Kefka the Sad Clown (character synopsis)

I recently listened to this youtube video (not required viewing):

Spoiler (Click to View)

While I was listening to this, I realized how even FF6 fans have some misconceptions about the themes of FF6 and about its main villain.

However, before taking on Kefka's cracked mind right off the bat, we need to talk about the game as a whole. We cannot understand the villain until we understand the game that revolves around his character.

A Game About People

It's not the net worth of one's life that's important. It is the day to day concerns, the personal victories, and the celebration of life... and love!
-Terra Bradford

Final Fantasy 6 is a game that has a global plot but only tells personal stories. This seems to be a theme with Final Fantasy games, but in this case, it is taken to the nth degree. While most games have very major personal struggles amidst fighting for the world, I would say FF6 does the opposite: the small stories take the limelight while saving the world is reduced to primarily a plot-device for moving pieces.

Why? What story is really being told when one sits down in front of their SNES or computer and is glued to it for 20+ hours? What is the real driving force behind the game, and why are we so drawn to its characters? Why are there moments of FF6 that stretch a lifetime in our minds?

It's about people.

When I say it's about people, I don't mean that its about these people. I mean its about all people. Where other games build their characters stories and complexity to create story depth, FF6 instead appeals to baser emotions: love, hope, honor, acceptance. The characters of FF6 feel more real because they are more human. The need for love and acceptance is one of, if not the, most primary emotional need of humankind, and is embodied in the story of Terra, a half-esper amnesiac who understands herself almost as little as she does the rest of the world. The majority of main characters throughout the game strive not for great things, or even particularly specific things, but rather ideas; the same ideas that each and every human confronts on a daily basis. It is in this lack of complexity that we are drawn to the characters. Life is complicated, people are not.

So what do we see as our protagonists march through the story? We see real people responding to real problems. And the way these ideals cope with apocalyptic circumstances not only teaches us about the world or the characters of FF6, but about ourselves. It is that heart wrenching pain of loss and despair that caused Celes to throw herself over a cliff. It was the ever-present fear of losing another loved one that turned the adventurer Locke solitary with a hero complex. Even the monster Ultros is like the bully on the playground that really just wants a friend but is scared to be rejected.

The unifying thread as each of these themes is thrown into chaos as the plot takes a nasty turn is hope. Hope to find life and love and happiness again; hope that spreads like wildfire when one dares to show it to others. And the culmination of all the stories in their final scene on Kefka's tower is the very same thing the ancient peoples found faintly shining at the very bottom of their pandora's box: hope.

Kefka's Story

Life...Dreams...Hope...Where do they come from? And where do they go? None of that junk is enough to fulfill your hearts! Destruction...Destruction is what makes life worth living! Destroy! Destroy! Destroy! Let's destroy everything!
-Kefka Palazzo

So then the question becomes, what is Kefka's story?

The popular theory takes its potency from the latter half of this sections quote; but I would encourage you to take a longer look at the beginning. Kefka was not a nihilist, he didn't want to destroy everything; he, like every other human, was looking for fulfillment.

Kefka is a man is driven mad when imperfectly infused (willfully or unwillfully) with magic drained from espers. In one fell-swoop, Kefka's life had been changed forever. Power bred fear, fear from others, fear from himself, fear brought on by powers he couldn't quite control; and the instability of his mind kept him from coping. What was he now? Without hope of any kind of normalcy, Kefka turned to what was probably a quite natural drive for him; ambition. His power seemed to be the only absolute thing left about him, and embracing this power might afford him the ability to fulfill the part of him that had lost hope.

Kefka's evolution as a character begins with him first seeking better and better magitek power, then raw magical ability, then magic itself. He couldn't stop because power never fulfilled. Once he had claimed all power, he was faced with the shattering reality that power hadn't fulfilled him, so he turned it on everyone else. Where had his hope gone? Where did other peoples' come from? He couldn't answer the question, so he set out to prove that hope itself was useless, that he didn't need hope, or acceptance, or love. Hurting people hurt people. He had always been evil, and quite fond of inflicting pain on others, but it wasn't until after the end of the world that Kefka became truly obsessed with destruction.

The Sad Clown

Let's take a look at Kefka's Character design.

Kefka's appearance has very powerful symbolic imagery. Think of the idea of a clown. A clown is a person who paints a face for himself, normally happy. This face stays regardless of what's going on inside. Kefka puts this face on for two reasons.

First: to convince himself that he is okay, that his pursuits are actually making him happy. This is something that we all do. When there isn't true happiness to be had, we distract ourselves. We look for things to keep us from thinking about our actual state and our real needs that may be going unmet. Kefka is no different in this sense. He, however, physically manifests his idea with his appearance. The man inside him slowly dies as the clown frantically clings to things that he thinks will bring him "life", which end only in a total abandonment of the idea of living.

Second: Kefka believes himself to be a monster. This is why he feels he has no hope to begin with. He dons his persona to drive others away in attempts to convince himself that he doesn't need them, while quietly wishing that someone would come into his world and free him from being trapped with himself. This condition is most comparative to the emo culture. The fault here isn't with the individual or their clothing or pass-times, its with their belief that they aren't worthy of love. It's an immensely difficult cycle to break. Kefka pushes others away because he hates himself, then uses the fact that they run away to justify his belief that he is no good.

The Misguided Goal

Why do people insist on creating things that will inevitably be destroyed? Why do people cling to life, knowing that they must someday die? ...Knowing that none of it will have meant anything once they do?
-Kefka Palazzo

So then with all of this in mind, here is Kefka's goal: he wanted specifically to rob people of hope. It was always about people with Kefka. Hope, Love, Dreams: these were things he couldn't understand himself, and thus he wanted to rob those things from everyone else. It was never about destruction, it was about the aftermath as it relates to human nature.

With this goal in mind, Kefka indeed accomplished his goal for a time. For a year following his ascension to power, the world had zero hope. There weren’t any characters who lived happily. There was constant fear and panic. Some people drowned themselves in distraction (such as the people of jidoor), while on the other end of the spectrum, some simply ended their own lives (those living on the solitary island). Most lived in some kind of medium between these, which says something about humanity’s ability to cope. But no one had hope. There was no change, only coping.

However, Kefka couldn’t squash hope entirely, and it was strangely Locke who, after a year’s time, returned hope to the world. It was only after he bandaged a suffering bird that it found its way to the solitary island where Celes finds the bandaged bird after a failed attempt at suicide and sets out to find her friends who all struggle to survive or make the best of what they have left. Small pockets of hope form as the party encounters others in the desecrated planet and soon that hope (and incidentally your party size) grows to a point that is able to overthrow Kefka.

In Summary

Kefka needed people in order to fulfill his plans, because he only ever cared about people in the first place… he needed to remove everyone elses hope in order to validate his own emptiness, and ultimately, if left unchecked, I believe Kefka would have destroyed everything because even robbing others of hope would never fulfill him. Once everyone else was gone, his own emptiness would still eat at him until he eventually destroyed the rest of the world and himself along with it, all to prove that he never should have hoped for something better to begin with.

Really good synopsis :-) hope you make more of this with other main villains!!!

Very good synopsis on kefka.

I read a character synopsis of Ash's Charizard in the anime, and this is one I enjoyed reading as well. It kinda makes you feel sorry for him, though Kefka still made me want to kill him.