Further Reading
From Beyond A Wiki
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It is that alien origin of all Gaians that would allow for Cloud to carry and swing his enormous sword, for the Remnants to make their bikes literally jump off the surface of the planet (which, for the record, you can actually do <i>on Earth</i> with the right shocks on your bike...), for Reno to climb buildings and do handsprings in midair, and since objects are inherently lighter and fall more slowly in lowered gravity, this even permits Rude to get cracked on the head by a metal billboard and get up dusting off his sleeves. Especially if the sign was made of, say, aluminum. | It is that alien origin of all Gaians that would allow for Cloud to carry and swing his enormous sword, for the Remnants to make their bikes literally jump off the surface of the planet (which, for the record, you can actually do <i>on Earth</i> with the right shocks on your bike...), for Reno to climb buildings and do handsprings in midair, and since objects are inherently lighter and fall more slowly in lowered gravity, this even permits Rude to get cracked on the head by a metal billboard and get up dusting off his sleeves. Especially if the sign was made of, say, aluminum. | ||
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| + | On a sidenote, Nanaki/Red XIII is somewhat exempt from these particular stipulations; his species is native to Gaia. However, he <i>is</i> a feline of sorts, and felines have a tendency to defy several levels of physics in the first place. | ||
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===Zombies?=== | ===Zombies?=== | ||
| - | We also ran into a bit of a quandary on the subject of Phoenix Downs or | + | We also ran into a bit of a quandary on the subject of Phoenix Downs or Life spells that will revive a KO'd character in-game. Now...Biology and Physics would argue that it is pretty much physically impossible to bring someone back to life once they are "dead", so we took a bit of artistic (scientific?) liberty with the definition of these sorts of items/magic, and added the stipulation that they do not re-animate someone who is dead...but rather revive someone who is unconscious so that they may heal themselves and continue battle. After all, save for the Full Life spell, both revival magic and the Phoenix Down only return a small percentage of the character's total HP...so it served more to reason (and science) that reversing death would be...unreasonable. Ergo, these sorts of items/materia can only revive someone who is unconscious and restore the amount of health and magic applicable. If you die, you're screwed. Sorry.<br><br> |
...Otherwise, we come back to the age-old argument, "Well, why <i>didn't</i> they just use a Phoenix Down on Aerith?"<br><br> | ...Otherwise, we come back to the age-old argument, "Well, why <i>didn't</i> they just use a Phoenix Down on Aerith?"<br><br> | ||
| - | Just as with the Phoenix Down item, | + | Just as with the Phoenix Down item, Restore materia can only revive someone who is unconscious--it <i>cannot</i> bring you back from the dead. This is a scientific impossibility on just about every level of every reality feasible. Certainly there are feats stranger than fiction that have happened in real life, but there is no medicine in a bottle that will bring your mortally wounded girlfriend back from the dead after she's been skewered by a nine-foot sword. On a similar tangent, there is an 'undead' or 'zombie' status effect that is actually <i>cured</i> by Phoenix Down and Life spells. If you cure the effect of being brought back from the dead by the spell that would bring someone back from the dead... My head spins from all this circular logic. No matter how you look at it, it makes no sense.<br><br> |
Part of the reason being able to bring people back from the dead is such a ridiculous prospect in the first place is that it erases fear of death. Perhaps even more important than the literal circle of life being interrupted by this false immortality is that the entire psyche of society would unravel. If dying is of no consequence, then no one would be afraid to <i>try</i> ridiculous death-defying stunts. No one would listen to rules held up by deadly force, because teh very word 'deadly' would mean nothing. Without fear of death, it wouldn't matter if people did foolhardy reckless things, because they would know that anybody could just bring them back to life. Certainly in an actual <i>video-game</i> setting, being able to revive your fallen party is going to be a necessary stretch of reality in order to defeat your final boss. In a game, if you only had one chance, nobody would get very far. But in 'real life'--in writing a story where the characters are three-dimensional and living out an actual life instead of simply acting as a two-dimensional pixellated avatar for the person holding the controller--fear of death is a necessary evil. Without it, there would be no villains (why bother killing anyone if they could all be brought back? What an exercise in futility!) and there would be no heroes (kill the villain, and his sidekick just brings him back? What a useless, vicious cyle!). In order to maintain that every mortal would have some awareness of his own mortality, that mortality needs to <i>exist,</i> and if the Lifestream itself negated that mortality, it would be killing it<i>self</i> slowly, if its power truly lay in the energy of dead souls.<br><br> | Part of the reason being able to bring people back from the dead is such a ridiculous prospect in the first place is that it erases fear of death. Perhaps even more important than the literal circle of life being interrupted by this false immortality is that the entire psyche of society would unravel. If dying is of no consequence, then no one would be afraid to <i>try</i> ridiculous death-defying stunts. No one would listen to rules held up by deadly force, because teh very word 'deadly' would mean nothing. Without fear of death, it wouldn't matter if people did foolhardy reckless things, because they would know that anybody could just bring them back to life. Certainly in an actual <i>video-game</i> setting, being able to revive your fallen party is going to be a necessary stretch of reality in order to defeat your final boss. In a game, if you only had one chance, nobody would get very far. But in 'real life'--in writing a story where the characters are three-dimensional and living out an actual life instead of simply acting as a two-dimensional pixellated avatar for the person holding the controller--fear of death is a necessary evil. Without it, there would be no villains (why bother killing anyone if they could all be brought back? What an exercise in futility!) and there would be no heroes (kill the villain, and his sidekick just brings him back? What a useless, vicious cyle!). In order to maintain that every mortal would have some awareness of his own mortality, that mortality needs to <i>exist,</i> and if the Lifestream itself negated that mortality, it would be killing it<i>self</i> slowly, if its power truly lay in the energy of dead souls.<br><br> | ||
Revision as of 21:24, 20 April 2007
Disclaimer
In order for a lot of the things that occurred in Final Fantasy VII and its compilations to be possible, the laws of physics appear to need to be bent into pretzels, if not broken entirely. This was one of the most common complaints we came across in doing our research into Advent Children in particular, was that so much of what went down was so impossible it left fans frustrated and angered by the disregard for science. We found it a bit hypocritical of the fandom to find no particular fault with the physics of the original game, but complained that the effects used in the movie and/or compilations required a complete suspension of disbelief...but we still decided that in order to be satisfied, we were going to have to figure out how the physics of Gaia work. The following is a full and thorough explanation of the decisions we came to, and how we arrived at these conclusions. Bear in mind that while the hypotheses we post here can only explain some of the physics and events that happened in the world of FFVII. Some things can't be explained with science no matter how much you know... Like a flowing current of glowing turquoise energy threads thrumming just below the surface of the planet. O_o;;;
Contents |
Spira
Canon Correlations
[The information stated below was paraphrased from a translation of the FFVII/X/X-2 Ultimania Omega Guides]
Nojima revealed that Shinra of the Gullwings (in FFX-2) would attempt using the remains of Vegnagun to extract life energy from the Farplane. This energy could then potentially be used to power machina. During a diagnostic he made on the Farplane itself, Shinra concluded that there was a great deal of energy floating around inside the Farplane, and that it was most likely the very life force of Spira. He postulated that this could be extracted and used as a power source; however, he concluded that it would take many generations to properly implement the idea. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
Nojima went on to further explained that the Al Bhed entrepreneur Rin also was interested in extracting mako from the Farplane, and that he provided Shinra with the funding to make an attempt. Rin's mutual desire to study the Farplane as an energy source is revealed during the game should he be uncovered as the culprit behind covering up the malfunctioning machina disaster on the Mi'hen Highroad. Shinra's attempts to use Vegnagun's remains ultimately failed, and he was unable to complete the concept of mako-extraction, just as he himself had predicted. There was far too much research and far too little time for such a great endeavor to be completed in his lifetime. However, some 1000 years later, once space travel became possible, Shinra's descendants would go on a voyage to the world of FFVII. There, at some point in the future, they would be successful in utilizing the concept, and would provide electricity from the planet for a price; these descendants would found the Shin-Ra Company of FFVII.
[End translation paraphrasing]
Machina, Space Travel, and the Spirans of the Future!!
So there we have it, folks. The Spirans went to Gaia. We didn't even have to reach on that one--it was stated by the creators. Taking this information into account, putting together the physics and capabilities of the Gaian people was a snap. Picture this:
We are told that over 2000 years ago (the exact year is not specified), the Ancients arrived on Gaia. It is very possible that these so-called Ancients were, in fact, those Spirans . Come the time of FFX-2, machina was no longer outlawed as it was in the original game, and technology was once again thriving across Spira. While they had no cars, there were advanced airships and speeders, so it was only a matter of time before the ability to traverse the atmosphere and go into space was available to the Spirans. And when they discovered the planet Gaia was atmospherically compatible and had pleasant landmasses amid a vast sea, they decided to expand their civilization. These ancient Spirans settled on the tiny landmasses of Gaia and began their peaceful nomadic life, basically starting over without any fear of Sin and without the haunting, lingering fear that Sin's destruction could follow them to this new place. They lived peacefully with the powerful Lifestream to guide and help them care for their new world.
As time went by, the ancient Spirans began to lose touch with the planet, instead deciding to settle into towns across the continents. A new force of destruction would then suddenly come to disrupt the Spiran's life on Gaia. Jenova's arrival on the tiny planet 2000 years ago sent the civilization into whorling chaos. But we all know how this part of the story goes.
There is, of course, the question of what precisely it was that made the space-travel technology of the Spirans die out. Come FFVII, the ShinRa Space Program was a big deal, and it appeared that while the origins of the people were rooted on another planet, the technological capabilities of the ancient people who populated the planet thinned and vanished as centuries passed. This was probably largely due to Jenova. The Spirans had in their recent history been plagued by Sin, who they knew as a monster that was attracted to the powers of technology, and would destroy any civilization that implemented such things. Naturally, the Spirans would be inclined to believe that this monster from space--Jenova--had come to punish them for their blasphemous use of machina to travel to other worlds. After defeating Jenova, it would serve to reason that the remaining Ancients would abandon the ways of machina and technology to instead live a simple life in harmony with their planet, which is why most of Gaia is not particularly technological, and ShinRa holds pretty much a monopoly on cool shit. A big part of the conflict in FFVII is ShinRa and how they are "killing the planet".
Gaia
[As stated in the footnotes...] As we began formulating the ideas for this story, it dawned on us that the world map of Gaia was likely very tiny, simply from the in-game mechanics. Your bitty little sprite could feasibly walk a chocobo all the way around the world in a matter of minutes. Obviously, the planet can't be that tiny, but it gives an overall sense of a very small scale. This didn't really cause too many issues initially...until we discovered the canon timeline of events that took place in Advent Children (shown to the left). Having a set amount of time things were required to be done in put a specific limitation of size on the planet; we needed for Reno to be able to fly the helicopter from Northern Crater back to Edge and then to Healin within a three-hour timespan, and for Cloud to be able to get from Edge to Healin and back in a very short amount of time.
In short, we came to the conclusion that Gaia is a moon. There is simply no other way to make all of the constraints the posted canon places upon distance and time actually work. There is no feasible way that the planet can be a planet; the distances that need to be traveled in certain amounts of time are too great for the surface area of the globe to be very large at all. That said, seeing as how Gaia must be a moon, it is likely a moon of Spira. Why would the Spirans bypass a perfectly good moon right in their own gravitational field to go further? Space travel takes a long time, it makes no sense for them to go further than they had to when a perfectly acceptable celesital body was right there in front of them. Size notwithstanding, a new place to live is a new place to live. Who wouldn't think it was cool beans to live on the moon, am I right?
Distances and Time on Gaia
In the FFVII Ultimania Omega, stats are detailed for all of the machinery used in the original game. The maximum speed of the helicopters used in-game is listed at 150 knots--about 278 kilometers/hour. Come the events of Advent Children, two years have passed, so it served to reason that ShinRa could have facilitated modifications to their current fleet. However, given the state the world is in post-FFVII, with the destruction of Midgar by Meteor and the fact that Rufus Shinra suffers from a severe case of geostigma and the entire company is somewhat in shambles, significant progress in aviation was probably not high on their to-do list. We went with a slight advancement and supposed that small modifications could have feasibly been made in this state of affairs to where the choppers can fly up and perhaps just over 300 kph. Going with this idea, we calculated that the maximum distance Northern Crater can possibly be from Healin Lodge is about 616 km.
Then we hit the issue of timezones. It appears that Gaia has about a 24-hour day, like earth. However, with the map being as small as it had to be for distances to be traversed in the amount of time dictated, a 24-hour day presented a few logistic complications. Northern Crater--basically the northernmost point on the map--is very cold. Obviously. Mideel--basically the southernmost point on the map--is visibly subtropical, meaning that the size of the map only encompasses about one hemisphere of the planet at best.
Saving you, the reader, the explanation of the hours and hours of math and geography it took us to reach our decision...here are two maps:
The thick red vertical lines demonstrate where the timezones would be divided, one hour being lost per timezone as one travels east Timezones on Earth fall every at approximately every fifteen degrees longitude, so we applied the same concept for Gaia, making each time zone about 269 km wide. Ergo, the circumference of the planet is 6,456 km--that means the entire planet is not that much bigger than the United States, to give you a sense of orientation. Since the map of landmasses only spans approximately 981 km, most of Gaia is water. The size being as it is, Gaia must be a moon, since no planet can be that size and still be a planet. There are two scenes in Advent Children that indicate Gaia itself has a moon in its sky, however this can easily support the idea that Gaia is one of multiple moons to a larger planet--Spira, for example--and has little bearing on whether or not Gaia itself can be classified as a moon.
As further demonstration of the diminutive stature of Gaia, here is a full-area map of the world (it's mostly ocean, we assume), and an overlay that shows how big all of the known landmasses in Gaia are in comparison to the size of the United States. Please bear in mind that the second map is only for size-comparative purposes and does not show the proper latitude of Gaia's landmasses.
Since the landmasses of Gaia cover such a small percentage of the planet itself, there are only three timezones represented on land. Since Midgar seemed to be the largest and most populated, industrial city in the game, it served to reason that it was thus the most important. To prevent temporal issues that would have arisen from the fact that traveling east causes one to lose daylight, we chose to unite all three timezones under one blanket timezone: Midgar Standard Time--similar to how on Earth we use Greenwich Standard Time to synch up official timepieces. While each timezone does run on its own hourly marker, we chose to show the events of Advent Children as having a timestamp from a consistent source, giving us Midgar Standard Time.
Gravity and Physics of the Native Gaians
Moving along, a significant amount of complaints seem to arise as to the physics--or lack thereof--depicted in Advent Children. I find it a bit unusual that the blatant lack of physics in the original game itself is apparently perfectly excusable, but a lack of physics in a movie is complete and utter blasphemy. *eyebrow* Whatever. Either way, most of the issues with the physical sciences can be easily rectified with a simple explanation--and no, it's not 'magic'. It is, in fact, significantly more concrete than that. It's gravity. Gaia is an exceedingly small body, ergo the gravity thereupon would be significantly less than that of, say, Earth. This means that objects fall slower, things are lighter, and motion has potential to be much faster.
The point is, the residents of present-day Gaia descended from those Ancients. And if those Ancients were originally from Spira, then much of the argument for lack of physics dies right there. Supposing Spira is a full-fledged planet (as opposed to a moon or a dwarf-planet), the gravity on it would be significantly higher than that of Gaia. Therefore, the indigenous creatures of Spira would have evolved to be able to withstand and function in an environment with that higher amount of gravity--their bone structure would be sturdier than that of a creature that evolved in lowered gravity, and the musculature of the Spirans would be exponentially stronger than someone from a lowered-gravity environment. When the Spirans arrived on Gaia, they probably had a hard time adjusting right away--think moon-bouncing. But as time passed, they would adapt...like ya do...to be able to walk on Gaia as any native creature would. However, there isn't enough time in two millennia for evolution to take any drastic steps to adjust the skeletal and muscular makeups of these people; meaning that, while they appear to move in normal Earth-style gravity, their bodies are used to a level of gravity that is much greater. So much like martial artists can manipulate their bodies in ways that your average Joe cannot, highly skilled people on Gaia like Cloud and Tifa and Vincent and the Turks all appear to be able to utterly defy physics, because their trained bodies simply allow them to use their muscles and inert bodily strength to overcome an amount of gravity significantly smaller than that which they were designed for. So while they walk as if gravity holds them down like anyone else, the evolutionary process that molded their race to function in high-gravity gives them almost superhuman strength in a low-gravity environment.
Think like how Goku from DBZ trained in space at 100x the gravity of Earth, and then when he got to Earth, he was the friggin' strongest dude EVER. Now take that amazing strength, and make it built-in. In order to pull the feats Cloud and the others do, their bodies obviously had to be trained for it. However the strength and sturdiness comes standard in Gaians--their origins demand it.
It is that alien origin of all Gaians that would allow for Cloud to carry and swing his enormous sword, for the Remnants to make their bikes literally jump off the surface of the planet (which, for the record, you can actually do on Earth with the right shocks on your bike...), for Reno to climb buildings and do handsprings in midair, and since objects are inherently lighter and fall more slowly in lowered gravity, this even permits Rude to get cracked on the head by a metal billboard and get up dusting off his sleeves. Especially if the sign was made of, say, aluminum.
On a sidenote, Nanaki/Red XIII is somewhat exempt from these particular stipulations; his species is native to Gaia. However, he is a feline of sorts, and felines have a tendency to defy several levels of physics in the first place.
Inter-Planetary Medicine, and the Healing Powers of the Lifestream
So...continuing our thoughts on the defiance of physics, let's take a look at the lack of science that pretty much makes a video game a video game--restorative magic, items, and abilities. Sure, it's completely acceptable to bring your dead party back to life, but Rude can't get cracked on the head with a sign and live to tell about it? O_o Buh? It is this dichotomy of acceptance that makes me question the sanity of the fandom in the first place sometimes, but even so, we have a card to play in this situation was well. While harnessing the power of the Lifestream is one thing that has no immediate parallel in reality, a lot of restorative items can be easily explained with simple medicinal Earth-logic.
Potions, Ethers, and other Items
Since the Final Fantasy worlds revolve around magic and the use thereof, coming up with a feasible method of explaining the Lifestream and Potions and the like to the satisfaction of our scientific OCD was trying. But we finally came up with something that satisfied canon and our anal-retentiveness. Since Potions and Hi-Potions restore a specific amount of HP (100 and 500 respectively), the amount of healing a Potion can do is exact and does not vary based on who is using it. This was easy to explain; dosages. However, an X-Potion restores a character's full health. Ergo, an X-Potion is not a specific strength or percentage; it's going to be different for every character. This took a little pondering, and we finally decided that since X-Potions cannot be bought and are difficult to come by anyway, we'd take a little artistic liberty and say that an X-Potion is not a specific type of potion that magically restores you to full-health--rather it's...sort of like a prescription. You have it calibrated to your specific stats. Each X-Potion is made exactly to the specifications of who it is being made for, which would logically be the only way anyone who uses one could be restored to full-health without severely overdosing a low-level character, or falling short for a high-level character. Now, this also presents the issue of potential overdose if you're not that hurt. Well duh, an X-Potion is a pretty coveted item; you only use it when you're about to KO anyway. ^_^
This rule also applies to other such items, including Turbo Ethers, which restore all of one's MP, and Elixirs, which fully restore both HP and MP.
Zombies?
We also ran into a bit of a quandary on the subject of Phoenix Downs or Life spells that will revive a KO'd character in-game. Now...Biology and Physics would argue that it is pretty much physically impossible to bring someone back to life once they are "dead", so we took a bit of artistic (scientific?) liberty with the definition of these sorts of items/magic, and added the stipulation that they do not re-animate someone who is dead...but rather revive someone who is unconscious so that they may heal themselves and continue battle. After all, save for the Full Life spell, both revival magic and the Phoenix Down only return a small percentage of the character's total HP...so it served more to reason (and science) that reversing death would be...unreasonable. Ergo, these sorts of items/materia can only revive someone who is unconscious and restore the amount of health and magic applicable. If you die, you're screwed. Sorry.
...Otherwise, we come back to the age-old argument, "Well, why didn't they just use a Phoenix Down on Aerith?"
Just as with the Phoenix Down item, Restore materia can only revive someone who is unconscious--it cannot bring you back from the dead. This is a scientific impossibility on just about every level of every reality feasible. Certainly there are feats stranger than fiction that have happened in real life, but there is no medicine in a bottle that will bring your mortally wounded girlfriend back from the dead after she's been skewered by a nine-foot sword. On a similar tangent, there is an 'undead' or 'zombie' status effect that is actually cured by Phoenix Down and Life spells. If you cure the effect of being brought back from the dead by the spell that would bring someone back from the dead... My head spins from all this circular logic. No matter how you look at it, it makes no sense.
Part of the reason being able to bring people back from the dead is such a ridiculous prospect in the first place is that it erases fear of death. Perhaps even more important than the literal circle of life being interrupted by this false immortality is that the entire psyche of society would unravel. If dying is of no consequence, then no one would be afraid to try ridiculous death-defying stunts. No one would listen to rules held up by deadly force, because teh very word 'deadly' would mean nothing. Without fear of death, it wouldn't matter if people did foolhardy reckless things, because they would know that anybody could just bring them back to life. Certainly in an actual video-game setting, being able to revive your fallen party is going to be a necessary stretch of reality in order to defeat your final boss. In a game, if you only had one chance, nobody would get very far. But in 'real life'--in writing a story where the characters are three-dimensional and living out an actual life instead of simply acting as a two-dimensional pixellated avatar for the person holding the controller--fear of death is a necessary evil. Without it, there would be no villains (why bother killing anyone if they could all be brought back? What an exercise in futility!) and there would be no heroes (kill the villain, and his sidekick just brings him back? What a useless, vicious cyle!). In order to maintain that every mortal would have some awareness of his own mortality, that mortality needs to exist, and if the Lifestream itself negated that mortality, it would be killing itself slowly, if its power truly lay in the energy of dead souls.
Dead is dead. If death were truly reversible, Aerith would have been brought back. President Shinra would have been brought back. The Turks wouldn't have been commanded to kill Veld in Before Crisis, because it would have made no difference--they could have just as easily had someone bring him back to life.
Materia
All right. Here's the deal, kids. You really can't science magic. That's the nature of the beast--it's like oil and water. You can put them in the same jar, and they'll still separate into two levels of stuff that will never mix and get along peacefully no matter how many times you shake it up. However, we can make things a little more consistent by placing some limitations on what materia can do.
Turk Stuff
the turks--R&D -> assassins? only when AVALANCHE started becoming hostile.
