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ffxvi and vinland saga comparison, assume full plot discussion


glad I waited until now to watch vinland saga, since it's both a great series and a useful contrast against ffxvi in how their main characters are written

thorfinn and clive have somewhat similar arcs of revenge and redemption, the biggest difference is how the former has a story built around him, whereas the latter is functionally an inciting incident of the story around him

both had an important member of their family taken away from them right in front of their eyes, unable to do anything to stop it in their positions. they then spend the bulk of their lives around people they hate, being used as tools for a conquest they don't believe in until they become desensitized to murder, and are wholly motivated by exacting vengeance on their terms

with clive though, we have a problem: we're never privy to even a single moment of his violent upbringing. the time skip picks back up at roughly the exact moment where he has no choice but to grow a conscience (and you get the impression that he was capable of casting off his oppressors at any time but just didn't until it was too inconvenient not to do so)

after this, clive will repeatedly remind the viewer that he did very bad things in his past that he regrets, including a scene of breaking down in tears over his guilt. this is not a game that has been averse to bloodiness, but it's unwilling to get messy with showing us the atrocities he's apparently committed

clive's revenge story gets really muddled when he comes to a realization that was extremely obvious to a viewer, followed by this becoming completely undermined when aforementioned dead family member comes back to life looking no worse for wear

(jill also has a similar problem with a guilty past that's only ever told to us)

no such shortcuts are taken with thorfinn. not only did he have to watch his father be dishonorably killed in front of him, but he was partially responsible. and now, in the delusion that an "honorable" murder will somehow fix things—despite his father having tried very hard to steer him away from that thinking—he spends the next decade traveling with the band of pirates who killed his father and their merciless leader askeladd

we see his first kill from a young age and how much the entire experience breaks him, taking away his ability to recognize the humanity in others. we see him deceive a kind family, dooming their village to death and slavery right in front of his eyes. and when we skip forward to him as a young adult, we're taken to the nadir of his life, killing without a second thought if it'll get him closer to another fruitless duel with askeladd (who is perfectly aware of how this arrangement isn't actually all that beneficial to him)

the entire first season of this show is spent with this sad and wretched picture of a man, with nothing to give you the idea that there's any way out of this cruel cycle for him. when a close friend of his family finally catches up to him late in the season and tries to plead with him to return to his remaining family, thorfinn asks why he should give a damn about something that won't benefit his vengeance mission. seeing that meek little boy become this pathetic creature of base instinct makes the hope of redemption seem impossible

until askeladd, sacrificing himself for a shockingly noble cause, dies right in front of thorfinn and tells him in no small words that he needs to find new purpose in life

season 2 gives us a new point-of-view character in the form of einar, a man who also had everything taken away from him right before his eyes, but refuses to be broken by any of it. when we arrive back at thorfinn, from einar's perspective we see an empty being, having lost any good reason he can see for wanting to live

surely enough, in the course of another 8 episodes, einar's hopeful perspective gets through to thorfinn. in his nightmares, he stops running from the ghosts of all the people he's killed, giving his oath that he will make a more peaceful world where their souls can rest. he finally climbs out of the hole his life is in, and it's one of the most beautiful moments of any work I've watched

I really, really wish that ffxvi had strived to make the story as a whole a vehicle for seeing a man make that kind of character journey. that game makes it an instantly foregone conclusion, to give a slightly different flavor to the (imo) reheated leftovers of the archetypal final fantasy plot

it didn't need to look to western media to find mature stories of men and women pulling themselves out of the abyss, japanese series like vinland saga do it a whole lot better than almost anything else

(and yes I know the second season only just recently finished, the manga had reached that point a while ago)


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