Tumgik
#it was a rhetorical question joking about my distress it wasn't a challenge to undo it!!!
icharchivist · 11 months
Note
i completely relate to your feelings for the ff7 remake. its so crushing when you love something and then the remake/sequel/whatever carries its name but butchers the themes so thoroughly that you feel like they didnt understand what made the original so great to begin with. it just feels like a lazy cash grab. looking at every disney remake specifically. or i love this manga that has been going for 1000+ chapters and i wish it would end. i love it dearly its so nostalgic and it was like the first manga i ever read but the characters have become 2d caricatures of themselves and have lost their personality and it just kind of makes me sad. and i agree that a choice like killing aerith hurts because you love the character but it was meaningful and gave characters depth and raised the stakes and just not doing it in the remake because shes so beloved is missing the entire point. i just completely get it and while im not that attached to ff i completely get how youre feeling and why youre so annoyed. it looks great but whats the point if the story doesnt match? themes are so so important and your explanation of how ff7 is about the conflict between nature and industrialization and how aerith represents the planet itself sort of makes a lot of sense. its a really deep story with a lot of thought put into it and her death is so symbolic and important to the story itself. yes shes adorable and beloved but killing her feels like the only right move. its so integral. so yeah jail for square enix for disguising their fanfic sequel as a remake. jail for 1000 years.
aaah nonny thank you 😭💞
while i'm sad the feeling is all too well known it is reassuring at least to find people who relate to it, so thank you for sharing that thought.
the Disney remakes are also a huge pet peeve of mine in term of missing themes or fixing things that don't need to be fixed, but honestly i've given up caring about them at least, and the original always still stand very well on its own even now that it's just *shrugs* whatever yknow, if some people want to connect with the remakes so be it.
for the ff7 remake it irks me a little more since i know people tend to not like getting into older games in general. and with 7 having had many entries to the saga, the original game clashed in gameplay and designs, which threw a lot of people off from playing it.
And it's wild bc i can't exactly call the remake lazy, the amount of work is seen everywhere, but it does feel extremely cynical. Like idk the moment you bring a meta textual level criticizing the fans for wanting to keep the story like it was before, it ends up feeling personal rather than an actual thoughtful approach on the story.
As for like, super long sequels that ends up ruining the spirit of the original, gooood yeah. sometimes it's good when a series can properly end. Fans can do the "keeping the story alive" part just fine we don't need to milk it until the characters are no longer enjoyable...
I am also glad that my POV on Aerith's death and its thematical importance makes sense to you also 🥺 It's a death i feel strongly about because it's genuinely way better done than people give it credit for and i've seen too many takes missing the point that it's something i've been ruminating about for years. (i've read takes about how it's fridging women again for Cloud's manpain and it irks me a lot bc this is not what fridging is and while yeah Cloud suffers from it since yknow, he's the protagonist so we follow his own journey through pain - it's not about Cloud, not just about him anyway. There was also how in ff15 Lunafreya's death was compared to Aerith's by the lead developer and to me it really gives the perfect counter example on how meaningful Aerith's death was to ff7 if you compare it in details to Luna's.)
and of course Aerith is fantastic and i wish, on an emotional level, for her to be alive, but it's not the narratively satisfying ending imo, and any scenario where she doesn't die undo most of the story moving forward.
and honestly it's just. idk kinda sad, that they took back the original dev team from ff7 for this remake, and yet they went into this direction. I do remember that there were tons of interviews about doing right to the fans and honoring the characters the fans came to love so much (it was especially a Kitase's interview where he was especially talking about Sephiroth and Zack, two characters who shouldn't have appeared in the remake at the time, and that i found extremely noticeable bc i have an interview of Kitase in a magazine dating from 2015 where he mentions how much he was always pissed off by Zack's popularity and didn't understand why fans loved him so much.). And so it's like. is it really just fanservice for the sake of fanservice, wanting so much to please the fans you ignore the themes you put in the game? or were all of the themes genuinely accidental??? or the fact it was 25 years ago means it's too far away for them to be remembered as such??
Ad i do think it's even sadder considering how relevant the OG's themes are to our modern days in general.
So yeah, i'm sad the remake went in such a different direction, i feel a bit cheated, but especially i'm bewildered how much it betrays the original themes more than just being different yknow? like i said with the whole "the whole game was about coping with the denial that makes you rewrite your own life and be easily manipulable as a result, so why make the whole remake about "let's rewrite this timeline actually""
but HELP yeah that's definitely a fanfic alright *mumbles* and i've read better ones.
jail!!! jail for a thousand years!!!!!
thank you for your understanding nonny <3333
3 notes · View notes