The Copied Factory: FFXIV’s objectification of Women and Pro Capitalist Agenda.

Lakisha Rodriguez
Nov 5 · 4 min read

I don’t think that I was alone in my excitement when Square Enix announced that the next large 24 man raid in Final Fantasy 14 was going to be a cross over with another popular Square Enix title, Nier. The game’s music is breath taking, the story is complicated and deep and the aesthetics are amazing…except for how they design women. The first Nier game that I played was like most people, the second one, the one that this 24 man has been taken from. The primary character of this game is 2B, an android designed for battling against humanities robotic scourge all whilst dressed in a very impractical but aesthetically pleasing dress.

Looks battle ready to me

This carries along with various other female characters being dressed or in some cases undressed in ways that are clearly designed for sexualisation and objectification. Now when I first picked up the game whilst I was turned off by how the female characters were designed, I put it to the side because I thought maybe, maybe this was all an ironic message that the game was self aware. What I mean by that is that these are robots, designed by humans to be objects of sexual desire and weapons of war personifying two inherent traits of toxic masculinity. This seemed to be backed up with how 9S, a petite boy with limited combat skills versus the more physically dominant 2B ended up moving from being an ally to 2B to antagonistic, an obsession to kill her that carries over into the Nier Raid. In this respect he represents an expectation from men for women to be submissive and their anger when their expectations are not met, an accurate representation of the incel community in the 21st century and white male terrorism. Objectification reaches such heights that the females themselves are actually in theory just objects.

Come at me and argue that changing how a woman's ass looks in gear isn’t objectification.

Sadly my conceptions of self awareness saving the game from a woke perspective have been dashed by the raid. All of the gear obtained in the raid is hyper sexualised with the vast majority of it designed specifically with females in mind, made to look them skimpier and more revealing with one piece of gear that specifically changes the shape of your characters ass to be more in line with what men may consider to be sexy. Despite the 2B glamour not being gender locked it is extremely obvious that this gear was meant to only be worn by a woman as any male character puts it on it at best looks ridiculous and at worst would make a trans individual feel more like a cross dresser. I am a proponent of gender neutrality in the games armour, making it skimpier does not improve protections given; enhancing the ass and displaying the bust does not make any sense when battling against gods and monsters.

I’m waiting for liberty prime to show up in the next raid

And as if I didn’t feel annoyed enough at the gear and the message that it gives, Square of course had to go ahead and once again push the message of western capitalism on us. The third boss in the raid is a giant rusted robot surrounded by abandoned factories that throwback to an industrial revolution. This giant rusted failed war machine’s main attacks all start with the word “ Marx”, considering that the bosses in the raid take names from philosophers it is impossible not to link the surroundings and the robot with the idea of Karl Marx and communism.For those that doubt that this is the case, the name of the boss “ Engels” is the name of a German Communist philosopher. So here we are fighting on the side of arguably superior robots working to take down a rusted, blunt wreck of a machine named after a communist. Even the name of the raid “ The Copied Factory” could be linked to the thoughts of China and its communist party attempting to poorly copy technology from the west; furthering the idea that the only great ideas and innovations come from the greed inherent in capitalist societies.

Beards, Bombs and Turbans. Not a dog whistle at all, nope.

In the end the Dwarf NPCs prove this to be correct by saving the 9S model after its attack on 2P (2B insert for this raid) talking about keeping it a secret for their own gain. Speaking of the dwarf NPCs, wearing Turbans and throwing bombs at everything to solve problems? Really Square? Really?

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