Fall of the House of Shinra
Michael Lee
“Aeris is gone. She’ll no longer talk, no longer laugh, cry… or get angry… What about us? What are WE supposed to do? What about my pain? My fingers are tingling, my mouth is dry. My eyes are burning!”
Death has come for Aeris. The finality of this moment, and the echoes of it through the remainder of Final Fantasy 7’s story, is a gift in disguise to the player. It is a confrontation with death, an interrogation of the nature of mortality, and an affirmation of the warmth and fondness of memory. Only when Aeris is unequivocally gone can we truly mourn her. To keep her in our hearts and be reminded of how much love she gave us. The narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story Ligeia says of his late wife, the story’s namesake, “but in death only, was I fully impressed with the strength of her affection.” We tend to take for granted the people in our lives, and only when they are gone do we see the impact they left on us. For Cloud, and the player, Aeris’ impact left a Northern Crater sized hole in our hearts. We can only fully grasp this because there is a finality to her death.
Rumors abound in the late 90s. Quite literally spread on the playground, that there were ways to revive Aeris if the player was willing to devote their energy to do so. Being rude to Tifa at every possible dialogue option would change the City of Ancients cut scene, with Tifa throwing herself in the way of Sephiroth’s blade. Fully leveling the Cure materia and obtaining the Underwater materia would allow the player to revive Aeris from her watery grave. Having Aeris’ level 4 limit break maxed and ready to go when she leaves the party after Temple of the Ancients was the key. And much like Poe’s narrator in Ligeia, with his intense desire to see his wife once more…
“I would call aloud upon her name, during the silence of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could restore her to the pathway she had abandoned --ah, could it be forever? --upon the earth.”
If I did these things, if I wished her back into existence, if I recited the spell correctly could I see Aeris again? Could I restore her abandoned pathway?
The exploration of that liminal space between living and death, is a common subject of horror. The morbid curiosity of what happens when we dance on that line between life and the great beyond. Toying with mortality, or attempting to pull a loved one back from the darkness into the light is often met with cataclysm. To be so brazen as to upset the eternal balance, or flirt with the taboo of resurrection, is to play with hellfire itself.
A number of Poe’s works feature the dead, or not quite dead, and the horror with which a person’s status in limbo brings ruin is strongly felt. H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward features resurrection as a tool used to torture people and acquire their knowledge and power. Edogawa Ranpo’s The Strange Tale of Panorama Island tells the tale of a man attempting to pass for a recently deceased colleague and the curse that invites. Heck, Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) opens with the Elric brothers attempting to bring back their mother, paying not only a physical price, but bearing witness to a monstrosity created from their desire to bring her back. The mass of flesh they alchemize, writhes and pulses as a skull with piercing eyes stares right at the young Edward Elric. And to wish for Aeris to live once more, and not let the dead past be, we are not writing a beautiful story of love regained, we are writing a horror story.
In a culture that fears death so much—and worse, a culture where media companies fear franchise death—no one is allowed to die. Billionaires are attempting to de-age, everything we once loved must be revived & rebooted, and we mustn’t ever heed the warnings found in the words of horror writers past and present. Instead, we’ll wish on a monkey’s paw to bring someone back and continue the idolatry of zombified bodies.
Aeris died for us. She died for the planet. She died to stop Sephiroth. She died for Cloud to grow. She died so we would never forget our reason for going on. She died. She died, she died, she died. and now… because we wish she didn’t, because we are just too selfish, because we are as unwell as a Poe narrator, she has been reborn for us. We just haven’t yet realized the horror of it all.
Aeris is dead. Long live Aerith.
Descent into the Maelstrom
Lurking in the shadows of every beautifully realized vista from Junon to Nibelheim, I couldn’t shake this feeling of a slow-creeping horror that stalked me as I played Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. I would zig down another sidequest branch, abruptly departing from the story line in hopes I might catch a glimpse of the terror I felt. No. There was nothing. Just innocuous AAA game busy work. I would zag back on to the story line. Maybe if I got back on track, I’d find my answer to why it all felt so unreal. Lost in a dream that was becoming a nightmare. Isn’t this what I had wanted? Final Fantasy 7 was back in this incredibly, miraculously fully realized form. It had been revived, and with it, maybe I could finally bring back Aeris.
Aeris… Ah, sweet Aeris. Your PlayStation self was already so beautiful to me. You never left my party. You really were Heaven’s Gospel… But… then you did leave, and the younger me, the immature me, wished more than anything that the rumors were true. That you could be brought back to life. I wanted it. I wanted you to be there at the end to fight Sephiroth. There was a gap between Cloud and Vincent that couldn’t be filled. Your place in the party was now occupied by a rotating cast who could never measure up.
But now you’re here, although something’s different. You’re Aerith now. Was I saying your name wrong all this time? Was my memory of you clouded by a nostalgia-addled fog? A haze of misremembrance. And yet, Aerith, you are unmistakably that girl from 1997. In fact, you are an even more amazing version of yourself now. How is that possible? Herein begins the claustrophobic feeling that something foul begins creeping in on me. Was Aeris this perfect? Is Aerith the girl I fell in love with all those years ago or is she a warped manifestation of my own nostalgia and longing?
In the same way that I had wanted Aeris to miraculously rise, so too now do media companies desperately attempt to revive works or perform life extension therapies to keep a shambling corpse moving along. Necromancy as a parlor trick, giving us a nostalgic moment of revisiting, trapping us in past narratives unable to move on. Amusing the audience with warm, rose-tinted memories of a thing that reminds of us of a different time in our lives that we wish we could go back to. Or perhaps the cursed magic could be the conjuring of bestial appendages, growing uncontrollably outwards from a once pure source, offshoots of something we once loved, sapping the strength of that source in order to continue its proliferation. Extending further and further, to the point of overwhelming us like a Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Connected by tentacled narrative sinews and coursing with the poisoned blood of the profit motive, these terrors reach across media, dominating the landscape, rendering us incapacitated and fully under their spell. Final Fantasy 7 Remake is an unholy combination of both. Nostalgia and an extended universe converging into one horror-inducing entity. This is the Lore Monster.
This was what was causing me such dread playing through Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. I could nary catch a glimpse of the Lore Monster at any particular moment, it isn’t a monster that makes itself immediately evident. It doesn’t just spring out from behind a rock and scare you. It is the feeling of suffocation as an entire media universe crushes down on you. This is not just the story of Final Fantasy 7 being (re-)told here, it is every piece of Final Fantasy 7 LORE ever created coalescing into a gigantic, overwhelming worldview.
The Purloined narrative
It all comes down to some postmodern thinking on how we consume narratives. Before postmodernism could birth the Lore Monster, we had previously viewed narratives as being whole in themselves, and the way in which they are presented to us as the true way for the narrative to be enjoyed. Suspending disbelief to allow the piece of media to build its world in front of us. More passive certainly, but it allowed for the reader/watcher/player to take in what was presented before them and internalize it, reflect on it, be moved by it. As art is supposed to.
In postmodernist thinking, narrative can be enjoyed in fragments, and the joy one derives is in the relations these fragments have to one another. The relationships and the connectiveness of the fragments creates the worldview of the narrative. Engagement with art becomes active, chasing down the ecstatic pleasure derived from connecting fragments and building the worldview ourselves. Mastery of the consumed object by building one’s own complete worldview is seen as a valid objective. Though often that mastery is shockingly superficial. When this meets late capitalism’s desire to monetize everything, soon we end up with franchises where a narrative can only properly be understood by reading every side story, and playing every obscure video game in a franchise. The Lore Monster emerges.
El Dorado
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is nothing but fragments. Pulled from every piece of Final Fantasy 7 media. From the regions themselves, to the countless side quests and minigames, to the increased focus on character quirks and relationships. Everything is compartmentalized, categorized, and it is up to us to make the connections in this world. The worldview itself has fallen victim to the Lore Monster, replaced with the literal “World Intel” that drives the player towards 100% completion and mastery. The point isn’t understanding the world or feeling the world, it’s simply knowing it that matters. It’s only when you can see the Lore Monster is everywhere all at once, that this creates horror for the player. Everything you do is in service of acquiring more lore. A task that, for me, became too much to bear. Does knowing that “during the war with the Republic of Junon, Shinra saw fit to occupy Kalm, due to its stout fortification and strategic value, and it has remained under company control ever since” matter?
For some it does. Some feel that by knowing every piece of lore the player will reach a higher level of understanding. Achieving this mastery over the franchise is a powerful driver. Committing to consuming narrative in this fashion allows the player to level up, going from a mere pleb to the lore librarian, squirreling away bits of trivia in the stacks of their mind. Organized in a way that would make Melvin Dewey proud, and able to be recalled in order to pontificate at the lesser beings who ‘just don’t get it’. Mastery of lore is a prize to be won in the gamification of art. Consuming every narrative fragment is the perverse goal the Lore Monster wants you to strive for. The monster feeds you its own rotted flesh, though it has cleverly masked it in a way to make it palatable going down. Consume every last ounce of its flesh until you too become zombified. Mindlessly spewing the narrative you have mastered back out in Reddit forums and on social media.
Imp of the Perverse
Japanese theorist Hiroki Azuma writes in his book Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals that this kind of narrative consumption does far more harm than merely creating annoying folks on Twitter or Reddit. He sees it as causing a complete degradation of humans, what he calls an animalization, wherein we lose our ability to be independent subjects capable of reasoning and compassion, and become animals, mindlessly consuming, acting on impulses of hunger and desire. Which is why Aerith, and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth as a whole, left me feeling no emotional connection. The game is designed to keep you in an animalistic state of hunger and desire so you’ll actually make it through the bloated run time.
Azuma’s theory is a critique of otaku fetishization of the elements of moé that make up the design of anime girls: Twintails, school uniform, thigh highs, glasses, bandages, THE FANG. Every character trait is a charm point. And every charm point can be fetishized. We have merely adopted this same level of fetishization and applied it to lore. Elements of narrative. As we focus on these fragmented pieces of story beats, gameplay and nostalgia, it no longer matters that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is thematically and narratively weaker than the game it is remaking because all that matters is lore. The fragments. Azuma’s right, we’ve lost the capacity to engage with art as humans, we’re all just animals now.
In Final Fantasy 7, the negative impact Shinra has on the planet is constantly in focus. Everywhere our heroes turn, Shinra’s greed has ruined lives. The planet itself is on the verge of collapse. This is not only mentioned in dialogue, but made evident in the art, direction and music. All work together to portray a world on the brink of collapse. It feels imperative for the player to keep chasing Sephiroth, lest the world end because we could not reach him fast enough. Cloud’s story begins to unravel by this point in the original game, creating a sense of doubt for the player as Nibelheim’s residents refute the tale Cloud told everyone in Kalm. It’s a fascinating B-plot. Some might even consider it the true A-plot of the game.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth does tremendous work to undercut these strong thematic elements. Yet, because the Lore Monster now dominates discourse, saying that the environmentalist messaging of the original is getting muddled in Rebirth is met with “but at the beginning of the game, dialogue tree 1-dash-17, Red XIII says the planet is dying even though it looks fine.” Ah, phew. Got that theme covered. Praise be to our lore and savior.
The Raven (but it’s the lore monster)
I know it’s watching me now, the Lore Monster. I don’t want to draw attention to the fact I know it’s watching me. I must continue to consume the fragments it so purposefully has left out for me. Zack in a parallel dimension (thank The Planet he’s not dead!), Cissnei has turned a Gongaga ravaged by Shinra’s avarice into a thriving village set amongst a venerable bounty of nature (Cissnei…oh! From Before Crisis and Crisis Core?! Ah ha! I remembered! More experience points for me!), hold on, Chadley’s calling, “yes… oh, Divine Intel? Yes, yes, I can fight Bahamut Arisen in the simulator now? Great!” Oh, I wonder what his design will look like! Will it be more Bahamut, Bahamut Zero, or will it incorporate design elements from other entries in the franchise. Now that would be meta. I need to know.
Now… where has Aerith gone… oh, she’s at the Cosmo Candle giving a speech about how she’s an Ancient… Huh… Aeris didn’t really ever do that. She kinda kept to herself… The girl I remember was always good-hearted, that much was clear, but… she never really went on that much. There was a mysterious air about her. Aerith is here in front of me, pouring her heart out to a group of strangers… It’s sweet, it seems earnest, but… it’s not Aeris. It feels like a dream version of Aeris. A cold breeze runs down my spine, I turn, nothing. Nothing but a heavy, ominous presence. The Lore Monster is making itself known. Aerith is more forthcoming now, she drives conversation, she is our biggest cheerleader. In fact sHe aLwAyS wAs. She had so many big moments like this in FF7 where she brought people together… of course, it must be me who is misremembering.
Aeris… Aerith… Aeris… Aerith…Aeris… Aerith…
The fragments, the poisoned fleshy bits of the Lore Monster, have started to take their toll. Is this what Mako poisoning feels like? We’re in Nibelheim, it’s a Shinra wellness center now. Nice. Love some good corporate PR after a tragedy. Is this being set up to be critiqued? No? Fantastic. The headaches won’t stop. I crawl into bed at the inn, same room as that time... I have another vision. Zack won’t leave my thoughts, he was here in Nibelheim five years ago.
Wait. Why are we seeing Zack now? Oh god, they’re moving key narrative pieces around without a care. The Lore Monster is getting lazy, it’s feeding me dessert before my main course. My stomach churns. I wretch again, I need to sleep this off, whatever it is.
A knock at the door awakens me, I shuffle to the door in my pathetic state. It’s Aerith. A smile creeps onto my pallid face. “Oh dear! You look terrible! Let me get you something that will perk you up.” Aerith returns only a moment later, she brings me Vincent in the Shinra Manor. Ohhh, I like Vincent, he’s so cool. I shovel down the morsel, it tastes like 1997. Warm, comforting. “Do I get to play as him?” “No, silly. You’ll have to play Intergrade II to do that.” She’s tricked me again, this wasn’t really Vincent, it was more of the Lore Monster’s flesh. I gag, the realization returns my senses to me. I’ve been poisoned further. The hunger and desire remain. It’s becoming painful. Ah, Aeris… Soon, soon all will be right. I’ll finally save you, I know I will.
I hope I will…
ligeia
The cold stone walls guide me deeper into the temple, my head throbs, it is a struggle at this point to maintain my sanity. The crumbling labyrinth we have ventured into, once an architectural marvel, is on the verge of ruin, like my brain slowly disintegrating as if from a degenerative disease. What was once solid gray matter, is now a loosely held together collection of misfiring synapses, causing me to misremember at a faster clip. Voices talk to me from all points of the past, at the same time, relentlessly. We are far below the surface at this point. Aerith has gone ahead. The Lore Monster has been feeding me continuously. I feel as though I may burst. I don’t want to see more Zack. It meant something that he too was gone. Why is he talking to me from another dimension? What is any of this? Just a little further. Then I’ll save her.
I must be too late. Just like 1997. Sephiroth stands over her, chuckling to himself. Even after everything I’ve been through I couldn’t save her. I have missed my chance to restore her abandoned pathway.
“Aerith wake up.”
And then…
She winces, and looks up at Cloud.
I hold my breath.
But…
It was there that I truly realized what I was faced with. To borrow a line from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, “The beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.” With clarity of the moment setting in, of what I was seeing happen to one of the most iconic scenes in video game history, I could only feel repulsed. Aerith now ‘lives’ only to haunt us further. The gravity of Aerith’s death is immediately lost as she appears in the next scene to reassure us everything will be alright. Why does she get to tell us it’s OK she died? Why don’t we get to process it? Why is it laid out for us like this? Because even her death is a meaningless check box for nostalgia purposes.
The Lore Monster doesn’t care about the emotional weight, it only cares that the event happens and we can move on to the next event it wants to show us. Aerith isn’t allowed to rest in peace, she isn’t allowed to be a symbol for anything. But she isn’t allowed to be alive and free either. She becomes a ghost that will coo in our ear until we fully consume the Lore Monster’s flesh. We must now bring together all of the timelines, and find the one where she and I will be reunited again. Because Final Fantasy 7 isn’t about coming to terms with imposter syndrome, grappling with the person inside us who we don’t know. It isn't about saving the planet from environmental catastrophe even at a time when climate change is reaching a critical point of no return. It’s about saving our video game wife. Barf.
In Poe’s Ligeia, the narrator remarries, wed to a woman the complete opposite of the lost Ligeia. By all accounts, Rowena is a lovely girl, but… she’s not Ligeia. The narrator, still so hung up on his lost love, essentially imprisons Rowena, in a space that is so deeply imbued with the energy of Ligeia that it crushes her spirit. She falls ill, poisoned seemingly by the narrator’s desire to have Ligeia back in his life. He wants only for Ligeia, and this metaphorical suffocation the narrator inflicts upon his new wife is manifest into reality as Rowena gasps her last breath. Once Rowena is gone, the body shoots back to life, taller than before, and with the unmistakable dark eyes and hair of Ligeia. She returns by taking over Rowena’s body.
We pined for Final Fantasy 7 to return to us, for Aeris to speak to us once again, our nostalgia for it so destructive, that the comments, fanfics, forum posts, think pieces, and the forces of postmodernity in late capitalism fermented to create an elixir so venomous. Our Rowena—a new game with a new world to explore—was simply not Final Fantasy 7, so she had to drink from our poisoned chalice and die. The desire to revive our lost love has driven us mad, and in this madness we succeeded in killing off a new experience that could enrich us with something never before seen because we told media companies that we just want our dead wife to come back to life.
Thinking that somehow this remake could have been better, that it could have interrogated its themes with a 21st century eye, that it might even shun fan expectations and make bold narrative decisions… I wanted to believe. I may have already been fed the Lore Monster’s flesh before I even realized what was happening. Now it’s too late, sunk cost and the accursed heaps of nostalgia and lore I have been dining on have turned me into a shambling zombie of late capital.
Because, I am… a puppet.
Michael Lee is the Editor of KOSATEN, and writes in other places as well. His work looks at video games, anime, and Japanese fandom, with a particular focus on doujinshi and other fan-created media.
