#nobody could behave themselves when i started shitposting about the gold saucer and that's why we can't have nice things

[nautilusopus]

WOW this post was in my drafts for almost two years and I am realising I never actually finished writing it. So fuck it I guess.

Something that's always bugged me about the end of FFVII that I thought I'd share:

So, during the ending, Meteor arrives and grows like energy tentacles or whatever and starts ripping up the city and burrowing into the Planet and shit. In the process, a lot of the city is completely demolished, and the Shinra logo is ripped clean off the tower:

But then later when Holy shows up and the devastation continues, now on both the Planet's end and Meteor's, the tower remains standing.

This is hardly an oversight -- it's visibly buffeted pretty hard by everything going on, but never at any point gets knocked over. Which is a little weird, right? If they were ever going to blow up their big iconic setpiece, now would be the time. It'd be pretty convenient symbolism, too, given the environmental themes the game's had up until now. Man's hubris or whatever. It'd look really cool and this would be the ideal time to do it, but they instead went out of their way not to.

The tower, now devoid of Shinra's logo, no longer represents Shinra, and is now being used to bring up another point the game has raised at a few points up until now, most notably at Great Glacier.

The tower, built by humanity in defiance of the natural world (a force that is neither inherently good nor evil, but simply worth preserving) around it, remains unfelled by Holy and Meteor. Humanity is a part of the world as much as the rest of it, but still has chosen to set itself apart. This, too, is something not inherently good or evil, and the game argues that this too can be something worth preserving.

I'm reminded somewhat of Princess Mononoke (an EXTREMELY similar work in terms of theme and the way the story resolves incidentally go watch it it's really good Neil Gaiman did the English dub if you liked VII you'll love Princess Mononoke). The conflict is not even inherently "Humans Bad Nature Good". The natural world -- the forests, the spirits -- are all shown as beautiful and worth preserving for their own sake; but at the same time, there is a degree of brutality inherent to it as well. Nature is not always good and nurturing. In contrast, Lady Eboshi (who is vastly more benevolent than Shinra) finds herself in conflict with the forest, all too willing to rip it all down in the name of progress and the distinctly human quality of compassion. Ashitaka himself is later berated by the wolf god Moro for expressing it.

At the end, when (spoilers) Iron Town is destroyed and overtaken by greenery, the only thing that is left are the people, who must choose to live and decide what "living" even means, being inextricably intertwined with the natural world and yet inevitably in conflict with it, and who must learn to balance this conflict with the fact that all life -- be it human or otherwise -- is as precious as it is insignificant in the broad scheme of things.

It's hard not to think of the image of Midgar's ruins completely overgrown 500 years later, and Iron Town covered in plants, taking a step back and thinking about not just their lives, but about what it even means to live and be a part of the world that is as much a part of them as they are of it.