Beyond the Fantasy: Getting off the train once and for all

[Skyblade]

Evil Inc and Mega Corp.

Stereotypical, one sided, overly extremist, and completely ridiculous. And it's still considered "art" by today's gamers. How sad.

Some quotes if you are too lazy to read through it.

Rarely are Mega Corporations portrayed with anything other than unremitting negativism; rather than being a simple business making things that people want to buy, they are almost invariably the villains of the setting, and depicted as exploitative, oppressive and screwing the rules with their money while maintaining a Peace & Love Incorporated façade. They are home to the Corrupt Corporate Executive, Mean Boss, Pointy-Haired Boss, and Obstructive Bureaucrat, and usually have Amoral Attorneys on the payroll.
Mega Corporations are shown to be private institutions and therefore don't have to play by most rules the government has to, such as freedom of speech, because it's always "nobody is forcing you to work for them or buy from them or use their institutions or buy their products." However, more darker versions will also show these guys pretty much buying off or eliminating their competitors, brainwashing the masses, and coming up with Evil Plans to ensure they have a monopoly and making it so that you still have to buy their products, while their employees are sometimes portrayed as oppressed, paid pitifully low wages (if at all), and treated as expendable.
They may also be shown controlling the government either through having employees in important positions or through lobbying, or taken to its extreme, may have Private Military Contractors or other Hired Guns (or even an entire country or world) at their disposal, and become Superpowers in their own right. Corporate Warfare may result if financial means are not enough to accomplish the company's goals.

Ooh, also this one:

A Mega Corp is often a large, shadowy organization with a power base and structure that rivals even The Government. When you take it one step further, with the Mega Corp actually being the government, you get One Nation Under Copyright, or a "corporate state."
Essentially, a corporate state is a government run and organized like a business. At the top is typically a board of executives (more likely than not corrupt in fiction) which makes all the decisions; for the common people, the terms "citizen" and "employee" are more or less interchangeable. Some may actually have a form of quasi-democratic government, allowing all shareholders a certain number of votes proportional to the number of shares the voter owns.
One Nation Under Copyright may employ Law Enforcement, Inc., or even own them outright as a subsidiary.
If taken to the extreme by the government owning everything, raises the question: "What's the difference between these and Dirty Commies?" Some might argue that this is the whole point. This idea—that "business runs government" and "government runs business" are basically the same—is at the heart of many, many populist and/or agrarian movements since at least the 19th century, e.g. G. K. Chesterton's "Distributism".

[silentenigma]

Really? "Our" capitalist society? I seem to be living in a very different society than you. Because in my case, exploitative practices by companies attempting to tear the most money out of their consumers has in fact led to continual collapse of said companies. That is has been government interference (in the form of subsidization and bailouts) that have kept these companies going, rather than capitalism, which is, by definition, private, not government control of businesses. Which, by the way, also leads to a very interesting argument that Shinra cannot be based on capitalism at all, since Shinra is the government of FFVII's "world".

This a million times over. Capitalism ≠ Corporatism. Shinra the weapons manufacturer was only able to become Shinra the mega-corporation because their biggest customer was a government during wartime. (A government, of course, can use coercive means [taxes] to support essentially limitless spending - this is NOT capitalism.) Shinra further takes advantage of government's monopoly of force, not unlike corporations in our own society; a few decades and a bit of corruption later, the company has, for all intents and purposes, become the government.

If anything, FFVII's story is one of corruption, in almost every area of society, and explored from different angles.

A lot of great ideas here. From my point of view, FFVII's biggest theme is humanity's loss of spirituality and appreciation for life in the modern world, largely manifested in the examples of corruption you've given. Definitely much bigger than Midgar alone.

[Bolivar]

I kind of stayed away from this thread because I really hate getting into disagreements with people and how it makes me feel about myself, but hot damn did Skyblade just rock this thread!

[Sephex]

I kind of stayed away from this thread because I really hate getting into disagreements with people and how it makes me feel about myself, but hot damn did Skyblade just rock this thread!

Oh, Snapiroth!