Final Fantasy XIV is a very large game. An MMO that covers a series of story arcs (including one that is no longer available), XIV’s broad and wild fantasy world is loaded to the brim with characters. This short blogpost is a little bit of a focus on one particular character and his arc. Contains story spoilers for FFXIV from A Realm Reborn all the way to Shadowbringers, as well as some spoilers for anime series Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
To begin with, a quick explanation of FFXIV’s main setting. Eorzea, a continent split into several nations, is under invasion by the Garlean Empire. The Garleans, a militant, technology-abusing dictatorship ostensibly invaded Eorzea not just for material and territorial gain but because of Eorzea’s nature as a land rife with Primals. See, in FFXIV’s world, if a bunch of people express enough powerful emotion towards a god or hero, and there’s enough magical ether crystals around to serve as a catalyst, it’s possible to summon a Primal, which is essentially an incarnation of those beliefs in the form of whatever deity was prayed to. The problem with Primals is that they aren’t able to sustain themselves without aether, and thus enslave everyone around them and suck the land dry of magical power.
The Garleans as a people both hate and fear the concept of Gods and innately lack magic, so they are naturally terrified of the Primals, even more so than other peoples, as they have no real defenses against them besides technology. Combined with their expansionist policy, the Empire wasted no time into making multiple attempts to conquer Eorzea and its myriad peoples to prevent any Primals ever growing out of control and devastating the Empire as well.
The man in charge of the invasion is the subject of this blogpost; Gaius van Baelsar. Though he may cut a cliche figure in his Darth Vader-esque armour and giant robot final boss battle, Gaius is an interesting character in several ways in how he changes, and what his story arc represents on the larger stage of authoritarian regimes and the nature of a dictatorship(insofar as such a thing is “romanticized”). To begin with, Gaius is not a cartoonish supervillain. In his original 1.0 incarnation (now lost in the game’s remaking), Gaius is appalled by the genocide his superiors intend to enact on Eorzea via a superweapon, and even aids the protagonist by helping them attempt to avert the catastrophe, albeit indirectly. The calamity still occurs, however, and Gaius is forced to retreat from his conquest.
In A Realm Reborn, the Garleans under Gaius look to a new way of subjugating the Primals. It’s made pretty clear in the text that this would involve wiping out the indigenous inhabitants of Eorzea, the Beast Tribes (not a moniker of their choosing and a topic for a larger essay!), who are the true believers in the gods that are summoned as Primals. While this genocide sounds horrible, and it is, it’s important to note that the Eorzean Alliance itself (the ones who colonized the land hundreds of years prior, yes, FFXIV is about this too) has undertaken campaigns of genocide against the Beast Tribes multiple times. This hypocrisy is an ongoing plot point, from the start of ARR all the way to as of writing current content, and one the game’s still dealing with.
At any rate, Gaius finds his solution- Ultima Weapon, an ancient war machine excavated from beneath the royal palace in occupied Ala Mhigo. Ultima has the ability to absorb Primals and use their powers, thus giving him a weapon that could prevent any more disasters. Upon confronting the protagonists, Gaius explains his worldview: the strong must protect and guide the weak, because weak will inevitably put their faith in nebulous, risky things like gods (IE the Primals) and only a strong ruler can be considered reliable for civilization to depend on.
So! Gaius’s belief is something you’ll find fairly commonly in fiction (and unfortunately in real life too). An empire, a kingdom, a dictatorship, whatever, the idea of a strong and noble leader that protects the weak through decisive rule is in a lot of stuff. The writing often will ignore the inherent issues and focus more on the nobility and self-sacrifice of these sorts of characters, which is definitely on display here too. Gaius’ personal life is one of comradery with his subordinates- he doesn’t discriminate by race or origin, only caring about merit. This is a classic flag for this type of transformative authoritarian hero type. Additionally, Gaius is a man of empathy and kindness outside of battle. After he invaded a region and occupied it, he took in a group of orphaned children as his own and raised them with love, encouraging them and helping them in the rough Garlean society. He despises mass-casualties, and actively campaigned against the use of chemical weapons.
Now a lot of stories like this will only go this far. They’ll say “maybe authoritarianism is bad, you should know that already, but this guy’s good, he’s holding his kingdom together, individuals can make it work” and that’ll just be it. The problem with this is there’s nothing stopping someone from pressing the issue: “Why is authoritarianism bad? Why can’t we praise and follow good people?” In fiction, the warrior king is decisive, heroic. He cuts through the corrupt bureaucracy of the world and rips the heart from the slimy, evil politicians and advisors. if a warrior king is evil, it’s tragic- he’s become a monster, gone down the wrong path. A hero will rise and slay him and…so on.
Now this is where things get a bit more interesting. Gaius, for the most part, sees himself as one of the strong men who could lead. Obviously he puts his Emperor over himself, but in his position as commander he’s the one who by all rights is best-positioned to rule Eorzea and safeguard it. It’d be bloody, take some sacrifices, but less than the alternative he fears and as a result it’s the correct path. Unfortunately for Gaius…he was used. A shadowy faction called the Ascians manipulated him into using Ultima Weapon which results in a massive disaster that destroys his own base and nearly wipes out all present. Gaius, in despair, cries out that the devastation he had unwittingly released was never his intention and declares his rage and grief at the unseen manipulators.
Naturally, Gaius is defeated physically. But as he lay in the ruins of his life, he had a realization that he couldn’t simply let things end there, especially after all his friends died fighting for him. Discarding his former life and place in the Empire, Gaius becomes a rogue vigilante, out to hunt down the Ascians and try to root out their corrupting influence, which is quickly revealed to extend right to the heart of the Imperial bloodline. When players next meet Gaius some time later, his beliefs have changed: He no longer believes himself to be capable of becoming the great leader he once idolized, and sees the Empire as having fallen into chaos and disorder.
And it has. Everything Gaius stood for? It’s all gone. The orphans he adopted were mistreated in his disappearance, forced into an experimental program under a cruel Garlean supremacist who abuses them constantly. In Ala Mhigo the locals who were incorporated as citizens under the new regime and eventually became a military force were sacrificed as bait in battle, wiped out to a single individual. The chemical weapon project he’d successfully shut down was secretly revived and prepared for use by the Emperor, the stable rule of said Imperial line was completely upended with the ascension of the insane and remorseless prince Zenos. The peace of the Empire itself was destroyed in factional bloodshed, multiple rebellions and a fragmentation of provincial warlords each trying to take power for themselves. The Garlean Empire cannot even protect its own people, let alone the people it intends to occupy. Gaius’ beliefs of meritocracy and equality to those loyal to the cause are in the dirt, racism and abuse right back on the menu. In fact, they never left; they just weren’t allowed in his specific cafeteria.
The end result is where Gaius is currently: facing his own countrymen down the barrel of a gun, facing off against people he cares about who still believe the naive things he taught them about power and strength. He’s quite literally dealing with the consequences of his own actions: the soldiers in the Empire now are the ones who listened to every damn speech, every battlecry, every shitty pep talk he ever gave. That’s his legacy, a bunch of corpses and an Empire thrashing about like a headless beast, begging to be put out of its misery.
But you might say “Hag, but Gaius is still a good guy. He’s still being praised for his actions and he hasn’t outright called for the Empire to be dismantled, has he”? Well technically, yes, but the important thing here is the same issue with the idea of celebrating this sort of authoritarian hero archetype in general. Mainly, it’s not about him. It’s not about the warrior king. The problem with fictional authoritarian stories is that they use a sort of moral pendulum- if A is a good man, then B is a bad man, so we need to swing back to A and things will be right and B is going to represent the unnatural, evil offshoot of this archetype. That’s fundamentally wrong and to explain why I’ll use another series as an example:
Legend of the Galactic Heroes, a massive novel series that takes historical fiction concepts and applies them to a space opera, tells the tale of a democratic alliance of planets fighting against an oppressive Empire. The main focus of the series is that the Empire is stagnant, corrupt, and ruled by petty old men, and the heroic and decisive young Reinhard von Lohengramm comes along and kicks them all in the ass and takes over, doing noble and brave and forward-thinking things as he rises as the new Emperor. It’s the same thing we’ve been talking about.
The problem is Reinhard’s rival, a young admiral named Yang Wen-li. While in the show itself Reinhard’s faction does a lot of good, and the democracy of Yang’s own government is often called into question(in fact it gets shit on a lot), Yang repeatedly insists that democracy, while shitty and often busted, is still the only way to go. This is because there’s no guarantee of what will follow in Reinard’s wake and no guarantee it will be anywhere near as just or as pure; we even get a preview when near the end of the series one of Reinhard’s own trusted admirals turns traitor. When even the most lionized, intelligent and powerful men can allow such a thing to happen while still alive, what’s stopping it when they’re dead?
This is the actual issue behind the character, and we can see it very clearly in Gaius Baelsar’s wake in FFXIV. The moment he left the fold, everything immediately went to shit in all the areas he cared about. Racism, ethics, his own family’s safety, the Empire’s purpose and future. They were crushed by the oppressive nature of the Empire itself, of the authoritarian regime, and Gaius was the tentpole holding it back. The nature of the fictional strong man is that he is ultimately just that, a man, and if you kick the legs out from under him everything he’s carrying with his noble persona falls in the dirt.
FFXIV has a lot of plot issues, but I think the way it’s depicted Gaius in recent parts has been really good at highlighting the flaws in his world view and the views of people like him, both in fiction and in real life. Gaius himself may still believe in the Empire, perhaps even enough to try and protect it one day. But it’s crystal clear to all of us that everything he did was pretty much worthless in changing how a dictatorship would work, and in fact his words and belief probably did active harm to his proteges by encouraging them to give their lives in the service of an Empire that never cared about them in the first place.
That kinda sucks, ya know?
Hag's Un-profound Adventures in Writing and Opinion 