the--calamity

[the--calamity]

Because my love language is memes I made one for @the--calamity to show my support. I hope it finds you well

#<3 <3 <3

[the--calamity]

SENT

BACK

WRONG

#personal art #the void

[the--calamity]

I’m still around. Apologies to everyone for the delay in updates to AMTB. We’re up to the downfall. This was always going to be the hardest part of the series to write - Vincent encountering Sephiroth at the Temple, Aeris’ death. Lucy in the cave. …Hojo. The ending.

When I started this thing, I didn’t imagine it would end here. Running this personal race against SE and the Remake (of which I lost and I’m sorry. I tried my damndest and I couldn’t do it) while being pelted with nasty shit by this mirage of a community.

All of this is thematic to my series. It’s what it’s fucking about. The damage of self preservation. As individuals, as communities, as cultures and systems.

I’m still here. I’m just face down leaking all over the floor spouting what sounds like nonsense but isn’t. We know what happens. He gets up. He accomplishes what he came to do - just not in the way he thought he would.

I’ll get back up. I have to. I have to finish or I never had anything worth saying.

Thank you to everyone still here. Thank you for the art. For the comments. For the kindness. For staying with me. For this series mattering enough to you that it can matter enough to me to get. up.

One thing at a time. Just one.

[the--calamity]

Chapter 38 - HAND - is up.

-

I’m not going to post a snippet from this one, but I do want to call something out about it.

One of my favorite moments and lines in OG is during the ending cinematic, when everyone in Kalm opens their windows to watch Holy. Marlene, from the window in the spiral staircase house (this is where you obtain Vincent’s Peacemaker,) says “...It’s coming.”

When I am sad about the fading of OG in its own space - how many people only know VII through the compilation - it is for moments, like that one, being lost. This is one of the moments I am here, all these years later, because of. And writing my series around.

I wonder how many people who read my stuff will miss these things. I wonder at my inability to share them. I wonder if it even matters. It matters, very much, to me.

I don’t want to put an asterisk and a note next to every thing I piece together. There is so much. A lot of it is easter eggs and in jokes. A lot of it does heavy lifting. It is the “Why.” It’s part of why I’m doing this openly with VII and not taking all this love and putting it into writing original shit. And I don’t want to be the guy bashing anyone with my elbow all waggishly eyebrowed going ‘eh? eh? eh? eh?’

But. This one. This one matters enough to specifically point out. Because it is the point.

#Can't make this unsharable I guess #so please don't

[the--calamity]

"Eventually... all humans die. What happens to them after they die? The body decomposes, and returns to the Planet. That much everyone knows. ...What about their consciousness, their hearts and their souls?" [Art for the 2023 FF7 Secret Santa Exchange.]

#Vincent Valentine #Nanaki #Red XIII #Lifestream

[the--calamity]

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The original posters for Final Fantasy 7 on the PS1

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kinder than man, athea davis

[the--calamity]

welcome home!

[the--calamity]

This is excellent. The energy of your lines, where they intersect, the weight of them. You’ve got such intensity. Aeris is so enmeshed visually with Sephiroth here, it is powerful and eerie and desperate. Wonderful composition. And Vincent. Ugh. I love this so much.

This scene is one of my personal favorites and I am THRILLED to see it illustrated. Thank you!!!

"THUNDERAGA!"

@the--calamity Minute to Breathe, Chapter 36,

#Minute to Breathe #aeris gainsborough #vincent valentine #ff7

[the--calamity]

“I learned love as taxidermy; the careful art of keeping alive a dead thing.”

— - blythe baird

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finished watching The Boys recently and couldn't stop thinking about how sephiroth could've ended up like homelander. esp if considering og as occurring in a time analogous to the 90s when it was released and remake as analogous to now, and how corporate evil like shinra has maybe not changed their ways but just got better at manipulating their image

#This - This is it #And I don’t see Remake having anything to say about this - any awareness of this - or worse - where as OG was absolutely a warning #This is why I care so much #This is why it matters

[the--calamity]

Hi anon -

A little tricky to address you since I don’t know who you are or if you will even see it. I’ll post this anyway, for you and anyone else who finds themselves compelled to send me that sort of message in the future.

For the most part, I stay out of general fandom. I usually don’t involve myself with others or their activities or conversations. I have been doing one thing since I have been here - focusing on my series - and this blog is a space to document and talk more in depth about my project with the people who want that additional context.

My series serves a specific goal and that goal is counter to mainstream fandom. I am aware of this and as a result, I make the majority of my posts unsharable. If you see my opinions, it is because you have positioned yourself to see them. If you don’t like what I have to say, by all means - start an actual conversation or remove yourself. There is no reason to attempt to harass me.

There is a virtually endless amount of fandom content out there. I am confident you can find a stack of things more your speed you’ll never reach the bottom of. Isn’t that thrilling? That there is so much out there already catering to you? Why must I as well? Why do you care what I think, here in my attempts to stay on the sidelines and speak to people who want to hear what I have to say? Get over myself? What is the point of keeping a personal blog?

Seeking out things you do like is a far better use of your time than sending someone you don’t anonymous insults.

There are people who are here because they want to be. I’m not going to stop engaging with them because you don’t like it. There is a difference between speaking with purpose unapologetically and arrogance. I welcome a further conversation with you when you can tell the difference.

-C.

[the--calamity]

Really cool how dramatic and arrogant you are. Really. In the words of a better post, "'you totally missed the point of the character they are in fact-' followed by 14 paragraphs of justification and lore which are literally all just made up headcanons. like im sorry you are genuinely so much better at writing this character than the author. you're almost on to something except for the fact that none of that is true." Give yourself more credit and also maybe get over yourself it's embarassing

delightful!

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about to go slay the minotaur of cretes haha lol catch me celebrating like crazy on the ship after this

#patron saint

[the--calamity]

I think that I am about ready to admit that so much of the things I admire and care deeply for and about in FFVII come from me and my work in extrapolating them.

The last chapter I wrote was like falling through the fucking ice.

My disappointment and sometimes frustration in people not being able to pick up on so much of this stuff (and the resulting “holy shit, how did I miss this” response from them after I put it all together) is somewhat misplaced. …This stuff is there because I put it there.

To clarify, I do believe everything I am doing with my series does line up to OG and lines up air tight. I do believe that the foundation of everything is there and set - it is there to be connected - but all this actual depth and complexity and scope is coming from my work and my weaving.

Like virtually every relationship I have had, I do the heavy lifting to dig to the fucking depths of anyone or thing on the other side to seek and pull up and arrange and bolster everything remarkable. Even when those remarkable things were far too generous or best faith assumptions or taken at word with trust I should not have given. Because I don’t know how to put down hope. The real kind. The kind you hide to protect and hurt to endure and work and never stop working to keep alive.

I will finish my series. Because it matters. A lot. To me. To other people. Maybe, in some way, it even matters to OG. But maybe it should be “holy shit, look what I did with this” instead of “look at this thing that was always this.”

If the bullshit of remake and complication and fandom have done anything in my journey it’s been, maybe, to lead me to a place to look back on my tree and realize that it is just a fucking tree. That the “magic” in it has been my own. And that maybe, for once, I should claim it.

[the--calamity]

Sometimes hope doesn’t look - or live - in the places and ways we expect it to. Sometimes it doesn’t look much like hope at all.

Be careful what you deem hopeless.

It is often the last place hope has to survive.

     “Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does James Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.”      Terry Pratchett,            A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-Fiction