The Moral Principles in FF7

[Clement Rage]

The point is made while talking to an NPC that "If the explosion had been in the middle of the night, that woulda been one thing. At least the people coulda gone in their sleep" -- so that definitely suggests nearby homes were damaged, if not entirely engulfed, by the blast.

The only people that must get there are technicians for the maintenance and scientists for studies. Jobs that doesn't require a permanent presence but rather occasional visits.

In every real-world circumstance I can think of, maintenance technicians or operators of some sort are a permanent presence in any sizable factory or utilities facility. They certainly were in the factory where I used to make glue, and at the wastewater plant where I work now, it's state law that at least one certified operator be on the premises at all times.

That NPC is in the Sector Seven slums, she most likely got her information from the news, which several characters tell us is unreliable. Shinra would want to play up the evil nature of the terrorism if they could.

Regarding reactor workers, isn't it also usually policy to evacuate staff from facilities in the event of a confirmed terrorist attack/bomb threat/fire/whatever on the premises? We hear Barret and Cloud set off the alarms by accident, a lot of reactor workers would have heard em and got the hell out. People still would have died, but maybe not as many as it might appear. Of course there was damage and death, but it is very hard to know how much.

Also, while not wishing to argue too much from game play, Tifa and Barret do "kill" an awful lot of Shinra soldiers on their way through the Shinra building.

If you play it subtle and get through the sneaking bit, there's a grand total of three, the guards on floor 59. Most of the random encounters inside amount to monsters and machines, although you can also fight SOLDIER 3rds if you want.

There's an argument that the technicians would be even more culpable than the combat staff, as they're more likely to know what the reactors actually do.

Being willing to kill people doesn't mean not feeling bad about it. Snow in FF13 is willing to kill Cocoon's troops, but tries hard any chance he gets to talk them down/intimidate them into fleeing, because given the choice it's not something he wants to be doing. Why is it assume that Tifa and Barret can't/don't feel bad about enemy combatant deaths, while accepting them as necessary?

Re death tolls I think it's likely somewhere in between the Shinra perspective of 'make the terrorists sound as evil as possible' and 'no, nobody innocent got hurt.

There was an explosion, but the alarms had gone off well beforehand, a lot of the workers probably got out.

 

[Lex]

That NPC is in the Sector Seven slums, she most likely got her information from the news, which several characters tell us is unreliable. Shinra would want to play up the evil nature of the terrorism if they could.

Regarding reactor workers, isn't it also usually policy to evacuate staff from facilities in the event of a confirmed terrorist attack/bomb threat/fire/whatever on the premises? We hear Barret and Cloud set off the alarms by accident, a lot of reactor workers would have heard em and got the hell out. People still would have died, but maybe not as many as it might appear. Of course there was damage and death, but it is very hard to know how much.

The characters feeling guilty about their actions toward the end of the game when they reflect on it is enough for me to know they killed more innocent people than they intended to.

There's an argument that the technicians would be even more culpable than the combat staff, as they're more likely to know what the reactors actually do.

Not getting this logic. If you examine it within the logic of VII's world, you're forgetting that "lifestream" is a bit of a spiritual belief in the context of the general population's knowledge. I.e. the Mako reactor technician is just a person doing a job and probably not thinking much beyond that (the same could be said of the vast majority of Shinra's employees ranking below the Turks). Mako is a fantasy allegory for Oil with the added-not-widely-believed-or-known fact that the oil happens to be the essence of souls. The Mako reactors are responsible for sucking life from the planet, true. But they're also responsible for giving the humans around an easier life re: sources of energy.

 

[Clement Rage]

The characters feeling guilty about their actions toward the end of the game when they reflect on it is enough for me to know they killed more innocent people than they intended to.

Agreed. I do think the fandom plays this up or down a bit depending on the argument, though. The alarms had gone off well ahead of time, so it probably isn't quite as bad as it looks.

I'm also not sure that the characters wouldn't care at all about the soldiers deaths.

Not getting this logic. If you examine it within the logic of VII's world, you're forgetting that "lifestream" is a bit of a spiritual belief in the context of the general population's knowledge. I.e. the Mako reactor technician is just a person doing a job and probably not thinking much beyond that (the same could be said of the vast majority of Shinra's employees ranking below the Turks). Mako is a fantasy allegory for Oil with the added-not-widely-believed-or-known fact that the oil happens to be the essence of souls. The Mako reactors are responsible for sucking life from the planet, true. But they're also responsible for giving the humans around an easier life re: sources of energy.

As analogies go, I think Nuclear power fits much better than oil, but anyway.

It's not widely known/believed that Mako is killing the Planet, true. But technicians working with Mako would have to know something about its properties, and what is known is that Mako rich areas are fertile, and Mako reactors damage that fertility. That's why the Promised Land is important. There'd be some kind of introductory lecture along the lines of 'what is Mako', so they would be the ones best placed to figure out its actual effects.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I'm also not sure that the characters wouldn't care at all about the soldiers deaths.

Nobody is suggesting that they didn't care at all.

But is it really so difficult to imagine Barret feeling a certain amount of vengeful pleasure when he kills a Shinra soldier? Shinra soldiers destroyed his village and killed his wife. And they all look the same, because they're in uniform and wear dehumanising helmets that hide their faces. As for Tifa, for a while there her principal motivation is hatred. Hatred of Shinra. The soldiers are representatives of Shinra, and therefore objects of her hate. We don't have any reason to think she'd got over that hate by the time of the bombing missions.

We can't know, because it's never spelt out for us, exactly how Tifa and Barret felt about killing Shinra soldiers, but given how much they have suffered at Shinra's hands I'd be surprised if they felt much remorse at the time. Later, once their perspective had changed, they probably did.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Given that Tifa admits in Case of/Episode:Tifa that she initially adopted the "mako is killing the planet" sentiment because it gave her an excuse to destroy Shin-Ra, yeah, I'd be very surprised if she didn't get any pleasure at all from bombing them or killing soldiers during that time. She admits that the anti-mako stuff was hiding her real motive: simple revenge.

Upon reviewing that story, I also see that it's specified that the first mako reactor explosion did destroy some of the surrounding area, presumably meaning residences.

This is "expanded universe" stuff, though, so it may not satisfy you if you want something from the original game.

 

[Clement Rage]

"surrounding area"= "residences"? Why? (I'm not trying to say that nobody got killed, or anything, but we don't know the details of it)

I think that Barret gets characterised sometimes as more bloodthirsty than he is. That conversation with Cait isn't the first time he's thought about the casualties, as early as Dyne, he talks about how "My hands ain't any cleaner."

(Aside: I really hope they do that scene justice in the remake)

In Cosmo Canyon: "Will they ever forgive me?"
If you burst into the Shinra building, the first thing he says is something like "Anyone that doesn't want to get hurt, get out of the way." He's very aggressive towards the high ranking execs he meets, and is prone to destroying stuff (not people) when he's particularly angry, but I still think casualties were a means to an end rather than something he enjoyed in itself. Anyone he expresses a desire to attack is high up the hierarchy.

Revenge is a motivator, but what I'm arguing against was 'if only soldiers were killed, they wouldn't feel the same depth of guilt', when we can't know that.

Yes, people were killed, but we can't use the depth of their guilt as a measure of the numbers of casualties, because the more moral they are, the fewer casualties it would take to get the same response, so it would be a very slidey scale. As factory bombings go, it could have been relatively bloodless and still got the same response (or not, who knows?). But we can't really measure the bombings based on the weight of their emotional response.

Maybe the reactor was nearly empty, maybe it was crammed. We don't know, and how guilty they are isn't a good way to measure it.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

You're right that "surrounding area" doesn't have to entail residences, but since it's brought up in the context of killing civilians, it does at the least entail civilian spaces.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

But it DOES entail residences - and bars - as can clearly be seen in the video. Apart from the fact that one building is collapsing, there's rubble everywhere, and the Goblin's Bar has fallen in on itself, physically it is not possible for rubble from the blast to be strewn as far as Fountain Square without damaging anything in between the square and the reactor. The force of the blast goes out in all directions, not just upwards. I'm not saying it's impossible that the rubble in Fountain Square is from the reactor; I guess it could be, I'm not a physicist. But the much likelier explanation is that it's from nearby residential buildings that have been damaged in the blast. And for the blast to have such a wide diameter, I think it's pretty much impossible that nobody living within that blast circle was killed. (Sorry for my inept language).

Anyone who wants to is free to go with the less likely scenario - FFVII is a fantasy game, after all - but at the very least they need to admit that it IS the less likely scenario.

 

[Octo]

I reckon Goblins bar was an insurance job, it was just a happy coincidence

The owner must have shat himself when half the sector exploded.

 

[Clement Rage]

Yes, people were killed. How many exactly is somewhere in between 'enough to make Tifa and Barret feel bad' and 'Shinra propaganda on the news, making it sound as bad as possible'. The 'real' total could be anywhere between those numbers.

I don't think that nobody was killed, but paleofan does have a point that it might not be nearly as bad as it looks if the reactor has some kind of 'evacuate noncombatants when the alarms go off' policy.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

But it DOES entail residences - and bars - as can clearly be seen in the video. Apart from the fact that one building is collapsing, there's rubble everywhere, and the Goblin's Bar has fallen in on itself, physically it is not possible for rubble from the blast to be strewn as far as Fountain Square without damaging anything in between the square and the reactor. The force of the blast goes out in all directions, not just upwards. I'm not saying it's impossible that the rubble in Fountain Square is from the reactor; I guess it could be, I'm not a physicist. But the much likelier explanation is that it's from nearby residential buildings that have been damaged in the blast. And for the blast to have such a wide diameter, I think it's pretty much impossible that nobody living within that blast circle was killed. (Sorry for my inept language).

Anyone who wants to is free to go with the less likely scenario - FFVII is a fantasy game, after all - but at the very least they need to admit that it IS the less likely scenario.

Oh, I'm totally with you on that. There had to be a lot of dead people between the reactor and Fountain Square/Loveless Avenue.

Like you said, we can clearly see that one building that had completely collapsed, that bar that looks to have caved in on itself (the view through the windows above it during the opening cinematic appeared to indicate apartments), overturned vehicles, rubble all over the place -- even shattered windows on the side of a building facing away from the reactor on the other side of Fountain Square! These windows were intact during the opening.

 

[Clement Rage]

Hmm. I honestly don't see some of the stuff you're talking about. I see an apartment building at a list, shattered windows, overturned cars... Does anyone have a screenshot of the collapsed bar?

As I've said a couple of times now, I'm not claiming that nobody was killed. But there is a lot of leeway on death tolls. To make an estimate, you'd have to know things like whether it was considered safe to live near a Mako reactor, whether Shinra policy involved a panic room on site or an evacuation, or something else. You can't measure it on foot of an emotional response, because they'd probably be guilty about a relatively low number regardless. Or by what Shinra says on TV. Cloud gets out of the blast zone easily enough, by the time he gets to the train bridge, there's no more damage. We don't know.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Yes, there is a lot of leeway. I'm not saying my version is the incontrovertible truth, only that it is the likelier scenario. You must surely be able to see the rubble in Fountain Square in the video I posted? And I'm surprised you can't see that the top floor of the bar has dropped (I don't know how to do a screen shot with my chromebook). I don't know - how many civilian deaths do you think there needed to be in order for Tifa and Barret to feel guilty about their part in the bombing?

FWIW, I don't think the game makers were at all interested in trying to show us exactly how many died or even the full extent of the damage. For the purposes of their story and for character development, all we need to know is that Avalanche planted a bomb, it went off, structural damage was done to the reactor and the surrounding area, and power was lost (who knows, maybe all the life support machines in the hospital went down) and some people died - but we only know about this later because we hear about it. We're not shown the mangled dead bodies, for obvious reasons.

Exactly how many died is really neither here nor there. We can't say that hundreds died, because we don't know. But we also have no proof that nobody died. Given what we've seen of the extent of the damage, it's highly, highly unlikely that nobody died, and I am pretty sure the game makers intended to convey the general idea of extensive damage, panic, and disarray, because that's what it looked like to me.

BTW if civilians were injured or killed in a panic stampede as a result of Avalanche's bomb, wouldn't their deaths be Avalanche's fault too?

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Hmm. I honestly don't see some of the stuff you're talking about. I see an apartment building at a list, shattered windows, overturned cars... Does anyone have a screenshot of the collapsed bar?

Here's what I see, using the video Lic posted:

At 34:00 - We have a lot of reactor debris in the background. In the upper left, there's a collapsed tenement(-looking) building

At 34:48 - We get our first post-blast look at Loveless Avenue. At this point, you can already see the shattered windows of the apartments above the Goblins Bar. As the camera pans down, you can see that the side of the building has massive cracks and the entire structure is now slanted starting at the first crack (compare to its appearance in the opening cinematic), giving the appearance that the upper floors collapsed into the bottom floor. You have a bunch of overturned vehicles here as well, obviously

At 35:23 - We get to Fountain Square and can see bits of rubble here and there. We're starting to get to the edge of the damaged areas, but we're not quite there yet

At 36:00 - In the bottom right, we can see windows shattered all the way out here. And these were windows facing away from the reactor in a building on the other side of the square (again, compare to the opening cinematic to verify that these weren't already broken)

 

[Clement Rage]

Youtube is kind of touch and go with me, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I did watch your video, and there is debris, sure, but I didn't see the collapsed bar. Given my generally poor observation skills, I'll believe you.

It's canon that people died, yes. Reeve makes that pretty clear. But there seems to be a certain fandom assumption sometimes (especially in arguments where the actions of AVALANCHE are being compared to Shinra) that the only possibility is the worst case scenario, where nobody at all was evacuated from the reactor when the alarms went off, that the debris hit mostly only in residential areas rather than the kind of building not populated at night, that Shinra propaganda is accurate, and so on.

What I actually think is most likely somewhere between the two extremes, yes people died, but Shinra are also likely to play up the damage for PR purposes, so it might not be as bad as it looks. And AVALANCHE would feel bad regardless.

Yes, the riot is AVALANCHE's fault, but people are less likely to die in that than explosions, and it would account for some of the damage.

 

[JechtShotMK9]

Why would Shinra bother to evacuate people? The higher the death toll, the more support they get from the populace. This is the company that dropped the plate on Sector 7 so that they could blame it on Avalanche, for God's sake.

 

[Clement Rage]

Because their business is Mako reactors, and training new people to run them would take time and cost money?

 

[JechtShotMK9]

Because their business is Mako reactors, and training new people to run them would take time and cost money?

THEY KILLED OFF AN ENTIRE SECTOR TO MAKE AVALANCHE LOOK BAD.

They obviously don't care too much about maintaining the infrastructure.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I reckon it would be a more a case of people evacuating themselves. The alarms go off, you run for the hills, unless your job dictates that you mean - like a soldier - or you have an overdeveloped sense of duty like Shera and are willing to die in order to check that last goddamn oxygen tank. I mean, if the alarm went off at my place of work I'd either be running out the nearest door or locking down fast. No one would have to tell me to do it.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Of course, this begs the question whether anyone beyond the reactor heard it/would have considered it was a concern for them as well.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Presumably they would have heard it.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

They may have if it was an "Evacuate! Evacuate! This is not a drill! Follow your training, because we have totally had drills with you civilians about this!"-type alarm instead of a security alarm confined to the facility -- but that's my question, I guess. If anyone outside the reactor heard it, would it have sent them running for the hills?

 

[Tennyo]

It has been my experience that people don't take alarms seriously.

Fire alarm? Must be a false alarm.

Tornado siren? Meh, it's probably just the radar picking up rotation in the clouds, not an actual touchdown.

 

[Clement Rage]

I reckon that the reactor staff would react, but civilians in the general area probably not.

This kind of calculation is full of unknowns, though. How many staff are even needed at a Mako reactor? Nibelheim seems unoccupied.

 

[jacoobmiller]

While Sephiroth may have progressed through these six stages earlier in his life, before the Nibelheim incident, he no longer can be classified passing the stages of 4 and 5 post Nibelheim. I agree that he definetly paralles with part of stage 6 by individually judging his moral principles as good. I feel his progression is reverted back to stage 2 and is halted since he devotes his life, after the incident, to not only pleasing Jenova, but also himself. Sephiroth's mind is perplexing. Not only is he percieved as "insane," I love how immersed he is in studying the lifestream, and venturing around the continents to learn more from ancient artifacts. But, I also remember a famous line, "What I want, Cloud, is to sail the cosmos with this planet as my vessel," furhter defining his insanity. xD