Is Final Fantasy Fantasy or SF?

written by Mari Nakamura

Final Fantasy VII Advent Children (2005) is a Japanese computer-animated film. When I saw the film recently, I kept asking myself if it is a fantasy or science fiction (SF). It has both characteristics of fantasy and SF: magic and dragons appear, but advanced technologies also exist in the film. It reminds me of Fredric Jameson’s discussion over fantasy and SF.
In his Archaeologies of the Future(2005), Jameson points out that the structural differences between fantasy and SF. According to Jameson, fantasy has, as a genre, stronger medieval features such as the culture of the peasantry and a Christian nostalgia. It is also characterized by the ethical binary of good and evil, and the fundamental role to magic. Quoting Darko Suvin’s influential conception of SF as “cognitive estrangement,” which emphasizes the commitment of the SF text to scientific reason, Jameson suggests that SF has a long tradition of critical emphasis on verisimilitude from Aristotle on. Yet, he also argues that modern fantasy have some affinities with SF; fantasy have critical and even demystificatory power. He notes that in modern fantasy (e.g., Le Guin’s The Earthsea series) magic, a fundamental motif of fantasy, and its role “may be read, not as some facile plot device…but rather as a figure of the enlargement of human powers and their passage to the limit, their actualization of everything latent and virtual in the stunted human organism of the present” (Jameson 2005: 66).
Although Jameson does not mention any non-Western fantasy and SF in his book, it seems that we can also apply his arguments to Final Fantasy VII. Here, two readings are possible. Firstly, we can see the film as a fantasy: the story revolves around the antagonism between good and evil; some symbolic scenes have Christian characters. For instance, the protagonist Cloud lives in the ruined church; overcoming the sense of guilt, Cloud decides to fight against the evil to save his people; Cloud cures seriously infected children in the church in a climax after he defeats the enemy Sephiroth. Here, the magical feature, Lifestream, the planet’s life force, plays an important role. It can be both good and evil depending on who uses it: Sephiroth attempted to use Lifestream to control the planet, while Cloud use it as a cure. Secondly, we can read the film as SF if we see Lifestream as the novum*. People have been used Lifestream, the technological innovation, in gene engineering and energy generation from age to age; this innovation is surely different from our world. The story has critical element too. The power struggle over Lifestream, the disaster and mysterious disease caused by Lifestream make me think of dark side of technological developments we are facing today, such as energy war, danger and threat.
So is Final Fantasy VII fantasy or SF? Perhaps, it can be both and it depends on how we treat some features such as Lifestream as the magic or the novum. In any case, it has some critical elements.
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*Novum is “the primary element in a work of science fiction by which the work is shown to exist in a different world than that of the reader.” (Prucher 2007)

References:
Jameson, Fredric (2005), Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Verso.
Prucher, Jeff (ed.) (2007), Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, Oxford University Press.