On "FF" in MTG.
The Final Fantasy MTG set makes me want to fucking scream and claw myself to shreds. I don't know why I feel so strongly about it, and I wish I could have a more reasonable reaction to it, but it's deeply alienating. Truly, deeply alienating.
I think it's maybe the conjunction of different factors that augments what are otherwise moderate but still distressing problems.
I dislike the hyper-commercial product MTG has become. I always thought it was a super interesting game and I resent that it has tried to commodify and cash in on community formats and fan interest in other works.
I dislike that meaningful, beloved characters and stories are having their images extracted and reproduced elsewhere merely to sell product. Yuna's life isn't meaningful because she summons creatures. It's because she is a too-young adult on a pilgrimage to sacrifice herself to protect a world that is too complex for her to even fully acquaint herself with. It's because she is headed towards death in a world fraught with death. It's because she gets to free herself and her world from a vicious, violent cycle. She gets to throw off the yoke of the world's expectations. She earns the freedom to become herself and live her own life. You wouldn't know that shit at all if you read the card.
I dislike that I feel any pressure at all to be quiet or "let people enjoy things" about this. It's perverse. Not that MTG has FF in it. It's perverse that due to our form of life, our major cultural works are shaped by the whims of a-human profit-seeking organizations, are sold as commodities rather than presented as creations with any real meaning or gravity, and we're expected to enjoy beautiful and painful and compelling characters and situations being reduced to a stat block and rules text, with a price tag.
I never understood when people would say shit like, this is perverse, this is obscene, this is an insult to life itself. But this shit isn't art even if it's made from art and happens to contain art. It's a commodity wearing the image of art, preying on your attachment to and love for art. It's disgusting.