FFX meta: Summoner affinities

Fic writers often depict Braska as a white mage, perhaps because Yuna is as well and perhaps also because summoning seems to be the preserve of white mages in FF9. In the mobile games where Braska is playable, though, he’s more of a black mage: in FFRK, iirc, he was a black mage with fire affinities, and the same is (was? ☹️) true in DFFOO, where he has a couple of white spells (Curaga for one) but these are outnumbered by black ones. In FFBE, he appears to be some kind of support unit? It looks like most of his abilities just apply buffs, but I also never play this game and don’t really know what’s going on.

I definitely don’t mean to suggest that the mobile games should be considered to contribute incontrovertibly to canon! There are a lot of details in the DFFOO chapter where Braska’s introduced that don’t match up with FFX events anyway, and I think taking a hard line on what canon is when there are so many different sources is unwise, particularly when some of those sources are no longer available. But I do think it’s fun to think about how I can work some of these details into my own conceptions of Spira and my own fics. For me, the idea of Braska’s being mostly a black mage makes sense. Jecht probably doesn’t have any magic abilities to start off with: Tidus’ baffled reaction to the existence of magic shows that there’s no such thing in their Zanarkand. Auron also seems unlikely to have any, based on the abilities he learns in the game. If Braska didn’t either, there wouldn’t be anyone in the party with black magic, which would seem a bit risky.

Braska’s more than ten years older than Lulu, so I think it makes sense for him to have some degree of competence in both black and white magic. Given that he was once a priest, and may have trained for this from an early age, I like to imagine he learnt white magic earlier and moved onto black magic when he was a bit more mature, and then found the latter to be a more natural fit. Maybe he was told to learn black magic before his postings to the Al Bhed, as a self-defence measure, or maybe he learnt it of his own accord once he moved back to Bevelle, for the same reason. (The second option is marginally more angsty, so obviously I’ve chosen that one for my WIP.)

Seymour is also a summoner, and he’s a black mage – although like Braska, iirc, he has access to some white magic as well.

We don’t really know how other summoners fight in the game; I like to imagine that people with more sensitive, reflective personalities tend to be mages and those who are more practical and straightforward are usually physical fighters. Going by this, Isaaru strikes me as a mage and Dona as a physical fighter, which I guess means that to complement their skills, Maroda is also a physical fighter (Pacce is definitely just along for the ride, I’m sorry) and Barthello gets to be a mage even though he’s so big and brawny, which is fun to think about!

As for the previous High Summoners, Yocun is carrying some kind of cutlass in her statue and in her official art, which also supports the theory that summoners don’t have to be mages. Ohalland and Gandof aren’t carrying weapons at all; perhaps the statues were erected as a set (at least those of G, O, and Y) many years after Gandof and Ohalland defeated Sin, and so the knowledge of which weapons they favoured had been lost to the mists of time. Or maybe they were both mages and the fashion back in the day was to cast magic with one’s bare hands. Or, maybe, Ohalland the well-known blitzball player used a ball as his weapon, like Wakka, but the temples deemed that unbecoming of a High Summoner and decided to edit it out.