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Caution for spoilers.
Every so often someone pops up on 4chan whining about how Marche, the hero of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on the GBA is not a hero, but in fact the ultimate villain. That's one of the biggest crocks on the internet, and just another illustration of how casual the modern day's relationship to truth is, as well as the concept of a moral absolute.
Several reasons are given for this new retitling, among them the fact that he succeeded, and that he essentially destroyed a world, Ivalice, beat up his friends for wanting to stay, and dragged them screaming and crying back to the cesspools that were their lives.
Sounds pretty grim. And his friends' lives WERE in fact cesspools of a sort. Mewt lost his mother, with his dad an unemployed drunkard (the American version of the game edits out the alcoholism), and is constantly bullied for carrying around a stuffed animal. Ritz resents her albino-white hair, dyeing it a firey red to avoid being teased and called whitey-locks. Marche's own brother Doned is a paraplegic who needs to make regular visits to the hospital.
FFTA plays out along familiar lines. Mewt buys a mysterious old book, and after playing with his friends, goes home. During the night the book, predictably magical, makes with the juice and transports everyone to another world, Ivalice (not to be confused with St. Ivalice, their town, nor with the Ivalice of Final Fantasy XII). Marche is separated from his friends, finds some party members, and gets all tactical on everyone's ass for about 300 missions.
Long story short, Marche wants to go home, but his friends don't. Why? Turns out the book is Le Grim Grimoire, an ancient magical tome that grants the reader's deepest desires. Ivalice is a reflection of that. In Ivalice, Mewt is a prince, his father, the Judgemaster, leader of the royal knights, and his mother, alive (and queen!). Oh, to spoil it, Mewt's mother in Ivalice is actually the Grimoire taken human form. Ritz's red hair is natural, and she lives in what is, by all accounts, her favorite fantasy video game's world. Best of all, Doned can walk. But Marche would rather just be home. Unfortunately, doing that means to cause Ivalice to disappear.
Over the course of the game the player aids Marche as he...well, marches across the land, causing serial massive HP loss in monsters, rival clans, and elemental crystals everywhere.
As you read this chronicle of the deeds done it looks like Marche was indeed quite the dickhead. Going back home meant going back to all that. Back to nasty white hair, back to a dead mom and bullying, back to the wheelchair. But taken in the frame of the gameworld, Marche was nothing but right.
Countless works of fiction, religion, self-help, and common sense have taught us that it's never better to live in a lie. Ivalice was exactly that. Created by the Grimoire to reflect a reader's desire (for whatever reason, it's never revealed), Ivalice was a paper cutout laid on top of St. Ivalice. You often encounter monsters that bear the names of characters in town, zombies or vampires by the names of bullies who injure Mewt in the prologue. Much points to the intersection of St. Ivalice and Ivalice, its status revealed as less than some alternative universe.
With that in mind, we see how right Marche is. It's never healthy to live in fantasy, and always wrong not to confront a problem. No one but Marche had the courage to see that and stand up for the truth and fight to return to the real world. Like Reginald Barclay on the Enterprise's holodeck, Marche's friends were willfully trapping themselves in illusion, too afraid to face up to their own issues and deal.
To maul some Chuang Tzu, "Am I dreaming of being a butterfly, or is the butterfly just dreaming a dream of being me?"
One way to interpret the question is to see it as a statement of uncertainty regarding what makes our reality. Are we all dreaming? Are we fighting right now in a dream world of Ivalice, or was St. Ivalice just a nightmare? Are evil robots even now using me as a living battery? Are agents closing in on my position, with Keanu Reeves flying to my rescue? That's the popular interpretation, but not the one we apply to Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.
FFTA never has any ambiguity about which world is the "real" one, at least not for our cast. Ivalice may have been a world, but it was never THE REAL WORLD. The game's own constructions harped over and over about the world's nature as a construct of Le Grim Grimoire.
In any other context, particularly our own, where we aren't sure about things (both Nietzsche and Chuang Tzu tended to agree that reality was the subjective thing, dreams the objective), Marche's actions would look villanous. Here he was imposing his worldview on everyone else. When people do that, bad things tend to happen. That's one of the reasons why people view him with such disdain. He's literally forced people to go home, and no one likes that.
In FFTA, however, there is no such debate. We, as the omniscient player, know. Ivalice isn't the real world. Everyone is trying to avoid having to deal with their issues. Only in a dream is anyone ever truly fulfilled, and only in a game can things ever really be so simple. Awakening opens us to uncertainty and ignorance. You can't blame anyone for not wanting to go back, but you can't blame Marche for wanting to help his friends, like it or not.
A little escapism is natural, helpful even. A break from having to deal keeps us sane, keeps us from breaking under the strain of our collective misery, but facing up to it, and with help, fiber, and a little luck, overcoming it, is part of life. Just running away is never the answer.
What about Doned? How could Marche be so horribly cruel as to force his own brother to return to the hell of being a diseased paraplegic? How is that not evil?
That argument is as unfair to Doned as it is to Marche. It's painful and horrible to be disabled, to not be able to walk as a normal human being, but the big mistake, the big disservice people who draw the Doned card do to everyone who's ever been disabled is the callous assumptions they make as they draw that card. They assume that while sure, disabled people can still be happy, they'll never be as happy as THEY could be. That's as discriminatory as walking up to a paralyzed man and flaunting your tap dancing skills in front of him, all the while yelling "You can't do this!" to his face.
Perhaps it would be even more cruel to Doned to allow him to live in Ivalice, constantly fearing that the dream would end, that he'd have to go back to it, and having him grow with only remaining in Ivalice as his prime concern. During the game Doned rails at his brother, accusing him of wanting to go back only because he had everything. Marche counters, saying that Doned's getting all the attention from their mother made Marche envious, never being able to ask for anything out of concern. They eventually make up, Marche pledging to help his brother once they got home. Had Doned remained in Ivalice, that scene would never have happened. Doned would only go along in his fantasy, the nagging fear gnawing at his sanity.
The worst thing that can ever happen is for what you always wanted to be given to you, only to have it taken away. But horrible as that might feel, it's not always wrong to have it happen to you. Which is the point. Far too often we assume (and why should we not?) that what feels good IS good. But that's not always true, is it? It's a classic case of having to swallow the foul tasting medicine. It's good for you, but it sure as hell isn't something you'd want.
When nerds everywhere decry poor Marche, what they're really mad about is that they never got their own Ivalice, their own Grim Grimoire, that they'd use, and never try to get rid of. It's a collective, selfish wish that they took the god-damned Blue Pill. They whine and complain that Marche wasn't a Mary-Sue, a vessel for convenient self-insertion and ego-stroking, as so many fantasy characters are.
A 4chan user posted that he couldn't wait for a darker, "more mature" remake of FFTA, wherein Marche was the nefarious villain, that he could kick the poor kid's ass six ways from Sunday.
Given how many nerds wanted revenge on a video game character for cutting power to the holodeck, I'd say that such a remake would be less mature. Immature, even.
P.S. It's interesting how the most "family-friendly", least complex game of the Tactics series sparks the most intense discussion. Ah nerds.
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