/lit/ - Literature

>>12451797
to go back to Cid: it is kind of a sad thing that we never really got a reunion between Kefka and Cid in the WoR, like the one we have in Blade Runner in the meeting between Roy Batty and Tyrell. Kefka is a monster, but he is their monster. his brand of irony, or cynicism, is exactly the face one would expect him to have: the Outside painted on. in another way, it reminds me of the relationship of Venom and Eddie Brock: the symbiote stands for desire itself, but it is grafted onto the body of Brock, who becomes a host, in a way, for a symbol of his own schizoid, bodiless cravings.

the monster that Cid produces is one of experimentation, but the experiment is successful beyond all measure, in a way. it is when Good experiments on Evil, or handles the plane of immanence with disregard, that hubris calls. madness exists in the world, and it is always fecund. again, it would be a different thing had Kefka broken into the laboratory and conducted the experiments on himself. but he doesn't do this. nor is it a referendum on the process, or any question of Cid's own skill as a genetic engineer - the experiment works, just fine, on Celes.

i know i am reading far more into this than i need to, there's no question. but it's all about what it really does mean to explore the idea of life Beyond Good and Evil. Fisher was right, that a lot of people think: 'sweet, beyond Good.' that much is easymode. Beyond Good is harder territory yet - that's the realm of Deleuze and Baudrillard (Land, not so much, i think, and Nietzsche was never his bag anyways).

Evil *fascinates* us because it is always creative. the dark, libidinal, cthonic powers of the unconscious fascinated Freud and Jung as well, and a century of psychoanalytic deconstruction followed. and Woke Capital is far less about actual capital itself, but the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of academics and philosophers. corporations wind up eclipsing the state, only to find themselves looking to intellectuals for marketing advice. Gillette ads are the result, or media stories indistinguishable from Situationist art, Rorschach events. it's capitalizing on Evil that does it, and it comes from a combination of arrogance and fascination.

i would have loved a flashback to Cid's experiments, i really would have. what else does that tower connote? why the tigers, the women, the multiple bodies, the coils of steel? are these all memories trapped in Kefka's mind? or aspects of the research? we'll never know.