Ok, so you know how a lot of priests in FFX wear weird white semi-fingerless gloves? Do they not vaguely resemble the kind of gloves people would wear to treat arthritis?
Originally posted here on 2022-05-18.
Ok, so you know how a lot of priests in FFX wear weird white semi-fingerless gloves? Do they not vaguely resemble the kind of gloves people would wear to treat arthritis?
I have this conviction that there is a general class difference between priests/high-ranking warrior monks and the rest of the monk corps, in that the former tend to be a lot posher than the latter. This really comes from nowhere but my own head, but it’s fun to think about Auron being very culture-shocked as he ascends the ranks of the monks, being one of the few people from a working-class background to come within spitting distance of the maester pipeline. Wen Kinoc, in my mind, didn’t work his way up the ranks but was just dropped into a fairly senior position thanks to family connections – we can tell he’s posh because of the extra name he has, which seems to be something that only the biggest boys are entitled to. Also Braska being posh and Auron not adds a special flavour to the ship dynamic for me (see also Frodo/Sam). Auron just gets where he is on his own merits because, damn him, he’s just so great.
But there’s only so far Auron can go as a result of this, and his proper acceptance into the higher ranks has to be cemented by this marriage that he rejects; otherwise there would be talk about the impropriety of his position for years afterwards (Bevelle runs on gossip: see Shelinda). This kind of marriage, then, is presumably pretty rare: mostly the priests just marry each other’s daughters (er, nuns? As an aside, I’m convinced there’s no expectation of celibacy among monks or nuns in Spira; see Auron, again. (Also, it’s more fun to imagine that Auron has some sexual experience, in timelines where he and Braska do get together, because Braska probably hasn’t been with a man before.)).
So basically the priests are endogamous (a word that came up in something I was reading at work today, which is probably why I’m thinking about this), and have a horribly small gene pool, and I have no idea if this is conducive of arthritis in particular, but, I mean, Spira probably has its own biological quirks. What I’m saying is, the priests all marry into the same families repeatedly and then their descendants get arthritis. Kinoc, despite not technically being a priest himself, is from the same background and therefore has the same issue. Braska’s family are a bit more progressive (although not wholly so – bonus headcanon, his parents definitely cut him off after his marriage and made disastrous attempts at reconciliation when they heard he was going to take the pilgrimage), so they’ve been a bit more sensible and bred with people slightly different from themselves, so no arthritis for Braska, hooray!
Clearly this whole idea is ridiculous and these weird gloves are just an arbitrary part of the priest uniform, but you know what, highly esoteric headcanons for this universe absolutely sustain me.