you realize
okay
that so much trouble could've been avoided
if Sephiroth hadn't been left alone
down in that secret library
that time alone
fixating on such a bizarre conception of himself
it's a fuckin' dilemma
'cause I don't like anyone looking over my shoulder
and I never had any teachers worth-a-fuck
I had to seek out the Good Shit all on my own-
-hmmm.
Maybe I'm okay with Sephiroth's unsupervised reading time. Sure, he caused a lot of damage, but the Shinra regime was already violent, and thereby provoked responses in kind. Sephiroth just clarified the worldaround situation by igniting the planet's rage, causing it to vomit forth giant monsters and speeding up the collapse of the Mako-extractive Shinra machine, and this in turn puts the Player on the map to intervene. Cloud, Barret, Tifa, Aerith, Vincent, Cait Sith, Cid, Yuffie, Red XIII-just so many cooling rods getting dropped into place, y'know? But without that brush with cataclysm . . . would the people of Midgar get the point?
-I know, I know, I know.
It isn't fair.
The collateral damage was incalculable.
It really sucks.
But the people of Midgar had to have their asses kicked a bit to wake them up out of their narcotized complacency. Sephiroth crossed every line, sure, but nothing less would hit it, y'know?
Even the Ending refuses a return to Status Quo, depicting the corrupt metropolis of Midgar reabsorbed into Nature in the fullness of time-all the storm and stress of Cloud v. Sephiroth-just the workings out of so many chemical-metaphysical reactions-
Of course, this all got rolled back quite a bit by subsequent sequelizations/remakes/remixes.
1997 ended up being a lifetime ago, didn't it? More than enough time for millennial zeal to cool out, and the Inevitable Nostalgia Malfunction to seize up the brainworks-
Nothing can be left well enough alone, can it?
-December 1999-August 2022
