I'll preface it by saying that I think FF8 is notoriously bad about ambiavlent, unclear, or outright contradictory characterizations, but I think this is good for fanfic, since there's a broader range of plausible behavior and a lot more room for authors to write varied characters.

That being said, I don't agree with the usual characterization of Quistis in fanfics and I wonder exactly where it came from. If you look at the other forums on here, or read any of dozens or hundreds of fanfics, you see the same traits emerging to describe her: cool, cold, analytical, ice queen, reliable, stable, etc. I have since come to think that this is one of the greatest illusions of fandom, and one I for a time fell for myself. But this illusion is not particularly supported by the events that actually occur in the game. Let's think about this.

First of all, Quistis is not really a cool or detached person, at least aside from her role as an instructor. She laughs in the very first scene that we see her. She runs away during the Deling mission to apologize to Rinoa. She quite obviously (and a little pathetically, I think) pursues Squall. She has a reputation for being bossy from the time at the orphanage, but that's not necessarily a sign of ice cold calculating demeanor. She's also particularly open with her feelings at one point to Squall, and rather transparently to the player later (which I will soon discuss).

While her early attainment of SeeDship and a teaching post is a testament to her skills, her fulfillment of them is lacking and a little less than professional. First off, speaking as a teacher (horrifying, I know) the very idea that one would relentlessly pursue a student the way Quistis does is really unprofessional and smacks of no restraint at all. She definitely shows favoritism to Squall, personally taking him to complete his trials. While the game doesn't show beyond a shadow of a doubt, I doubt other students received this kind of aid. We never learn exactly why she was dismissed from her post (I suppose it could merely be the Garden faculty throwing their weight around), but it could be because of behavior like this. Similarly, her behavior on the Deling mission also shows a lack of professionalism.

Quistis is nothing close to independent, though she certainly fakes it. She is actually a very needy person. Her entire conversation with Squall in the training center was an attempt to solicit comfort from him. She wants him to understand and sympathize with her, maybe even tell her it is going to be all right. This is a perfectly normal emotion and there's nothing wrong with it, but it certainly suggests more raw, open vulnerability than a lot of authors suggest. As an aside, people always argue about why Squall rejected Quistis (including all those "What is he, gay?" jokes). I believe that it's precisely BECAUSE she is so emotionally needy. Squall is needy himself, whether he admits it or not. The last thing he needs is someone with as many issues as himself. Rinoa, a cheerful (if vapid) person doesn't offer him these burdens until later, when he's already come to care for her. His rejection of Quistis in the training center is thus basically him saying "Sorry, I've got my own problems. Good luck with that."

Quistis, like everyone but Squall and Rinoa, basically stops getting development of any significant sort by the second disc at the latest. Her last big bit is when she reveals to the other characters that her feelings for Squall were based on a "big sister" kind of complex. Talking with her on the seashore reveals that these remarks were a little disingenuous and she had already given up on Squall, especially with Rinoa in the picture. While it's a testament to her character and maturity that she could control these feelings in the end, her self-conscious comments about them show that she's not really as together as the facade she presents.

This is basically the reason I don't enjoy the Seifer/Quistis pairing. In the one fic I've written about it, I admittedly put both characters on the extreme ends of what I feel is reasonable behavior for them. I don't think they necessarily have to go to this level, but I do feel like they make a poor match. Most people like to point out the "opposites attract" aspect, typified by the famous "Fire and Ice" title. I see less a harmonious meeting of opposites or a romantic clash than a disaster waiting to happen. Quistis is a self-conscious and self-doubting person - the game shows this at several points. Seifer is willing to manipulate or use people as he desires. The ball, in this situation, seems firmly in his court unless one or both of the characters get some significant development in the story itself (for example, a lot will depend on just how "reformed" the author thinks Seifer is).

Anyway, that's my piece. Tell me what you think and why Quistis is awesome and cool and calculating and totally WITH IT and give some examples that totally blow holes in my theory. Or agree, or whatever.

This is an excerpt from a fic called SeeDs of Change, written by Jade Princess14.

“But you’re the best teacher there is in Garden.” Seifer protested.

“That may be true now, but I wasn’t then. Do you know that my field exam was the only mission I’d ever been on when I started teaching? I didn’t really have the experience to be a good Instructor. So I learned leadership from watching Squall take charge of our party. I learnt from Rinoa leading the Forest Owls, from how Selphie handled things at the Missile Base. I studied how Zell ran things when he went after the Lutanic Pandora and how Irvine managed the assignation attempt. I watched them all Seifer, and every one of them were better leaders than I had ever been. So when it was all over and we came back here, Cid saw the change in me and gave me my old job back. Except I’m a Field Instructor now because that’s where my experience lies.”

I think she really nailed it with that one. I don’t know. I do agree with you, but I just think people are entitled to portray their characters however they feel is best, provided they have a good reason and enough explanation to make it plausible.

Quistis has a meteoric rise through SeeD, and yet has an even faster drop-off. She was sent to Garden by her foster family at age 10. We've got no clue as to what went on there, she only says "things didn't work out at my new home, so I was in Garden at age 10. I've always figured the foster family were either dabbling yuppies who realized they didn't want a child after all so they stuck her in a military boarding school, or the foster family were pathological disciplinarians who sent their "unruly" 10 year old to military boarding school to be straightened out (i.e. broken). Either way, Quistis could very easily have a fear of rejection/nobody loves me complex almost as bad as Squall's. Her foster parents getting rid of her at 10 and no apparent communication between parents and foster daughter after that? That's gotta mess with your self esteem, I'd think.

So she shows up at Garden, and after a few years of refereeing Squall and Seifer, she makes SeeD at the very young age of 15 -- which is either unprecedented or incredibly rare, the game seems to suggest (I think. I don't know what I base that impression on but it's there). She probably overloaded on the Honors and AP classes, or at least the garden equivalent, in order to leap ahead like that. Or, alternately, she took a much larger class load than your average student. Either way, that's lots of study time, little play time. And probably not a lot of friends (except for the Card Club, I guess). Although apparently quite a lot of admirers.

As she enters the post graduat program and becomes a teacher at 17 -- again, the youngest ever to do so -- she's leaping even further ahead of her peers and having less and less in common with them. I imagine she gets aloof and even possibly snobbish during this phase. While the Trepies are fellating her for her success (and probably feeding the ego) on the other hand you've got the classmates left behind, i.e. Seifer, who are probably jealous/resentful. It's hard for me to imagine Seifer not feeling this way toward her, actually, and eager to take her down a peg, especially when he starts his implied series of exam failures.

Getting back to those mysterious foster parents and how they might tie back in now, I'm seeing Quistis as someone who gets a lot of reinforement for being "smart" (good grades, record rise, pats on the head and praise from teachers and what not) but probably does not get a lot of reinforcement on being "pretty"; i.e. she feels respected but not loved (this also seems to explain, perhaps, why she would give up without a fight to Rinoa on having Squall. {{"oh, she's prettier than me, I don't have a chance. *sob*}} Excelling professionally is the lynchpin of her self-esteem (with love/friends being the weak link). School is what she's good at; being liked is what she's bad at. (The "Disciplinarian" foster parents might also have added a dimension of "you have to do good at school and follow the rules and be obedient and excellent OR ELSE you will not be loved, and if you screw up well we'll send you to that military school for ORPHANS!") And while at first she'd probably write off the disinterst in her as the other kids merely being jealous haters, after a while she'd have to start asking herself "why doesn't anyone seem to really like me?

So, after she becomes a teacher, and is seemingly "done" with the professional path where she has become accustomed to quick success, she starts trying to work on the personal side of things, while not really knowing how to do that. The people around her age who she sees most are her new crop of students, including that one mousy haired kid who never says anything but seems to do really well and is a natural fighter and she probably still remembers breaking up his fights with Seifer even if she's forgotten the Orphanage connection by now. It's not too farfetched to imagine Quistis and Squall even had a class or two together early one before she shot ahead of everybody. So there's kinda a bond there. Squall is also probably throwing himself into his work and his career to compensate for his whole ball of rejection issues, much like she has. Quistis is really smart and perceptive, of course she picks up on this. Hey! Here's somebody who I kinda have a lot of stuff in common with! Nevermind that he's my student and so I should remain at a professional distance from him, here's finally somebody I like who might well like me back!

So Quistis either subconciously or consciously starts favoring him in class, both because she likes him and also maybe to get him to notice her. The faculty probably doesn't need long to pick up on this pattern of unprofessional behavior. Also, she's a rookie teacher and first year teachers are bound to make mistakes in general anyway, just because they're still new to it and figuring out how to do it in such a way that works best for them. So after bailing him out of the infirmary, then personally taking him out into the field for a makeup exam after the deadline presumably (they're supposed to have done the fire cavern before being eligible for the dollet mission, doing both on the same day is A) a health risk B) gonna mess with the red tape of who is eligible so who is going on the mission so how many sets of equipment and stuff do we need?) the faculty has probably had enough of her favoritism. Also, I imagine Seifer has been complaining, since pro-Squall favoritism also likely leads to Seifer getting shafted.

So she loses her license over this boy Squall. Losing the license so quickly, a new experience of professional failure (after a year of a job that was actually hard) has really gotta mess with her head. This is what she's good at, now all of a sudden she isn't anymore? "Well, at least I've finally found a boy my age that l...

"...oh, wait. He danced with that total stranger on his grad nite, and then when I told him how I feel and all that I'd been through for him, he told me to talk to a wall." *SOB*

Quistis has her cool, analytical side, but she loses her composure a lot earlier and a lot easier than Squall. She tries to put on that front like she's got handle on everything and is calm and in control, but underneath, she's pretty insecure. And, by the way, the early part of the game takes away the foundations of what security she has, and before long she's not cool and analytical on the surface, either -- she has obviously lost it during the Deling City mission, shouting down Rinoa then wanting to run back and apologize while even Selphie is shrieking "But we CAN'T leave our post!" Squall making her leader of the gateway team was seriously some misplaced confidence in her on his part. Although given that Zell and Selphie were his other options I guess one could say he was stuck hoping that Quistis would return to her pre-secret area scene form, which would've been her "normal" to the rest of them, and in the subsequent disks it gets worse, and in fact everyone EXCEPT Quistis is trusted with a leadership role from then on out [Selphie leads the commando raid on the Missile Base, Zell instigates the jailbreak and is Edea's personal bodyguard, and Irvine leads the charge into Galbadia Garden after Nida rams it out of the sky. Quistis doesn't lead zhizzle (for rizzle!), and rightly so.]

By game's end, I imagine she's still scrambling to put that mask of mature composure back in place, while also searching for some foundations upon which to rebuild some real confidence. She could be on the road to doing that, since after all the Orphanage Gang are her real and true friends (and a definite Trade Up over the trepies and the card club). And hey, she helped beat THE sorceress, which is what SeeD's ultimately all about, so her professional life could be getting back on track. Even if not she's still a hero. And hey, the student she unfairly helped all the way through turned out to be THE hero, so maybe her judgment as a teacher wasn't really that bad after all. She's also desperate enough to do something stupid that could set her back even further and really mess her up for a long time; trying to force herself into some relationship, any relationship, thinking relationship = i'm loved no matter how screwed up said relationship actually is, she could very easily end up like she does in DK's "Fly". It may well depend on how "over" Squall she actually is, and/or how long it takes her to actually get to that point.

Also, I find bitter/insecure Quistis way more entertaining to write and read than stable happy and well composed Quistis. :P

That said, it's also a good idea to take into account the likely effect the last parts of the game would have had on her. While I do see a point in the passage you have quoted, Ami, it must be kept in mind that there is a huge difference between 'watching' and 'studying' leadership techniques and actually being able to perform them. Leading a team requires more than just know-how, it also requires charisma and emotional distance. Quistis has failed utterly at keeping an emotional distance, and charismatic is not a word I would use to describe her within the context of the game. Smart, yes. Hardworking, yes. Fundamentally good, yes. Charismatic, no. She's just too needy, which is such an unappealing quality. But I do agree that the last parts of the game might have affected her self-confidence in a positive manner. It's up to the author, though, to sketch those changes convincingly. Not just the know-how, but the emotional development too. And after that the experience of doing, not just studying.

As far as Seifer/Quistis... well, I have a soft spot for it, but I have to admit that there is something fundamentally disappointing almost every S/Q story I've read (excepting yours, DK, which doesn't fall into the class of fanfiction I am talking about). There is a whole mess of fanfiction devoted to this pairing, and while a lot of the details differ, what I've found is that I disagree in general with the characterization of both Seifer and Quistis nearly 99% of the time. The other 1% are stories where I think one or the other of them is developed appropriately, but not both. Quistis is portrayed as strong and independent without the necessary development that I as a reader would require to make it believable, and Seifer is often so reformed that he's unrecognizable. I think a little reform is essential to make his character sympathetic, but I think most authors take it way too far.

But I do think that the characterization of Quistis is the biggest obstacle to a truly successful, feel-good Seifer/Quistis story. She's not nearly as cool as most authors portray her, and without development I can't see even a majorly reformed Seifer going for her. What I'd like to see is a story where Quistis gets the necessary reforms to actually be interesting, and Seifer is still pretty sharp. ;p

You know, I'd never really thought about much of this before. It's so easy to buy into the idea that she's Miss Independent, partially because she doesn't get that much character development, and partially because it's the opposite of character bashing and therefore most people don't think twice about it. ("It's an improvement, so it must be okay!")

I think that some people just look at some aspects of her and then write her as they think she ought to be. She's attractive, she's got a fan club (I really think that's an ongoing joke,) she uses a whip, she's good at fighting, she attained her instructor's license at a young age... They look at all of that and think, "Wow! Someone like that MUST be really cool!"

When you think about it, though, it's not surprising that Quistis would be a bit needy; doesn't she say during the game that she was adopted at one point, but it didn't work out and she became an orphan again? That has to do weird things to a kid's self-esteem. (I've actually heard people say that attractive people *can't* have self-esteem issues, and if they think that they do they're lying to themselves. They were serious, too. I'm disturbed.)

One contributing factor to all of this, I think, is the belief that it was all Seifer's fault that Quistis lost her instructor's license, and therefore her behavior as an instructor had nothing to do with it. I've seen a lot of people say that, and I believed it myself, for a while. Now I think that he had *something* to do with it; the timing is a bit weird if he had nothing to do with it at all. But I don't see how he could have had enough clout to cause her to be fired all on his own, although he could and probably did hasten the process.

Her being good at fighting just proves that she was trained well and practiced like she should've. I don't think that anyone can deny that she's talented and intelligent, even if she doesn't always use what she has as well as she could. Besides, if she did have low self-esteem, she probably viewed training and fighting as an escape. So of course she's good at it; she worked hard at it.

Of course, I really think that with a few people, they don't think about her characterization that deeply. See, lots of people like Squall, and they don't like Rinoa. Therefore, Quistis HAS to be better than Rinoa in every way, so that people can make Squall break up with Rinoa and hook up with Quistis, and then all is right with the universe again. (For the shoujo-ai version of this scenario, just switch the names accordingly.)

I do like the stories set after the game where Quistis is maturing and coming into her own. I would like to see some setup for that, though. I like the example that Ami quoted, for instance, although I'd like to see it developed a bit beyond one paragraph. ^^;

Also:

Similarly, her behavior on the Deling mission also shows a lack of professionalism.

True. Yes, it's to her credit that she wanted to apologize, that she realized that what she'd said wasn't right. But the middle of a sensitive undercover operation is NOT the time to go and apologize to someone for a relatively small slight. (Maybe I'm just bitter, because I HATED the crawl through the sewers.)

...she reveals to the other characters that her feelings for Squall were based on a "big sister" kind of complex. Talking with her on the seashore reveals that these remarks were a little disingenuous and *she had already given up on Squall,* especially with Rinoa in the picture. While it's a testament to her character and maturity that she could control these feelings in the end, her self-conscious comments about them show that she's not really as together as the facade she presents.

Honestly, I can't believe the "big sister" stuff. I think that she's either acting like the fox who couldn't reach the grapes - "Well, I didn't really want Squall's affection that much anyway" - or she's saying it to take herself out of the picture because she thinks that Rinoa and Squall could be happy together and she doesn't want to be in the way. (I usually lean toward the latter reason, especially because she's the one who yells at Squall later in the game about leaving Rinoa behind in Esthar; she wants Rinoa to be happy with Squall, so she puts her feelings aside so that Rinoa won't feel bad for pursuing him. Or something.)

I've always figured the foster family were either dabbling yuppies who realized they didn't want a child after all so they stuck her in a military boarding school, or the foster family were pathological disciplinarians who sent their "unruly" 10 year old to military boarding school to be straightened out (i.e. broken).

My pet theory is that they (or at least her mother) was obsessive about beauty and put Quistis through a lot of emotional pressure to look good. Not that that on its own would be grounds to an adoption not working out, I'd think, but it would be a factor.

Well, that's my two cents. Much as I like Quistis, she has her character flaws. She isn't the "normal person" in the cast. ^^;

I think we're on the same page here. That scene and the fact that she felt moved to apologize to Rinoa in Deling City (regardless of the timing and how ANNOYING traversing the sewers was, I’m completely with you on that) is why I do respect Quistis. It takes a certain kind of person to publicly disavow what is probably a pretty serious emotional involvement just so that someone else won’t feel uncomfortable. She’s got a bit of a noble streak, which is definitely a point in her favor.

Yes you viewed Quistis very well. I will say that she is the most 'human' character in that game whose personally isn't fabricated to make her appear 'cool' and 'badass'(as fans would put it) just to please the masses. She isn't the typical emo personalitied character or excessively bubbly character who seems to have 24 hour power despite the fact that they've had a troubled past or not. I stopped reading ff8 fics a long time ago because most of the stories lacked depth and creativity and most of the characters were too ooc for me too enjoy the story. I do somewhat like Quistis/Seifer stories simply because Quistis is my favorite character and I hate it that her character is the only one left out of the love scene. Well to hell with it because I think Quistis is one who can easily repair her emotional damage(even though her underlying problems comes to the surface at certain times).

Quistis is very mature and accomplished for her age thus called the garden prodigy, but she isn't boastful about that or continuosly fall back on that fact. As they said she 'lacks skills in leadership', she has potential to become a great leader but she isn't that 'gung ho' she's always second guessing herself. I mean if she was as cold and crass as people portray her to be she wouldn't have gone back to apologize to Rinoa as you mentioned. I going to mention some bad portrayls of her character I've seen in stories, but I hope no one takes offence to this it's just my opinion.

Suicidal Quistis, realizes that she failed as an instructor and her years of pursuing Squall were in vain. She feels alone and unloved(mainly by Squall) and wants to end it. *I just don't see Quistis getting that upset over that, she gets down over trivial matters but doesn't let them completely run her over. She may have liked Squall but she mainly wanted to be the one to fill the void in his life left by Ellone and years of trying to do this lead to her misunderstanding her love for him. Without Quistis, I doubt Squall would've made it as far as he did.

Ice Queen Quistis, distances herself away from her friends is self-involved and very secretive with her emotions and business. *Being mature for her age(or at least acting it) doesn't make her an ice queen. She is friendly and tries to get along with everyone, but her differences with others is probably what puts a barrier between herself and others or makes her feel 'left-out'.

Newfound Confidence Quistis, wants to leave her past behind and finally decides to step up and gets what she wants in life. Wears attractive clothes, makeup, and seems to become extremely flirtatious with Squall or Seifer(or whoever she's after). This persona of her just confuses me. I know we've all tried to wake up one day and become a better person, but relapses always happen. It takes time for that to happen so no presto chango I'm a brand new person thing...just not realistic.

I still love her as my fav ff8 character to date, but I'm just not one to read ooc stories about a fav character of mine.

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