Feminine Themings: The Construction of Musical Gendering in the Final Fantasy Franchise

This chapter explores the evolution of musical gender representation in the 33-year Final Fantasy series. From the series' genesis, musical character themes were linked with musical tropes of conventional femininity borrowed from opera and film music. With a few notable exceptions, conventional archetypes of musical femininity and masculinity persisted in Final Fantasy IV–X, composed by Nobuo Uematsu. Prominent musical traits encoding conventional femininity include the use of flute and harp, lyrical melody, arpeggiated accompaniment, major mode, and periodic phrasing. However, as the series incorporated other compositional voices in Final Fantasy XII, XIII, and XV, Hitoshi Sakimoto, Masashi Hamauzu, and Yoko Shimomura adopted more subversive approaches to the previously-established musical gender norms.