Symbolism in FF7

flowergirlssoldier

Flower Girl
Joined
Dec 23, 2014
Messages
24
Age
30
Location
Midgar
Gil
0
I'm sure this type of thread has maybe already been done (but it was probably a long time ago), so I decided I put in my own two cents and point out the symbolism (or symbolism I think is there more like) that I've noticed in FF7.

Anyway, I was rewatching Advent Children and you know that wolf that pops up every so often? Well, I always took that, for some reason, to be the image of Zack. Like we see Aerith as herself throughout the movie, but we never see Zack until the ending in the church and I don't know where I came up with the idea that Zack is the wolf, but I feel like that could be true? I don't know why, but I do.

Also, I've recently realized just how many parallels there are between Aerith and Saints/prophets/messiahs. She dies praying (and is seen praying a lot and often throughout the original game and the compilations) and seems to sacrifice herself for the greater good and she seems to know she's going to die. Not to mention, she carries around flowers, which could potentially be symbolism for stigmata (more info on that here), since it's said that when you have stigmata, the wounds smell like gardens (called Purity of Essence).

This could, again, just be me coming up with random stuff, but maybe it holds at least a little bit of weight? What do you guys think?
 
Oh yeah without question, i think every story/game/painting, etc. holds some sort of symbol behind itself. Why else would you create lets say, a character without giving anything behind the said character? Everything has a reasoning behind it... maybe not all characters hold symbols, but I believe for the most part as writers, we like [or they lol i suck at writing] to add quality into the characters. We don't do this on purpose all the time per say, but there's enough creative people in the world to look outside the box.
 
I think the wolf in Advent Children is meant to be Fenrir.

Cloud's bike in the movie is called Fenrir and Cloud starts to wear the Fenrir emblem on his shoulder (and other places on his body I think).

I'm not entirely sure why they decided to marry Cloud up with Fenrir in Advent Children. I can understand the Nordic reference as Cloud hails from the very Nordic sounding Nibelheim (heim as in 'home', and I think Nibel might relate to Germanic Nebel for 'fog', or possibly stretching that to 'cloud' = Cloud-Home). Also Midgar is essentially Midgard, the realm of mortal men (and nearby it is the serpent). Midgar city acts like an electric Yggdrasil (the World Tree). There are quite a number of associations with Norse mythology in FFVII.

I do not understand why Cloud should be associated with Fenrir though. Fenrir was a son of Loki, and his role during Ragnarok was to gobble up Odin, but then later be killed by Odin's son Vidar. Associating the main protagonist with a hell-hound antagonist is a little bit strange, but I guess there is still symbolism there. Cloud (the hound) kills Sephiroth (the god) in the original game. Or perhaps Cloud is being devoured himself by the hound which stalks him, in that his emotions and internal conflictions are eating away at him.

Some of Cloud's anxieties still relate to the death of Zack, and so perhaps Fenrir's appearance in the location of Zack's death is suggesting that Fenrir is an expression of Cloud's feelings about Zack's fate. Since the end of FFVII and Cloud's memory mix-up was fixed, he will have had to deal with remembering what had happened to Zack. Perhaps carrying the Fenrir wolf-emblem was part of this process.
 
Today I was thinking more about the symbolism in Advent Children and I thought of this: I think the geostigma is supposed to represent things people can't forgive about themselves. Like I think Denzel has it because he lived and his parents died during the attack on Sector 7, Shinra has it because he regrets what he did to the planet and to the people in SOLDIER and so many other things (that's why he has it so bad), and Cloud has it because he can't forgive himself for Aerith's death. When they are cured of the geostigma, it show they're able to let go of what they were unable to forgive themselves for previously.
 
The problem with this kind of inference about symbolism in fiction is that there almost no safeguards from stopping you just make shit up.
The author Ian McEwan told a good story in one of his interviews of how he learned of a university department that was studying Enduring Love as part of its english literature degrees.
So he read some of the papers and some of what the lecturer was suggesting as themes and meanings and he rather funnily pointed out that not one of the things they'd inferred was something he'd intended to put in.
 
Back
Top