#jrpg lore

The older I get, the more I think the Lucian crown in Final Fantasy 15 is basically one of the most dressed-up death sentences in Final Fantasy. The lineage looks glorious on paper, but once you actually think about 113 kings across 2,000 years, the whole thing starts feeling way darker.

That’s what I wanted this Noctis piece to hold onto.

If you want to see the full FFXV collection, it’s here:

Applying Your Own Standards Of Kindness - Zidane’s Final Fantasy 9 Message

One of the reasons Zidane Tribal stands out so much in Final Fantasy IX / Final Fantasy 9 is that he refuses to become the kind of hero the genre usually expects. He isn’t icy, aloof, or permanently sealed behind trauma. Even when the truth about Terra, the Angel of Death, and his manufactured purpose hits him, the story doesn’t turn him into a colder person. It gives him the chance to fall, and then lets love, friendship, and chosen family pull him back.

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That’s why this collection works so well around him. The SUPER RARE Edition captures Zidane running back through the Lifa Tree for Kuja, choosing compassion where destiny expected detachment. Terra Edition places him between worlds, turning his identity crisis into a moment of self-definition. Lifa Edition leans into raw rebellion and forward motion. Alexandria Edition preserves the lighter, freer Zidane who made the whole game feel alive from the very beginning. And Mono Edition strips him back to what he really is at core — movement, freedom, and a refusal to let the world decide who he has to become.

What if Aerith in Final Fantasy 7 / Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is not just a symbol of life, healing, and spiritual beauty — but the defender of a cosmic system that literally requires death to function? This FF7 Theory argues that Aerith may be acting less like a savior and more like a guardian of sacred dissolution.

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If Sephiroth represents permanence, refusal, and escape from the cycle, then Aerith may represent the opposite: the quiet, uncompromising defense of entropy itself.

What I love about this angle on Rikku is that it flips the way she is usually read. In Final Fantasy 10, Spira’s whole structure depends on people accepting the inevitability of sacrifice. That fatalism is so normalized that anyone who challenges it is treated as childish, dangerous, or impious. Rikku does exactly that anyway. She does not accept the logic. She does not romanticize the loss. She does not let tradition disguise the cruelty of the system.

If you’d like to own this piece, you can find it here in the full FFX collection:

That’s why her role is so much bigger than people give her credit for. She embodies the possibility that refusal can be wisdom. That saying “no” to the machinery of sacrifice is not immaturity, but moral vision. This Mix Edition expresses that beautifully because her Overdrive is all invention, adaptation, and disruption. She does not overpower the world as it is. She finds the exploit that proves it never had to be this way.

I think one of the reasons Auron feels so different from a lot of other Final Fantasy characters is that his integrity shows up before the big plot ever does. Before Braska, before Jecht, before any of the legendary stuff, he was already being tested. The arranged marriage detail is so important because it shows exactly what kind of system Yevon was, and exactly what kind of person Auron was. They wanted loyalty through control. He refused.

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That’s why his later role lands so hard. He isn’t just a badass older guardian. He’s a man who had already lost status for choosing principle over advancement, so by the time Braska comes along, he’s ready to walk away from the whole lie. That gives everything he does later so much more weight.

Aerith’s Dance Can Bend Reality Itself? | Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth Theory

One of the most fascinating moments in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth / Final Fantasy VII Rebirth is Aerith’s dance and the way the Lifestream gathers around her in response. It doesn’t feel random. It feels ceremonial. Deliberate. Almost like the game is showing us a spiritual technique rather than just a visual flourish. That’s what makes the comparison to Yuna’s Sending in Final Fantasy X / Final Fantasy 10 so compelling.

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This is by far my favorite way to read Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth.

Not as a normal remake.

Not even as standard timeline chaos.

But as Plato’s anamnesis brought into high fantasy.

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Plato argued that the soul is eternal, that it once knew perfect truth in a higher realm, and that birth into the material world is a kind of forgetting. The body clouds memory. The world distracts. Truth gets buried. But under the right conditions, the soul can begin to recollect what it once knew. Trauma can do it. Beauty can do it. Cracks in ordinary reality can do it.

That is why this theory gets so interesting.

In FF7 Remake and Rebirth, the world itself has been traumatized. Sephiroth’s rebellion against his original defeat does not just alter events. It seems to create the exact fractures needed for recollection to begin. Cloud’s tears arrive before comprehension. Zack’s role stops obeying the old boundaries. Aerith moves as if she is half-inside memory and half-inside destiny. The more the world breaks, the more soul-level recognition starts leaking through.

And that is where Plato’s spiritual side matters too. Anamnesis is tied to immortality, rebirth, and the idea that philosophy is really a kind of awakening. The soul dimly remembers its divine origin and begins clawing its way back toward truth. In that sense, Rebirth is not just a subtitle. It may be the literal spiritual mechanism of the story.

In Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, Cosmo Canyon suggests the Lifestream may not separate memory from dreams. If the Lifestream responds not just to memory, but to desire, trauma, hope, and refusal. Then Cloud is not simply losing his grip on reality, but unconsciously authoring a version of it?

That would mean the real fracture is not necessarily time itself. It could be will. A wanted reality where failure is deferred, loss is resisted, and the moment does not end where it was supposed to.

If this theory speaks to you, enter the FF7 collection here:

This piece leans perfectly into that reading. The blue is memory and resolve. The Buster Sword is burden and inheritance. The violent impasto feels like a psyche holding itself together so forcefully that the world around it begins to take on the shape of the struggle.