✨🔔The Beahive🎙️🥊

@hystericempress

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✨🔔The Beahive🎙️🥊@hystericempress4/20/2024, 4:53 PM

🎙️a brief thought on FF7 and grief

🎙️ To me the perfect crystal of FF7 as a narrative is... actually the snowboarding sequence. Right after Aerith dies, in the original game, you go to this town called Icicle Inn which is just like, a swiss chalet basically, and in order to reach the North Crater, you have to go snowboarding. Snowboarding, with a luridly-detailed minigame where you collect balloons and do tricks. And it feels like an IMMENSE tone break, that Cloud is just taking a dang ski vacation immediately after Sephiroth assassinates his aspiring girlfriend. It's so jarring and uncomfortable and confusing and it doesn't make any sense.

Which is why it's perfect.

Because as someone who's contended with the aftermath of grief, you don't realize how fucking brutally hard the tone shift of that cuts. Because I've been in that like... place where you're grieving someone but life refuses to stop to let you feel anything about it that makes any sense. Life resolutely fails to give a shit about you or your problems. You stumble through in a daze, desperately wondering what gets you from activity A to activity B. And it won't stop happening just because you're hurting and all your plans are still sitting there, all these things to be done, whether or not they seem to make sense anymore.

Nothing captures, to me, the utter dissociation of grief quite like "Aerith is dead... and you have to go snowboarding."

#ff7 #thinky thoughts #grieving

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in reply to @hystericempress's post:

@mystes4/24/2024, 8:43 PM

I can't help but think back to Malidoma Somé, narrating in his books that grief in a Dagara African village is a matter of utmost importance, where the whole village stops for a close death, to celebrate and grieve in equal measure, to give safe passage to the departed and to incite the tears and to wash the grief of the participants, for days on end, something like 3 days of grieving, village-wide, chants and chants and rituals and processing and processing, because that's how important one of them is to the village, and because they recognize the arresting power of grief, and they actually mold their spirituality, their practice of living, around it.

And it's so striking because that's how grief makes sense: the world at large can't, won't care about a close death of yours, but a close-knit community will, and they all would suffer the grief, and all would be in need to stop the world for it, but they have the power and the method to do just that. As a close-knit community, the world can stop for grief.