Masculinité de luxe

I’ve just finished Final Fantasy XV for the second time, this time including all the DLC episodes and the anime. I didn’t go after A King’s Tale: Final Fantasy XV because at some point I need to go outside and touch grass. Anyway, I’m glad I did go back and play it again, and so close after Final Fantasy XIV, because now I feel like I have a deeper appreciation for what has made the latter game work, and why this game… kinda doesn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, FFXV is a fine game, genuinely solid as a Final Fantasy title in its own right, its ending is hands-down one of the best in the franchise and possibly even among other JRPGs. But I hesitate to call it one of my favorite games anymore.

I’ve written thousands of unpublished words now about how I feel about Final Fantasy XV. I’ve done more research than I’d like to admit into concepts like hegemonic masculinity and “mythopoetic men.” I’ve played well over 60 hours in FFXV itself, watching closely as Noctis interacts with his friends and royal retinue, Gladiolus, Ignis, and Prompto. I’ve disputed the legitimacy of the term “toxic masculinity,” connected how characters in the game express and are effected by masculinity to ideas of power and ideology. I’ve gone back and forth with myself over whether it even matters that people found a positive representation of masculinity in this group of rich boys trying to become men, because surely it is better than other representations, right? Is “good enough” good enough?

But the image I keep coming back to is a moment that happened to me about 30 hours in, while I was still thoroughly exploring the desert region of Leide. Riding on auto-pilot, my party and I pulled up on a patch of brush north of Hammerhead with the top down in the Regalia. Dressed like Power Rangers in our Magitek Armor, we ran at full speed toward a pair of rare Dualhorns some jagoff in a trailer lazily labeled “Ashenhorns.” We killed one pretty easily, then took our time taking the second down. As we walked triumphantly back to our car, it suddenly occurred to me that there hadn’t been any other “ashenhorns” that we’d seen in the game, and that it was possible that the pair we just killed were the last of their kind.

It was here that my relationship to FFXV fundamentally changed. Even though we were recognized hunters and this successful bounty kill was framed as, like, helping out a local miner or farmer or something, the way it felt, the way it was presented was more reminiscent of a group of rich poachers on a pleasure safari – like, for example, the CEO of Jimmy Johns or something – casually driving up to a white rhino or an elephant and killing it for sport.

I began to see the themes and general demeanor of this game as being concerned – or obsessed – with ideas of what it means to be both born into the wealthy elite and a “traditional man.” It is that moment in the Leiden brush that got me to ask the question that has been driving me nuts re: this article for two weeks now: are the male relationships in FFXV really all that wholesome? Are they really examples of “positive” over “toxic” masculinity? To quote Melissa Gira Grant:

We really lost some clarity when “toxic masculinity” started replacing “patriarchy.”

— Melissa Gira Grant (@melissagira) May 29, 2022

I don’t want to get into some Kojima-ass “you’ll regret your words and deeds” shit over this six-year-old video game, but I do think it’s worth asking who the debate over toxic-vs-nontoxic masculinity serves, especially as it’s applied to video games in general (and especially as it’s applied to this one in particular).

According to researcher Carol Harrington, toxic masculinity first emerged as a concept in the 1980s as part of a broader “mythopoetic men’s movement,” a cluster of therapeutic self-help groups and organizations created with the intent of “connecting spiritually with a lost “deep masculine identity” towards greater personal growth and the reaffirmation of one’s manliness. These movements were categorized as apolitical, yet still pointed to forces such as feminism, industrialization and the separation of men from their fathers during childhood as reasons why this “deep masculine identity” had been lost in the first place.^[1]Harrington, Carol. “What Is ‘Toxic Masculinity’ and Why Does It Matter?” “Men and Masculinities, vol. 24, no. 2, June 2021, pp. 345–52. “DOI.org (Crossref), … Continue reading

Harrington draws a bright line between this mythopoetic men’s movement and the weaponization of “toxic masculinity” against marginalized men and boys. She writes, “Used in the aforementioned ways, toxic masculinity provided a framework that essentialized marginalized men as aggressive and criminal, discursively packaged in a way that it was presented as concern for men’s well-being. The idea of toxic masculinity harmonized with conservative political agendas concerned with the social control of low-income, under-employed men, and with patriarchal family values.” (2021, 4) That is to say, it wasn’t expressions of toxic masculinity that were being associated with the right wing, but rather arguments and analysis against it. Good men were manly men, and manly men were conservative men – so this initial wave of thought on toxic masculinity seemed to go.

Along with this conservative push to reestablish the nuclear heterosexual family’s hold on a changing society, “toxic masculinity” also saw adoption among therapists and psychologists, who prescribed “engaged fatherhood as an antidote to toxic masculinity.” Harrington writes, “Toxic masculinity provided a discourse for diagnosing men’s problems in the face of the gendered fall-out from deindustrialization, during which well-paid jobs in ‘masculine’ occupational sectors disappeared while feminized service sector occupations expanded.” (2021, 4) The term eventually found its way into academic and popular feminist discourse, and got a shot in the arm with the resurgence of the far-right around 2016. Currently the term seems to serve as a shorthand to describe men exhibiting outwardly misogynist and/or queerphobic behavior or attitudes, but still “individualizes the problem to the character traits of specific men.” (2021, 6)

Another researcher, Andrea Waling, posits that, “in using a term such as ‘healthy masculinity’, we continue to set masculinity up as the only expression of gender that men and boys can legitimately engage in, thus reinforcing the notion that femininity (and by extension, androgyny) remains a less valued, and less legitimate, expression of gender. Not only does it set up a particular kind of masculinity as the only expression of gender that men and boys can engage, but also, deflects attention from forms of female and non-binary masculinity.”^[2]Waling, Andrea. “Problematising ‘Toxic’ and ‘Healthy’ Masculinity for Addressing Gender Inequalities.” “Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 34, no. 101, July 2019, pp. 362–75. … Continue reading In sociological terms, I think, framing the discourse as “toxic” vs. “healthy” masculinity sets up a personal trouble, as opposed to addressing a broader institutional problem. That is, individuals are left to figure out for themselves how to be “less toxic,” rather than critiquing the broader patriarchal frameworks that hurt us all at their root.

When we say that a given game displays a “positive” representation of male relationships, what are we comparing it to? What counts as “negative,” and why is that our dividing line? It’s true, the quartet at the heart of FFXV doesn’t react violently negatively to moments of relatively-intimate emotional bonding; nobody is called a homophobic slur for having feelings. But as Todd Harper pointed out in a 2017 piece for Waypoint, it’s possible that – like the concept of “nontoxic masculinity” itself – a lot of the perceived intimate bonding between these four men is simply artifice, behind the mask of which is hidden a much more conventional, conservative, hegemonic masculinity. And outside of the relationships between the four main characters, the game itself treats its women/femme-presenting characters with intense disdain, if not outright mockery. This alone should make us raise eyebrows at the suggestion that it isn’t “toxic.”

Ultimately, I don’t want to stand here and say that Final Fantasy XV is “bad.” It is simply worth interrogating whether or not the game does as good of a job at being a so-called “antidote to toxic masculinity” as some have labeled it, and whether it’s even useful to think about games – or any media – in terms of “toxic” or “nontoxic” masculinity in the first place.