Final Fantasy VII - No Destiny, Just Systems

Why Final Fantasy VII Refuses to Let Us Off the Hook

There is a reason Final Fantasy VII keeps resurfacing in conversations it was never “meant” to belong to.

Not because it predicted the future.
Not because it was secretly political.
But because it modeled something we are still deeply uncomfortable confronting:

systems do not care about intent — only about structure.

The Planet Was Never Moral — It Was Mechanical

The Lifestream is often described as spiritual, mystical, even benevolent.
It isn’t.

It does not judge.
It does not punish.
It does not forgive.

It circulates.

Life, memory, energy, experience — accumulated, redistributed, recombined.
A closed system with feedback.

When extraction exceeds return, instability follows.
Not as vengeance.
As consequence.

That isn’t fantasy theology.
It’s ecology rendered legible.

Which is why climate collapse doesn’t arrive as a villain or a lesson —
but as heat, pressure, drift, and breakdown.

No narrative arc.
Just equations completing themselves.

Jenova Was Not Evil

It Was Incompatible

Jenova is not a demon.
It is an alien operating logic.

It does not dissolve into the system.
It does not return what it takes.
It persists, mimics, overwrites.

It cannot participate — only dominate.

The Cetra understood this immediately.
Not through ideology, but through attunement.

Jenova was dangerous not because it was powerful,
but because it was ontologically incompatible with a way of life based on circulation and return.

So some Ancients fought and died.
Some fled.
Some broke.

That is what happens when a participatory culture encounters a system that refuses reciprocity.

Humans Did What Humans Always Do

They Asked: “Can We Use It?”

Enter Hojo.

Not a villain in the cartoon sense.
Not driven by hatred or greed alone.

Just instrumental reason without restraint.

To Hojo, Jenova was not incompatible.
It was interesting.

A biological system.
A research opportunity.
A tool awaiting refinement.

He never asks whether it belongs in the system.
Only what happens when it is pushed harder.

This is the most dangerous posture in the entire story:

understanding mistaken for entitlement.

And Shinra is simply Hojo’s mindset scaled to infrastructure:

• life reduced to fuel
• future cost externalized
• stability purchased by interrupting flow

The alien did not conquer humanity.

Human systems independently reinvented a worldview compatible with that alien logic.

Sephiroth Is Not the Architect

He Is the Carrier

Sephiroth is not a power-hungry god in waiting.

He is:

• engineered before consent
• mythologized before identity
• infused with Jenova cells as a child

When his sense of self collapses, Jenova does not possess him like a demon.

It aligns with his fracture.

His isolation.
His hunger for meaning.
His projection of destiny.

He believes he is choosing transcendence.
Mechanically, he is executing a survival algorithm that requires embodiment.

He calls it destiny.
It is compulsion wearing purpose as a mask.

Projection works best when it feels like agency.

Gast vs Hojo: The Fork Humanity Ignored

This is where the story becomes genuinely uncomfortable.

Gast was also a scientist.
Also curious.
Also part of Shinra’s project.

But Gast did something Hojo never did.

He listened.

Through Ifalna, he understood that the Lifestream was not a resource —
it was a relationship.

Knowledge did not disappear.
Science did not stop.

But restraint entered the equation.

Gast changed course.
Hojo doubled down.

That divergence matters more than any villain monologue.

Aerith Is the Counterbalance — Not Because She Is Pure, But Because She Is Hybrid

Aerith is not a return to innocence.

She is:

• half Cetra
• half human
• born after extraction became normal

Her importance is not blood purity.
It is integration without domination.

She understands the Lifestream without claiming authority over it.
She participates without extracting.

She does not force outcomes.
She enables correction.

That places her opposite not just Sephiroth,
but Shinra itself.

Why Remake Breaks Fate

And Why That Is Not Rebellion

The Whispers are not authors.
They are constraint forces.

When Sephiroth’s influence becomes non-local — embedded in memory, identity, possibility —
local correction fails.

Weapons can level cities.
They cannot cleanse substrate-level contamination.

So the system loosens its own rules.

Not to abandon destiny —
but to prevent destiny from being monopolized.

Breaking fate is not freedom.
It is emergency decompression.

Variance is reintroduced so regression to the mean remains possible.

Anything else would lock the distortion in permanently.

This Is Why “It’s Just Fiction” Misses the Point

Calling this “not reality” is rarely a literal claim.
It is a defensive maneuver.

Because taking this story seriously does not just mean appreciating themes.
It means accepting an implication many people would rather avoid:

you are not standing outside the system observing it.
you are inside it — shaped by it, rewarded by it, constrained by it.

It is much easier to engage with a story where:

• evil is embodied in a singular villain
• power equals agency
• domination equals strength
• destiny flatters the individual

In that framing, Sephiroth as an unstoppable demi-god antagonist is reassuring.
He is cool. Singular. Other.

A tragic actor with less agency than he believes, embedded in forces larger than himself, is far more unsettling.

Because that version does not just threaten the hero.
It threatens the illusion that power equals freedom.

Simplification Is Incentivized — Not Chosen

People do not flatten stories like this because they are shallow.

They do it because the systems they live in reward simplification.

Modern systems incentivize:

• clear heroes and villains
• spectacle over mechanism
• individual blame over structural cause

A “strong villain” narrative scales well.
A systems-tragedy narrative does not.

Understanding Sephiroth as:

• a carrier rather than an origin
• an interface rather than a mastermind
• responsible yet constrained

forces a parallel question:

if agency can be compromised without disappearing,
how much of mine is actually mine?

That is not a comfortable question.

So the story gets flattened.

Not because the deeper reading is incomprehensible —
but because living with it is expensive.

Art Can Reveal This — But It Does Not Scale

Art can make systems legible.
It can compress reality into something thinkable.

But art does not scale.

It does not rewrite incentives.
It does not replace infrastructure.

It can destabilize certainty —
but it cannot enforce correction.

Which is why systems tolerate art the way organisms tolerate antibodies:

• useful in small doses
• dangerous when taken seriously

The moment fiction stops being “just fiction”
and starts acting as a lens,
it becomes disruptive.

That is when it gets dismissed.

The Part That Does Not Resolve

The story never promises restoration.

Once a system is contaminated at the substrate level —
once extraction, domination, and abstraction become normal —

recovery is partial, costly, and never clean.

No reset.
No return to innocence.
No villain whose defeat restores balance automatically.

Only mitigation.
Restraint.
Loss.

And the question the story leaves behind:

what kind of actor do you become
when understanding no longer excuses use?

That is not fantasy.

That is where fiction collides with reality —
and refuses to soften the impact. ☄️