Rydia’s Coming of Age. Aside from spending some time in a familiar environment, the Feymarch is a place of growth for Rydia. While acquiring new powers is certainly significant, something else happens deeper down.
It is in this period that Rydia, one of the few child characters in the game (the other two are twins Polom and Parom), experiences her coming of age. Or rather, it is during her stay with Eidolons that Rydia’s development, a process began when she met Cecil, sharply rises.
Examples of this theme abound in literature (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795–96) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the paragon of the genre, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) to name a few classics), television and films (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, many Studio Gibli works such as Spirited Away) or even in other games of the Squaresoft franchise (Vivi in Final Fantasy X or Sora in the Kingdom Hearts series). There are however at least two reasons that make Rydia’s coming of age fall a bit off the beaten path.
First of all, while Rydia is without a doubt human, she isn’t like other humans. Summoners are in fact a special group of people. They posses the unique ability of calling supernatural beings, in addition they live all together in a small village, probably quite detached from normal folks and, since no one has a surname, they might as well be a part of the same family1.
Secondly, the setting in which Rydia’s coming of age takes place is definitely uncommon. To begin with Rydia goes from being a seven-year-old kid to a young woman in her early twenties in a very short time span. Then, no matter how Rydia feels about the Feymarch (it is after all like a second home for her), that place is still far from the “normal” world. Albeit there is a passage connecting the Feymarch with the rest of the world, humans do not usually go there. Eidolons themselves aren’t particularly keen on humans unless they are summoners, which, as I said before, are a particular “category”. Finally the distance between the Feymarch and the rest of the world is not only physical. Eidolons are a race in themselves; they aren’t monsters (which they refer to as “cousins”), because they are intelligent, they run shops, write books…. Yet they aren’t, obviously, humans.
With these differences in mind, Rydia’s coming of age follows the traditional course. At the beginning the loss of Rydia’s family and village pushes her away from home. Then, after meeting Cecil and deciding to join him, she embarks on her real journey. The actual process of maturation, that is what happens in the Feymarch, is never told so it is not possible to know, say, whether Rydia encountered difficulties with the training or not. It is however possible to image some of the emotions Rydia felt and we certainly see the results of her leap from child to adult.
- Although this is never confirmed in the game, the Final Fantasy IV Settei Hen reveals that “the summoners of Mist have continually married within their own bloodlines,” therefore it is likely that all the inhabitants of Mist are (close or distant) relatives. [↩]