Étiquette : final fantasy

auronlu:

auronlu:

FINAL FANTASY X: GEOPOLITICS [click to enlarge]

Yuna’s pilgrimage is a linear journey across a landscape, but the landscape isn’t static. Unknown to Yuna and friends (apart from perhaps Auron), they’re crossing a gameboard, and the boundaries are being redrawn around them.

[[SPOILERS from here on]] Above, I’ve shown the biggest shift in spheres of influence. Before and after Operation Mi’ihen, the Crusaders are nearly annihilated and lose all authority in the regions where they had been the major power.

As we can tell from piecing together various NPC comments, their downfall was engineered by Maester Kinoc. I believe Maester Seymour was not originally a party to Kinoc’s stratagem, but barged in at the last minute and partially usurped it, as I’ll explain below.

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I was just revisiting this geopolitics question while editing the epic fic, and it finally hit me: LUCA IS ZANARKAND 2.0.

In the post above, I covered how, unknown to Yuna, a major power grab for control of the Luca-Djose corridor occurs just after she’s passed through the area, which one only discovers by backtracking and paying close attention. Kinoc was trying to take over Luca, the second most powerful city in Spira, plus the Luca-Djose-Moonflow corridor known as the Highroad. His plan worked only partway, because Seymour barged in. So, after Operation Mi’ihen, Kinoc’s warrior monks replaced the Crusaders defending Luca, and Seymour’s Guado replaced the Crusaders patrolling the Highroad.

But this isn’t the first time the maesters of Yevon have taken action against the Crusaders. When Yuna first sets foot on the Highroad out of Luca, Maechen is there to explain:

“This is a statue of Lord Mi’ihen. Eight centuries ago, he founded a legion known today as the Crusaders. In just a few short years after their founding, their ranks grew throughout Spira. The maesters of Yevon feared an uprising and accused them of rebellion. So Lord Mi’ihen walked along this very road to go face their charges and refute them. He succeeded in winning the maesters’ trust, and his legion became an arm of the Yevon clergy. It was then that Yevon gave them the name “Crusaders,” which they have kept ever since. And the rest is history.”

At this point in the game, Operation Mi’Ihen hasn’t happened yet; it’s still under preparation. So this is foreshadowing to the fact that if the Crusaders get too powerful, the maesters will crush them.

But it also shows the same north/south geopolitical division had existed for 800 years.

The statue of Lord Mi’ihen is at the southern part of the Mi’ihen Highroad, and there is a shrine to Lord Mi’ihen at the northern end where the name changes to Djose Highroad, just south of Djose. So while Crusader chapters formed all over Spira, his base of power – and therefore theirs – was in the south, far from Bevelle’s control.

Lord Mi’ihen realized the maesters were about to move against him, and abased himself to the maesters enough to avoid being crushed. When the Djose Chocobo Knights 800 years later arose as an elite division of the Crusaders, they didn’t have a shrewd political leader to save them.

But here’s what I hadn’t seen before: how this north/south conflict echoes the south/north conflict of Bevelle and Zanarkand.

Luca is the most modern-looking city in Spira, with a sphere theatrer and bars and shops. It’s a powerful, prosperous commercial port and blitzball mecca at the southern end of the world, as far as one can get from Bevelle. A largely unpopulated and difficult to traverse plain, the Thunder Plains, separating Bevelle and Luca.(Remember, Guadosalam only revently converted to Yevon, as the Ronso did; before that they would’ve been another barrier.) That unpopulated buffer zone mirrors the Calm Lands.

Luca is like Zanarkand at the southern end of the world, instead of the north. It’s not as advanced powerful as Zanarkand was, but then, thanks to Sin and the somewhat-enforced rules against machina, Bevelle isn’t what it was, either.

Lord Mi’ihen headed off Bevelle from attacking Luca as they had Zanarkand.

Later, Kinoc took over Luca instead of destroying it. But quite possibly Bevelle had intended to conquer, not destroy Zanarkand (although the weapons in that war were so powerful that destruction was more likely.)

In short, in the background of Yuna’s pilgrimage to Zanarkand, a dim echo of the Bevelle-Zanarkand conflict was repeating itself behind her.