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SPOILERS Remake's Shinra Experiments, Whispers, & Compilation Thematic Analysis

Kain424

Old Man in the Room
That's a fair stance. I think we'd all mostly hoped they'd find a better way of integrating Yuffie into the storyline for Remake, and it appears that's exactly what they've done. If they are making Final Fantasy VII fit into the Compilation better, the DeepGround stuff actually sets up the events of Dirge of Cerberus in a far better and more complete way. Whatever the case, color me intrigued.

X-SOLDIER . I am very much looking forward to your work on this.
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
This is how I feel about research days, with zero regrets:


Although in my case, it also involves a ton of other reference books, source articles, interviews, manga, and occasionally films and things. :awesomonster:
Been doing a lot of restructuring of some of my more scattered notes sections, and whatnot lately, but progress is progress, and it's all been super satisfying getting to bring things together a bit more.

Also, posting this is also my way of expressing just how difficult it is not to get pulled down into a rabbit hole of something that uses a lot of the visual themes and ways that it examines those same concepts, but at the same time also REALLY wanting to do that because it's a reinforced example of solidifying more and more evidence around how particular content gets used, designed, and portrayed. Definitely not at all related: Returnal seems to be a really good game that I want to dig into once all this is written.



X :neo:
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Been writing a bunch while looking forward to Intergrade, and wanted to mention that I'm also excited that my favourite types of enemies are getting a new version in Yuffie's chapter, and that I'm betting there are some details about them that will help give more emphasis to a thematic progression that I'm very much looking forward to seeing and delving into.

ff7r-episode-intermission-yuffie-art-of-war-v28alyysd.jpg




X :neo:
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
INTERMISSION & NEW INTERGRADE SPOILERS (I know this is the spoiler section, but wanted to make it clear since this thread was pre-that update)

It's astonishing the amount of things that have been reinforcing the research that I've been working on that were present in this, but one of them I did want to share since I think you'll find it really interesting.

The Diabolic Creation has the same wing-tentacle growth from its left side that both the Unknown Entities & Failed Experiments do. Additionally, it is an exact mirror to Heretic Hojo – who has a tentacled left arm and a three-clawed right arm, whereas the Diabolic Creation has a tentacled right arm and triple fingered left arm. This also reinforcing that Heretic Hojo's features match to the arms of H-0512 – however, H-0512 has tentacles that sprout from its head, rather than being the base of its body as should be expected of that subject.

Hojo's struggle is coming from information that we know in Crisis Core – which is that Cloud & Sephiroth have the last pure S Cells, which means that he's working with degraded material, and is trying to re-synthesize a pure S-Cell sample through hybridization of multiple test subjects. Essentially, this is implying that the Diabolic Creation's digital replica is the end-goal data for what the "pure" version of what a G-Cell-based body is meant to look like. This is also the reason that Heretic Hojo likely has so many physical deformations (like his face being massively distorted), because he's attempting to overcome those limitations through phases of metamorphosis – hence the lower tentacled body of Hojo's final lifeform phase having a lower body that is a single tentacle – again lining right up with the same metamorphosis of Safer Sephiroth's lower body properly manifesting in WINGS.

Additionally, while Meteor put him on a crunch and forced him to go with whatever version he currently had at that moment, Intergrade adds in Weiss' boss battle, where the ending shows that Hojo is utilizing the combat simulator as a means to attempt to not only test things about his subjects' data, but also to ultimately transplant his consciousness into a more perfect form if his current attempt fails and the Planet does survive.

All brought together, it's made even more clear that Hojo's end goal with his science is always just to construct the perfect vessel for himself to occupy – which is likely the basis of his entire relationship with Lucrecia, and Sephiroth's birth.

That gets into more things, but that's the in-universe science bit that I wanted to drop in here for now.



X :neo:
 

waw

Pro Adventurer
Fantastic! I've got some questions here in response, but I'm keeping them in a spoiler to match your info dump!

1. Do you believe the Diabolic Creation is Rayleigh?
2. You mention this perfect lifeform/vessel. Would that be what a whole/non-degraded/non-decayed Jenova would look like?
3. TKAA implies that someone in Shinra had a mummified Jenova Arm, presumably from the original corpse/body. Wouldn't this be purer than Cloud's S-Cells? Are the S-Cells really that evolved/different than pure Jenova Cells?
4. Why not just make another Sephiroth to get those cells? Impregnate a woman, inject her with Jenova Cells, etc?
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Fantastic! I've got some questions here in response, but I'm keeping them in a spoiler to match your info dump!

1. Do you believe the Diabolic Creation is Rayleigh?
2. You mention this perfect lifeform/vessel. Would that be what a whole/non-degraded/non-decayed Jenova would look like?
3. TKAA implies that someone in Shinra had a mummified Jenova Arm, presumably from the original corpse/body. Wouldn't this be purer than Cloud's S-Cells? Are the S-Cells really that evolved/different than pure Jenova Cells?
4. Why not just make another Sephiroth to get those cells? Impregnate a woman, inject her with Jenova Cells, etc?

To answer those questions:
1. I believe that the Ultimania Plus confirms that, but I'll have to double check.
2. Not quite. It's still a Jenova-Human hybrid, which is inherently different than JUST what Jenova's "true" form would appear as.
3. S-Cells and J-Cells are totally different things. S-Cells are important because they're a perfect hybridization of Human & Jenova Cells. J-Cells just give you the ability to start running those experiments all over again.
4. Well, that's an option, but there's no guarantee of success, since there was already variability between S & G Cells, which were essentially just doing the same thing in different ways. On top of that, you'd have to have a donor who's not only willing & healthy, but Lucrecia was left in a psuedo-undying state just by being the surrogate for the experiment. On top of that, now you have to consider that creating another entity like that comes with a known danger of just how powerful Sephiroth is. – Essentially, this is the whole purpose of the Sephiroth Copy Project, which is the main storyline in Final Fantasy VII.


Also, HI! It's been a bit again since I've been on here, since it's tougher these days to manage the amount of energy I have for things.

Still a little bit rough for me, but I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things, and the last two weeks have had a lot of really REALLY intense research and reading for me, since I needed to dive in and follow some themes to get a better sense of how they shifted within a certain time-frame.

I've been tracing a lot of the symbolism and themes back through the introduction of heroic fiction into Japan, and then looking at how a lot of those ideas started to be represented in manga by reading through a bunch of Osamu Tezuka's manga. Especially since he's referred to as the "Japanese Walt Disney" and is the godfather of manga as a genre, his works are really instrumental the same way that Miyazaki's films are in the anime industry (though I still need to read through the manga version of Nausicaä which I'm hoping to get to soon).

In the last... week and a half, I've read all of Phoenix, Message to Adolf, Ode to Kirihito, Book of Human Insects, Apollo's Song, and am currently making my way through Buddha. All of that's helped me to reinforce the historical threads I have with the way that those historical and religious concepts were being represented symbolically in media, so that I can make sure that the evolution of the visual themes and concepts around the time of Ozuka's death in 1989. That's the year CLAMP debuted with RD Veda, and the year that Miura started BERSERK – both of which I've also read in their entirety, so that I have a better handle on the key influences and perspectives on when and how those themes were used, when they meet up with the elements in Western Heroic fantasy around the time that it started being translated and brought into Japan, and then how those all started to impact various representations of particular themes in Final Fantasy leading up to FFVII.

But yeah, for this I'm REALLY intensely tracing through design themes from the last half century, now that I have a subset of very particular types of story elements that I'm able to trace more definitively. The story themes are ones that I've been tracing through essentially 1900, and then the religious and mythological roots are occasionally things that end up following thematic evolution along the Silk Road and whatnot mostly into the arrival of Buddhism in Japan around 600AD, but some of them are just facets of the evolution of things throughout Japanese history. Then some things involving China or Rome that are iconography that means poking around at some other pieces of ancient history, and some of that's digging into symbolism and other representation of themes in religion that I'm less familiar with, but yeah. Research and writing is all going super well, and all of this is actually helping me to be able to cite and condense a lot of more complex topics more easily, and more clearly expand upon the themes that are otherwise harder to pull out of that.

On top of that, I've been going through the Ultimania Plus and translating bits and pieces to double check things that I've noted and make sure that the elements line up with what I've managed to understand from them so far. Still going well even though I've been mostly just reading and trying to take it extra easy the last two weeks, since it's been rough, but still just totally absorbed in getting all of these themes and elements more openly dissected and represented while making sure that I'm being thorough enough to stay confident about my interpretations, and adjusting things when needed based on that and other research. The rest of the time, it's going back into Remake Intergrade & INTERmission and picking through details and using Photo Mode to my advantage, now that that's a tool that I have access to and can use it to better look around and get shots of things that I want to be able to depict or compile. So maybe I'll end up getting back to working on the images again once that's more wrapped up.

Also, glad that the last Evangelion film will be available in a couple weeks, so that I can cross that one off the list of things to consider on how that shapes things moving forward, since Evangelion & BERSERK are both really big visual influences over how those themes are used post-1997, along with the Compilation & coming in to Remake.




X:neo:
 

waw

Pro Adventurer
Thanks so much for the reply. I forgot about his post, I'm happy to see you return.

I do teach East Asian history and I continue to study East Asian religious philosophy (while visiting Japan). Though you have an excellent brain and handle on this stuff, my dissertation is on comics labor and I've had to research manga and mangaka a lot, including digging into their themes and such. Please consider hitting me up for anything I might be able to help with and/or bouncing ideas off of. I think your work is super fascinating.

To the meat of the post, I hadn't considered before why Hojo never duplicated Sephiroth in all those years. Surely finding a viable woman wouldn't be that hard, it's not like he cares about consent at all. However, having a rival Jenova-Human hybrid possibly vying for control over Jenova's hive mind thing could be super detrimental... To ensure Sephiroth's success, a duplicate could ruin it. This also means Project G could have been a rival for his Reunion theory (say, if Reunion happened around Genesis or something) and makes me wonder if Hojo would have/did sabotage his rivals rather than/in addition to making the best specimen.

Welcome back!
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Check your inbox & consider yourself hit up on the subject! :D

Thanks much, as I'm sure that there're a number of nuances where having a second human source of information who's got an extant background will likely be indispensable on a few of these themes and knowing if there are any other key sources worth cross-referencing.

The other factor is that even with Hojo's limited knowledge on the subject, and the frequent times where his hypotheses about Jenova aren't correct (as he's always been an inferior scientist to Professor Gast), the other element that plays in here is that Sephiroth is HIS creation biologically. Hojo is narcissistically possessive about Sephiroth despite the fact that he has no interest in him in a parent-child sense, he very much channels all of his success vicariously through Sephiroth being the absolute pinnacle of the SOLDIER program. As many potential risks as there are practically, I think that the ultimate reason that Hojo hasn't been as cavalier as he is with all of his other test subjects is that Sephiroth is something that he wants, because he believes that it is his right to that thing. It's the superior biological form that he desires to place his intellect into, which is really what his entire goal is and has always been.



X :neo:
 
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waw

Pro Adventurer
Hojo's desire to possess Sephiroth's body was totally lost on me until sometime after DOC, when I started to understand just how horrific Hojo was.

However, in regards to him being inferior to Gast... which I do agree in a general sense... he started to understand Jenova's nature before Gast did, right? I've never understood if this was because Gast was too tunnelvisioned and Hojo is messed up enough to assume this creature is a horror from the great beyond... OR if Jenova telepathically connected with Hojo and he is it's willing servant. To some extent, a willing servant makes a lot of sense, I just don't think it's ever made canon.
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Hojo's desire to possess Sephiroth's body was totally lost on me until sometime after DOC, when I started to understand just how horrific Hojo was.

However, in regards to him being inferior to Gast... which I do agree in a general sense... he started to understand Jenova's nature before Gast did, right? I've never understood if this was because Gast was too tunnelvisioned and Hojo is messed up enough to assume this creature is a horror from the great beyond... OR if Jenova telepathically connected with Hojo and he is it's willing servant. To some extent, a willing servant makes a lot of sense, I just don't think it's ever made canon.

I think that Sephiroth's comments about how he wished that Gast had told him the truth and that he always thought that Hojo was an inferior scientist speaks volumes about their overall talent, as one of Sephiroth's unspoken talents is just how well he manages to read people, especially given all the types he's been exposed to given his own past.




X :neo:
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
One of the things that I've found interesting lately that's a bit closer to the main topic is the camera shot of Cloud's mako poisoning hallucination from Chapter 3 that is later one that's echoed in Chapter 12. While we more prominently see Cloud's flashbacks of trauma covering moments with Nibelheim, Tifa & Sephiroth, and his future visions of Aerith, this one stands out rather interestingly among them for me, because it's the only one where we actively see a premonition and also close the loop.


Not only is that moment a part of trauma that Cloud has yet to experience in Chapter 3, but it's also a moment that's always emphasized as being primarily traumatic for Barret & Tifa moreso than for Cloud. However, I think that in the original game, this is not only one of the first moments when we get to see the "real" Cloud being more kind and sympathetic towards the fates of the other members of AVALANCHE that he'd previously acted so coldly towards, but it also represents the first time that Cloud lost Aerith, but Tifa lost her as well, and all of the other horrible things transpired in direct connection with that.

While the moment in the church of Cloud's premonition in Chapter 8 is very clear when he actually meets Aerith again, there's also follow-up in Chapter 9 when Elmyra has Cloud sneak off during the night. Then upon running into her, Cloud has the premonition of Aerith sneaking off during the night into the Sleeping Forest as an echo to that loss, that helps to reinforce this as a theme before we work towards closing the loop. It's why I think that it's notable that this catalyzing incident is when the Whispers first appear solely for Cloud in Chapter 3, and also why I think that the addition of the night scene with Aerith/Barret/Tifa in Chapter 13 helps to underscore that this is something that hurts Cloud, even beyond JUST losing Aerith, but also being wrapped into the pain that the "real" Cloud felt about everyone killed here that he masks with his cool ex-SOLDIER facade. This is the shared tragedy that really catalyzes the bond between all of them and pushes them forward against Shinra, which is why the Whispers are continually interfering to bring it about.

It's just a split-second moment, the explosion and debris are different, but the framing in how it's shot really nails this moment at the precise "point of no return" when Cloud, Tifa, & Barret are all forced to accept what happened and run. It's that moment that makes how they just previously used the "Cloud Mako Poisoning" visual effect for someone else when an undisclosed piece of future information slipped out between Aerith & Marlene earlier in the Chapter. It's understandably not JUST a Cloud-specific thing, but rather is related to the ideas here as a way to look at how they're portraying a traumatic formative link that fundamentally defines who the character is (like Cloud's flashbacks). However, in the case of the Whispers – this includes events for those characters that they have yet to experience.

That holds true throughout the rest of the game, and even in how Cloud experiences not only flashbacks, but in his link to Sephiroth, that's the same effect that's used. And that's also why I think that later on in Chapter 17, Red XIII describes it as a connection that they found in the Whispers, and the Ultimania reveals that it's information that Aerith might not even know, which makes sense if it's always a "whisper" of sorts to the character experiencing it about what makes them who they are.

It's why I really like that Remake uses this first for Cloud's Flashbacks with Sephiroth, then has the Whispers & Sephiroth with that effect when he meets Aerith, and then THIS is the moment that both of those things come together to hit Cloud for the first time absent of any other characters or stimuli.

These are the types of little things in the design and cinematography that you can tell that they poured a MASSIVE amount of thought into for the way that fans of the original game already have feelings attached to moments that define some of our favourite characters through a shared connection that doesn't exist in the story yet. It's why this topic in particular's managed to be so full of deeply enthralling things for me to pour over, and also why it's taken such a long time to really get into the specifics of all of those things in the way that I want to really cover them. ^^;




X :neo:
 

a_apple 2.0

Pro Adventurer
AKA
a_apple
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
 

ultima786

Pro Adventurer
AKA
ultima
One of the things that I've found interesting lately that's a bit closer to the main topic is the camera shot of Cloud's mako poisoning hallucination from Chapter 3 that is later one that's echoed in Chapter 12. While we more prominently see Cloud's flashbacks of trauma covering moments with Nibelheim, Tifa & Sephiroth, and his future visions of Aerith, this one stands out rather interestingly among them for me, because it's the only one where we actively see a premonition and also close the loop.


Not only is that moment a part of trauma that Cloud has yet to experience in Chapter 3, but it's also a moment that's always emphasized as being primarily traumatic for Barret & Tifa moreso than for Cloud. However, I think that in the original game, this is not only one of the first moments when we get to see the "real" Cloud being more kind and sympathetic towards the fates of the other members of AVALANCHE that he'd previously acted so coldly towards, but it also represents the first time that Cloud lost Aerith, but Tifa lost her as well, and all of the other horrible things transpired in direct connection with that.

While the moment in the church of Cloud's premonition in Chapter 8 is very clear when he actually meets Aerith again, there's also follow-up in Chapter 9 when Elmyra has Cloud sneak off during the night. Then upon running into her, Cloud has the premonition of Aerith sneaking off during the night into the Sleeping Forest as an echo to that loss, that helps to reinforce this as a theme before we work towards closing the loop. It's why I think that it's notable that this catalyzing incident is when the Whispers first appear solely for Cloud in Chapter 3, and also why I think that the addition of the night scene with Aerith/Barret/Tifa in Chapter 13 helps to underscore that this is something that hurts Cloud, even beyond JUST losing Aerith, but also being wrapped into the pain that the "real" Cloud felt about everyone killed here that he masks with his cool ex-SOLDIER facade. This is the shared tragedy that really catalyzes the bond between all of them and pushes them forward against Shinra, which is why the Whispers are continually interfering to bring it about.

It's just a split-second moment, the explosion and debris are different, but the framing in how it's shot really nails this moment at the precise "point of no return" when Cloud, Tifa, & Barret are all forced to accept what happened and run. It's that moment that makes how they just previously used the "Cloud Mako Poisoning" visual effect for someone else when an undisclosed piece of future information slipped out between Aerith & Marlene earlier in the Chapter. It's understandably not JUST a Cloud-specific thing, but rather is related to the ideas here as a way to look at how they're portraying a traumatic formative link that fundamentally defines who the character is (like Cloud's flashbacks). However, in the case of the Whispers – this includes events for those characters that they have yet to experience.

That holds true throughout the rest of the game, and even in how Cloud experiences not only flashbacks, but in his link to Sephiroth, that's the same effect that's used. And that's also why I think that later on in Chapter 17, Red XIII describes it as a connection that they found in the Whispers, and the Ultimania reveals that it's information that Aerith might not even know, which makes sense if it's always a "whisper" of sorts to the character experiencing it about what makes them who they are.

It's why I really like that Remake uses this first for Cloud's Flashbacks with Sephiroth, then has the Whispers & Sephiroth with that effect when he meets Aerith, and then THIS is the moment that both of those things come together to hit Cloud for the first time absent of any other characters or stimuli.

These are the types of little things in the design and cinematography that you can tell that they poured a MASSIVE amount of thought into for the way that fans of the original game already have feelings attached to moments that define some of our favourite characters through a shared connection that doesn't exist in the story yet. It's why this topic in particular's managed to be so full of deeply enthralling things for me to pour over, and also why it's taken such a long time to really get into the specifics of all of those things in the way that I want to really cover them. ^^;




X:neo:
Not gonna lie, I noticed the exact same
thing only yesterday. I noticed that the premonition of a part of the plate falling in chapter 3 was the exact same as what happened in chapter 12. It’s almost like he was prepped for it.

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
 

waw

Pro Adventurer
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.
 

Torrie

astray ay-ay-ay
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 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.

One of the things that I've found interesting lately that's a bit closer to the main topic is the camera shot of Cloud's mako poisoning hallucination from Chapter 3 that is later one that's echoed in Chapter 12.
Wow, thanks so much for sharing! I wasn't aware that it was an echo of that exact vision. The game is so rich in visual effects that it makes you overwhelmed and miss hints easily. But it's probably good for the sake of replayability.
 
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X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
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.



X :neo:
 

waw

Pro Adventurer
Is there any precedent in Japan for "memories" apply to "memories of the future?" It's a concept that is really new to me.
 

TurquoiseHammer

Pro Adventurer
Just for kicks I googled 未来の記憶/"future memories" and the vast majority of results are for the Japanese translation of von Däniken's "Chariots of the Gods?", which if you aren't familiar is a really stupid and frankly racist historical hypothesis that ancient aliens provided the tools and techniques for large scale architectural undertakings and the blueprints for the growth of civilizations in general.

Anyway, that may seem incidental, but climbing further down the rabbit hole I discovered the book was quite popular in Japan during the "occult boom" in the mid 70s, when it prompted a popular series by Kadokawa that became a cornerstone of the New Age movement in "spiritual" literature.

Is this all completely unrelated to the term's usage by FFVII's writers? Probably. But I thought it was an interesting coincidence!
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Anyway, that may seem incidental, but climbing further down the rabbit hole I discovered the book was quite popular in Japan during the "occult boom" in the mid 70s, when it prompted a popular series by Kadokawa that became a cornerstone of the New Age movement in "spiritual" literature.

Yeah, this is almost certainly one of the driving factors early on that probably ties in to the "onmyoji boom" in the mid-80s for how visions and things started also being looked at as alternate worlds and experiences, where memories are DEEPLY important to the core narrative around reality. Japan takes the "it was only a dream" trope and sort of reverses it where that makes it even MORE important to remember for an experience like in Link's Awakening. That game has some concepts that are also used in the themes in the Chrono series. That's how memories and vision get pulled in to things where time travel have whole alternate worlds where you can share memories with your other selves, because they're an intrinsic part of who you are and your actual ability to distinguish yourself as an individual.

Then another big part of the emphasis on memory as a narrative device is in Ghost in the Shell on the concepts of consciousness and external memories as anchor points to reality that allow others and your future self to be able to know that you're still the same you even as you change over time. Since this is all a science fiction examination of concepts of transcendental experience of reality and identity, physical objects tied to important memories also aids really well in communication visual symbolism. You also get a lot of the themes of cyclical rebirth and karmic experiences, and you might have memories of another life of your own, but it may not necessarily be one that's from the past. Specifically the final volume of Phoenix essentially does that in jumping between the past and the future for a single individual consciousness where he keeps waking up at different points and he's carrying memories from both points in time through to totally different moments in time.

For the purposes of Remake, this is why Aerith is REALLY overly focused on making the choices that lead to the memories that you want, because they're all that you have and what you return to the Planet with that generates more Lifestream. As a theme this is more like memories that the Planet already has – which in a singularity or a place that's removed from space-time, there IS no differentiation between past & future, so it's not the same as the oracle-like visions or prophesy especially because they're each tied to the character's own experience of their own path in the story.

While the Whispers are something like an external force or controlling framework that is setting a path for you to experience those moments in time, the visions themselves are more about you being nostalgic for something you've never seen before. It's likely not something that's hugely used, but there are a lot of consistent elements of things like that all over that help to craft a concept like this. Most importantly is that it's how us as the audience ACTUALLY experiences their story, and those are the sorts of things that stay with you when people aren't around any more, since you don't have them but ONLY their memories.

Related – at the end of Advent Children, Cloud & Sephiroth specifically go on about Sephiroth staying where he belongs in Cloud's memories, whereas Sephiroth refuses to ever become just a memory. One of the things that's most interesting about from that point to Remake is that at the end of AC, Cloud defeats Sephiroth by saying that there's NOTHING he doesn't cherish – which actually includes Sephiroth – and is why he's relegating him back to only being a cherished memory.

That carries a pretty significant bit of weight when it comes to the way that Sephiroth seems to be trying to assist Cloud is pushing against Fate, because it's looking at whether or not those are things that Cloud actually can and DOES cherish, or if that's something where he can choose another path to cherish. There're lots of really interesting questions around the way that VII has always played with memories, which is why I think that there's a lot of intentional emphasis in differentiating those themes from being conflated with prophetic causality.



X :neo:
 

X-SOLDIER

Harbinger O Great Justice
AKA
X
Weird to think that it's been 3 months since I last replied here. It definitely doesn't feel like it's been that long. :\ I'm still working on things, but progress is a bit complex.

Personal update for context:
I've actually been on medical psychological leave from work with a working diagnosis of burnout since the end of May, because I just wasn't able to do things that I've been doing for years, and also my memory was getting bad enough that I couldn't definitively say whether or not I was eating every day, and I'd already dialed back on a number of other things to try to keep those basics managed. Lots of my time is just taken up getting through a lot of really basic things on a day-to-day basis, which is super odd and after 6 months I've finally gotten in touch with a neurologist as I've been waiting on that referral the entire time I've been off of work. I'm hoping to maybe have some answers before Christmas, but we'll see as the whole pandemic state of the world makes everything take way longer than it would normally.

At present, I can optimally get about 2-3 days of pretty-close-to-normal functionality, and have been writing on those days as it's the thing that I enjoy most and it's good to keep my brain working on the sorts of things that I like doing that I don't have any other way to do. A lot of the rest of my time goes into trying to get more structure re-created to let myself slowly climb back into a loose normal, and doing other research to get my circumstances clarified and digging into that based on how I can or can't do things with an occupational therapist.

It seems like it was probably a month or so since I posted here, but another thing along with that is that my sense of time is really off and hard to keep track of. All my weeks are essentially broken in half as I can't track more than about 3 days at a time. It's tough to get a sense of how efficiently things are going on a writing or a personal front as that's all just a weird jumble. Keeping up on things is extra tough with memory being limited and some days just letting me do like 2-3 things before I'm absolutely exhausted.

That all being said, I really am pleased with where things are going on what I've been writing, and the research that I've been doing.

I do miss the folks 'round these parts, but it's been a prioritization of my time to where I can have some more reliable tracking of what I'm doing hence my time here has been buried in writing things that are related to this stuff even if I'm barely actually seen doing it.

<4


X :neo:
 
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