Heavy Hero or Digital Dummy: multimodal player-avatar relations in FINAL FANTASY 7

Though an important difference between the visual semiotic of comicstrip and film
and the oral narrative tradition is that the heroes become to some extent fixed in visual
form, they are, of course, at the same time extremely visually versatile, plastic,
adaptable. A look at variations on Batman and Superman over the years confirms this
- while retaining key iconic attributes, they adapt to suit variations in aesthetic
preference, social concerns, audience demands, in successive decades. The extreme
semiotic hybridity of games produces a more concentrated kind of variety, however.
Cloud’s appearance varies across a range of artistic and technical design contexts in
FF7, as we shall see. Furthermore, his design spills out into the fan cultures which
adopt and develop the game, so that fan art produces further variations. These vary
from fan pictures more or less faithfully adapted from the iconography of the game, to
more extreme transformations such as the production of doujinshi (amateur) manga in
the Yaoi (male/male slash) tradition. Here, texts depict eroticised relations between
Cloud and Sephiroth in which the hero and villain of the game are represented as
dominant (seme) or submissive (uke) sexual partners, their roles reversing in different
texts. (Fig. 2)

[INSERT FIGURE 2 ABOUT HERE]

The guise of the game, then, offers complex cultural resources such as the sexual
ambiguity of Cloud’s design, a booted warrior but with a feminised face and hair, so
that girl-gamers can either appropriate him affectionately, as Rachel seems to do; or
reject the stereotypical gender relations of the narrative, as this Final Fantasy girl-
gamer reviewer does while acknowledging the ambiguity of the visual design:

“What about Aeris and Tifa?!” [female characters in FF7] ... you cry
indignantly. Well, simply put, they are not the lead character in the game. By

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