...you know, I've never really thought of Exdeath as a particularly deep or interesting villain.
I mean. He's a sentient tree that turned evil and decided to conquer the world. He's a card-carrying Bad Guy doing Bad Guy Things. His name is "I'm 12 and this is edgy".
But after replaying FFV as an adult, there's something inescapable about Exdeath. What makes him compelling as a villain isn't who he is. It's what he represents.
The main villain of Final Fantasy V isn't Exdeath, a tree-turned-guy who wants to conquer the world because reasons. It's generational neglect. FFV is a story about the next generation having to clean up after the mistakes of previous generations.
Why does Exdeath exist? Because a long time ago, past generations used this one tree to bind evil spirits to. And they just kept filling it and filling it with evil spirits until it came alive and grew a consciousness of pure evil.
That seems fine. It's good that we did that!
This ancient warlock Enuo wanted to conquer the world using the power of the Void, the primal origin of existence itself. He was defeated but, fearing the power of the Void, the ancient peoples fractured the world in half in order to trap the Void in an extradimensional space between the two worlds.
In the process separating people from each other and creating weird knock-on effects like an ancient tome with valuable information being unreadable because half of it is in one world and half in the other, or wind drakes dying needlessly because the people with knowledge of how to care for them are in the other world.
And also an entire village was caught in the middle and banished to languish eternally in a place where time doesn't exist.
That seems fine. It's good that we did that!
The four Crystals are the foundational pillars of existence, born of the Void, which sustain the primary elements. They are very, very important natural resources and if anything happens to them, the world will decay and rot. Because of the fracturing a copy of the four Crystals exists in both worlds.
To defeat Exdeath, the Dawn Warriors, the last generation of heroes, sealed him away in a cave in the other world, the one that isn't theirs. They didn't think they were strong enough to kill him and chose instead to seal him in the land of Someone Else's Problem. They used the four Crystals of that world as his bindings, so that the only way he could ever get free and come back to their world is by first destroying the Crystals and dooming the other world forever.
Then they went home to celebrate solving the Exdeath problem and living in an Exdeath-free world.
That seems fine. It's good that we did that!
Meanwhile, the people of the other world, the one Exdeath was sealed away on, built machines to overexploit the Crystals and power unsustainable societal advances in the short term that maybe might just kinda possibly overexploit a renewable resource until it can no longer renew itself, destroying the Crystals and dooming the world utterly.
That seems fine. It's good that we did that!
The story of Final Fantasy V is a story of various civilizations born into a natural world that offered them everything, continuously writing bad checks and kicking cans down the road until eventually all of those bills come due. It's about children having to bear the responsibility for their parents' short-sighted decisions and face the consequences of centuries of exploitation and neglect for the wellbeing of the natural world.
All of the game's protagonists are the children of people who made these decisions. Lenna and Faris are the two daughters of King Tycoon, one of the world leaders who screwed his world over by employing the Exploitation Machines, amplifying the Wind Crystal's energy so that his country could have dominion over the skies.
Bartz is the son of the one and only Dawn Warrior who said, "No, we can't just peace out back to our world and leave Exdeath to be these people's problem. Someone at least needs to stay here and check up on him." The only person trying to be at least somewhat responsible with their irresponsible decision.
And then there's Galuf, a Dawn Warrior himself, who lays out this theme most clearly when he dies two-thirds of the way through the game and has to leave his fourteen-year-old daughter Krile to inherit his mistakes and entrust the responsibility of fixing them to her.
Final Fantasy V is about the children who grow up in a world their parents and ancestors ruined. Some, like Enuo, because they were greedy and selfish. Some, like Cid, who meant well but were naive and foolish. Some, like the Dawn Warriors, because they were afraid and it seemed like the best idea at the time, but then they stopped there, went home, and decided to call their compromise a solution.
It's about what happens when those bills come due.
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