Redemption and Retribution: Female antagonists in Final Fantasy XIV Stormblood

Spoilers for the Stormblood expansion of Final Fantasy XIV

Have you heard about critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV with a free trial up to level 70 with no restrictions on playtime including the award-winning expansion Heavensward? It also includes bereft of awards and highly polarizing expansion Stormblood, so obviously that’s the one I’m going to talk about.

Stormblood is a story about revolutionary war. The countries of Ala Mhigo (fantasy Middle East) and Doma (fantasy Japan) have suffered for well over a decade under the rule of the Garlean Empire, and the player character’s plan to overcome the superior military might of the Empire is to stage a simultaneous revolt in both east and west and spread the Garlean forces thin enough to make victory possible. As a result the expansion is essentially split into two halves, with each half having their own antagonist to deal with. These antagonists are two women, Fordola in Ala Mhigo and Yotsuyu in Doma. The two of them have similar histories of suffering under occupation and eventually joining the oppressor, and both are also given an attempt at a redemption arc for their numerous war crimes after their defeat. However, their treatment and ultimate fate in the story are starkly different, and in this way they clearly expose underlying gendered biases in how their writers think about Evil Women(TM) and who “deserves” redemption in narratives about trauma and war.

On top of that, FFXIV has some rather notorious translation differences between its localizations (causing confusion as early as 2015), and as a result the way each translation team decided to portray these women shows their opinion on the matter too. The global client of the game contains Japanese, English, German, and French language options. I’ve personally read through Stormblood in both English and German, while for Japanese and French I enlisted help to compare specific scenes.

Fordola, the soldier

Fordola is the leader of a special imperial military unit of Ala Mhigan voluntary conscripts, in other words, violent bootlickers who extort the local populace to look good in front of the empire, claiming that this is the only way to secure a future where Ala Mhigans can live safely under occupation. She is part of the raid that crushes the initial resistance movement, but suffers her own embarrassing military defeat and takes more and more extreme actions as she is pushed deeper into a corner and starts working overtime at the sunk cost factory. This includes undergoing experimental surgery to obtain an artificial recreation of the player character’s magic empathy power (the Echo), and ordering friendly fire that kills several of her comrades right as they had accepted a ceasefire offer, just to score a military victory over the resistance. She is finally captured in the battle to liberate the capital of Ala Mhigo and imprisoned to await trial.

Once the immediate post-war tumult has died down, most of the Ala Mhigan populace want Fordola lynched in the streets for her crimes. However, the expansion’s female lead Lyse refuses to let her be killed without fair trial and replace one reign of terror with another. When the player and Lyse visit Fordola in her cell, the player’s Echo gives them a vision of her past: her parents had successfully worked themselves into the good graces of the local imperial officers and obtained Garlean citizenship, convinced that this was the best way to secure a future under occupation. When a number of discontent Ala Mhigans attacked and killed her father in the streets, though, none of the imperial guards present bothered to lift a finger even as her mother begged them to. Thus disillusioned with the value of citizenship alone, Fordola decides to join the military and become strong enough that nobody can ever look at her wrong for being either Ala Mhigan or Garlean again.

In the present, Fordola is deeply suicidal with guilt and hopes to get executed and take the Ala Mhigans’ resentment down with her, but Lyse instead creates opportunities for her to actually contribute to the future of her country. Fordola continues the slow and gruelling process of making amends knowing most of the people she’s fighting for have every right to hate her, and we see some of her haters change their opinion in the face of her sustained efforts across expansions. While introduced as an antagonist, Fordola is granted complex motivations and ultimately allowed a redemption arc—the player comes away with the impression that she’s a nuanced, unlikable but interesting character in her own right.

Yotsuyu, the informant

Yotsuyu is introduced through hushed whispers of the acting Viceroy’s cruelty, and we learn she was promoted to this position after feeding the empire information that allowed them to squash the Doman rebellion 10 years ago. Her most vocal opponent is Gosetsu, an old samurai who was part of that failed rebellion. When the player corners Yotsuyu, the pacing briefly screeches to a halt to have her deliver her backstory: Yotsuyu’s direct family died during the imperial invasion and she was adopted by her aunt and uncle, who treated her like garbage while their own son made a career in the Garlean military. She was sold as a bride, then sold again to a brothel after her abusive husband died. Her first taste of independence came from earning a salary as an imperial spy, spurred on by her hatred of Doma for the way people in power repeatedly looked away from her suffering while speaking of justice and honor. 

Once she’s done talking, she attempts to blow up the building to take everyone down with her, but Gosetsu sacrifices himself to allow the rest to escape. The two of them turn out to have miraculously survived after the war is over, though Yotsuyu now suffers from amnesia that reverts her to an innocent and childlike personality and clings to Gosetsu like he is her grandfather. At Gosetsu’s insistence she is taken into custody while the new king, Hien, figures out how to judge her war crimes in this situation.

Meanwhile, Yotsuyu’s adoptive brother Asahi shows up claiming to be an imperial peace envoy and enters talks with Hien. Yotsuyu recovers her memory not long after and is overcome with guilt over her greatest enemies showing her the consideration they have. She sneaks away and tries to take her own life before she causes more trouble, but Asahi arranged for her parents to spot her before she can do so, and they promptly blame her for everything wrong in their lives and discuss trying to sell her again. Thus doubly disillusioned, she kills her parents and joins Asahi in his plan to restart the Garlemald-Doma war.

The details of this plan are convoluted and poorly thought out, but they do involve Yotsuyu fusing with a goddess to turn into a kickass bossfight. Halfway through the fight she starts actively re-traumatizing herself in order to stoke the hatred that fuels her transformation, and to try to drown out the glimmer of hope that had taken root in her heart after Gosetsu repeatedly stood up for her despite her torturing and almost killing him. After her defeat the player is forced to watch Asahi, supposedly protected by a diplomatic immunity that he already broke, physically and verbally abuse a mortally wounded Yotsuyu until she uses the last of her strength to kill him super dead, tells him he was the first person she hated for looking away, and dies with a smile at having completed her vengeance. The player character is allowed to mourn her death, but not to intervene in any of the largely preventable circumstances that led to it.

“Liberty or death”

The similarities in Fordola and Yotsuyu’s roles are obvious. Betrayed and scorned by their fellow oppressed, they turned to the empire for the power to enact retribution. They are reminders that winning the war is only the first step towards a better future, because the problems of the past that shaped them into the war criminals they are today did not magically disappear with one victory. Their crimes are similar, their kill counts roughly the same, and their personalities about equally caustic. Both are wracked with guilt and attempt to kill themselves after the war is over, and both have a former enemy vouch for their right to live despite their past crimes—but one of them gets to live and struggle to actually become a better person, while the other gets subjected to contrived amnesia and poorly thought out politics before she’s “mercifully” killed. They have the same writers, so where does this difference come from?

One immediate difference is that Yotsuyu is far more outwardly feminine and built on tropes typically associated with female characters than Fordola. Her tragic past leans much more strongly on her being a woman—the violence she suffered as arranged bride and involuntary sex worker is strongly gendered compared to Fordola getting rocks thrown at her for her parents’ politics. For most everything that happens to Fordola you could assume roughly the same thing would have happened were she a man instead; the few exceptions include a scene where some Garlean officers gossip within earshot that the savage must have slept her way up the ranks of the military, and the fact she’s walking around in her panties while the rest of her squad gets to wear pants (a design choice that has little bearing on her characterization, and which is rectified after Stormblood).

Yotsuyu is also openly prideful about overcoming this past in a way that Fordola isn’t. While Fordola claims her actions are for the future of Ala Mhigo, and only admits that she just wants the power to make those who wronged her regret it when she’s pushed into a corner, Yotsuyu makes it very clear from the start that she suffered immensely, she did whatever it took to survive, and now she’s going to make her enemies pay. She even uses this fact to taunt Gosetsu when she tortures him for information: Gosetsu ended the previous rebellion as prisoner of war and had joined the Garlean military to fight his way back to freedom, a past shame that weighs heavy on him, but Yotsuyu praises him as a fellow survivor.

Fordola’s path to power is through submitting to military authority and obediently licking boots to get into a position where she can start kicking down, a path she takes in large part because of her dead father’s memory. Yotsuyu, in contrast, defected to the empire explicitly to break away from the men that previously controlled her life, and she marks finally earning her own money as the turning point of her life. She lacks martial prowess herself, instead working as an informant, and depends on underlings to do most of her violence for her.

Yotsuyu is prideful, independent but not physically powerful, and has a history of sex work— in other words, she is An Evil Scheming Whore next to the comparatively more obedient Fordola. Consequently, the method the writers chose to make their audience believe in her deserving a second chance was to revert her to an innocent young girl that clings to a man. Fordola meanwhile gets to keep her wits and horrible attitude about her even after a long period of self improvement. She never stops being rude to everyone, including the player character, which makes her one of very few allied characters who don’t suck up to the player in some way sooner or later. Ironically, keeping her head down in one way (by being beholden to men) does in fact give her more freedom in another (to remain a huge bitch with her own distinct personality and motivations).

Fordola also gets to retain narrative relevance, with the writing checking in on her (and her character development) throughout future expansions, whereas the story largely forgets Yotsuyu existed and does not refer back to her even when it would be thematically relevant to do so. In Endwalker, two expansions after their debut, Fordola is pulled back from the brink of despair and encouraged to live by people who used to hate her, and Yotsuyu is offhandedly mentioned as the reason things are still going wrong in Doma, while her brother gets to have his corpse recycled for Endwalker’s main antagonist despite Yotsuyu having far more thematic overlap with this character.

Although Yotsuyu is more strongly defined by Being A Woman than Fordola, no other women reach out to Yotsuyu the way they do for Fordola. Lyse is there in Doma, but any time the player encounters Yotsuyu, Lyse is coincidentally somewhere else. Alisaie, Stormblood‘s other female lead, has a complex about playing second fiddle to her twin brother and is still processing the death of her grandfather who sacrificed himself to save a land marred with injustice, but none of this is used to connect her to Yotsuyu either pre or post amnesia. Only male characters decide the worth of Yotsuyu’s life, to the extent where some of these men’s own motivations are retroactively twisted and stripped of nuance to fit around her being a woman. After Yotsuyu’s death, Hien posits that Gosetsu must have cared so much about her because she reminded him of his dead daughter, who was never mentioned before this point. Gosetsu’s similarities to Yotsuyu as fellow traitors and survivors, and his eventual acceptance that his best efforts to die honorably have failed and he’s allowed to live disgracefully, are tossed aside at the last second. Any meaningful thematic parallels between these characters are abandoned in favor of the most twee interpretation of their relationship, with Yotsuyu reduced to a tragic reminder of another dead, unnamed girl.

Translation differences

The English translation inserts virulent misogyny that isn’t present in the Japanese all throughout Yotsuyu’s questline (and the rest of the game, but that’s for another article). It has Hien go out of his way to pardon the sex trafficker whose brothel Yotsuyu was sold to, which isn’t in any other language’s version of that line. Characters in other localizations insult her cruelty and treachery, where in English they insult her history of sex work. English downplays the role Doma’s failures play in her motivations and emphasizes her sadism, and removes mention of Yotsuyu’s circumstances as motivation for Hien and Gosetsu to create a better Doma that she could have had a peaceful life in. In contrast, the German translation actually adds more sympathy towards Yotsuyu than the other languages at some points, in a way that reinforces that she should have had a place in Doma, and that she didn’t is a failure that will be rectified in the future. 

The quality of the storytelling actively suffers because of the misogynistic angle the English translation takes: for example, in the English translation specifically, Hien is far more hostile towards the amnesiac Yotsuyu than in other languages, and as a result he’s incompetent and unpleasant compared to his counterparts in other localizations. Yotsuyu is now able to sneak out of the palace she’s being kept in multiple times because Hien is a blustering idiot who can’t even properly guard one amnesiac enemy of the state he won’t shut up about wanting to execute, rather than because he’s a sympathetic leader treating her as an innocent citizen. 

Fordola gets off comparatively lightly regarding English localization changes, but there was still little care to preserve important details of her story that make her character possible to understand at all, a problem rooted in the same unwillingness to extend sympathy to women. The English translation leaves out that her face tattoo, which she got shortly before joining the military, is a traditional Ala Mhigan design, meaning she had intended from the start to rise the imperial ranks as undeniably Ala Mhigan. Without this context, it seems she was trying to deny being Ala Mhigan while claiming to torture Ala Mhigans for the sake of Ala Mhigo’s future, making her less sympathetic and also just kind of stupid, really.

It also leaves out the implication that her fake Echo made her personally experience her comrades’ deaths when she gave the order to fire. When Fordola gets an Echo vision of the protagonist’s own history, in languages other than English, she asks the protagonist how the hell they can stay sane while knowing so much about other people’s pain. In English she instead responds with indignant awe at how strong the player character is for getting through the previous expansions’ events. Fordola reckoning with how she was so caught up in her own pain that she caused countless other people to suffer is glossed over in favor of telling the player how special they are. 

Even with these frustrating translation choices, one major writing decision remains clear across the expansion: Fordola gets to live and ultimately work towards redemption, with full ownership of her decisions as a complex character who is sympathetic despite her crimes; meanwhile Yotsuyu is stripped of her agency, presented as sympathetic only after that agency has been stripped, subjected to misogyny, and killed off. It stands out that the character whose trauma and evils are more tightly intertwined with gendered tropes is treated as the one who is ultimately irredeemable, and also the one who is robbed of her sense of self via infantilizing amnesia. 

Putting it all together, the line between life and death for an Evil Woman(TM) is how much of a woman she is about it. The script waxes poetic about how Yotsuyu deserved better, but when it’s time to actually create an opportunity for this character to grow, change, and redeem herself, she has crossed some arbitrary line and her death is treated as an inevitable tragedy—a tragedy that is nonetheless averted on Fordola’s side of things, and which required pushing various contrivances to even happen the way it does. The parallels between these characters, and the way their treatment wildly diverges, expose the gendered assumptions and biases behind Stormblood’s storytelling and, at many points, its translations.