#kinoc

Remember Lulu’s creepy speech explaining Yuna’s sending dance to Tidus?

The dead need guidance. Filled with grief over their own death, they refuse to face their fate. They yearn to live on, and resent those still alive. You see, they envy the living. And in time, that envy turns to anger, even hate. Should these souls remain in Spira, they become fiends that prey on the living. […] The sending takes them to the Farplane, where they may rest in peace. 

It strikes me that Kinoc might well “yearn to live on and resent those still alive.” But according to Lulu, that’s not enough to become an unsent. That’s what creates fiends.

We see the beginning of this transition from “not sent” to “fiend” in the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth, where Ginnem’s dead spirit has been hanging out for a few years:

Wakka: Peh! Another Guado fiend? Kimahri: No. An unsent.[The figure of a woman coalesces out of pyreflies]Lulu: It is…It’s you, is it not, Lady Ginnem? Forgive me. I was too young.[Auron glances at Yuna, who steps forward to perform the sending. Lady Ginnem snaps her arm and disrupts ritual with some kind of shock wave.]Lulu: There is no human left in you now, is there?

Lady Ginnem probably had a stronger will than most people, or she never would’ve become a summoner. So she seems to have held onto her human appearance and identity longer than people typically do after they’re killed. (Apparently it can happen pretty fast; one of the Kilikans who greets Yuna when she arrives after Sin’s attack says, “Our loved ones— we feared they would become fiends.”) Lady Ginnem seems to be crossing the boundary from unsent to mindless fiend: she still looks human, and is still aware enough to lash out at Yuna, but she is literally a ghost of her former self.

So why did someone as singular as Lady Ginnem become a fiend and not a longterm unsent? Well, she may have been “filled with grief over her own death.” She may have “refused to face her fate.” (You had better believe Lulu was thinking of her former summoner while saying all that.) I also think it’s significant that she lost her purpose in life (pilgrimage) and, unlike Belgemine, didn’t find anything to replace it in death.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me back up: what is it that makes people unsent like Auron instead of fiends?

When Jyscal manifests in Guadosalam (and, like Ginnem, seems to be having trouble holding onto his humanity), the party discusses his apparition: 

Wakka: Wha…what was that just now? That really Lord Jyscal?

Wait, I know!

Tidus: He wasn’t sent, so he became a fiend, right? A-ha!

Yuna: I don’t understand how a man like Lord Jyscal could die and not be sent.

Lulu: I would think that he was sent once…but he stayed on Spira. Something, a powerful emotion could have bound him to this world. Such things happen. Rikku: That’s against the rules, isn’t it? Auron: It means he died an unclean death.

Tidus hasn’t heard about unsent like Auron yet; he’s still going on what Lulu told him before, that people who aren’t sent become fiends. But Lulu corrects him and Yuna: Lord Jyscal almost certainly was sent, but had a reason to stay.

Auron adds, from his own experience: “he died an unclean death.” Now, does plain old backstabbing murder qualify? Because Seymour certainly did that to Kinoc. In which case, dang right, Kinoc might become an unsent!

Or does “he died an unclean death” mean an exceptionally abhorrent or personally appalling death, like Seymour murdering his own father? (Or Auron’s anguished death of betrayal and despair, whose agony we can hear in his awful scream?)

Or is Auron mistakenly applying his own experience to every unsent, painting with too broad a brush? Seymour died in clean battle with Yuna’s party (unless he was already dead, which I don’t think he was), Maechen appears to have simply been so engrossed in his studies that he forgot he died, and there’s not a hint that Mika died an “unclean death”: it’s possible, of course, but I get the impression he just refused to relinquish power.

I’m inclined to accept Lulu’s suggestion that “something, a powerful emotion could have bound him to this world.” But based on what she said before, it has to be a more powerful “something” than merely grief and refusal to face death.

My sense is that an unsent hangs onto his or her identity after death only through the unifying focus of some driving purpose, emotion, an overwhelming obsession. 

It’s not his own death that Auron couldn’t accept. It was Braska’s. Auron was driven by vengeance, and he was also driven by his oaths. He could not rest until his friends were avenged and his oaths fulfilled.

Seymour has his insane twisted mission to become the next Sin. As the game progresses, his obsession becomes alarmingly obvious.

Mika seems to be the typical tyrant, clinging to power.

Maechen is an obsessed antiquarian. (Although I’m not 100% sure that the game designers of FFX had come up with the idea he was unsent).

Belgemine was unable to defeat Sin, and her failure frustrated her so much that she stayed in Spira hoping to train another summoner to finish what she’d started.

Yunalesca has the whole Final Summoning tradition to maintain both for her father’s sake and Zaon’s (since otherwise she killed her lover in vain). 

Or, to quote Lorien in Babylon 5: “It’s easy to find something worth dying for. Do you have anything worth living for?”

I’m not certain whether revenge against Seymour would be enough motivation for Kinoc to hang on. Also, while Seymour is not exactly a trained psychoanalyst, his description of Kinoc matches my impression of his weak-willed personality:

He was a man who craved power. And great power he had, but he feared losing it. Trembling at unseen enemies, he spent his days scheming petty schemes. Chased by his fears, never knowing rest. You see… Now, he has no worries. 

That doesn’t sound like the sort of person with a burning passion so strong that he can’t let death get in the way of his goals.

Finally, when Kinoc dies, we see his body dissolve into pyreflies which get sucked into Seymour’s weird stone-armored second boss form. It looks to me like Seymour’s imitating Yu Yevon’s power, on a very small scale, to craft “unholy armor” out of the souls of the dead. In which case, Kinoc was absorbed by Seymour and then released as pyreflies once that armored body was destroyed.

But still, it all depends on whether you think Kinoc’s death was an “unclean death”and/or whether you think he has “something…some powerful emotion” to help him maintain his soul and sense of self after his body was (visibly) destroyed.