Final Fantasy VIII is not a story about how being raised in a military institution damages you; it's a love story. As a result, the impact of the characters' upbringing at Garden can feel a little underexplored.

Regardless, most of the main characters were trained from childhood to fight and potentially die on someone else's battlefield. Let's talk about that.

Someone Else's War

Rinoa is the only character in the party who has the luxury of choosing which battles to fight; she genuinely believes in Timber's liberation. The other characters are mercenaries; they're told who to fight, and they have to go and fight them, regardless of their own feelings. Irvine doesn't want to assassinate his mother figure, but that isn't his choice.

We're told multiple times that SeeDs aren't supposed to question what they're told to do. When Squall starts wondering why Garden is teaming up with General Caraway, he tells himself, (No point in me thinking about it. 'SeeDs aren't meant to question why.') When travelling with Squall through Deling City, Irvine asks, 'So, like... is it true that SeeDs aren't supposed to question their mission?'

Headmaster Cid tells Seifer, 'I don't want you all to become machines. I want you all to be able to think and act for yourselves.' But that's not what we see in the reality of how SeeD works. The SeeDs are human weapons, to be aimed and fired by their clients. They help Dollet and Timber to resist the Galbadians, but they could just as easily have been fighting on the Galbadian side if Galbadia had been the ones paying.

The SeeDs are also very aware that they're likely to die young and violently, and that their lives are just pawns in the larger concern of SeeD's mission. Before the Dollet field exam, Headmaster Cid reassures the candidates that the mission will still be completed even if they die in the attempt: 'You will be accompanied by 9 SeeD members. Should you fail, these members shall get the job done. They always do. Well, that's one less worry on your mind.'

When Rinoa, as SeeD's client, is leading Squall, Zell and Selphie to Timber's TV station, she starts trying to revise her plan because she's anxious about the guards. Squall and Zell tell her that, whatever decision she makes, they'll follow it, even if the battle is hopeless:

Squall: Don't worry about us. We'll fight your enemies based on your decision. That's our duty.
Zell: You tell us to go, we go. Even if it is a losing battle.

Zell's line here really struck me. These kids have been raised in the full knowledge that, at any moment, someone might tell them to die, and they'll just have to go ahead and die.

The Scars

How does being a soldier impact these characters? This isn't something the game explicitly goes into, so anything I can say on the matter is speculation; I can't say for certain whether any character was intentionally given a particular trait to reflect their upbringing as a child soldier.

What we know is that the SeeD characters are robbed of their childhoods, both figuratively and literally: they're out fighting wars rather than having normal childhood experiences, and their childhood memories are stolen from them by their use of GFs. If Balamb Garden knows that the rumours of GF memory loss are true, it doesn't particularly care about protecting its SeeDs from that effect: a Garden faculty member instructs Squall, 'Be sure to ignore all the GF criticism you hear from other Gardens or military forces.'

I'd say that Zell is the most well-adjusted of the Balamb Garden group, probably because he was raised by Ma Dincht rather than by Garden. (Side note: who does raise the orphan kids who live at Garden? When the orphanage kids first came to Garden as children, did they have anyone to look to as a parental figure? I suspect they just got flung into the same routine as any other student.) But the others have traits that stand out to me as possible side effects of their military upbringing.

I was a socially anxious kid, so I know you don't have to be a child soldier to have no idea how to talk to people! But I don't imagine Squall's life of training and battle made it any easier for him to learn how to interact with his peers, and the expectation that he might just end up another body on a battlefield probably wasn't great for his self-esteem.

Selphie's blithe, cheerful violence - instantly suggesting that they blow up President Deling's train with a rocket launcher, or proposing that they escape D-District Prison by skinning a Moomba and using it as a disguise - might just be a dark sense of humour. But I also sometimes wonder whether Selphie might just not have a normal conception of the severity of violence, having been raised in an environment where violence is normal and expected.

As a child, I thought Quistis seemed very mature. Looking at her now, though, she seems like what she is: a teenager trying and sometimes failing to be responsible, because she's been thrown too early into a situation where she has to be responsible. Flirting inappropriately with Squall, because she's a lonely kid separated from her peers by the fact that she's an instructor. Losing her temper with Rinoa and then abandoning her post to apologise to her during the assassination mission. Quistis is just eighteen years old, and she's expected to keep a cool head in very high-pressure situations; it's no surprise that she occasionally struggles.

I'm not even going to go into Seifer's psychological issues, or we'll be here all day.

What Does This Mean?

All of this basically boils down to two things.

a) I've created a cute little website based on an institution that systematically damages children and sends them to die.

b) I'm probably taking this too seriously. As I mentioned at the start, the psychological fallout of being a child soldier isn't really the focus of this game; the military school setup is just a convenient backdrop for the story to take place.

But the impact of being raised at Garden still peeks through, here and there. It's something I find interesting to think about.

'Damned imbeciles,' Bahamut says, when you confront him. 'Why do you wish to fight?' Thinking about Squall's response is why I decided to write this essay in the first place:

(It's our nature...)
(There is no real reason...)
(Maybe we were born... only to fight.)

• Go back to the training centre.