“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”
The Road
As we’re beginning to see the deconstruction of the Shinra-Midgar center, and to expand outward to the wider world of Final Fantasy VII, our human perspective is augmented not only with considerations of the divine (or the demonic) but with other sentient beings who share the Planet. Cloud’s party, that moving center of relationships, grows with the addition of Red XIII. Neither human nor Ancient, he is yet of great importance to Hojo’s experiment. In Sephiroth and Jenova we have some analogue for it–begging the question of who Sephiroth’s father was–and on the level of ideas, the interbreeding experiment is a blending of spiritual backgrounds. Red XIII’s and Aeris’ mystic connections to older traditions are juxtaposed against the alien, creepy power of Sephiroth and Jenova…
…all are partially under the remit of an absolutist scientific regime from which they subsequently break free.
In abstract terms, what we see here isn’t just a story about Final Fantasy VII or Midgar, but a story about that reality which in other contexts gets represented by the Buddhist Mandala and the Garden or Eden. The Promised Land, projected either back into myth or ahead into utopia, cannot be instantiated without justice at the center. Or to put it another way, it must be centered on the right thing–but where can that be found?
The former center, the President, has just died and been replaced by an even more cynical heir. The circumference has been compromised. Indeed, it was never completed. The model shows that there’s a jagged edge: even aside from the fact that the entire plate of Sector 7 has fallen, a whole other Sector wasn’t ever completed, any more than the stretch of highway we’ll escape along. Shinra are already moving on to the next city, to the projected Neo-Midgar, without having finished the first one. Or again, in the upper-lower dichotomy, we see a part of the city that’s integral to it for labor, but that is nonetheless forgotten and neglected, for all resources to be focused on the upper plate.
The Shinra Corporation don’t finish things, and they don’t maintain them.
There is a function for the lower depths–workers, including a protected brothel of sex workers, call it home–and yet it is only subject to extraction, just as the Planet itself, with its fecund Lifestream, is being extracted by the reactors. This is Barrett’s whole beef about the depression and the destructiveness caused by Shinra’s approach. The balance for a society between the wish to promote stability across the whole and to maximize prosperity for its most powerful segment seems to have shifted badly out of kilter. Though in Kalm the townspeople will tell us just how prosperous they are because of Shinra’s technology, they’ll lament the quantity of monsters that come with it. The potential to produce monsters, embodied in Hojo’s lab, occupies a high place in Shinra’s hierarchy. But to truly perfect the society, the top would have to show concern for the bottom, the widows and orphans, so to speak.
In Sephiroth’s figuration of Sophia or Jesus, depending whether we take a more gnostic or a more orthodox read, we get the inversion of the morality of the Beatitudes. He seems to think himself fit to inherit the world not because of his love and understanding, walking with the downtrodden, but because of his power, because he is the ultimate organism, one in being with Jenova. He was created from something outside of the world, for the purposes of this transnational corporation already on the point of dominating the world. Deeming himself the ultimate lifeform, he’ll end up being the ultimate monster.
That makes Red XIII’s introduction at this point in the story all the more interesting, as he’s aligned with Aeris as her… to put it mildly, spouse. Frankly, Hojo intends some sort of interspecies intercourse. He’s presented as a monster, but Red XIII immediately joins to fight against the real monsters. Powerful in combat, he’s then revealed to possess human speech: he’s gentle and intelligent, and thus more human, in a way, than the people who had been trying to control him. Whatever Sephiroth is, we haven’t heard him speak yet, nor seen him onscreen. He’s just this trail of blood, dragging with him the remains of Jenova the entire time. There are better ways to carry the past with you.
Red XIII’s Native American aesthetic, and that of his home, Cosmo Canyon, fit in a general way with the idea of Aeris’ Ancient nature.
Hojo, though, is trying to exert force over these distinct essences, to create a new ideal by blending them together with heavy-handed rationality, if “delicate machinery.” Artificially creating a new spirit or tradition that will embody the golden age of the past in the present, his error, part and parcel of Shinra’s, is precisely that he is attempting to force what can only be discovered: the appropriate way to experience consciousness in nature. That his plan involves forced reproduction between conscious beings is the greatest disconnect, a more viscerally wrong image of the Promised Land than even the Mako reactors sucking up the Planet’s energy. And the way that Red XIII reacts is not unlike the explosion of the reactors orchestrated by AVALANCHE. What Shinra had thought would lead to more power instead bites the hand that feeds it, turns around and asserts its independence.
We might hope the response then would be for Shinra to realize that these beings have a nature and a will of their own, that they’re working out their own purposes, which are not at all the ones Shinra was attempting to impose. In that sense, however problematic it is in broad strokes, I like the analogy with the Native American tradition as it’s creatively appropriated here. Red XIII’s look and his theme music are immediately distinctive, if stereotypical. The fluidity of his movements, especially in battle, are some of the best graphics up to this point in the game. And he is yet another member of the party with a mysterious backstory, another variation on exploring what it means to acquire the perspective of the past. As we’ll see, gaining access to its wisdom will be a painful process, but greatly increases his power.
The Materia that Red XIII comes in with, another All paired with Fire, makes him an immediate asset. More thematically interesting, though not all that useful yet, is his Sense Materia, which has a little more experience on it then yours probably does.
You also pick up the first of several Enemy Skill Materia at this point. One of my favorites in the game because of its versatility, equipping it doesn’t change anything about your stats, so it leaves your physical attacks undiminished along with letting you cast a slew of handy spells. First you have to learn them, and as an image of learning, it’s hard to beat: your character first has to get hit with the attack, undergoing it before he or she can cast it. The first one you can learn is just outside Midgar, Matra Magic, a bunch of little rockets that hit all enemies. At this point in the game, it’s decent non-elemental damage, plus you can cast it repeatedly, whereas your All has yet to level up. Taken together, these paint a striking image of our new companion: Fire paired with All, the guiding light or source of wisdom animating all different perspectives; Sense, the more developed capacity to understand one’s foes; and then Enemy Skill, the best approach to other powers not, like Shinra, to simply dominate and ignore them, but to take them into yourself, to learn from them, and you can only do that by suffering the effects, and accepting them.
At the end of this sequence, when Cloud hops on the motorcycle and the others all pile into the truck, Red XIII’s tail is shining in the gloom. There’s another homage to Akira’s iconic visuals here in the bike chase, but in Dante, too, there’s this beautiful quote about Virgil which resonates, no less apropos for being almost certainly coincidental. He has Statius, who was saved by means of Virgil’s work, say:
You did as he who goes by night and carries
the lamp behind him—he is of no help
to his own self but teaches those who follow—
Virgil, the poet’s guide to the brink of Paradise, who nevertheless will have to return to his place on the outskirts of Hell, is one who holds the candle behind himself, like Red XIII with his glowing tail, whose ancestors and descendants will be so crucial to the larger story. They are both like and unlike Jenova, who is a sort of guide, too: headless, she is unable to see or to move forward, while they can, within certain boundaries, but all can guide our eyes towards where it is we must go. And then we have to do the rest ourselves. We have to be out in the world if we’re going to escape from the structures of oppression in Midgar; we have to wander in exile. Eventually, we might return for a direct confrontation, but we are not yet strong enough to do so.
Now before you leave, even if you do rush in the front doors of the HQ with me, it may be worthwhile to double back to the stairwell for the Elixir hidden there. The elixir of life, a prominent inclusion/mcguffin in everything from Harry Potter to Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest—for symbolic value there’s little that can stand with it–is an item which is definitely worth getting, but it’s also an item which is so valuable that I practically never use them. I just end up hoarding them. Same goes for that Turbo Ether that you get from the little kid if you don’t steal his money. There’s practically never a situation dire enough to warrant using it. And yet he gives it so freely…
There’s also an item in one of the lockers in the locker room that you can’t get. What use could you possibly have for a megaphone, indeed? It’s reminiscent of that one little room down in the middle of the Wall Market, where the vending machine is booby-trapped to shoot you if you try to approach it. There’s all these little hints that we need to come back to Midgar later; if we refuse to let go of them for now, we’ll never proceed.
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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