Today, I scream into the dark, and at own ass….
Why is it that I'm so compelled by Squall/Seifer?
I'm not sure. This page is intended to be my ever-shifting, never-concluded attempt to examine that problem.
How serious is the problem?
Very. I became invested in the ship the first time I played the game as a teen and it continues to make me go up in hives whenever I play the game again. My concerning interest in Squall/Seifer remains unaltered through incredibly variant stages of my life. Something about it hits deep. The fact that their relationship is frontloaded to the beginning of the game and shrivels quickly makes me feel a little like I missed out on something, like there’s a parallel world where their uneven, rivalrous, confusing, metaphor-ridden relationship goes deeper.
Let’s open this can of worms.
Emotional Intimacy
It’s demonstrated early on in the game that Squall shares an emotional intimacy with Seifer that, compared to his relationships with everyone else in his life, is almost jarring. He tells Quistis to shut up and leave him alone. He tries everything he can think of to make Rinoa go away while h still sees her as an emotional threat. He makes it clear he thinks Zell is a dumbass and that’s that. But Squall worries what Seifer will think. He tries to be his best around him, to be impressive, a threat, taken seriously.
As Riona points out in her excellent page about their relationship (thank you so so much for doing that legwork and providing the actual lines and scenes), Squall repeatedly imagines what Seifer might be thinking or feeling in a point in his life when he doesn’t give a damn what most people think.
The story starts with a duel so heated it literally scars them both. That image demonstrates that the two boys have an emotional intimacy with each other that neither has with others is that they have shaped each other; wounding someone is shaping them.
That's really the heart of it, for me. That these two people have built up a relationship where they might permanently disfigure each other as part of normal daily activites, and no one else gets that but it obviously makes sense to both of them.
We never see, other than brief childhood flashbacks where they don’t appear all that close, where that emotional intimacy came from. It happened in the time before the game that we do not get to see. Why are they so important to each other in the beginning of the game? How did they decide they have this rivalry and why did they even come to this conclusion? The answers have to come from the player.
Understated
Squall becomes rather quiet rather quickly about the guy, considering he starts the game so hung up about him. He thinks about Seifer a lot at the beginning of the game, and then less and less rapidly as, understandably, much more important matters start taking up his headspace. Squall is growing up; a relationship that partially formed his childhood starts losing interest for him when he starts a romantic relationship and also gets a completely different adult life with an absorbing and difficult job and also the plot of FFVIII happens to him.
It’s interesting how much this relationship hushes up. Just the fact that so few people mention that these dudes have matching scars they gave each other is a little wild. Seifer puts Squall through literal torture as a scripted act in the romantic saga he has in his head and Squall never discusses that with anyone, which, by the way, is pretty worrying. It is a relationship that becomes too quiet, and that gets me thinking.
That reminds me…
The dude’s messed up.
Seifer, specifically, in interest of fairness we must admit that they both are. I like that. I love a dude that’s delusional. I’ll get a little more into that point in a bit when I discuss actual chivalric romance, but Seifer is playing his life by a script in his head and willfully ignoring what’s going on in actual reality. Consequently, he keeps making choices that make sense to (almost) no one else. Since Squall demonstrably does understand Seifer, he can operate in Seifer’s world too and has no questions about his actions, but it’s bugfuck insane to anyone else looking on.
I love it when two freaks share a private little world. The intimacy of being delusional together compels me, as does the intimacy of understanding someone no one else does.
I fucking love hateships
Yeah, that’s one reason. I’m just bent this way. Nothing gets me fired up like a relationship that has a strong hate component, and I go nuts for hate and. Hate and pity, hate and nostalgia, hate and sorrow, hate and fondness, hate and delight, hate and passion. Seifer and Squall, I think, have a ‘hate and respect’ relationship at first. They both care a lot about how the other one perceives them. Squall worries about what Seifer will think and won’t let himself slack around him; Seifer abandons hesitation and compassion and becomes his worst whenever Squall shows up, because he needs to keep Squall impressed, shocked, hateful, focused on him. They need to be taking up space in each other’s heads.
One reason I’m drawn to this ship is because I love a hateship and it will always compel me more than other kinds of ships. I’m a sucker for slowburns and lots of UST and foreplay; a relationship that is narratively based on hate always draws it out, makes the slowburn torturous, actually takes its time with the psychology of the relationship since the writers aren’t purely depending on sexuality and heteronormativity to sell the tension for them.
They share a love interest, I love that
Seifer’s romantic history with Rinoa is understated but canon. Two connected people sharing a love interest is a fascinating dynamic to me, but specifically when it is not a love triangle. The triangle does not exist here because time breaks the shape(fitting, considering.) Rinoa was with Seifer, then Squall, no overlap. They both see something they love in her; their similarity is emphasized, the closeness of their own relationship in the symmetry of their desires. It’s abstract, but interesting.
THEY’RE KNIGHTS
HOLY SHIT MAN I LOVE KNIGHTS, I love chivalry, I love medieval masculinity, there’s something between that archaic chivalric men’s honor code and Seifer using the archaic term ‘romantic’ to refer to his idealized dream, there’s something here in how they seek out these archaic roles and archaic structures for their relationships, and the inherently subby nature of being a Sorceress’ Knight rules also.
I called their relationship ‘metaphor-ridden’ in the introduction up top. Squall and Seifer slip into a private universe easily… they say things other people don’t understand, they get unreasonably intense quickly. There’s torture, there are several death matches, there’s fatal compulsion to the powerful women that run their respective lives; these two do the things they do for abstract honor, duty, and idealism reasons that make their motivations a little confusing. Seifer acts like a man who has read The Knight of the Cart and who is now doing the shit Lancelot does on purpose, but unlike with Lancelot, we’re not in his head and can’t actually see the reasons he just keeps digging that hole with that sunk cost fallacy shovel.
Incidentally, Seifer’s hound-like, lockjaw grip on a romantic ideal that keeps him utterly blind to the reality he’s living in reads more like the real deal medieval chansons I have read than the majority of modern media about knights. The absolutely stupid choices he makes in defence of a woman who is ruining him is more ill-made knight than a lot of takes on actual Lancelot. The unconditional love in the work of de Troyes is unconditional, his protagonists are, by modern standards, undeniably bad people. They kill for love. They kill a lot for love. They ruin their own reputations and go mad and abandon anyone else for the sake of their true love, who is also a harsh, commanding mistress. Seifer’s mistaken and uneven love for Ultimecia is more knight than anything Squall has going on.
This has become a tangent.
They leave it hanging
Through the game, Squall slowly loses respect for his rival. Squall’s correct; Seifer keeps making blatantly deluded decisions based on a willful misunderstanding of the situation he’s in and gets his ass kicked repeatedly in the process.
(Another way I could phrase that, if I wanted to flip the script, is that Seifer, a very young man, is taken advantage of by a canny abuser and starts breaking down under the abuse, which causes the people around him to gradually lose patience with him as he acts out and refuses help, which are almost mechanically predictable reactions to the treatment he’s dealing with. I digress.)
The two last interact before the final battle as Seifer pulls yet another dick move while falling apart, and then they never see each other again. Seifer is seen in the ending video, but not with Squall; he seems to be doing much better, but without his previous life and social connections, which are ruined.
Squall wins the rivalry. Seifer loses every contest; every battle, every philosophical point, socially, societally, totally. It feels grimly appropriate that Squall seems to discard him after this, the situation resolved and left behind. But there is necessarily a sting in the fact in that, per canon, the entire relationship really was just a conflict and Squall appears to be fully over it once he wins.
It is another factor that makes the relationship compelling, because someone who got invested in it will want there to be more. A final conversation, a real one, once the stress and chaos are over. Reconciliation, or, failing that, a proper set piece battle that mirrors the one that opens the game. It is an admirable narrative move to refuse that, to give the player not what feels right but what is actually appropriate to what happened to the relationship. Squall loses any respect he had for Seifer, their respect-based rivalry dissolves, and when Seifer is at his lowest, he’s cut cold.
(If you are asking yourself, ‘can we pinpoint the moment Squall loses all his respect for Seifer and their relationship as it was before ends?’, well, to be honest, it is probably the time Seifer literally tortures him. I know that’s early in the game, but it checks out, and also, he literally tortured him.)
I’m a fan of brutal writing. This is brutal; perhaps unintentionally so, as it may have been that they just cut Seifer out of their ending because they wanted a neater, tighter, more poignant conclusion, but nonetheless that is the ending this relationship gets. That is great writing, it's a compelling arc, and the fact that it leaves me wanting much more is undeniable.
About that scar…
I became convinced early on that Seifer lets him do it. After Seifer cuts Squall, he doesn’t swing again. It really looks like he could have dodged the return strike, if he had wanted to. What he does is close his eyes and flinch.
Again, what a moment of passion to introduce a character that then spends the first half of the game trying not to have emotions–reckless, unbridled, bitter hatred that is expressed in physical violence. Serious stuff. It leaves a mark. And, in my opinion, Seifer does let him do it.
Because he sees himself as a knight, bound by a code of honor? Because he shares a special emotional intimacy with Squall that makes him immediately regret what he did? It’s a microcosm moment; almost cosmically, Seifer just can't win. It looks like he has the upper hand for an incredibly brief moment, but he just chokes, like he has to, and stands still to let Squall win.
Seifer is going to lose from the start, and in that moment of hesitation that ties up their very first fight, I see an admission that he is going to lose because he always sabotages himself.
Could it have worked out if...
Lol, no.
Squall/Seifer is impossible in canon unless canon just doesn't happen to them. The intensity of their relationship, built on childish assumptions about life that crumble in the face of reality, crumbles alike. Seifer’s impression of the adult life he wants to have, innocently ideal, makes him a target for an abusive actual adult that just hollows him out. Squall’s purposefully insular worldview is shattered by finally opening up to the world around him, which is only accomplished when he falls in with much better people than Seifer. What they share slowly slips until the point where they become incompatible.
The relationship is as much of a lost cause as Seifer is. It just does not and is not going to work out. And that’s compelling to me. If you’re a certain kind of person, knowing there’s no way to work something out just makes it more interesting. Why not? Is there really no way? What would have to change?
The questions build up, the word docs with name like ‘ahhh fuck it why not’ get created, the AUs get alternate. There are ways to spin this post-canon; there are ways to change things so that it works. But the reality of the game is one in which there is no way. The game begins with the end for these freaks.
Any conclusions?
Resisting the urge to make a parallel conclusion to the character arc and just let this page fizzle out without resolution, what I will say instead is that we have a relationship compelling because it starts strong but disintegrates as one character learns and grows and the other one just fucking dissolves. The relationship is weird, hard to pick apart, sometimes every jarring or uncomfortable to other people in the setting. Like a character that dies early and could have done so much more, I keep getting compelled by this ship because I can just feel…
Well, something that was never going to happen. It couldn’t have. I’m not chasing an arc or story or moment that could have happened ‘if’, I’m chasing one that knows itself it couldn’t have been. That’s a frustrating poignancy that’s going to keep my stupid ass coming back.
There’s a haunting strain that reminds me too much of same-sex relationships I’ve seen and had in real life, where actually having that same-sex relationship is so not an option, so unavailable, so unspeakable, that the relationship is hollowed out, forced to conform around a hole, a core that can’t exist. The intensity remains, the understanding, the draw, but the relationship is blinded, muted, forced to not express itself. Those watching it can sense that it is shaped around something, but the shape is unspeakable, and that shell eventually collapses and the thing inside disintegrates, never truly seen, a ghost that shakes windows and shatters glasses but never, never, has a face.
That was not the intention in this relationship. I am under no delusion that I've cracked the code or found some secret hidden message. This is absolutely not what the writers wanted me to feel. I truly do not think that, in this instance, the relationship these characters might have had was supposed to haunt the one they do have. Nonetheless.
Now, let me address some questions that may or may not have come to your mind, gentle reader, as you read.
Do you like other FFVIII ships, or just this one?
Oh, yeah, I definitely do. I like Quistis/Rinoa, I like Seifer/Rinoa and Irvine/Selphie, I solidly see the appeal of Squall/Rinoa, but I just tend to not get into main canon ships too often. The game’s already about Squall/Rinoa, I don’t feel the need to speculate about it. It won’t get into my head the way tantalizing noncanon ships do.
I’m a multishipper and often a polyshipper. I never go down with the OTP, I’m always willing to mix and match and see what appeals. It’s not like I think Squall/Seifer should be canon or that any other ship featuring either of them is inherently worse.
Do you just like this m/m ship better than the canon f/m ships because of internalized misogyny, particularly and crucially the legacy of misogynistic hatred for Rinoa’s character that haunts the fandom to this day?
Honestly, I don’t think so. I’m not a huge fan of Rinoa but I don’t hate her. I’m very fond of both Quistis and Selphie and have been legitimately attracted to Ultimecia since playthrough one. I’m not as compelled by relationships featuring Rinoa partly because the game already explores them. There’s less to think about. I like to postulate about ships that could have been.
The character I personally have always disliked is Zell, who tends to be a fan favorite. Notice that that is a male character.
When I do play around with Squall/Seifer in fanworks, Rinoa is usually there. I don’t cut her out, I keep her relationship with one or both of them. It hits the same button that Gilvek (Girl Genius) does for me; I’m not trying to get them away from the girl, I’m deeply intrigued by making this a proper three-person situation, and in the interest of doing so, I want to take the third side of the triangle seriously.
To be honest, Squall/Seifer/Rinoa has fascinating potential to me that is only unlocked when you do take that third side seriously. What would it take for the three of them to team up properly in-game, platonically or with messy romantic entanglement, and what does that look like? Imagine with me a canon battle in which Seifer Has Enough and finally goes turncoat, returning his alleigence to Squall and the Garden and letting you use him as a party character once more in a battle against Ultimecia in one of her forms. Imagine the three of them bickering back and forth through his battle as they try not to address the romantic entanglements in the room. FUN.
I’ve always been pulled toward m/m ships but I reject the insinuation that this is somehow shameful or that I need be less gross and stop liking fictional same-sex relationships so much, especially since I’m bisexual myself.
Oh, it almost sounds like you’re bisexual yourself and that that’s part of the draw you feel to more complicated romantic relationships, especially ones with a same-sex element included?
Why, yes.
Wait, Quistis/Rinoa?
OH YEAH I’m intrigued by how Quistis seems to be emotionally unsettled by and compelled to Rinoa from the start. Her feeling like she has to find Rinoa, protect her, apologize to her in Deling City her feels more romantic than half of the scenes with Squall and Rinoa. Their relationship is super unexplored in the game but genuinely feels like the beginning of a gentle queer journey of self-discovery to me.
I like to pretend Quistis having her bi crisis is one of the reasons she practically stops existing in the second half of the game. It gives me a sense of internal peace.
Also... why "Squall/Seifer, that order?"
First good question. Seifer is a bottom.