Ultra Telluric Fury

Tifa knows something is wrong, but she doesn't know why, and therefore avoids confronting the issue directly for as long as she can because she is absolutely not equipped to deal with what could happen if she spoke up. Aerith doesn't know that Cloud's memories are entangled with Zack's, but her attachment to Zack is a significant building block in her bond with Cloud, and likely the reason why she takes an interest in Cloud to begin with. The rest of the party, to some extent, also relies on him being The Ex-SOLDIER - the person with insider knowledge about Shinra and Sephiroth.

None of this is malicious. They're all well-intentioned people who genuinely like and care about Cloud. But their limitations still have consequences. Other people can participate in constructing your sense of self without intending to, simply because they are relating to the version of you that they can perceive. This has both positive and negative consequences.

When Cloud finally gains an understanding of what happened to him, he does not revert to the 16-year-old infantryman who was experimented on in Nibelheim. He doesn't uncover some pristine, original "true Cloud" underneath everything else. Instead, he becomes capable of operating and cooperating in a more stable and grounded way because he has a fuller understanding of what happened to him and can finally participate in determining what he does with that knowledge.

Sephiroth's story is a much darker variation on the same problem. He was raised in Shinra's custody as an instrument of war and a symbol of scientific progress rather than as a person. His sense of identity and self-authorship were effectively put on the back burner for much of his life. Then, in Nibelheim, the question of who he actually was suddenly became unavoidable, and he responded by allowing that question to consume him. The contents of the back burner boiled over with catastrophic and far-reaching consequences.

His tragedy isn't simply that he discovered something terrible about his origins. It's that, having spent most of his life being defined by other people, he responded to that loss of authorship by constructing an identity of absolute certainty and imposing it on everyone else.

Cloud and Sephiroth therefore move in almost opposite directions. Cloud begins with an identity he has assembled from other people's expectations and eventually becomes more capable of determining who he wants to be. Sephiroth begins with an identity largely imposed on him and responds to that realization by trying to impose his own understanding of identity and existence onto the entire world.

In both cases, the problem isn't that the self is mutable. The problem is what happens when you lose the ability, or refuse the responsibility, to participate in determining what that self becomes.

Another big theme in the game is the instrumentalization of life versus the intrinsic value of life.

Shinra exploits the literal life essence of the Planet for profit. Their interest in the Cetra is limited to understanding their connection to the Lifestream not so they can learn from or respect that connection, but so they can reproduce or exploit it for their own purposes. They turn people into military instruments and then market them as celebrities, while offering those people very little in return. They mutilate or outright destroy communities like the Sector 7 slums, Corel, and Gongaga for their own convenience. Characters like Hojo (and, in more complicated ways, Gast) often approach other living beings primarily in terms of how they can further scientific progress and understanding.

Sephiroth is simultaneously Shinra's greatest weapon and one of the people most deeply victimized by them. He eventually goes on to instrumentalize other lives himself, using Cloud, the Black Robes, and even the Lifestream as means toward his own ends. He feels entitled to the world itself based on his understanding of and connection with Jenova. In that sense, Sephiroth becomes another expression of the same basic logic he was subjected to - other living things become valuable insofar as they can serve a larger purpose.

What makes this especially striking is that FFVII repeatedly presents forms of value that cannot be reduced to usefulness. People matter because they are people. Communities matter even when they aren't economically productive. The Planet is not merely a resource because it produces something humans want. Relationships matter even when they don't advance anyone's goals. Life does not have to justify its existence by being useful.

Identity asks what happens when people are denied authorship over themselves. Instrumentalization asks what happens when people and things are denied value beyond what they can provide. The two are deeply connected. When a person is valued primarily for what they can do, their identity becomes easier to define from the outside, and their autonomy becomes easier to disregard.

And this connects to another recurring theme in FFVII - the limitations of individual perspective. The game is deeply suspicious of the idea that any one person, institution, or ideology can possess the whole truth. At the same time, it doesn't treat individual perspectives as meaningless! Quite the opposite - each person has access to parts of reality that others cannot see, and understanding becomes possible through bringing those partial perspectives together.

Cloud has memories of what happened in Nibelheim, including Sephiroth's downfall, but he doesn't have the whole story of what happened to him there. His memories contain pieces of the truth, but without the context to connect those pieces correctly, he cannot understand his own experience.

Barret has firsthand knowledge of Shinra's exploitation and destruction of nature and communities, but possesses many blind spots when it comes to their more classified experiments and their consequences.

Tifa has known Cloud since childhood, perhaps better than anyone else in the party, but she doesn't understand what happened to him or have any idea of how to deal with it. Her knowledge of Cloud is intimate but incomplete.

Aerith has a special, innate connection to the Lifestream as a Cetra, but being the last of her kind, her understanding of what that connection means is limited. She possesses knowledge that nobody else can access, but that doesn't make her omniscient.

Sephiroth is the clearest example of what happens when partial understanding hardens into absolute certainty. He gains an understanding of himself as being fundamentally connected to Jenova, a being of unfathomable power, but as his certainty within that understanding crystallizes, he grows further and further from his own humanity. His mistake isn't simply that he learns something false - it's that he takes what he has learned and treats it as sufficient to explain everything else.

The answer FFVII offers isn't to distrust individual perspectives, but to recognize their limits. Cloud needs Tifa's knowledge of his past. Barret needs the perspectives of people whose experiences with Shinra differ from his own. Aerith's unique connection to the Planet gives the rest of the party something they could never understand on their own, just as their experiences give her perspectives she cannot possess by herself.

No one person has the whole picture. But that doesn't mean the picture is unknowable. It means we need other people to see more of it. Which brings me to the theme of connection versus isolation.

There are threads of this theme throughout the game, but Cloud and Sephiroth's narrative-foil/mirror-image relationship acts as the big neon sign for it.

Cloud is capable of pulling the pieces of his fragmented identity back together and becoming stronger for it because he is surrounded by people who, however flawed, care about him deeply. He starts off aloof, fragmented, and somewhat isolated, but is able to overcome that isolation through connection with others. His direct exposure to the cosmic soup of the Lifestream initially renders him a helpless, mumbling blank slate. Tifa helps him resolidify his sense of self not by telling him who he is, but by giving him the safety and context he needs to encounter himself again.

Sephiroth, by contrast, grew up profoundly isolated and, while he had periods of time in his life where he formed connections with others, they didn't last. He became progressively more isolated, leaving him with fewer relationships capable of challenging, complicating, or expanding his understanding of himself. Without those connections, the question of who he was became more urgent, and when he encountered what he believed to be the truth about his origins, there was no meaningful community around him through which he could process it. Instead, his understanding hardened into certainty, and that certainty hardened him against other people to a point of no return.

In that sense, Cloud and Sephiroth are almost opposite examples of what happens when a person encounters an identity crisis. Cloud is eventually able to tolerate uncertainty, accept that his understanding of himself was incomplete, and let other people help him reconstruct it. Sephiroth responds to uncertainty by seeking absolute certainty, and to isolation by trying to make the entire world conform to his understanding.

The difference isn't that Cloud needs other people while Sephiroth doesn't. They both needed other people. It's that Cloud got those connections in time and ultimately allows his connections with other people to remain connections between distinct individuals. Sephiroth did not get that, and he increasingly treated other people as extensions of his own narrative.

The more I think about these themes, the more I think they aren't really separate themes at all. They're different expressions of the same underlying idea - living beings cannot be fully understood, defined, or valued from the outside. You are not an isolated, self-contained thing. But neither are you merely a component of some larger system. You are an individual whose existence is meaningful partly because you can enter into relationships with other distinct individuals.

A person is more than the identity someone else assigns to them. A living thing is more than what it can provide. An individual's perspective is more than a disposable fragment, but it is also never the whole picture. And connection with other people is not about absorbing them into ourselves or making them conform to our understanding of the world so much as it is about allowing distinct people to encounter one another and change what they know.

Shinra repeatedly violates these principles by treating the Planet, communities, and people as resources, experiments, weapons, or data. Sephiroth takes that logic and turns it inward and outward at once, becoming increasingly convinced that his own interpretation of himself and the world gives him the right to determine what everything else is for. Cloud's story, by contrast, is ultimately about becoming capable of existing as himself without having to exist alone.

And I think that's a big part of why FFVII continues to resonate with me. Beneath all the mako reactors, alien parasites, and giant swords, it's a story deeply concerned with a very ordinary question - how do we remain ourselves while living in a world full of other people, other lives, and things we can never completely understand?