#there are obviously meaningful differences
Honestly, Zalbag and Ovelia are pulling into a close second with regards to Rafa and Wiegraf when it comes to Top Narrative Foils in Final Fantasy Tactics that Nobody Talks About.
Let’s talk about them!
Zalbag and Ovelia are ostensibly good people who do bad things through not asserting their own agency; letting their dreams be bound to another’s, to a collective’s. Just following orders.
Whatever lies they believed, whatever betrayals were visited upon them, they each provoked their own deaths by the end. I sense they regret their actions.
It helps contrast Ramza’s decision to buck convention when his morality demands, despite the ostracization it brings him.
I love how their failures to act also contrast with their status as the two characters we see in game who have some sort of meaningful connection to Denamunda IV (AKA the last Ivalician king to actually be good at doing things), and how the whole build up to their respective final tragedies involves Chapter 4’s really blatant paralleling of Delita and Dycedarg via back to back duke-stabbing and eavesdropping cutscenes. They’re two characters who should have the power to enact change as the hero of an era and as a queen recognized by half the country, but they only really undertake meaningful action when they’re put into conflict with the Machiavellians the narrative pairs them with. And then… when they collapse of those relationships to the people who supposedly brought them to power, they collapse along with them.
