#i can under no circumstances let even the Implication that i dont think abt this extensively stand in any way

[felikatze]

The message for LC & LOR: capitalism is bad

i mean YEAH the games are very anti capitalist. that post was more abt like the A's arc tbh,,, (<- has massive A brainworms) each sephirah does have their own central theme and moral and just Looking at the City is blatant satire

having energy be harvested directly from human suffering is not that subtle lmao.

murdering others to get by as the elite enjoy a comfortable live ignorant of almost all suffering <3 almost every single person so broken by the system that they are so hopeless, so devoid of dreams, it's referred to as a "disease of the mind" <3 massive corporations controlling almost every aspect of life and deliberatly ignoring and even utilizing the most Unethical business practices known to man for profit <3 yeah.

guess i should've been more specific i just love how much lor dunks on A. He is a vry tragic character whom i think entirely too much about because he is both the driving force behind the plot and a total non-entity as a player insert.

the rest of this got fuckin. long. sorry not sorry i had these thoughts locked and loaded for weeks

i just think it's funny that most stuff you could read out of the final "core suppression" where A gets visited by the three ghosts of christmas manifestations of his issues gets annuled a bit by Angela trying to prove him and his methods as wrong as possible.

esp if you read lc and lor together, with one of lor's main themes being breaking the cycle of abuse and suffering.. A's actions end up being a continuation of said cycle, started by Carmen's death. (talked abt in my A/Angela parallels post lmao)

specifically an aspect i mentioned in my tags is that by the end of lc he is completely and utterly alone. the only characters present in the final stretch are literally just himself. most of lc is ultimately about A confronting his mistakes, embodied by the sephirah being mechanical versions of the people he let die, and trying to move on and do anything worthwhile even though he passed the point of no return a long long time ago.

ultimately, he has no one to validate his pursuit of the light except himself. the sephirah are in an interesting position narratively, because they are without a doubt fleshed out characters. i'm not saying they're not. i just think personally that it does carry narrative weight how they effectively become irrelevant once their core suppression is cleared. Because those are the moments we get to see A's many many many horrible mistakes, and the sephirah moving on ultimately means A moves on from that particular aspect too.

afterward, the sephirah do not appear in-game outside telling you an employee died or something, and those are turned off during the final stretch, too, further enhancing the vibe of total loneliness.

lc by itself can be interpreted in many different ways, but lor comes around and tells us what happened in lc was fucked up.

different characters with different attitudes toward it are present, yeah, but for the most part we follow angela and it becomes apparent that the events leading up to and including lc hurt the characters a lot. Much of lor is just healing from that. And through this framing of lc as seen by the characters, who we are reminded were there, experienced those things, are not mere ghosts, it becomes so much more complicated to form a takeaway from it, just from how much it again plays into lor's themes of healing and moving on when lc is about repeating mistakes.

"man that was kinda fucked up isn't it" is also a 100% valid takeaway to any piece of media tho lmao.

anyway. you probably did not ask for rambling about A but you sure did get it.