#nibelheim

[acquired-stardust]

Final Fantasy VII Playstation 1997

[cainballad]

In Nibelheim

[ctae]

What keeps Cloud tethered FINAL FANTASY VII (1997)

[lorenzonuti]

Home sweet home.

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[adricarra-art]

Under the Starry Sky 🌠 [Commissioned work]

[monstrous-angels]

Trying out painting again. Never been particularly great at it (I'm not very thorough, nor am I great at polishing things XD). Have this pic of Sephiroth.

[rosy-crow]

Sephiroth Setting Nibelheim Aflame

Based on a Carrie (1976) Blu-Ray Poster

[nightmateria]

I've finally picked my Rebirth rewatch back up, so these are some neat little silent storytelling bits I've noticed in Fall Of A Hero.

1) Now that we know Sephiroth lived in a cell in the lab and that most of the furniture in it apparently consisted of crates, I find it very telling that the first time we see his sane self in FF7R, he is also sitting on a simple metal box. So many things have happened since he was a child, but his living and working conditions under Shinra - they way they're treating him as a tool and a weapon - seem to not have changed at all. Since Shinra owns him, he is, essentially, inside a cell wherever he goes.

As an aside, these boxes look even less comfortable than the ones in his "room" in the lab. You could of course argue that maybe the front seat next to the driver is simply too cramped for someone of his size, but everything about how this scene is presented immediately tells the audience that it's apparently routine for him to be sitting with his men and in the same uncomfortable conditions.

By contrast - at least if Cloud's warped memories of this scene are correct - Zack is on his feet throughout almost the entire scene. While Sephiroth stays on the same "level" as the troopers the entire time until there are hostiles blocking the road. Only then does he join Zack up front by moving into a protective position.

2)

I love the way the reactor is looming over the village, looking even more threatening than the jagged mountaintops. I wonder, and that might be more spec than analysis, if the villagers put up the Nibelheim sign after the reactor was built, in the expectation that now lots of visitors and merchants and business venues would want to come to their village. The reactor being built lifted the village out of poverty, but iirc that didn't last very long. Hence the sign now being all rusted/dirty and not really standing out anymore against the brown/gray backdrop of the town, to show that any fame and attention that Nibelheim once may have gotten has long since been lost completely.

Also, and this is probably overanalyzing it, but I really like how the spiky mountaintops of the sign resemble flames 😈

3) I've analyzed both the bridge scene and the reactor scene to death, so I'm skipping straight to the library.

I'm 100% certain many other people have pointed this out, but this shot where the camera slowly zooms out of the library is so good with how it shows the cracks in the ceiling - symbolizing the way both Sephiroth’s worldview and his sanity are slowly "cracking".

This might be overanalyzing things again but while the shot slowly fades to black, the overhead lights almost look like stars, or a star constellation. Which could be argued to symbolize Sephiroth’s shift in alliance from humanity to the calamity from the stars.

4) This isn't silent storytelling, just something that occurred to me recently that I've found hilarious in some ways - Sephiroth disgustedly calls himself the crowning glory of Professor's Gast's wondrous experiment. Gast's. Not Hojo's. Imagine Hojo hearing that 🤭