thinking about song of ice and fire got me thinking about ffxvi again
I think it was imran kahn who said something along the lines of "I was waiting for there to be any subtext and it never happened," which is very apparent if you compare it back to its big inspiration
in the book series, and most of the show before it went off the rails, no character can be boiled down entirely to a good or bad person. they're all a product of their upbringing. that isn't to say grey morality, there are people who are obviously self-interested to the point of scheming, and some who are trying to fulfill some idea of "good" for altruistic or sometimes selfish decisions
annabella in ffxvi is very obviously an analogue for cersei, it's glaringly obvious from the backstabbing, son obsession, and haughty behavior. what's weird is that the closer parallel in personality is catelyn stark, which makes for an even less flattering comparison in character writing
cersei does genuinely awful things, but it's motivated by a far too unconditional love for a son that has had his moral compass sanded off by a severely unhealthy family relationship. so when he indulges in the cruelty that he (mistakenly) believes his father wants, cersei will go as far as destabilizing the nation to coddle her precious little sicko
catelyn represents what I like about martin's writing, that even an otherwise good person can be so spiteful as to hate someone for something they never had control over: being a child of a tryst between her husband and another woman
when it comes to any of her direct children, catelyn is almost the ideal mother in both loving them and wanting them to grow into good people (creating a healthier contrast to cersei and joffrey), but not jon. despite being a nice but aloof person, catelyn despises jon for how he represents a crack in her otherwise idyllic marriage. she hates him enough to say to his face, "I wish it was you who was paralyzed instead of my real son". she says this knowing he's about to leave forever to attend the wall, basically a self-enforced prison sentence for life. despite her cruelty, jon still loves her and the rest of the family, because he's a fool with too much empathy for his own good in the series' socially darwinist setting
holy shit annabella sucks. she's all of the most surface-level bad qualities from both cersei and catelyn, with no underlying reason driving her to be an objectively evil person. she hates clive because he isn't immediately The Special, has little love for oliver despite him being The Special because he's kinda frail, but then emulates cersei and joffrey's unhealthy codependence for her brand new son because [ERROR: char_depth_field missing]
so she's not driven by an extreme love for her children since she brushes two of them aside for little reason. and it's not like clive was a lovechild (because the writer wanted his father to be an absolute paragon of goodness) to give her a reasonable justification for hating him. she just wanted to trade up to a bigger king because These Bitches Ain't Loyal
you know what song of ice and fire never did, even though they knew the audience probably wanted it, because martin knew that it would mean nothing in the story? a moment where jon gets to righteously denounce his mother's behavior and be presented as the better person by the narrative framing. because that would be fucking stupid and undermine the grounding of these characters. if martin ever did a scene like this, it would not have the satisfying result that a reader might hope for, because that would be the disappointingly easy choice
clive laying into annabella and then reminding us that he's still also a jon snow good little boy who loves his disney villain mother regardless, right before she dies a pointless death, is like something out of a bad isekai in sacrificing opportunities for character pathos on the altar of the almighty audience satisfaction
annabella and her plotline might be an all-time low in game writing involving women, with jill and benedikta not faring much better. austin walker's bombshell statement of "somehow xenoblade 2 is less misogynistic" kinda shocked me the first time I heard it, but it's tough to fully disagree