He will make her... happy

Okay, I've had this rant held in me for most of my life about the ending of Shining Force 2, so tl;dr version: fuck fantasy tropes!

Also, yes, totally reading too much into this game's ending maybe. Dun' care, its been my reaction since I first saw it when I was like... 10?

------

Long version - 'ight so Shining Force 2 was a strategy RPG on the SEGA Genesis - maybe the first strategy RPG game that I played and got me into the genre.

Now, Sarah here, the blue haired elf girl, is one of your first party members, the one that convinces Bowie to start the adventure, and is your first healer, which means you will use her often, she will level up a lot, and with barely any effort she can become the biggest badass on your team. She was my favorite since I started the game, and I never removed her from the battle formation for anyone else. She's just awesome. I'll be fair that she basically drops out of the story after the opening, but she still has a lot more screen time than almost any other character and has a well established personality.

The ending though. My god. Kay, so you rescue a princess (to the game's credit, thats kind of a side thing to the actual goal of sealing an ancient evil) and blah blah sleeping beauty blah blah she's poisoned and needs a kiss to wake up or some bullcrap. Yeah, so its the main guy Bowie who's going to smooch and marry her. Duh. Its a fantasy game from the 90's. None of this is surprising.

Then in the ending Gandalf Sir Astral puts who's going to kiss her to a vote for some reason. Jaha, the red nosed little dwarf (hobbit? I donno, US manual says dwarf) pipes up that, actually, he wants to kiss her. Which would be comedy relief i guess except he gets shut down hard as shit, including other party members start spouting flat out fantasy racism saying that of course it has to be Bowie, he's a human, she's a human. They'd be so cute together, being actively humans and whatever. Then douchbag-mc-TOTALLY-NOT-GANDALF walks up to Sarah, who, by the way, has been visibly uncomfortable this entire time, even for the simple sprites of the game, and asks her, "Sarah, what do you think"

Freakin'. Poor girl's put on the spot and has a bit of an emotional breakdown before running out of the room. Because actually she had fallen in love with Bowie. And nobody seems to give a shit besides Chester the half-horse-half-retard who is confused and Kazin the elf wizard who goes after her because.... uh.. they're both elves, as far as I can gather from his reasoning of "She needs someone like me". NO SERIOUSLY WHAT EVEN THE HELL IS THIS

My favorite character just had to sit through all her friends talk loudly about how inter-species relationships are apparently wrong as she's around to celebrate her crush and friend that she's known since they were kids and have spent, in game time, something like 4-5 years adventuring together marry some girl who the closest he's come to interacting with is hanging on to the evil dude beside her as they rise above the ground before he fell off FIVE YEARS AGO. And then gets put on the spot. and then has a breakdown. and then freakin nearly nobody even cares! NO SERIOUSLY WHAT EVEN THE HELL IS THIS

Even as a little kid I was baffled. Yeah, the hero marries the princess, sure, but I'd never seen that storyline actually cause emotional suffering to another of the hero's group! This blew my freaking mind. How the hell. What the hell. I don't even. I DONT EVEN, FOLKS

----

_{Also, cuz I'm a dork, I want to point out the inaccuracies in my drawing - first, Jaha aint that tall, second, Elric wasn't in that scene, and third, Bowie is having a personality which is totally not canon! haha}