genres form the basis for the expected and unexpected in any communicative act, since a degree of novelty is expected in fictional contracts between texts and readers/players. At the level of game macrostructures, another reason that players are likely to accept the presence of shops and shopkeepers in isolated regions is because they are conventions of computer role-playing games: as characters adventure they find and sell items they find, and buy new, more powerful ones. Shops are needed to perform this service. At the level of narrative macrostructures, players will expect Tidus' rejection of Sin's tyranny because protagonists in epic fantasy narratives always confront a major opponent, and not only is Sin a pre-eminent opponent, the goal to defeat him is stated in the blurb and manual. Generic vraisemblance (Tidus will fight the monster) reinforces naïve psychology in the discourse of the real (people resist oppressors) against cultural vraisemblance within the diegesis (Sin is part of everyday life).
These aspects of vraisemblance are central to the operation of “mimeticism,” which Jackson (1988) and Hume (1984) refer to as a “mode” or “impulse,” embodied in classical realist texts. Mimeticism is an effect that may be found in a variety of genres, such as horror, science fiction, romance, tragedy, epic and comedy. However, we can better appreciate the game's construction of the “ un real,” and its concomitant ways of regulating player interest, in terms of Todorov's (1973) “genres” of the “marvellous,” the “uncanny,” and the “fantastic.” These may be seen, like the “mimetic,” not as historical genres, but as “modes” which cross other genres (see Cornwell, 1994; Jackson , 1988; Todorov, 1973). These modes provide a useful way of differentiating the ways in which FFX recruits codes of vraisemblance for aesthetic effect.
The Marvellous
For Todorov (1973), the defining principle of the “marvellous” is the acceptance of violations of known physical laws. More accurately, a new discourse of the real is posited that governs the reality of the diegesis and thereby provides a new context that renders the narrative facts intelligible (Culler, 1974, p. 141). As a mode, the marvellous can frequently be found in, and often characterises, mythology, religious texts, magic realism, sword and sorcery, science fiction, and some horror and romance. However, Todorov (1973) identifies four variations of the marvellous—the hyperbolic marvellous, the exotic marvellous, the scientific marvellous, and the instrumental marvellous—all of which may be identified in FFX .
Todorov's (1973) exotic marvellous occurs when supernatural elements are represented as normal within the diegesis, usually through the acceptance of magical beings, abilities or events, which violate laws of life, motion and energy in the modified discourse of the real which defines a texts's (meta-) physics. In FFX , the precise location and nature of magic varies. Spira itself may be said to be supernatural because its ontology includes magical events (the Grand Summoning and Jecht's transformation into Sin) and magical beings. FFX 's magical beings are sometimes magical in themselves by virtue of their fantastic or impossible nature or origin. For example, Yu Yevon has the mysterious, divine origins of most gods; the Bandersnatch is a folkloric creature drawn from Lewis Carrol's poem Jabberwocky , with the same otherworldly status as unicorns or fairies; and the Defenders are inanimate matter inspirited by magic, like golems.
Figure 4.1. (a) The “supernatural” Aeon Valefor. (b) Yuna's “magical” ceremony to “Send” the spirits of those killed at Kilika.
Some beings are magical by virtue of having magical abilities: this is as true of monsters, such as Black Elements (with their elemental Strikes), and Behemoth Kings (with their Zombie Touch), as it is of characters, such as Yuna (with her ability to Summon Aeons) and Lulu (who is typed as a sorceress with innate spell casting abilities) (see Figure 4.1). However, most magical abilities are external to the non-magical beings who use them, and are only acquired by: finding items (on monsters, or on the paths of Spira, or as part of a quest); receiving gifts (from non-player characters, or NPCs, such as Belgemine); and through experience (the accumulation of Ability Points which can be used to advance on the Sphere Grid). These magical events, beings and abilities are accepted as part of the laws of the diegesis in that, at the level of generic vraisemblance, players expect magic in a fantasy role-playing game, and because the character's cultural vraisemblance, and their basic reactions, reflect the discourse of the real in Spira. None of the characters are surprised at their magical abilities, or at the presence of any events simply because they are magical.
In Todorov's (1973) next two categories, impossible but accepted magical events and beings blur into science, or scientific explanation. Todorov defines as scientific marvellous those narratives in which events or items are represented in rational terms but operate according to physical laws no longer accepted or not yet realised. This is, for Todorov, the realm of much science fiction, and the (forbidden) Machina embody this scientific marvellous in that while it may be possible to build an entire city over a river like the Moonflow, to contain water in the manner of the globe in the blitzball stadium, or to float an Airship like the one flown by the Al Bhed, this technology is beyond our current level of understanding (see Figure 4.2). Indeed, the player may be aware of developments in architecture, aerodynamics, or magnetic field theory which legitimate as future possibilities the city that was built over the Moonflow, the Al Bhed's Airship, and the water sphere in the blitzball stadium. However, even the Al Bhed, who are associated with the Machina, have only partial knowledge of the machines they repair. Rikku's brother states this for comic effect as he pilots the Airship on its shaky, virgin take-off from the Al Bhed home. Consequently, the vagueness of explanation of these possibilities allows them to retain the flavour of the exotic marvellous.
Figure 4.2. (a) The blitzball stadium at Luca filling up with water held in place by a presumably “scientific” force field. (b) The Airship escaping the ruined Al Bhed home.
Todorov (1973) refers to as instrumental marvellous those narratives in which can be found devices that were not possible in a certain historical context but whose function has been produced in the present. He offers flying carpets, apples that cure diseases, and pipes which see long distances as examples, whose qualities exist in, respectively, helicopters, antibiotics and binoculars. Many supposedly magical devices in FFX similarly may be interpreted as poetic representations of scientific devices. For example, weapons Tidus that may acquire include: a Taming Sword which captures creatures it kills (like a stun gun); Gilventure, which multiplies the amount of money found on a monster (like interest in venture capitalism); Twilight Steel, which, renders opponents blind (like certain poisons); and Soldier's Sword, which increases strength (like injections of testosterone).
Indeed, magic in general may be read as a poetic representation of science and/or physical laws. In many fantasy texts and role-playing games magic is learned at something equivalent to a modern college or university, where magical research takes place, such as the Schools of Magic in J. K. Rowling's (1999) Harry Potter , Bruce Heard's (1987) Dungeons & Dragons Gazetteer: Principalities of Glantri , and Terry Pratchet's (1985) The Colour of Magic . In other fiction, magic is acquired through personal tutoring or experimentation, as with Pug in Raymond E. Feist's (1983) Magician and Gorian in David Edding's (1983) Belgariad series, or as a pseudo-science, as with Jack Vance's (1950/1985) alchemical magicians in The Dying Earth . In FFX , all characters acquire magical skills through experience, and magic itself is structured in a hierarchy of increasingly powerful spells. That is, FFX 's magic is as dependent upon laws as strict and predictable as those of the natural world, and its magical effects are as quantifiable as those of non-magical items weapons and armour. Using a water-based spell like Watera against a fire monster is no different from using a hose, and is strategically equivalent to using a Piercing attack against a monster with armour. In this respect, specific magical practices and effects may be accepted as marvellous, but may also be read as poetic representations of existing scientific practices and effects.
Todorov's (1973) last category of the hyperbolic marvellous refers to those tales that contain elements that are supernatural “only by virtue of [excessive] dimensions” (p. 54) or through a literalised metaphor. In regards to dimension, physical laws are not subverted so much as exaggerated. FFX contains physically excessive (giant) wasps, piranha and wolves as monster types, which have non-fictional referents. In regards to literalised metaphor, FFX can be read in terms of the metaphor of the “overbearing father.” Since exaggeration often functions to represent something in a manner which reproduces its psychological impact, the excessive size of Braska's Final Aeon, the game's visual spectacle, and its narrative drama (death, loss, revenge, and so on), may represent the force of patriarchal authority as experienced by a son (and/or the forcefulness of the son as a liberal individual resisting and overcoming all odds).
By considering these variations of the marvellous it is possible to identify a spectrum from the literally unreal, in which the marvellous exists as an accepted unreality, to the poetically real, in which the marvellous involves the poetic manipulation of a known reality. Across these variations, the marvellous may be generally accepted, but in some circumstances a particular marvellous quality elicits wonder, awe or surprise in characters. Tidus frequently displays amazement or disbelief. When Tidus encounters the Zu in Sanubia Sands, the “camera” moves behind him and he looks up at its unlikely, shaggy mass to exclaim: “Whew!” He is also amazed at the water-travelling, dinosaur-like Shoopuff, whereas the others consider it as no more amazing than a horse-ride, with Yuna reminiscing (and giggling) about a childhood experience in which Kimahri fell in the water. Similarly, while Tidus expresses surprise when he first sees Chocobos, the Chocobo trainer is surprised that Tidus is surprised, since they are as familiar to her (and to players who have played other Final Fantasy titles) as any other steed. Ind eed, when Tidus is confronted by the Aeons, the Temples of the Fayth, and Sin, his status as a visitor to the “future” allows him to express the wonder of a tourist lead through a marvellously exotic foreign culture: alien to him (and players), yet both possible and real within Spira. That is, th e marvellous in FFX is reinforced by descriptions of exotic races, cultures and beings with their own cultural vraisemblance. Even the words “Maester” and “Fayth” are deviations from conventional spelling which evoke other-ness. Tidus, of course, comes to accommodate these exotica, and during Chocobo Racing the balloons and prizes connote a carnival or circus-like affair, framing the marvellous elements as part of a tame, sideshow amusement. Yet, despite a player's ready acceptance of these marvels as natural to Spira, s/he may, along with Tidus, initially be surprised at them.
The game also undermines the bland acceptance of magic, and produces an attitude of awe, through its use of magical spells and events. When Lulu uses elemental spells for the first time she offers such comments as “Need a light?” (for fire) and “Go with the flow” (for water). These comments may be glib, but they prepare the player for the new spell's spectacle and damage. Inasmuch as new spells open up new powers they may be seen as violations of the previous economy governing gameplay, even if technically they merely confer a higher status (or greater access to resources) within a consistent economy of magic. However, some spectacles of magic seemingly violate the rules of magic in a more radical sense, most notably the cataclysmic arrival of Sin at Zanarkand and the devastating appearance of Anima in Luca Stadium. Both of these spectacles are likely to be seen as a violation of expected magical effects in that they display magical effects so beyond the predicted curve of character development that the player cannot properly conceive of confronting these figures as opponents within the rules of the game, much less effecting an equivalent display of power. Yet, as the player continues the game, characters become exponentially powerful, may acquire Anima as an Aeon whose abilities operate within the rules of the narrative, and eventually confront and defeat Sin. In this sense, the spectacular representation of magic is presented as exceeding the development curve experienced as governing the rules of magic in the game macrostructure, but is subsequently normalised as players develop their characters and learn more about Spira. Magic, then, is represented as variously accepted and un- or dis-expected through the gradual acclimatisation to the rising scale of magical efficacy.
Players may also experience a sense of the dis-expected through the gradual revelations about Sin, which violate prior disclosures about the discourse of the real in Spira. Sin is initially accepted as part of Spira's normal existence, and is interpreted by the Laws of Yevon as divine punishment. However, FFX later offers a new explanation: Sin is an Aeon, like the Fiends, and his existence is not normal and natural to Spira. He is the undead armour of a god, part of the Grand Summoning which preserves the memory of long-dead Zanarkand, and the key to the Spiral of Death, in which the dead govern the living. Suddenly, what is seen as a physical law (Spira's discourse of the real) is revealed to be a changeable social convention (cultural vraisemblance). What is at stake here is not ontology but the epistemology of Yu Yevon. Sin is not a symbol of divine punishment, merely a tool of Yu Yevon's unnatural vengeance. Since both epistemologies presume a supernatural ontology, the shift from one to the other stages Sin as marvellous a second time.
The narrative strategy of FFX may, then, be seen in terms of a tension within the marvellous: between the literally unreal versus the poetically real; between acceptance of and surprise at the unreal; and between our initial expectations about the reality of the diegesis and our subsequent revision of this reality. These tensions preserve a tension that is central to the marvellous: the provision of an ongoing sense of wonder and awe that minimises the progressive acceptance and invisibility of the supernatural.
The Uncanny
If the marvellous is characterised by a sense of wonder at spectacles of the unreal, the “uncanny” is characterised by seemingly unreal events that are symptomatic of a hidden, unsafe, fearful, dreadful, or dangerous reality (Freud, 1919/1990; Jackson, 1988; Todorov, 1973). T his usage can be traced to the un-negated and negated version of the German term “heimlich”:
[ Das Heimlich ] signifies that which is homely, familiar, friendly, cheerful, comfortable, intimate . . . . [It] also means that which is concealed from others: all that is hidden, secreted, obscured. Its negation, das Unheimlich , then functions to dis-cover, reveal, expose areas normally kept out of sight. . . . It uncovers what is hidden and, by doing so, effects a disturbing transformation of the familiar into the unfamiliar. (Jackson, 1988, p. 65)
Freud (1919/1990) distinguishes the uncanny as a type of fear directed not towards some known object, but to something that is in the process of being revealed and/or to the process of revelation itself. Armitt (1996) summarises:
In order for us to feel something to be uncanny [as distinct from fear], it must derive from a situation, object or incident that ought to feel (and usually has felt) familiar and reassuring, but which has undergone some form of slight shift that results in what I have referred to as a form of dis-ease. (p. 49)
The key mechanism here is projection. In formal terms, projection refers to the process whereby aspects of the self are displaced and relocated in an external position. This may occur in fairly benign ways, such as the routine proximal-distal transactions that Grodal (1997) discusses, or the projection of one's mood, which thereby seems to characterise the environment. However, projection also occurs when a subject cannot tolerate aspects of him or herself and attempts to expel them. It is this latter sense that informs Freud's (1919/1990) account of the uncanny, which is built upon his general theory that neurotic disorders are symptoms of repressed psychological causes. For Freud, a latent trauma is projected onto mundane events which are thereby imbued with the affects associated with that trauma. In addition, just as one may feel unease as the psychic defences of the ego are being dismantled during therapy, the anxieties of a projected trauma may be combined with dread at the gradual process of that trauma's revelation.
What especially characterises the effect of the uncanny for Todorov (1973) is uncertainty about whether seemingly marvellous or unreal events have a psychological or physical cause. On the one hand, a character may confuse the real and the imaginary by thinking that an event happened when it was simply in his/her head, in the manner of a projection, dream, hallucination, or delusion. On the other hand, a character may confuse the real and the illusory , knowing that an event has happened but not understanding how it happened, as in the case of an inexplicable magic trick. The uncanny results when events are presented in such a way that a character, and usually the reader, is unable to decide either way. This holds open the possibilities that: there is a genuine, hidden reality beyond a character's perception-consciousness; that the character is merely (mis-) perceiving events; and/or that the character is projecting some hidden reality of his or her psyche onto events (also see Cornwell, 1994; Mishra, 1994; Modleski, 1982; Radway, 1984).
Freud (1919/1990) describes four categories of events that can produce this effect: repetition, the perception of doubles, the animation of inanimate objects, and the omnipotence of thoughts. Todorov (1973) extends these tropes, but Jackson (1988) is even more embracing, linking the unsettling effect of the uncanny to violations of linear time, space, cause and effect, as well as motifs of metamorphosis, entropy, and bodily disintegration that violate the unity of the self. In fiction, then, a character may perceive any of these as a violation of the natural, objective order that constitutes his/her reality. This not only holds open the possibility that events are distorted by the character's perception-consciousness, it cues the reader to expect that some horrible past event about to be disclosed and/or that some horrible event is about to befall the character. For Freud (1919/1990), Todorov (1973), and Jackson (1988), the effect of the uncanny is also linked to the violation of taboos, in that the subversion of a social order elicits anxieties of punishment and expresses a desire for the repressed, unseen, and unspoken. Chapter Seven will discuss this in terms of how FFX generates the empathetic emotion of fear. Here it suffices to emphasise that projective processes are at the core of the uncanny and that they promote a characteristically paranoid outlook characterised by a wary suspicion that what one fears is true (see Swanson, Bohnert, and Smith, 1990, p. 8). That is, uncanny events lead characters to progressively confuse their anxiety about past or possible experiences with the actual threat posed by their environment in the present.
Several aspects of FFX cue such an uncanny, or paranoid, outlook. To begin with, in the opening sequence at Zanarkand, it is revealed that Tidus' father is missing, and no reference is made to his mother. Not long after, retrospective narration reveals Tidus' psychological abuse from Jecht, and his mother's inattention. Here players may realise that Tidus' success as a blitzball player, with thousands of adoring fans, has not made him narcissistic; rather, he lives in the shadow of his father, who was a greater legend in the game, and ultimately he feels abandoned. Tidus' feelings of abandonment, even amidst the enormous crowds at the Zanarkand blitzball stadium, are reflected in his isolation after walking away from his fans, his lonely musings as he walks the Causeway, and his isolation while preparing for the game.
The possibility that Tidus' feelings of abandonment may be physically manifested is foreshadowed by the enormous mirror through which he passes to enter the blitzball stadium. As noted in Chapter Three, hermeneutic codes associated with dreaming suggest a shift from reality into fantasy. Indeed, FFX is preoccupied with dream-states. When the boy appears on the bridge in Zanarkand the world freezes as if preserved in memory. Prior to teleporting, Tidus enters the City of Dreams and swims underwater-in-the-air. Each time Tidus is teleported there is a fade-to-white that may be metonymic of a loss-of-consciousness or the passing from waking to dreaming. The Farplane responds to visitor's thoughts and manifests their memories of lost loved ones. At the end of the game, Tidus returns to the City of Dreams and confronts his father in a surrealistic parody of Zanarkand. He then confronts Yu Yevon amidst a dream-like abstraction of clouds, standing on the enormous sword that was wielded by Braska's Final Aeon.
Apart from these explicit signs of dream-states, players may also perceive as dream-like the radical oscillation between the ideal and nightmarish in the rapid, and seemingly incoherent, opening sequences. The serene situation at Zanarkand turns into the chaos of Sin's visitation. The disorientation after Tidus' subsequent teleportation gives way to quiet exploration of the Ruins, but this is broken by the attack by the Geosgeano, who personifies oral-sadism with his Swallow attack. This is followed by more quiet exploration, this time of the Temple , where Tidus falls asleep. However, another predator wakes Tidus. The Al Bhed arrive to help him, but then they force him onto their boat and force him to help Rikku raise the Airship from under the ocean. Tidus is inexplicably teleported again, this time to the paradise of Besaid, only to realise that the exotic, island peace is false because of the looming threat of Sin. While the pace of the narrative subsequently becomes more coherent, these and later shifts between threat and safety are paralleled by shifts between the spectacular (sweeping views of Zanarkand, Sin, and Geosgaeno) and the mundane (gathering wood, the contemplative quiet of the ruined temple, and the quiet ocean); between the specular (cut-scenes) and the interactive (navigation and fighting); and between Tidus' role as active protector (as Guardian and lover to Yuna) and passive victim (lonely, confused, lost, and a tragic romantic lead).
Such a rapid succession of incoherent events, with a recurring sense of danger, may not only connote a dream-like quality; combined with Tidus' uncertainty about what is happening, this incoherence may lead him (and the player) to remain vigilant and hesitant about who his “true” friends are, where the “real” danger lies, and what is “really” happening. It can be argued that this promotes a paranoid outlook in the sense that an internal state—suspense or fear about what is happening and what could happen—is not properly distinguished from the actual threat posed by the environment. Each fearful event proves that fear is justified, and that some “Them” or “It” is, indeed, out to get one. A distrusting vigilance about the “truth” or “reality” behind the appearance of things is certainly justified each time FFX offers disclosures that force players to revise their view of events and they learn that Jecht, Auron, Seymour, Kinoc, Yunalesca, Yu Yevon are manipulating Tidus, the Guardians and Spira in ways that are selfish, potentially dangerous, or downright vengeful.
As the game nears its conclusion, the uncanny in the formal sense of the supernatural explained is evident in that FFX allows players to infer that Tidus' teleportation from Zanarkand to Besaid, a thousand years into the future, was partly an illusion. After all, players are told that Zanarkand and its people, including Tidus, were destroyed a thousand years ago and only exist as Aeons, as part of the Great Summoning. The Grand Summoning therefore preserved Tidus in temporal stasis along with the rest of Zanarkand, and since a thousand years have passed in the narrative, his seeming temporal displacement actually involved the transportation of his Aeon-spirit by (or perhaps in ) Sin while he was “unconscious.” So despite the presence of a supernatural context , there is another level of reality in the text which is invoked to explain the teleportation, even if this “reality” is also marvellous. It can be argued, then, that one marvellous ontology is unmasked and replaced by another, but that an element of the uncanny persists because the laws of time (and, perhaps, space) are preserved within the diegesis. The obfuscation of illusion and imagination is thereby removed, allowing players to perceive the psychological “reality” of Tidus' experience.
However, because of subsequent disclosures, players will realise that most of Tidus' experiences do literally happen in the exotic marvellous of Spira, and are not simply a projection of his emotional state. Most significantly, the uncanny conflation of Jecht as monstrous father and his subsequent role as Sin, tyrant of Spira, is eventually revealed to be merely a coincidence. Yet it remains a curiously uncanny coincidence, and it is not surprising that Tidus experiences an uncanny congruence between his own anxieties and the drama unfolding in Spira. Jecht's transformation seems to have a poetic logic: it is hard not to read Jecht's transformation into Sin as an elaboration of (or perhaps punishment for) his monstrous parenting of Tidus. Indeed, FFX as a whole makes a lot of sense when read in terms of Tidus' psychological state. Tidus' repeated emphasis that “This is my story” logically re-affirms that the story is his (final and by implication fatal) fantasy. This preserves the unsettling sense that the story may be not merely a marvellous tale of supernatural events, but a reflection of Tidus' mental state, and perhaps an imagined working-through of his abandonment. After all, Tidus' feelings are made conveniently visible to a surrogate love (Yuna), who accepts him, confirms his value, reciprocates his love, and provides a mirror of his own plight. His rescue of her also allows him to perform his desired-for heroism, and his dual union with and defeat of his father allows him to achieve psychological closure. Ultimately, the scale and intimacy of Tidus' suffering—the loss of his father, his mother, his home, his fame, Yuna, and his own life—makes the game's spectacular excess and unreality emotionally intelligible.
The Fantastic
While Todorov's (1973) experience of the uncanny involves a hesitation that is resolved through subsequent explanations, there is no such resolution in the experience of the “fantastic.” For Todorov, the fantastic is characterised by three criteria:
First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character . . . . Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as “poetic” interpretations. (p. 33)
In regards to the first criterion, for an event to be fantastic a reader must hesitate between interpreting an event, such as Tidus' teleportation, as either marvellous (supernatural) or as uncanny (an imagined projection and/or an illusion). Since the fantastic persists during the period of hesitation many texts that otherwise belong to the marvellous or uncanny may have fantastic aspects or sequences. Indeed, while Todorov sees the fantastic in formal terms as occurring in texts in which there is no closure, Jackson (1988) emphasises that the “fantastic” is simply the most subversive form of fantasy in general and that the experience of hesitation often has the experiential qualities of the uncanny.
Todorov's (1973) second criterion is conditional, in that while hesitation is often represented in the mind of a character it suffices that the reader experiences it. It must be emphasised that this hesitation need not be a consequence of the formal qualities of the work: a character may make inferences on the basis of a short-attention span, confusion, or aporia in the plot, and these may give rise to uncertainty. In fact, we can avoid many of Todorov's formal verbal, syntactic and thematic requirements of the fantastic by falling back on Grodal's (1997) account of unreality as the experience that occurs in the absence of closure in and/or between perception, affect and cognition. That is, the effect of the fantastic may be seen in general terms as a consequence of cognitive dissonance in the reader produced through the inconsistent coding (or de-coding) of events. However, even with this qualification we can retain Todorov's (1973) third criterion of the fantastic. As he argues, there can be no hesitation about the status of seemingly supernatural events if they are explained away as “poetic” representations of a familiar reality, or if they are read allegorically as an extended metaphor for something beyond the diegesis, such as the universality of greed, an historical conflict, or a political figure.
There are several events in FFX which are represented in such a way that there may be unresolved uncertainty about their reality-status; indeed, it can be argued that the game's hermeneutic code actively works to code vraisemblance in a logically inconsistent fashion. As noted above, an explanation for Tidus' teleportation may be inferred near the end of the game, but the game seems to be more concerned with exploiting its uncertain status. Since visual representation at a cinematic level of detail is taken as objective description, the player is likely to perceive him/herself as a witness to Tidus' perceptions and/or environment. After all, players see Tidus teleported, or, rather, they see the effect of teleportation, along with him, and so are inclined to accept the teleportation as marvellous at face value. However, the incoherence of the related narrative sequences may be perceived as an excessive representation of the physical disorientation of teleportation within a marvellous text. Given the initial absence of any explanation for the teleportation, players are more likely to receive the impression from the first hour of play that the story itself is incoherent, and may feel premonitory doubts about the quality of its telling. Of course, some readers may simply interpret this in relation to the discourse of the real: “this (Spira) is a crazy world!” Yet if Spira is a marvellous world, why is there such an excessive representation of the violation of time and space? Why is Tidus so confused by events at the beginning of the game? Tidus' expression that “This is my story” here may resonate with a player's awareness that he is not an omniscient narrator, but has a limited perspective, and may be subjectively distorting events. Nonetheless, Given Tidus' surprise and players' shared confusion, there is a possibility that the teleportation may have violated the discourse of the real that governs Spira.
When Tidus talks to Rikku and Wakka, and as the narrative starts to progress in a more linear fashion, players may feel assured that the incoherence of the opening sequences is intentional (or, at least, merely a transitory example of poor storytelling). However, while Rikku and Wakka soon offer players information which helps them to make sense of Tidus' teleportation, they do not resolve its status. On the salvage ship, Rikku tells Tidus that Zanarkand has been gone a thousand years. While honest and seemingly compassionate, Rikku is young and naïve, belongs to a group that seems isolated from the rest of Spira, and, given the Muslim coding of the Al Bhed, perhaps prejudiced, with a distorted, fanatical view of the world. A short time later, Wakka suggests that, having gotten too close to Sin, Tidus' mind is addled by Sin's toxin. Wakka also seems honest, but he is characterised as unintelligent, primitive, and (like Rikku) as living in an isolated region. The unreliability of Rikku's and Wakka's accounts holds open the possibility that what has been narrated has another explanation.
On the S.S. Winno, Yuna provides some early support for Tidus by relating how she met his father, Sir Jecht, ten years ago, and that her quest is taking her to Zanarkand. While Yuna's attraction to Tidus may colour her willingness to remain-open-minded, she places more weight on the possibility that Tidus is right: players are free to infer that Zanarkand has been displaced into this future, or that there is some temporal lapse between Zanarkand and the rest of Spira. In any case, having accepted the teleportation, the concern for Tidus becomes how/why he was teleported, where Zanarkand is (past or present), and how, or if, he can get home. This perspective is reinforced by Auron, who, by being present in both Tidus' past and present, is readily perceived as knowing the truth of Tidus' teleportation. Auron eventually confirms Tidus' account and provides the reason for the teleportation: he had promised Jecht to bring Tidus to Spira. (The reader may presume that he and Auron “rode” Sin as Sin travelled through time and/or space.) There is, then, a marvellous means to a mundane end: a father's desire to see his son.
Through this, and with the subsequent disclosures about the Grand Summoning, players may come to accept Tidus' teleportation as marvellous and/or uncanny. However, a sense of uncertainty about the status of Tidus' teleportation persist because it is linked to other events that are equally uncertain. The fact of Jecht's transformation into the monstrous Sin, for example, is initially presented to Tidus by Auron. Tidus respects and relies upon Auron, but Auron's appearance at Zanarkand to help Tidus seems overly convenient (and therefore suspicious), and Auron's taciturn qualities may lead players to suspect that he is not telling the whole truth. The statement also is hard to accommodate. Players do not see a visual representation of Jecht's transformation (except analogously, when Seymour changes into his alternate forms), nor do they hear an explanation for how the transformation came about and its extent (does Jecht's mind reside in Sin, or has he completely changed?). There is also no basis for familiarity between Sin and Jecht in terms of shape, intelligence, or motive, except Tidus' perception that Jecht's treatment of him was monstrous.
Later in the game players see that Jecht seems to govern Sin's movements. Sin quietly presents himself to Tidus at the Mushroom Rock battle site, and later at Zanarkand after the confrontation with Yunalesca (Tidus here feels confident enough to refer to him as his “old man”) (see Figure 4.3a). When the characters fall under the ice under Guadosalam, players also learn that Sin shares Jecht's love of the Song of the Fayth, likely confirming the fact of the transformation. However, some players may recognise that the connection between Jecht and Sin is not entirely logical, even within the realm of the exotic marvellous. Auron says that Jecht is Sin, but players learn that Sin is a congregation of Aeons—part of the Summoning of all the Aeons, or dead, in Zanarkand—and Tidus later confronts Jecht inside Sin. During the actual confrontation in the City of Dreams , Jecht says that the transformation (into Sin and/or the Final Aeon) is not yet complete, such that he still has some control over his (Sin's) mind. This is the logic governing Tidus' Talk function during his battle with Braska's Final Aeon: by Talking to the Aeon Tidus appeals to the vestiges of Jecht's humanity, reducing his Overdrive Attack. After two attempts to Talk, Jecht's humanity has faded and all that remains are his physical vestiges: muscularity, clothes, tattoos, and the Jecht's Shot Overdrive Attack.
Figure 4.3. (a) Sin-Jecht presents himself to Tidus. (b) The pyreflies which compose the Farplane.
The link between Braska's Final Aeon and Sin is equally ambiguous, unless players think of Jecht as the sacrifice that links the divine to the human, such that the Final Aeon is a kind of spiritual battery (an assertion that is never explicitly made). Indeed, there remains an unresolved slippage between the Grand Summoning of the Aeons of Zanarkand, the Aeons of Auron, Tidus and Jecht, Sin, and Braska's Final Aeon. All partake of the Grand Summoning, such that it is not merely Jecht that has “become” Sin: Tidus and all the others from Zanarkand are a part of the Grand Summoning which preserves Sin, and this in turn is merely part of the Spiral of Death, in which the dead (Maesters) rule the living.
Even if the Grand Summoning and the Spiral of Death are accepted as marvellous, death and the dead are inconsistently represented. Mika can voluntarily reveal his spirit-state, and Seymour is able to see that Auron is a spirit (players may retrospectively realise the significance of Seymour 's comment of: “What are you still doing here?” to Auron in Guadosalam as an indication of this). However, Tidus is not even aware of being dead: he has mass, he can injure and be injured, he can move and be moved, and he can touch and kiss Yuna. Players might generalise from the convention that ghosts persist because of unresolved commitments or excessive attachment to the world, and that some ghosts do not know that they are ghosts, as was recently dramatised in The Sixth Sense (1999). Having acknowledged this, an Aeon who knows s/he is an Aeon might choose to disappear, as does Mika when he learns that Yunalesca has been killed. However, as long as one remains ignorant of one's situation and/or uses one's will to persist, one remains (like Tidus) in the world.
Here players might explain away Tidus' and other Aeon's solidity as part of the game's (meta-) physics. It is significant that Tidus is not undead in the classic sense of a putrefying corpse. Indeed, the absence of zombies, vampires, mummies, and other literary and cinematic icons of the undead is significant for reasons other than censorship. Excluding Anima, who embodies bondage and torture with her Pain attack, FFX visualises death not in terms of putrefaction, but dissipation . It is as if material existence is merely a solid state of a substance that can turn liquid or gaseous. This is perhaps evident in elemental beings such as the Larva (Fire), Imps (Lightning), Ice Flans (Ice), and Remora (Water), which may be seen as a distillation of compound materiality into its fundamental particles. Players may also distinguish an even more fundamental particle: the atoms of spirit, or mind, positively embodied by Aeons, and negatively embodied by monsters such as Ghosts, who are susceptible to the White Magic spell, Holy. That is, the spirit world may be seen not as some “other” realm, but as the inspiriting force behind all matter: an animistic conception in which all things have a spirit, and are spirit.
However, if players make this inference, another distinction needs to be accommodated. During combat, we bear witness to the way in which Fiends killed during battle dissipate in a spectral blur marked by motes of multi-coloured lights. Given that Fiends are the spirits of the dead, we may presume that these motes represent the atomic particles of the spirit-hood dispersing into the world. However, when we see similar lights at the Moonflow and at the Farplane they are called pyre flies. Pyre flies, we are told, resonate with the memories of the living, and in the Farplane they may manifest as the spirits of the dead (see Figure 4.3b, above). Since Tidus crosses the barrier into the Farplane, it would seem that Auron could enter but chooses not to because he knows he will see nothing of value. However, as they leave, Seymour 's father, Lord Jyscal, appears at the edge of the Farplane and physically passes on a recording sphere speaking of Seymour 's treachery. We are, then, less likely to see him as merely a projection. The problem is, do we read Lord Jyscal's handing over of the sphere as a supernatural occurrence within an already otherwise supernatural diegesis, in the manner of a new level of the marvellous? Jyscal's desire to pass on the truth makes his manifestation equivalent to that of Aeons like Tidus and Auron, who are able to remain in the world because of their attachment to it. W e have no basis for perceiving Tidus, Auron or Seymour as a mass of pyre flies, but Lord Jyscal's manifestation effectively blurs the boundary between Aeons and pyre flies.
This indeterminacy about the metaphysics of death culminates in the patent surrealism of the final battle with Yuna's Aeons and Yu Yevon. Characters have an Auto-Life status, so that when they die during combat with the Aeons or Yu Yevon they are immediately resurrected. Even though they are resurrected with minimal health points, so that characters may die quickly after being brought back to life, the absolute worry of dying and having to replay the game sequence is suspended. In this respect, the end sequence is strangely abstracted from other combat sequences. Furthermore, while Yu Yevon is not physically imposing he is likely to kill the player's characters several times, and his healing abilities mean that he keeps returning to his initial condition, undermining any sense of progression. The easiest way to kill him is by the logical reversal of attack types. If we cast Reflect on the characters, Yu Yevon's spells rebound back onto him. By casting Zombie status on Yu Yevon, his own healing spells injure him; and if we subsequently cast Full-Life on him he is subject to the reverse: full death. The whole end sequence is, then, governed by a kind of dream-logic.
While this last conflict may seem anticlimactic, it retains a certain retrospective force because of its inexplicability. With Jecht dead, the confrontation is a weird witnessing and participation in the known resolution of a tragedy, a form of estrangement from the player's previous engagement with the game. At the same time, the end sequence may produce a kind of exhilarating sense of freedom, of joyous reversal: we fight amidst the abstraction of orange clouds, aware of a moment of finality, destroying Aeon after Aeon as a permanent extinction (as opposed to the temporary defeat from which they can later be re-summoned). The whole sequence allows not merely an anticlimactic resolution to a ninety-hour-long gaming experience, but a kind of suspension of the telos that governed this play, governed by a euphoric recognition that one has actually performed the labour of the entire game: one has finally made it. If no single reward can adequately suffice to provide closure for such a sprawling narrative, then the surrealism of the closing experience connotes the transcendence of the laws of the diegesis prior to re-entering the laws of the “real.”
It is possible to argue that the subsequent narrative resolution expurgates some of these inconsistencies. By dispelling the Spiral of Death, the order of Life is re-instated, or, rather, Spira recovers its “natural” balance of life and death, matter and spirit, reality and unreality. Prior inconsistencies can therefore be dismissed as an index of the prior imbalance. However, players may still have cause to hesitate between different interpretations of the game. As has been noted, despite knowing that events are marvellous, there is a logical reason for perceiving FFX as an uncanny projection of Tidus' mental state. Similarly, while Yu Yevon may be read as a supernatural being, he is figured as an elemental ball of anger or hatred just prior to being unveiled as a small, ugly, and pathetic figure. This may incline some players to read him as a kind of psychic residue, a distillation of the hate and rage born from fear of those in Spira. That is, players may see him as literally a projection of Spira's emotional life just as some ghosts are seen as psychic residue of the emotions experienced during their death.
Players might also might read Yu Yevon as an allegorical projection, whereby FFX becomes a story about how giving into fear and hate can give rise to escalating, pointless suffering. Such an allegorical reading might be reinforced by the parallel between Seymour 's pathological way of dealing with the prejudice he was subject to as a child, and Yu Yevon as over-reacting to his fear of humanity's potential technological powers (especially given Seymour 's desire to appropriate Yu Yevon's power). That is, these coincidences or parallels are readily interpreted in thematic terms, allowing players to read FFX as a parable about not only an adolescent's rite-of-passage, but intolerance, fear, or, even more generally, the human condition. Indeed, even those players who do not observe any inconsistency in the logic of FFX 's events, such that it is not experienced as fantastic, may still hesitate over whether to read the game as supernatural, uncanny, or an allegory, preserving a hovering sense of its indeterminate reality-status. This uncertainty may promote a global anxiety about what is happening that may complement any paranoid, projective tendencies that the player experiences about events in the game.
Conclusion
This chapter has argued that FFX may be seen as placing emphasis on reality by not only revising hermeneutic expectations about what is happening, but by also revising players' understanding of what has happened and if or how it happened. Therefore it is reasonable to suggest that the ambivalent perceptual impressions of reality addressed in Chapter Two are recuperated in thematic terms and integrated as part of the game's aesthetic effect. That is, the experience of intensities and saturations produced by disjunctive proximal-distal transactions may work together with the inconsistent cognitive construction of reality to reinforce players' confusion, and suspense, about Tidus' experiences. As will be argued in later chapters, disjunctive affects may resonate with other aspects of FFX , but before making such arguments it is necessary to address a different kind of reality: the reality of players' relationships to characters.
