FFVII Rebirth Retrospective ~ Dyne, Mental Illness and the Ethics of Empathising with Murderers
G’day websurfers, editing Kabba here. I need to preface this Retrospective with a trigger warning: I will be discussing mental illness, mass murder, suicide and capital punishment. This is very sensitive, multifaceted and controversial subject matter, so if you‘re especially vulnerable to any of these topics, please prioritise self-care and proceed with caution or skip this one entirely, I promise I won’t be upset if you do. For those of you who do keep watching, I wish I could’ve gone into so much more detail with this Retrospective, but to say the very least, writing this coincided with some… topical anniversaries for me. I’ve had to really focus on my own mental health for the last few weeks, so I engaged with this topic as best as I could, but it is far from comprehensive. Keeping that in mind, please understand that I don’t have all the answers, I just want this video to act as a springboard for further brainstorming and action to help address some of society’s most deadly failures. With all that being said, let’s talk about Barret and Dyne‘s fateful encounter.
I still stand by most of what I said in my initial playthrough two and a half years ago, but I feel like my opinion has evolved since then. It’s not that I think suicidality should never be featured in fictional media, what I more so take umbrage with is how it’s depicted, and in my opinion OG does an atrocious job of it. Dyne is an extremely traumatised man - his hometown was destroyed, all his loved ones seemingly killed, his arm amputated and left with only criminal subordinates for company. This trauma manifests as nihilistic frustration, driving him to shoot and kill several people at Gold Saucer and fight Barret in a twisted bid to reunite Marlene with her dead mother. After their duel Dyne becomes eerily calm and resigned, lamenting that he‘s so broken he doesn’t even deserve to hold his own daughter before throwing himself off a nearby cliff.
OG was not subtle in its use of Dyne as a foil for Barret, having them share the same upbringing, trauma, disability, prosthetic weapon, vendetta against Shinra and even the same daughter; the main difference between them is that Barret has people to fight for and keep him grounded, while Dyne does not. Dyne is the personification of what Barret should NOT become in his quest for justice; while he certainly succeeds from that angle, none of the grisly events leading up to his death are given much respect, time and development of their own.
Unlike with other atrocities such as the Nibelheim incident or the Sector 7 plate collapse, OG all but completely glosses over Dyne’s massacre at Gold Saucer. The tragedy itself occurs offscreen and, much more importantly, the only victim to be given any type of focus is purely there to exposit a detail about the killer and set up Barret as a red herring. It’s a barebones inciting incident to get Barret and Dyne in the same place, failing to humanise the victims and survivors, or to encourage players to empathise with the horrors of being gunned down in the middle of a fun, joyous outing. As a result, players are quite likely to forget or downplay the gravity of the situation, which seems a bit counterproductive when this is meant to be about forcing Barret to confront the dark reality of his own violent brand of justice.
There’s also the unavoidable implications behind Dyne’s reason for taking his own life. Considering how memorable and narratively significant this scene is, and how there’re no other examples of outright suicidality in FFVII, Dyne is very likely to leave a lasting impact on players, influencing their perception of severe mental illness. Consequently, having him choose to kill himself rather than face the consequences of his own actions and get help is horrifically harmful. There’s already a pervasive attitude that wanting and/or attempting to take one’s own life is selfish and cowardly; we don’t need any more portrayals regurgitating that rhetoric, especially without other types of representation within the story to counteract it. It also perpetuates the notion that people with mental and/or neurological conditions are inherently dangerous and unsalvageable, and that they’re doing the world a favour by dying.
When exploring the relationship between violent crimes and mental and neurological conditions, it’s absolutely imperative that great care is taken to not only avoid retraumatising victims but also to not use the offender’s actions as an excuse to reinforce ableist attitudes. Most people flinch at the idea of empathising with murderers, let alone rehabilitating and re-integrating them back into society, understandably so. It can be seen as disrespectful and alienating for the victims’ loved ones. It’s also a hell of a lot of trust to put into someone who might not regret their actions or may cause further harm to the community. Furthermore, keeping offenders out of sight, out of mind in prison offers a sense of relief and comfort - we removed the problem, all is well again.
On the other hand, killing or letting murderers rot in jail is arguably just sweeping that problem under the rug - it does nothing to address the well-known risk factors of violent crime like poverty, poor education, dysfunctional relationships and untreated disability and/or mental illness, all of which are failures on a systemic level. Not to mention, incarceration and capital punishment are mostly designed to torture criminals in ways which would be considered inhumane in any other context. Very little is done to help offenders resolve the underlying causes of their behaviour or to build the skills needed to adapt to post-prison life, leading to high rates of recidivism upon release.
Had Dyne lived, what would justice look like? Would he qualify for the insanity plea? Would spending the rest of his life under psychiatric care be letting him off “too easily”? Would a life sentence bring true peace and closure for his victims, or fix the systemic issues Shinra causes? Does he deserve to be reunited with Marlene, when his victims will never get to see their families again? Should he ever reintegrate with society, let alone be fully forgiven and redeemed? And what about the survivors? Did the massacre affect their perception of Gold Saucer or its parent company? How do they feel about Dyne, would learning about his circumstances change their perception of him? What would healing look like for them if their loved ones’ killer was also getting therapy?
OG doesn’t offer any opinions one way or another, because Dyne, and by extension his victims, only exist to further his former friend’s arc, with no regard for the extremely triggering subject matter of this part of the story. Like I said in my initial playthrough, OG loves to martyrise antagonistic people in the name of plot convenience and main character growth, at the cost of its broader sociopolitical commentary and thematic integrity. It’s far easier to outsource antagonism to the cosmic, unaccountable evils of Jenova, and to mainly use mental illness as a gimmick to situationally raise the stakes.
So what does this mean for Re- project’s version of events? Well, positives first. This was hands down the most emotionally profound sequence in the entire game, in no small part due to its overall faithfulness to the dark, bleak tone of its OG counterpart. John Bentley and Dave Mitchell did a fantastic job of conveying the raw desperation and despair their characters are feeling in this moment. One of my favourite parts is when Dyne accuses Barret of trying to take the easy way out by offering to die for his sins, only to later admit he himself can’t do what needs to be done. This implies his struggle with suicidal ideation, but because of his own internalised guilt and shame around it he’s projecting that onto Barret; in a meta sense, it almost reads like an acknowledgement of the dubious connotations his OG fate carries. These moments prove the devs do understand how to write subtle, nuanced and emotionally compelling dialogue… which makes Re- project all the more frustrating because we could’ve been getting scenes like this the whole time, had they not been so preoccupied with levity, fanservice and theorybaiting.
Even this relatively good scene has critical shortcomings…and not just the shit with Palmer, Dio and the Turks; you shouldn’t need me to tell you why that was disgustingly tone deaf. As I previously discussed in Donning the Armour, Re- project has all but completely negated Barret’s most prominent flaw: his disregard for collateral damage in his quest for vengeance against Shinra. First and foremost, while Remake still has Barret verbally accept sacrifices for the greater good, the Sector 1 reactor explosion has been retconned to be entirely Shinra’s fault rather than Avalanche’s, absolving Barret of direct responsibility for the tragedy, at least from the audience’s perspective. As a result, him and Tifa’s conversation in the aftermath of the Sector 7 plate collapse is recontextualised. In OG, his assertion that Shinra is solely to blame demonstrates his grief and righteous anger, but the earlier explosion he personally ordered casts doubt on his claimed innocence, arguably adding a layer of guilt and denial to his words. This is supported by his defensiveness while getting called out on it much later in the story. But in Remake, because the game goes out of its way to show Avalanche never intended, nor was ever truly capable of causing much damage, and it consistently emphasises the more palatable aspects of his personality, we’re incentivised to just take Barret’s words at face value rather than dig deeper and consider to what extent he is right or wrong.
Furthermore, he inexplicably sticks his nose up at Yuffie’s assassination methods, spares Rufus in Junon and was shown to be innocent before the Gold Saucer massacre even happened. While he still threatens people’s lives from time to time, his target either gets the upper hand, bigger conflicts usurp the scene or it takes very little convincing for him to redirect his anger. Even his line about having blood on his hands, originally said after Dyne’s death as an implicit admission of his own violent tendencies, now occurs while he recounts the Corel massacre, reframing it as a misplaced expression of self-blame for an atrocity he did not commit nor could’ve ever foreseen or prevented. And to top it all off, the context behind the Gold Saucer massacre itself has been changed from a deliberate, indiscriminate bloodbath to a botched assasination attempt with collateral damage.
All this sanitisation fundamentally changes the meaning of the confrontation. Rather than initiating the duel as part of his desire to destroy EVERYTHING, Re- project Dyne turns on Barret because he resents his former friend for allegedly conspiring with Shinra to ruin his life. Rather than having Barret approach Dyne as an equal, Rebirth skews their dynamic by grossly exaggerating Dyne’s mental instability through wild mood swings and hallucinations, while presenting Barret as a mere victim of his manic accusations and outbursts. I‘ve seen people excuse the weird monster tentacles both as a symbol of Dyne’s descent into madness and as a gimmick to keep the battle engaging… to which I have to ask: isn’t it kinda insulting that Square Enix doesn’t think we’re smart or mature enough to appreciate a simple but emotionally loaded shootout between estranged friends? Doesn’t that also betray a lack of trust in their own writing and game design, one so great they felt the need to literally dehumanise the mentally ill character just to keep our attention? “We don’t need to justify anything to do with Dyne because he’s crAaAZyYY”. I’m so fucking sick of video games using artistry as an excuse for ableism, but anywho.
In OG, Dyne does not exclusively fixate on the Corel massacre and those he deems responsible for it… but in Rebirth, that’s been made the entire point of his murderous behaviour. He spitefully taunts and victimises Barret, despite also acknowledging Shinra’s role in his trauma, before dying on top of his former friend while telling him to carry the weight of his guilt. This heavy-headed message manages to be even more cynical than OG’s, where Dyne used his final words to encourage Barret to be a better person than him. It cannot be overstated just how problematic OG’s portrayal of Dyne was, but at least it had a constructive point to make; what is Re- project Barret supposed to take away from this experience? If not to teach Barret a harsh but lifesaving lesson about not letting his righteous anger consume him, what purpose does Dyne‘s death serve this time around? In conforming to OG’s path, despite decontextualising it so heavily, Rebirth makes Barret, Dyne and the latter’s victims suffer for no good reason. Those people in Gold Saucer died so a half-naked man could sexually harass Cloud, an elderly manchild could chuck a trantrum and Barret could be further scapegoated for the one tragedy in his life he was not responsible for. It’s all just trauma porn to kill time and make us pity Barret, distracting from his inconsistent character development and lack of flaws post-Remake so we can pretend he’s growing more than he actually is. This won’t be a recurring problem, will it?!
In my playthrough, I said I preferred Dyne‘s new cause of death, but now I don’t think it’s any better than his OG fate. While not as overtly self-destructive as his predecessor, Re- project Dyne still indicates that he wants to die, a wish granted by the Shinra troops who ambush him. We could argue whether or not this counts as a suicide by cop situation, but I think it’s more important to examine the overall rhetoric sent by the consistently fatal outcome of this scene. Changing the way he dies does nothing to assuage the insinuation that death is the only option for him. That he is an example of an utterly irredeemable antagonist, too monsterous to live… which again, is not a good way to depict a suicidal character, regardless of how flawed they are.
Dyne is a mass murderer, he’s about as far from being an innocent victim as it gets, but here’s some food for thought: the Turks have killed thousands of people while carrying out Shinra’s dirty work; Rufus is a self-proclaimed fascist who benefits from and upholds the monopolistic regime his father established; Sephiroth is personally responsible for the extinction of two races, was instrumental in the ongoing genocide of a third and is attempting to destroy the entire Planet. These villains are mass murderers on a global scale, yet the extended FFVII story has gone to great lengths to try and make us empathise with them. Hell, Advent Children literally brought Tseng and Rufus back from their heavily implied deaths just to redeem them. Whether Revelation pushes a redemption arc for Sephiroth remains to be seen, but Square Enix sure has been setting that up by downplaying his countless atrocities and overemphasising his victimhood at the hands of Shinra and Jenova, as I called out in Mindless Meandering.
Dyne hasn’t killed nearly as many people and as often as the Turks. Dyne doesn’t command the same dictatorial power as Rufus. Dyne lost all empathy and started hurting people because of unresolved trauma just like Sephiroth. Dyne’s crimes are barely even acknowledged, whereas the other villains have entire stories dedicated to theirs. Yet HE’S the one getting punished with death at every given opportunity? What kind of message is FFVII sending when it only chooses to humanise its most rich, powerful and conventionally attractive villains? That second chances only exist to bail out elites so the inherently abusive status quo never gets challenged? That if your flaws can’t be easily fetishised or excused with alien magic or neatly resolved within the deadline of a scripted fight or story arc there’s no point trying to get better?
Ironically, the extended FFVII story ends up serving the elitist propaganda that violence is an individual problem to be scapegoated onto a few unfixable degenerates, rather than a deliberate practice baked in the very foundation of our hierarchical societies. Murder through direct physical violence is rightfully reprimanded, but when governments, corporations and their supporters enable millions of deaths through war, exploitation and otherwise gatekeeping the basic survival needs of everyone else, it’s just business as usual. Because the violence isn’t as tangible or clean-cut as an axe to the face, it gives the ruling class plausible deniability to keep oppressing the masses.
Like Dyne, people in real life get increasingly desperate and resentful of the status quo as their needs go unfulfilled. From vigilantes assassinating people in positions of privilege and power to convicted murderers being subjected to barbaric forms of capital punishment, the ongoing rise of right-wing authoritarianism is forcing society to reflect on how it treats those who commit its worst taboos. Many of us are beginning to recognise that, as controversial as it is, even murderers need to be extended a base level of empathy - not to condone their actions or prioritise them over their victims, but to identify motives and risk factors so we can implement better preventative measures for everyone’s long-term safety and welfare.
Whether or not you believe in redeeming murderers, making human rights conditional to a person’s adherence to the law sets a very, VERY dangerous precedent - what we allow to happen to the worst of us can end up happening to ANY of us. We may think we’re law-abiding citizens and that we’ll never have reason to face the wrath of the state, but laws are not immutable or infallible - they can be rewritten and weaponised by those with enough financial and sociopolitical power. Years of widespread political ignorance and apathy has enabled our hard-earned rights to be slowly eroded, law by law, election by election. Contraceptives, abortion, gender-affirming care, disability pensions, healthcare, education services, privacy against surveillance, even the right to vote and protest are all being targeted. Fascists don’t care about how respectable you are or how minor your infractions are - anyone who doesn’t seamlessly conform to and benefit their agenda will be persecuted like a murderer. Look no further than how cops and anti-immigration agencies have been openly executing and dehumanising their victims for years now.
I think the thing that gets me the most about Square Enix doubling down on killing Dyne is that defying destiny is literally the core theme looming over every single creative choice this trilogy makes. If they had the courage and curiosity to fully commit to this theme, we could’ve had a version of the story which explored what it means to push back against the most common prophecy we hear throughout our lives - that humans are doomed to pointlessly suffer, succumb to our darkest urges and only find solace and absolution in death. Nobody in all of FFVII embodies that rhetoric more than Dyne, an antagonist too uncomfortably grounded in reality for most fans to romanticise and the devs to want to directly deal with for more than a scene or two. But we need characters like Dyne to survive their stories now more than ever, to show that no matter how fucked up we become it‘s worth carrying on. To at least try to improve and break the cycles of abuse dictating our lives, even if we’re never fully healed or accepted. “Sometimes life’s a bitch and you keep living”. Without the hope, self-reflection and resolve to endure our worst moments, how can we ever expect things to get any better for those we’ll leave behind?
I cannot emphasise enough just how hard Re- project has wasted the potential of its own premise. This trilogy needlessly railroads itself to its predecessor’s path time and time again, only deviating to sanitise characters and plot points or to manufacture cheap drama and theory bait. Changing fate would feel like a more resonant throughline if it was allowed to permeate and deconstruct OG’s framework in less marketable ways. Dyne could’ve been so much more than a problematic plot device this time around… if only his creators deemed him worthy of a second chance. But they didn’t.
Thank you all so much for watching. This was a pretty heavy Retrospective but hey, it was pretty heavy part of the story. Once more, this is a conversation that goes far beyond the scope of this video, so be sure to do your own further research into the topics discussed to gain a better understanding. On a lighter note, Gongaga is next and I will have that video ready to release very soon. I’ve also got more Legend of Spyro on the way, so stand by for those. In the meantime take care, have a great day and I’ll catch yous all later. Bye!