Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood makes its colonialism as awful as it should be
Colonialism in fantasy is a troublesome subject. For any fantastical world, it’s almost required that there be some form of empire, a central suzerain controlling territories and peripheries. The forces involved are always dressed with proxy races; humans , orcs, elves. Ways to depict racial imperialism while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability. The author, in plain, can have a surrogate racial violence without the worry of actual racism. The races aren’t actually real, after all. They’re “evil tribal warmongerers with totally not-Zulu facepaint” or “the tall and lithe white people with sharp ears who are horny for plant stamens”. Joke’s on them! It’s still racist. Sorry, fantasy authors.
Take for example The Continent by Keira Drake. Its abstract reads “[f]or her sixteenth birthday, Vaela Sun receives the most coveted gift in all the Spire — a trip to the Continent. It seems an unlikely destination for a holiday: a cold, desolate land where two “uncivilized” nations remain perpetually locked in combat.” Although the novel describes a young (white) woman who discovers that ‘this is wrong, actually,’ the premise is precipiced on a 1:1 replication of the existence of colonialism and the orientalist propaganda surrounding it. It doesn’t help Drake’s cause that one culture is mirroring Sengoku-period Japan and the other a crude syncretism of Native American Great Plains culture. Uh oh.
When inventing a fantasy race or depicting dominion and oppression, that’s undeniably political. Because, quite simply, it is establishing a power dynamic. And when power is involved, care is required. Fiction is able to transgress into reality not only because it uses the words of reality, it requires them. When we read, we recognise and associate. Approximating the difficulties in our world through a parallel language, especially when our world has got a very large stake in that whole imperialism business, should, at the minimal least, be done with respect to the history and culture of people (parallelly) depicted.
Decolonization never takes place unnoticed, for it influences individuals and modifies them fundamentally. It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with the grandiose glare of history’s floodlights upon them.
Wretched of the Earth, 36.
That is why I’m extremely fond of what Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood has offered me so far. Final Fantasy isn’t known for its political outspokenness, and no one expects anything from an MMO’s story. But hot damn! It’s pretty good. Specifically, Stormblood’s depictions of imperialism, of the ideology of the imperialist, of the ‘tools of the master’, of those victimised and those complacent or complicit are all skin-crawling and very on the nose. I’ll announce right away: I’m not at all deep in the story because server issues are preventing me from progressing further (lol). But the premise it has offered me, with all its nuances and uncomfortable reflections, is something I want to explicate. Spoilers here on out.
For Stormblood, a bit of context is required: On the Eorzean continent where Final Fantasy XIV takes place, there exist four major city-states: Gridania, Limsa Lominsa, Ul’dah, and Ishgard. All of them are embroiled in a war against the empire of Garlemald, a militaristic-expansionist power that wants to make Eorzea a province. It attempts so with a level of technology (magitek) which pales its resistors’. The Garlean army sports impressive mechs and gunships, as well as advanced engineering projects that lets it raise territorial and demarcational walls over a fortnight. Meanwhile, players that picked the Machinist class can just barely shoot a flintlock pistol and summon a floating peashooter. After the empire’s miraculous defeat, the Eorzean nations agree upon a single thing: this may never happen again. They form a military pact that… doesn’t do anything.
See, twenty years prior to the events of the game, Garlemald invaded and conquered the fifth Eorzean nation of Ala Mhigo. Even after the Eorzean alliance is inducted, it takes about an expansion and five patches worth of story for them to break the stalemate with the empire they’ve grown fat and complacent with. Serving as XIV’s in-world Middle-East, most Ala Mhigan NPCs you meet are dark-skinned, sport dreads and naturals, and have distinctive northern-English accents (which is a fantasy stand-in sociolect for AAVE), setting them apart from the lighter-skinned Londoners of Eorzea. Relevant to mention is that the game speaks of ‘Eorzeans’ and ‘Ala Mhigans’, separately.
One section of A Realm Reborn’s story takes the player to a decrepit refugee camp called Little Ala Mhigo, named after their now-conquered homeland. Nothing more than a cave filled with brown-canvased tents and bonfires, its displaced inhabitants wait in frustration, haplessly join the Ul’dahn military, or become restorationists in a fruitless rebellion. Players who have selected Ul’dah as their starting state will also have seen the scores of Ala Mhigan refugees camping outside of the walls of the prosperous city-state, clearly prohibited from going inside, no bureaucrat feeling especially spurred to hasten the asylum-seeking process. Treated like oxen, the most capable end up exploited by greedy merchants or pimps. The elderly and sick count a blessing a day.
(I have to point out: the ‘lore’ behind the matter at hand is little more than an afterthought, brown bodies exploited and suffering for the sake of sketching an ongoing, but seemingly story-irrelevant refugee crisis. Their role, up to this point, screams ‘the passive colonial Other’.)
“Our victims know us by their scars and by their chains, and it is this that makes their evidence irrefutable.”
Wretched of the Earth, 13.
No wonder, then, that in the last part of the Heavensward campaign, an Ala Mhigan insurgent rises up. Known as ‘The Griffin’, a mysterious cloaked figure with a mighty voice rallies the oppressed, marginalised, and subalternised Ala Mhigans. They attack one of the empire’s holdings, ‘Baelsar’s Wall’, dressed in the uniforms of Eorzean nations, and actually succeed in conquering it. So much for the tolerant left!!!! Then the empire strikes back, many people die, and, because this is still a Final Fantasy game, a primal is summoned.
Most cutscenes involving dealings with The Griffin and his rebellion show an effort to prevent it from ever unleashing. The politics of non-interventionism mark the Alliance as well as the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, the faction the player belongs to. Indeed: native people are dissuaded from casting off the yoke of dominion, urged to instead try ‘civil dialogue’, something the Eorzean Alliance is so liberally a proponent of. Of course, brokering a liberation with a militarily-superior coloniser without applying any pressure of sorts is a dullard’s idea, as The Griffin has been realising for the last twenty years. He dressed his soldiers in Eorzean colours as to force Eorzea into war: the Garleans believed they were attacked by them, after all. It’s so The Battle of Algiers my decolonial ass can’t handle it.
[Note how in the first stills of the launch trailer, we are given panoramic views of Garlemald’s military might, and, most importantly, their flags. Also of note is the Garlean uniform. Jet-black, bulky, militaristic. And the face-masks: deeply pale. I won’t draw parallels to the villainy of the white empire but all the evidence is there.]
This is where Stormblood starts. In the clearing smoke of a heel-stomped rebellion that, ultimately, achieved its goal. The alliance, after years of contentedness with a fragile peace entirely dependent on the bloodlust of the invader on their shores, go beyond Baelsar’s Wall and enter Ala Mhigo.
Then they stop. And I was ready to explode when general Raubahn and fuccboi Alphinaud explained why: “we don’t want to be seen as invaders.” I was worried this was going to reveal that the Eorzeans recognise the legitimacy of Garlean rule of Ala Mhigo. But instead, they mentioned how they didn’t want to be seen as invaders by the people of Ala Mhigo. And I was a bit shocked by how legit of a point that is. An interventionist force can push out an invader, but if it doesn’t ally itself with the people or plan out rebuilding efforts, it’s simply continuing the occupation under another name. Hey USA please take notes from this video game.
What’s stupendously executed is Stormblood’s exploration of how the imperialist looks and how imperialism affects. As you explore the areas, you come across an exploited, extracted land. It echoes something that used to be better than now. Defaced statues, desecrated temples, depressed peoples. Imperialism is, at the very basis, an adversarial, exploitative dynamic between a foreign occupator and a native occupied, the latter violently stripped of resources, people, and identity.
When you enter an area called The Peaks, you arrive in the ruins of an impressive structure. Your guide mentions how this was the result of civil war, not of Garlean invasion. He sardonically adds that to the imperials, this must’ve looked as “pointless infighting between people of lesser blood.” The notion of blood impurity is an important nuance, because it is including the geneology of inferiority into Garlemald’s system of colonialism. It becomes a dichotomy baked in blood, an argument of inherent, endemic weakness. As is wont of imperialist rhetoric: military defeat is the result of cultural inferiority, not the beginning of it. The colonised, in every suffering, ‘had it coming’. It’s racial theory, and it’s racist as hell.
Being the colonised locks you out of the coloniser class. This sets us up to a body of ‘inbetweeners’ that will never, can never ascend into a ruling class. They are fed the false hopes of full citizenship and given positions primed to replicate the colonial system. Indigenous culture and identity is repressed and swatted out. As life worsens under imperial hegemony, desperate people claw at betterment, and are used as local pawns. The harder they tie the chain around their own necks, the likelier it becomes they will get to enjoy a relatively better life. But ‘likely’ never, ever becomes true. We see this in history, we see this in dialogue:
One of the people you’re with mentions how the battered and bruised merchant, struggling to stand up, “got lucky, he’ll live to see another day.” The Garleans, at the administrative level, are manipulative, exploitative and merciless. All statues of the god of the Ala Mhigan religion, Rhalgr, breaker of worlds, have been defaced. Culture has to be squashed out, out of a deep fear the Ala Mhigans remain unified. But in the main resistance camp there is a gigantic statue of him, his hand outstretched, reaching for the Garlean occupation headquarters. His sermon is destruction and there has never been a more faithful congregation.
For Final Fantasy XIV, to entrench Garlemald’s cause of rule in racial theory addresses colonialism in its worst forms. But not in its most archaic forms. I think, with its elements of local insurgency, international backing, and guerilla combat, the liberation efforts become a relatively modern metaphor. The tactics used are not dissimilar to Fidel Castro’s July 26th Movement against Fulgencio Batista. I’m not saying the story is a callback to any real decolonial, socialist revolution, but I am making the case that the writers did their research.
Now, at the conclusion of this all, I am not claiming that this more realistic depiction of colonialism is in any way radical, or in itself anti-imperialist. It is, after all, just a video game. Which may or not be art? It is also a fantasy narrative. It uses fake names and people to convey something real. The imperialism gets across, but that’s it. To depict it, though, as something sinister, violent, and inevitably ending, is rare for a Final Fantasy game, let alone an AAA game in general. Using colonialism in a premise of a setting requires doing justice to the word. Meaning never downplaying it, aestheticising it, or framing its oppressed as the true oppressors or whatever the fuck. This is no Captive Prince. It’s awful, and Stormblood makes it believably awful.
It makes no mistake, though: it posits that conquerors are defeatable. It’s got many stinking health bar and requires a lot of clobbering. It is comprised of fascism, tyranny, exploitation and extraction, and a lot of gouvernors. But there is a simple grace to how Final Fantasy XIV lets players dismantle it: with a good dose of substantiated violence. Liberating villages and killing the hell out of oppressors are quest objectives. You get EXP and money for doing it. Stormblood makes an objective out of ending imperialism and treads the politics with an agreeable morality: the empire is vast and evil, the resistance is everywhere and good.
Poor settler; here is his contradiction naked, shorn of its trappings. He ought to kill those he plunders, as they say djinns do. Now, this is not possible, because he must exploit them as well. Because he can’t carry massacre on to genocide, and slavery to animal-like degradation, he loses control, the machine goes into reverse, and a relentless logic leads him on to decolonization.
Wretched of the Earth, 16.
