games

Did the designer of Sephiroth deliberately design his outfit after ss uniforms?

7 year old me who never got past the golden saucer:

You forgot about the vision quest to the observatory in the desert.

If we want to take a bit of an armchair analyst media critique angle, movies can often be viewed through the dual lenses of what society fears and what it desires. (If you want to overextend this a little bit more then "what it desires" could go so far as "what it desires to believe about itself".)

Horror and, to a lesser extent, thriller movies are really fertile ground for understanding societal and individual fears.

Action and drama movies tend to be the best hunting grounds for what are the desires of society during that time period.

Sometimes it all comes together in one neat little package, like the TV show 24 where a lone prodigy protects freedom and democracy from the evil terrorists who seek to cause havoc and injury to innocent civilians and he does this by going beyond the bounds of what is permissible by morals and laws but he is permitted this exception because what he is doing is ultimately for the good of society, even if he has to resort to doing bad things to protect society. If that isn't just the perfect snapshot of the US zeitgeist in the post-9/11 world during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan then idk what could do a better job.

If we pull at this thread a little bit more, we have the backdrop being the advent of the nuclear family in the post-war era to replace closely connected extended families and communities that have existed in one place for at least a century if not far longer than that, then came the ushering in of the neoliberal era where communities were crushed and the nuclear family was saddled with so much pressure that most of them crumbled, or otherwise they fell apart but still lived together in the ruins of the nuclear family, (sidebar to mention that housing projects were specifically designed to break up families, with Pruitt and Igoe requiring that black dads were not allowed to stay with their families because the government saw them as a "harmful" and "dangerous" element that would introduce violence and addiction and criminality to that particular project).

Now suddenly movies are all about family instead of being about something deeper. Idk I don't really watch movies but if we take that as true then just like how Disneyland sells a simulacrum of the experience of a rich, vibrant, and interconnected community to punters then Hollywood is selling product based on our unrequited desire for community which has been culturally and politically hemmed into the model of the nuclear family because we are so far disconnected from the loss of true community that we can only really reach back in history to the 50s-80s where there was at least some degree of long-lasting human connection.

It's a classic case of capitalism destroying something in order to commodify it and then to sell it back to us.

I mean, after First Stabbing, why not Second Stabbing?

I'm gonna disagree on Sephiroth being a product of the planet. He's a product of the arrogance of man.

He was conceived when Shinra and Hojo discovered Jenova and put her cells in a human fetus to make a god.

By all measures, he has the powers of a god, but he's ultimately an ego project put forward by an electric company who wanted to drain the essence of heaven for personal profit.

Defeating Sephiroth is telling him he's not prefect or a god and that he too will return to the planet when he dies.

He's a supersoldier made by a capitalist empire and he believes he's better than humanity because he was born powerful. He's like the worst kind of nepo baby who thinks the world should not go on without him.

When he finds out about his heritage, and that he wasn't naturally just born better, he snaps and doubles down on his insistence that he's a god. He goes on a killing spree.

His whole plan is to become undeniably powerful so he doesn't have to think of the material conditions that created him.

Edit - with Jenova being from space, I don't see Sephiroth as being as much a product of earth's wrath. His attempt to destroy Gaia to gain power feels like the ultimate goal of Shinra. He's a a product of Shinra.

Also, I think it would be interesting to see an evil Cetra, but I don't want that to happen in the already complicated VII universe.

Sephiroth is the result of the foolishness of Shinra in thinking they are above nature. They created Sephiroth using the cells of a creature they couldn't possibly control, thinking they could use it like a tool. But of course the moment everything goes off balance they lose control and their ineptitude shows, and suddenly these powerful executives can do nothing while the ones to finally bring balance back end up being ecoterrorists from the slums.

Sephiroth and Cloud are also mirrors of each other. Both were duped into being tools for capitalist imperialism, when they find out one of them says "I am going to carry on with my own brand of imperialism and conquering" and the other goes (after a lot of character development and a mental breakdown) "I am going to break the cycle."

Hey! You can't shut down the bum fights! It employs literally dozens of people!

You mean after they drained the land of its life force, killing all the plants, then murdering a bunch of villagers who were upset that they were told lies by Shinra? Yeah, who knew that place would be worse off after they left.