S. R. Dreamholde

Tidus does indeed start the game as a whiny adolescent who covers his insecurity with insufferable jock-posturing. “When I make this hand sign after a goal, you’ll know it’s for you,” he says cheekily to a pair of adoring girl fans. He’s showily bitter and dismissive at the radio announcer’s mention of his famous father, and yelping panicked when exposed to any kind of danger. When Tidus is alone with Auron, his mentor figure, he vibrates with a self-centered petulance. 

Auron’s stoicism, present early in the game, underscores Tidus’s childishness. “Hmph,” Auron says with disdain as they’re attacked by sinspawn amidst the disintegrating city. Auron, the narrative tells us, is behaving like a grown-up. Tidus, as evidenced by his own dreams about wishing he could just tell his dad how much he hates him, exists in some sort of horrible, awkward, socially disgusting proto-human larval state.

Tidus’s early game childishness also expresses itself as entitlement—to winning, to getting all the things he wants, to impulsiveness, and to being allowed to express grumpiness and emotion. “The goal is to win,” he says to Wakka when Wakka tells him that the Besaid Aurochs are OK with just doing their best in blitzball. “I’m worried about the summoner,” he says, as he barges into the Besaid temple. “I want to save Yuna AND beat Sin,” he wails at the rest of the party after learning the truth about Yuna’s mission.

If you want to get all literary about it, the game’s narrative expresses Tidus’s childishness by correlating it with how loud he’s being. Auron and Lulu, the game’s adults, are quiet, stoic figures. When Tidus is overcome by his homesickness at Killika temple, Yuna sensibly asks him what he’d like to do about his frustration. “Scream real loud,” he says. And to everyone's horror—including the player—that’s exactly what he does. It’s a wince-worthy scene, and expresses in a nutshell his childish noisiness and ineffectiveness.

“Okay,” you say, “this is exactly what I always knew. Tidus is a horrible, whiny grub. Nothing new here!”

Yes, but! As in all good love stories, or maybe just in keeping with real life, Tidus’s transformation from a whiny grub into a hero starts with his desire to impress a pretty, mysterious, and reserved girl.

I could write another essay or ten about how awesome Yuna is, but as all of you who have finished the game already know, Yuna is the most mature person on the team, and probably the real hero of the game. If Auron and Lulu are the stoic adults who hide their pain and grief behind impressive reserve, Yuna’s maturity has transcended to another level. She’s suffered incredible loss and faces existential terror, and yet manages to hide this so perfectly behind a veneer of quiet, filial cheer that everyone around her is obliged to act like she’s marching to great victory, and not her own funeral.

Shortly after Tidus asks her if he too can be her Guardian, she observes that he is looking unhappy again, and that perhaps it would be better for everyone involved if he followed her lead and practiced smiling when he’s feeling sad.

This scene was incredibly embarrassing to watch the first time I played the game, and the context-free excerpts that are so popular on YouTube don’t help. Either way, during my first playthrough all I could see was Tidus taking her advice, and doing it terribly. Awkwardly, horribly terribly.

I’m a lot older now, and the last time I watched this scene, I found it profoundly moving. I get Yuna’s advice, deep down where it really counts. The first time you have to be brave because someone else is depending on you—the first time you tell someone you’re close to that nothing is wrong, because if you told them the truth, they’d just feel terrible? That’s what this scene is about. Sometimes, it’s important to pretend to be happy even when you’re screaming inside. Yuna already gets it. And Tidus’s terrible, horrible, awkward laughter? That felt even more profound to me, because I saw that the storytellers get it too: the first time you pretend everything’s OK when really, the world feels like it’s imploding is terrible and awkward, just like his laughing. Faking it feels fake.

Maybe it’s only something I could understand after I’d been there.

Anyway, in my mind, this is the moment when Tidus first begins to transition from a whiny, adolescent larva into a stoic, heroic adult. Because he wants to impress a girl, he starts to learn not to bleed his emotions out over everyone, even if it hurts to hold things in.

Tidus’s transformation isn’t immediate. His outburst when he first learns about Yuna’s true mission is probably the nadir of the game. But immediately thereafter, like when he finds the sphere in which Yuna records her goodbyes to her guardians, he begins to follow her advice about smiling as he comprehends the scope of her stoicism, and how directly it applies to her. It’s right after this point, in fact, that the narrative catches up to the events of the game, and he even stops monologuing to the player.

Fast forward to the end of the game, in which Tidus has learned that it is indeed possible to defeat Sin and save Yuna—but at the cost of his own life. If Tidus is really still the whiny, adolescent brat that he was at the beginning of the game, what do you think he would have done? Immediately started crying and pounding the floor about it, right? But he doesn’t. Watch this scene, which takes place in the Chamber of the Faith in Bevelle, right after the Faith reveals that to kill Sin forever one must destroy its carapace, find Yu Yevon, and kill him:

Important dialog, recapped (thanks to Auronlu!)

Creepy Kid: But, you know… When it is all over… we will wake, and our dream will end. Our dream will vanish.

Tidus: Yeah. You’ve been dreaming a long time, haven’t you?

Creepy Kid: I’m sorry.

Tidus: I’m grateful.

Creepy Kid: (Vanishes)

Yuna: About what?

Tidus: Oh, nothing. Hey, don’t make that face! Come on! We’re going to beat Sin! Let’s see some cheer, okay?

Yuna: You’re hiding something.

Tidus: (Turns his face away) I’m not!

Yuna: Really? (After he leaves) You’re a bad liar, you know?

In this scene, Tidus has finally grown up. He’s being as cheerful and stoic about his impending death as Yuna was about hers. He’s so stoic, and his act of maturity is so silent, that it’s easy for the player to miss. There is no great reveal. There is, in fact, the absence of a reveal, and the absence of action.

“I’m grateful,” he says, cheerfully.

“Cheer,” in fact, is his buff action, his free Special in combat. It makes his friends stronger and tougher.

His special. Not Yuna’s.

As I mentioned before, Tidus has stopped monologuing long before this scene, so we the players don’t even get to know if he’s lying or not. All you get is a slight hesitance as he turns his back on her, and rubs the back of his neck. You have to imagine how much self control it took to not show her—or the player—even a hint of how he feels about the annihilation of his home, his original mission, his dad, and himself.

If volume is correlated with childishness, and silence with maturity... well, at this point, I’d say Tidus has finally grown up.

It’s pretty obvious, even during one’s first playthrough, that Yuna is Spira’s Christ figure. Ever since she was a child, she’s been determined to give her life, as did her father before her, to save her people from (literally) Sin.

It’s a little less obvious that Tidus is in the exact same boat; he just doesn’t figure it out until later. Why did Jecht send Auron back to Zanarkand? To raise Tidus, little sacrificial lamb, so that one day he could find a way to end the dreaming—which would, of course, end his own life. At the end of the game, Tidus actually gives his life, as did his father before him, to save Yuna and the rest of the world from Sin.

The HD remaster of FFX has one quite annoying feature: the loading screens are very long. To assure us the game will return, we see a spinning gif of the Zanarkand Abes. It’s the symbol Tidus wears all over his clothing, the team of which he’s proud to be the star.

The symbol is a stylized fisherman’s hook.

Goodbye, Tidus. Love you lots. Thanks for showing me, belatedly, how much you grew up.