Killing Our Gods: Faith Remains in Final Fantasy X

Killing Our Gods is a monthly column from Grace Benfell about Christianity, religion, and role-playing through a queer, Marxist, and lapsed Mormon lens.

There’s a continuous still shot in the Swedish Film Songs From The Second Floor that has long stuck with me. A massive congregation gathers at a cliffside. All are dressed formally, some are clergy, others nobles. Gradually, a procession moves up from the bottom of the frame. At the front is a blindfolded young girl. They lead the girl to the cliffside where a bishop steps forward and pushes her off.

What’s haunting about this shot is its stillness. You get the sense that everyone knows what is about to happen, but rather than terror or distress there is complete solemnity. This young girl’s murder is neccessary to the maintenance of society. The soldiers, clergy, and businesspeople who watch on believe this. That is why they let it happen.

Final Fantasy X is a game about standing on that precipice, ready to die as all of culture watches you. It unveils what, and who, has to die to make faith live. It asks whether that is a price worth paying. Sin haunts the world of Spira. A massive organic machine that seeds destruction in its wake, Sin is widely believed to be the punishment for Spira’s overreliance on technology. The one way to stop it is a summoner’s pilgrimage. As dictated by the prophet god Yevon, a talented sorcerer, monk, or priestess, must travel across the land of Spira. They must gather powerful creatures, Aeons, to summon. At the end of the journey, the summoner will banish Sin with a final Aeon, losing their life in the process. The resulting “Calm” lasts only ten years. Sin eventually returns, in what Spira’s leaders inevitably attribute to the land’s ongoing atonement.

FFX begins in the middle of Sin’s resurgence, as Yuna and her new friend Tidus begin a pilgrimage. Tidus is a foreigner, from a distant past, he is tossed into the future by Sin. Yuna is a summoner. Her father was the last person to banish Sin, over a decade ago. Yuna is the sacrifice the world makes to sustain itself, for at least a little longer, but make no mistake, Yuna knows what she is doing. She walks to the cliff, eyes wide open. Even as she does, the motives of institutions supporting her leap become ever more suspect, and she begins to wonder if there might not be another way.

People tend to read Final Fantasy X, or even the whole series, as anti-religion. This is a reduction of its most profound nuances. It conflates the series with the loudest atheists, who tend to view religion as an evolutionary defect, a lingering effect of “primitive” behaviors. The assumption is that education or debate will free “locked” minds from the disease of faith. How many videos are there of Richard Dawkins debating creationists? (Don’t answer that). FFX deftly resists these platitudes. Just as in reality, the fantasy world of Spira’s religion roots itself in material and cultural conditions.

The fact is that Sin, much like the ever escalating economic crisis of capitalism, or climate change, or more fundamentally death and pain, is a major threat to the lives of ordinary people. It is a massive enough threat that it requires a communal, organized response. The equivalence of church and state in Spira means that there are very few alternatives. For many people, including several of the game’s principle cast, Yevon’s teachings are the only way to live. They are the only thing that has even temporarily ended Sin’s terror. Crucially, this does not make their faith less vivid, less real. Wakka is the first faithful person Tidus meets upon reaching Spira. He takes Tidus into his home, tolerating his questions, and showing him how to live in a different time. Wakka and Yuna’s homeland, the isle of Besaid, gratefully houses Tidus. Clinging to Yevon may be the desperate act of the threatened, but it also structures a tight-knit community of believers.

There is, of course, a dark side to this. Yevon’s teachings, no matter how sincerely believed, support a system of incredible violence. It would be impossible for the religion to become popular or powerful without Sin. The two exist in an almost symbiotic relationship. While Spira believes in Yevon because they wish Sin to end, Yevon’s teachings offer only the vaguest ways of making that happen. Furthermore, Wakka hates the Al Bhed, a racialized nation of tech enthusiasts, who refuse to give up their advanced technology. On one hand, Wakka’s resentment comes from real ideological tensions. On the other hand, Wakka labels the Al Bhed as untrustworthy. He discourages even association with them. I want to be clear that I do not think Wakka is a bad person or that the game wants to claim that “even racists can be good people.” Rather the moments where Wakka’s kindness falters are an example of what his ideology prioritizes, what the systems around him encourage. Faith can foster community; it can also fester bigotry.

Wakka’s position, and Tidus’s relationship to him, echoes real world Christian communities. When I was younger, I believed that Mormonism transcended politics. My faith community leaned Democrat, unusual for the area, but was as politically diverse as a middle class, primarily white community of believers could be. In turn, my memory is of real kindness. I remember a sense of caring for and looking out for each other. We would pray for the sick over family meals. There would be community wide calls to help people move. My parents would stay long after church ended to chat with their friends. I vividly recall helping a ward member fix their sink with a local engineering professor. Part of this was, of course, because I was a child. I did not see or understand moments of cruelty. 

Eventually though, it became impossible to avoid. The cruelty that was accepted at church, the shaming and ocstrasizition of those who failed to live up to punishing standards, the total abstraction of queer people, reduction of the marginalized to a problem to be solved so that faithful white mormons could continue comfortably all compounded. Queer people specificallly, whether they leave the church or stay, or stay, often suffer from PTSD and suicidal ideation. It is a natural consequence of a culture that calls “homosexual behavior” a sin and puts an extreme emphasis on the necessity of the nuclear family. To reject those teachings though would end Mormonism as the mainstream understands it. The death and trauma of LGBT+ youth is regrettable perhaps, but doing anything to prevent it would destablize the foundation of the heteronormative church. So church leaders settle for empty words and platitudes. With that burden, my faith that Mormons were a fundamentally kind people, that change could come from within, began to waver. 

As much as FFX is about faith’s sacrifice, the things systems and people do to maintain belief, it is also about the point when faith shatters. Refreshingly, FFX’s pace is slow in this regard. There is not a single moment where Yuna’s belief breaks. She does doubt from the beginning. The infamous laughing scene is actually one of FFX’s most keenly observed character moments. The laugh is simply Yuna and Tidus attempting to look and smile past their pain. Yuna is going to die, though she is young and making new friends. So, she forces herself to smile, to laugh, to find joy in what remains of her life. That pain becomes more acute, as she falls in love with Tidus, as her friends long to save her, and as her once fianceé Seymour, the maester of Yevon, is exposed as a murderer. Still, even as Yuna combats Yevon’s leadership, exposing their worst crimes, she holds in her heart the intention to die to save others. It takes until the moment her pilgrimage is nearly complete to reject her fate. 

Yuna discovers that the final Aeon is made from the soul of one of her companions, yet another sacrifice. She realizes that her pilgrimage was, in many ways, an attempt to run from her sorrow. She lived in a world constantly under sudden threat. Her father had died to temporarily end that threat. The only hope in such a world was in her own death, thereby freeing herself from the sorrow of living in a broken world. Finding a new hope would require facing the injustice of the world, living in one’s sorrow, living one’s own life. After this realization, Yuna has the courage for a new hope and she chooses a new belief.

Many people do talk about a single moment their faith fell apart, and I believe them, but the process was incredibly slow for me. It ebbed and flowed, it still does. Faith is not static. People do not simply alter from Christian to Atheist. Faith instead transforms. Now, I hope that I believe in my friends, in a queer divine, in a material world that can change. Ultimately, that is what gives FFX its ferocious, echoing power. It knows that faith and its communities are malleable, that they can grow and shrink. It is when Yuna and her friends believe in each other, rather than Yevon, that the world begins to change. 

Key in all this is that there are things Yevon taught that are worth keeping. The pilgrimage brought all these people together, the people that shattered Sin’s grip over Spira. Yevon built the communities that will survive past its faith. There is a kinship, a commonality to the people of Spira that will rebuild the world. That does not mean there will not be tensions, problems, and difficulties (this game has a whole sequel after all), but it does mean that faith can make something new.

It is difficult though, to overcome the institutions of faith. Final Fantasy X goes to great lengths to show how much support Yuna needs to reject her fate. Without Tidus or Wakka or any of the other stellar party members I haven’t mentioned, it is easy to imagine Yuna walking off the cliff. Similarly, I think often of the queer mormon kids, closeted, perhaps alone, without knowledge or support of how to get free. I worry everyday that they will be one day murdered, tossed from the cliffside so that more important work of religion can continue. As long as Mormonism requires death, there will be more dead.

FFX believes that more is possible. Together, with the families that are chosen, not forced, with communities that support not exclude, with a vision beyond the day-to-day problems of survival, we can make a sustainable world. We can form a new faith, in which the powerful now longer sacrifice the innocent. FFX knows that there are reasons why we believe in oppression, why we believe in those that hurt and kill us. It simply asks us to move that faith toward new life, new gods, and new ways of living. The cliffside will be barren, yet not a place of death. We will dance and make new rituals from the space the old ones left behind. Faith will remain, and so will we.