I think the future flashforwards are due to Sephiroth sitting in Clouds brain, he has future knowledge by A swimming around in the lifestream for god knows how long and B because he has partially infiltrated the Whispers, and since we know that they are sucking up memories and have the script of the OG it could be possible that Sephiroth through time gains those memories and is sending Cloud those glimpse of the future either intentionally or unintentionally due to that process
Now I wonder if Sephiroth is giving Cloud these visions so he can save himself when required… or do something useful for Sephiroth,,,, or something
I'm going to disagree with the idea that this is Sephiroth-related this simply because while we don't witness the visions that Marlene & Red XIII see when they connect with Aerith, but we know they're about things that haven't happened yet. It's why Red XIII describes the other ones that the party experiences during the conflict against the Whisper Harbinger as "a glimpse of tomorrow if we fail here today" making it clear that his understanding about this is related to the future.
The flash forwards are really interesting. I've noticed translations from the Ultimanias seem to call these something like "memories of the future." It's an interesting think and I think the creators are playing with an unusual set up of time. I don't think we have characters that are time traveling exactly, maybe more like body/memory jumping? But it's interesting they aren't just calling these "visions of the futuries." They're memories, something they've experienced. It's a really mindset and this is one of the most puzzling things.
I do not understand how our creators understand time, entirely. It may be a symple cyclical nature, but usually that isn't so explicit. So what rules apply here? What's their internal rules? I would like to see that memo.
I experienced something similar when playing the Remake for the first time recently after having seen numerous playthroughs before. And I guess it's kind of similar to what OG players feel while playing FFVIIR. In both cases it's like you walk through the area and know what's going to happen in the game withouth knowing or remembering particular details.
You nailed what's key here waw, is that these are meant to be
memories.
All that is preserved of someone when they die is in the memories that others have of them, while THEIR memories are what returns to the Planet. This is fundamentally what causes the energy of the Lifestream to grow over time as more beings live out their lives until they eventually die, and return to the Planet in the cycle of Life & Death. This is also why Jenova is an entity that consumes the Lifestream of other worlds, because she only makes copies or duplicates of people from memories that she absorbs from the Lifestream. They're all just puppets because it's just her taking their forms, not who they actually were in life. She is the antithesis of Life & Death – she's unliving & undying, and as such, she can't have the experience of a living thing, but she is going from world to world taking in that experience in the only way that she can. The Planet only creates, and she only consumes.
This is why Aerith so heavily emphasizes the importance of memories and making sure to do things the way you want – EVEN when you can't change anything. She emphasizes this to Wedge in Chapter 12, and it's also what she talks to Cloud about in their night scene during Chapter 13, but it's also why she finds Sephiroth utterly terrifying because none of those things carry any meaning to him. He is more than happy to discard them all in exchange for a completely different reality where none of those terrible things occur – which gets at the key for why
Remake discusses Fate & Destiny in the way that it does. It's why she warns Cloud that he says he wants to protect the Planet, but there's no greater threat to it. Sephiroth wants to preserve HIMSELF & CLOUD, but he doesn't want to preserve the path that they get placed on, and doing that would involve resetting potentially everything else to shape a world where that happens (like one where Zack doesn't die).
The Planet is the amalgamation of all of the memories of everyone who's ever lived, which is what you hear as "the cries of the Planet" and collectively all of those souls represent "the Will of the Planet" and the Whispers are the way that it seeks to ensure that the memories that are precious to the dead are not destroyed forever. This is also the basis of when that knowledge crystalizes, it forms materia, and this is also why the Whispers' bodies are meant to have an ethereal energy-like appearance that constantly has a type of crystaline appearance and form in the notes of the Ultimanias. When it comes to the Whispers & the Will of the Planet, you're looking at something that's COMPLETELY OUTSIDE the scope of time.
To protect the memories of those who have died, you have to look at the moments that shaped them, and then comes the question of whether or not the Planet experiences life, will, or desire the way we do SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE this is a story that's already been told. We know the memories that shape Cloud & Aerith's time together even without having seen them in this form. We have formative memories of theirs from the future that this retelling has to protect to preserve the integrity of them being who we know. We're nostalgic for something we're only seeing for the first time – because we have memories of their future. This is why Cloud & Sephiroth are at the Edge of Creation looking at two different paths while outside of time, and with 7 seconds left before the end of the world to decide which path to take.
If you exist outside of time, you would be able to see everything that ever happened when characters were acting of their own free will through the entirety of the span of all of reality, and you were able to see that 500 years after these events, the Planet would be able to heal and life would return to balance – but ONLY if things played out this way. If the goal is to "Save the Planet" then there is no possible set of actions to take other than this. That's why Cloud sends everyone away at the end of FF7, because they need to have their own personal motivation that's not just subscribing to the ideological commitment of doing something for the greater good. It has to be personal and mean something to THEM.
But that's different when you're a living being.
There's nothing that guarantees that that's the ONLY path to the Planet's survival. But it is a guarantee that it's A path to the Planet's survival. It's the one we've all experienced in the Compilation, and probably most importantly, the life of the Planet is what preserves the life of its Protector & avatar – Genesis. This is why S & G are the "two taboos" that represent the Planet's destruction and protection, but they're both inherently selfishly motivated. This is why the Whispers aren't for or against Sephiroth and they're not for or against Cloud & Co – but Cloud, Aerith, & Sephiroth are ALL opposed to existing within a framework where their Fate has been predestined. It's antithetical to the self-directed agency that they are all fully committed to fighting for – albeit in different ways.
So, the reason for addressing this in the scope of Remake has an in-universe basis, but it's also got an ideological basis that goes back to the original game's question around what the Promised Land is. If you were aware that there's a future where Zack survives, Sephiroth gets to be at peace, and Aerith survives – you're going to be driven to fight for that. To knowingly allow your friends to suffer a horrible torturous fate would be evil. However, if you are also selecting that path only because it will relieve the suffering that you experience, but it ignores the ultimate fate of the Planet, that would instead be an even greater evil that is essentially what Sephiroth is doing. So – how do you determine what's good? How many millennia of time do you observe to select the future that will bring about a better world? Then, once you do that, what happens when someone else rejects that choice that you've made?
The lesson here is one that's forcing you to understand what the idea of fate & destiny mean, and question when it's "just" to defy them and when it's "just" to protect them – because this is always a contextual question that has to be determined outside of JUST your own personal desires... sort of.
At the end of all of time & space, when all living souls have been returned to their Planets, and all of that energy no longer exists in life & death individually, it will be the same as if Jenova had consumed everything, as all of reality will be one. All points will lead to her in the same way that it does with other gods of destruction like Shinva & Kali in Hinduism. So, this is why her & Sephiroth act as though their will supersedes everything. He tells Cloud not to cry about Aerith's death, because her soul has returned to the Planet and just become energy to become a part of him like it was always destined to do at some point. However, this is exactly why Jenova cannot ever choose the fate of living beings. This is why it's down to the ones who ARE alive to fight for the fate & the memories that they want, and why Aerith & Sephiroth are aligned against the Whispers. This comes back to Cloud being faced with the difference between having "a normal life" like a Human or "power" like a SOLDIER, because it reflects his choice as a Sephiroth Copy & Jenova experiment.
The bigger piece of the puzzle here is that it's also about recognizing other things that seem invisible like the Whispers. In
Star Wars, is Luke Skywalker a freedom fighter driven to restore justice, or is he a radicalized terrorist motivated by revenge? Yes. That's important, because we have to understand that the same exact motives and purpose within a different perception of the greater context change something between being good and being evil at an individual level, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of their actions is. In the real world, societal constructs, political systems, corporate environments, military structures, and all of those things are mirrors of the type of structural system of control that creates the bounds by which we're allowed to exist.
Sometimes it's CRITICALLY important to defy those and bring them down, and other times it's critically important to preserve them – but you can't know which of those actions you're taking without genuinely understanding what exists on the other side. It's why Shinra is telegraphed explicitly with all of the authoritarian narcissism and exploitation, but
Remake also underscores that there are plenty of innocent people trying to preserve the lives and health of those they love with the work that they do there. You should never cower because an enemy is too great, but you should also not believe something is an enemy just because it causes YOU pain.
Barret hates Shinra because they killed everyone in his hometown. However, Barret has to make himself hate the Mako Reactors. He wanted to have one built in Corel to give his wife a better life. She was terminally ill, and the possibility of a better and more comfortable few years with the comforts that Mako energy would provide are something that he was motivated to embrace for good reason. However, his hatred of those things comes from what Shinra is doing – not what they enable. It's why his stand-off with the President is being called about for attempting to cripple Midgar's reactors without looking for a way to ensure that the future will still be a better one for people without it.
That's true. They need to find a better solution to Mako, but they also need to preserve the improvements that it's given people as well – but Shinra needs to be structurally dismantled from being in control of those things, because they are exploitive and are only providing those things as a way to protect themselves from harm, and be allowed to do whatever they want. This is in essence like how Whispers are protecting the party from SOME types of harm and intentionally subjecting them to others.
It's about a system of control that is allowed to ignore the suffering that it causes being absolutely unacceptable, and that a system where some suffering occurs but it is always pushed to be alleviated being paramount. Any parent-child mirrored structural relationship (god-creation, military-soldier, government-citizen, business-employee, master-student) is one where it cannot be measured by the satisfaction of the one in power, but by the wellbeing of the one without. It is a constant and fundamental struggle that is the basis of having Life & Death.
That's why it had to be clear that the Whispers were a system of control that violated the free will of others and created suffering. Defying them means that whatever happens afterwards CAN still follow the events of the original story exactly, but it isn't being forcibly bound into that path for the benefit of another selfish will. It is a world where all the characters' choices take them to the same place, because that's who they are. However, it's also a question and a framework to continually explore along that journey, so that when you have to choose a Promised Land, it has to be YOUR decision of what that is and what that means to you as the player who represents the agency and free will of those characters.
But yeah. There's a lot more to that philosophy about how to consider time, but that should hopefully fill in why the implementation of the glitched effect and the visions are about the future memories of the characters in the story, and why those visions in particular are the ones that they see to round out the context on what it means with Zack's being alive. That's a "future" memory of something that occurred in the past – THAT'S NEVER OCCURRED BEFORE FOR US. It's there to make you consider the importance of the bright and pleasant memory and opportunity it presents, but also how that seemingly interrupts everything about the future that Aerith experienced with Cloud. If you only get to keep one of those, which one do you keep as a memory and which one do you have as nothing but a dream? Can you have both? What does the reality here allow for? That all still remains to be seen, but there're a lot of reasons why it's all heavily intertwined into the deepest existential questions that the original game presented in a less nuanced manner.
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