ALESSANDRO CECCOTTI
Reframing the cultural catastrophe: the posthuman aesthetics of Final Fantasy VII and Bloodborne
Currently at the core of mass culture, videogames correspond to the kind of media that most demonstrates how much our present merges with the development of technology. The worlds they depict always involve ours, whether these are realistic or fictional. As Braidotti notes, the contemporary imaginary shapes aspirations and anxieties of our posthuman existence through the correlative categories of the cybernetic and the monstrous, manifesting an inherent ambivalence in the relation that we, as humans, maintain with the impersonal domains of technics and nature. Indeed, this is the case of Final Fantasy VII (1997) and Bloodborne (2015), which both revolve around a human-driven apocalypse: the former describes its imminence and the latter its aftermath.
The article will examine the imaginary elements that these videoludic works adopt to portray a modern-day version of the apocalypse – a cultural one – and the role they play in defining two opposite high-concept posthuman aesthetics. Such videogames share a similar post-anthropocentric perspective, although from different sources: Final Fantasy VII draws on the ecologism of Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, while Bloodborne on the cosmicism of Lovecraft’s poetics. They also share a communal social commentary: the planetary catastrophe is set off by a despotic technopolitical corporation, whose immoral ethics broke an interdict on several scales – violating the Oedipal law, acquiring forbidden knowledge, and transcending the human condition.