Checked through the JP playthrough of FFVIII on Youtube that I mentioned a while back. I admit I'd been reluctant to do so, simply because it's just someone playing through the game as a regular player, and thus not really
organized in a way that facilitates searches. All the videos are simply numbered, for instance, with no description of what it contains, and the thumbnails are what seems like random timestamps in the video. Entirely understandable for a Let's Play video series more than a decade ago, but a bit inconvenient for my purposes.
Because Quistis asks everyone if they remember 'Matron.' She uses the word Matron as a proper noun, without a particle, which is really weird because the dialogue makes it clear that she means the matron, as in the person in charge of the orphanage.
"Matron" is probably the only thing that came to the translator's mind for the term used in Japanese: "Mama-sensei".
Which is the sort of thing the matron of a small orphanage might be called by the children. "Sensei" is the usual "respected authority figure" title, and "Mama" here is unusually in hiragana (まま), rather than katakana (ママ). Using hiragana rather than katakana is used to indicate very young children, who are still learning their alphabets. The children using it when they're about four or five (and their grown-up selves using it) is likely because they've gotten used to it, although obviously it would sound identical when spoken.
Irvine: "...Hear me out. SeeD and Garden were all Matron's idea, right? I'm not a SeeD, but I share the same feeling as all of you. SeeDs are supposed to fight the sorceress, right?"
It took embarrassingly long for me to realize something: Irvine is not a SeeD.
Irvine
never graduated from Garden, simply because he was used by Martine as the Galbadia Garden representative attached to the Balamb Garden team. And then events progressed such that he's not likely to get a proper General Certificate Of Garden Education, because now the Sorceress has taken over Galbadia Garden, probably also interrupting the educational career of the rest of its students.
So Irvine is in the same not-quite-SeeD status as Seifer, or the former Garden students protecting Winhill. It's interesting to compare this to Seifer's clear inferiority complex over not becoming SeeD, or Rinoa feeling left out due to not being SeeD either.
Which makes Irvine's reveal of the orphanage story even more insensitive. "You and I might not be SeeDs, but I have backstory with everyone else, unlike you."
Unfortunately, I think it'd be impossible to tell. I went back to check all of Child!Selphie's lines, and they are limited to "Irvy, wanna play?" and "WAR!" Most of the dialogue in this scene, even in scenes featuring the children, is spoken by the present-day cast talking about the kids. So we see Selphie pick on Zell for being a snitch, but we only hear the other characters talk about it.
So unless you could tell a Kansai dialect from these two sentences alone, I think it's a lost cause, at least until/unless we get more flashbacks to her childhood. Which is a shame, because now I'm curious as well!
Yeah, Selphie goes back to Standard Japanese when she talks to the other party members, so she's not speaking Kansai dialect now either. As for child Selphie, she doesn't have any dialect indicators in her speech, which as you say is too limited to tell anything.
The question of whether memory is identity is a pretty contentious one and any given piece of science-fiction-fantasy may fall on either side of the divide, but my rough impression is that Japanese works are somewhat more likely to fall on the side of "identity exists beyond memory" than Western works. In FF8's case, so far it seems to fall squarely on the side of identity being something that transcends memory - Squall and the others may have arrived in Balamb Garden with no memory of their past relationships, but they immediately started gravitating towards one another and reconstructing the same web of relationship they had at the orphanage, in addition to retaining their core personality traits (Selphie is energetic and loves violence, Quistis is bossy but also a mediator who makes people get along, Squall is a loner who's lost someone important to him and is afraid to connect to others, Seifer is an arrogant dickhead). They're the same people, finding each other in spite of having forgotten one another, and forming the same relationships... It's just that they don't remember that's who they are.
How this ties into the theme of reincarnation that I'm certain is going to get picked up again at some point, I have no idea. Maybe I was wrong and I misidentified memory-related themes as reincarnation-related themes, we'll see.
I'm reminded of the discussion back in FFVII about the difference between "kioku" and "omoide" memories, when Tifa was doing therapy to Cloud in his mind. Memories you know, and memories you
really know deep down. Given the comments about how FFVIII was trying to one-up FFVII for Big Story Twists, I wonder if this is a continuation of the same theme.
Something this sequence reveals is apparently junctioning GFs doesn't
erase memories. They just kind of put a lid on those memories, and it does not seem to take much to bring them back; just Irvine bringing it up, describing the events and location in summary, and suddenly everyone remembers everything.
Taking that into consideration, how serious is GF memory loss, objectively? The memories are clearly
there to be recalled, but not available at the moment, until consciously thought of, perhaps with an effort. This implies keeping a diary to reference would have solved these alleged memory issues, but that might have been too much to ask for a child freshly enrolled into Garden who now has to list out their entire life history so far, just in case some small detail from when they were five years old turns out to be significant.
