Final Fantasy 6's Shadow's Fear of Commitment

You know, looking back on it, I’m not sure that Shadow was quite as cool as we thought he was.

By all outward indications, of course, Shadow is really cool.  The guy’s covered head to toe in black, with that cool bandana thing; I can’t think of a single character that so succinctly, effectively pulls off the “ninja” aesthetic as Shadow does.*  He’s got a mysterious and dramatic past, which we only get glimpses into.  He’s an assassin-for-hire.  He’s got a trained killer dog that’s at all times about 2 seconds away from ripping someone’s throat out.  The guy appears for all the world to be a total badass.

But appearances deceive, and beneath that cold attitude and the ninja outfit, you will find a man with a raging, out-of-control phobia for commitment.

Seriously, Shadow is the most unreliable flake ever.  You know that bit in Scrubs, where JD keeps ditching Kim in order to get out of having to have a serious talk with her about their baby?  That’s basically Shadow the moment anyone possesses any expectation whatsoever of him.  The guy flees commitment like a frightened animal.

Oh, oh, okay.  I see the expression on your face.  I mean, I don’t, but I totally see the expression on the face that I’m imagining you have (you handsome devil, you).  You don’t believe me.  “You’re exaggerating again, Arpy,” is what the quirk of those gorgeous lips nestled beneath that debonair mustache tells me.  You think I’m making mountains of mooglehills again, huh?  Alright, then.  Let’s take a look at Shadow, all he does, and, more importantly, all that he leaves undone.

Our first major encounter with Shadow is during Sabin’s little story after the main party gets split up on the raft.  Seeing that Sabin is alone and lost, Shadow takes pity, for some reason, on the creatine colossus that can literally hold up an entire fucking house all by himself, and offers to help the guy make his way through this inhospitable area on his quest to reunite with brother and pals.  And full credit to Shadow, this is very nice of him...also completely at odds with the only thing we’ve heard about him previously, that being that, according to Locke, he’d slit his mama’s throat for a nickel.  But hey, I’m not gonna look a gift party member in the mouth, and not just out of respect for social distancing.

The thing is, though, at any given time, Shadow may decide, at the end of a battle, that he’s done playing tour guide, and run off.  This can occur (and has, to me) as early as the very first random encounter you have!  Even if Shadow doesn’t just up and run off at random, he’ll still ditch the party once Sabin and his new pal Cyan reach Baren Falls, far early of Sabin’s actually achieving his stated goal of catching up with his friends.

Now, I don’t, in fact, hold this initial Shadow outing against the guy.  This whole venture is a freebie that Shadow’s throwing Sabin out of the goodness of his heart, and, barring an unexpectedly early exit, Shadow’s helping Sabin with an all-out frontal assault on an entire military base, and escaping a moving train full of ghosts.  Hell, Shadow will join Sabin in fighting a goddamn phantom train while running in front of it!  That’s a heck of a job to perform gratis for a total stranger--if my own family asked me to help them fight an oncoming train in hand-to-wheel combat, I’d sure as hell charge them for the service, and that’s just a regular train, let alone a phantasmal locomotive ferrying the departed to the afterlife.  That shit takes balls of steel; Winston was a goddamn Ghostbuster and he still froze like a him in headlights in the same situation!  I think that, with all the shit that Shadow has put up with for Sabin by that point, the refusal to follow him in diving headfirst off the cliffs above a waterfall is entirely reasonable.

But let’s look at Shadow’s next appearance in the game, and the point at which his inconstance becomes a problematic and defining character trait.

After the battle for Narshe, the party heads to the west, and stops by a small town, where Shadow is hanging out.  If the party has at least 1 open slot, you’re given the option to hire Shadow on as a companion, for a sizable but generally affordable 3000 Gil.  Reunited with the badass merc and his killer pup once more, hurrah!

Until this ninja bitch randomly decides he’s earned his keep and decides to fuck off.

Yes, once again, Shadow’s fickle loyalty can display itself at any time at the end of battle.  The guy can leave the very first time you run into a random encounter, I’ve seen it happen!  And unlike the first time around, he’s not here out of the goodness of his heart; you paid for his services!

I’m sorry, Shadow, did the act of fighting exactly 4 bees with the help of a mage knight, a master samurai, and the most powerful sorceress in the entire Final Fantasy series really take you to your limit?  Was the random encounter with a pair of wolves just not worth multiple thousands of gil?  “Oh shit, I know I said I was the best of the best, but I didn’t realize you guys were gonna be going up against a couple of vultures!”

And if anything, it might actually be a good thing for him to run away sooner than later, because at this point in the game, changing the party at all requires you to go all the way back to Narshe.  If you get halfway through Zozo when Shadow suddenly remembers that he left the oven on, you find yourself with a choice: You can press onward, which is going to be difficult as Zozo is fairly challenging even to a full party, or you can go all the way back to Zozo’s exit, and then make a trek over half a continent to pick up Shadow’s replacement.

I dunno about you guys, but I haven’t personally worked many jobs in which it’s an understood and acceptable thing that its workers can, at any time, just decide to go on home and still expect the full day’s wages.

But hey, okay, we all knew Shadow was randomly unreliable in these early stages of the game.  From this point on, however, his presence in the party will be plot-mandated, so that means an end to his lack of commitment, right?

Not really.  If anything, I think it only gets worse from here!

Shadow’s next role in the game comes when the Returners and the Empire have teamed up to search for the Espers that had fled after rampaging through Vector.  The Empire hires Shadow to accompany them all and assist in the search efforts.  Here’s how that goes:

A: Shadow dodges answering Terra’s questions about love on the boat ride over, unable to commit even to a conversation.
B: While the party’s staying at the inn, Strago comes asking for help in the middle of the night because his granddaughter is trapped in a house on fire.  Shadow declines, remembering an article he read somewhere about the importance of getting a full 8 hours of sleep each night.
C: Realizing that his dog is less of a chickenshit than his owner and has left to help with the whole child-burning-to-death situation, Shadow begrudgingly goes off to save the day after all...on his own, that is, not with the party as a whole, because even when he’s working with the team, he’ll be damned if he works with the team.
D: Upon the party finally figuring out where the Espers are hiding, Shadow separates from them, saying that he’ll keep searching for the Espers in his own way.

Let’s just review that last one, shall we?  Shadow has been paid by the Empire to do 1 single thing: find the Espers.  That is the entire purpose of this mission.  It is the reason he has been hired.  So what’s he do the moment there’s a legitimate, likely lead?  He bails.  The very second a successful end to the job he’s been paid for is in sight, the man backs away from it faster than SquareEnix retreats from a good idea.  It’s like he has a mortal terror of satisfied employers.***  It’s kind of hard to blame the Empire for roughing him up off-screen afterwards, considering that he basically took their money and then actively avoided accomplishing the assignment he’d agreed to.

Which I’m not even fully convinced actually happened, at this point.  Terra and Locke see that Interceptor got hurt, and just assume that it means Shadow was attacked by the Empire.  But we really only have Shadow’s own word for that, when the party catches up with him on the Floating Continent.  But let me ask you this: if the Empire really had stabbed him in the back and left him for dead or whatever, would he be in a condition to join the party at full HP when they find him shortly afterward?  If he’d been badly wounded on the Floating Continent, by far the most dangerous and difficult area of the game up to this point (one could make the argument that it’s the most difficult dungeon of the game, period), would he really be able to just lie there on the ground for an hour or 2, completely left alone by the ferocious local fauna, until Celes and company happen by?  Something doesn’t add up about all that.

You want my theory?  I think Shadow dumped some tomato sauce on Interceptor, told him to go find the rest of the party knowing that they’d be so hopped up on Empire-hate that they’d just assume the worst (and probably thinking that this was also a great opportunity to ditch the commitment of pet ownership), then proceeded to kick back to finally enjoy some alone time with no one whining about stuff like “saving the world,” and “my granddaughter is burning to death,” and “contractual obligations.”

Conspiracy theory aside, however, what can’t be denied is that the Floating Continent once again displays Shadow’s inability to commit.  Sure, he’ll join the party for the ride, but when the heat’s on, he up and runs off again--when the group’s about to confront Gestahl and Kefka at the end, Shadow steps aside, spouts some melodramatic drivel about not deserving to fight alongside them because he’d sold his assistance to the Empire before, and runs off.

Okay, buddy, first of all?  That is a fucking stupid reason in and of itself, because if they had any objection to your prior allegiances, they’d probably have voiced it in the last 2 hours you guys have been running around this place.  It’s also all the dumber because, while the player can have whoever they want in the party, the plot of the game at this moment has a heavy preference for Celes being present, so Shadow is basically telling a former general of the Empire that his having taken a single, no-strings job to afford Interceptor’s preferred Killer Kibble brand makes him too dishonored to work together.  Furthermore, that assignment he took was the same one that Locke, Terra, and Celes were taking part in, except they didn’t even have the distancing factor of getting paid for it!

And lastly...Shadow?  Pal?  Amigo?  Compadre?  We’ve just established that you never even attempted to do the job the Empire hired you for, so technically, your slate’s still clean.  Get your ass back in the party you weasel.

But no, the party just wordlessly lets him run off.****

I wouldn’t be half surprised if, at the end of the Floating Continent sequence, while the whole place is coming apart, Shadow actually just happened to be strolling along contentedly, feeling pleased with himself that he had finally managed to ditch the Returners for good because surely they had already taken off, and then he comes up over a hill, and his heart drops as he sees them patiently waiting at the end of the fucking world for him and realizes that he’ll never be rid of these jerks.

Even Shadow’s mysterious past is all about him flaking out!  His old partner, suffering from terrible wounds, asks Shadow to finish him off?  Shadow runs off.  He shacks up with some lady who saved his life and puts a baby in her?  Shadow runs off without a word of explanation.  Oh, I’m sorry, no, he delivers his excuse to the woman’s dog about how his daughter'll be soooo much better without him.*****  As bullshit as his rationalization for skipping out on the party at the Floating Continent is, at least he told THEM about it, not their pet.  Then the dog decides to follow Shadow and become Interceptor, rather than stay with his proper owner, because apparently Shadow’s fear of commitment is so pronounced that it’s actually contagious.

The meme about Dad saying he’s going out to buy some cigarettes and using it as an opportunity to ditch his family?  Shadow manages somehow to be worse.  Than the meme.

Finally, once Kefka’s been defeated and the ending’s rolling, Shadow finishes his part in this tale true to form: he runs off from everyone else, tells Interceptor to take a hike, and finds himself a nice little corner in which to die, determined to enact Operation: Give Me NPC Status Or Give Me Death, which he didn’t get a chance to follow through on back at the Floating Continent.  Perhaps, as the game implies, this is the fitting and contented end to a man troubled by his past who has finally found a way to do something powerfully good to atone for his mistakes and is ready now to die as he should have years ago.

Me?  I think Shadow’s just so appalled at the fact that he actually accomplished a task expected of him, to the employer’s satisfaction, that he can’t bear to live with it.

Now obviously, this rant has just mostly been for laughs.  It’s basically an extension of a running joke that I had fun participating in during an old friend’s stream and wanted to perpetuate a little here.  This isn’t like my early rant on Locke, which was (and still is) entirely in earnest--I do actually like Shadow and think he’s a decent enough character.  Still, there is a bit of a pattern of commitment-avoidance there, and his excuses for running off all the time legitimately are illogical and dumb.  Also, it's hard to strongly deny that he's a kinda shitty person in regards to Relm and her mother.  So...yeah, mostly tongue-in-cheek today, but maybe also a decent bit of earnest criticism, here, too.
















* And this is a finer line to walk than you’d think.  With the bloated social preoccupation with ninjas that sank its teeth into the world at large 50 years ago and never, ever let go, the whole ninja thing is so overplayed that it’s actually really tough to design one that’s not so distinct that it looks like a generic anime character more than an actual ninja (Strider Hiryu, Izuna, and don’t even get me started on the entire Naruto series), or so simple and standard that it just comes off as a disposable henchman from a bad (read: any) 70s made-for-TV movie.  It’s kind of laudable** that Shadow manages to actually look like a ninja, but doesn’t just look like Ninja Brian, or Snake Eyes, or John Peter McAllister, or any given extra from the crappy season of Daredevil.


** Even more so when you consider Amano’s usual difficulty in drawing any character other than Anemic Shirley Temple In Her “Unfinished Goth Sketch” Phase.  Although, as always with Amano, the majority of the credit for the character’s true look should go to the saint(s) who translated his “I’ll put an excessive and confusing amount of detail into everything BUT the very character I’m being paid to create” doodles into actually functional sprites and in-game facial profiles.


*** Yeah, I know from the development perspective, Shadow needs to clear out so there’ll be room for Relm to join the party in the next dungeon.  But there are other, far more rational reasons why he could be leaving the party; it didn’t HAVE to be “now that we know where our targets will be, I’m going to deliberately go somewhere else, yet still pretend that I’m earnestly searching!”  The immediate reason that comes to mind, like the off-the-top-of-your-head-really-freaking-obvious-and-rational reason, would be that Shadow’s going to go find the other search team and report that they’ve got a lead.  Wouldn’t that make some basic, simple sense?  It’s a rational decision to coordinate both teams in such a way, he’d be the perfect guy for the job since he’s got a dog that can track down the other team, and it even provides a passive explanation for how everyone reunites in Thamasa once the Espers are found--that didn’t NEED explanation because it’s so minor a detail and you can easily just extrapolate Locke and Terra fetching the other team in the time between scenes, but still, having Shadow leave to report to General Leo and company would have been a natural lead-in to a scene that was gonna happen soon anyway.  But no, instead we get him basically just lying to us.


**** Again, I feel the need to point out that I do understand that Shadow’s not being here does NEED to occur.  The party needs a space open, after all, for Celes to suddenly fill if she’s not already there (not sure why they didn’t just make her a required character for this area instead, though, would’ve been sensible enough that she’d insist on being present to confront her former boss, and forcing some level-gaining for the character who was going to be the required protagonist for the following 5-ish hours would’ve been a good thing), and Shadow’s story role needs to be him showing up at the last moment to hold Kefka back.  But, again, this could have been easily accomplished by just having Shadow give a different stated reason for leaving.  The party just got done with a boss battle against Atma Weapon--why not have Shadow suddenly collapse, the battle having reopened the wounds that the Empire had (allegedly) inflicted on him earlier?  Or point out that he’s best utilized for sneak attacks what with the whole ninja thing, and run off to find a different path to launch an attack from so he can help the party more tactically?

I mean, in fairness, I’d probably still make fun of him in this rant and say these were just excuses.  But at least it’d seem like he was putting some sincere effort into flaking on them, instead of telling a group 25% populated by individuals who have previously collaborated in some form or another with the Empire that his own half-hearted cooperation stains his honor too much to help them.  The guy can’t even commit to finding a good excuse.


***** Big thanks to Ecclesiastes for informing me that, in the GBA remake of FF6, Shadow specifically states that it's his daughter that he's heroically walking out on.  Until this moment, I had just assumed that "the girl" referred to in the original SNES version was the woman who found him, and that he potentially had been unaware that his trumped up pretense of nobility was half-orphaning a child.  But as it turns out, even after I had already decided to write a rant about Mr. Abandon (Relation)Ship, Shadow is still more irresponsible than I'd believed.