Originally posted here on 2024-02-05.

Tidus’ mother is dead, therefore she appears on the Farplane. However, Tidus’ mother is also not a real person. So dead dreams appear to be just as able to manifest themselves on the Farplane as actual people.

Jecht doesn’t appear on the Farplane, therefore isn’t dead. He is a fayth – although that would imply he has been transformed and encased in stone somewhere, but we never see any evidence of this. The physical, stony forms of individual fayth still exist even when the fayth in question can no longer grant its aeon to a new summoner: Zaon’s fayth is in Zanarkand, and when the Gagazet wall of fayth dies at the end of the game, it continues to exist in greyscale. (At least, it does for a while? What’s the deal with FFX-2’s “fayth scar”?) This suggests there should be a stone with some semi-transformed version of Jecht encased in it somewhere.

Is Jecht’s not-a-real person status what allows the lads to enter Sin and fight him, or could this have been done no matter who had become the Final Aeon? After travelling from their Zanarkand to Spira, are Jecht and Tidus real, or are they dreams, or are they somewhere in between? Auron suggests that living inhabitants of Spira aren’t able to travel between the two: “Being dead has its advantages,” he says. “I was able to ride Sin and go to your Zanarkand.” But Ifrit’s fayth says to Tidus, “Your father touched Sin and became real that night.” If this is true, Tidus is surely also real after coming to Spira. But that seems to be contradicted by the fact that he disappears at the end of the game. He ends up on the Farplane with the three OG pilgrimage bros after this, and is apparently capable of interacting with them, which lends more weight to the theory that both real people and dreams go to the Farplane when they die – the latter apparently not needing a sending. However, when we see Tidus’s return in the perfect ending of FFX-2, he seems to have spent the past two years in some kind of primordial water, not aging and not having any sort of conscious contact with anyone else on the Farplane. The beginning of the FFX-2.5 light novel also suggests this, and refers to the souls of the dead as “living shadows”, implying that Tidus gains some greater level of consciousness only because he has been called back to the living world by Yuna.

In fact, Tidus returning in this way is compared a bit later in the same chapter to the way that spirits appear on the Farplane in Guadosalam to those who think about them. “He thought about that other world, the place where spirits could take shape in response to people’s prayers and speak to them; he remembered his first visit to the Farplane. He had thought about his mother, and she had appeared.” Put together, this implies that the souls of the dead are normally at rest and unaware – and then, when someone visits the Farplane and thinks of them, they are briefly conjured into some kind of physical existence, but specifically only in that one location, only for a few minutes, and only in translucent, ghostly, silent form. Yuna manages to call Tidus back in what appears to be a more permanent way, with the help of the fayth – but the fayth are supposed to be gone, aren’t they? Wasn’t that the point of the FFX ending sequence?

Looking back at the novel will help me disentangle this more, I think, especially when the whole thing takes place between the final scene of the FFX-2 perfect ending and the additional 100% completion scene. I’m a firm member of the “the novel was maligned and misunderstood” camp, although I’ll happily tell the audio drama to wind its neck in. There were always two shoopufs, damn it!