Projecting that outward, we might suppose there must be some external figure to blame: stop Sephiroth, and it will save the world. In pursuing Sephiroth, he is starting to pursue his own identity, and that inevitably involves finding signs of anomaly or threats to his current existence. Nature itself seems to conspire, adding its warning signs of the coming storm.Ĭloud and the player observe the danger, but should also recognize that he is on the path of the hero. And so much the more if it’s a giant snake-dragon that’s been impaled to send us a message. Each time we see a snake, we’re going to freak out. That archetypal image never gets old, never loses the shock of the new. On the other hand, we might ask why we’re compelled to check the serpent again and again.
In a word, it’s almost overly dramatic, if the player chooses to watch the same little cutscene over and over to the point where it loses its initial shock. It’s a bit like President Shinra’s role-play in the Honey Bee Inn, where thunder sound effects roll out through the keyhole of the dark room of his promised-land fantasy. He is the dying and resurrected god, but he is also the hero king and the culture bringer, the earthly and divine representative of the principle of light and humanity.Įach time you look up at it, lightning will keep flashing. He is not a hero who transforms the outside world, but one who transforms himself by atonement. Again, the spin the original myth gets here is profoundly negative, if Neumann’s analysis of the feathered serpent is any guide: Particularly if we’ve played FFVII recently, we might think of Quetzalcoatl, the thunder-serpent summon of that game, and the dying and reborn god of the Aztecs. The snake is lolling face up as the camera pans up. His power is undeniable, to have done this to such a fearsome monster. We can read this as the death of the possibility of transformation, at least for Sephiroth. The suffering and dying god-man gets exchanged for a negative symbol of transformation. The snake, that figure of wisdom and transformation, but also of forbidden knowledge and awareness of mortality, is impaled on a tree, the primordial cross. Here the godlike Sephiroth sacrifices another in place of himself, flipping the myth upside down. To stay with the Norse connection, Odin, too, is portrayed as a suffering god:
We might see in it an inversion of the heroic iconography of Christian belief, among many others. It’s a dramatic memento mori, a promise of what awaits you in pursuing Sephiroth. If not a prohibitive limit, then, the dead snake gives a clear warning. And of course we have to push on to proceed with the game.
But though we’ve made it out of Midgar, we are nowhere near the edges of this world of FFVII.
0 kommentar(er)
