Final Fantasy VII Myth & Materia: “Leave the lech alone…”

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed…”

-Franz Kafka

We’ll have to hone our squat technique in the gym so as to make the most of our time dressed up in the Honey Bee Inn. These are an interesting couple of spots, comprising some of FFVII’s first mini-games and side quests, and in them we can see…well, more than we might want to. 

Before even coming to the Wall Market, though, there’s a few things to notice about Aeris’ house. 

A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

–Song of Solomon 4:12 (KJV)

Building upon the iconography of the flowerbed in the church, the place where Aeris lives is a garden surrounded by waterfalls and shot through with light, the sort of place which seems like it should be impossible to find flourishing in the midst of the slums. And of course, you find a Cover Materia tucked away there. The whole notion of the “garden inclosed,” or hortus conclusus, is a core trope of art and theology, linking up the Garden of Eden and the Incarnation of the Word in Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, for example.

In FFVII, it gets encapsulated in that purple Materia conferring the ability to protect your companions, which you can take with you even after leaving this impossible homelike place. 

The clothes and accessories in Wall Market, in contrast to the useful Cover Materia, are limited to this one portion of the game. They too embody a desire to help, to protect–Aeris to help Cloud, and Cloud Tifa–but primarily a desire to beautify, to ornament. The masculine physique on display at the gym, where the bros’ devotion to working out is made fun of in a puerile, homoerotic fashion, is just one instance of Wall Market’s simultaneous exaggeration and trivializing of things good in themselves but all too prone to excess. Food, health, shelter, sex: the most basic and universal human needs, actions, and characteristics come in for satirically overblown treatment with Don Corneo and his domain. 

The cliches of masculinity on display in the gym, and femininity (and masculinity, again) in the brothel, correspond in their fetishization of the body. How to account for these pathological roles? It is easy to get stuck in the creature comforts, artificially stimulated and endlessly repeated, sublimated in the game. Its images soothe with their accretions of particular behaviors molded into a general form that all of us can recognize because we all partake of them in some way or another. Does the fact that both the male form and female form are fetishized thus in FFVII, particularly in Wall Market, suggest we’re living in a time of exploitation of men as well as women? (Poor Cloud!) Or even that what’s being exploited by our advertising-image-driven age is not just the female or the male–for many, that’s an exploded binary, anyhow–but the idea of the human form as such having any appreciable nature distinguishable from the accretion of excesses?

Particularly if you remember playing FFVII as a kid or as an adolescent, not a woman or man yet, or however you identify, but just on threshold of maturity, it was especially disorienting to come to this part of the game where you’re asked to see these roles at their hyperbolic extreme–and then be told that you’re going to cross-dress, to immediately blend them. To be shown two corresponding extremes, and then to fill this completely different role–now that’s funny. It might even be liberating, as all good humor is. The pointedness of the joke comes in the way it’s presented as Aeris laughing to herself at Cloud’s expense. Our aloof hero suddenly seems really uncomfortable with it all, and as the player, you’re sort of left to choose between the two responses, how seriously to take this. 

Depending on how much time and effort you want to put into it, this is one of those places you can replay to see more outcomes than is possible on a single playthrough. Most scandalously, you can be selected to spend some time in the Don’s boudoir. Also, you can actually go into or peek through the keyholes of the other Honey Bee rooms to sample the various hijinks on offer. It’s by no means a required element of the journey through Wall Market, but you can see some very upsetting scenes in there which I’d completely forgotten or blocked out if I ever did see them as a kid… 

Lasciviousness, lewdness, perceiving people as sexual objects–all get sent up here. How seriously are we to take all this? You might say we as a society have allowed our views of sex and gender to become corrupted, and that instead of attempting to fix that image we deny there is anything to worry about and try and mix them together. It can create tremendous angst, profound confusion for the young person let into the Inn, or the internet. Or is it harmless and hilarious, a reflection of that release that comes of mixing together what’s normally supposed to be kept at poles, kept private, to maintain an essential tension? 

If we entertain the thought, for argument’s sake, that the traditional morality surrounding sex and gender might be valid in its recognition that these two poles, as presented in Wall Market, are pathological, unhealthy representations, isn’t it fair to read the episode as satire with a corrective, purgative aim? The actual embodiments of gender roles and sexual mores could be otherwise, the logic runs; if we’re saying that what we see in Wall Market is not healthy, we must have an intuition about what is. The infiltration into the Don’s inner sanctum performed by Tifa, Cloud, and Aeris is our solution to the obstacle of how to proceed. But it doesn’t go great… If it’s potentially the wrong solution, this business of having our heroes go undercover as prostitutes, it might be because the diagnosis is wrong. The very ideas of “masculine” and “feminine” as realities, with their distinct roles and responsibilities, remain clouded because of how we perceive them and portray them. Whereas the appropriate diagnosis then would be to realize we have been portraying them incorrectly, and we should figure out what they really are. 

In short, we underestimate that wily Don Corneo to our peril. And it’s a hoot!

The provisional, perhaps not the best solution, is this drag outfit that Cloud puts on, under Aeris’ guidance, in order to infiltrate Don Corneo’s affairs and then to also attempt to topple him in the mansion. Very well. What are we to make of Don Corneo as a character? He’s the slumlord, right, a godfather-wannabe, an archetypal figure of the system as it is: corrupt, yet entertaining. But then consider the resemblance between Don Corneo and President Shinra. It’s yet another negative portrayal of the patriarchy, the father standing in judgment. Of course Cloud, the eternal child, running from who he actually is, would play dress-up like this, accompanied by magical images of the feminine like Aeris, or Tifa as seen atop the Chocobo-drawn wagon. 

And what an awkward meeting, when all three of them finally reunite in the dungeon! Doesn’t it say something about the player how we react here, too? Do we feel for Cloud, and flush with embarrassment? Choose Aeris or Tifa, if they’ll have us? Or laugh it off? Who, in the past, wasn’t enchanted with Aeris? Who, replaying, wouldn’t side with Tifa?

Aeris, the Jungians might say, represents the new, anomalous girl who’s magical, as opposed to Tifa, the one you think you already know and who seems as known territory, who with all her flaws is real. Aeris, the anima or figure of the feminine as formed by an underdeveloped imagination, is perfect and fantastic and keeps the youth from life rather than representing the possibility of a real relationship.

In myth, we see the idea worked out in many ways. Like Calypso, who offers Odysseus immortality and an easy life for all eternity with the most beautiful woman, hidden away; the hero turns away from her offer in order to suffer and to keep fighting until he reaches home. Or like Circe, whose allurements associate with a motherly, caring instinct–she bears Odysseus a son in Madeline Miller’s fresh retelling–but we also see that she gives Odysseus essential knowledge for continuing his journey.

That includes the all-important descent into the underworld, rich with symbolism of sacrifice and rebirth, but also the iconic encounter with the Sirens. For as dangerous as their song is, surely it would be far worse–Odysseus would not have been Odysseus–never to have heard them. Hence the profound pathos mixed with wry humor of Eliot’s Prufrock, standing in for a certain modern cast of hero-manque, who concludes his “Love Song” in mangled terza rima:

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Similarly, though ultimately illusory, Aeris, in her mocking (later maudlin) way, does push Cloud to pursue this journey. We don’t know yet who she really is, only our projected image of her. That kind of image has to serve as a basic way to interact with a person, whoever they are, until you come to know them, cutting away at the projection and seeing it for what it is: in this case, the figure of the anima that needs to be filled in with and replaced by the real. 

For another take on this, consider Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, translated as The Golden Ass. A phenomenal work, completely profane and mind-expanding, the proto-novel’s most striking passages, treating the myth of Cupid and Psyche, gave CS Lewis the material for his most serious work of fiction, Till We Have Faces. If a hero’s journey is a process of individuation, we have a chance to read that progress into the way Apuleius represents his protagonist. He becomes, literally, an ass, until he finds God and turns back into a man. It’s like we see in the Circe episode of The Odyssey, how the crew become swine in the presence of the goddess, representing their failure to move to the level of really knowing her, whereas Odysseus, helped by the psychopomp Hermes, is the only one who keeps his human form and acquaints himself with Circe. He saves his companions through his example–for now.

Perhaps Cloud here, though he undergoes a temporary transformation, stands opposed to Don Corneo as the man going on to the next step. For Don Corneo and every other man in that Wall Market is represented as swine, the pigs men can become when they fall short and go after pleasure, forsaking the spiritual for the sensual. Insofar as we focus on the lowest form of the feminine, we fail to progress to being able to care not just for simple pleasures and imaginings, but to take responsibility for relationship to real people around us. 

One last connection on this metamorphosis theme, speaking of turning into an ass, would be “bully” Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Aeris’ plan here to get Cloud to dress up as a girl could lead to Cloud seeing things from the feminine perspective and so make him more able to move on to his next stage of development, but you can also see it as Aeris in kind of a puckish way just having fun.

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

She seems so demonic, enjoying his discomfort if she’s aware of his feelings at all. Cloud and the player are forced to confront the feminine experience in a new way, gaining valuable knowledge through a phantasmagoric bit of role-playing. Thus, if the way we perceive reality is like the way a hero progresses through a game or story, sometimes it is a dream, sometimes a nightmare. Sometimes the hero on one level of the play is the buffoon of a wider play. And so on. 

It’s a “slum drunk,” the dressmaker, who suggests you should get a wig, and he happens to know some guys who can help you with that. But it’s Aeris who masterminds the plan, and the player who is left to discover those other corners of Wall Market to explore if we want to get fully equipped to go to Don Corneo’s. There’s much more here beyond what we really need to do to progress. Seeking out perfume, lingerie, and make up, the player enacts just what Aeris is doing, in a way, joking around with Cloud for the fun of seeing what happens. And isn’t it significant that what happens is that we retain control of the game’s main story, mano a mano with Don Corneo, instead of being put into a side holding room while either Tifa or Aeris is chosen instead? One takeaway, then, is the power that can come when you take a game seriously as a game, playing along with all these sort of created rules, in cooperation with their spirit, and are rewarded by more closely embodying its ideal.

So much for our attempt at amplifying the gym scene and its counterpart, the brothel. That sequence of mental squats should get us a beautiful wig from the guys. Looking good, Cloud! Remember, when it comes to the dress, you’ve got to go silky and shimmery, not soft and shiny, if you want to win the Don’s affections. 

Wesley Schantz (the Bookwarm Mage) coordinates Signum Academy, writes about books and video games, and teaches in Spokane, WA. FFVII Myth & Materia comes out of his podcast series with Alexander Schmid and Vincent Reese.

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