fyeahcontroversialcharacters:

Kuja is a very misunderstood villain. Yeah, he isn’t among my favorites, but the reasons for hating are just too absurd to ignore.

This defense is going to have spoilers, so if you haven’t played FF9 (or the other games before it) maybe you shouldn’t read this one

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• wears make up

Newsflash: do you know all those hot guys in the movies and TV series? They all wear make-up. Now please do tell me why this is a problem

I also fail to see how make-up is something bad. Unless we are talking about something made out of the blood of the infants or some other nefarious origin, but I doubt it is the case.

Also the make up is tied to the costume, which I’m going to talk about next.

• weird outfit (has been compared to bondage and gay femme look)

Before continuing on, we all agree that clothes are a very important way to some to express their individuality.

That’s the key word here: individuality

Kuja is a Genome. They are artificial beings created by a doomed race to be vessels in the future, so because of it they lack a soul and have little to no emotion. But Kuja was different: he was created to be the perfect Genome with a mission, to work for their creator.

All the other Genomes were very alike, most likely made from templates. But Kuja was above that, he was unique.

(some regular Genomes)

Just look how they are exactly like Mikoto and Zidane. No sense of individuality or self, just being there. But Kuja had something else, so he felt like he needed express his individuality by becoming different from the ordinary Genome. After all, he was far from ordinary.

He shows this much skin to show self-confidence, to show himself off. He’s not modest and even narcissist: he certainly loves himself, he is special. To use his elegance to belittle the others and intimidate them whilst captivating and influencing others, like Queen Brahne.

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Oh, maybe I should point out his outfit is like an over-flashy exaggeration of the regular male Genome? Just look at the picture of the ordinary ones.

• talks too much

It is a part of how he is. He uses theatrics to manipulate to archive his goals. He is articulated, and because of his own narcissistic side he might enjoy talking a little too much and go rambling on and on…But hardly without a purpose.

• “Girly”,  outfit has been compared to bondage and gay femme look

I don’t think that was his intention, really. We see in the game that Genomes don’t really reproduce, but are made through machines and other stuff like this. Unlike Zidane who was created to experience childhood and was raised in a -relatively speaking- normal environment, Kuja was created as an adult and lived in a infertile world where gender roles are unimportant and probably don’t exist. 

Same goes to all sexual connotations. Except for Kuja, Zidane and Mikoto all of the Genomes are capable only to show few emotion, and love may be a little too complicated for them.

• doesn’t show up as the main villain until later in the game

But he is hinted even early in the game. It is called “arcs”: when a arc ends it builds up the setting for the next one. I can’t even say Kuja being a bad guy was a plot twisted because it was hinted all along! The real plot twist was revealing who Kuja’s boss was and Kuja betraying this guy and becoming the real main villain and not just a pawn.

And if you are going to whine about doesn’t showing up until later on, Golbez was mind-controlled during most of Final Fantasy IV by the main villain; at first Emperor Gestahl is the main villain of FF6 until Kefka decided he had enough; Ultimecia had been controlling Edea and Adel from the future all along and you only learn of her in disc 2, the real Sephiroth doesn’t shows up until the final battle : it have been Jenova taking his appearance this whole time (and don’t get me started about Hojo). Maybe the only two Final Fantasy games you have the real villain right from the start were Final Fantasy II and V.

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• not as interesting as other villains in the series

What do you mean not interesting? We are talking about an artificial being created to be the Angel of Death (I’m looking at you, Sephiroth) that upon finding out he isn’t immortal like the others Genomes, he gets afraid.

It is natural to be afraid of dying. It isn’t a pleasant concept to the most, but can you imagine how devastating it was? He deemed himself as the perfect being, flawless. All the lesser Genomes were immortals, why should he die? Was that a flaw?

Then Kuja had a breakdown. It just wasn’t fair that he would die. How could it be? Facing with the perspective of dying and being forgotten, he decided that everybody should die too.

The entire theme of the game is life and mortality. Life is such a precious gift that should be appreciated and lived to its fullest. You should appreciate every little moment because they are too precious. Life is too fleeting. But it also teaches you that with life comes death. It is a natural thing: the Gaians (the ones who created the Genomes to be their vessels) had reached the end of their civilization and another should start anew, and this is the same for the individual. It is OK to fear death, but you should celebrate life. Kuja was so obsessed about his fear that he lost it. Kuja invite us to reflect upon our own mortality and shows pure despair while Zidane shows us the joys of living.

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Now let’s compare him with another villains:

Until Dissidia came up, Garland had barely any back-story except he was a knight for the king, went insane out of nowhere, kidnapped the princess and made a pact with Chaos upon his death. Very interesting. 

The Emperor was so greedy he started summoning demons straight from Hell to do his biding and when he was killed by the party he just defeated Lucifer himself and became the ruler of the Hell. All because his ambitions. Nice.

Cloud of Darkness isn’t the real villain of Final Fantasy III. It was Zande, and he went insane because he feared his own mortality so he decided to stop the time of the entire world and when he was about to die he decided to release the Darkness itself (CoD). Ooops. Hey Kuja! You found a kindred spirit!

Like CoD, Golbez isn’t the main bad guy of FFIV. It is Zemus. While others of his race decided to go to slumber until the people of the planet were evolved enough to coexist, Zemus was bend on world domination. Yes, it all boils down to this.

Ex-death is a tree (!?!) contaminated with the very essence of evil and the Void (nothingness). Final Fantasy V never took itself too seriously, so shouldn’t us.

Kefka went insane because of experiments and decided to “create a monument to non-existence”. He is basically a nihilist Joker (from Batman if you lack popular culture knowledge)

If your remove all the Shinra and Hojo plot, FF7 is all about Sephiroth and Jenova. Jenova is a cosmic biological horror whose existence is only about getting to a planet, infecting everything with her cells, destroying all life and use the destroyed world as a vessel (as in a comet or meteor) to get to the next world. It is said that even a tiny Jenova cell represents the whole, so Sephiroth is Jenova. It is also said that Jenova can assume any form she wants, in early FF7 when she goes missing from the Shinra building her tank was tore open from inside. So I’m sorry if you guys think you are up against Sephiroth during all this time : you have actually been fighting a humanoid-shaped alien virus.

FF8 rarely showed anything behind Ultimecia’s motivations, specially the US version. We get some glimpses, the Ultimania complements with some more, but we only got a more clearer picture about her on Dissidia. We know she wants to rule over time and space (heck, her powers are basically Einstein’s relativity equation: time, space and gravity are the one and the same and meaningless without each other). She wants to compress time to rule over it all to all eternity.

tl;dr : compared to all the villains before him, Kuja is a fairly well-developed character. He was toned down a lot for Dissidia, while some of the older characters got retconned to be more interesting.

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Sure, Kuja is a fairly odd character, unusual. But all those reasons to hate him just doesn’t makes sense. People underestimate him because he became more like a buttmonkey (no pun intended  Honest!) but in FFIX he basically single-handled caused a world war, committed genocide (twice) and wanted to exterminate all life in two planets. Now, who is the non-interesting girly villain now?