(For those who have not read the introductory post, you will find a series of disclaimers and content warnings there. I encourage you to read to those first if you are concerned about thorny topics).
If there is no chosen one in the world of FF7, nor is there a chosen one here in the real world – at least, as I understand the message of the game’s writers. To repeat what we said above, FF7 seems to dramatize many of the ideas encapsulated in Friedrich Nietzsche’s diagnosis of monotheistic religions and their secular offshoots. Messianism appears in the most desperate times, among the most desperate, vulnerable people. It expresses the bitter frustration of the powerless: Sephiroth cannot rectify the past injustices of the human race against the ancients, nor those of Shinra and Professor Hojo against him and his real mother. The storyline of Dyne is a microcosm of FF7s story as a whole: powerless to bring back his dead wife or ruined hometown, Dyne turns to murderous and ultimately suicidal nihilism “Why? […] because I want to destroy everything”. This is Dyne’s outlet for his ressentiment, it is the only way of exerting his will in a world he is otherwise unable to change. This is true even to the point where he is willing to murder his own daughter and best friend rather than tolerate the world that has been created by Shinra’s corporate greed. In a way, Dyne is simply an honest representation of what both Barret’s and Sephiroth’s mentality really amounts to: if self-destruction is the only outlet available through which a person can act upon the world, or attain meaning and agency, that is the one they will take. To take one of Nietzsche’s most famous quotes out of context, ‘man would rather will nothingness than not will’.[1]
Do I
think FF7 is somehow a Nietzschean game, though? Not exactly.
It is
hard to find any direct connection between this Nietzschean line of
interpretation and any interview comments from the main story writers, Kitase,
Nomura or Nojima. In particular, Nomura, who designed Sephiroth, and came up
with the story idea in which characters chase after the villain, mentions only
that his physical appearance and his relationship to Cloud being inspired by the
historical figures of Sasaki Kojiro and Miyamoto Musashi, (Sephiroth being the
latter).[2]
We might not be totally surprised by Nietzschean themes given the developers
and other personalities associated with this game, and their history of
inserting such references and messages into other similar games of this period.
For instance, one of the ideas pitched for FF7 (which was rejected and later
became Xenogears) was written by Soraya Saga and Tetsuya Takahashi – two writers
whose games are full of Nietzsche references (Look at the Xenosaga episode I
and II subtitles, for instance).[3]
Another figure worth mentioning in Masato Kato, who wrote large chunks of
Chrono Trigger, was the director on Radical Dreamers and later Chrono Cross – a
veritable existentialist nightmare of a game -
and also wrote much of the dialogue in many of FFVII’s key story scenes.[4]
Of course, none of this contextual proves anything about the game meaning or
its developers intentions, given the lack of explicit references to religious
thought or German philosophy – our only leads here are the character names Sephiroth
and Heidegger (the latter being a topic for another essay unto itself).
Indeed, one should probably be grateful that the writers of FF7 chose not to
fill the game with unsubtle references to German philosophers and esoteric
religions, as so many other games from the JRPG genre seem to, even today.
Perhaps
more interesting is the disquiet that seems to be expressed in a great deal of
Japanese media, from around the nineties, concerning messianism as a cultural
import of the West. This essay has sought to show how this unease is expressed
in respect of Final Fantasy 7, but there are many other games, films, and
television series in which this ambivalence seems to be found. This output is
not simply dismissive about messianism, but rather ambivalent about it: messianism
is something powerful, but destructive; it is like a foreign body (a machine, a
virus, a sperm, or indeed, Jenova cells) that cannot be removed or expelled. It
is here to stay. Here I list a few examples.
The
most obvious and well known outside Japan is perhaps Neon Genesis Evangelion,
which contains an extensive number of explicit references to both Kabbalah and
Nietzsche, both in its visual symbolism and in its dialogue. The manga/anime Berserk
features a great deal of similarity with FF7, particularly in the androgynous design
of its antagonist, and their bloody ascent to godhood. The anime/hentai Urotsukidoji
features a messianic prophecy of a chosen one who will restore the world to its
original balance by becoming united in sexual congress with a human woman. In
the event, the chosen one renews the world by destroying it, reducing cities to
rubble, inflicting extreme sexual violence and spectacular death on its
inhabitants (the series is an infamous and early example of the tentacle-rape
genre). Finally, the masterpiece Tetsuo the Iron Man (the only media
mentioned here I can actually recommend beside FF7) features a man who runs
over an innocent bystander, and whose girlfriend persuades him to run from the
scene. Tetsuo’s guilt is then personified by a character named the fetishist,
who slowly destroys his relationship with his girlfriend – and with himself – by
physically fusing with him, turning him slowly and painfully into a machine.
The film closes in a way which ought to remind us of the long Nietzsche quote
early in this essay, and with words which we can easily imagine a more sweary Sephiroth
saying to Cloud. As the new, two headed being blasts-off triumphantly to the
strains of Chu Ishikawa’s ‘Megatron’, the fetishist declares to Tetsuo: ‘our
love can destroy this whole fucking world’.
Notes
[1]
Friedrich Nietzsche The Genealogy of Morals in Basic Writings of
Nietzsche trans & ed Walter Kaufmann (Modern Library 2000) 599.
[2] Weekly Famitsu Issue no. 1224: Tetsuya Nomura Interview (Accessed: March 08, 2020) at The Lifestream
[3] https://www.siliconera.com/soraya-saga-on-xenogears-and-xenosaga/
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20110724162937/http://mitsuda.cocoebiz.com/friends/kato.html
accessed 16/09/2023
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