Glide

I'm really glad to hear my words reached someone, regardless of whether they resonated with OP. Right now especially, we have to remember that life is what we choose to make it. Thanks for letting me know, as well. Makes it feel worth typing out, sometimes.

To be fair, I have heard a lot of vague fear mongering around the project with very little clear statements of exactly what it's proposing, until this thread. None of this is to suggest it's not as bad as people were making it out to be - it seems fucking horrific and regressive - but I won't attack someone for wanting to know the specifics.

Mind you, I'm Canadian. If I were American, I suspect I'd have read at least parts of the primary text, because that's what I tend to do.

EDIT: Okay, I decided to start reading about it right after making this post. It's fucked. You all are fucked. Welcome to a White Christian Nationalist Ethnostate.

She isn't even the most interesting or well-written character in Origins. /shrug

My life is almost a total failure. I am in my 20s

Your life has barely started. It can't be a failure when it's barely begun. You spend 18 years with no real control over yourself or your trajectory, then you finally begin to make a few relevant decisions for yourself. Even if you're 29, you really only start your life when you're 19-20. That's 10 years out of 50+, assuming you live to be at least 70. You have only lived a small fraction of your life.

I won't pretend to know the unique challenges you're facing, the difficulities of finding work in your region/with your degree, or the social/economic struggles you're facing because I am so far divorced from your life that any direct discussion is so meaningless. I would never have the relevant information and context, so I can't suggest what you should do in a tangible way. What I can say, is this: find what you want to measure your life in, and work towards that. If you value your life through work and wealth, I can understand why you'd feel the way you do, but there far more ways to be prosperous, and things you can focus on.

A healthy dose of positive nihilism would do you wonders: each and every one of us is so tiny, so insignificant, that the difference between a "successful" and "unsuccessful" life in the terms you've defined literally do not matter. You and Elon Musk will both die and decompose, and regardless of either of your impact on the world, this rock we're riding around the sun will continue to support life for a time, and one day everything humanity has ever conceived will be dust, and our sun will explode, and the universe won't care if you lived with your parents or owned a mansion. The only things that matter are the things we, individually, give meaning to. If you choose to find meaning and value in creating art then your work has meaning and value. If you choose to find meaning and value in helping others find joy and happiness, then dedicate yourself to your friends, your family and your community, because that has meaning and value. If you want to experience the world through literature and media, then engaging with that material has meaning and value. No one else can define what matters to you in this world, because they're not you.

I'm sorry that what you've spent time and energy on isn't panning out for you. I really, truly am. But step back, and think about if those things matter to you because they matter to you, or because everyone else has told you it's what a successful, prosperous life looks like. Then consider what your version of a good and meaningful is, and chase that. Many people waste 10, 15, 20+ years on things that they ultimately realize don't bring them joy. In a way, you're lucky to have found out sometime in your 20s that what you've been working on isn't leading you where you want to be. It took me until 33.

Yeah, there's a lot of cheeky "hurr, thanks for finally catching up!" in response to all these recent articles about Trump being an ignorant, bigoted dictator wannabe, and while none of them are wrong, it's just not useful commentary. All this self-servinf political-intellectual one-upsmanship only serves to talk down to people who are finally coming around to the reality of the situation, and I'd much rather be glad it's finally being said than jerk myself off over the fact that I've known it for the past 8 years.

I get that it's frustrating to have mainstream media only finally admitting to Trump's anti-democratic position as early ballots are beginning to make things look like he's losing this race, but it's just not constructive conversation. Spread the word, get more people exposed to this, rather than lording it over others that it's old news.

My man, if a shadowy cabal of elites were dictating who won and lost the upcoming election, they sure as fuck wouldn't be manipulating results in such a base-level way. They'd just have the numbers fudged at the end, rather than take risks with tracked objects going missing.

God, I can't wait for the election cycle to end so the majority of the trolls, nutters and Russian astroturfers can finally crawl back into their respective holes for another 3.5 years.

I can't believe someone uttered that monologue with the expectation that it's a winning argument. Like, yes? Perform sex acts without consent and the police should be, in fact, after you.

"You sick bastards will permit anything as long as it's between consenting adults!"

Ummm, yeah? Glad you finally grasp what we've been saying.

I feel like this was meant as a tongue-in-cheek jab at the post title, but sarcasm of this type is lost in text.

No satire here; I genuinely think it's a great example of a remake done well.

There are some major breaks from the original plot, which in itself would be neat, but they introduce an entire plot element that interacts with this derivation. The spirits I was talking about, "Whispers" (had to look up the official name, tbh), appear whenever the story attempts to break from the original story from the original release. In universe, this is explained as pre-determination, or destiny. Thanks to our meta knowledge, we know in reality that these spirits are attempting to maintain the timeline from the original release.

As an early example, after the events at the first Mako reactor, Cloud decides to collect his pay and go his own way, which is not the original intended path of the game. To correct this, a group of Whispers attack the party, and ultimately injure Jessie, preventing her from going on the mission. Needing another body, Barrett is forced to rehire Cloud for Avalanche's mission to the next reactor. Without spoiling specific details, the whispers slowly become a form of antagonist as the characters try harder to get away from the original plot of FFVII.

This is interesting in a few ways. First, we've introduced a new major conflict in the form of the characters fighting against a physical embodiment of destiny. They do not want the outcome of their struggles to be predetermined, particularly as that predetermination involved the death and suffering of some specific characters. This is, in my opinion, an interesting new plot element beyond being "the same game again."

Second, stepping back, and examining this with a wider lens, we can look at the Whispers for what they are to us, the players, rather than what they are to the characters. We know they are not maintaining "destiny," but instead trying to reestablish the original story we loved. As a result, I see the Whispers as the collective voice of the "change nothing" remake ideology. When a community asks for new content of IPs they love, there will always be diehard essentialists who want their loved stories to remain untouched; the Whispers, then, are these people.

So if the Whispers are a physical representation of the "change nothing" remake ideology, then what is there to make of the fact that they're largely an antagonist? This seems to me that the writers were critical of this culture, so much so that they ask you to fight it to earn the different take on the story. Of course, it's far from the only derivation from the original game, but that's exactly my point: FFVII remake was so far divorced from the conceptual, soulless "let's pump out the same game again" remake that they literally wrote that culture into a new antagonist.

But isn't it featured in the list of games being given a short film via Secret Level? I kind of assumed the goal was to promote it via that episode and re-release the game around the same time.

Dammit, and I JUST bought some of his chocolate as a gag/to say I tried it earlier today!

I feel like people are taking this commentary a little too literally. I don't think it's intended to suggest that all remakes are always bad and we should be ashamed of ourselves for enjoying them. Mankind has a habit of romanticising the past, and that's led to something of a modern obsession with nostalgia. These are fair, and interesting, statements.

That said, the choice of pairing the statement with an allusion to FF7 is probably not a great choice. The remake is fantastic, and isn't at all symptomatic of the problem of quick cash-in, nostalgia driven remakes. Hell, the first game specifically tackles themes of pre-determination, which functions as a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for nostalgia. And fascinatingly the meta-analysis of this is critical of exactly the same thing: there are literally spirits of sorts which attack the player and manipulate events to ensure the original story remains untouched, and they become a prominent antagonist of the game as the player works to tell a story that is different from the one told in the original. Perhaps there's something counterproductive about attaching this message to a remake that's critical of soullessly telling the same stories we've already heard.