Part 3: It's a Good Thing Wakka is a Dog Person

Last time, we followed the misfortunes of a sad and soggy waffle as he struggled to earn his Wilderness Survival badge.  (He did not qualify.)

Sin drops off our hero off the shore of Besaid Island, where the Aurochs see his apparently unconscious body drifting along and decide that the best course of action is to peg a blitzball at it. These guys are terrible lifeguards.

 But he’s overjoyed to see something familiar, for once.

 He does respond by Sphere Kicking their ball into orbit, though.

“Hey! That guy stole our ball!” Also wow Botta what happened to you?? (My guess is piranhas.)

Duly impressed, the team captain and his amazing hair gel ask what team he plays for.

Aaand it took him less than five minutes to forget Rikku’s advice.

Nice save.

 

This is pretty much the only time blitzball players’ superhuman lung capacity is addressed, and even then it’s kind of vaguely handwaved. As with most other belief-suspending aspects of the world of Spira, the only explanation we’re given is that it has something to do with pyreflies. (Pyreflies: the midichlorians of FFX.) It would also stand to reason that a summoner’s ability to manipulate pyreflies is what allows Yuna to walk on water.

Long-term breath-holding does require training, though, so of our eventual team of party members, only Wakka, Tidus, and Rikku are able to swim. While Rikku hasn’t had any blitzball training, it seems likely that the Al Bhed would have some kind of device to draw breathable oxygen out of the water. (Apparently, even when she’s not wearing her wetsuit.) Either that or the Al Bhed are all accomplished swimmers!

“I think Walter is a good egg.”

 

Waffles tries to find out what exactly did happen to Zanarkand, if it was destroyed 1,000 years ago.  We’re led to assume that this is the event we witnessed at the beginning of the game, before we find out that the two Zanarkands are separate.

Incidentally, I was just listening to a Selected Shorts podcast today that featured the Ray Bradbury short story “The Veldt”. (Read excellently by Stephen Colbert.) The story features a family living in a futuristic home that automatically takes care of all their needs, allowing them to live lives of indolence. As you can probably guess, this ends horribly, although not in ways you might expect.

The society Wakka describes is a setting of many science-fiction dystopias, an advanced society that appears utopic but is fundamentally flawed in some way. In this case, the flaw is Sin.

I wonder how soon after the Zanarkand-Bevelle war all the machina cities fell to Sin. He makes it sound like it was an immediate retribution. It could be that the first incarnation, Lord Zaon’s Sin, was just so powerful that he laid waste to all of Spira on one rampage, so that all the ancient technology was lost at once. Or maybe Sin hit so frequently that the people simply had no time to rebuild, and over time, with their machina crippled by Sin’s attacks, they had no means of fending for themselves and died out except for a few survivors who figured out how to cope without the help of machines.

Here’s another seagull. This one resembles Tidus. I don’t know what’s up with that . . .

Wakka is in the middle of explaining how Old Spira was powered by machina, allowing the inhabitants to live in luxury while the machines did the work for them. Then Sin came along and destroyed everything, an act that – he has been taught by Yevon – was punishment for their laziness. Nowadays every Spiran bears the burden of Sin, whom they are taught will never be really gone until they all repent for their sins. While he stresses that it’s important that they repent, he also expresses the opinion that it isn’t fair that everyone today has to suffer for “what some goofballs did back way back when”.

This echoes the infamous Catholic concept of original sin (“I poked a badger with a spoon!”), whereby humanity is assumed to be in a constant state of sin inherited for generations since the fall of man. However, Christian faith necessitates intervention from the divine in order to be absolved of your sins (you have to be baptized in order to be “saved”, or “make your peace with God” before you die, or if you’re Catholic you go to confession and tell the priest your sins). The concept of independent self-improvement is more in line with the Buddhist interpretation of karma, whereby performing positive deeds and overcoming negative habits moves you along the path towards nirvana, a state of transcendent peace. (Also, uncoincidentally, the name of Yuna’s ultimate weapon but I’ll get to that eventually.)

Look at that tangent! Thanks, seagull.

Wakka adopts Stray Doggie Tidus and starts treating him as a little brother immediately. (Including pushing him into the lagoon and dragging him around in a headlock, which is a very big brotherly thing to do.) We learn very soon that it’s because Tidus reminds him of his own little brother Chappu, who died only a year ago, but he didn’t even take the time to get to know him before deciding that he liked him. As we’ll see, Wakka makes judgments of people’s character right away, for better or for worse.

The aurochs, by the way, is a now-extinct species of giant wild cattle similar to oxen. No, I don’t have any idea what this has to do with blitzball or why their logo is a seashell.

Most people get around the Your-Name-Here convention by not even bothering to learn poor Waffles’s name. But as epithets go this one is pretty poetic. I can see Yuna sitting on the dock a year from now looking wistfully out at the ocean and romantically remembering ~*~The Boy from the Sea~*~.

Aiders?

I guess since Dream Zanarkand is a peaceful utopia, the dream-people weren’t given any consciousness of war or unpleasant history so he’d have no reason to know what a crusade was. This makes me giggle, though.

Speak for yourself, Thong Skirt Lady!

Bawwwwww poor Waffles.  It’s okay, neither do we.

Kitties!!! With the fur ridges along their backs, they look like tiny domesticated coeurls, which is probably what they are.  Eeeeee what adorable worldbuilding.

The two main livelihoods on Besaid are weaving and fishing. Unfortunately, the local economy, which relies on sea-based trade to other islands and the mainland to export the handmade textiles and import goods, is constantly imperiled by Sin.

 

 

“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. I guess they won’t mind if I loot the place?”

Pictured: one of the few beds in the entire village. Not pictured anywhere: room for everyone to live.

There are some beds in the Crusaders’ lodge, but that seems to function not only as a base for the Crusaders but as a kind of hotel for visitors. Apart from that, there are only four huts. Even if people sleep on hammocks or futons that they only bring out at night, that is still not nearly enough space for all the people who live in Besaid! (I do assume that some of them, like Lulu and Yuna, live in the temple, but that doesn’t account for everyone.)

I guess the only real explanation here is Video Game Architecture. It wasn’t until fairly recently that games, particularly open-world games, started showing every detail of the worlds you’re playing in. The Elder Scrolls games, for example, have villages with houses for every single NPC, all of whom have families and schedules independent of you. Earlier RPGs tended to supply just enough houses as were essential to the plot plus maybe a few more (which you usually couldn’t enter) for flavor, and the layout of Besaid seems to be an artifact of that.

I would have loved to see Spira redeveloped as an open world in FFX-2, where you could go everywhere and explore everything. But alas.

Wakka tells Tidus to go present himself to the temple summoner, whom I guess is this guy? It’s definitely not Yuna, since she’s an apprentice summoner and also he knows she’s currently in the trials. Also, Yuna had to have been apprenticed to somebody in order to learn how to become a summoner, and it stands to reason that the village would have one who did not go on pilgrimage in order to perform sendings and other necessary rituals at the temple. But it’s kind of weird that he's never named.

The village probably scraped together all the money they could to fund this so Yuna could see it before she left on her pilgrimage. :( I’m sure it was not an easy task for them to raise all that money but that shows how much they care about her.

I like the idea of the High Summoners having fan followings, and everyone has their favorite. It’d be really funny if there were like, summoner trading cards, or something, but that’s actually pretty morbid. And commercial culture doesn’t seem to have hit Spira yet except perhaps in Luca. In the post-Sin Spira of X-2, though . . . it seems like something they’d do. I feel like there’d be all kinds of ridiculous memorabilia of Yuna and her guardians.

The dead summoners seem to function both like Catholic saints and Shinto kami. As an alternative to praying directly to Yevon, people pray to the summoners to ask for favors, blessings, and intercessions. There’s even some specificity as there is for which saint or Shinto shrine to pray to for a certain task: Wakka, for example, prays to Lord Ohalland for good blitzball fortune because he was a blitzball player.

 

Around this time everyone and their dog starts expressing worry that the apprentice summoner has not yet returned from the trials. With Tidus’ interpretation of High Summoners as “we should respect some great men, or something like that” and the way everyone is deliberately not mentioning the gender of the missing summoner makes it seem like it’s supposed to be a surprise. But we are so used to men being the standard characters in media that when a story starts concealing a character’s gender we already suspect that it’s because it’s a deviation from the norm, and therefore a woman. So it’s not really a surprise. (Also it's mentioned right out in the instruction booklet.)

This old lady gives it away, but she’s the only one and you have to look hard to be able to find her. (Somehow Tidus is still surprised later when Yuna turns out to be not an old man.)

I don’t know who this comment is supposed to be referencing so I am forced to assume it is Waffles. Or maybe the worried old man over there, but what an awful thing to say, Green Shirt Man!

“Except to you, just now.”

Man, that would be pretty terrible. Everyone in the village is gathered around to see how it went and they just bring out her broken little body. :c 

Which seems to be a horribly real possibility. (The second line of dialogue is from the other person, btw. They’re not talking to Tidus; he’s just eavesdropping on their conversation.)

What did happen to the last summoner? And who was it? Did they become a summoner? Did they die? (Did they become a summoner, go on pilgrimage, and die that way?) Nobody ever mentions this person again. Maybe if the fayth rejects you, or you somehow else fail to become a summoner, you are shunned by society or have to go somewhere to perform penance before you can try again.

Are you sure? We can go back and talk to all the villagers again.

This brings up a question that I have had for some time and for which I’ve never really seen a satisfactory answer: what is so dangerous about the Cloister of Trials? When Tidus goes in (and he manages to barge into all of them eventually) the only obstacle to the Chamber of the Fayth is a sphere puzzle. So, unless there are more trials that we don’t see on account of gameplay/story segregation, it would seem that the real danger is the communion with the fayth itself. (And we do see Yuna being overwhelmed by this, especially when she receives Bahamut.)

I had a discussion about this with some people on tumblr awhile back, which heck I will just repost rather than trying to paraphrase.

kawohni:
Yuna’s first “real” appearance, and she’s all sweaty and gross. :[
But in all seriousness, apparently obtaining an Aeon is a dangerous and difficult task. Some summoners even die in their attempt to do so, as indicated by Lulu’s backstory.
It’s pretty interesting, but I always wonder what exactly goes into the art of summoning. We see the tail end of the process of acquiring an Aeon in Bevelle, and it does look rather jarring and uncomfortable and I’m sure it takes a ton of spiritual power, but does something else happen?
Given that summoners are generally psychopomps of sorts, it really makes me question how one gains that power.

mintywolf:
I always wondered this too. Near the beginning Tidus asks Wakka if it’s dangerous in there, and Wakka replies “sometimes,” and everyone in the village seems worried about her, but we never see anything particularly dangerous in the Cloister of Trials.
(Also, are the capabilities of summoners really assessed by a sphere puzzle, or is that a story/gameplay separation? Are there more Trials that we simply don’t see?)
So is the danger from the actual communion with the fayth? We do see Yuna fall down exhausted after receiving some of her aeons (to the disdain of Dona in one case) and Bahamut knocks her right out.
I wonder if any summoners ever died during this process. :o

auronlu:
When I first played FFX, I also wondered what was so scary about the Cloister of Trials. The characters seem to make an awfully big deal out of MYST-style puzzles.
To some extent, I think it’s gameplay and story segregation. However, I’ve seen some pretty awesome meta fanon dealing with the Cloister of Trials in Clarion (story of Braska’s Pilgrimage) and Aftermath (dealing with the events leading to the foundation of the Youth League).
The basic idea in those two stories (if I’m recalling correctly) is: Someone died to become a fayth. The ritual of snapping all those spheres into place somehow recreates or taps into the ritual that killed and bound the sacrificial martyr, priming the sleeping fayth to be ready to open up and loan some of that imprisoned life-force out. Summoners are literally manipulating the stored powers of life and death in their hands when they touch those spheres.
Powerful, dangerous stuff, which may in turn be opening up the summoner’s spirit to accept the aeon. (And, come to think of it, since the guardians have to participate, all that mumbo jumbo with the spheres may be priming the guardians’ spirits and attuning them to their summoner in some fashion so as to prepare them for the same death-ritual in the Final Summoning.)
It’s easier to understand why the ritual of obtaining the aeon could be dangerous to a summoner.
First, there’s the prayer to the fayth. The fayth probably tests the summoner’s spirit, will, and mind before agreeing to join with the summoner, so there’s an inner trial as well as the outer one.
Then there’s the joining itself.
When we see Bahamut and Yuna at the moment of junctioning, the fayth enters her body. Essentially, the summoner is opening up her body and soul to house that fayth just like a living summoner’s statue. That’s pyreflies entering someone’s living flesh, the same pyreflies that give aeons their physical shape and that provide artificial life support to the fleshly-but-terminal bodies of the unsent. Pyreflies are like a bridge between matter and energy; they are both physical and non-physical, in a sense.
The fayth is grafted to the summoner, physically (because of the pyreflies), spiritually, and mentally. An alien is taking up residence in her head.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some summoners go insane, or that others die in a psychosomatic response that’s akin to anaphylactic shock or donated-organ-rejection.

MacalaniaSpring also put forth the idea (on the same post but I can’t find it now because I didn’t want to reblog it three times, but I liked it) that before the trials summoners spend 24 hours fasting, so that they enter the Chamber of the Fayth spiritually meditative and purified, but physically tired and weakened.

And while I absolutely agree that receiving the fayth is a spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and physically taxing ordeal for the summoner, it’s also a completely solitary one since it’s forbidden for anyone else to enter the Chamber of the Fayth. So why do guardians need to be there? There’s a little kid in the temple who says “Wakka’s a guardian, he should go help!” and another one who wants to charge in there and help the summoner himself, but what are they expecting to be able to do? Help what? How?

I mean, maybe they’re just there for moral support, or to help the tired summoner back out if necessary, but it still seems like there’s something we’re not being told. 

And of course our beloved Waffles just says “To heck with all that!” and in he goes.
He has no real idea of who’s in danger or even what’s going on. He just goes.

At first I was really annoyed with him about this, because clearly this is a tradition that everyone around him places very heavy value on, it’s something important and sacred to them (and his breaking the rules could have serious consequences, such as Yuna’s excommunication, we learn), and he just stampedes in his yellow boots over 1,000 years of someone else’s cultural tradition like it’s completely meaningless. But his heart is in the right place, and while Tidus is impulsive this shows that he is also caring and courageous, willing to charge into an unknown place he was just told is dangerous in order to save someone he has never met.

 Next time: Waffles opens the Chamber of Secrets.