Final Fantasy Sexism Part II: The Early Years of Gender Roles

[Mirage]

I'm going to take your challenge Lez and find the last time a male needed to be rescued in a Final Fantasy game.

I'll be back.

you might have to define exactly, what you mean as off top of my head these could fit:
Strago WOR FF6
not physically but you have to rescue cloud from his melt down in 7
Laguna in FF8
in FFX tidus is rescued in the opening scene by auron & then 15mins later by Rikku
in FFX-2, the party rescues numerous men (i.e. the chocobo idiot, kamarhi)

Well god damn you, I wanted to do this myself .

Maybe I can find more instances though. However, many of these examples are from after the era this article covers.

In FF5, I am pretty sure you have to save Cid and his grandson Mid several times. I also think both the main character dude and the two girls in the party gets mind controlled by Siren, and the only reason Galuf can make them snap out of it is because he is amnesiac and doesn't recognize the fake images Siren conjures up to control them with.

I'm also not entirely sure, but I can't remember Krile needing any saving in FF5 either.

Maybe my memory fails me, but I can't think of a whole lot of woman-saving in that game. Lenna gets saved once at the beginning of the game, and I think she and Bartz gets stuck in the antlion cave in world three, where Faris ends up saving them both.

At the end of the game, you also end up with three times as many females in your party as males. It might be interesting to note that the previous generation of heroes in FF5 (the warriors of dawn) were all men, but your party, who represents the new generation (the warriors of light), are mostly women.

All in all, I think FF5 does a pretty darned good job. It is probably among the best for gender equality at the time it was released.


As for FF6 and Terra and Setzer. Both suffers a kind of a mental breakdown. Even if it might be "stereotypical", Terra is the only one of those two who turns that into something constructive. Setzer is the one who got the short straw here. He ends up an ex-gambler dude who is stuck drinking his sorrows away at a bar, while Terra actually does something good for the world, even when things were looking as grim as they were. It definitely sounds like she's the mentally strongest of the two.