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I'm getting sick of people claiming certain things about Rosa (from Final Fantasy IV) that either simply aren't true or are not fully thought through. So, after having posted this on a different site in response to someone's assumptions that Rosa is nothing more than a "stereotypical white mage" and a "damsel-in-distress", I've decided to make a post on the subject here as well. I'm basically just taking the exact same thing I posted there and copying it to here, but I really think it means something to shed light onto this after the bashing she gets for such faulty reasoning.


Firstly, the "typical white mage" assumption. Everyone, now having played Final Fantasy 502847 just recently, knows by now what a "stereotypical white mage" is like. They've played all the Final Fantasy games. But here's what they COMPLETELY NEGLECT: Final Fantasy IV was the first Final Fantasy to truly distinguish personality traits for certain characters with certain classes. What does this mean? Rosa is not a "typical white mage" in the negative connotation people want to put it; she's the ORIGINAL white mage personality-wise. She is, in essence, unable to be nothing more than a cheap imitation of a white mage because of this. If anything, this speaks volumes in support of Rosa, since it suggests that her personality was so amazing at the time that they decided to adopt its general characteristics for all future white mage setups.

And it's important to make sure it's understood that I am NOT saying Rosa is the first white mage to ever exist in Final Fantasy. We know FFI had the first one. I'm saying she's the first to have an actual personality.

Now, the second count: that she's a "damsel-in-distress" character. There are only two times she is found in distress: when you need to get the Sand Ruby from the Antlion, and when kidnapped by Golbez. Two. That's hardly enough to suggest that she's pretty much just a female character for you to save left and right. By this logic, we should be ready to refer to Kain as nothing more than a traitorous scoundrel.

I only managed to play it for a short time on a rom. If he has any black mage abilities or inclinations (however he has it all), I'm more inclined to believe that he's a red mage rather than a white mage. Since it won't get released until DS and I have no plans to buy one of those, I probably won't ever know first-hand. I stopped being obsessive in buying and playing everything FF-related when Square-Enix started letting me down with FFX-2 and the splurge of money-grabbing attempts with all the FFVII stuff coming out right now. That, and I just plain don't have that money to spare.

Hmm...tricky thing then. Rosa's hardly typical with her weapon, since it's meant to be bow and arrow (which says a lot about her individual personality compared to general white mage characteristics, too). However, she's able to equip staves too, so she's not limited to just her unique weaponry. How about a middle ground where he is the original white mage with a personality, but not the type of personality we've come to associate with white mages, which would still make Rosa the original "typical" white mage?