Magical Mondays: Sephiroth is an Aeon

Whether you love it or hate it, Final Fantasy X is a prequel to Final Fantasy VII. Thankfully, for everyone who dislikes this connection, the two games don’t actually impact each other in terms of plot or characterization. However, for the rest of us, it’s always fun speculating about all the different ways the two games are alike and figuring out the history of both their worlds. This connection is something the game creators have been adding to for some time, and considering that Auron shows up in the new FFVII remake trailer, I imagine that we’re going to have a few more hints and Easter eggs in our future. And yet, somehow, I found myself surprised when Kingdom Hearts turned Sephiroth into an Aeon.

Magical Mondays: Kingdom Hearts and Worldbuilding

The very first post on Lady Geek Girl and Friends went up all the way back in June of 2011. Since then, we have had a collective total of nineteen writers, not including guest writers, and well over 3,000 posts. I bring this up because although nearly five years have passed since we launched this site, not a single one of those 3,000 entries has been dedicated to Kingdom Hearts. We’ve mentioned the games in passing a few times, but we’ve never actually explored the series in depth. I find this surprising—Kingdom Hearts is literally nothing more than an epic Disney/Final Fantasy crossover fanfiction, which means that it should be right up our alley.

I’ve only recently gotten back into playing Kingdom Hearts—I kind of fell out of the fandom for a bit when the third game managed to spend the better part of the past ten years not being released—but if I had to pick a favorite video game series, Kingdom Hearts would be it. That seems a bit disingenuous of me to say, since I’ve only played KH1 and KH2 and skipped out on all the others in the series. It also feels weird to call them my favorite games because literally nothing about the story makes any kind of sense to me whatsoever. The very first game came out fourteen years ago, and in those fourteen years of playing and replaying it over and over again, I still don’t understand the mechanics of how anything works in this universe.

That’s not to say that Kingdom Hearts doesn’t have a lot of worldbuilding—it has tons. Its worldbuilding just happens to be a giant convoluted mess that makes the story more than a little difficult to follow at times. Surprisingly, though, despite all that, Kingdom Hearts’s premise and gameplay more than make up it.

Continuity Needs Consistency

It’s my birthday next week and it’s got me thinking about time lapses in our favorite media. As I’ve referenced before, I believe that worldbuilding is very important to story maintenance. Continuity supports this, especially when managing time. Proper care of the chronology of a series can have a heavy effect on the viewer’s perception and that consistency is important when dealing with it.

In Defense of Skye from Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has been getting a lot of mixed reviews. There are people who love it, but there are also plenty of people out there who find that the show is not up to their standards, including people on this blog. Despite Stinekey’s very well-articulated opinion on the matter, I am actually in love with the show and the characters. That said, I’m not going to delude myself into thinking Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is perfect. It has numerous problems; for one thing, just about all of its antagonists are people of color.

However, this post is not about whether or not it is a good show. But there is one argument against Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. that always crops up, and I do take issue with that. It didn’t take long after the show first aired for the hatred and bashing of the character Skye to commence, and though I don’t mind that some people find her character bland and unrelatable, I feel as if some of this dislike for her is based on her gender.