Blue skinned humans.

Dionysos

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FFIX's world surely has the most diverse population of all FF games. We have a plethora of different species: moogles, rat-like Burmecians, hippo-people, bird-people, the genderless Qu, and many, many, many more. It is perhaps the closest Final Fantasy has got to a fairy-tale setting.

And yet even within the human species there seems to be a variety of skin pigmentation that we don’t have on our own Earth: blue.

Queen Brahne and Amarant Coral are both blue-skinned, and I think there may be a variety of background NPCs with a similar pigmentation. These characters are usually listed as ‘human’ rather than as members of a separate humanoid species.

Amarant Coral.jpgBrahne.jpg

FFIX’s setting is medieval fantasy and so the characters are mainly white with European-influenced designs, but there are a couple of arguably Hispanic, black, and Polynesian-inspired characters too – in addition to the Japanese and Asian elements which would be expected in a Japanese game. But FFIX manages to sneak in an additional skin colour in the form of blue skin. It does this discreetly and I don’t know if many people think about it as the aforementioned species variety means that it doesn’t look out of place at all. It would look out of place in nearly every other Final Fantasy game, but FFIX is so unusual in its character designs that we do not question blue skin.

Imagine playing a version of FFVII where Cid Highwind was blue? Or imagine if Selphie in FFVIII was blue? Or FFXIII's Hope? It would look out of place there, but FFIX gets away with it.

What were they going for with this? Why do you think that they decided to add blue skinned humans? It is quite an odd thing to do, yet we rarely question it because we are distracted by talking hippopotamuses.

If there is a message behind it, is it that race shouldn't matter at all? Blue people simply exist, and we accept that without thinking about it while playing the game because the inhabitants of Gaia aren't concerned about race and don't comment on blue skin. Or is this nothing to do with that?

Alternatively, do you think that the blue skinned humans are supposed to be a different species, not Homo sapiens at all, and that Square-Enix forgot / felt it unnecessary to define them?

Thoughts?
 
You know I always questioned what Amarant was, if he was even human to begin with... Granted I also thought his dreadlocks was also some weird hat at first too...but I digress... He is also the tallest human around I think, which made me question if he was a mix of human and Burmecian or a Qu since he is that much taller than the tallest humans you see (I think at least.)
As far as Queen Brahne is concerned, I cannot say. I would assume since the King passed and she still has the power in Alexandria that she was the one born a princess versus her husband (if we are going follow the rules that monarchies that were set up here in Earth, which is hard to do in the video game world.) This questions who and what the rulers looked like before Queen Brahne. The only other solution that I can come up with is that she is a human mix with a Qu or a Burmecian..
 
I find it fascinating that so many people notice Amarant's tall stature and red dreadlocks before they notice that he has blue skin. It really shows that FFIX managed to create a world where distinct individuals could exist without the need to explain who / what they are.

As for the Burmercian-human hybrid theory, that is interesting. Wasn't Alexandria sometimes at war with Burmecia though? Would the Alexandrians accept a queen rumoured to be half-Burmecian?

I’m not sure though. I’ll have to find my FFIX walkthrough to see what it says, but a lot of places seem to list Amarant’s race as human. Brahne is and always will be the victim of vigorous debate about what she is.
 
I find it fascinating that so many people notice Amarant's tall stature and red dreadlocks before they notice that he has blue skin. It really shows that FFIX managed to create a world where distinct individuals could exist without the need to explain who / what they are.

As for the Burmercian-human hybrid theory, that is interesting. Wasn't Alexandria sometimes at war with Burmecia though? Would the Alexandrians accept a queen rumoured to be half-Burmecian?

I’m not sure though. I’ll have to find my FFIX walkthrough to see what it says, but a lot of places seem to list Amarant’s race as human. Brahne is and always will be the victim of vigorous debate about what she is.

I believe the official booklet said Amarant was human, although I could be wrong in that.
I do believe a long time ago Burmecian and Alexandria were both at war but I do not know how long ago it was, I would have to look that up.
I just don't see how/why Brahne would be blue minus the fact that she is either some hybrid mix or something along those lines... maybe a Qu but that would be me calling her that based on her weight :wacky:
 
It's funny, I never really thought of them as 'blue' even though they are both obviously colored very strangely. I always assumed they were just very, very pale. Maybe they both have a type of albinism? Maybe Amarant dyes his hair, which is why he's got popular nicknames like The Flaming Amarant, Red, Scarlet Hair & Red-headed Man. Queen Brahne maybe just has fake hair, which is how she gets it to jet out like that on top :O

If anything I think we can write this off as possibly a side effect of the mist? If FFX can do it with Pyreflie then I think FFIX can do it with Mist!


:snowmitts:
 
It's funny, I never really thought of them as 'blue' even though they are both obviously colored very strangely. I always assumed they were just very, very pale. Maybe they both have a type of albinism? Maybe Amarant dyes his hair, which is why he's got popular nicknames like The Flaming Amarant, Red, Scarlet Hair & Red-headed Man. Queen Brahne maybe just has fake hair, which is how she gets it to jet out like that on top :O

If anything I think we can write this off as possibly a side effect of the mist? If FFX can do it with Pyreflie then I think FFIX can do it with Mist!


:snowmitts:

They definitely have light blue skin in their character models.

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(Right is official merch which I think makes the blue aspect of Amarant even more pronounced)


Having said that, some of the Amano artwork is a bit more ambiguous, but that's Amano's style. Many of his characters look white as snow.
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About Amarant's red hair, I had completely forgotten to consider the relevance of the salamander imagery in the entirety of Amarant's character design. Amarant Coral’s Japanese name is Salamander rather than Amarant, and his tattoos are little blue or green salamanders. In classical Greek and Roman folklore, salamanders were sometimes believed to be immune to fire. Though many naturalists debated this as being silly, the idea persisted into the Renaissance period. According to some beliefs salamanders could live in or walk through fire, and even put a fire out with the ice-coldness of their bodies (for example see Aristotle, History of Animals: 5.17.13 and Pliny the Elder, Natural History: 10.86). The ice-coldness attributed to the salamander in antiquity could be reflected in Amarant's blue skin. Certainly Amarant taps into the association of the salamander with being able to control fire (incidentally the same idea that Pokemon's Charmander plays with). In referring to the bounty hunter as the 'Flaming Amarant', 'Red', and 'Scarlet Hair', this fire-like red hair is certainly a critical part of his image and it actually seems to tie in nicely with his icy skin when considering the salamander.

As for in-game reasons for blue skin... The Mist theory is interesting, though I wonder why it hasn't affected many of the other human characters. Brahne I can understand because of her interest in Mistborn weapons of mass destruction, but I don't know where Amarant would fit into that. As far as I can recall he was just a bounty hunter with a grudge from Treno. Mist is everywhere, however. Maybe he did take a tumble down a mountain and absorbed too much Mist.

Mist turning people blue might make some sense. While we associate the colour blue with Terra, apparently Terra's crystal was red. Gaia was the opposite. We associate Gaia with red but its crystal is blue. The souls of Gaia have been denied access to their blue crystal and instead have been pumped into Gaia as Mist. Maybe something in the Mist can turn things blue after all.

Or maybe they just ingested far too much silver? :argor: Maybe they have an extreme form of Argyria (Google it at your peril, or just look up Paul Karason as an example). This is a condition caused by improper medicinal use of silver which can in some cases lead to a build up of silver in the human body, turning the skin bluey-grey.

Again... I'm not entirely sure what that would have to do with Amarant, unless he charged too much silver for his services. For Queen Brahne, some parallels might be considered in the use of powdered lead and other metals used as makeup in the Tudor period and beyond which were also had detrimental effects. I mention Tudor here because Queen Elizabeth I caked herself with lead and Brahne resembles her in the form of an exaggerated caricature (filtered through Lewis Carroll's Red Queen).
 
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