Ultima-Griever
Sorceress
Before I even start, I must say that I'm fully aware of how freaking thoroughly the Rinoa/Ultimecia theory has been discussed AND that Final Fantasy VIII Ultimania has stated that this theory is false. However, it is always interesting to play such a game under such light, and I never said anywhere that this theory is true -- only plausible. Many of you will find so, many of you won't.I just wanted to say it so you won't come at me like "B*TCH SE HAS DISPROVEN THIS THEORY" or sth like that. I don't need to be told what I already know.
Well... It all begins at the SeeD graduation ball. Squall is leaning against the wall, looking at the sky... when a shooting star falls. The moment the shooting star falls, Rinoa appears and raises her index finger: one of her most notorious traits. It is here that they meet for the first time, then at the Timber Owls train. This triggers somewhat the main theme of Final Fantasy VIII: the relationship between Squall and Rinoa and their love. It is shown that in the end of Disc 2, Zell obtains Squall's ring and gives it to Rinoa, telling her that he will make one exactly like it to her. And then, she says: So this L I O N of yours, how's it called? That's when you're prompted to name Griever. And this is the only time Griever's name is mentioned in the whole game, except for when Ultimecia summons it during the final battle. And Rinoa says, "So that's how you call it. You know, Zell said he'll make me one exactly like it. Who knows, maybe I could become like a lion, too." And then Edea inadvertently passes on her powers (which are immense, considering that she received a dying Ultimecia's powers 13 years prior to the beginning of the gme) to Rinoa, turning her into a sorceress. Since her powers are way too strong for her to harness with ease, she can only use them through a Limit Break and still cast random magic in her junction list. At this point, her bond with Squall is so strong that he would even go out in space and risk getting lost there himself just so that he could save Rinoa -- not knowing that she had become a sorceress. He didn't mind her being what she became and retrieved her from the Sorceress Memorial - a device which bound a sorceress and her powers, preserving her life so that she wouldn't have to pass her powers on to another woman. At the flower field, where he makes his promise, he becomes her Sorceress Knight, a man who is a companion to the sorceress and protects her not only from others, but from herself and her powers.
However, in the ending part, we see Squall lost in what seems to be the end of time, when the world is nothing more than a deserted landscape in the middle of literally nothing. He walks to the edge of an abyss which leads into nothingness and notices that the world itself was nothing more than a portion of land in the middle of nothing. And we see Rinoa running desperately at the flower field, wondering what had become of Squall. And she holds the Griever ring, an object that symbolizes the bond between her and Squall. Here could be stated that Rinoa had found out her natural element: Time and Space, when she uses her powers to send a signal through time so she could find out in which era Squall was. To support this theory, it can be noticed that the white feather, seen in the very opening that is Rinoa's signature, appears from nowhere and falls on Squall's hand. Here she finds out when in the timeline Squall got lost, which is how she found him later on. But what she could not have foreseen is that when Squall got hold of that single white feather, he remembered Rinoa, but, considering that he was stuck at the end of time, his memories of her could be millennia old.
Squall kept having millennia old distorted flashbacks, most of them concerning Rinoa, and his brain couldn't assimilate when exactly this was from and he began allucinating: instead of seeing her safe and sound inside the Ragnarok, because he had succeeded in getting her out of space, he sees the glass of her helmet breaking: Rinoa had died and Squall had failed her. All of these confusing flashbacks and hallucinations caused a powerful feedback that ended up killing him.
Rinoa then finds Squall, or at least his dead body. By that time she had not noticed that she was the one who did this to him: she thought that he was just unconscious and that he'd wake up in no time. But Squall doesn't wake up. And she realizes what she had done. The fact of killing not only her knight, but her beloved man, when her only intention was to find him and bring him back to their time safely, drove her mad. During the credits, one could see that, while everyone is commemorating the sorceress' defeat in the Great Hall, Rinoa is at the balcony, alone. Irvine's camera shows her alone with a fair distance between her and the line of the threshold. Squall isn't seen anywhere, either. The scene after the credits show Rinoa on the balcony staring at the sky, thinking of Squall: it must be noted that here, too, she is shown to be alone, for even the place where Squall appeared later had previously no one. Then the shooting star falls. A grieving to the point of madness Rinoa remembers that when last a shooting star fell, she had met Squall, and she raised her index finger, exactly what she did to get his attention. Only then Squall appears and, from this point forward, this is only Rinoa hallucinating, wishing that Squall was there to see a shooting star with her and make her dream real.
Rinoa, a powerful sorceress, is knightless due to her own mistake and, though she was not alone, she may have preferred to be, since the people had started hunting sorceresses so that Ultimecia wouldn't be born and, since she had already killed Squall, she didn't want to be around the others in fear of doing the same to them. This attitude of her can be shown when she wanted to be sealed away at the Sorceress Memorial, fearing that Ultimecia from the future would possess her again and she might end up hurting them. Now, Rinoa is alone, suffering from intense persecution, and gradually losing her memory due to GF usage. Notice that I still haven't mentioned the GF Griever. Rinoa had started junctioning GF since she entered the party, not since she found out about Griever. In roughly 2 years of training Squall and the others had forgotten nearly their entire childhood at Edea's Orphanage and that Edea was their Matron, even to the point of attempting to kill her. The same happened to Rinoa. She just couldn't forget Squall completely because of her strong guilt and the ring on her necklace: Griever's ring. With her powers more under control, she found out that there was a force inside that ring, something that Squall could never have noticed unless by accident, and she extracted Griever from the ring and junctioned it to herself. Griever, to Rinoa, was the embodiment of her lost knight and, with time, she came to forget even his name, and this could have been a relatively short time. At this point, Rinoa could have started mutating already: tattoo-like marks could have started appearing over her body; her eyes, hands and feet somehow resembled Griever's, and her hair turned white, just like Griever's mane. All she could remember now was that Griever was an entity linked to something that used to be very important to her, and she took on some of its physical traits in order to honor this link.
Sometime around that time, during the witch hunt, Laguna, who wasn't exactly young even at FFVIII's timeline, was too old to keep ruling Esthar like he used to and was way too much time at the governor's seat, and had to relinquish it to someone else. Naturally, the people, afraid of the sorceress since Sorceress Adel, put there and advocate of the witch hunt, and this person may have found Sorceress Rinoa and bound her again at the Sorceress Memorial. Feeling enraged and somehow betrayed, Rinoa remained sealed for an unknown time that could have been even generations: even that it isn't stated on the game, the device at Sorceress Memorial is implied to preserve the life of the sorceress trapped inside, because, if she dies, her powers will be passed on to another woman or another sorceress, which will invalidate its use. We must also remember Sorceress Adel, who was already dying at the time of the Sorceress War, but still remained sealed during 17 years and hasn't changed a bit. At this point, the Junction Machine Ellone was being perfected, and this can be stated securely because that's what Ultimecia uses to send her consciousness back in time and possess other sorceresses.
After all those years imprisoned, Rinoa could have been freed by someone, most likely the last sorceress looking for a suitable successor. She was rather weak of spending so many years imprisoned and didn't have any idea of how much time she had been trapped. When she found out, she went enraged, stole the Junction Machine Ellone and probably turned the SeeD, a special force widely known to be trained to defeat the sorceress, into slaves for the construction of her castle and killed them afterwards. To take revenge on those who had persecuted her and turned her life into what it was, she planned to cast Time Compression, a spell which compresses all time into a single moment like a huge "now" and become a goddess who will be the only one to live in such a world.
Rinoa/Ultimecia's hatred of SeeD can be explained as SeeD is later known to be a force created to defeat the sorceress rather than being solely mercenaries and, since she can't remember the time she spent alongside SeeDs due to junctioning, it is plausible that this is the only thing she knows about them. She also suffered from intense persecution at the hands of society and was also shaken by guilt for having killed her Knight, which contributed to increase her madness, and only the madness remained when she ultimately forgot about him. She can't remember anything even when she attacks her past self or Squall: it had been such a long time ago and her mind was consumed by junctioning GFs and Griever. She may not have realized exactly what she was doing when she let her past self to die that many times. The only thing she knew about Squall was something that she had heard during recent times: that a legendary SeeD would defeat the sorceress. Considering that she fought Squall so many times, she could have realized that this was the "legendary SeeD" destined to face her, as she says at the end of Disc 2.
This theory is rather different from the mainstream Rinoa/Ultimecia theory. Somehow I found the theory interesting, but there were too many holes in it -- not that mine doesn't have any, it's just that I found it way more plausible than the mainstream theory.
Well... It all begins at the SeeD graduation ball. Squall is leaning against the wall, looking at the sky... when a shooting star falls. The moment the shooting star falls, Rinoa appears and raises her index finger: one of her most notorious traits. It is here that they meet for the first time, then at the Timber Owls train. This triggers somewhat the main theme of Final Fantasy VIII: the relationship between Squall and Rinoa and their love. It is shown that in the end of Disc 2, Zell obtains Squall's ring and gives it to Rinoa, telling her that he will make one exactly like it to her. And then, she says: So this L I O N of yours, how's it called? That's when you're prompted to name Griever. And this is the only time Griever's name is mentioned in the whole game, except for when Ultimecia summons it during the final battle. And Rinoa says, "So that's how you call it. You know, Zell said he'll make me one exactly like it. Who knows, maybe I could become like a lion, too." And then Edea inadvertently passes on her powers (which are immense, considering that she received a dying Ultimecia's powers 13 years prior to the beginning of the gme) to Rinoa, turning her into a sorceress. Since her powers are way too strong for her to harness with ease, she can only use them through a Limit Break and still cast random magic in her junction list. At this point, her bond with Squall is so strong that he would even go out in space and risk getting lost there himself just so that he could save Rinoa -- not knowing that she had become a sorceress. He didn't mind her being what she became and retrieved her from the Sorceress Memorial - a device which bound a sorceress and her powers, preserving her life so that she wouldn't have to pass her powers on to another woman. At the flower field, where he makes his promise, he becomes her Sorceress Knight, a man who is a companion to the sorceress and protects her not only from others, but from herself and her powers.
However, in the ending part, we see Squall lost in what seems to be the end of time, when the world is nothing more than a deserted landscape in the middle of literally nothing. He walks to the edge of an abyss which leads into nothingness and notices that the world itself was nothing more than a portion of land in the middle of nothing. And we see Rinoa running desperately at the flower field, wondering what had become of Squall. And she holds the Griever ring, an object that symbolizes the bond between her and Squall. Here could be stated that Rinoa had found out her natural element: Time and Space, when she uses her powers to send a signal through time so she could find out in which era Squall was. To support this theory, it can be noticed that the white feather, seen in the very opening that is Rinoa's signature, appears from nowhere and falls on Squall's hand. Here she finds out when in the timeline Squall got lost, which is how she found him later on. But what she could not have foreseen is that when Squall got hold of that single white feather, he remembered Rinoa, but, considering that he was stuck at the end of time, his memories of her could be millennia old.
Squall kept having millennia old distorted flashbacks, most of them concerning Rinoa, and his brain couldn't assimilate when exactly this was from and he began allucinating: instead of seeing her safe and sound inside the Ragnarok, because he had succeeded in getting her out of space, he sees the glass of her helmet breaking: Rinoa had died and Squall had failed her. All of these confusing flashbacks and hallucinations caused a powerful feedback that ended up killing him.
Rinoa then finds Squall, or at least his dead body. By that time she had not noticed that she was the one who did this to him: she thought that he was just unconscious and that he'd wake up in no time. But Squall doesn't wake up. And she realizes what she had done. The fact of killing not only her knight, but her beloved man, when her only intention was to find him and bring him back to their time safely, drove her mad. During the credits, one could see that, while everyone is commemorating the sorceress' defeat in the Great Hall, Rinoa is at the balcony, alone. Irvine's camera shows her alone with a fair distance between her and the line of the threshold. Squall isn't seen anywhere, either. The scene after the credits show Rinoa on the balcony staring at the sky, thinking of Squall: it must be noted that here, too, she is shown to be alone, for even the place where Squall appeared later had previously no one. Then the shooting star falls. A grieving to the point of madness Rinoa remembers that when last a shooting star fell, she had met Squall, and she raised her index finger, exactly what she did to get his attention. Only then Squall appears and, from this point forward, this is only Rinoa hallucinating, wishing that Squall was there to see a shooting star with her and make her dream real.
Rinoa, a powerful sorceress, is knightless due to her own mistake and, though she was not alone, she may have preferred to be, since the people had started hunting sorceresses so that Ultimecia wouldn't be born and, since she had already killed Squall, she didn't want to be around the others in fear of doing the same to them. This attitude of her can be shown when she wanted to be sealed away at the Sorceress Memorial, fearing that Ultimecia from the future would possess her again and she might end up hurting them. Now, Rinoa is alone, suffering from intense persecution, and gradually losing her memory due to GF usage. Notice that I still haven't mentioned the GF Griever. Rinoa had started junctioning GF since she entered the party, not since she found out about Griever. In roughly 2 years of training Squall and the others had forgotten nearly their entire childhood at Edea's Orphanage and that Edea was their Matron, even to the point of attempting to kill her. The same happened to Rinoa. She just couldn't forget Squall completely because of her strong guilt and the ring on her necklace: Griever's ring. With her powers more under control, she found out that there was a force inside that ring, something that Squall could never have noticed unless by accident, and she extracted Griever from the ring and junctioned it to herself. Griever, to Rinoa, was the embodiment of her lost knight and, with time, she came to forget even his name, and this could have been a relatively short time. At this point, Rinoa could have started mutating already: tattoo-like marks could have started appearing over her body; her eyes, hands and feet somehow resembled Griever's, and her hair turned white, just like Griever's mane. All she could remember now was that Griever was an entity linked to something that used to be very important to her, and she took on some of its physical traits in order to honor this link.
Sometime around that time, during the witch hunt, Laguna, who wasn't exactly young even at FFVIII's timeline, was too old to keep ruling Esthar like he used to and was way too much time at the governor's seat, and had to relinquish it to someone else. Naturally, the people, afraid of the sorceress since Sorceress Adel, put there and advocate of the witch hunt, and this person may have found Sorceress Rinoa and bound her again at the Sorceress Memorial. Feeling enraged and somehow betrayed, Rinoa remained sealed for an unknown time that could have been even generations: even that it isn't stated on the game, the device at Sorceress Memorial is implied to preserve the life of the sorceress trapped inside, because, if she dies, her powers will be passed on to another woman or another sorceress, which will invalidate its use. We must also remember Sorceress Adel, who was already dying at the time of the Sorceress War, but still remained sealed during 17 years and hasn't changed a bit. At this point, the Junction Machine Ellone was being perfected, and this can be stated securely because that's what Ultimecia uses to send her consciousness back in time and possess other sorceresses.
After all those years imprisoned, Rinoa could have been freed by someone, most likely the last sorceress looking for a suitable successor. She was rather weak of spending so many years imprisoned and didn't have any idea of how much time she had been trapped. When she found out, she went enraged, stole the Junction Machine Ellone and probably turned the SeeD, a special force widely known to be trained to defeat the sorceress, into slaves for the construction of her castle and killed them afterwards. To take revenge on those who had persecuted her and turned her life into what it was, she planned to cast Time Compression, a spell which compresses all time into a single moment like a huge "now" and become a goddess who will be the only one to live in such a world.
Rinoa/Ultimecia's hatred of SeeD can be explained as SeeD is later known to be a force created to defeat the sorceress rather than being solely mercenaries and, since she can't remember the time she spent alongside SeeDs due to junctioning, it is plausible that this is the only thing she knows about them. She also suffered from intense persecution at the hands of society and was also shaken by guilt for having killed her Knight, which contributed to increase her madness, and only the madness remained when she ultimately forgot about him. She can't remember anything even when she attacks her past self or Squall: it had been such a long time ago and her mind was consumed by junctioning GFs and Griever. She may not have realized exactly what she was doing when she let her past self to die that many times. The only thing she knew about Squall was something that she had heard during recent times: that a legendary SeeD would defeat the sorceress. Considering that she fought Squall so many times, she could have realized that this was the "legendary SeeD" destined to face her, as she says at the end of Disc 2.
This theory is rather different from the mainstream Rinoa/Ultimecia theory. Somehow I found the theory interesting, but there were too many holes in it -- not that mine doesn't have any, it's just that I found it way more plausible than the mainstream theory.