I, SEPHIROTH
from forrest
Part 1 | Part 2
1, The Sephiroth of Suburbia
“I've always felt, since I was small... That I was different from the others. Special, in some way.”
Before cigarettes and alcohol, cars and girls, work and bills, marriage and mortgages; betwixt red maple and palm; back when Grandma Susu woke me every morning with a tall glass of chocolate milk; when I still kinda believed that toys came to life when people left the house; back in that prepubescent fog wherein I still enjoyed Blue’s Clues but had developed just enough self-awareness to be embarrassed about it; when music skipped and movies barfed tape; back when Miles, my best friend, lived right by the fishing pond on the border of my backyard; when trampolines were gravity wells around which all children orbited; back when we thought time could be stopped and things would never change; when I could pick up Between the Lions and Dragon Tales on PBS if I moved the antenna just right; back when the internet was confined to large gray cubes and was mainly used for printing out cheat codes; when clouds only existed in the sky and Final Fantasy VII, not everyone’s pocket; back when Game Boys and asthma inhalers were the only devices kids had; when I would leave the house with nothing but my wits because phones were still tethered to walls with curly cords; back when true freedom was just beyond the picket fences, in the overgrown alleys between houses of red brick and cheap vinyl siding; when we all knew the neighborhood cats by name; back when politics were boring and there was just so much else to talk about; when neighborhoods felt like they were owned by people instead of banks and politicians; back when parents kept their doors unlocked and kids swept through like little tornadoes; when we would spend afternoons ringing doorbells and running away; back when I would fall asleep on the floor enveloped in the soft glow of video game cathode; when sleepovers were the best thing in the whole entire world; back when Miles lent me his friend Lauren’s Game Boy Camera, which I traded for store credit to buy the game with the cool spiky-haired blonde guy on the cover.
And that’s how I came to own Final Fantasy VII.
I still have that very same copy of Final Fantasy VII; disc 3 missing, the manual gone, the bright yellow sticker with the words PRE-PLAYED and the price $16.99 and the serial number 933185-133 nearly peeled off, discs barely stay in their slots, front-cover hinge so broken that the jewel case just kinda falls apart in my hands whenever I mess with it. But it’s still here, right on my desk; I’m looking at it right now: Cloud is standing there, in that chalky whiteness, wearing his dark blue baggies, right arm bent nearly inhuman, gloved hand wrapped around the grip of a massive sword that itself seems to just kinda float there without a strap or connector of any kind; hair electric, Cloud stands confidently, perhaps wondering how he’s going to pull the blade over his shoulder without breaking his arm or accidentally slicing his own head off while he stares off at that massive steel tower of technological oppression, which itself seems to be staring right back down at him: Cloud representing youthful innocence while the Shinra building represents the techno-fascist future that, at the time, we had no idea was just around the corner, waiting to monopolize our lives—or something.
Basically, Final Fantasy VII’s cover—designed by Tetsuya Nomura—is iconic, practically begging children between the ages of ten and twenty-five to snatch the game right off the store shelf and make a run for it straight to the nearest CRT television set; and in this way, Final Fantasy VII aspired to make thieves of us all.
Which is why, in a roundabout way, I ended up stealing Final Fantasy VII in what amounted to a video-game-laundering scheme. And I didn’t feel bad about it either. At the time, I told myself that I did it because Lauren was always so cruel to me: she formed a neighborhood skateboarding club but refused to let me join; she even told Miles that he could only hang out with me on Tuesdays and Thursdays—the worst days of the week. But the real reason I laundered Lauren’s Game Boy Camera was not to enact some sort of righteous vengeance against her; it was because I was an envious asshole kid, the kind of kid who believed that revenge could be righteous at all, the kind of kid who preferred to hang out with his friends one-on-one because the introduction of a third person made me incredibly jealous, which in turn made me incredibly passive-aggressive, which in turn made me very unpleasant to be around; and Lauren likely picked up on this, which was probably why she didn’t want Miles hanging out with me at all: she was looking out for her friend, because she was a nice caring person—which is more than I can say about myself, even now, over twenty years later.
So, yeah, Lauren was right to distrust me; I didn’t care about anything other than myself, and it was obvious. In fact, she probably thought I was the kind of kid who would steal her Game Boy Camera and pawn it for my own personal gain—which is exactly what I ended up doing. And I did it because, deep down, I hated her for taking time away from Miles and me. I was envious of every second she stole from me, so I decided to steal something of hers. And I hated how she had something I didn’t—a Game Boy Camera—and I wanted to deprive her of that. And I was also envious of her ability to draw Miles away from me at all; I would sit around staring at walls, thinking stuff like: What does she have that I don’t have? Why would Miles want to hang out with her instead of me? How could she possibly be better than me? I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to see her weep, for she could have nothing over me: neither her Game Boy Camera nor Miles nor anything else; depriving her of the things she loved would make me feel better, I thought.
And I wasn’t afraid of getting in trouble for stealing the Game Boy Camera, because trouble always seemed to miss me. It was as if trouble loved me in the best way possible: staying out of my way. And I believed this was because I was different from other kids, smarter, as if rules didn’t apply to me, as if I were above mortal law, as if I were special. In fact, from the moment I gained my first speck of awareness, I knew that I was better than other people; that I was stronger and smarter and more attractive than everyone else. And anyone who didn’t agree, well, they just didn’t understand me, they didn't see the greatness—they were idiots.
That summer, Miles and I became obsessed with Final Fantasy VII, spending the majority of our time huddled around my grandma’s living room television set, which was one of those massive wooden projector things meant to emulate a sort of theater experience, with a front compartment that would pull out to reveal a mirror on which three colored lenses would project an image upon the black canvas that was the television’s screen, an incredible sight to behold, if not for the poor color saturation and brightness, which meant that every curtain in the room had to be fully drawn and blackout if we wanted to actually see the images being projected. And, oh boy, did we want to see those gritty cyberpunk-fantasy images being projected, and we especially wanted to see the massive laser-beam-spitting dragons and motorcycle chases wherein one of the coolest-looking protagonists in video game history swings a massive blade back and forth to knock over other cyclists while somehow keeping perfect balance in a scene that must have been inspired by Prince’s Purple Rain. And we didn’t care if the graphics were blocky and every character model looked as if they had colorful blobs of lard dripping down their bodies, because, at the time, those polygons were the peak of graphical fidelity, and those smooth cutscenes that somehow flowed in and out of gameplay so seamlessly were something akin to magic to our little adolescent pea-brains. We sat transfixed by those dancing lights; from the morose slummy playgrounds to the star-gazing whispers of teenagers in love to the high-energy battles that, despite being turn-based, forced you to think fast because the enemies just would not stop attacking, all of which made perfect by the MIDI industrial prog-rock soundtrack, composed by Nobuo Uematsu, whose compositions of lightspeed keys, earth-shattering chugs, and twinkling synths, multiplied by a metric shitload of anxiety and just a sprinkle of hope, must have been composed in Midgar itself—for how else could Uematsu capture the world of Final Fantasy VII so perfectly?
And so, when I played Final Fantasy VII, I would not let go. Miles would often ask: Can I start my own save file? And I would say: Later. And, of course, “later” would never come. Because I just loved Final Fantasy VII so damn much that I never wanted to stop playing it—and I was also selfish as hell, still am, always have been.
Back then, we had never experienced true love, but if asked, we would have probably said it felt something like Final Fantasy VII. And, if asked what we loved most about the game, we would have probably said: The Characters. Because The Characters of Final Fantasy VII are some of the most unique in video game history; a ragtag mix of morally grey terrorists and spunky teenaged ninjas and double-crossing cat puppets and even an abrasive mechanic who’s obsessed with going to space and a Mr. T lookalike that has a gun for a hand and a red dog that talks for some reason and even a goth with a gun and, of course, the main character’s got the mako eyes and the one shoulder pad and the spiky hair that every millennial kid tried to emulate at one point or other. There’s even a love triangle going on between Mako Eyes and the cowgirl with the two heavy hitters (her fists) and the beauty in the pink dress on borrowed time. And, of course, there’s the fallen hero turned villain; the villain who assassinated the president and slayed the Midgar Zolom; the villain who summoned the meteor; the villain that every subsequent Japanese role-playing game tried and failed to copy; the villain to end all villains: Sephiroth.
Sephiroth: tall and handsome with ice in his veins and mako in his eyes and quicksilver in his hair. Oh, his glorious hair, which parts in the front like two jagged peaks and flows like a river of silver far beyond his ass. His pants tight ebony leather, long black coat open to chiseled Adonis, two black belts crossed at his nipples like softcore BDSM for some reason, gloved hands perpetually gripping the tsuka of the longest katana anyone has ever seen: The Masamune. He wields the highest level magics—Fire 3, Meteor, Ultima—like it’s nothing. He’s a man of few words, but the words he does use are those of an edgy teenager’s delivered with the confidence of a god: YOU ARE JUST A PUPPET. YOU HAVE NO HEART AND CANNOT FEEL ANY PAIN. He’s the product of a mad scientist’s research, infused with the cells of a super-powered alien, which makes him the most powerful lifeform on the planet, and he knows it—and he’s pissed about it. His ultimate attack—Supernova—is literally an unskippable two-minute cutscene wherein he summons a massive comet that tears through nearly every planet in the Milky Way galaxy, with each planet’s name flashing on-screen as it shatters to bits. He’s arrogant as hell, believing himself to be better than literally everyone and everything. He knows of the vile circumstances of his birth and the dark history of his own people, which fuels a cynical hatred of all things, which fuels a self-righteous desire for vengeance, which fuels his massive ego, so much so that he summons a meteor to wipe out all life on the planet, to start anew, because he believes that he knows best for the world. He considers himself a truthsayer, a revealer of dark secrets, but deep down he doesn’t give a shit about any of that stuff, wanting only to set fire to the universe, because he’s consumed by rage, which drives an unyielding dedication to burning down all things, and he will stand in the blaze as he does so, dramatically lifting his head to stare into the camera as the fires dance all around him, a crazed curve on his lips and a flicker of fury in those mako eyes of his, as if he’s the star of his own epic Hollywood movie.
As an edgy preteen living around the turn of the millennium, Sephiroth was the coolest fucking character I had ever seen in my life. So much so that, when Miles and I would go out in the nearby woods, surrounding ourselves with towering oaks and needle-like pines and stunning maples and out-of-place palms, to play pretend—something we did far past the culturally accepted age range to do so—I would exclusively pretend to be Sephiroth. I kept rocks in my pocket like they were materia, wielded pinecones and acorns as Ultimas and Meteors, and forged thin maple branches into Masamunes. I, Sephiroth of Suburbia, was unstoppable in those woods. And any attempt to defeat me was met with the lashing of a maple branch or a pinecone to the face. The rules bent to my will, for I controlled the cosmos as the mightiest most beautiful man alive. And, of course, Miles—who often wore FUBU pants and pretended to be Cloud—didn’t like that. He didn’t like it one bit. He would say things like: SEPHIROTH LOSES IN THE END! And I would say: Maybe, but you haven’t even beaten the game yourself! And then he would get angry because I never let him play the game to begin with, and one time, he got so angry that he demanded I prove that I was, indeed, the Sephiroth of Suburbia. So, remembering that one time I used our friend Matt’s dad’s computer to search for Final Fantasy VII cheat codes but instead found a fan-made “Which Final Fantasy VII Character Are You?!?!” personality quiz on Quizilla.com, I suggested that we go to Matt’s house and take the aforementioned quiz to prove once and for all that I was, indeed, the Sephiroth of Suburbia—to which Miles begrudgingly agreed.
So there we were, huddled in Matt’s dad’s small dimly lit office, which had one big gray boob-tube computer monitor, a jaundiced keyboard that I remember being very sticky for some reason, and one of those big thumb-controlled roller-ball mice that actually worked quite well for maneuvering the pointer on the Windows ME desktop, on which the icons for Tomb Raider 1 and 2 and 3 and The Last Revelation occupied most of the upper-left desktop space alongside SimCity 3000 and SimAnt and AOL Instant Messenger and Netscape 6, the latter of which I watched Miles click, and, with my help, find the “Which Final Fantasy VII Character Are You?!?!” personality quiz on Quizilla.com, at which time he curtly asked me to leave the room while he completed said quiz, to which I probably shrugged and said whatever or taunted him in some way before actually leaving the room, at which point I promptly snatched a soda from Matt’s kitchen fridge without asking then exited the main interior of the home through the inner-garage door and then loitered in the garage—which was always open for some reason—sipping on my contraband soda while waiting for Miles to complete the quiz. I was so freewheeling about the whole thing because it was the middle of a summer workday, which meant Matt’s parents were at work, which meant we could walk freely in and out of Matt’s home doing pretty much whatever we wanted, which was exactly what I was doing in that garage when I walked past the old souped-up BMW Matt’s dad used to work on and the fluffy black cat named Chips who was perched upon it, meowing at me for pets, which I obliged, at which point Matt walked into garage, looking quite groggy as if he had just woken up, and asked me something like: What are you guys doing? Because Miles and I had just walked into his home without even alerting him—which we often did—and I told him something like: Miles and I are taking Final Fantasy personality tests. To which Matt, who was meek and eldritch in many ways but also older than us by several years so didn’t really care about which fictional video game character he may be vaguely similar to, mumbled something like: OK cool, do you want to go swimming later? To which I promptly agreed because I loved to swim back then—still do.
After almost thirty minutes of chit-chat with Matt while petting Chips and drinking contraband soda, the inner garage door opened, and out walked Miles into the open garage proper, a look of something like despair and defeat on his face. He held a single sheet of white paper down by his side. I asked: What took you so long? He paused and fidgeted and stuttered before speaking: I took the quiz a few times, but. He trailed off, then he raised before him the paper, on which was a wall of black text below a large image of an older man with faded blonde hair and goggles who was chewing on a cigarette while grinning a big toothy grin; it was Cid—the space-obsessed, spear-wielding mechanic, pilot of the glorious Highwind airship—a character that, at the time, we both thought was kind of a joke character. So I leaned in closer to Miles, my eyes zoning in on the paper with the old dragoon upon it, and that’s when I erupted with uncontrollable laughter. Miles yelled: It’s not funny! And I retorted: Is too! and he retorted: Is not! and I retorted: Is too! and so on and so forth until he threw the paper in my face and darted out of the garage faster than I had ever seen him dart before. Matt was still standing there, like weird furniture, blinking hard before asking something like: Is he OK? To which I probably shrugged and said whatever before letting out a forced villainous chortle of some sort then picking up the thrown quiz results and grinning at them one final time before crumpling them into my pocket so as to wield them against Miles later for more big laughs.
Taking one final sip of my contraband soda before patting Chips on her fluffy head and pushing my way through the inner garage door back into the house proper, which was shadow-filled and smelled like an ashtray with air freshener sprayed directly on it, which only made it smell more like an ashtray somehow, I grabbed another soda from the fridge and made my way to Matt’s father’s computer room, which was dark and smelled of sour milk for some reason, and that's where I sat my slightly overweight self down, spun around a few times in the twirly chair, then pulled up to the desk, placing my thumb comfortably on the roller ball of Matt’s father’s mouse. “Which Final Fantasy VII Character Are You?!?!” already pulled up on the screen, the old results still showing, YOU ARE CID HIGHWIND, that old dragoon staring out at me from behind the glass with that big toothy cigarette-dangling grin, as if he had measured the worth of my soul and found it so laughably pathetic that all he could do was crack a smile, as if Cid knew that I would get what's coming to me in time, and this spooked me somewhat, so I quickly clicked the RETAKE THIS QUIZ button and, after a refresh that took a whole minute, there I was, staring at question one—DO YOU FEEL AS IF YOU DON’T BELONG?—determined to prove that I was the strongest, coolest, most beautiful character in the whole neighborhood, that I was, indeed, the Sephiroth of Suburbia.
So I cracked my knuckles and got to it.
2, Which Final Fantasy VII Character Are You?!?!
“The Ultimate Final Fantasy VII Personality Quiz, with Images! Created by ClimHazzardJones, published July 2000. Now with increased accuracy and even more characters!”
Q1: DO YOU FEEL AS IF YOU DON’T BELONG?
Before we go any further, I want to stress the following point: I am not looking for sympathy here. Nothing written in this essay is a cry for help; I am not fishing for some sort of “You’re being too harsh on yourself! Everyone has these feelings! Don’t beat yourself up” type of vacuous, nothing-statements one might feel inclined to make upon reading a self-critical analysis such as this one.
Now, let’s move on.
For as long as I can remember, I have never fit in; neither cliques nor squads would have me. I had a few close friends over the years, like Miles and Matt during the summers in Arcadia, but I have never been popular, even though I desired to be. And looking back, this has always been my own fault. I was always considered the quiet weirdo, according to my peers. I was, and still am, aloof and standoffish and coy, and quite tall, which all begets a certain level of unapproachability; and when I was younger, I had this obvious perpetual chip on my shoulder, as if I had something to prove, and this all combined into an aura of know-it-all-ness that was probably unbearable to anyone who associated with me. I was the “well actually” kid before that was even a thing—perhaps I made it a thing. The point is, I was not well-liked growing up, in school, camp, or otherwise.
From the ages of six to sixteen, I remember having approximately zero long-lasting friendships—outside of Miles and Matt, whom I only saw during the summers, so they had the benefit of not being around me for nine months of the year, which helps—and the one elementary school friend I did make—bonding over Pokemon cards—eventually stopped associating with me because I kept lying about having special knowledge of new Pokemon that were going to be released in the next-generation Pokemon games and I would make up all sorts of obviously fake names, like Bluey and Floofly and Sheepie, and a bunch of others that always ended with the “ee” vowel sound for some reason. Eventually, that ex-friend challenged me on the secret Pokemon thing, and, in my nervousness, I admitted that I had made some of them up but “not all of them,” and I remember this kid looking me straight in the face and saying: You’re an idiot. And I responded by squinting my eyes and glaring at this kid for at least half a minute, which ended up spooking him, I think, and he walked away, looking back every few steps only to find me still glaring at him as if I had the fiery mako eyes. From that point onward, he never spoke to me again. I believe his name was Chris. I felt so burned by this Chris that, one day during a recess break, I stayed behind in the classroom after everyone had left, dug through his desk, and stole a bunch of his Pokemon cards, pocketing a holographic Blastoise and Vileplume before ripping up the rest and making sure the ripped pieces were visible right on top of the trash in the open wastebasket by the door by my desk. I did this so that I could see this kid burst into tears when he realized that someone had ripped up all his cards. Unfortunately for me, however, later that day, after recess, after I had made sure to get into the classroom before everyone else so that I could watch my genius plan unfold, Chris, upon noticing his Pokemon cards were missing and finding many of them ripped up in the trash can, did not cry but screamed and immediately pointed at me and said: HE DID IT. At which point the teacher, Ms. Brooks—who was obsessed with bears and had laminated bears stuck up all over the walls and sometimes dressed up as a bear—took me into the principal’s office and made me empty out my pockets, the Blastoise and Vileplume revealed, at which point the jig was most definitely up, and my parents were called, and I got grounded for a week and, from that moment forth, I was known as the Pokemon thief that should be avoided at all costs because who knows what I was actually capable of. But at the time, I didn't feel like a thief, I just felt burned by Chris, which made me feel bad, which made me want to enact revenge; I wanted that kid to feel bad for making me feel bad, so that’s exactly what I did: made him feel bad.
Later, in middle school, I adjusted somewhat but was still aloof and standoffish and coy and tall, so I never made many friends, and the friends I did make were, for lack of better words, juvenile delinquents; one urinated on a kid’s backpack, another set fire to a trash can while screaming I AM AN ANTICHRIST I AM AN ANARCHIST, which were the lyrics to the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.,” which we all thought was the peak of rebellious music at the time despite the fact that the Sex Pistols were signed to a major corporate label at one point, and this next bit is probably a given, but we all wore those black baggy tripp pants with the totally unnecessary belts hanging from them that cost a small fortune from Hot Topic, which my mom purchased for me without a second thought because she had remarried a very wealthy older man, and we all lived in a mansion; and, as a wealthy white boy of relative handsomeness, I had no real troubles in the world but wanted so badly to have troubles that I manufactured them myself; often I presented myself as poor because I thought it was some sort of cool fashion statement—because being wealthy was certainly not cool—and to this end, I was really just a massive poser. Toward the end of middle school, I started to realize how much of a poser I actually was, becoming even more self-conscious about the fact that I was wealthy but had already lied about it so much that I felt I couldn’t tell the truth without suffering some extreme embarrassment, so I doubled down, like some sort of poser-sunk-cost fallacy. So, even within the troubled-punk clique, I still didn’t belong because I was wealthy and not troubled at all. Eventually, I fell out with the punk kids and had no friends at all, which was around the time I started getting into '80s alternative rock and new wave—The Smiths, The Cure, and New Order, particularly—and started thinking that depression was cool and, as such, would lie to girls about how my dad was abusive when he was actually just a normal everyday dude who loved his son, and I did this because I thought it gave me a tragic backstory, thus making me more interesting. I might have told a few girls that I cut myself, which was something that I never actually did, but I did wear long-sleeve shirts so as to pretend that my arms were riddled with all sorts of heinous cuts. I also told people that I could play the guitar, but actually could do no such thing, so when people would ask me to play something for them, I would go to extreme lengths to either nope-the-fuck-out-of-there or make up some insanely elaborate excuse as to why I couldn’t play at the time; carpometacarpal neuropathic syndrome was mentioned a few times.
In short, growing up, I was an aloof, standoffish teen who had never experienced any real hardship in his life; I was insanely privileged, with basic teen interests like video games and alternative music and cartoons and comic books—but I wanted people to think I was more than that. I wanted to be perceived as cool and interesting, so I lied constantly to make myself seem more cool and interesting than I actually was. And I had a very skewed idea of what “being cool” actually meant—linking it to tragedy and depression and apathy. I was basically that girl from The Breakfast Club, you know the one that pretended to fuck her therapist. My entire background was either a lie or an extreme exaggeration. I wanted to be cool without putting any real effort into being cool, thinking I could simply shortcut my way to cooldom. And, in some ways, I’m still doing this today, even with this very essay you’re reading right now.
When high school came around, I had stopped lying as much, but I had also retreated into myself almost completely, out of fear of embarrassment mostly, holing up in my room playing Counter-Strike and Final Fantasy and Diablo while simultaneously listening to depressive '80s music while abusing amphetamines because the family psychiatrist believed that I had ADHD—and that was fine with me as long as I got more of those amazing pills, because those pills put me in another world, and I loved that other world because it was much better than the the world I inhabited, or so I had convinced myself, being a wealthy white boy that had experienced literally no real hardship in life. And it was around this time that I started to pretend to read Nietzsche and act like I was a high-brow intellectual, purposely carrying smart-sounding books under my arm in the school halls, and this, alongside my tallness and odd manner of dress—tight jeans and very baggy sweaters and The Cure hair (obviously)—was how I caught the attention of another kid named Robert, who shared many of my same interests, except he had actually read Nietzsche and actually knew how to play the guitar, so basically he was an honest version of me, minus the assholedom. And Robert and I became close friends; we even started a band together—The Crayons, which eventually renamed to Golly Gee—in which I insisted on being the frontman despite having no musical talent whatsoever and making him, Robert, compose all the music, which, for some reason, he obliged, which eventually led to me becoming envious of Robert’s musical talent to the point where I became resentful and angry all the time, which would end up becoming the main theme of our friendship, which is still ongoing, on-and-off today, with envy and resentment still there, in big terrible scoops, which really has nothing to do with him and everything to do with me.
Fast forward to now: I’m working for a software company in some sales-adjacent role that I loathe; everyone around me is obsessed with Ted Lasso and drinking and partying and making quota, whereas I’m over here reading David Foster Wallace short stories and being teetotal and never leaving the house and writing essays about how I hate sales culture (see: “Dionysus: Death”); so, once again, even present day, I do not belong, whatever that means. But I recognize that since I am so aware of these facts about myself—my almost willful contrarianism and this urge to be seen as interesting and/or unique—my resistance to fitting in is pretty much all ego at this point. Meaning, I could go hang out with the sales guys, fit in with the crowd, make a few friends here and there, but, when I get right down to it, I think myself better than these people—as if their life philosophy is just so stupid and corrupt that I could just never fit in with them to begin with; so basically, I am reducing people to ideologies—which they probably don’t even put much thought into to begin with—and then denouncing those ideologies, which in turn denounces huge swathes of people, probably unfairly. And upon reflection, this seems like the peak of human hubris, as if I believe that I have everything figured out while these sales dudes are just mindless goons that don’t think further than their next commission check. And the ultimate irony here is that, because of my terrible attitude toward my job and my general anti-corporate philosophy, I am doing worse financially than my peers, which could end up hurting me and my family in the long run, because finances are everything in modern life; so it’s not like my superiority complex is even producing good outcomes for me—it’s basically just pretension, almost as if I am erecting some sort of faulty intellectual barrier in an attempt to shield myself from accusations of being an unmotivated, lazy person who just doesn’t want to do any real work, which is absolutely what I am and have been doing for my whole life, considering that I dropped out of both high school and college, and my career path thus far has pretty much been just keeping a low profile and coasting while not giving one single fuck about the company I work for—a company that, supposedly, does not align with my values as a person, yet I still work for them, pretending actions don’t speak louder than words. All this is to say that, in a roundabout way, I am still just like I was in grade school: a poser, a fraud.
In fact, I have always sorta felt like a psychopath trying to blend in with nice, caring people. I had a rocky start from a young age, revealing my psychopathy a bit too much, but the more mistakes I made, the more I learned how to better pretend at being a normal, caring person. But perhaps this is just an excuse; my ego trying to justify my desire to be perceived as interesting and cool and different: I’M NOT LIKE THE OTHER GUYS: I’M A HIGH-FUNCTIONING PSYCHOPATH. Like some sort of Melancholic Phantom Nightmare Boy.
I tell myself that everyone is like this, they just don’t admit to it. I tell myself that everyone is a liar, a faker, a poser. But maybe I only tell myself this to make myself feel better about being a massive faker who is pretty much empty inside. I don’t know.
What I do know is, I want to belong to some sort of group, just not the groups I find myself surrounded by. I know that I want to belong, or be associated with, or be known as, a genius writer. I want people to read my stuff, coming away thinking something like: Holy shit this is the most brilliant thing I have ever read how can this guy be so deep and honest and open about his own inner darkness like this wow just wow. And maybe that’s the real reason I write all this stuff to begin with—because I want to belong, I want to be praised, loved. But does this not undermine the act of writing itself? Should I not just write because I enjoy writing? That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy writing, just that, sometimes, the drive to produce perfect works and be praised for producing those perfect works is stronger than the love of writing itself, and with this comes cognitive dissonance rooted in feelings of fraudulence, which means that, even when doing something that I supposedly love—like writing—I still do not truly feel like I belong here, doing the thing that I supposedly love doing.
So, to answer the question: I have never belonged. Ever. And it’s no one’s fault but my own.
Q2: ARE YOU COMPETITIVE?
Outwardly, no. Inwardly, I’m one of the most competitive people I know.
But competition makes me feel bad in many ways, which is why, outwardly, I manufacture an air of chill go-with-the-flow unassumingness that only serves to cover up the fact that I am incredibly competitive but, at the same time, acutely aware of my inability to compete—due to incompetence and laziness—thus, my outward anti-competitiveness serves as a soul bulwark to deflect the dissonance and feelings of despair that arise from my own shortcomings. And, in this way, I am an ouroboros, making excuses for my own lazy incompetence, thus becoming more lazy and incompetent, thus relying on more excuses to deflect from my increased lazy incompetence, thus becoming more lazy and incompetent, and so on and so forth.
For example, as an amateur writer, I like to say that “good writing” and “bad writing” do not exist. I like to say that writing—and other works of art—cannot be objectively judged, because to judge something there must be a standard and, since everyone's standards are different, objectivity in the judgment process therefore cannot exist, thus nothing can be concretely “good” or “bad.” But this outwardly stated belief conveniently shields me from accusations that my writing may not be very good. Thus, this “quality is subjective” concept that I have cultivated, while based on some modicum of truth, only serves to deflect criticism from myself, so that I don’t have to deal with the unpleasantness of negative feedback. It allows me to say stuff like: WELL, THEY JUST DON’T GET IT and then brush my hands off and walk away, never having to face the fact that maybe possibly something I wrote is actually not that good, which also means that I never have to compete with others, because everything is supposedly subjective so what the hell is there to compete about in the first place.
But there’s a contradiction here: I am constantly comparing myself to other writers, competing with them in my mind, so, obviously, I have an idea of what I believe to be “good” and “bad” writing, and I try to emulate what I perceive as “good” writing. Thus, I undermine my own outwardly stated “quality is subjective” value system, all the while constantly competing with other writers in my head. And yet another contradiction here is that, inwardly, I am incredibly judgmental of other writers, sometimes reading their stuff in private while vocally mumbling about how much their work sucks, even though no one is around to hear me, as if I’m possessed by some sort of fifth-circle demon—or perhaps am one. And, to top off the contradiction cake here, outwardly, I often provide positive feedback to the very same writers I think so vitriolically of—on good days, however, I just ignore their work completely. So, in conclusion, I am not some chill go-with-the-flow hippie writer; I am actually an incredibly harsh critic who shits on everyone else’s writing—I just pretend that I’m not, because it deflects criticism away from me. And this ties in with the whole idea that I am a fucking fraud poser.
But it goes much deeper than that. Because, while I do read a lot—mostly literary fiction, sci-fi, and essays—I try to avoid reading the work of other writers whom I know personally, because:
Q3: DO YOU ENVY OTHERS?
I get uncontrollably envious of them—almost insanely so—as I see their writing as a challenge to my own identity as a writer, and I just can’t deal with these feelings in a healthy way; so much so that I become overcome with jealousy, which warps into resentment, which warps into a storm of quiet rage, pulsing a psychic negative aura so strong that it can even be felt across vast distances, and this ends up destroying all my relationships with other writers.
Writers within my orbit threaten me on some deep visceral level, even though I know that if I feel threatened by a person, it’s almost always because I’m scared that that person is better than me in some way; then I become envious of their better-than-me qualities, and my behavior toward that person changes in very negative, obvious ways: communication becomes shorter, more frank, I make snippy remarks poorly hidden behind thin layers of humor for plausible deniability—IT WAS A JOKE—or I just suddenly avoid the person outright. And, even though I know all this about myself and can analyze it, I still continue to feel threatened—almost uncontrollably so. And it’s very easy for me to feel threatened; even a 500-word short story with poor syntax and terrible spelling can make me feel envious as a writer, as if my id is asserting that only I can be a writer, no one else—as if my whole being depends on it, as if writing is all that I have and other writers are just trying to take that away from me, make me look stupid, hurt me in some way. So, usually, I choose instead to just ignore the writing of people I know personally, because I know myself and I know that I’ll start thinking stuff like: DO THEY THINK THAT THEY’RE A BETTER WRITER THAN ME? ARE THEY TRYING TO COPY MY STYLE? WHY ARE THEY TRYING TO COMPETE WITH ME? MAYBE THEY ARE BETTER THAN ME. MAYBE I AM A BAD WRITER. MAYBE I SHOULD JUST STOP WRITING ALTOGETHER. WHY DO THEY MAKE ME FEEL THIS WAY? ARE THEY DOING THIS ON PURPOSE? ARE THEY TRYING TO HURT ME? FUCK THEM. And in this way, I project my own competitive insecurities onto everyone else, as if I am the supermassive black hole at the center of the amateur-writing universe, as if other writers are constantly thinking about me and trying to be just like me because they themselves are actually envious of me, not the other way around—even though I know, deep down, this is not true and, in fact, totally ridiculous, yet I still have all these terrible envious thoughts, as if I imprisoned a muse and this is my punishment. I knew this about myself for a long time but never really thought about it too hard until a few years ago—back in 2023, when I ran a writing blog, oncomputer.games, with my only real long-lasting friend, Robert, the same friend who I was in a band with in high school.
Robert and I both wrote several essays for oncomputer.games, which was focused on merging philosophy, nostalgia, and socio-political issues with video games. It started as a fun cooperative project, a way for us to combine passions into something that, at the time, we felt was important and meaningful. And, of course, there was also the element of wanting to be perceived as cool and smart, like some sort of writing celebrity or something—at least these motivations were there for me; I can’t speak on Robert’s behalf, although I often pretended that I could, which basically destroyed our relationship, because back then, I had convinced myself that I knew what he was thinking—I had convinced myself that he was trying to make me look like a bad writer by constantly trying to compete with me.
Let me explain.
After I wrote the first essay for that publication, I felt like a god of writing, as if I had just published Shakespeare or something, even though it was actually a very dull review of Final Fantasy XII in which the only interesting part was the comparison between the game and Star Wars, and also how *Final Fantasy XII *turned the Final Fantasy franchise into “Vaan throws a tornado at the monster.” But, regardless of all that, I still felt accomplished after publishing it; until Robert posted his first essay tying Xenosaga to a number of lofty philosophical concepts that, frankly, went over my head—and still go over my head to this day. From that moment forward, I became envious of Robert’s ability as a writer, just as I had become envious of his ability as a musician years prior. This envy was easy to ignore at first—I just kept writing and publishing and pushing it down as best I could—until Robert would release another essay, which was always much better than his previous essay, which would throw me into yet another spiral of envy. And after this happened a few times, I became resentful of Robert. I started to feel like I knew what he was thinking; I started to feel like he was purposely trying to write better essays than me, like it was a competition, like he wanted me to know that he was the better writer, as if he wanted me to feel bad, which is where the resentment sprang from, and then I started to feel like I hated him; I could barely speak to him without wanting to burn his life down like Sephiroth at Nibelheim. Sometimes, when we spoke, he would tell me about how he was having trouble coming up with things to write about due to various personal issues, and I would always think to myself: YES, I HOPE YOU SUFFER SO THAT YOU NEVER PUBLISH ANOTHER ESSAY EVER AGAIN SO THAT I NEVER HAVE TO FEEL THIS WAY. I wanted him to stop publishing essays so badly, but I couldn’t tell him this outright because I was too proud to admit my weakness, thinking it made me look pathetic in some way. I grew cold and distant, started making little passive-aggressive comments about his writing style, would get drunk and rage at him in online chat, call him a pretentious copycat loser, and then I started ignoring him—all the while, he kept publishing essays, but I wouldn’t read them, both for his sake and my own, because I knew what would happen if I read them: I would go insane again. But ignoring his work didn’t help, because it was still there, still happening. In this way, oncomputer.games became a nexus of torment, and after about a year inside this nexus, Robert and I got into a big fight. I was drinking back then, and we were both drunk, and we discussed, via text, the weird funk that both of us felt. I remember telling him that I knew he thought my writing was bad and that he was trying to outdo my work, but he denied it, highlighting ways that my writing actually inspired him, but I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe him. I could not accept his words because I believed I had him all figured out, I believed that I knew the contents of his soul, and therefore, I could not be incorrect about him. And after accusing him of being a liar—like a twelve-year-old throwing a tantrum—I told him something like: YOU HAVE SURPASSED THE MASTER I RELEASE YOU GO AWAY. And that’s exactly what he did: he deleted his essays from oncomputer.games, vanished from our online spaces, and didn’t speak to me for over a year—and he was totally right to do that.
All this is to illustrate that envy is basically one of my core character traits.
I’m envious of people who are prettier than me people who know how to play instruments and sing people who know how to write and draw real well If I were a hermit crab, I’d be envious of their shell
I’m envious of people who know things I don't know even those who know less because I envy their bliss but when I feel heaven I envy the abyss
I’m envious of the people I fall in love with of how they make me swoon if I were the sun I’d be envious of the moon
I'm envious of the people I hate because I end up hating all the people I envy and I hate myself from years ago so youthful, dumb, and trendy
I’m a dark cloud envious of the sky so blue and if you're reading this there's a good chance I'm envious of you too
So, do I envy others? You’re damn right I do.
Q4: ARE YOU MANIPULATIVE?
Yes. I’m even trying to manipulate you—the reader—right now with this essay.
I’m trying to cultivate a certain image that fits the narrative of this piece: an image of an introspective person who is able to take full stock of himself, owning up to all his darkness. And I’m doing that by presenting myself in the worst possible light and then criticizing the resulting caricature. I’m also mixing fact and fiction through exaggeration and hyperbole in a way that you—the reader—are totally unable to discern, because how could you really know the true details of my life? In fact, some of the stuff in this essay is just flat-out made up, all to cultivate this version of myself that I am trying to sell to you right now. I'm even manipulating you with this seemingly honest paragraph by trying to make you believe that I am an unreliable narrator. But these are not the only ways that I’m manipulative.
At the end of Disc 1 of Final Fantasy VII, Cloud travels to confront Sephiroth in the North Crater; on his way there, Sephiroth presents Cloud with trippy images of Cloud’s past, attempting to show Cloud that he is not who he believes himself to be. Sephiroth, knowing the truth of Cloud’s identity—which is actually the identity of another person entirely, but due to both grief and mako poisoning, Cloud has subconsciously adopted this person’s identity—believes that by showing Cloud his true identity, he can control Cloud, manipulate him. Just like I am trying to manipulate you—the reader—right now. But not only that, Sephiroth, in this instance, sees himself as a truthsayer, dropping little truth meteors on Cloud; much like how I see myself when typing up ten-thousand word essays about how you should stop using the internet or how you should stop watching the news or how you shouldn't have children or that one time I pretended to know what “love” actually is
You see, I’ve written dozens of essays now, many of which proclaim to know the root cause of certain problems in the world, and each essay presents some sort of solution, as if I'm qualified to provide a solution at all. Many of the essays directly address the reader and society at large, strongly asserting conclusions that basically amount to: YOU SHOULD STOP DOING THIS AND INSTEAD TRY TO BETTER YOURSELF or something like that, trying to manipulate the reader into changing their attitude and behavior, as if I know what’s best for the world and the people in it, as if I’m some sort of truthsayer, as if I'm Sephiroth manipulating Cloud. When the truth is that I’m just a privileged white dude that has never faced any real hardship in his life. I don’t know shit. I’m just typing up long-form essays in my office here because I think it makes me seem cool, trying to manipulate people into thinking I’m a genius writer, while people all around are starving and dying en masse.
The only truth meteor here is that I’m a manipulative person, everything else is just words.
Q5: DO YOU WANT A RABID FAN CLUB?
My father used to ask me: SON, WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP? As if he were never a child himself to know how ridiculous that question actually is. And for the longest time, I didn’t have an answer—who does?—so I would play dumb, shrug it off, which was something my father hated; he wanted his little boy to be decisive and strong and athletic and basically all the things I wasn’t. But around the age of fifteen, I figured it out—I finally knew what I wanted to be: I saw it on the television, one late late night, on MTV2; the makeup on his face, his animal grace, his darkness and disgrace; that razor-sharp jawline of his and that little smirk that glew with occult radiance; the way he shifted from Stardust to Duke to Goblin King, like some sort of human chameleon; his extraterrestrial baritone howling out WE COULD BE HEROES in the deep dark, a single spotlight shining on his back, rays of light shooting out from all around him, as if he were the star itself, his celestial body swaying romantic as he stared out with those supernova eyes of his; the way the audience swooned over him, loved him, worshiped him. That’s what I wanted. That’s who I wanted to be. David Bowie. I wanted to be David Bowie.
I also wanted to be Siouxsie Sioux, Sting, Sephiroth, Morrissey, Prince, one of those robots from Daft Punk, Beck, Jack White, Kevin Shields from the band My Bloody Valentine, Trent Reznor circa Pretty Hate Machine, 2-D from Gorillaz. The list goes on. Basically: idolatry. I wanted to be just like my idols. I would take pictures of Robert Smith to the barber and they would look at me like I was fucking crazy. I wanted to be a pop star, a big-time weird celebrity. I wanted to be adored—still do, really.
Of course, my father could never know about any of this; he’d only laugh at me, tell me I’m being fanciful, unrealistic, maybe even a little stupid; he’d tell me how it would never happen, how I should focus on school and other actually-obtainable goals, and he would have been right. Because try as I might, in high school, I could just never make it work; I fronted a band, we played one gig at a coffee shop that only did acoustic shows, and me, not knowing how to play an instrument, just kinda stood there on that stage swaying Bowie-like a little bit, singing very poorly, wearing these big goofy glasses that, at the time, I thought were cool for some reason. We played a song titled “Silly Silly Sorceress,” which was inspired by Final Fantasy VIII, and we covered Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer,” and some girls came up to us afterward, told us how they liked “Psycho Killer,” but they didn’t say if they liked our cover, likely because I couldn’t pronounce the French parts properly, which was probably quite amusing to those in the audience that night. And over the loud sound-testing of the next act, one guy even said to me in a very dry tone: WELL AT LEAST YOU PUT YOURSELF OUT THERE, which, in my mind, solidified the quality of our performance. I remember one older woman said the guitarist, Robert—my best friend—was really talented and asked for his number, and this really pissed me off because it rubbed in the fact that obviously he was the talented one and I was not. Maybe if I had put in some effort in, practiced the songs more than once or twice, put in the time to learn how to play an instrument, I might have impressed those people, that might have even put me on a path to Bowiedom, who knows—but I’m not actually that attractive either, certainly not Bowie-level attractive, so I’d have to put in double the effort to get as big as Bowie, and the idea of that was just very very daunting to me, and thus I became discouraged, and then I became more envious of Robert’s seemingly natural musical ability; so, in an effort to make the pain go away, I walked away from the whole dream of becoming Bowie 2.0 and focused, instead, on taking Adderall and playing video games and, occasionally, writing for a music blog and bemoaning my life on LiveJournal.com and doing all sorts of other stupid teenage shit like pregnancy close-calls and overdosing on cough syrup and skipping school every other day.
I realize this is an incredibly long-winded way of saying that I do, indeed, want a rabid fan club. Even now, I’m trying to cultivate a rabid fan club, except I’ve moved on from trying to be a pop star to trying to be some cult online indie writer or whatever. And if you don’t believe me, then take this essay you’re reading right now as an example; take it as a microcosm of my entire writing portfolio thus far: on the one small hand, this essay exists because I enjoy writing; on the other very big hand, I want people to come away from this thinking that I, the author, am a massive super genius who is also incredibly insightful due to my uncanny ability to be so hyperaware of my own inner darkness and borderline-psychopathic machinations—as if simply being aware of this stuff fixes it somehow. So, really, what I’m trying to do here is actually cultivate a cult of personality, with myself as the pop star messiah. In other words, I’m trying to become the David Bowie of the literary blogosphere.
But that’s not necessarily true; it’s more complicated than that: I’m too vain to grovel for readers by advertising my work, thinking it’s beneath me, thinking my work should stand on its own and should therefore cultivate a cult of personality all by itself—so much so that I undermine my reach as a writer and therefore still toil in obscurity. But that self-psychoanalysis isn’t necessarily true either, because I don’t really refuse to advertise due to thinking I’m too good for it—that’s just an excuse—I refuse to advertise because I’m terrified of negative feedback, and advertising my work opens me up to a lot of negative feedback indeed. So ultimately, the first reason I cited was actually more of a lie and, in actuality, I don’t advertise because I just cannot take negative feedback very well at all, because it makes me angry and spirals me into a deep pit of egocentric despair; a pit so deep that I have to dig myself out by telling myself over and over that my critics are actually not very smart people and that they don’t know how to write like I do and therefore their criticism is invalid and they should just fuck off. So I want a rabid sycophantic fan club but I’m too afraid to really go for it for fear of someone saying something that might hurt my fragile ego.
And the few times that I have cultivated a small fan club, I ended up self-sabotaging myself into obscurity, nearly subconsciously, out of fear of exposure—for example, some of my video game writing became popular back in 2024, then I declared that writing about video games was a meaningless stupid waste of time, and thus stopped publishing on the site that was finally getting some traction, thereby ostracizing whatever video game-adjacent fan club I had worked for a year to cultivate. And there was that other time when I became semi-popular on social media then declared that social media was toxic and anyone on it was toxic as well, so, in an effort to stop being so toxic, I deleted all my social media accounts, leaving no easy way for people to contact me, thus destroying whatever semblance of a fan club I had in that space as well.
So, yes, I want a rabid fan club, but also I don’t, because I’m afraid of negative feedback; yet, when I do get negative feedback, I just tell myself that my critics are stupid and that I’m better than them in every way, and this makes me feel a little better.
Q6: DO YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN OTHER PEOPLE?
At this point, it would be stupid to deny it, as I’ve written it quite plainly above, multiple times, for all to read: I think myself better than other people—at least, that’s what I tell myself. And I’m happy to deep dive into this, but before I do, I want to talk about Sephiroth again for a moment.
When Sephiroth learned that he was a test-tube baby with alien DNA and that humans were destroying the planet to power pizza cities, he burned down Nibelheim, murdered Cloud’s girlfriend, and summoned a meteor to destroy the very planet he claimed to care about. He saw himself as the scourge of humanity, someone to wipe the slate clean: an accelerationist, a speedrunner, a one-man extinction event. But by doing this, he became the very thing he hated: a planet-killing murderer, just like the humans he thought himself so much better than. But Sephiroth had a defense for this accusation; his rage manifested a superiority complex, a barrier shielding him from accusations that he himself might also be a monster. And if he were a monster, he would have to kill himself, too; and he can’t have that, because he’s an egomaniacal psychopath. So instead, Sephiroth tells himself that he’s different from the rest, better than other people, special—and this spares him from having to deal with the cold hard truth: that maybe he’s just like the people he claims to hate. And one can’t help but think that Sephiroth knew this about himself—knew that, effectively, he was a massive hypocrite; perhaps he didn’t care, or perhaps he did, and, in destroying the planet, perhaps he planned on destroying himself too; perhaps the only person he hated was actually himself all along. One thing is certain, however: Sephiroth’s superiority complex—his belief that he was better than other people—did not come from a place of positivity, or even a place of change; it came from a place of negativity: rage, despair, maybe even a little envy. Almost as if Sephiroth had a little demon in his head, telling him lies to make himself feel better about being such a monster—when the only reason Sephiroth felt like such a monster to begin with was because he acted as if he were a monster, and by telling himself that he was ultimate lifeform—giving into the little demon in his head—he didn’t have to deal with the root cause of his despair: himself. But unfortunately, we’ll never really know his true motives, as Seprhioth was a man of few words—and those few words were those of an edgy teenager’s—if only he had written a long-winded essay explaining himself, perhaps then we would better understand his inner demons.
Pardon the cliché, but sometimes I feel like there’s a demon inside my head, an angel too, both zapping different parts of my frontal lobe. Maybe this is the left-brain, right-brain dichotomy, or the ego-id-superego thing—who knows. It’s hard to explain, but the demon and the angel feel like different layers of a soul barrier, both guarding my true soul in some sense; the demon is the surface-level barrier, the first line of defense against anything unpleasant, while the angel is the second barrier deeper down, closer to my soul and, as such, possesses some wisdom about my true self. The angel and the demon both tell me things, sometimes simultaneously, which causes no end of heinous cognitive dissonance. The demon tells me that whenever I face criticism or feel threatened or envious or whatever, whoever is kicking me in the psychic groin is a fucking idiot whom I'm better than, essentially twisting the perpetrator of my pain into some sort of monster that I can then metaphorically slay with my Ultima Weapon, thus maybe saving myself some emotional health points. The angel, however, tells me that under every superiority complex is a harrowing fear of inadequacy; she tells me that my envy is self-inflicted, because I believe myself to be inadequate by my own standard—essentially, I am unhappy with myself—and that, because of this, anyone who meets my personal standard of adequacy causes me to feel threatened because they have reached a level of adequacy that I have not yet reached myself, and that, when faced with this revelation, I erect barriers to block out the feelings of inadequacy that follow, barriers such as the demon wall of envy, rage, and narcissism. The angel tells me that, if I want to stop this envy-rage-narcissism cycle, I must focus on improving myself through hard work and practice and dedication and all that classic self-improvement stuff, and that even the simple act of attempting this self-improvement routine will help me break the cycle of envy; and sometimes, when I listen to her real hard, it makes sense and I believe her and I know she’s right, and thus I know what I must do. But then I turn my attention back to the demon, who gives me a little smirk and a wink, tells me that it’s easier to just give in, and that makes me feel good, so I turn back to the angel and say: DO YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER THAN ME? WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO HURT ME? ARE YOU DOING THIS ON PURPOSE? FUCK YOU.
And then the little angel goes poof.
#FinalFantasy7 #Essay #Autobiographical #ShortStory #ComputerGames