The Final Fantasy Mythology

[Wolf Kanno]

You know, I've been doing research on the background of FFVI and was lucky to run into quite a bit of info on FFIV in my search. Now the bad thing is that the title I really would have loved to stumble across and actually tried to search for and found jack squat of was FFV.

I'd love to learn more about Enuo, the Void, and how the world came to be split in twine. I've always felt part of V's problem was that it utilized a mythology that was not always presented to the player in a way they could really understand.

[auronlu]

Mythology makes me jump into a thread.

Guardian XIII -- I love your insight that despite the industrial trappings of FFVII, it is very medieval in outlook in the sense of a stagnant status quo with memories of a more "advanced" civilization once upon a time, but now everything and everyone is so locked into the role where they're born. And the Shinra family is very feudal. That almost makes the Turks into Knights Templars (a bad analogy, as they didn't serve a particular king, but it just has a touch of that). The Wutains are like Gypsies or Jews or some other group considered "foreign" and suspect, except unlike those two groups, they aren't really integrated into another country; they keep to themselves.
The analogy breaks down if pushed, but it's a lens for looking at Midgar (what a mythological name that is-- the Norse version of "Middle Earth") that I hadn't seen at all.

Mythology is absolutely what drew me to FFX.

We have an animist culture -- which seems to me to be pre-Yevon -- with people who sacrifice themselves to become spirits, which powerful spiritualists can then summon. Summons are common to all of FF, but I felt that they were integrated into the religion, culture and magic system of Spira very deeply. And there's the aspect that they are people who gave their lives to fight Sin. Although apparently there were fayth and aeons and summoners in the machina war, so it's an amazing, troubling concept: why did people sacrifice themselves before that?

There is the incredibly Jungian connection between death and dreams in FFX. Reams of books have been written in analytical psychology about the way our minds associate dreams and death, and how we "die" in a way, each night, when we lose consciousness and go into that Otherworld only accessible in dreams: an alternate reality unique to every one of us. In FFX, as Maechen says, pyreflies may the unreal real for all to see, and the aeons are the dreams of the fayth made real through the soul of the summoner. Essentially, in this world, your dreams can manifest as physical reality, but you have to be in a suspended animation, a "death", as a fayth, in order for your dreams to come true!

And Tidus is a dream that becomes "alive" and real by coming into contact with the powerful magic that creates the shell of Sin: it was meant to maintain Sin as a large, stable, manifested aeon, but when he touches it, it gives him a solidity and reality he didn't have before. (SPOILER)Until Sin goes away, and the magic maintaining it stops maintaining him, too. (In X-2, a different sort of "manifesting magic" is used to bring him back: the physical anchor is no longer Sin, but the bodies/memories of loved ones in the real world helping to provide an anchor for him there, so the pyreflies have something to "connect" him with in Spira.)

I love the examination in FFX of organized religion versus innate faith and ethics. The religion is corrupt and founded on lies. Yet dreams and magic are more true, more visible in their world than ours.

I love the mythology built up around the Calm and pilgrimage as a means of providing people with hope on the one hand -- one of the Four Functions of Mythology mentioned by Joseph Campbell is that it helps us make sense of the incomprehensible and terrible cruelty of existence, with death and plague and all the rest -- and on the other hand, the pilgrimage and the promise of the Calm are a means of social control, lies to keep the people passive and obedient to Yevon.

That is the positive and negative power of myth in a nutshell: it can be immensely inspiring, but it can also be used as propaganda.

Wolf Cano: Many apologies for having not added to your question, but I still need to get the compilation and go back and play the games before VII!