intro (>؂ •́)ᕗ⊹ ࣪ ˖

hi. im loz. get used to that statement. i like to say it !!

i'm a creature thing from the northern crater, come to blow up the planet and eat it for dinner. just kidding :-) haha that's what we call "comedy" where i'm from.

i am an adult. usually!

it's my personal goal this year to write more things without worrying about it being "publishable", so i made this place to be a middle ground between my shitposty tumblr and our "official" system website and AO3.

i live with my brother kadaj and sister yazoo in the town of midgar-edge. they're in my brain but also not! its complicated. i hope to use this journal to be a place where i can write out my complexities without some bullshit going on.

i have many disorders that i talk about sometimes. but i don't consider being loz "disordered" or "delusional" or see my siblings as a "symptom".
we are part of a larger system called "syzygy". but this account and all things linked to it belong to us aka "synthesis".
i think our strawpage says something about concerntrolling. whatever you're worried about wrt our behaviors is unwarranted, we live in a place for crazy people already, are on meds, etc etc. and yes, they still let me have internet access. womp womp !

uhhh i also like the rest of the ff7compilation and have played (or watched/read in the case of before crisis and ever crisis) everything except dirge of cerberus. i've also read all the books except for traces of two pasts, which is coming in the mail later this week!! other games i like are elden ring, kenshi, fallout, and basically anything that lets you kill stuff with cool weapons.
i also like to read, write, and draw.you can find my art here on tumblr (but u need an account)

sometimes, i post in bulk because i write A LOT stuff down and then decide later that i want to share. so if you add us to your daily news cycle, you may get a lot of our posts at once!
 

okay !! that's all i think! its bedtime lol i've spent all night figuring out this on this dreamwidth thang

voicetags

i refer to posts that are influenced by kadaj&yazoo as being posted "in their voice". 

they cannot front or have control over the syzygy body, so they relay information to me through speech and i will transcribe it.
i hope this gives them a bit more of a sense of independence by letting their words be seen.

so! posts with their input will include a tag "voice:their name". keep an eye out! comments can be addressed to them as well, and if they choose to respond, i will transcribe that too :-)

"he's like a newborn..."

in the age of the "minor-coded character", being us is really fucking annoying.

much ado about the Advent Children. are we adults? teens? little kids in the bodies of adults?

fun fact: it really does not matter!!

our age-incongruity is something that a lot of folks in post-remake FF7 fandom really, really can't seem to wrap their heads around. arguments about whether or not it's appropriate to ship us with anyone. calling yazoo and i "literal children", ignoring our abilities and capacity for total independence. calling me a "man-baby" for daring to show emotions beyond cold, edgy contempt for the world around me. i could go on forever.
it's frustrating to constantly run into this, and to know that others have gotten bullshit for not caring about it -- preferring to engage with us as we are presented without debate.

as part of syzygy and synthesis, as well as someone who actually cares about the story being relayed, it's all pointless. 

from a plural perspective: it's common knowledge in plural spaces that age doesn't align with intelligence, or independence, or external interests/hobbies/activities. plenty of jokes about the jaded 15 y/o who's in charge of the body's 9-to-5, or the 9 y/o who secretly loves dark souls, or the 40-something who copes through cartoons and comfort foods. idek what else to say about this. it's just a fact -- plurality sometimes makes internal experiences of age clash with external self-expression. 

from a remnant perspective: even if nomura sat down and said "yes, kadaj is 18, yazoo and loz are 21" or whatever, that still would not negate the vulnerability inherent to being born 2 weeks ago, supernatural knowledge notwithstanding. 
i personally had little control over how people physically saw me. unlike kadaj(who had a good amount of control over his body from months of practice prior to the events of AC), i could never really guess whether some one saw me as a leather-clad MMA combatant, or a strange looking little boy, or a formless cloud of pestilence. to this day, i confuse people with various parts of my appearance/expression and its relation to my identity -- from my age to my gender to my mobility aids and visibly autismophrenic behaviors.

from a story perspective: source material makes our ages unclear on purpose. the reunion files say yaz&i our in our twenties, but interviews with nomura&nojima talk about how we have a certain "childlike purity/naivete", and refer to us as "boys" in the same vein as kadaj. 
kadaj is younger than us(reunion files place him between 13-19), but has more chronological life experience and a more solid sense of self and purpose. he's the one "in charge" from the perspective of rufus, the turks, vincent, and cloud. 
this vagueness is directly related to our existence as remnants of sephiroth, as well as the general 7comp meditation on the nature of child soldiers; the cognitive dissonance required to be one, or to utilize them in your technofascist military dictatorship.

all this to say -- there's no clear answer to the question of our "true age" for a multitude of reasons. the vagueness is not only important to us as beings, but a deliberate part of our depiction on the 2D plane. learn to be okay with the fact that there is very little about a remnant that makes sense to the average person. we do not operate on human timescales or within human social norms. there are parts of us that are very childlike or straight up infantile, and other parts that are undeniably Grown As Fuck. we will indulge both of these parts at our own whims, whether it fits your interpretation or not. while our bodies are impacted by external interpretation, it is no longer the end-all-be-all of our lives. we now live in a way that rejects being "owned" by any individual or group -- whether it's sephiroth, shinra, square enix, or a head-canoner hellbent on ignoring anyone's perspective but their own.