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I still not understand at this day about Tidus being a projection of dead souls or whatever.
Is him an actual person or just a "spirit"?
 
Prophetic Spirit said:
I still not understand at this day about Tidus being a projection of dead souls or whatever.
Is him an actual person or just a "spirit"?
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It’s been a long time but my read of the Good Ending to X-2 is that he’s become a person, most likely through having the sort of experiences that give someone a well-rounded life. And that’s schmalzy enough for Final Fantasy.

Before that everything about his Zanarkand life is actually about Shuyin but it remains basically the same between the two entities and he has Shuyin’s feelings about them. With the “plot hole” for me being how he has no equivalent to Lenne, who seemed more important to Shuyin than Jecht did.

Now if I am wrong about any of this someone who knows better will happily explain it better.
 
Prophetic Spirit said:
I still not understand at this day about Tidus being a projection of dead souls or whatever.
Is him an actual person or just a "spirit"?
Click to expand...
He and everyone else from Dream Zanarkand were essentially summons brought into existence by the fayth. They were alive but weren’t “actual” humans. Which is why when the fayth stop dreaming (in other words, stop their summoning), Tidus fades away.

In the good/canon ending of X-2, he’s brought back to life as a human.
 
Prophetic Spirit said:
I still not understand at this day about Tidus being a projection of dead souls or whatever.
Is him an actual person or just a "spirit"?
Click to expand...
I just replayed FFX earlier this year (finally finished it, now I know for a fact I don't like it, lol) and my read of it (with a little update from the wiki) was this: In the past, Zanarkand and Bevelle warred with advanced magicks and technology. Yu Yevon, the leader of Zanarkand, before being destroyed by the machina armies of Bevelle turned everyone into a fayth and thus magically preserved in their dreams a recreation of Zanarkand at the height of its power. Tidus is an aspect of the Dream Zarkand brought into existence by the fayth (based on a real life guy who lived in the real Zarakand named Shuyin). At the end of the game, the party realizes Sin will exist so long as there are fayth, so the fayth let themselves be killed and finally move to the farplane. With no one to dream Tidus into existence, he fades away.

Now, why Tidus and Auron have physical bodies that can apparently be inflicted with things like poison and blindness despite being made of spirit matter, why no one can tell a person from Dream Zanarkand or the Farplane from a regular human, and why the dream of the fayth is a literal place in the middle of the ocean somewhere, idk.
 
Prophetic Spirit said:
I still not understand at this day about Tidus being a projection of dead souls or whatever.
Is him an actual person or just a "spirit"?
Click to expand...
It's all a bit metaphysical but... Right, so the FFX world is filled with these things called Pyreflies, which are like will-o-wisps or like pieces of soul energy. They can carry the will and memories of people, and when collected together can form physical manifestations. Fiends are formed when Pyreflies carrying the grudges, regrets, or other negative emotions of the deceased collect together, similar to vengeful ghosts in old Japanese superstition. Unsent are formed when someone has a strong will and refuses to die that their will is able to pull surrounding Pyreflies together to form a new body out of their self-image, essentially becoming a physical ghost.

Now there's some secret ritual that allows you to take someone's soul and place it inside a statue, which forms a Fayth (super literally a "praying child" in the Japanese version). The experience of being a Fayth is likened to being asleep and dreaming. Aeons are formed from the imaginations of Fayth thinking up their own image of a powerful guardian to aid summoners, their constant "dreaming" being the mental/emotional energy that glues the Pyreflies together into the summoned Aeons. Now, Sin and Tidus's Zanarkand (which is actually just floating out in the middle of the ocean somewhere) are effectively the same as Aeons, but instead of a single Fayth they're formed from an army of Fayth made up of the former population of the real Zanarkand, lead by Zanarkand's final ruler Yu Yevon. Tidus is one those, he's not made of regular physical matter, but of Pyreflies held together by the collective dream of Zanarkand and its people.

The Fayth, as the Bahamut kid Fayth explains, are tired of dreaming of Zanarkand after 1000 years, but they can't stop unless Yu Yeven is gone. Yu Yevon was so single-mindedly obessed with the idea of making Zanarkand live on forever that his obsessions have remained as the core of Sin that keeps everything still going. When the heroes obliterate Yu Yevon at the very end, this allows all the Fayth to finally stop dreaming and attain true rest. This means the Aeons, Sin, and Zanarkand all disappear, and also means Tidus disappears too, as the Pyreflies making them up can no longer be held together into physical form.

Now even though the popular of Dream Zanarkand are basically like Aeons, made from the Fayths' imagination, it's implied they have enough autonomous will that they have their own souls after death, which is why Tidus was able to see his mother in Farplane, and why there's that symbolic visual at the end showing Tidus and Jecht reuniting in the afterlife. In X-2 we have Shuyin, who looks exactly like Tidus and was a famous Blitzball player in the real Zanarkand 1000 years ago. The implication is that the Fayth based Tidus off Shuyin, but Tidus isn't a 1:1 copy of Shuyin, it's more like his general appearance and some basic manurisms were taken from Shuyin because those were things the Fayth knew of Shuyin as a celebrity.

At the end of X-2, Tidus comes back because the Fayth, as thanks to Yuna, are willing to dream for one lifetime longer to reform Tidus's body so he and Yuna can have a life together.

There's also some more stuff from the X-2.5 novel, where there's another type of summoning made from the summoner's imagination, and Tidus is revealed to actually be one of these formed from Yuna's memory of him and he could think himself out of existence if he ever become self-aware of this and has an existential crisis, kind of like what happened to Alucard in Hellsing. But that's all a bit silly and trying to set up stuff for a X-3 that will probably not happen because it's a bad idea, so take that as you will.
 
Retarded Weeb said:
Aeons are formed from the imaginations of Fayth thinking up their own image of a powerful guardian to aid summoners, their constant "dreaming" being the mental/emotional energy that glues the Pyreflies together into the summoned Aeons.
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Much better write-up than mine, but I do need to note there's some element of human sacrifice to the process of making an Aeon, and the Aeon is, in some way, based on the person who was sacrificed to become the Aeon (though this probably degenerates and becomes more general as Aeons swap hands from the original summoner who made it). But you can still see pretty clearly that Anima is Seymour's mother and Braska's final aeon is Jecht. If Yuna had gone through with making Tidus into the final Aeon, we would have a Leviathan or Bahamut Zero aeon with aspects of Tidus's character design.
 
Berrakh said:
Tidus is the opposite of Andrew Tate who places all the blame on his mom for his dad being a nigger (leaving and missing time with him).
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Jesse_Lee_Peterson_at_BOND,_2015_(cropped).webp

TEDDIUS, YOU NEED TO FORGIVE YOUR MOTHER, IN ORDER TO FORGIVE YOUR FATHER.
 
Tom Bombodildo said:
If Yuna had gone through with making Tidus into the final Aeon, we would have a Leviathan or Bahamut Zero aeon with aspects of Tidus's character design.
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That only scene when Yuna denies against Yunalesca is one of those plot twists which grabs you by the balls and screaming like hell.
And the battle is fucking hard. I love it.
 
Gravityqueen4life said:
View attachment 7483894

TEDDIUS, YOU NEED TO FORGIVE YOUR MOTHER, IN ORDER TO FORGIVE YOUR FATHER.
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I mean, that kind of is literally what happened. The big turning point to Tidus reevaluating Jecht as a person was when he saw his mother in the Farplane in Guadosalam and talking about her with Yuna causes him to come to terms with the fact that the biggest reason for his animosity towards his father was because his mother would so clearly act like Tidus was number 2 in life compared to Jecht.

Prophetic Spirit said:
That only scene when Yuna denies against Yunalesca is one of those plot twists which grabs you by the balls and screaming like hell.
And the battle is fucking hard. I love it.
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Now! This is it!
Now is the time to choose!
Die and be free of pain, or live and fight your sorrow!
Now is the time to shape your stories!
Your fate is in your hands!

And the boss music is sick as hell too, and perfectly synced for the transition from cutscene to gameplay.
 
Insensitive father and distant mother. I know nothing about Japanese families but maybe this is why Tifus resonated with the Japs more than he did here.

I do like his backstory more than I used to, because I’m less a fan of “I had one really bad day” backstories these days.
 
Prophetic Spirit said:
That only scene when Yuna denies against Yunalesca is one of those plot twists which grabs you by the balls and screaming like hell.
And the battle is fucking hard. I love it.
Click to expand...
Retarded Weeb said:
And the boss music is sick as hell too, and perfectly synced for the transition from cutscene to gameplay.
Click to expand...
I'm gonna be honest, the party choosing not to sacrifice anyone was so clearly telegraphed, I don't even register that scene as a plot twist. It is a fun scene though. I'll always enjoy those "the party gives one last pronouncement of defiance" scenes, because the ones from Chrono Trigger are etched into my memory. And music does indeed go hard. For all the faults I have with any Final Fantasy game, there's not a one of them where I dislike the soundtrack.
 
Berrakh said:
Insensitive father and distant mother. I know nothing about Japanese families but maybe this is why Tifus resonated with the Japs more than he did here.

I do like his backstory more than I used to, because I’m less a fan of “I had one really bad day” backstories these days.
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I'm not sure if Tidus's homelife is something that's really more relatable to Japs than others. People in English-speaking circles do make fun of Tidus more than Japan does, but I've gotten the impression that a big thing that causes that sort of reaction with a lot of JRPGs is simply that a lot people in the West have a lot lower tolerance for watching teenagers act like dipshit teenagers than Japanese audiences do. Even if the point is that the character(s) matures over the story, a lot people seem to get frustrated by it and blame the story itself as being immature for depicting it.

I think who gets it worse with cultural divide, but similar vein, is Squall in VIII. He's a popular protagonist in Japan, but gets a lot of shit elsewhere, especially when VIII was newer. Japanese players seem to mostly understand him as fitting into a pattern of behavior they recognize or even relate to of trying to act cool and aloof to keep an emotional distance from people, but because some small cultural/translation differences + the player being privy to all of Squall's internal thoughts seems to make a lot of Western players view him as fitting into the mold of overly dramatic goth kids that they don't have patience for.
 
I didint like Tidus when i was younger (as said above, i found him to whinny) but i came to appropriate and even sympathies with him as i got older.

Yeah, the Yunalesca scene hits hard since Yuna gets her character development and Aurons entire speech before the battle. He was waiting for that very moment. You could tell.
 
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I do actually wonder why Tidus never ”remembered” Lenne if he’s a recollection of Shuyin. I mean I’m fine just writing it off as where the story’s artifice pokes through but wondering if I just don’t get the idea of him and Shuyin as well as I think I do.
 
Berrakh said:
I do actually wonder why Tidus never ”remembered” Lenne if he’s a recollection of Shuyin. I mean I’m fine just writing it off as where the story’s artifice pokes through but wondering if I just don’t get the idea of him and Shuyin as well as I think I do.
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Because the writers hadn't thought of the FFX-2 characters yet🙃
 
LoverofPi said:
He's not a recollection of Shuyin. He's what you come up with after dreaming a literal 1000 years of people who live, have kids, die, etc. etc. etc. He looks a bit like Shuyin because these things happen, but he's about as much of Shuyin's doppleganger as Yuna is Lenne's.
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That sounds exactly like what I said— an imperfect recollection of Shuyin, which are also (approximately) the words used in game.

And he’s quite a bit more a Shuyin doppelganger than Yuna is a Lenne one since they look the same and like blitzball/swords. And presumably Auron/Jecht since they ‘recognize’ Tidus? Lenne/Yuna are kind of a bad way to make that point so I’d focus on the two older men to explain the distinction you were getting at.
 
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