Patreon Letter: 30th March 2020

Hey folks,

Jackson here with my Patreon Letter this month! And uh, what a month. I won't be talking about that much. I'm anxious, you're anxious, nobody is doing great and personally I would find it frankly selfish beyond belief to navelgaze about My Situation when I have friends working in hospitals, in grocery stores, with no protection and even less money. There has been a lot of relatable discussion about quarantine anxiety from middle class people as if we are all stuck at home where it is safest, and I have found it repellant. I am poor, disabled and scared, but I am for now at least, staying inside in a house I am at no risk of being evicted from. Nobody needs to hear from me about how much i miss going to the pub, and we're all sick to death of rich people making "in this together!!!" messages of gratitude in the middle of what is inarguably one of the most naked periods of class warfare this century. 

So If i have anything to say about the situation it is this -  please don't cross any picket lines. Instacart is striking today, Whole Foods tomorrow, and there will be more in the coming months. These situations will change fast so the least we can do is make it a priority to stay on top of who is striking and where the picket lines are on any given day. Take care of yourself best you can, and make sure to stand in solidarity with those that need you. 

Okay that's it that's the update about the world. I hope everyone reading is doing okay. The letters will continue on the new schedule! Abnormal Mapping keeps on trucking, and I hope you enjoy. Now it is time to talk about something far less serious: The Compilation of Final Fantasy VII.

[THUNDER CRACK] THE COMPILATION OF FINAL FANTASY VII

It fucking sucks dude.

That is not fair, the games deserve more than that, and seeing as I did play them for Content I shall get off my ass and write an actual essay. But that said it is hard to over-exaggerate the amount the existence of this strange beast knocks the wind out of the sails. The movie is bad, the games are bad, often in the same ways, sometimes in different ways, and only very rarely in interesting ways. And so their universal crappiness becomes the point of interest. 

While it is easy to  point to Spirits Within's failure as the moment where Square fell apart, it does not serve as such a neat narrative marker. The games became less consistent for sure, but the various teams that make up the Square side of Square Enix have created some fantastic, ambitious and interesting video games since then. While pulling the cord marked "make a goddamn Final Fantasy VII movie" is nakedly a desperate and cynical move by a company who just needs to make money, it is not like the people involved are making bad work around the edges. FFX-2 proves that they know how to make direct sequels! So why, when charitably Square Enix since the early 00s has been "uneven" and "interesting," is the Compilation so uniquely consistent in being the dirt worst? 

We may never know. But three things stick out.

First, a lot of people hated X-2. You can feel the influence of the gamefaqs posters mad about Yuna's girly dance-fest treasure hunt hanging like a spectre over every moment of Dirge of Cerberus and Crisis Core, taking great pains to treat the source material with the over-reverence the fans believe it deserve. While X-2 was as, if not more, intense with its tie-ins to FFX's events and characters, following up on literally every subplot and NPC from the previous game, the way it did so was often uncomfortable. It asked the audience to consider what the previous quest truly meant, was it worth it, are people making the same mistakes? The way Spira moved forward was genuinely unexpected and the threats the world faced were not simply elaborations on the plots and villains of the original game.

This is not so with the compilation. I want to talk about Advent Children separately so let's focus on the games. Before Crisis features the Turks in a happening-just-offscreen civil war inside Shinra where they must stop a terrorist organization AVALANCHE (no relation. seriously) from using a summon to destroy all life to save the planet. Dirge of Cerberus features a just-offscreen previously hidden branch of Shinra summoning Omega weapon to (again, seriously) merge all souls into one and destroy the world. Crisis Core features two just-offscreen Sephiroth offshoots in a grand battle of good and evil for the souls of SOLDIER experiments.

None of these games expand in any significant way upon the themes of FF7. In fact they all run them back by softening up Shinra because the villains in the prequels are always characters who oppose Shinra but are "too extreme" (read: want to destroy the world). It's just boring. What you get instead is two prequels of people running into Cloud and Aerith and Yuffie, usually inspiring them to become the characters they are in the game. And the sequel is about Vincent so it's basically the most inconsequential thing that they could have made, lest the delicate balance that is the FF7 fandom fall down like a house of cards.

But all this said while I definitely think the "safe" and ultimately boring nature of the compilation is partially an intentional move from a company trying to give the people what they think they want, it's also because FF7's themes are simply too hot for Square Enix to grapple with. FFX was a game about religion, the apocalypse and what it means to build a better world. FF7 was a game about corporate control of the environment being tantamount to genocide. It was only ever good on accident. A lot if being said in the shadow of the remake's changes of what FF7 truly believes about its ecoterrorist protagonists, but the fact is no other Final Fantasy is so direct in its themes of the neccessity of extreme violence in the face of oppression. Even the original game goes from having Reno murder an entire slum with the flick of a button to having the Turks get their coolguy exit into the night. And given how, removed from the specificity of AVALANCHE and Shinra, the wider themes of FF7 are extremely generic and icenstuous for the genre, compilation reveals not that Square has forgotten the core of its masterpiece, but that the Emperor has no clothes.

Square Enix is a massive company. They were massive when they made FF7, they were bigger when they made the compilation, and they're even bigger now. Such is the nature of the exponentially increasing scale of game development. It is not an environment in which radical stories can be created, and given the legions of leftists for whom FF7 was a deeply influential and formative game for their politics, perhaps it is actually good that a giant corporation cannot capture that lightning in the bottle twice. To outgrow what corporate art has to say about the need to blow up corporations with actual, real bombs, is probably a pretty good place to be. And while the products that make up the corporation are bad on their own standards, if they were the best versions of themselves, I think it's fair to say the outcome would ultimately not be that different.

Which brings me to my third, and completely unrelated point. It's time to talk about Advent Children. It's time to talk about my nemesis, Tetsuya Nomura.

Tetsuya Nomura was making Advent Children at the same time he was making Kingdom Hearts II. To put it bluntly this is what is known as "taking the piss." Games have a strange relationship with Auteur Theory, using it more as a badge of artistic merit and celebrity rather than a critical lens. But there is perhaps no better place to apply that lens properly than right here, to Tetsuya Nomura in 2005. Jean Renoir famously said, "A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again." 

Motherfucker gave Sephiroth Nobodies. 

Nomura has what can be charitably called a laser focused interest set when it comes to his storytelling. He likes to write emotionally arrested characters with lingering, unresolvable trauma. He is deeply interested in concepts of identity, how identity is formed internally and externally, and crucially how the self is enforced upon people as much if not more than it is defined by people. This is what Kingdom Hearts is. And while the series has mixed success with how it handles these themes (KH2 is terrible, Birth By Sleep rules, get back to me in a few month once i've finished 3 and I'll write properly about it), it is consistently about nothing but this the whole way through. Y'know, when it's not about how Disney owns everything.

Final Fantasy VII is not about this at all. It superficially has many similar elements, and identity is perhaps its central concern, but the original game's approach could not be night and day more different than Nomura's. FF7 is a game where people talk to each other, where Tifa helps cloud put himself together. It is a game about how trauama is mediated, how identity is constructed by the self and how through communication and empathy you can find the path to the wholeness that you desire, whether you "exist" be damned.

Advent Children is a movie about three villains who do not exist. Whose defeat or victory is irrelevant, their fate is to go from not being real to total nonexistence. Cloud has not reverted to his old self, he's not putting on a cool front, he is instead near catatonic in his abandoning of reality, his trauma victorious over the sense of self he forged in the original game. This is the most Nomura shit in the world. His values here are not positioned as an argument against the themes of FF7, but simply overwrite them in this new status quo. 

Nomura and FF7 are just a terrible, terrible match. I say this as someone who, on a good day, can like both of those two things a whole lot. He didn't direct the games but you can feel Advent Children leading the way as a guidepost for the direction of the Compilation. A hollow remnant of Cloud and a hollow remnant of Sephiroth fighting a meaningless battle that will probably repeat again as they are never able to escape and form new identities can be seen both as a cynical plot created by a company who needs to bring back fascimilies of the past, and also a deeply earnest plot written by a man who eats this shit up for breakfast. 

It is impossible to detangle these things and create a clean narrative about square "losing its way" or a single creator run wild breaking everything to his vision. Compilation is all of these things and probably more that we'll never know about. The journey is over for a couple weeks and then I shall proceed onto the remake, morbidly interested in it until the end of the decade.

Thank you for reading this letter! I think it's pretty good, sitting here having finished it, I am proud of this one. Hope you enjoyed it too. A quick announcement: I will be streaming Final Fantasy VII remake when it comes out. Not all of it, not all the time, and definitely not on A Schedule but I have a headset that works on the PS4 and will be using that to stream it on occasion. Please look out for that, if that is a thing you will be interested in.

Okay, that's it for me, take care and I'll see you next month.

-Jackson