Squall Leonhart

Character
Name:	Squall Leonhart
Occupation:	SeeD, Gunblade Specialist
Relationships:	Cloud (rival), Sora (acquaintance), Donald (acquaintance), Goofy (acquaintance), Aerith (colleague), Yuffie (colleague), Cid (colleague), Seifer (enemy/rival), Rinoa (friend/love interest), Quistis (friend), Selphie (friend), Zell (friend), Irvine (friend), Laguna (father), Raine (mother), Kiros (friend of father), Ward (friend of father), Ultimecia (enemy)
Fandom:	Final Fantasy
Other:
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Squall is a main character in the Square Enix video game Final Fantasy VIII, and a supporting character in the Square Enix/Disney video game Kingdom Hearts, albeit under the alias of 'Leon' in the latter.

Canon

Squall Leonhart is a 17-year-old cadet at Balamb Garden, a school to train young people to join the mercenary organization SeeD. As Final Fantasy VIII does not have voice acting, and Squall is a very quiet character, much of his dialogue represents his thoughts rather than things he voices aloud. This leads other characters to only hear a small portion of what he is thinking, and makes him standoffish and occasionally rude. Squall is a highly skilled gunblade specialist, one of two gunblade specialists in Garden (the other being Seifer Almasy). Squall is carrying trauma from being separated from his ‘sis’ Ellone in the orphanage when he was a child, though he has limited memories of the event due to memory loss from junctioning GFs. As a result, he chooses to isolate himself to avoid forming attachments to people, because he believes that if he forms attachments he will inevitably be abandoned and hurt.

In the course of canon, Squall goes from being a cadet, to a SeeD, to the SeeD commander. He learns to accept his friends into his life and trust people, and allow himself to need people. He forms a strong bond with Rinoa Heartilly, as well as his friends Zell Dincht, Quistis Trepe, Irvine Kinneas, and Selphie Tilmitt. He also becomes acquainted with Laguna Loire, though he is unaware that Laguna is in fact his father.

Fandom

Common ships:

• Squall/Rinoa -- this is a canon relationship.
• Squall/Seifer -- Squall and Seifer are typically interpreted as rivals, though a common trope in fanfiction is that they were close friends in the orphanage before they began losing their memories and became rivals/enemies. Hatesex is also a popular trope. Many post-canon works engage in character bashing of Rinoa.
• Squall/Zell
• Squall/Quistis
• Squall/Irvine
• Squall/Laguna is surprisingly popular, given that parent/child incest ships are typically not very common

Squall's Kingdom Hearts alias Leon is frequently shipped with Cloud. The ship's popularity has earned it the nickname StrifeHart

Example Fanworks

Examples Wanted: Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples.

• come aboard (let's go dreaming) by dustofwarfare, a Seifer/Squall/Rinoa post-canon polyfic

Links & Resources

• Squall Leonhart tag at Archive of Our Own