Feel free to skip this post.
So I have been doing some thoughtful reflecting because I am an incorrigible nerd and something we were talking about in my classical sociology class sent the wheels in my fangirl head a-turnin' once more. That is item number 2, however.
Item number 1: My thoughts on yaoi Aeris/Sephiroth. I kind of want to pull my ship manifesto and I kind of don't. On the one hand, I feel like it's not a bad representation of how most A/S fans feel about the ship and that it's pretty conservative and good-humoured and I don't have to worry that there is some manifesto out there that waxes poetic about the purity of their love that will force me to hide my face in shame (any more than I already do).
On the other hand, I don't feel that it really reflects my personal thoughts/feelings on the ship.
Obviously I'm going to leave it up because it's better to have something general and universally applicable, but at the same time, I wish somebody else would take the credit for it so that I don't feel hemmed in by what I said there, I suppose. I really love their hypothetical relationship, but the truth of it is that I don't see it as something that is explicitly (or even implicitly, half the time) romantic. I mean, an ideal of closeness between them for me is something intimate, delicate, and mutually understanding/respectfully... but without any realized romance. Their relationship is completely hypothetical in every incarnation, but I feel like it does the characters a disservice to reduce the natural tension between them to something purely sexual, especially since that tension and the paradox that surrounds it is so often the crux of the pairing. Am I saying there can never be sexual tension? No, not at all - just that to me, it's more interesting to see them developed a place to where they value eachother than love eachother.
I guess part of this is also coloured by my canonshipping tendencies. I do believe Aeris loves Zack, or at least that she isn't over him, and I also believe that he's a much more sensible match for her romantically and they can be happy together (as an aside, I wish that was an impression that wasn't coloured by post-OGC canon, but I cannot truthfully say that it is). I don't believe that it's true love forever between them, but insofar as Aeris' love life goes, I think a relationship with Sephiroth opens her up to more drama than she's willing to handle and leaves her more vulnerable than she's willing to make herself in his presence. Also, Sephiroth is kind of asexual and doesn't really do romance - so, I can see them close... but still at arm's length, because that's just who they are and that's just the relationship they have with eachother.
I'm certainly not opposed to pictoral fanservice or to fics that make romance between them believeable, but those are few and far between, in my opinion. I guess I'm always so self-conscious about this stupid pairing because I have a very specific idea of what I want and why and I want it and I feel very alone with it, so I constantly need to explain myself. I guess that's why I write for them most often, too - I write mainly because I want to see my thoughts and feelings represented, and with a lot of my other ships and fandoms, there are already people who have represented them for me!
"Final Fantasy VII's theme is life" has never really made sense to me. I mean, okay, sure, on a superficial level, you've got the lifestream and you've got people struggling to stay alive... But everyone struggles to stay alive in fantasy video games and the lifestream is but one element of the series. I guess today it sort of clicked into place for me. Maybe it was already obvious to some people? Most people? I don't know, I still think I might have something useful to say about it!
We were discussing Georg(?) Simmel and modernity, and one of the things we touched upon was modern ways of looking at the universe. From my notes:
Simmel thought that our basic idea is not god, or nature, or being - it is life. We tend to think of the universe as basically a living being of some kind. It’s surging, it’s growing. The picture of the universe is not a clock (Newtonian), it is an organism. This also means that the universe is not actually about anything at all - it is just about living, and releasing our vital energy as much as we can.
I feel like this fits, really. We can see this as an overriding theme not only in the lifestream, but in the planet itself, in the characters, in the game's preoccupation with the stars and the universe, etc, etc. I haven't thought it all the way through yet, but I'm pretty sure there's something there.