[JohnBooty]

I don't think it's silly of you to bring this up. In fact I think it's crucial to reexamine nonconsensual stuff in fiction, even kids' fiction. But I don't think I agree with your conclusion here.

It's true: in the real world a forced marriage is more or less explicitly rapey.

But at some point we as a society decided that in light works of fantasy we don't need to really need to follow every single thing to its logical real-world conclusion.

I mean, was there rape in Super Mario Brothers? The antagonist is quite the princess-kidnapper.

[jstarfish]

> I mean, was there rape in Super Mario Brothers? The antagonist is quite the princess-kidnapper.

I was surprised to see they only now re-released Super Mario RPG. There's a forced-marriage story arc in that one too, and Mario Odyssey also had an abort-the-wedding mission.

I'm in a weird position where you don't agree with me, but I actually agree with you. Yeah, wedding implies an unwanted consummation, but there's already kidnapping and unwanted bondage (marriage), which are themselves serious crimes and boundary violations. What may or may not happen next isn't really the point since we're already in not-ok territory.

I don't have a dog in this fight, I was mainly arguing against the Setzer-wouldn't-do-that line of thought. He's a wildcard who lives for himself, not a saint. Celes leveraged his own ego against him to challenge him to a game-- and cheat at it to guarantee her success. She didn't need no man to save her. Even then she ended up having to babysit him later.

[JohnBooty]

If we extrapolate what Setzer might do "in reality" then yeah, it's hard to argue he wouldn't do that. I don't know we can argue that he definitely would do that, but we can't say he wouldn't.

But in fiction, especially fantastical works like FF6, we can't make claims about the original work (ala "there is rape in FF6") based on those kinds of extrapolations.

[xwdv]

Take another look at the cast of FF6 and you’ll realize a lot of them aren’t really good people… Locke is a thief, Shadow is a straight up killer for hire, Setzer a degenerate gambler and rapist, Edgar a creepy womanizer, and Celes was gleefully killing people for the empire before changing sides (imagine a Nazi general just deciding she’ll join the Allies instead).