tbh my feeling has always been it’s better to push any narrative fiction you can as having leftist messaging if for no other reason than propaganda purposes, authorial intent is dead anyways so why not?
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i’m not sure it’s really possible to know this, and i feel like the devs themselves would probably not put it this way. i kind of see FF storylines as being in line with Miyazaki/other Japanese media that focused on environmentalism, encroaching industrialization, overreach of Empire, etc. etc. that was happening a lot in the 80s. i won’t claim to be an expert on why this was happening, exactly, but it was.
more perplexing, to me, are all the Japanese creators who seemingly found out about Gnosticism at the same time. like…i still don’t get why that happened.
anyway! presumably, these themes are in the games because that’s the kind of world they want to see and they hoped it would reach kids, but whether or not they anticipated actual revolution, idk.
it definitely worked on me! lol. like, i think the values of characters in this series always spoke to me, and the idea of a small group of people fighting against injustice to make the world a better place (and sometimes explicitly failing to do this) is something that’s stuck with me.
FFXIV also gets into this a lot
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yeah, that’s fair. i was so excited to voice this opinion to someone because i’ve been thinking about it for a decade. i guess what we’re talking about is why there are differences between people who consume this stuff in general. the nazi weeb and the chill japanophile ( i actually hate this word but i need contrast here ).
i’ve been wondering about this for so long, ahahaha
yeah, this is how i feel too. it was also the lush worlds and getting lost in them and wish i could be there instead of here too ( i’m ritz lol ) but i figured that was implied.
hey @toups play ff xiv with us
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i think stories from inside the empire about outcasts beating up an empire can sometimes serve as a pressure release valve from the inherent moral contradictions that come with living in the empire but not consciously buying into its ideology?
and you always get people who see this empire that’s reminiscent of the one they’re subject to and cling onto its aesthetics (star wars fans are notorious for this, tho i’ve seen enough zenos fanart and people roleplaying as garleans to think it’s a contingent in FFXIV fans as well) without maybe consciously grasping that’s what’s going on?
xiv’s an interesting one to bring up in that context too since it spends an entire expansion on a belligerent colonial empire terrorizing a constellation of thinly-coded asian nations but completely dances around japan’s history of doing just that by portraying the Definitely Not Japan nation as a neutral party whose worst sin is playing both sides for financial gain
(anyway i’m not very well educated on this stuff so apologies if i’m missing the mark)
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oh, yeah, totally. growing up in suburbia, i like, ached for new environs my whole juvenile life. even now, when i do get to travel, there’s a part of my poisoned brain that’s like “ooo, this cliff and waterfall is just like in (game). i am now the videogame protag.”
but yeah, i tried to like, follow a thread a couple years back wrt the Gnostic stuff. the Xenogears creator mostly talks about going to the library and reading about different religions there. but again, Gnosticism?? like 95% of the Christian world probably doesn’t even know what that is (i guess stuff like the Da Vinki Code popularized this a bit more in the West, but i’ve never read/seen those, so idk how explicitly they discuss gnostic denominations of early xtians), so why would they have books about it in a Japanese library in the 70s?
my gut feeling is that there was some kind of New Age thing happening and maybe there was a popular book at the time that a bunch of people read. no one ever bothers to ask these questions in interviews lol.
same with the VALIS series. like…why did they name it after a PKD psychosis novel?
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Japan has its own history of indigenous genocide and colonization, for sure, but it was also subject to a bit of that, itself with various invasions. that said, yeah, Doma is pretty blatantly the same kind of thing that Ghosts of Tsushima is doing wrt propagandizing a certain brand of “Japanese-ness”
with XIV, i guess i was thinking more about its emphasis on organizing seemingly-disparate groups of people
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Even though Final Fantasy good guys are usually achieving their goals by force, I always liked that the party collectively represented the world through myriad races and perspectives. They can only win by working together. 9’s Zidane apothesosis basically is this. 12 does this moreso for class than any other but I think its one of the things I like about FF more than other JRPGs when it comes to parties. FF7R practically screams: look what happens when a bunch of randos come together to overthrow homogeneous authority.
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when you think about it, The Power of Friendship is just collective action
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Gnosticism is pretty important to any basic history of Christianity, and has been pretty popular in various occult traditions. It’s Funny someone would randomly read about it but it definitely would be available.
Philip K Dick is if anything more popular outside of the US iirc? It was published in japan in 1982 so maybe it was fresh in someone’s mind and the word just sounded cool.
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There was a general “occult boom” that happened in Japan in the early 70s and carried on in various forms into the 90s, with an interest in both Japanese and non-Japanese sources of weird mysticism, supernatural power, and occult ideas:
The Occult Boom in Japan
The first authentic “occult” boom of the postwar period occurred in Japan in
the 1970s. It was especially the year 1974, when the film The Exorcist became
a great hit and Yuri Geller’s visit to Japan launched the supernatural power
boom, that saw the occult emerge as a social phenomenon (Kaneko 2006).
The phenomenon continued into the 1980s under different forms and is said
to have ended in the mid-1990s.10 But the problem is what “occult” means in
this case.
From: The “Itako” as Mass Culture in: Journal of Religion in Japan Volume 5 Issue 1 (2016)
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from what i’ve read, “the gnostics” definitely were a known entity in some capacity throughout history, though much of it was seemingly speculative/made up until the 40s, when the Nag Hammadi texts were found. and i guess my point was more about the average person in 20th century America/the West being aware of it at all, less that the history was available. i just don’t know how deep any of these histories really get into the actual details of the various gnostic beliefs, though. like, from what i’ve seen, there are a lot more books on Kabbalah than on gnostics (though there is plenty written “on gnostics” by people who are mostly making things up, i’ve found).
but i guess that’s a good point! i suppose it’s possible that a young Takahashi, just interested in reading various religious histories and texts, could have stumbled onto it.
yeah this is something i’ve sensed for a while without knowing the actual history of it.
i guess my point is that, there is a whole lot of popular Japanese media that deals with the demiurge, and…not very much at all in the West, which i think is a little puzzling.
Yeah, it’s something that’s been background in a bunch of stuff I’ve been reading especially lately, but it’s not something I’ve read all that much about. I’m not sure how much great work on it is out there in English (the Kaneko 2006 source cited in my quote is in Japanese and I might have to do some more diggign to either get my hands on it or see if his work (or that of any of his fellow contributors to that edited volume) is available in English).
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I’d assume that a curious nerd rooting around in foreign mythologies would produce very different entry points and focal interest in christianity than most anyone in the west would from the casual osmosis of their local culture’s commonly curated bible stories
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i think that’s a good point, too.
i guess i wanna narrow down the focus of my question, a bit, though:
why so many nerds, and why in Japan, at around the same time?
the VALIS thing i could believe being “it sounds cool.”
edit: anyway, i’ll stop beating the dead horse that is my own specific obsession.
Final Fantasy is fun and i will play them all
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Didn’t a similar thing happen in the west with Buddhism and Hinduism in the 1960s making their way into popular culture?
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because the opening of the Nag Hammadi texts in 1947 released a homoplasmate of living information, a salvific entity which immediately went about attaching itself to living minds and hiding itself using mimickry of our environment to a) relinquish the hold of the Black Iron Prison over our divine souls and 2) to get some old Japanese guys to create some sickass 2d platformers
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yes, but we know the history of why that happened. i just wanna know what the trajectory was in Japan.
but
turns out vikram has the right answer
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I think it’s possible to follow these lines of influence relatively farther back than the localized canon – eg Gainax before Eva – but most of the threads accessible to me only go back as far as the mid-80s or so, and it seems like there should be more right before that with some explanatory power
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when i moved to rural-ish japan, one of my first thoughts walking around was, “this is exactly like persona 4” and i was very ashamed at my lack of imagination.
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what purpose is there to game if not this
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