And once you get past all that, I keep coming back to the idea that The Opera's "seriousness" was the Final Fantasy writers taking the piss out of other, older stories. Look! There is Celes playing the typical part of a damsel in distress, forced to marry another man while her warrior betrothed is lost on the battlefield. And you, audience, know we're better than that, right? Celes is actually a kickass general! All of our women in FF6 are not pining "opera floozies" like Maria, they studied the blade!
On this subject: we can conjecture about intent forever (and never know one way or another), but for the game and story that
FFVI is, it doesn't have much room to grandstand about being better than its peers and predecessors; in many ways it is worse. To the extent that I dislike any game in a series where I broadly like most or all of them, it ranks near the bottom, because I find it so consistently stifling in how it pigeonholes and writes both women and men in the roles they're afforded to play and the characterization they're allowed to have.
It has all these nominal strengths to its credit, like featuring two women as the co-leads, as much as anyone among the ensemble can grab onto a starring role and status... but the practical side of it doesn't live up to the premise. Terra's otherwise compelling arc is mostly conveyed through men in various positions of authority talking at her, telling, suggesting and goading what she should do and feel (a dynamic repeated by Ashe in
FFXII), while Celes's entire narrative existence circles around Locke, someone who will take the word of a mass-murdering clown over his own ally, at proof that doesn't extend beyond "I guess I shouldn't trust women." These aren't character flaws or deliberate narrative maneuvering to support the rest of the game's themes because they are not followed up on; they're unconscious biases that seep into the character writing at every juncture from whoever was responsible, and that tone leans heavily toward unexamined machismo and stock gendered roles.
We--I--generally observe and like the thematic arcs around many of the characters, rate the signature scenes highly, but none of it exists in a creative vacuum. Terra may have been a male character early on in development, but her and Celes's narratives revolving around the concept of "love" (in very different ways) are almost certainly a result of them being women, and this being palatably a story that can be told about women. Celes's suicide attempt could not be more "tuned" for a woman to perform; a woman throwing herself off a seaside cliff in despair is a particular kind of folklore cliche that is exclusively reserved for women; men kill themselves in other, arguably less dramatic ways. Kaori Tanaka believed that her treatment and characterization of Edgar was different from other "sleazeball" ladykillers in fiction, because she wrote him from a woman's perspective, and all I can say there is that Tanaka was extremely close to the text and her characters, and its nature in total possibly escaped her or the people who might've edited her or added further aspects; Edgar fantasizing about a 10-year-old is what it plainly is and all localizations have had to grapple with the reality of the sentiment and what the hell to do about it.
It's not just what women get or don't get to do but how narrow the possibility for existence in the game even is for them. What's the point of a fourteen-person playable cast if it only extends to three women? If you can't find any there you start looking for them in the supporting cast, and it's just tumbleweeds all over... except when someone has to briefly exist and die for the sake of a man's narrative development. Rachel is this to Locke, Darill to Setzer, Elayne to Cyan--even the damn mascot character's girlfriend dies offscreen. When you've got characters whose grief is centered around losing their parents and parental figures, it's the dads who are individualized and emphasized as having been lost: Maduin matters, Edgar and Sabin's kingly father matters, Gau's father matters, Cid as Celes's grandfather matters--the women are either de-emphasized, unnamed or dead. This isn't a new paradigm for the series;
V displayed the same bias... but in the ostensibly more character study-focused narrative of
FFVI, these decisions weigh more, and the absence of women in any meaningful roles stings the harder when the primary cast on the men's part is occupied and represented by folks who to put it lightly could be characterized as having women problems. Not that the game is equipped to examine most or any of it--they're just quirks.
Any interaction I continue to have with
FFVI on a narrative basis is mostly bargaining and compartmentalization. A number of queer readings are possible and legible in its cast; Terra as an aroace lead is just one way to interpret her particular identity struggle and eventual claim to it, but I recognize it for what it is: taking material that doesn't agree or fulfill me on the surface and making it "better" through my own interpretive devices that aren't strictly part of the text. It cannot be counted as a strength of the game; my personal lens prods me to do this with most media to begin with. I like aspects of other stories in it, cognizant of their flaws and aided by my own biases: Cyan's arc is founded on stock manpain, but you have the scene at the train platform, and he has a moustache, which believe me, counts for irrationally lot. Shadow is a pathetic man, but his failures and their resolutions aren't reliant on sacrificing a woman for them (though again, Relm's mother is never named or portrayed), and as such I'm more receptive to his melodrama.
It's not a detestable or even a bad story, especially in the wider arc of it and in its thematic crux... but I lack the affinity for most of the cast on an individual basis, or as a collective, where the descriptor "ragtag" communicates an absence of an interesting group identity rather than highlighting it. This is to my knowledge the only game in the series that was so heavily informed by an ensemble writing emphasis to reflect the nature of the cast--to my knowledge the primary cast's writers comprise at least Hironobu Sakaguchi (Terra, Locke), Yoshinori Kitase (Celes, Gau), Kaori Tanaka (Edgar, Sabin, Relm), Tetsuya Nomura (Setzer, Shadow) and Akiyoshi Oota (Relm) in the people who have been cited as having informed and guided those individual depictions, whether or not Sakaguchi and Kitase as the overall lead writers had the final say in the staff's contributions. I think the story around the characters manages to cohere and communicate its themes... but the character writing in the moment, or paired up amongst themselves, often does not, resulting in an equilibrium that a narrative so centered on character cannot support.