Garbage Article about FF7's sexism...

  • Thread starter Thread starter Travis
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
T

Travis

Guest
http://www.themarysue.com/remake-final-fantasy-vii-without-the-sexism/

Came across this, this morning. Its gotta be a fake article, this can't be real... The author is "Sandy Beaches" i.e. a pseudonym out the ass.

I'm sorry, but we've reached a critical point where people are too soft.

1. Tifa argument

- She's a fucking polygonal character, that's literally all I am saying.

2. Shera should stand up to her abuser

- Its more realistic that she doesn't because most women don't. It sheds light on real life and doesn't ignore it.

3. Yuffie's sidequest

- Argument boils down to trying to show how the minority character truly feels... um, the entire culture has been beaten down and is unwilling to stand up to their oppressors. Yuffie represents that. This author is an idiot.

4. Cloud should die instead of Aerith

- Idiotic argument. Attempts to say Cloud is constantly whining, which barely happens anyway.

I noticed that this article has been getting a good amount of hits to.

I guess all it takes is to look for some sort of negative buzzword that's highly controversial about something people love, the person who wrote this deserves to be slapped.
 
I'm not even going to read it. I don't give this kind of crap the time of day - and nor should anyone.
 
I know that saying this will upset a lot of people, but it makes sense on so many levels. Cloud is a blank slate whose life is mostly a lie. Aerith is the last surviving Cetra, whose existence has profound meaning—from that alone, it’s easy to see that Cloud’s life has less weight than Aerith’s, and further, the game wouldn’t have to change from that point onwards.
Click to expand...
This argument doesn't even make sense. The whole ferning central theme of the game is Cloud's rediscovery of himself. If he dies, you lose that. Ultimately, the other protagonists do very little growing throughout the game. Their character development mostly takes the form of revelation rather than growth.

Even if you were to somehow make that work, if you were able to give Tifa or Barret or Aerith a more complex, involved character arc with more focus on growth than merely backstory, it also utterly misses the point of Aerith's death. It was significant precisely because she was the last of the Cetra, as well as the most innocent of the party members. The whole point is that of all of them, she was the one whose life was worth the most, and who deserved to die the least. THE ENTIRE FUCKING MOTHERFUCKING GOSH DAMN FUCKING POINT IS THAT HER LIFE AND DEATH HAD MORE WEIGHT. If you have Cloud die instead, it just becomes random and meaningless, and confuddles up the storytelling since he was the protagonist before that; at that point, you might as well just not kill anyone at all.

but this time, their leader will be Aerith, whose wise and gentle counsel will make sense
Click to expand...
Aerith is anything but wise. Gentle, sure, but she does not have what it takes to be a leader. She is weak and foolhardy and got herself kidnapped. In Cloud's absence, the de facto leader would be either Barret or Tifa; both of these characters have strong personalities, a good head on their shoulders (despite Barret's temper), and the ability to lead from the front lines instead of the back, which is what a leader should do in such a group.

(as opposed to Cloud’s constant whining).
Click to expand...
It's like the author accidentally confused FF7 with Kingdom Hearts or Advent Children. Cloud doesn't really whine at all in FF7. At his worst, he's just a jerk who feigns apathy.

This article has a foul stench to it. I can't tell if it's clickbait for clickbait's sake, or if the author has been wearing the idiot-colored glasses too long to have a firm grasp on reality or basic storytelling, but the end result is the same. Y'know, if she'd limited it to reasonable things, such as giving Tifa and Yuffie more modest costumes, and maybe making Elena a little less of a useless fangirl, I would've been able to get behind that. But this article went full retard almost from the get-go. I'm angry I wasted five minutes reading it.




As an aside, the end of the article praises Lightning and reboot Lara Croft. That alone is enough to discredit it; both games were rife with awful, hamfisted, "tell-don't-show" storytelling, and in fact Lara came across as weaker than her original badass '90s counterpart, not stronger.
 
I'm not even going to read it. I don't give this kind of crap the time of day - and nor should anyone. 
Click to expand...
I refuse to click it. They don't deserve any attention.
 
Last edited:
I always thought Aerith's death was intended to be somewhat like that of Obi Wan in Star Wars - that it was strongly implied she ultimately made the trip to the city of the ancient on her own knowing that Sephiroth would kill her, so she could work her magic from within the life-stream.
So having her not die, would be as stupid as not killing off Obi Wan in Star Wars - or rather more, since Obi Wan didn't actually do much of anything after dying, while Aerith certainly did.

But, to reiterate the most important point here - this article is on themarysue, and that fact alone disqualifies it from serious consideration. That site is a troll heaven for intellectual midgets who think feminist literally analysis derived from critical theory is not just a vapid exercise in tortured reasoning and projection, and that it somehow has anything of value to say about the medium of video games despite the obvious f'ing differences between literature and video games both historically and in a contemporary context.

I wish people like this would get an actually f'ing education, and maybe do some cursory reading on philosophy/philosophy of science, so they would stop polluting the space and the air with their trite and inflammatory garbage.
 
Last edited:
I'm not going to click on it or read it either. (Ironically, the fact that Travis created a link to the article from this thread will actually boost its Google search rank. But that's not necessarily a bad thing if people are searching for that kind of article.)

After reading the original post, the first thought in my mind was that I wanted to argue that Aerith's death had meaning precisely *because* she was the least deserving to die. Then I saw Covarr's comment on the exact same thing. So I'll just stop there.

hian, that's quite an interesting analogy, comparing to Obi-Wan Kenobi. I like it.

Re:Cloud's whining, Im guessing she's put off by Cloud's "I don't care about anyone" attitude in the beginning of the story, and/or his masculinity in general. Off-topic side note: This reminds me of how Crisis Core, while I thought was great overall, attempted to bridge the end of the game with the beginning of the original FF7 story (CC is a prequel), but the way it presented Cloud's personality at the end didn't seem to match well. Not sure if it's just me, maybe I should watch it again.
 
I'm not even going to read it. I don't give this kind of crap the time of day - and nor should anyone. 
Click to expand...
Agreed. Pondering over the stupidity of the the ignorant is only liable to make you susceptible to the same stupidity.  That said, I can see stumbling upon this article first before realizing the heaping pile contained within so I am not blaming you.  But really you should just be ignoring it rather than linking to it.  The premise is flawed, that's obvious.  Not much else to be gained.
 
Looks like they removed it
Editor’s Note: It has been brought to our attention that the personal accounts and opinions in this piece were fabricated, so it has been removed. We apologize for the confusion this may have caused.
Click to expand...
 
Dude's very first post is to necro something from four years ago?  WTF?
 
"2. Shera should stand up to her abuser

- Its more realistic that she doesn't because most women don't. It sheds light on real life and doesn't ignore it."

Not to mention Cid sacrificed his life dream to rescue her life- so she lives thanks to Cid but he is abusing her with harsh words due to his dream being ruined in the process. He could have let her die but chose to save her over fulfilling his life dream. So Cid is a hero- and Shera doesn't stand up to him because she knows he is a good person, and is just angry about his dream of going to space being destroyed.

She knows that she caused this.. And that she kind of deserves it.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top