Final Fantasy VII Myth & Materia: “Oh, You Mean Practice My Pose?”

“The first root, and the deepest, goes into the underworld, to Niflheim, the place that existed before other places.”
-Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology

So you, as Sephiroth, hop down from the truck and kill the dragon. Ho hum. Now we can move on to the town, and see what’s the deal with this reactor.

In a tidy parallel to what we just saw in Kalm, the party breaks up and Cloud’s free to explore Nibelheim. The name, like Midgar(d), comes straight from Norse myth, and its meaning, the “home of mist,” perhaps precipitated Cloud’s own name. In the cosmos represented along the axes of Yggdrasil, the world-tree, Nibelheim occupies the roots, along with the underworld of fire; between them, the cold and heat generated the first elements of creation. If Cloud and his hometown is associated with the cold, we’ll see one image of fire, too, before very long which will keep us busy with creative thoughts.

When you want to proceed with the story you go to the inn, head upstairs, and talk to the other party member–in this case, Sephiroth. What’s cool is that as you walk around talking to people and going in their houses, Cloud’s memory is reconstructed according to the player’s actions. That internal voice he heard on falling into the church perhaps comes into play a bit, asking the player to choose whether he remembers this or that–seeing his mom; going into Tifa’s house; going into her room–and your choice determines whether you see that scene replayed. There are things Cloud’s just making up, apparently, and places where the memory fades in and out. There’s also a curious lack of emotion: this is the last time he ever sees his mother alive, and he’s unsure whether he even stopped in to see her. Maybe we could say the memory’s repressed by that very trauma, that he still has not dealt with those emotions, that he’s not comfortable sharing them at this point. In this ambiguity, it’s left to the player to decide what to play through, and what to make of it. 

When he returns in the context of his story, the place itself has already changed for Cloud. What was once home, known territory if you like, has been exchanged for an allegiance to Shinra and SOLDIER; and now in Kalm, he’s telling the story to the survivors of what seemed set to be his new home, in the slums of Midgar. Yet he holds them at a distance, too, having insisted on the contractual language of a mercenary or bodyguard, rather than the familiarity of a friend. He’s so intent on maintaining his distance, his freedom as an individual–with the irony that he’s actually been lying to himself a good bit of the time, as we’ll see–that his repeatedly divided loyalties leave Cloud no longer knowing how to be at home anywhere, or how to talk about it. Around his mother, he feels like he should act like a soldier, rather than as her son. The upshot seems to be that, even if it’s not literally destroyed, burned in a fire or crushed under an upper plate, you can’t go home again.

After sleeping at the inn, the next morning the party takes a photo. If Cloud talks to this photographer character earlier, he delivers the great line: I don’t take pictures with nobodys [sic]. Given what we learn from this picture later, we might wonder whether that was a real memory smuggled in by the real Cloud, the ur-nobody, not one devised by this Cloud projecting himself in the role of another. If nothing else, it’s one of these little jokes to lighten the mood–like finding the orthopedic underwear at Tifa’s.

Of course, Tifa herself, in her jaunty Indiana Jones hat, guides the party all the way to the reactor, only to not be allowed in. Plot-wise, the explanation for this would be to protect Shinra’s trade secrets. Her remaining outside, on the fringes of his memory, could also be a metaphor for Cloud’s relationship to her at this point: not letting her in, though later with the lifestream she’ll gain entry to all of him. (I’ve heard that Kingdom Hearts plays with this interpretation a bit, but I don’t know those games well enough to speak to that.)

The music in the reactor is the same we’ve grown accustomed to, and though Nibelheim’s is much smaller than the latest models in the capital, it holds something more than Mako: Jenova. The unformed creatures in their pods are the work of Hojo, in his bid to be as great as Professor Gast, souping up SOLDIERS with more than the usual sprinkling of Mako energy. Sephiroth is dismissive, until he connects this with the source of the experiment in her chamber, the name of his own mother… His breakdown there, accompanied with all the creepy sound effects, continues in the basement of the Shinra Mansion, reading obsessively to the tune of one of the great musical buildups in any game. 

This area is rich in raw power that flows in the Earth in its natural form, an image of the beauty of things in their home state, as opposed to the horror and corruption of Shinra’s reactors and Hojo’s freakish experiments. With that, we have a symbol of how Sephiroth goes in his own mind from being a beautiful, perfect crystal to one of these monstrosities, the prototype of a disgusting reproduction. His problem is not just that he’s been created, but that there’s a bunch more like him.

The big realization of true individuation, then, seems to be not that we are each perfectly unique, but that we are each essentially the same as one another. That isomorphism is why science is possible, why ethics works. It’s a deeply humbling experience, to seek knowledge, to work towards justice, or to go even further, as bodhisattva or saint or hero, to recognize our own vulnerability in the sufferings of others, to bring that knowledge of shared humanity back in as one of its many carriers. That seems to be precisely the issue with with Sephiroth, that he is unwilling to be part of a human community.

Instead, he grows exalted with the idea that he is an Ancient. Based on the erroneous research of Professor Gast, he believes Jenova to be the last of that race, and decides that as her son he should be the inheritor of the planet. Like the anthropological account for the story of Cain and Abel, the Ancients here move from an itinerant culture–traveling from planet to planet–to a more settled lifestyle. Sephiroth identifies himself with this special race, which no longer exists, to justify his hatred of those who are like him, whose kinship he cannot tolerate. 

It is this fabricated identity he holds onto here in his breakdown and rebuilds himself around, an appropriation of the group to himself as sole survivor, rather than accepting his identity within a manifold living process. Jenova, we’ll learn, was never an Ancient, but was rather the cataclysm from the skies which led to the destruction of that people. In Sephiroth’s cleaving to her, FFVII depicts an incest motif of the dark or lunar hero. It’s not for nothing he wears black and has silver hair. Jenova, the winged serpent, is the anomalous thought which takes over Sephiroth’s mind; the once dragon-slaying hero becomes the bringer-forth of monsters and destruction; the once savior, now corrupted, will bring about the destruction of the people. He will attempt himself to bring a cataclysm from the sky, just as Jenova did in the past to the Ancients. 

With Sephiroth spouting this false history, calling Cloud and his race traitors to the higher beings, FFVII turns very dark here. Not only does it profoundly undercut the idea of the individual hero, with this self-aggrandizing misfit turning his indisputably great talent to false and evil ends, but this language of racial supremacy invites more concrete historical analysis. The figure of a philosopher like Heidegger comes to mind, or the engineer Jiro Horikoshi, whom Miyazaki depicts in The Wind Rises, or indeed that entire cohort of the World War II generation in the Axis countries who found themselves complicit with the Nazi or the Japanese imperial ideology of their time, used to justify any sort of experimentation, or outright genocide, on others. 

When we compare Cloud’s reaction to all this with Sephiroth’s, the difference is striking. Cloud doesn’t care at all about Jenova and the Ancients or if Sephiroth was grown in a Petri dish; it’s his deeds and his skill that make Sephiroth the incredible figure of emulation he is to Cloud, and also ultimately his choices, not his origins, which make him into a monster. The same goes for the kids playing this game. We can viscerally recall our glee at joining Sephiroth’s party, and or devastation at so obviously a tragic fall for him. We are so primed to be, like Cloud, fascinated with this character. Everything about him is objectively so great, so cool. The problem is that with a little bit of new self-knowledge–or as it turns out, self-deception, and that’s also part of the tragedy–how lightly his whole self-image crumbles! We see, too, how deranged Cloud’s memory remains as a result. He has blocked out the end of the scene. He lacks crucial parts of the story: how did he survive? How did he make it out of there? He seems unwilling even to formulate the question, much less hazard an account.

According to the story he’s been telling people, Cloud can’t possibly have defeated Sephiroth. He cannot manifest that memory because it doesn’t fit with the current narrative. In a way, Cloud has arrived at Sephiroth’s point of identity break, he just hasn’t been pushed over it yet. We might wonder to what extent that’s a comment by the game on just how fragile all of our identities are. It’s not easy, what he’s going through, putting himself back together. We’re just now putting it together ourselves, all these years later. We get accustomed to our idea of how things are, and then destabilizing information comes in, like the knowledge of mortality and illness to the future Buddha ensconced in his palace garden, or like the serpent to Eve. At any time the great unknown can hit you with something that rocks your narrative and does not fit within it. The hero chooses to undergo the terrible struggle of integrating all that information. For Cloud, it’s the truth that he never made it in SOLDIER, and precisely that he was not a hero in any way, that enables him to become a hero, stepping into the breach when Zack and Tifa are down. 

For all of our party members, something in their past has gotten away from them, or they haven’t come to terms with it. There’s a more paradigmatic element to this: it’s not just Cloud and Sephiroth. We have Aeris with her memory of her mother, who gave her the Materia that doesn’t seem to do anything, and her set of unique powers and abilities; Barrett with his gun-arm, which has not yet been explained; Tifa, who knows the story that Cloud is telling and doesn’t speak up at this point, doesn’t bring her side of things to bear, but errs on the side of supporting him and trying to help him; and Red XIII, who’s been subject to Hojo’s experiments, though no one’s asked him about his whole story so far.

What is special about the dynamic between Cloud and Sephiroth is the reflection it permits. Looking at someone else, Cloud and the player can begin to see the problem. What’s much harder is to look inside, mapping oneself onto this story. The pursuit of Sephiroth, which ultimately ends up being a pursuit into Cloud’s own mind, as we see in the final battle, dramatizes the pursuit of some truth, some information about us as represented in an external figure. The Sephiroth who lives in Cloud’s mind stands for what he failed to live up to, the hero he didn’t make it as in the way he wished to, in SOLDIER. It’s both the great gift that Sephiroth gives him, and the horrible burden that he places upon Cloud, to come to terms with his own potential for good and for evil.  

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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