Originally Posted by
Example
For the first half of the game Squall does nothing but wallow in self pity over being an orphan. That might (keyword here) have been understandable if not for everyone else in the game also going through the exact same experience, yet they managed to get over it and move on with their lives while he for some reason couldn't. Why should I feel sorry for him again? Aside from not knowing his parents there was literally nothing else wrong with his life. He was the best at what he did and surrounded by people who genuinely cared about him, yet he constantly pushed them away because he was a afraid of losing them and having his feelings hurt. And no I didn't just exaggerate, that's literally his rationale. This made it impossible for me to resonate with him on any level.
I see lots of people hang trout on Cloud for being "emo" yet give Squall a free pass for being just as bad if not worse, I just don't get it.
I wouldn't say he wallowed, I mean you don't even realize he's an orphan until the second disc, instead he's just a highly competent loner that everyone wants to best buddies with. I also find it less whiny and more of him just observing how silly it for people to assume attachment with no basis for anything to go on. He's this really uptight and stiff professional stuck baby sitting highly competent but ultimately juvenile characters acting their age. He's trying to be an adult despite being a kid himself. The other thing I would point out is that Squall was pretty much a loner even as a child, with Ellone being his only emotional connection and she was taken from him. The rest of the cast was adopted except for Squall and Seifer, but Seifer isn't so bottled up emotionally that he can at least make friends even if his childhood woes manifested in other deviant behavior; so being the orphan who wasn't good enough to have parents generally does a number on people and it simply solidified his antisocial behavior even further. So even if you dislike his personality, it's actually justified in game. So yeah, shy kid loses his parents and his only emotional connection and basically shuts down socially to protect himself and carries it into adulthood, then he's forced to confront his emotional baggage cause jokes on him, you need some level of social skills to make it in society. This isn't to say he doesn't whine and have some cringy moments here and there, but you also have to remember that Squall is not emotionally stable and thus his extreme moments of showing his feelings are going to look completely awkward to a normal person because he's wrestling with something he doesn't know how to deal with, whereas more well adjusted people learned to deal with this crap in elementary school.
I can totally relate to all of this because in high school, I was pretty much the same way where I brushed people off cause I didn't want to be connected to them (I still tend to be arms length), I did act older than I really was, I would still say that I have the EQ of a child and I am more logic based in my assessment of the world around me. So having a hero who is emotionally stunted like myself was rather gratifying and it opened up the idea that maybe if he can do it, so can I. So yeah, he totally resonated with me more than a guy who simply wanted to be someone besides himself due to his insecurity. I never had that issue growing up, but I won't be bothered if that's why people like him. So Squall for me was something personal, Cloud was just a character in a poorly written story.