Midgar: A Hypothetical Video Essay Part One (Cultures)

[CrashOuch]

I mean, cartoon stuff aside, Midgar is a high-tech functioning city. I was joking before, they clearly have plumbing and sanitation.

 

[ChipNoir]

Well, there IS a sewer system underneath at least part of the slums. I had originally thought it might have just been vestigial, from whatever town must have existed there before ShiRa purchased the town and built over it.

But there's no reason they couldn't have just hooked that up. Likewise, the plate would need to bring water up from somewhere. They do basically have access to an ocean front as well as potential underground water sources.

 

[CrashOuch]

Yeah, exactly!

 

[jazzflower92]

I mean, cartoon stuff aside, Midgar is a high-tech functioning city. I was joking before, they clearly have plumbing and sanitation.

Probably check up more on the upper parts than the lower sections.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I have an interest in Roman sanitation systems, so I extend that to Midgar!

 

[CrashOuch]

I think it's a really interesting topic! Stuff like that comes up when you worldbuild and I think it can give you a really clear idea of exactly what sort of people/society/world you're dealing with when little details come out in some form of media (like a book or a game or whatever)!

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

There are sewers in the slums, and it seems unlikely that the Plate would be less well provided than the slums in this regard. In one of my fanfics Tseng and Reno escape through the sanitation facilities disguised as two workers - in dirty hazmat suits! And in BC, Veld is held in the garbage processing facility, which I think is in the slums (I might have made that bit up).

 

[jazzflower92]

There are sewers in the slums, and it seems unlikely that the Plate would be less well provided than the slums in this regard. In one of my fanfics Tseng and Reno escape through the sanitation facilities disguised as two workers - in dirty hazmat suits! And in BC, Veld is held in the garbage processing facility, which I think is in the slums (I might have made that bit up).

The sewers are always the go to place to move around.

 

[ChipNoir]

My impression is most everything in the slums his hijacked from the plate to some extent. Little or nothing is obviously planned by ShinRa, so providing resources is likely not a thing either. One look at the teaser trailer's example of the massive number of electric wires everywhere kind of enforces this idea. Either that or there's likely "Middlemen" that offer lower quality mako energy at a much higher price, and everyone basically steals from everyone else to some extent.

Water in at least part of the slums seems to be sourced from that waterfall around Aerith's house, as you can see pipes jutting out from the foundational earth under her house.

So one of the questions I really want to ask, if there are any architecture and/or physics nerds is: How much weight is an entire city, and what would you need to support that? How do you keep it all from just collapsing, if at all? Or is this going to be mythbusted as something only possible in fantasy?

 

[pxp]

Speaking of water resources in and around Midgar, where the hell did the huge water mass come from in the vignette of the Midgar Ruins 500 years later? Is that even possible in 500 years (at least in our world)? At the risk of betraying my ignorance.

 

[jazzflower92]

Speaking of water resources in and around Midgar, where the hell did the huge water mass come from in the vignette of the Midgar Ruins 500 years later? Is that even possible in 500 years (at least in our world)? At the risk of betraying my ignorance.

Erosion.

 

[pxp]

Erosion.

Yes of course but can it happen in half a millennium? I was under the impression lakes take longer to form than that.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I thought the water came closer to Midgar after giant earthquake when the Weapons escaped from the Northern Crater, or maybe when Meteor nearly touched the earth.

 

[pxp]

I thought the water came closer to Midgar after giant earthquake when the Weapons escaped from the Northern Crater, or maybe when Meteor nearly touched the earth.

I think Meteor’s destructive proximity would be the better explanation, thinking about it.

 

[Vyzzuvazzadth]

With the help of monsoon-like rain periods during those 500 years, created from an atmospheric shift after the Meteor catastrophe.

(Yes, I'm still alive )

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

The shoreline had already moved in significantly by the time of AC (the full extent is particularly visible in DC's ending), so Meteor/the Lifestream eruption is the likely explanation.

Re:sanitation
It's mentioned in Episode Denzel that rats in the slums were unfit for consumption because of all the contamination dumped down there from the plate.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Yup:
"Remember this. All the rats here are crawling with horrible germs, because of the sewage you dumped down here. There's no one dumb enough to eat something like that," Ricks said as he left.
But I can't accept that it simply fell from the plate onto their heads!!

 

[Claymore]

But I can't accept that it simply fell from the plate onto their heads!!

This reminds me of Battle Angel Alita's scenario with Zalem dropping all of it's waste onto Earth below:

 

[ChipNoir]

Everyoone has a this idea that each slums has it's own, but I get the impression that perhaps not all of them do. So while 7-5 maybe habitable, we have no idea what condition some of the others are. There may literally be one that's entirely a toxic dump site. That IS the reason there's a plate to begin with after all. True, it's reactor byproduct they're geting rid of, but they might as well discard trash and other elements as well.

 

[Clement Rage]

Gah, I miss having separate reply windows.

Given that every slums town was pre existing, they likely have their own systems, and it'd just be a question of how well maintained they are. Sector 6 does connect to sector 7, though so I could be wrong.

For the plate, given how thick it is, there's some giant tanks built into it or some such.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FantasyCounterpartCulture

Even though Yuffie is not technically Asian, she is based on a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Japan.

Yeah, but that doesn't mean they're identical. Fanfic tends to run into problems when taking the similarity too literally. Such as

Fanon Yuffie: Argh, I'm so oppressed by these stuffy traditional values, this town needs to modernise.

Canon Yuffie: Modern Wutai is awful, I want our old traditional values back!

 

[ChipNoir]

What do you mean by tanks?

 

[pxp]

What do you mean by tanks?

Water tanks I guess?

 

[Clement Rage]

Sewage tanks? Other options would include dumping it into the lifestream or trying to fertilise the wastelands.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Or piping it to sewage treatment plants. I really doubt Shinra would dump shit into the mako. That would screw up their own profits and ruin their reactors.

How Sewage Systems Work

Like any large and corrupt organisation, be it a business or a state, Shinra is highly inefficient, and Midgar is full of people trying to make as much money as they can while doing as little work as they can. I don't doubt Reeve designed a high-tech state-of-the-art sewage system for Midgar, but the contractors skimped on the construction and skimmed off the profits, and the workers just CBA to maintain it properly.

Look at what happened in Walkerton, Canada - a state much more benign than Shinra but probably no less corrupt or inefficient.

The sludge that results from sewage processing (the solids that are left after all the water has been removed, cleaned and sterilised) is usually too toxic to be used as a fertiliser. Not because of human poo, although nowadays that's full of shit like artificial hormones and antibiotics, but because of all the other stuff people flush down their drains and toilets. It would be hard to believe that Shinra scientists can splice genes yet don't know this basic fact about waste disposal.

 

[ChipNoir]

Well, there's certainly something they're dumping down on the slums. The whole point of of the plate is so that people with enough money to afford it can live in close proximity to the reactors without having to deal with the dangerous monsters and mako poisoning.