FFVII Myth & Materia: “A Steal in the Sewer”
8 min read
“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
–Genesis 1:2 (KJV)
Sometimes when I go back through the original recordings and peel away at all our rantings and ructions, there isn’t actually much left about Final Fantasy VII to show for it. So it was this time–which makes for a shorter one this week 🙂
To begin with, a riddle: what permits you to stop playing, and yet to continue? What allows you to replay and repeat a given segment of the game, but also strings together the linear series of stages on the journey through to its end?
Consider the save point.
If there’s a given part of the game you want to revisit, say that part coming up before too long now where you actually get to have Sephiroth in your party, with all his Master Materia and seeming invincibility, a perfect hero, as far as Cloud was concerned at the time, and maybe we thought so, too, the first time playing the game–you can keep a save there. But when you make these multiple saves, do you feel a slight twinge, as if the game uneasily straddled the difference between a novel and a choose-your-own-adventure story? Is it not being true to a single narrative? Is it cheating, leaving the door open to pursue different options without starting the game over, as if not fully committing to one narrative dilutes the experience? Or is it just the contrary, a mark of greater devotion, precisely because it opens your mind up to those additional experiences you would not otherwise have seen? Your consciousness is expanded to have a wider view of what the game actually is, a perspective more like that of the designer or if you like the scholar of the game, seeing more of what’s there than the player who goes along the prescribed path laid out, sticking by their choices.
This is all just to say make sure you save before that squat contest and the rest of the Wall Market cross-dressing side quest, because you don’t get another chance at winning a wig for your night at Don Corneo’s. Frequent saves and maybe even slightly staggered save files can be cumbersome, but it’s always nice to be able to go back and try things over again, even if you’re looking at the game just linearly. Midgar as a whole (with this red light district being one of the few exceptions) will be one of those places you can’t return to go over again once you’re past it.
I wonder what might be analogous to a save point in real life. One answer might be these touchstones of memory, these chances to reflect on experience, to recollect, replay, record. We should take time to save when and what we can, for all these moments exist as potentially unrepeatable turning points in our life, Even the most ordinary shared experiences, ones practically everyone gets to have, aren’t cheapened by being common; each is still a precious and personal matter, multiplied and not divided, in the light of such meditations.
Precisely because of how many people share a love of FFVII, its very popularity can become a reason for other people to hate and despise it, but there’s no sense in that. That sort of elitist approach to it, to want the thing that’s yours to be, if not perfectly unique, then at least luxuriously rare, cuts us off from the best part of it, the real art of engaging with and embracing as many perspectives as possible. By remaining open to all that it can teach us, it’s almost as if we become a figure out of one of these myths that manifests itself in countless ways, each meaningful and distinct, each an expression of unifying purpose. To explore what the heck this thing we call good is, this diagonal of a square, in Socrates’ analogy in the Meno, all he asks there is for his interlocutor to speak Greek–that is, for a common language, the possibility of discourse–and the ground they stand on, where he can draw out diagrams, that common fund of exemplary experiences to work upon.
When we doubt the commonality of language and suggest that each person’s experience is completely individual, for whatever reason, we deny ourselves the capacity to enjoy things together, trading it in for lonely sophistication. In fact, living in this time, in this place, we have access to the most profound forms of help, the greatest availability of goods, the best library of stories ever assembled. We should be able, together, to bring out the most of what is in us, and push the bounds of human potential as much as any classical era or renaissance. We should revel in not just the static perfection of Cloud’s image of Sephiroth, but also the heat and clamor of Wall Market, the grime of Midgar and the garden in the slums.
In plumbing this collective unconscious of the internet for all of the vast sweep of connections that can be made, we might yet lament over a lack of critical thinking, a failure to trust in the past, or maybe just to trust in thinking and listening to others. For it’s not the amount of information we have access to, but rather the judgment we use in order to pick out what’s relevant, the mindset to ask the right questions, that’s critical now. That makes the difference between identification with the mass society, vainly imagining we know everything, and accepting we need to dialogue, in actuality knowing practically nothing as individuals, in order to ever learn. We need to find, as a foundation, a certain basis of respect for speech and decorum, whatever the metaphysical status of the logos, in order to have the conversation. In terms of the game, this would be the requisite system, or in terms of sports, the field on which to play, and the rules to abide by. The player either accedes to these or finds a different game.
We can make the most of our thrownness, our situation coming to the story in medias res, or try to revert to the dream of the blank slate.
The only way out of Don Corneo’s is to be dropped into the sewers. At Aeris’s house, we saw the waterfalls and the purple Independent Materia, Cover. Here, glittering in the muck, we find our first yellow Command Materia, Steal. It adds a new ability to your list of actions in battle, allowing your character, depending on their level, to snag items from enemies. This suggests the alchemical interpretation that it’s down in the lowest place, the place of filth, where you find the gold: the ability to learn from the other, if we take that as symbolized here in a physical way. A number of the Command Materia, notably Enemy Skill and Manipulate, support that reading.
The boss that we meet there, right on schedule since we’ve completed another section of the game, is the first explicit mythological call-back we actually encounter in battle. This Aps, if you squint, might be Apsu/Abzu from the ancient Mesopotamian religion, the consort of Tiamat. Together, the two primordial deities represented freshwater and saltwater, rivers and the sea. In the establishing of a new order by the god Marduk, they are captured and bounded. The saltwater, as representation of the infinite, or as great mother, Tiamat, relates metaphorically and even etymologically to the deep of Genesis 1.
In this mythic scheme, the boss fight is a reordering by Cloud and friends, starting from the abyssal depths of the chaos of Wall Market, from the underground aquifers presided over by Aps, from dissolution and deceit, to begin the long process of establishing a more harmonious order. When an existing hierarchy becomes too sullied and sick, like the waves of muck the boss raises against you, those caught at the bottom form their own hierarchies, gangs, criminal operations like Don Corneo’s, to try to survive. The only way out, though, is to descend, to undergo that heroic passage through death and the underworld. We’ll see that represented further in the imagery of the Train Graveyard.
But there was also something else with fascinating connotations which attacks us as we’re going between Sector 6 and Wall Market: a house, literally a broken home.
That Hell House we battle might be a sort of small-scale manifestation of the greater dysfunctional city, Midgar, we find ourselves in, rather than the mostly pastoral fantasy landscapes we might have expected from previous games in the series. Its maternal, child’s drawing color scheme all of a sudden breaks out into a robotic monstrosity that attacks you, a deceptive transformation. It’s all the more striking because of its placement right after you’ve left Aeris’ house, like a materialization of Cloud’s dream about his old house where his mom gives him relationship advice. There’s a clear comment on the temptations of the big city, the erosion of social controls that once existed to push people towards moral and normative behavior. They no longer exist except as a voice in the memory; they’re harder to reinforce except internally, on the level of self-consciousness, which might be what’s happening with Cloud and why we keep seeing him flash back.
The other voice he hears, in the first reactor and after falling from the second, however, is not Cloud’s mother’s. That disembodied voice is akin to it, in that it’s the voice of a self from his past which not is fully conscious at this point. The ongoing adventure of FFVII, once we finally escape Midgar, will be substantially a process of discovering what that other voice has to say.
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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