| Various musings on FF7 History and Sociology |
[May. 11th, 2009|01:32 pm] |
| [ | mood |
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Gongaga region.
There's a strong fanon tradition for making Zack Fair into a character who is at least bisexual, and is quite often involved in homoerotic relationships with various other male figures. Oddly enough, I can see how this might work in the context of Gongaga in a social and cultural sense.
One of the more annoying little monsters in the Gongaga region is the "Touch-Me" frog. As people who have played the game know, this amphibian's little trick is turning humans into frogs either through direct contact, or through their frog song. One of the few known remedies is a maiden's kiss. Humans settling in the Gongaga region would therefore have a certain interest in prolonging the maidenhood of all female children for as long as possible - simply in order to prevent people being irredeemably frogged. Combine this with a restricted gene pool (the Gongaga village is shown to be in the middle of a thickly wooded area, and gives the strong impression of being rather isolated as a result) and the concomitant risk of inbreeding and reinforced harmful recessive genes presenting as a result, and you wind up with a community which has a couple of strong social pressures working against teenage sexual experimentation with those of the opposite sex. Instead, there'd probably be a strong tendency toward encouraging homosexual relationships as the preferred form of "love" relationship. Marriages might well be arranged, in order to remove the risk of inbreeding, and while married couples would be expected to breed only with each other, and girls would be expected to retain their heterosexual virginity until marriage (possibly on some kind of community roster to deal with cases of frogging), there would be a strong social pressure toward ignoring both male/male and female/female homosexual relationships as a method of venting built up emotional and sexual energy.
Western Continent
The Western continent, between Midgar and Wutai, is likely to have wound up as something of a social, cultural and physical battleground for the two empires involved. There's at least some evidence of a Midgarian cultural colonial heritage, and certainly evidence of a Wutaian physical heritage in the people born in certain areas of the Western continent. Nibelheim, for example, is very clearly built along Midgarian cultural lines (and from the name at least, was likely created as a colonial outpost). The village itself is placed in a very interesting strategic location, controlling the only mountain passage between the Cosmo Canyon region and the area which was later named after Rocket Town.
It is likely there would be a certain amount of colonialist scorn (or at the very least, mild condescension) toward those people born on the Western continent from the population of Midgar in particular, and from the inhabitants of the eastern (Midgarian) continent in general. This would probably breed a certain amount of resentment from the natives of the Western continent, particularly since they're in a position of economic dependence on the Midgar continent for things like energy and the like (although it seems likely the first mako reactors were created on the Western continent - the Nibelheim reactor appears in canon to be at least one technological remove from the reactors in Midgar, if not more). This resentment might well be vented through some of the following: dumb rebellion (following only the orders given, not acting beyond them); "local yokel" tricks in places like Costa del Sol, where the colonisers come to play; hyperconsciously aping the colonising culture; hyperconsciously reinforcing the current culture. It seems believable that the best and brightest youngsters from the Western continent would see their future as being in Midgar, or on the Eastern continent, so there would be a steady "brain drain" from Western towns and cities.
Given this sort of history, I'd be basing cultural norms for groups on the Western continent on the cultures of other colonised places, as well as those around which the images are clearly based ("Costa del Sol" is a fairly clear pointer toward the Mediterranean resort towns, where tourists from the US and UK are cheerfully separated from the excess weight on their wallets).
Cetra/Humans
From the way the Cetra were described in the game, and from subsequent information, it seems unlikely they were a separate species to the humans of Gaia (for a start, the definition of "species" indicates interbreeding between humans and Cetra would be impossible; yet Aerith exists). I suspect the difference to be more cultural than anything else - Gaian humans and Cetra share a similar genetic heritage, but the Cetra culture unlocked certain abilities, such as magic using and communicating with the consciousness of the Planet. This would explain why those who stepped away from the journeying became ordinary humans, since without certain cultural practices, their abilities would have become dormant. It is likely, prior to the arrival of the Jenova organism, that there might have been a certain amount of interchange between the two groups, with those human children with the strongest potential gifts being trained in the Cetra ways, while those children of the Cetra who weren't as gifted might choose to live as ordinary humans.
The coming of Jenova would have served as a devastating blow, since in one calamity, a large chunk of cultural and social knowledge was removed. The loss of so much of the Cetra knowledge reservoir meant certain Cetra abilities might well have become lost over time (it is possible the abilities relate to a lot of the various types of materia later created - so the "Steal" materia points toward a much more believable society for the Cetra than the rather idealistic notions of mythology) until the only ones which remained were the half-learned healing and empathic skills of Aerith Gainsborough.
Skin colour discrimination
This isn't as prominent on the world of Gaia as it is in our world, since Gaians don't have the warping effect of Christianity to justify prejudices. However, it probably does exist, although it's more likely to manifest as a form of xenophobia. I suspect there might be a certain amount of prejudice in the Midgar region toward folk from the Western continent ("foreigners coming over here, taking our jobs"), and that this would be more likely to manifest toward darker skinned foreigners, simply because they'd be more physically distinctive on first sight. |
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