Overanalyze art of visual AND non-visual varieties here!

Since this is a video game forum, I will start with a video game. This was the OP of the 18th thread in the YCS goldmine (YCS is the video game shitposting forum, and they make TONS of threads, but only 68 of them have been goldmined) over at Something Awful, and it wasn't even in YCS, just to give you an idea of how awesome it is.

This is my analysis of the final battle of Final Fantasy VI. There will be spoilers for the last boss. Also, some people on the IRC already saw this, but I don't care.



   

Yes, yes. We all know how it went down. You talk to Kefka, he delivers killer dialogue, he lasers tons of innocent people, and then he ascends on a spire made of deities and oversized animals. But do you think that's really what happened? Do you think that at the end of the game Kefka really transforms into an uber-muscular 60-foot-tall purple angel? Of course not. Kefka is the incarnation of ultimate self-centeredness. He will do whatever it takes to reach his goals. He kills the emperor and even breaks the world into pieces. The writers elevate him to a mythic level. The effect this has is that he can speak awesome line after awesome line and we don't bat an eye at it. "V for Vendetta" also uses this technique. V is an abstraction of a human and he represents the little glimmer of hope people have when faced with adversity. When he gives his speech of many V's, we are impressed by his wit and cleverness rather than finding the soliloquy cheesy or quippy. He is not human anymore, but rather a demigod.

He is written to represent the embodiment of an idea, and he is drawn to show what happens when a person fully surrenders to his vices. The easiest way to visually represent selfishness is as vanity, the visual equivalent. Much like other immature kids who don't know how to put on makeup, he takes the "makeup makes you pretty" concept and runs with it and ends up looking like a clown. In the final battle, he got all the power he wanted. He has amassed tons and tons of it. But it made him grotesque. Each enemy on his pillar of doom tells us something about Kefka, and their proximity to him is a symbol of how closely he holds them to the core of his being. The bottom monster is hate, which is not one of Kefka's primary motivators even though it manifests itself on the very outside of his interactions with the rest of the world. (who can forget the line, "I hate hate hate hate hate hate HATE you!!!!!"?). He is furious, he is sinewy, he is furthest from the actual being of Kefka. The second tier is bondage. He is not truly happy with himself, he is suffering from a compulsion to keep getting more powerful. He is addicted to it. The third tier represents his god complex. It is pretty clear, the only things in it are a man with the figure Greek god, and a woman with huge magical powers. The final battle is against the man himself, with skin tinted with the color of royalty; with muscles that are so bloated as to be disgusting; with qualities so close to angelic that they fall straight into the uncanny valley. This is the summation of all his faults in one tragic mess.

If you'll notice, there is a thing that looks like Kefka in each individual tier. The first tier is only a crude likeness, having only his hair, but the blue person in the second and third tiers, who starts to look closer and closer to the real person, serves as an anchor to show us that we are peeling away his personality traits one by one. In the end, when we finally get to the "core" of Kefka, he dies. He has to die. We robbed him of all his life force. Similarly, in Romeo and Juliet, the title characters were in love to a fault. It completely consumed their lives and they lived solely for each other. When Romeo was convinced that Juliet was dead, he died because she was all he had.

Because people are not used to thinking of video games as a storytelling medium, they accept what is put on screen at face value. If Final Fantasy VI were a book, the reader would realize the absurdity of the final battle. It is never made clear how the enemy can actually attack, because they only have to be drawn statically. The player just accepts that they attack. It's what enemies do. However, the final battle is not about killing a person. It's about uniting to defeat greed and selfishness. What actually happened, what the party members actually saw, was probably closer to either decapitation or a nonviolent coup. But such a final confrontation would not have done justice to the story, the party, or the villain.