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Comment by jstarfish | Hacker News Reader

> Especially after you get the backstory on Setzer and his love interest - nothing else in the game paints him as character that would do something awful like that.

Did we play the same game? However you define "rape," Setzer was an amoral gambler and rogue whose idea of romance was kidnapping and forced marriage. His relationship with Darril was mostly one of sport. He planned to kidnap the opera singer, was duped into kidnapping Celes instead, and was only willing to help them save the world or whatever if Celes married him. She only got out of that by challenging him and literally beating him at his own game (gambling).

Setzer was misogyny incarnate...Darril, someone he had an actual "relationship" with, was only ever his girlfriend. The opera singer, he wanted to marry on sight. Dude's priorities were seriously fucked.

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Let me rephrase... Regardless of the interpretation of intent, this was not "rape in ff6" or "discussing rape", and "rape" is not in ff6.

If I heard as a parent that a game has rape in it, I am thinking "there is a scene in which a character is raped", and there is no way I would let my kids play that game, regardless of the rating, until I felt they were mentally or emotionally ready to be exposed to such an awful scene.

This is not rape in a game or anything like that. Speculation or interpretation of events or intent is FAR different than a scene literally displaying such an act.

So, my commentary in this thread has been to clarify, there is no such scene in this game, and any interpretation or speculation is just that. It does not explicitly actually occur in the game.

I don't think it's silly of you to bring this up. In fact I think it's crucial to reexamine nonconsensual stuff in fiction, even kids' fiction. But I don't think I agree with your conclusion here.

It's true: in the real world a forced marriage is more or less explicitly rapey.

But at some point we as a society decided that in light works of fantasy we don't need to really need to follow every single thing to its logical real-world conclusion.

I mean, was there rape in Super Mario Brothers? The antagonist is quite the princess-kidnapper.

> I mean, was there rape in Super Mario Brothers? The antagonist is quite the princess-kidnapper.

I was surprised to see they only now re-released Super Mario RPG. There's a forced-marriage story arc in that one too, and Mario Odyssey also had an abort-the-wedding mission.

I'm in a weird position where you don't agree with me, but I actually agree with you. Yeah, wedding implies an unwanted consummation, but there's already kidnapping and unwanted bondage (marriage), which are themselves serious crimes and boundary violations. What may or may not happen next isn't really the point since we're already in not-ok territory.

I don't have a dog in this fight, I was mainly arguing against the Setzer-wouldn't-do-that line of thought. He's a wildcard who lives for himself, not a saint. Celes leveraged his own ego against him to challenge him to a game-- and cheat at it to guarantee her success. She didn't need no man to save her. Even then she ended up having to babysit him later.

Take another look at the cast of FF6 and you’ll realize a lot of them aren’t really good people… Locke is a thief, Shadow is a straight up killer for hire, Setzer a degenerate gambler and rapist, Edgar a creepy womanizer, and Celes was gleefully killing people for the empire before changing sides (imagine a Nazi general just deciding she’ll join the Allies instead).

If we extrapolate what Setzer might do "in reality" then yeah, it's hard to argue he wouldn't do that. I don't know we can argue that he definitely would do that, but we can't say he wouldn't.

But in fiction, especially fantastical works like FF6, we can't make claims about the original work (ala "there is rape in FF6") based on those kinds of extrapolations.

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