Missed Opportunities: FFX, Tidus and Yuna

A recurring experience for me is to see some moment where a story came so close to doing something incredibly awesome and interesting... and didn't quite complete the connection.

A missed opportunity.

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Here be spoilers for Final Fantasy X. You might not want to read this if that concerns you.

Tidus is a very odd protagonist.

Our introduction to him is that he's a sports superstar, completely removed from any kind of normal/relatable life. Everybody loves him and he loves basking in the cheers of his adoring fans. He knows how to play to the crowd.

Then Sin happens and he's dumped in the middle of nowhere, where no one recognizes him, where no one is awed to meet The Tidus! No people wanting his autograph, no fame, no nothing. He doesn't even know where he is, and somehow no one has heard of the biggest city in the world!

Now, this is all very interesting-sounding, but unfortunately the plot proceeds to suddenly turn Tidus into just being your standard JRPG protagonist -clueless and vaguely stupid, as an audience stand-in who is also clueless about this strange world they find themselves in. Tidus is a fish out of water, so he can ask all the questions the audience wants to ask. What's going on? Who are these people? Why are they doing the things they do? Etc. The fact that Tidus is a Blitzball superstar stops being relevant to the plot, and even the fact that there's a plot sequence centered around Blitzball has no real payoff to that fact.

Even weirder is Waka's presence. Tidus' status as a Blitzball superstar doesn't get parleyed into using a Blitzball in his fighting style to give him a striking and visually unique approach to fighting. Instead, the ostensibly-less-talented Waka is our Blitzball player, while Tidus... gets a sword? Don't think too hard about the fact that Tidus is from some vaguely modern-day world and has probably never wielded a weapon in his life while Waka is from the local subsistence-living culture and so probably at least knows how to hunt, if not outright defend himself from the monsters that explicitly exist and aren't just a gameplay construct the plot ignores. If anything I'd expect Tidus to be the Blitzball player and Waka the swordwielder.

Alas, JRPG tropes demand the male lead wield a sword, so off we go.

Why is Tidus introduced to us as a sports superstar, again?

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Ah, but that's not the real missed opportunity here. The above is pretty depressing, but here's the Missed Opportunity:

Yuna, in her role as Summoner, is suddenly thrust into the spotlight. She doesn't really know how to cope, and eventually confides in Tidus that it's hard and intimidating and scary.

Now, Tidus, being experienced in standing in a spotlight and managing a crowd, indeed comfortable with the experience, offers to teach Yuna his ways-

Nope.

He gives vague emotional condolences that make her feel slightly better.

End scene.

...

Yeah, Final Fantasy X has a perfect moment to have Tidus and Yuna connect, to have Tidus do something unique and useful to help Yuna better cope with her life, to better ground their romance -spoilers, JRPG male lead and female lead pair up- and to finally give us a real payoff to this whole "Tidus the sports superstar" thing the game opened up with... and it turns to generic emotional platitudes that are awkward and essentially empty.

Missed opportunity.