#its her story about a plucky hero who cares about their friends

[plisuu]

My decided take on Veilguard is that it's like DA2 - we're getting a story from an unreliable narrator. This time though, we're not getting Varric, the professional, widely published thriller-mystery writer.

It's really just Bellara's amateur friend-fiction.

[crowdsourced-webcomic-reviews]

Puffer and Clarissa: By James Nelson

Sharon White has plans at world domination.  She has a magic detector, an army of robots, and a plan to overthrow the enigmatic Lord Jel.  She also has a daughter.

Puffer and Clarissa is a coming of age adventure story created by James Nelson.  After an accident washes her overboard, Puffer now finds herself stuck with Clarissa, who is just the worst.  She just can’t see how awesome Puffer’s mom is, obviously. The dynamic and interaction between the two leads is wonderful.  The enemies to friends (and maybe someday more?) pipeline is so much fun.  

I love the characters in this comic, every one of them has such great designs and over the top personalities reminiscent of the old Saturday Morning cartoons I wasn’t allowed to watch as a child.  Our heroes are plucky and interesting, and it’s been so much fun to follow along as they’ve both grown and learned about one another.  

Sharon in particular is an interesting and complex character.  There are obvious and insidious villains in the story, like Lord Jel or the wonderfully delightful Killer Whale, but the crux of the story’s conflict is about Sharon.  She is not a good mother, she is manipulative, she is cruel, she gaslights her daughter, and above all, she is self centered.  She does love her daughter, but not in a way that is healthy or really even resembles actual love and care.  Puffer’s journey to see this and hopefully break away is the heart of the story, and is told so well and so poignantly.

The flooded world of Puffer and Clarissa is interesting and cool, it is itself a character, and it is full of life and intrigue.  Every setting and location feels unique and cohesive, this is a world of survivors.

From start to present, Puffer and Clarissa has been such a delightful read, I highly recommend you check it out!  It is quickly approaching its conclusion, so now is a great time to catch up and join us for the end of this journey.

You can read Puffer and Clarissa here: https://pufferandclarissa.com

[ladyshivs]

Actually I do have a few additional questions about Sal, if it's ok? ^^ How does he feel about his tattoos? The face scars - what's the story behind them? What is his stance on the Puppet business? Who's his Puppet? How is he getting along with other Rangers?

Oooh! Thank you! It's very okay, I love to talk about my steps!

Sal is very self conscious about his tattoos. He doesn't find them particularly ugly, but its how blatantly othering they are that bothers him. In his opinion, regenes are normal human beings. They may have been grown in a lab, but they're still human. Still people. And the blue grey skin and tattoos are all set dressing, designed to make them seem inhuman, to seem unnatural. They're an acute reminder that even though he thinks of himself as human, the rest of the world will judge him based on these markings, and find him subhuman because of them.

His facial scars are from the window during heartbreak! He went out face first and had to have some plastic repairs to his cheek because of it. The lip scar is from a fight where he got caught on the mouth with a pair of brass knuckles--it knocked a tooth out in the process as well.

His puppet is another OC that I reskinned, Avery Serpas. The puppet is just a tool in his eyes. A dead body. Sal's got a fairly mid-level ruthlessness, but it gets a bump because he doesn't really care if the puppet gets hurt during the gala. Don't get him wrong, its a very useful thing to have in his back pocket, but it also one that he could replace if he was pressed to. He's not losing any sleep to guilt over possessing a nearly dead body to achieve his goals.

As for the rangers, he and Chen are both tacticians, and they actually get a long surprisingly well for two people who can't seem to stop posturing and keeping their guards up. He likes Spoon and the chats that he's had with Chen haven't always ended terribly. He'd call him a friend, but it's still very tense. There's a lot still being hidden on both sides.

Herald is a plucky little thing, in Sal's eyes. A kid with a lot of potential that he agrees to train, enjoying the hero worship and the chance to plant some information and keep tabs on the rangers without putting too much spotlight on himself. He severely underestimates Daniel, something that he starts to catch on to during the rescue from the hospital when Daniel lifts him.

He caught Argent's dress on fire during the gala and now he has to focus to not get a boner when they fight on the bridge. She's lovely, she's wildly dangerous. She thinks he's a cheater and only very much hates his schmoozing and sleazy jabs. But by the end of retribution, they've reached an wibbly level of respect for one another. He let her have the regenerator, largely because he fucked up with Dr. Mortum.

Or well. He exposed himself to Dr. Mortum. It didn't go as he planned, but he's sure he can smooth that over. He's sure of it.

And then there's Julia. And what can he say about her?

It's annoying as fuck that she didn't move on. That she won't move on. That she keeps clinging to this idea, this ghost, of who he was and who she wants him to be. That she thinks that a few drinks and cigars and kisses can bring that fake version of himself back from the dead. So she can tell herself that she never lost him in the first place. And he is, without pause or question, helplessly in love with her.

She's an asshole that needs to know when the fight is too big for her to handle and all he wants is to make her laugh. He wants to get her heart racing and make her feel young and invincible and he wants her respect and he wants her mouth and her hands and her control over him, looking down at him and knowing she could break him with a word. He wants to meet eyes across the room and share a knowing look before they both move in for a. Well.

Not a kill.

[knightotoc]

So the final ep of Rings of Power came out yesterday, and I binged the whole season with my dad. Kind of a rough show to watch with him, since it's all about mean dads! How far this story has gone since Tolkien wrote it for his kids.

I went into it with low expectations, but it ended up disappointing me in compelling ways. Like Star Trek movies, the even-numbered episodes are better than the odd-numbered ones. Late-game reveals retroactively add some thrill, but can't go back in time to erase the initial tedium. The show has the same structural and characterizational flaws as last decade's LotR spinoff, the Hobbit trilogy: unrestrained emptiness in both showtime and our hero's brains. These goodguys are stupid, and their writers have even less respect for the audience.

But stupidity, while an unexpected legacy for the world's most overthought fictional setting, is not a killing blow to it. We've always had Pippin, after all. The thing that hurts, the thing that makes RoP unique, is indifference. These characters, with a handful of important exceptions, do not love each other. They certainly don't hate each other. They just don't care. In the first scene children destroy each other's toys, and nobody really grows out of that pointlessly selfish mindset.

Fight choreography is self-centered and nasty. Shot composition is lonely. Nobody talks to each other with the goal of actually communicating; they speak in dramatic pauses, anecdotes, twists and turns. At one point, a blind woman asks what has happened, and no one answers her. Her father died. Everyone else is too far inside their own feelings to tell the person for whom that matters most.

The leadership and general population of the elves, dwarves, and humans are bigoted isolationists. The villains, a host of orcs who wear cool skulls on their heads like Cubone, display far more fellowship and joie de vivre than any group we're supposed to like. They even call their leader Dad, and, by this show's standards, he's above-average at that role.

But the most shocking intrusion of indifference is with the horrible nomadic harfoots. You know how ohana means family, and family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten? I don't think they know about ohana, Pip. These cultish hobbit-knockoffs condemn anyone who misbehaves, and their family, to the back of the group when they migrate. If not for some supernatural help, our plucky heroine would apparently have gotten picked off in the night by the cruel forces of nature. If the hobbits had been anything like the harfoots, the only logical message of the original story would have been "Fuck the Shire."

But I said there were important exceptions. Of the multiple subplots, at least two revolve around genuine affection, and at least one of those is actually cool and fun. Firstly, there is the grand romance of sexy elf Arondir and lovely human Bronwyn, original characters who have to drag around his lazy coworkers, her stupid neighbors, and a cute kid.

Secondly, there is the rekindled friendship of conflicted dwarf prince Durin and ambitious half-elf Elrond...who is not only my favorite character in LotR but one of my favorite characters in anything, so I am happy to report that he slays in this one. And in the end, for me, that's all that really matters.

Durin and Elrond's friendship is not only beautiful on its own, but it shines all the brighter among the cynicism and apathy that characterizes the rest of this show. After some genuinely great shenanigans, Elrond starts to give Durin a literal elevator pitch about some bullshit. Suddenly, Durin tearfully confronts Elrond with the fact that, though they used to be friends, Elrond missed Durin's wedding and the birth of two of his children. Elrond is taken aback -- after all, twenty years is much shorter for an elf than any other being. He apologizes. They hang out. They take a vow on the mountain. They defend each other to their shitty kings, at the risk of their own futures. Durin almost tells Elrond his true name, and Elrond's like, "Save it for Heaven." They cry because they wuv each other so much. It fucking rules. Eat your hearts out, Legolas and Gimli.

Unfortunately Elrond's not a dad yet -- he's a little baby who looks like a combination of Hermey and MatPat (pictured) -- so the proportion of bad dads to good dads remains overwhelmingly poor. The only actually good one was the one who sat next to me while we endured this terrible production.

[insanehobbit]

a twenty-five thousand word post about a twenty-three year old “debate”

As time goes on, I’m baffled that it remains a commonly held opinion that:

The LTD remains unresolved

SE is deliberately playing coy, and are (or have been) afraid to resolve it.

To me, the answer is as clear as day, and yet seeing so many people acting as if it’s a question that remains unanswered makes me wonder if I’m the crazy one.

So I am going to try to articulate my thought process here, not because I expect to change any hearts and minds, but more to get these thoughts out of my head and onto a page so I can finally read a book and/or watch reruns of Shark Tank in peace.

To start off, there are two categories of argument (that are among, if not the most widely used lines of argument) that I will try NOT to engage with:

1) Quotes from Ultimania or developer interviews - while they’re great for easter eggs and behind-the-scenes info, if a guidebook is required to understand key plot points, you have fundamentally failed as a storyteller. Now the question of which character wants to bone whom is often something that can be relegated to a guidebook, but in the case of FF7, you would be watching two very different stories play out depending on who Cloud ends up with.

Of course, the Ultimanias do spell this out clearly, but luckily for us, SE are competent enough storytellers that we can find the answer by looking at the text alone.

2) Arguments about character actions/motivations — specifically, I’m talking about stuff like “Cloud made this face in this scene, which means be must be [insert whatever here].”

Especially when it comes to the LTD, these tend to focus on individual actions, decontextualizing them from their role in the narrative as a whole. LTDers often try to put themselves in the character’s shoes to suss out what they may be thinking and feeling in those moments. These arguments will be colored by personal experiences, which will inevitably vary.

Let’s take for example Cloud’s behavior in Advent Children. One may argue that it makes total sense given that he’s dying and fears failing the ones he loves. Another may argue that there’s no way that he would run unless he was deeply unhappy and pining after a lost love. Well, you’ll probably just be talking over each other until the cows come home. Such is the problem with trying to play armchair therapist with a fictional character. It’s not like we can ask Cloud himself why he did what he did (and even if we could, he’s not the exactly the most reliable narrator in the world). Instead, in trying to understand his motivations, we are left with no choice but to draw comparisons with our own personal experiences, those of our friends, or other works of media we’ve consumed. Any interpretation would be inherently subjective and honestly, a futile subject for debate.

There’s nothing wrong with drawing personal connections with fictional characters of course. That is the purpose of art after all. They are vessels of empathy. But when we’re talking about what is canon, it doesn’t matter what we take away. What matters is the creators’ intent.

Cloud, Tifa and Aerith are not your friends Bob, Alice and Maude. They are characters created by Square Enix. Real people can behave in a variety of different ways if they found themselves in the situations faced by our dear trio; however, FF7 characters are not sentient creatures. Everything they do or say is dictated by the developers to serve the story they are trying to tell.

So what do we have left then? Am I asking you, dear reader, to just trust me, anonymous stranger on the Internet, when I tell you #clotiiscanon. Well, in a sense, yes, but more seriously, I’m going to try to suss out what the creator’s intent is based on what is, and more importantly, what isn’t, on screen.

Instead of putting ourselves in the shoes of the characters, let’s try putting ourselves in the shoes of the creators. So the question would then be, if the intent is X, then what purpose does character Y or scene Z serve?

The story of FF7 isn’t the immutable word of God etched in a stone tablet. For every scene that made it into the final game, there are dozens of alternatives that were tossed aside. Let us also not forget the crude economics of popular storytelling. Spending resources on one particular aspect of the game may mean something entirely unrelated will have to be cut for time. Thus, the absence of a particular character/scenario is an alternative in itself. So with all these options at their disposal, why is the scene we see before us the one that made it into the final cut? — Before we dive in, I also want to define two broad categories of narrative: messy and clean.

Messy narratives are ones I would define as stories that try to illuminate something about the human condition, but may not leave the audience feeling very good by the end of it. The protagonists, while not always anti-heroes, don’t always exhibit the kind of growth we’d like, don’t always learn their lessons, probably aren’t the best role models. The endings are often ambivalent, ambiguous, and leaves room for the audience to take away from it what they will. This is the category I would put art films and prestige cable dramas.

Clean narratives are where I would categorize most popular forms of entertainment. Not that these characters necessarily lack nuance, but whatever flaws are portrayed are something to be overcome by the end of story. The protagonists are characters you’re supposed to want to root for

Final Fantasy as a series would fall under the ‘clean’ category. Sure, many of the protagonists start out as jerks, but they grow through these flaws and become true heroes by the end of their journey. Hell, a lot of the time even the villains are redeemed. They want you to like the characters you’re spending a 40+ hr journey with. Their depictions can still be realistic, but they will become the most idealized versions of themselves by the end of their journeys.

This is important to establish, because we can then assume that it is not SE’s intent to make any of their main characters come off pathetic losers or unrepentant assholes. Now whether or not they succeed in that endeavor is another question entirely.

FF7 OG or The dumbest thought experiment in the world

With that one thousand word preamble out of the way, let’s finally take a look at the text. In lieu of going through the OG’s story beat by beat, let’s try this thought experiment:

Imagine it’s 1996, and you’re a development executive at what was then Squaresoft. The plucky, young development team has the first draft of what will become the game we know as Final Fantasy VII. Like the preceding entries in the series, it’s a world-spanning action adventure RPG, with a key subplot being the epic tragic romance between its hero and heroine, Cloud and Aerith.

They ask you for your notes.

(For the sake of your sanity and mine, let’s limit our hypothetical notes to the romantic subplot)

Disc 1 - everything seems to be on the right track. Nice meet-cute, lots of moments developing the relationship between our pair. Creating a love triangle with this Tifa character is an interesting choice, but she’s a comparatively minor character so she probably won’t be a real threat and will find her happiness elsewhere by the end of the game. You may note that they’re leaning a bit too much into Tifa and Cloud’s past. Especially the childhood promise flashback early in the game — cute scene, but a distraction from main story and main pairing — fodder for the chopping block. You may also bump on the fact that Aerith is initially attracted to Cloud because he reminds her of an ex, but this is supposed to be a more mature FF. That can be an obstacle they overcome as Aerith gets to know the real Cloud.

Aerith dies, but it is supposed to be a tragic romance after all. Death doesn’t have to be the end for this relationship, especially since Aerith is an Ancient after all.

It’s when Disc 2 starts that things go off the rails. First off, it feels like an awfully short time for Cloud to be grieving the love of his life, though it’s somewhat understandable. This story is not just a romance. There are other concerns after all, Cloud’s identity crisis for one. Though said identity crisis involves spending a lot of time developing his relationship with another woman. It’s one thing for Cloud and Tifa to be from the same hometown, but does she really need to play such an outsized role in his internal conflict? This might give the player the wrong impression.

You get to the Northern Crater, and it just feels all wrong. Cloud is more or less fine after the love of his life is murdered in front of his eyes but has a complete mental breakdown to the point that he’s temporarily removed as a playable character because Tifa loses faith in him??? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Oh, but it only gets worse from here. With Cloud gone, the POV switches to Tifa and her feelings for him and her desire to find him. The opening of the game is also recontextualized when you learn the only reason that Cloud was part of the first Reactor mission that starts the game is because Tifa found him and wanted to keep an eye on him.

Then you get to Mideel and the alarm bells are going off. Tifa drops everything, removing her from the party as well, to take care of Cloud while he’s a catatonic vegetable? Not good. Very not good. This level of selfless devotion is going to make Cloud look like a total asshole when he rejects her in favor of Aerith. Speaking of Aerith, she uh…hasn’t been mentioned for some time. In fact, her relationship with Cloud has remained completely static after Disc 1, practically nonexistent, while his with Tifa has been building and building. Developing a rival relationship that then needs to be dismantled rather than developing the endgame relationship doesn’t feel like a particularly valuable use of time and resources.

By the time you get to the Lifestream scene, you’re about ready to toss the script out of the window. Here’s the emotional climax of the entire game, where Cloud’s internal conflict is finally resolved, and it almost entirely revolves around Tifa? Rather than revisiting the many moments of mental anguish we experienced during the game itself — featuring other characters, including let’s say, Aerith — it’s about a hereto unknown past that only Tifa has access to? Not only that, but we learn that the reason Cloud wanted to join SOLDIER was to impress Tifa, and the reason he adopted his false persona was because he was so ashamed that he couldn’t live up to the person he thought Tifa wanted him to be? Here, we finally get a look into the inner life of one half of our epic couple and…it entirely revolves around another woman??

Cloud is finally his real self, and hey, it looks like he finally remembers Aerith, that’s at least a step in the right direction. Though still not great. With his emotional arc already resolved, any further romantic developments is going to feel extraneous and anticlimactic. It just doesn’t feel like there’s enough time to establish that:

Cloud’s romantic feelings for Tifa (which were strong enough to launch his hero’s journey) have transformed into something entirely platonic in the past few days/weeks

Cloud’s feelings for Aerith that he developed while he was pretending to be someone else (and not just any someone, but Aerith’s ex of all people) are real.

This isn’t a romantic melodrama after all. There’s still a villain to kill and a world to save.

Cloud does speak of Aerith wistfully, and even quite personally at times, yet every time he talks about her, he’s surrounded by the other party members. A scene or two where he can grapple with his feelings for her on his own would help. Her ghost appearing in the Sector 5 Church feels like a great opportunity for this to happen, but he doesn’t interact with it at all. What gives? Missed opportunity after missed opportunity.

The night before the final battle, Cloud asks the entire party to find what they’re fighting for. This feels like a great (and perhaps the last) opportunity to establish that for Cloud, it’s in Aerith’s memory and out of his love for her. He could spend those hours alone in any number of locations associated with her — the Church, the Temple of the Ancients, the Forgotten City.

Instead — none of those happens. Instead, once again, it’s Cloud and Tifa in another scene where they’re the only two characters in the scene. You’re really going to have Cloud spend what could very well be the last night of his life with another woman? With a fade to black that strongly implies they slept together? In one fell swoop, you’re portraying Cloud as a guy who not only betrays the memory of his lost love, but is also incredibly callous towards the feelings of another woman by taking advantage of her vulnerability. Why are we rooting for him to succeed again?

Cloud and the gang finally defeat Sephiroth, and Aerith guides him back into the real world. Is he finally explicitly stating that he’s searching for her (though they’ve really waited until the last minute to do so), but again, why is Tifa in this scene? Shouldn’t it just be Cloud and Aerith alone? Why have Tifa be there at all? Why have her and her alone of all the party members be the one waiting for Cloud? Do you need to have Tifa there to be rejected while Cloud professes his unending love for Aerith? It just feels needlessly cruel and distracts from what should be the sole focus of the scene, the love between Cloud and Aerith.

What a mess.

You finish reading, and since it is probably too late in the development process to just fire everyone, you offer a few suggestions that will clarify the intended romance while the retaining the other plot points/general themes of the game.

Here they are, ordered by scale of change, from minor to drastic:

Option 1 would be to keep most of the story in tact, but rearrange the sequence of events so that the Lifestream sequence happens before Aerith’s death. That way, Cloud is his true self and fully aware of his feelings for both women before Aerith’s death. That way, his past with Tifa isn’t some ticking bomb waiting to go off in the second half of the game. That development will cease at the Lifestream scene. Cloud will realize the affection he held for her as a child is no longer the case. He is grateful for the past they shared, but his future is with Aerith. He makes a clear choice before that future is taken away from him with her death. The rest of the game will go on more or less the same (with the Highwind scene being eliminated, of course) making it clear, that avenging the death of his beloved is one of, if not the, primary motivation for him wanting to defeat Sephiroth.

The problem with this “fix” is that a big part of the reason that Aerith gets killed is because of Cloud’s identity crisis. If said crisis is resolved, the impact of her death will be diminished, because it would feel arbitrary rather than something that stems from the consequences of Cloud’s actions. More of the story will need to be reconceived so that this moment holds the same emotional weight.

Another problem is why the Lifestream scene needs to exist at all. Why spend all that time developing the backstory for a relationship that will be moot by the end of the game? It makes Tifa feel like less of a character and more of a plot device, who becomes irrelevant after she services the protagonist’s character development and then has none of her own. That’s no way to treat one of the main characters of your game.

Option 2 would be to re-imagine Tifa’s character entirely. You can keep some of her history with Cloud in tact, but expand her backstory so she is able to have a satisfactory character arc outside of her relationship with Cloud. You could explore the five years in her life since the Nibelheim incident. Maybe she wasn’t in Midgar the whole time. Maybe, like Barret, she has her own Corel, and maybe reconciling with her past there is the climax of her emotional arc as opposed to her past with Cloud. For Cloud too, her importance needs to be diminished. She can be one of the people who help him find his true self in the Lifestream, but not the only person. There’s no reason the other people he’s met on his journey can’t be there. Thus their relationship remains somewhat important, but their journeys are not so entwined that it distracts from Cloud and Aerith’s romance.

Option 3 would be to really lean into the doomed romance element of Cloud and Aerith’s relationship. Have her death be the cause of his mental breakdown, and have Aerith be the one in the Lifestream who is able to put his mind back together and bring him back to the realm of consciousness. After he emerges, he has the dual goal of defeating Sephiroth and trying to reunite with Aerith. In the end, in order to do the former, he has to relinquish the latter. He makes selfless choice. He makes the choice that resonates the overall theme of the game. It’s a bittersweet but satisfying ending. Cloud chooses to honor her memory and her purpose over the chance to physically bring her back. In this version of the game, the love triangle serves no purpose. There’s no role for Tifa at all.

Okay, we can be done with this strained counterfactual. What I’ve hopefully illustrated is that while developers had countless opportunities to solidify Cloud/Aerith as the canon couple in Discs 2 and 3 of the game, they instead chose a different route each and every time. What should also be clear is that the biggest obstacle standing in their way is not Aerith’s death, but the fact that Tifa exists.

At least in the form she takes in the final game, as a playable character and at the very least, the 3rd most important character in game’s story. She is not just another recurring NPC or an antagonist. Her love for Cloud is not going to be treated like a mere trifle or obstacle. If Cloud/Aerith was supposed to be the endgame ship, there would be no need for a love triangle and no need to include Tifa in the game at all. Death is a big enough obstacle, developing Cloud’s relationship with Tifa would only distract from and diminish his romance with Aerith.

I think this is something the dead enders understand intuitively, even more so than many Cloti shippers. Which is why some of them try to dismiss Tifa’s importance in the story so that she becomes a minor supporting character at best, or denigrate her character to the point that she becomes an actual villain. The Seifer to a Squall, the Seymour to a Tidus, hell even a Quistis to a Rinoa, they know how to deal with, but a Tifa Lockhart? As she is actually depicted in Final Fantasy VII? They have no playbook for that, and thus they desperately try to squeeze her into one of these other roles.

Let’s try another thought experiment, and see what would to other FF romances if we inserted a Tifa Lockhart-esque character in the middle of them.

FFXV is a perfect example because it features the sort of tragic love beyond death romance that certain shippers want Cloud and Aerith to be. Now, did I think FFXV was a good game? No. Did I think Noctis/Luna was a particularly well-developed romance? Also no. Did I have any question in my mind whatsoever that they were the canon relationship? Absolutely not.

Is this because they kiss at the end? Well sure, that helps, but also it’s because the game doesn’t spend the chapters after Luna’s death developing Noctis’ relationship with another woman. If Noctis/Luna had the same sort of development as Cloud/Aerith, then after Luna dies, Iris would suddenly pop in and play a much more prominent role. The game would flashback to her past and her relationship with Noctis. And it would be through his relationship with Iris that Noctis understands his duty to become king or a crystal or whatever the fuck that game was about. Iris is by Noctis’ side through the final battle, and when he ascends the throne in that dreamworld or whatever. There, Luna finally shows up again. Iris is still in the frame when Noctis tells her something like ‘Oh sorry, girl, I’ve been in love with Luna all along,” before he kisses Luna and the game ends.

(a very real scene from a very good game)

Come on. It would be utterly ludicrous and an utter disservice to every character involved, yet that is essentially the argument Cloud/Aerith shippers are making. SE may have made some pretty questionable storytelling decisions in the past, but they aren’t that bad at this.

Or in FFVIII, it would be like reordering the sequence of events so that Squall remembers that he grew up in an orphanage with all the other kids after Rinoa falls into a coma. And while Rinoa is out of commission, instead of Quistis gracefully bowing out after realizing she had mistaken her feelings of sisterly affection for love, it becomes Quistis’ childhood relationship with Squall that allows him to remember his past and re-contextualizes the game we’ve played thus far, so that the player realizes that it was actually Quistis who was his motivation all along. Then after this brief emotional detour, his romance with Rinoa would continue as usual. Absolutely absurd.

The Final Fantasy games certainly have their fair share of plot holes, but they’ve never whiffed on a romance this badly.

A somewhat more serious character analysis of the OG

What then is Tifa’s actual role in the story of FFVII? Her character is intricately connected to Cloud’s. In fact, they practically have the same arc, though Tifa’s is rather understated compared to his. She doesn’t adopt a false persona after all. For both of them, the flaw that they must learn to overcome over the course of the game is their fear of confronting the truth of their past. Or to put it more crudely, if they’re not lying, they’re at the very least omitting the truth. Cloud does so to protect himself from his fear of being exposed as a failure. Tifa does so at the expense of herself, because she fears the truth will do more harm than good. They’re two sides of the same coin. Nonetheless, their lying has serious ramifications.

The past they’re both afraid to confront is of course the Nibelheim Incident from five years ago. Thus, the key points in their emotional journeys coincide with the three conflicting Nibelheim flashbacks depicted in the game: Cloud’s false memory in Kalm, Sephiroth’s false vision in the Northern Crater, and the truth in the Lifestream.

Before they enter the Lifestream, both Cloud and Tifa are at the lowest of their lows. Cloud has had a complete mental breakdown and is functionally a vegetable. Tifa has given up everything to take care of Cloud as she feels responsible for his condition. If he doesn’t recover, she may never find peace.

With nothing left to lose, they both try to face the past head on. For Cloud, it’s a bit harder. At the heart of all this confusion, is of course, the Nibelheim Incident. How does Cloud know all these things he shouldn’t if Tifa doesn’t remember seeing him there? The emotional climax for both Cloud and Tifa, and arguably the game as a whole, is the moment the Shinra grunt removes his helmet to reveal that Cloud was there all along.

Tifa is the only character who can play this role for Cloud. It’s not like she a found a videotape in the Lifestream labeled ‘Nibelheim Incident - REAL’ and voila, Cloud is fixed. No, she is the only one who can help him because she is the only person who lived through that moment. No one else could make Cloud believe it. You could have Aerith or anyone else trying to tell him what actually happened, but why would he believe it anymore than the story Sephiroth told him at the Northern Crater?

With Tifa, it’s different. Not only was she physically there, but she’s putting as much at risk in what the truth may reveal. She’s not just a plot device to facilitate Cloud’s character development. The Lifestream sequence is as much the culmination of her own character arc. If it goes the wrong way, “Cloud” may find out that he’s just a fake after all, and Tifa may learn that boy she thought she’d been on this journey with had died years ago. That there’s no one left from her past, that it was all in her head, that she’s all alone. Avoiding this truth is a comfort, but in this moment, they’re both putting themselves on the line. Being completely vulnerable in front of the person they’re most terrified of being vulnerable with.

The developers have structured Cloud and Tifa’s character arcs so that the crux is a moment where the other is literally the only person who could provide the answer they need. Without each other, as far as the story is concerned, Cloud and Tifa would remain incomplete.

Aerith’s character arc is a different beast entirely. She is the closest we have to the traditional Campbellian Hero. She is the Chosen One, the literal last of her kind, who has been resisting the call to adventure until she can no longer. The touchstones of her character arc are the moments she learns more about her Cetra past and comes to terms with her role in protecting the planet - namely Cosmo Canyon, the Temple of the Ancients and the Forgotten City.

How do hers and Cloud’s arcs intersect? When it comes to the Nibelheim incident, she is a merely a spectator (at least during the Kalm flashback, as for the other two, she is uh…deceased). Cloud attacking her at the Temple of the Ancients, which results in her running to the Forgotten City alone and getting killed by Sephiroth, certainly exacerbates his mental deterioration, but it is by no means a turning point in his arc the way the Northern Crater is.

As for Cloud’s role in Aerith’s arc, their meeting is quite important in that it sets forth the series of events that leads her to getting captured by Shinra and thus meeting “Sephiroth” and wanting to learn more about the Cetra. It’s the inciting incident if we’re going to be really pedantic about it, yet Aerith’s actual character development is not dependent on her relationship with Cloud. It is about her communion with her Cetra Ancestry and the planet.

To put it in other terms, all else being the same, Aerith could still have a satisfying character arc had Cloud not crashed down into her Church. Sure, the game would look pretty different, but there are other ways for her to transform from a flirty, at times frivolous girl to an almost Christ-like figure who accepts the burden of protecting the planet.

Such is not the case for Cloud and Tifa. Their character arcs are built around their shared past and their relationship with one another. Without Tifa, you would have to rewrite Cloud’s character entirely. What was his motivation for joining SOLDIER? How did he get on that AVALANCHE mission in the first place? Who can possibly know him well enough to put his mind back together after it falls apart? If the answer to all these questions is the same person, then congratulations, you’ve just reverse engineered Tifa Lockhart.

Tifa fares a little better. Without Cloud, she would be a sad, sweet character who never gets the opportunity to reconcile with the trauma of her past. Superficially, a lot would be the same, but she would ultimately be quite static and all the less interesting for it.

Let’s also take a brief gander at Tifa’s role after the Lifestream sequence. At this point in the game, both Tifa and Cloud’s emotional arcs are essentially complete. They are now the most idealized versions of themselves, characters the players are meant to admire and aspire to. However they are depicted going forward, it would not be the creator’s intent for their actions to be perceived in a negative light.

A few key moments standout, ones that would not be included if the game was intended to end with any other romantic pairing or with Cloud’s romantic interest left ambiguous:

The Highwind scene, which I’ve gone over above. It doesn’t matter if you get the Low Affection or High Affection version. It would not reflect well on either Cloud or Tifa if he chose to spend what could be his last night alive with a woman whose feelings he did not reciprocate.

Before the final battle with Sephiroth, the party members scream out the reasons they’re fighting. Barret specifically calls out AVALANCHE, Marlene and Dyne, Red XIII specifically calls out his Grandpa, and Tifa specifically calls out Cloud. You are not going to make one of Tifa’s last moments in the game be her pining after a guy who has no interest in her. Not when you could easily have her mention something like her past, her hometown or hell even AVALANCHE and Marlene like Barret. If Tifa’s feelings for Cloud are meant to be unrequited, then it would be a character flaw that would be dealt with long before the final battle (see: Quistis in FF8 or Eowyn in the Lord of the Rings). They would not still be on display at moment like this.

Tifa being the only one there when Cloud jumps into the Lifestream to fight Sephiroth for the last time, and Tifa being the only one there when he emerges. She is very much playing the traditional partner/spouse role here, when you could easily have the entire party present or no one there at all. There is clearly something special about her relationship with Cloud that sets her apart from the other party members.

Once again, let’s look at the “I think I can meet her there moment.” And let’s put side the translation (the Japanese is certainly more ambiguous, and it’s not like the game had any trouble having Cloud call Aerith by her name before this). If Cloud was really expressing his desire to reunite with Aerith, and thus his rejection of Tifa, then the penultimate scene of this game is one that involves the complete utter and humiliation of one of its main characters since Tifa’s reply would indicate she’s inviting herself to a romantic reunion she has no part in. Not only that, but to anyone who is not Cl*rith shipper, the protagonist of the game is going to come off as a callous asshole. That cannot possibly be the creator’s intention. They are competent enough to depict an act of love without drawing attention to the party hurt by that love.

What then could possibly be the meaning? Could it possibly be Cloud trying to comfort Tifa by trying to find a silver lining in what appears to be their impending death? That this means they may get to see their departed loved ones again, including their mutual friend, Aerith? (I will note that Tifa talks about Aerith as much, if not even more than Cloud, after her death). Seems pretty reasonable to me, this being an interpretation of the scene that aligns with the overall themes of the game, and casts every character in positive light during this bittersweet moment.

Luckily enough, we have an entire fucking Compilation to find out which is right.

But before we get there, I’m sure some of you (lol @ me thinking anyone is still reading this) are asking, if Cloti is canon, then why is there a love triangle at all? Why even hint at the possibility of a romance between Cloud and Aerith? Wouldn’t that also be a waste of time and resources if they weren’t meant to be canon?

Well, there are two very important reasons that have nothing to do with romance and everything to do with two of the game’s biggest twists:

Aerith initially being attracted to Cloud’s similarities to Zack/commenting on the uncanniness of said similarities is an organic way to introduce the man Cloud’s pretending to be. Without it, the reveal in the Lifestream would fall a bit flat. The man he’s been emulating all along would just be some sort of generic hero rather than a person whose history and deeds already encountered during the course of the game. Notably for this to work, the game only has to establish Aerith’s attraction to Cloud.

To build the player’s attachment to Aerith before her death/obscure the fact that she’s going to die. With the technological limitations of the day, the only way to get the player to interact with Aerith is through the player character (AKA Cloud), and adding an element of choice (AKA the Gold Saucer Date mechanic) makes the player even more invested. This then elevates Aerith’s relationship with Cloud over hers with any other character. At the same time, because her time in the game is limited, Cloud ends up interacting with Aerith more than any of the other characters, at least in Disc 1. The choice to make many of these interactions flirty/romantic also toys with player expectations. One does not expect the hero’s love interest to die halfway through the game. The game itself also spends a bit of time teasing the romance, albeit, largely in superficial ways like other characters commenting on their relationship or Cait Sith reading their love fortune at the Temple of the Ancients. Yet, despite the quantity of their personal interactions, Cloud and Aerith never display any moments of deep love or devotion that one associates with a Final Fantasy romance. They never have the time. What the game establishes then is the potential of a romance rather than the romance itself. Aerith’s death hurts because of all that lost potential. There so many things she wanted to do, so many places she wanted to see that will never happen because her life is cut short. Part of what is lost, of course, is the potential of her romance with Cloud.

This creative choice is a lot more controversial since it elevates subverting audience expectations over character, and understandably leads to some player confusion. What’s the point of all this set up if there’s not going to be a pay off? Well, that is kind of the point. Death is frustrating because of all the unknowns and what-ifs. But, I suppose some people just can’t accept that fact in a game like this.

One last note on the OG before we move on: Even though this from an Ultimania, since we’re talking about story development and creator intent, I thought it was relevant to include: the fact that Aerith was the sole heroine in early drafts of the game is not the LTD trump card so people think it is. Stories undergo radical changes through the development process. More often than not, there are too many characters, and characters are often combined or removed if their presence feels redundant or confusing.

In this case, the opposite happened. Tifa was added later in the development process as a second heroine. Let’s say that Aerith was the Last Ancient and the protagonist’s sole love interest in this early draft of Final Fantasy VII. In the game that was actually released, that role was split between two characters (and last I checked, Tifa is not the last of a dying race), and Aerith dies halfway through the game, so what does that suggest about how Aerith’s role may have changed in the final product? Again, if Aerith was intended to be Cloud’s love interest, Tifa simply would not exist.

A begrudging analysis of our favorite straight-to-DVD sequel

Let’s move onto the Compilation. And in doing so, completely forget about the word vomit that’s been written above. While it’s quite clear to me now that there’s no way in hell the developers would have intended the last scene in the game to be both a confirmation of Cloud’s love for Aerith and his rejection of Tifa, in my younger and more vulnerable years, I wasn’t so sure. In fact, this was the prevailing interpretation back in the pre-Compilation Dark Ages. Probably because of a dubious English translation of the game and a couple of ambiguous cameos in Final Fantasy Tactics and Kingdom Hearts were all we  had to go on.

How then did the official sequel to Final Fantasy VII change those priors?

Two years after the events of the game, Cloud is living as a family with Tifa and two kids rather than scouring the planet for a way to be reunited with Aerith. Shouldn’t the debate be well and over with that? Obviously not, and it’s not just because people were being obstinate. Part of the confusion stems from Advent Children itself, but I would argue that did not come from an intent to play coy/keep Cloud’s romantic desires ambiguous, but rather a failure of execution of his character arc.

Now I wasn’t the biggest fan of the film when I first watched a bootlegged copy I downloaded off LimeWire in 2005, and I like it even less now, but I better understand its failures, given its unique position as a sequel to a beloved game and the cornerstone of launching the Compilation.

The original game didn’t have such constraints on its storytelling. Outside of including a few elements that make it recognizable as a Final Fantasy (Moogles, Chocobos, Summons, etc.) and being a good enough game to be a financial success, the developers pretty much had free rein in terms of what story they wanted to tell, what characters they would use to tell it, and how long it took for them to tell said story.

With Advent Children, telling a good story was not the sole or even primary goal. Instead, it had to:

Do some fanservice: The core audience is going to be the OG fanbase, who would be expecting to see modern, high-def depictions of all the memorable and beloved characters from the game, no matter if the natural end point of their stories is long over.

Set up the rest of the Compilation - Advent Children is the draw with the big stars, but also a way to showcase the lesser known characters from from the Compilation who are going to be leading their own spinoffs.  It’s part feature film/part advertisement for the rest of the Compilation. Thus, the Turks, Vincent and Zack get larger roles in the film than one might expect to attract interest to the spinoffs they lead.

Show off its technical prowess: SE probably has enough self awareness to realize that what’s going to set it apart from other animated feature films is not its novel storytelling, but its graphical capabilities. Thus, to really show off those graphics, the film is going to be packed to the brim with big, complicated action scenes with lots of moving parts, as opposed to quieter character driven moments.

These considerations are not unique to Advent Children, but important to note nonetheless:

As a sequel, the stakes have to be just as high if not higher than those in the original work. Since the threat in the OG was the literal end of the world, in Advent Children, the world’s gotta end again

The OG was around 30-40 hours long. An average feature-length film is roughly two hours. Video games and films are two very different mediums. As many TV writers who have tried to make the transition to film (and vice-versa) can tell you, success in one medium does not translate to success in another. 

With so much to do in so little time, is it any wonder then that it is again Sephiroth who is the villain trying to destroy the world and Aerith in the Lifestream the deus ex machina who saves the day?

All of this is just a long-winded way to say, certain choices in the Advent Children that may seem to exist only to perpetuate the LTD were made with many other storytelling considerations in mind.

When trying to understand the intended character arcs and relationship dynamics, you cannot treat the film as a collection of scenes devoid of context. You can’t just say - “well here’s a scene where Cloud seems to miss Aerith, and here’s another scene where Cloud and Tifa fight. Obviously, Cloud loves Aerith.” You have to look at what purpose these scenes serve in the grander narrative.

And what is this grander narrative? To put it in simplistic terms, Aerith is the obstacle, and Tifa is goal. Cloud must get over his guilt over Aerith’s death so that he can return to living with Tifa and the children in peace.

The scenes following the prologue are setting up the emotional stakes of film - the problem that will be resolved by the film’s end. The problem being depicted here is not Aerith’s absence from Cloud’s life, but Cloud’s absence from his family. We see Tifa walking through Seventh Heaven saying “he’s not here anymore,” we see Denzel in his sickbed asking for Cloud, we see a framed photo of the four of them on Cloud’s desk. We see Cloud letting Tifa’s call go to voicemail.

What we do not see is Aerith, who does not appear until almost halfway through the film.

Cloud spends the first of the film avoiding confrontation with the Remnants/dealing with the return of Sephiroth. It’s only when Tifa is injured, and Denzel and Marlene get kidnapped that he goes to face his problems head on.

Before the final battle, when Cloud has exorcised his emotional demons and is about to face his physical demons, what do we see? We see Cloud telling Marlene that it’s his turn to take care of her, Denzel and Tifa the way they’ve taken care of him. We see Cloud telling Tifa that he ‘feels lighter’ and tacitly confirming that she was correct when she called him out earlier in the film. We see Cloud confirming to Denzel that he’s going home after this is all over.

What we do not see is Cloud telepathically communicating with Aerith to say, “Hey boo, can’t wait to beat Sephiroth so I can finally reunite with you in the Promised Land. Xoxoxo.” Aerith doesn’t factor in at all. Returning to his family is his goal, and his fight with Bahamut/the Remnants/Sephiroth/whatever the fuck is the final obstacle he has to face before reaching this goal.

This is reiterated again when Cloud is shot by Yazoo and seemingly perishes in an explosion. What is at stake with his “death”? We see Tifa calling his name while looking out the airship. We see Denzel and Marlene waiting for him at Seventh Heaven. We do not see Aerith watching over him in the Lifestream.

Now, Aerith does play an important role in Cloud’s arc when she shows up at about the midpoint of the film. You could fairly argue that it’s the turning point in Cloud’s emotional journey, the moment when he finally decides to confront his problems. But even if it’s only Cloud and Aerith in the scene, it’s not really about their relationship at all.

Let’s consider the context before this scene happens. Denzel and Marlene have been kidnapped by the Remnants; Tifa was nearly killed in a fight with another. This is Cloud at his lowest point. It’s his worst fears come to pass. His guilt over Aerith’s death is directly addressed at this moment in the film because it is not so much about his feelings for Aerith as it is about how Cloud fears the failures of his past (one of the biggest being her death) would continue into the present. If it was just about Aerith, we could have seen Cloud asking for her forgiveness at any other time in the film. It occurs when it does because this when his guilt over Aerith’s death intersects with his actual conflict, his fear that he’ll fail the the ones he loves. She appears when he’s at the Forgotten City where he goes to save the children. The same location where he had failed two year before.

This connection is made explicit when Cloud has flashes of Zack and Aerith’s deaths before he saves Denzel and Tifa from Bahamut. Again, Cloud’s dwelling on the past is directly related to his fears of being unable to protect his present.

Aerith is a feminine figure who is associated with flowers. That combined with the players’ memory of her and her relationship with Cloud in the OG, I can see how their scenes can be construed as romantic, but I really do not think that it is the creators’ intent to portray any romantic longing on Cloud’s part.

If they wanted to suggest that Cloud was still in love with Aerith or even leave his romantic interest ambiguous, there is no way in hell they would have had Cloud living with Tifa and two kids prior to the film’s events. To say nothing of opening the film by showing the pain his absence brings.

A romantic reading of Cloud’s guilt over Aerith’s death would suggest that he entered into a relationship with Tifa and started raising two children with her while still holding a torch for Aerith and hoping for a way to be reunited with her. The implication would be that Tifa is his second choice, and he is settling. Now, is this a dynamic that occurs in real life? Absolutely. Is this something that is often depicted in some films and television? Sure - in fact this very premise is at the core of one my favorite films of the last decade - 45 Years — and spoiler alert — the guy does not come off well in this situation. But once again, Cloud is not a real person, and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is not a John Cassavettes film or an Ingmar Bergman chamber drama. It is a 2-hour long straight to DVD sequel for a video game made for teens. This kind of messy, if realistic, relationship dynamic is not what this particular work is trying to explore.

(one of these is a good film!)

By the end of Advent Children, Cloud is once again the idealized version of himself. A hero that the audience is supposed to like and admire. We are supposed to think that his actions in the first half of the movie (wallowing in his guilt and abandoning his family) were bad. These are the flaws that he must overcome through the course of the film, and by the end he does. If he really had been settling and treating his Seventh Heaven family as a second choice prior to the events of the film, that too would obviously be a character flaw that needs to be addressed before the end of the film. It isn’t because this is a dynamic that only exists in certain people’s imaginations.

If the creators wanted to leave the Cloud & Aerith relationship open to a romantic interpretation, they didn’t have to write themselves into such a corner. They wouldn’t have to change the final film much at all, merely adjust the chronology a bit. Instead of Cloud already living as a family with Tifa, Marlene and Denzel prior to the beginning of the film, you would show them on the precipice of becoming a family, but with Cloud being unable to take the final step without getting over his feelings for Aerith first. This would leave space for him to love both women without coming off as an opportunistic jerk.

This is essentially the dynamic with Locke/Rachel/Celes in FFVI. Locke is unable to move on with Celes or anyone else until he finally finds closure with Rachel. It’s a lovely scene that does not diminish his relationships with either woman. He loved Rachel. He will love Celes. What the game does not have him do is enter into a relationship into Celes first and then when the party arrives at the Phoenix Cave, have him suddenly remember ‘Oh shit, I’ve gotta deal with my baggage with Rachel before I can really move on.’ That would not paint him in a particularly positive light.

Speaking of other Final Fantasies, let’s take a look another sequel in the series set two years after the events of the original work, one that is clearly the story of its protagonist searching for their lost love. And guess what? Final Fantasy X-2 does not begin with Yuna shacked up and raising two kids with another dude. And it certainly doesn’t begin with his perspective of the whole situation when Yuna decides to search for Tidus.

Square Enix knows how to write these kind of stories when they want to, and it’s clearly not their intent for Cloud and Aerith. Again, the biggest obstacle in the way of a Cloud/Aerith endgame isn’t space and time or death, it’s the existence of Tifa Lockhart.

A reasonable question to ask would be, if SE is not trying to ignite debate over the love triangle, why make Cloud’s relationship with Aerith a part of Advent Children at all? Why invite that sort of confusion? Well, the answer here, like the answer in the OG, is that Aerith’s role in the sequel is much more than her relationship with Cloud.

In the OG, it wasn’t Cloud and the gang who managed to stop Sephiroth and Meteor in the end, it was Aerith from the Lifestream. In a two-hour long film, you do not have the time to set up a completely new villain who can believably end the world, and since you pretty much have to include Sephiroth, the main antagonist can really only be him. No one else in the party has been established to have any magical Cetra powers, and again, since that’s not something that can be effectively established in a two-hour long film, and since Aerith needs to appear somehow, it again needs to be her who will save the day.

Given the time constraints, this external conflict has to be connected with Cloud’s internal conflict. In the OG, Cloud’s emotional arc is in resolved in the Lifestream, and then we spend a few more hours hunting down the Huge Materia/remembering what Holy is before resolving the external conflict of stopping Meteor. In Advent Children, we do not have that luxury of time. These turning points have to be one and same. It is only after Aerith is “introduced” in the film when Cloud asks her for forgiveness that she is able to help in the fight against the Remnants. Thus the turning point for Cloud’s character arc and the external conflict are the same. It’s understandably economical storytelling, though I wouldn’t call it particularly good storytelling.

As much as Cloud feels guilt over both Zack and Aerith’s deaths, it’s only Aerith who can play this dual role in the film. Zack can appear to help resolve Cloud’s emotional arc, but since he has no special Cetra powers or anything, there’s little he can do to help in Cloud’s fight against the Remnants. More time would need to be spent contriving a reason why Cloud is able to defeat the Remnants now when he wasn’t before or explaining why Aerith can suddenly help from the Lifestream when she had been absent before. (I still don’t think the film does a particularly good job of explaining this part, but that is a conversation for another time).

Another reason why Zack could not play this role is because at the time of AC’s original release, all we knew of Cloud and Zack’s relationship was contained in an optional flashback at the Shinra mansion after Cloud returns from the Lifestream. If it was Zack who suddenly showed up at Cloud’s lowest point, most viewers, even many who played the original game, would probably have been confused, and the moment would have fallen flat. On the other hand, even the most casual fan would have been aware of Aerith and her connection to Cloud, with her death scene being among the most well-known gaming moments of all time. Moreover, Aerith’s death is directly connected to Sephiroth, who is once again the threat in AC, whereas Zack was killed by Shinra goons. Aerith serves multiple purposes in a way that Zack just cannot.

Despite all this, though Aerith is more important to the film as a whole, many efforts are made to suggest that Zack and Aerith are equally important to Cloud. One of the first scenes in the film is Cloud moping around Zack’s grave (And unlike the scene with Aerith in the Forgotten City, it isn’t directly connected with Cloud’s present storyline in any way). We have the aforementioned scene where Cloud has flashes of both Aerith’s and Zack’s deaths when he saves Tifa and Denzel. Cloud has a scene where he’s standing back to back with Zack, mirroring his scene with in the Forgotten City with Aerith, before the climax of his fight with Sephiroth. In the Lifestream, after Cloud “dies,” it’s both Aerith and Zack who are there to send him back. Before the film ends, Cloud sees both Aerith and Zack leaving the church.

Now, were all these Zack appearances a way to promote the upcoming spin-off game that he’s going to lead? Of course. But the creators surely would have known that having Zack play such a similar role in Cloud’s arc would make Cloud’s relationship with Aerith feel less special and thus complicating a romantic interpretation of said relationship. If they wanted to encourage a romantic reading of Cloud’s lingering feelings for Aerith, they would have given Zack his own distinct role in the film. Or rather, they wouldn’t have put Zack in the film at all, and they certainly wouldn’t have him lead his own game, but we’ll get to the Zack of it all later.

The funny thing is, in a way, Zack is portrayed as being more special to Cloud. Zack only exists in the film to interact with Cloud and encourage him. Meanwhile. Aerith also has brief interactions with Kadaj, the Geostigma children and even Tifa before the film’s end. Aerith is there to save the whole world. Zack is there just for Cloud. If it’s Cloud’s relationship with Aerith that’s meant to be romantic, shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Let’s take a look at Tifa Lockhart. What role did she have to play in the FF7 sequel film? If, like some, you believed FF7 to be the Cloud/Aerith/Sephiroth show, then Tifa could have easily had a Barret-sized cameo in Advent Children. And honestly, she’s just a great martial artist. She has no special powers that would make her indispensable in a fight against Sephiroth. You certainly would not expect her to be the 2nd billed character in the film. Though of course, if you actually played through the Original Game with your eyes open, you would realize that Tifa Lockhart is instrumental to any story about Cloud Strife.

Unlike Aerith’s appearances, almost none of the suggestive scenes and dynamics between Cloud and Tifa had to be included in the film. As in, they serve no other plot related purpose and could have easily been cut from the final film if the creators weren’t trying to encourage a romantic interpretation of their relationship.

It feels inevitable now, but no one was expecting Cloud and Tifa to be living together and raising two kids. In the general consciousness, FF7 is Cloud and Sephiroth and their big swords and Aerith’s death. At the time, in the eyes of most fans and casual observers, Cloud and Tifa being together wasn’t a necessary part of the FF7 equation the way say, an epic fight between Cloud and Sephiroth would be. In fact, I don’t think even the biggest Cloti fans at the time would have imagined Cloud and Tifa living together would be their canon outcome in the sequel film.

Now can two platonic friends live together and raise two children together? Absolutely, but again Cloud and Tifa are not real people. They are fictional characters. A reasonable person (let’s use the legal definition of the term) who does not have brainworms from arguing over one of the dumbest debates on the Internet for 23 years would probably assume that two characters who were shown to be attracted to each other in the OG and who are now living together and raising two kids are in a romantic relationship. This is a reasonable assumption to make, and if SE wanted to leave Cloud’s romantic inclinations ambiguous, they simply would not be depicting Cloud and Tifa’s relationship in this manner. Cloud’s disrupted peace could have been a number of different things. He could have been a wandering mercenary, he could have been searching for a way to be reunited with Aerith. It didn’t have to be the family he formed with Tifa, but, then again, if you were actually paying attention to the story the OG was trying to tell, of course he would be living with Tifa.

Let’s also look at the scene where Cloud finds Tifa in the church after her fight with Loz. All the plot related information (who attacked her, Marlene being taken) is conveyed in the brief conversation they have before Cloud falls unconscious from Geostigma. What purpose do all the lingering shots of Cloud and Tifa in the flower bed in a Yin-Yang/non-sexual 69ing position serve if not to be suggestive of the type of relationship they have? It’s beautifully rendered but ultimately irrelevant to both the external and internal conflicts of the film.

Likewise, there is no reason why Cloud and Tifa needed to wake up in their children’s bedroom. No reason to show Cloud waking up with Tifa next to him in a way that almost makes you think they were in the same bed. And there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for a close-up of Tifa’s hand with the Wolf Ring on her ring finger while she is admonishing Cloud during what sounds like a domestic argument (This ring again comes into focus when Tifa leads Denzel to Cloud at the church at the end - there are dozens of ways this scene could have been rendered, but this is the one that was chosen.) If it wasn’t SE’s intent to emphasize the family dynamic and the intimate nature of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship, these scenes would not exist.

Let’s also take a look at Denzel, the only new character in the AC (give or take the Remnants). Again, given the film’s brief runtime, the fact that they’re not only adding a new character but giving him more screen time than almost every other AVALANCHE member must mean that he’s pretty important. While Denzel does have an arc of his own, especially in ACC, he is intricately connected to Cloud and Tifa and solidifies the family unit that they’ve been forming in Edge. Marlene still has Barret, but with the addition of Denzel, the family becomes something more real albeit even more tenuous given his Geostigma diagnosis. Without Denzel in the picture, it’s a bit easier to interpret Cloud’s distance from Tifa as romantic pining for another woman, but now it just seems absurd. The stakes are so much higher. Cloud and Tifa are at a completely different stage in their lives from the versions of these characters we met early on in the OG who were entangled in a frivolous love triangle. And yet some people are still stuck trying to fit these characters into a childish dynamic that died at the end of disc one along with a certain someone.

All this is there in the film, at least the director’s cut, if you really squint. But since SE preferred to spend its time on countless action sequences that have aged as well as whole milk in lieu of spending a few minutes showing Cloud’s family life before he got Geostigma to establish the emotional stakes, or a beat or two more on his reconciliation with Tifa and the kids, people may be understandably confused about Cloud’s arc. Has Cloud just been a moping around in misery for the two years post-OG? The answer is no, though that can only really be found in the accompanying novellas, specifically Case of Tifa.

Concerning the novellas, which we apparently must read to understand said DVD sequel

I really don’t know how you can read through CoT and still think there is anything ambiguous about the nature of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship. The “Because I have you this time,” Cloud telling Tifa he’ll remind her how to be strong when they’re alone, Cloud confidently agreeing when Marlene adds him to their family. Not to mention Barret and Cid’s brief conversation about Cloud and Tifa’s relationship in Case of Barret, after which Cid comments that “women wear the pants,” which Barret then follows by asking Cid about Shera. Again, a reasonable person would assume the couple in question are in a romantic relationship, and if this wasn’t the intent, these lines would not be present. Especially not in a novella about someone else.

Some try to argue that CoT just shows how incompatible Cloud and Tifa are because it features a few low points in their relationship. I don’t think that’s Nojima’s intent. Even if it was, it certainly wouldn’t be to prove that Cloud loves Aerith. This isn’t how you tell that story. Why waste all that time disproving a negative rather than proving a positive? We didn’t spend hours in FF8 watching Rinoa’s relationship with Seifer fall apart to understand how much better off she is with Squall. If Cloud and Aerith is meant to be a love story, then tell their love story. Why tell the story of how Cloud is incompatible with someone else?

Part of the confusion may be because CoT doesn’t tell a complete story in and of itself. The first half of the story (before Cloud has to deliver flowers to the Forgotten City) acts as a sort of epilogue to the OG, while the second half of the story is something of a prologue to Advent Children (or honestly its missing Act One). And to state the obvious, conflict is inherent to any story worth telling. It can’t just be all fluff, that’s what the fanfiction is for.

Tifa’s conflict is her fear that the fragile little family they’ve built in Edge is going to fall apart. Thus we see her fret about Cloud’s distance, the way this affects Marlene, and Denzel’s sickness. There are certainly some low moments here --- Tifa telling Cloud to drink in his room, asking if he loves her -- all ways for the threat to seem more real, the outcome more uncertain, yet there’s only one way this conflict can be resolved. One direction to which their relationship can move.

Again, by the end of this story, both characters are supposed to be the best versions of themselves, to find their “happy” endings so to speak. Tifa could certainly find happiness outside of a relationship with Cloud. She could decide that they’ve given it a shot, but they’re better off as friends. She’s grateful for this experience and she’s learned from this, but now she’s ready to make a life for herself on her own. It would be a fine character arc, though not something the Final Fantasy series has been wont to do. However, that’s obviously not the case here as there’s no indication whatsoever that Tifa considers this as an option for herself. Nojima hasn’t written this off ramp into her journey. For Tifa, they’ll either become a real family or they won’t. Since this is a story that is going to have a happy ending, so of course they will, even if there are a lot of bumps along the way.

Unfortunately, with the Compilation being the unwieldy beast that this is, this whole arc has to be pieced together across a number of different works:

Tifa asking herself if they’re a real family in CoT

Her greatest fear seemingly come to life when Cloud leaves at the end of CoT/beginning of AC

Tifa explicitly asking Cloud if the reason they can’t help each other is because they’re not a real family during their argument in AC. Notably, even though Cloud is at his lowest point, he doesn’t confirm her fear. Instead he says he that he can’t help anyone, not even his family. Instead, he indirectly confirms that yes he does think they’re a family, even if is a frustrating moment still in that he’s too scared to try to save it.

The ending of AC where we see a new photo of Cloud smiling surrounded by Tifa and the kids and the rest of the AVALANCHE, next to the earlier photo we had seen of the four of them where he was wearing a more dour expression.

The ending of The Kids Are All Right, where Cloud, Tifa, Denzel and Marlene meet with Evan, Kyrie and Vits - and Cloud offers, unsolicited, that even if they’re not related by blood, they’re a family.

The ending of DVD extra ‘Reminiscence of FFVII’ where Cloud takes the day off and asks Tifa to close the bar so they can spend time together as a family as Tifa had wanted to do early in CoT

Cloud fears he’ll fail his family. Tifa fears it’ll fall apart. Cloud retreats into himself, pushing others away. Tifa neglects herself, not being able to say what she needs to say. In Advent Children, Tifa finally voices her frustrations. It’s then that Cloud finally confronts his fears. Like in the OG, Cloud and Tifa’s conflicts and character arcs are two sides of the same coin, and it’s only by communicating with each other are they able to resolve it. Though with the Compilation being an inferior work, it’s much less satisfying this time around. Such is the problem when you’re writing towards a preordained outcome (Cloud and Sephiroth duking it once again) rather than letting the story develop organically.

Some may ask, why mention Aerith so much (Cloud growing distant after delivering flowers to the Forgotten City, Cloud finding Denzel at Aerith’s church) if they weren’t trying to perpetuate the LTD? Well, as explained above, Aerith had to be in Advent Children, and since CoT is the only place where we get any insight into Cloud’s psyche, it’s here where Nojima expands on that guilt.

Again, this is a story that requires conflict, and what better conflict than the specter of a love rival? Notably, despite us having access to Tifa’s thoughts and fears, she never explicitly associates Cloud’s behavior with him pining after Aerith. Though it’s fair to say this fear is implied, if unwarranted.

If Cloud had actually been pining after Aerith this whole time, we would not be seeing it all unfold through Tifa’s perspective. You can depict a romance without drawing attention to the injured third party. We’re seeing all of this from Tifa’s POV, because it’s about Tifa’s insecurities, not the great tragic romance between Cloud and Aerith. Honestly, another reason we see this from Tifa’s perspective is because it’s dramatically more interesting. Because she’s insecure, she (and we the reader) wonder if there’s something else going on. Meanwhile, from Cloud’s perspective it would be straightforward and redundant, given what we see in AC. He’s guilty over Aerith’s death and thinks he doesn’t deserve to be happy.

Not to mention, the first time we encounter Aerith in CoT, Tifa is the one breaking down at her grave while Cloud is the one comforting her. Are we supposed to believe that he just forgot he was in love with Aerith until he had to deliver flowers to the Forgotten City?

And Aerith doesn’t just serve as a romantic obstacle. She’s also a symbol of guilt and redemption for both Cloud and Tifa. Neither think they have the right to be happy after all that’s happened (Aerith’s death being a big part of this), and through Denzel, who Cloud finds at Aerith’s church, they both see a chance to atone.

I do want to address Case of Lifestream: White because it’s only time in the entire Compilation where I’ve asked myself — what are they trying to achieve here? Now, I’d rather drink bleach than start debating the translation of ‘koibito’ again, but I did think it was a strange choice to specify the romantic nature of Aerith’s love for Cloud. I suppose it could be a reference her obvious attraction to Cloud in the OG, though calling it love feels like a stretch.

But nothing else in CoLW really gives me pause. It might be a bit jarring to see how much of it is Aerith’s thoughts of Cloud, but it makes sense when you consider the context in which it’s meant to be consumed. Unlike Case of Tifa or Case of Denzel, CoLW isn’t meant to be read on its own. It’s a few scant paragraphs in direct conversation with Case of Lifestream: Black. In CoLB, Sephiroth talks about his plan to return and end the world or whatever, and how Cloud is instrumental to his plan. Each segment of CoLW mirrors the corresponding segment of CoLB. Thus, CoLW has to be about Aerith’s plan to stop Sephiroth and the role Cloud must play in that. In both of these stories, Cloud is the only named character. It doesn’t mean that thoughts of Cloud consume all of Aerith’s afterlife. Case of Lifestream is only a tiny sliver of the story, a halfassed way to explain why in Advent Children the world is ending again and why Cloud has to be at the center of it all.

Notably, there is absolutely nothing in CoLW about Cloud’s feelings for Aerith. Even if it’s just speculation on her part as we see Sephiroth speculate about Cloud’s reactions in CoLB. Aerith can see what’s going on in the real world, but she says nothing about Cloud’s actions. If Cloud is really pining after her, trying to find a way to be reunited with her, wouldn’t this be the ideal story to show such devotion?

But it’s not there, because not only does it not happen, but because this story is not about Aerith’s relationship with Cloud. It is about how Aerith needs to see and warn Cloud in order to stop Sephiroth. By the end of Advent Children, that goal is fulfilled. Cloud gets his forgiveness. Aerith gets to see him again and helps him stop Sephiroth. There’s no suggestion that either party wants more. We finally have the closure that the OG lacked, and at no point does it confirm that Cloud reciprocated Aerith’s romantic feelings, even though there were plenty of opportunities to do so.

I don’t really know what else people were expecting. Advent Children isn’t a romantic drama. There’s not going to be a moment where Cloud explicitly tells Tifa, ‘I’ve never loved Aerith. It’s only been you all along.” This is just simply not the kind of story it is.

Though one late scene practically serves this function. When Cloud “dies” and Aerith finds him in the Lifestream, if there were any lingering romantic feelings between the two of them, this would be a beautiful bittersweet reunion. Maybe something about how as much as they want to be together, it’s not his time yet. Instead, it’s almost played off as a joke. Cloud calls her ‘Mother’, and Zack is at Aerith’s side, joking about how Cloud has no place there. This would be the perfect opportunity to address the romantic connection between Cloud and Aerith, but instead, the film elides this completely. Instead, it’s a cute afterlife moment between Aerith and Zack, and functionally allows Cloud to go back to where he belongs, to Tifa and the kids. Whatever Cloud’s feelings for Aerith were before, it’s transformed into something else.

Crisis Core -- or how Aerith finally gets her love story

The other relevant part of the Compilation is Crisis Core, which I will now touch on briefly (or at least brief for me). In the OG, Zack Fair was more plot device than character. We knew he was important to Cloud — enough that Cloud would mistake Zack’s memories for his own -- we knew he was important to Aerith — enough that she is initially drawn to Cloud due to his similarities to Zack — yet the nature of these relationships is more ambiguous. Especially his relationship with Aerith. From the little we learn of their relationship, it could have been completely one-sided on her part, and Zack a total cad. At least that’s the implication she leaves us with in Gongaga. We get the sense that she might not be the most reliable narrator on this point (why bring up an ex so often, unsolicited, if it wasn’t anything serious?) but the OG never confirms this either way.

Crisis Core clears this up completely. Not only is Zack portrayed as the Capital H Hero of his own game, but his relationships with Cloud and Aerith are two of the most important in the game. In fact, they are the basis for his heroic sacrifice at the game’s end: he dies trying to save Cloud’s life; he dies trying to return to Aerith.

Zack’s relationship with Aerith is a major subplot of the game. Not only that, but the details of said relationship completely recontextualizes what we know about the Aerith we see in the OG. Many of Aerith’s most iconic traits (wearing pink, selling flowers) are a direct product of this relationship, and more importantly, so many of the hallmarks of her early relationship with Cloud (him falling through her church, one date as a reward, a conversation in the playground) are a direct echo of her relationship with Zack.

A casual fling this was not. Aerith’s relationship with Zack made a deep impact on the character we see in the OG and clearly colored her interactions with Cloud throughout.

Crisis Core is telling Zack’s story, and Tifa is a fairly minor supporting character, yet it still finds the time to expand upon Cloud and Tifa’s relationship. Through their interactions with Zack, we learn just how much they were on each others’ minds during this time, and how they were both too shy to own up to these feelings. We also get a brief expansion on the moment Cloud finds Tifa injured in the reactor.

Meanwhile, given the point we are in the story’s chronology, Cloud and Aerith are completely oblivious of each other’s existence.

One may try to argue that none of this matters since all of this is in the past. While this argument might hold water if we arguing about real lives in the real world, FF7 is a work of fiction. Its creators decided that these would be events we would see, and that Zack would be the lens through which we’d see them. Crisis Core is not the totality of these characters’ lives prior to the event of the OG. Rather, it consists of moments that enhance and expand upon our understanding of the original work. We learn the full extent of Hojo’s experimentation and the Jenova project; we learn that Sephiroth was actually a fairly normal guy before he was driven insane when he uncovers the circumstances of his birth. We learn that Aerith was a completely different person before she met Zack, and their relationship had a profound impact on her character.

A prequel is not made to contradict the original work, but what it can do is recontexualize the story we already know and add a layer of nuance that may have not been obvious before. Thus, Sephiroth is transformed from a scary villain into a tragic figure who could have been a hero were it not for Hojo’s experiments. Aerith’s behavior too invites reinterpretation. What once seemed flirty and perhaps overtly forward now looks like the tragic attempts of a woman trying to recapture a lost love.

If Cloud and Aerith were meant to be the official couple of the Compilation of FF7, you absolutely would not be spending so much time depicting two relationships that will be moot by the time we get to the original work. You especially would not depict Zack and Aerith’s relationship in a way that makes Aerith’s relationship with Cloud look like a copy of the moments she had with her ex.

Additionally, with Zack’s relationship with Angeal, we can see, that within the universe of FF7, a protagonist being devastated over the death of a beloved comrade isn’t something that’s inherently romantic. Neither is it romantic for said dead comrade to lend a helping hand from the beyond.

SE would also expect some people to play Crisis Core before the OG. If Cloud and Aerith are the intended endgame couple, then SE would be asking the player to root for a guy to pursue the girlfriend of the man who gave his life for him. The same man who died trying to reunite with her. This is to say nothing of Cloud’s treatment of Tifa in this scenario. How could this possibly be the intent  for their most popular protagonist in the most popular entry of their most popular franchise?

What Crisis Core instead offers is something for fans of Aerith who may be disappointed that she was robbed of a great romance by her death. Well, she now gets that epic, tragic romance. Only it’s with Zack, not Cloud.

If SE intended for Cloud and Aerith to be the official couple of FF7, neither Zack nor Tifa would exist. They would not spend so much time developing Zack and Tifa into the multi-dimensional characters they are, only to be treated as nothing more than collateral damage in the wake of Cloud and Aerith’s great love. No, this is a Final Fantasy. SE want their main characters to have something of a happy ending after all of the tribulations they face. Cloud and Tifa find theirs in life. Zack and Aerith, as the ending of AC suggests, find theirs in death.

Cloud and Aerith’s relationship isn’t a threat to the Zack/Aerith and Cloud/Tifa endgame, nor is it a mere obstacle. Rather, it’s a relationship that actually deepens and strengthens the other two. Aerith is explicitly searching for her first love in Cloud, revealing just how deep her feelings for Zack ran. Cloud gets to live out his heroic SOLDIER fantasy with Aerith, a fantasy he created just to impress Tifa.

There are moments between Cloud and Aerith that may seem romantic when taken on its own, but viewed within the context of the whole narrative, ultimately reveal that they aren’t quite right for each other, and in each other, they’re actually searching for someone else.

This quadrangular dynamic reminds me a bit of one of my favorite classic films, The Philadelphia Story. (Spoilers for a film that came out in 1940 ahead) — The single most romantic scene in the film is between Jimmy Stewart’s and Katherine Hepburn’s characters, yet they’re not the ones who end up together. Even as their passions run, as the music swells, and we want them to end up together, we realize that they’re not quite right for each other. We know that it won’t work out.

More relevantly, we know this is true due to the existence of Cary Grant’s and Ruth Hussey’s characters, who are shown to carry a torch for Hepburn and Stewart, respectively. Grant and Hussey are well-developed and sympathetic characters. With the film being the top grossing film of the year, and made during the Code era, it’s about as “clean” of a narrative as you can get. There’s no way Grant and Hussey would be given such prominent roles just to be left heartbroken and in the cold by the film’s end.

Hepburn’s character (Tracy) pretty much sums it herself after some hijinks lead to a last minute proposal from Stewart’s character (Mike):

Mike: Will you marry me, Tracy?                      

Tracy: No, Mike. Thanks, but hmm-mm. Nope.

Mike: l've never asked a girl to marry me. l've avoided it. But you've got me all confused now. Why not?

Tracy: Because l don't think Liz [Hussey’s character] would like it...and l'm not sure you would...and l'm even a little doubtful about myself. But l am beholden to you, Mike. l'm most beholden.

Despite the fact that the film spends more time developing Hepburn and Stewart’s relationship than theirs with their endgame partners, it’s still such a satisfying ending. That’s because, even at the peak of their romance, we can see how Stewart needs someone like Hussey to ground his passionate impulses, and how Hepburn needs Grant, someone who won’t put her on a pedestal like everyone else. Hepburn and Stewart’s is a relationship that might feel right in the moment, but doesn’t quite work in the light of day.

I don’t think Cloud and Aerith share a moment that is nearly as romantic in FF7, but the same principle applies. What may seem romantic in the moment actually reveals how they’re right for someone else.

Even if Aerith lives and Cloud decides to pursue a relationship with her, it’s not going to be all puppies and roses ahead for them. Aerith would need to disentangle her feelings for Zack from her attraction to Cloud, and Cloud would still need to confront his feelings for Tifa, which were his main motivator for nearly half his life, before they can even start to build something real. This is messy work, good fodder for a prestige cable drama or an Oscar-baity indie film, but it has no place in a Final Fantasy. There simply isn’t the time. Not when the question on most players’ minds isn’t ‘Cloud does love?’ but ‘How the hell are they going to stop that madman and his Meteor that’s about to destroy the world?’

With Zerith’s depiction in Crisis Core, there’s a sort of bittersweet poetry in how the two relationships rhyme but can’t actually coexist. It is only because Zack is trying to return to Midgar to see Aerith that Cloud is able to reunite with Tifa, and the OG begins in earnest. In another world, Zack and Aerith would be the hero and heroine who saved the world and lived to tell the tale. They are much more the traditional archetypes - Zack the super-powered warrior who wants to be a Capital-H Hero, and Aerith, the last of her kind who reluctantly accepts her fate. Compared to these two, Cloud and Tifa aren’t nearly so special, nor their goals so lofty and noble. Cloud, after all, was too weak to even get into SOLDIER, and only wanted to be one, not for some greater good, but to impress the girl he liked. Tifa has no special abilities, merely learning martial arts when she grew wise enough to not wait around for a hero. On the surface, Cloud and Tifa are made of frailer stuff, and yet by luck or by fate, they’re the ones who cheat death time and time again, and manage to save the world, whereas the ones who should have the role, are prematurely struck down before they can finish the job. Cloud and Tifa fulfill the roles that they never asked for, that they may not be particularly suited for, in Zack and Aerith’s stead. There’s a burden and a beauty to it. Cloud and Tifa can live because Zack and Aerith did not.

All of this nuance is lost if you think Cloud and Aerith are meant to be the endgame couple. Instead, you have a pair succumbing to their basest desires, regardless of the selfless sacrifices their other potential paramours made for their sake. Zack and Tifa, and their respective relationships with Aerith and Cloud, are flattened into mere romantic obstacles. The heart wants what it wants, some may argue. While that may be true in real life, that is not necessarily the case in a work of fiction, especially not a Final Fantasy. The other canon Final Fantasy couples could certainly have had previous romantic relationships, but unless they have direct relevance to the their character arcs (e.g., Rachel to Locke), the games do not draw attention to them because they would be a distraction from the romance they are trying to tell. They’ve certainly never spent the amount of real estate FF7 spends in depicting Cloud/Tifa and Zack/Aerith’s relationships.

At last…the Remake, and somehow this essay isn’t even close to being over

Finally, we come to the Remake. With the technological advancements made in the last 23 years and the sheer amount of hours they’re devoting to just the Midgar section this time around, you can almost look at the OG as an outline and the Remake as the final draft. With the OG being overly reliant on text to  do its storytelling, and the Remake having subtle facial expressions and a slew of cinematic techniques at its disposal, you might almost consider it an adaptation from a literary medium to a visual one. Our discussions are no longer limited to just what the characters are saying, but what they are doing, and even more importantly, how the game presents those actions. When does the game want us to pay attention? And what does it want us to pay attention to?

Unlike most outlines, which are read by a small handful of execs, SE has 23 years worth of reactions from the general public to gauge what works and what doesn’t work, what caused confusion, and what could be clarified. While FF7 is not a romance, the LTD remains a hot topic among a small but vocal part of the fanbase. It certainly is an area that could do with some clarifying in the Remake.

Since the Remake is not telling a new story, but rather retelling an existing story that has been in the public consciousness for over two decades, certain aspects that were treated as “twists” in the OG no longer have that same element of surprise, and would need to approached differently. For example, in the Midgar section of the OG, Shinra is treated as the main antagonist throughout. It’s only when we get to the top of the Shinra tower that Sephiroth is revealed as the real villain. Anyone with even a passing of knowledge of FF7 would be aware of Sephiroth so trying to play it off like a surprise in the Remake would be terribly anticlimactic. Thus, Sephiroth appears as early as Ch. 2 to haunt Cloud and the player throughout.

Likewise, many players who’ve never even touched the OG are probably aware that Aerith dies, thus her death can no longer be played for shock. While SE would still want the player to grow attached to Aerith so that her death has an emotional impact, there are diminishing returns to misdirecting the player about her fate, at least not in the same way it was done in the OG.

How do these considerations affect the how the LTD is depicted in the Remake? For the two of the biggest twists in the OG to land in the Remake — Aerith’s death and Cloud’s true identity in the Lifestream — the game needs to establish:

Aerith’s attraction to Cloud, specifically due to his similarities to Zack. This never needs to go past an initial attraction for the player to understand that the man whose memory Cloud was “borrowing” is Zack. Aerith’s feelings for Cloud can evolve into something platonic or even maternal by her end without the reveal in the Lifestream losing any impact.

Cloud’s love for Tifa. For the Lifestream sequence to land with an “Ooooh!” rather than a “Huh!?!?”, the Remake will need to establish that Cloud’s feelings for Tifa were strong enough to 1) motivate him to try to join SOLDIER in the first place 2) incentivize him to adopt a false persona because he fears that he isn’t the man she wants him to be 3) call him back to consciousness from Make poisoning twice 4) help him put his mind back together and find his true self. That’s a lot of story riding on one guy’s feelings!

The player’s love for Aerith so that her death will hurt. This can be done by making them invested in Aerith as a character by her own right, but also extends to the relationships she has with the other characters (not only Cloud).

What is not necessary is establishing Cloud’s romantic feelings for Aerith. Now, would their doomed romance make her death hurt even more? Sure, but it could work just as well if Cloud if is losing a dear friend and ally, not a lover. Not to mention, her death also cuts short her relationships with Tifa, Barret, Red XII, etc. Bulking those relationships up prior to her death, would also make her loss more palpable. If anything, establishing Cloud’s romantic feelings for Aerith would actually undermine the game’s other big twist. The game needs you to believe that Cloud’s feelings for Tifa were strong enough to drive his entire hero’s journey. If Cloud is shown falling in love with another woman in the span of weeks if not mere days, then the Lifestream scene would be much harder to swallow.

Cloud wavering between the two women made sense in the OG because the main way for the player to get to know Aerith was through her interactions with Cloud. That is no longer the case in the Remake. Cloud is still the protagonist, and the player character for the vast majority of the game, but there are natural ways for the player to get to know Aerith outside of her dialogue exchanges with Cloud. Unless SE considers the LTD an integral part of FF7’s DNA, then for the sake of story clarity, the LTD doesn’t need to exist.

How then does the Remake clarify things?

I’m not going go through every single change in the Remake — there are far too many of them, and they’ve been documented elsewhere. Most of the changes are expansions or adaptations (what might make sense for super-deformed chibis would look silly for realistic characters, e.g., Cloud rolling barrels in the Church has now become him climbing across the roof support). What is expanded and how it’s adapted can be telling, but what is more interesting are the additions and removals. Not just for what takes place in the scenes themselves, but how their addition or removal changes our understanding of the narrative as a whole vis-a-vis the story we know from the OG.

Notably, one of the features that is not expanded upon, but rather diminished, is player choice. In the OG, the player had a slew of dialogue options to choose from, especially during the Midgar portion of the game. Not only did it determine which character would go on a date with Cloud at the Gold Saucer, but it also made the player identify with Cloud since they’re largely determining his personality during this stage. Despite the technological advances that have made this level of optionality the norm in AAA games, the Remake gives the player far fewer non-gameplay related choices, and only really the illusion of choice as a nod to the OG, but they don’t affect the story of the game in any meaningful way. You get a slightly different conversation depending on the choice, but you have to buy the Flower, Tifa has to make you a drink.

So much of what fueled the LTD in the OG came from this mechanic, which is now largely absent in the Remake. Almost every instance where there was a dialogue branch in the OG has become a single, canon scenario in the Remake that favors Tifa (e.g., having the choice of giving the flower to Tifa or Marlene in the OG, to Cloud giving the flower to Tifa in the Remake). Similarly, for the only meaningful choice you make in the Remake — picking Tifa or Aerith in the sewers — Cloud is now equidistant to both girls, whereas in the OG, his starting point was much closer to Aerith. In the OG, player choice allowed you to largely determine Cloud’s personality, and the girl he favored — and seemingly encouraged you to choose Aerith in many instances. In the Remake, Cloud is now his own character, not who the player wants him to be. And this Cloud, well, he sure seems to have a thing for Tifa.

In fact, one of the first changes in the Remake is the addition of Jessie asking Cloud about his relationship with Tifa, and Cloud’s brief flashback to their childhood together. In the OG, Tifa isn’t mentioned at all during the first reactor mission, and we don’t see her until we get to Sector 7.

Not only does this scene reveal Tifa’s importance to Cloud much earlier on than in the OG, but it sets up a sort of frame of reference that colors Cloud’s subsequent interactions. Even as Jessie kind of flirts with him throughout the reactor mission, even with his chance meeting Aerith in Sector 8, in the back of your mind, you might be thinking — wait what about his relationship with this Tifa character? What if he’s already spoken for?

Think about how this plays out in the OG. Jessie is pretty much a non-entity, and Cloud has his meet-cute with the flower girl before we’re even aware that Tifa exists. It’s hard to get too invested in his interactions with Tifa, when you know he has to meet the flower girl again, and you’re waiting for that moment, because that’s when the game will start in earnest.

After chapter 1 of the Remake, a new player may be asking — who is this Tifa person, and, echoing Jessie’s question, what kind of relationship does she have with Cloud? It’s a question that’s repeated when Barret mentions her before they set the bomb, and again when Barret specifies Seventh Heaven is where Tifa works — and the game zooms in on Cloud’s face — when they arrive in Sector 7.

It’s when we finally meet her at Seventh Heaven in Ch. 3 that we feel, ah now, this game has finally begun.

It’s also interesting how inorganically this question is introduced in the Remake. Up until that moment, the dialogue and Cloud are all business. Then, as they’re waiting for the gate to open, Jessie asks about Tifa completely out of the blue, and Cloud, all of a sudden, is at a lost for words, and has the first of many flashbacks. That this moment is a bit incongruous shows the effort SE made to establish Tifa’s importance to the game and to Cloud early on.

One of the biggest changes in the Remake is the addition of the events in Ch. 3 and 4. Unlike what happens in Ch. 18, Ch. 3 and 4 feel like such a natural extension of the OG’s story that many players may not even realize that SE has added an whole day’s and night’s worth of events to the OG’s story. While not a drastic change, it does reshape our understanding of subsequent events in the story, namely Cloud’s time spent alone with Aerith.

In the OG, we rush from one reactor mission to the next, with no real time to explore Cloud’s character or his relationships with any of the other characters in between. When he crashes through the church, he gets a bit of a breather. We see a different side of him with Aerith. Since we have nothing else to compare it to, many might assume that his relationship with Aerith is special. That she brings something out of him that no one else can.

That is no longer the case in the Remake. While Cloud’s time in Sector 5 with Aerith remains largely unchanged though greatly expanded, it no longer feels  “special.” So many of the beats that seemed exclusive to his relationship with Aerith in the OG, we’ve now already seen play out with both Tifa and the other members of AVALANCHE long before he meets Aerith.

Cloud tells the flowers to listen to Aerith; he’s told Tifa he’s listening if she wants to talk; told Bigg’s he wants to hear the story of Jessie’s dad. Cloud offers to walk Aerith back home; he offered the same to Wedge. Cloud smiles at Aerith; he’s already smiled at Tifa and AVALANCHE a number of times.

Now, I’m under no illusion that SE added these chapters solely to diminish Aerith’s importance to Cloud (other than the obvious goal of making the game longer, I imagine they wanted the player to spend more time in Sector 7 and more time with the other AVALANCHE members so that the collapse of the Pillar and their deaths have more weight), but they certainly must have realized that this would be one effect. If pushing Cloud/Aerith’s romance had been a goal with the Remake, this would be a scenario they would try to avoid. Notably, the other place where time has been added - the night in the Underground Shinra Lab, and the day helping other people out around the slums — are also periods of time when Aerith is absent.

Home Sweet Slums vs. Budding Bodyguard

Since most of the events in Ch. 3 were invented for the Remake, and thus we have nothing in the OG to compare it to (except to say that something is probably better than nothing), I thought it would be more interesting to compare it to Ch. 8. Structurally, they are nearly identical — Cloud doing sidequests around the Sectors with one of the girls as his guide. Extra bits of dialogue the more sidequests you complete, with an optional story event if you do them all. Do Cloud’s relationships with each girl progress the same way in both chapters? Is the Remake just Final Waifu Simulator 2020 or are they distinct, reflecting their respective roles in the story as a whole?

A lot of what the player takes away from these chapters is going to be pretty subjective (Is he annoyed with her or is he playing hard to get), yet the vibes of the two chapters are quite different. This is because in Ch. 3, the player is getting to know Tifa through her relationship with Cloud; in Ch. 8; the player is getting to know Aerith as a character on her own.

What do I mean by this? Let’s take Cloud’s initial introduction into each Sector. In Ch. 3, it’s a straight shot from Seventh Heaven to Stargazer Heights punctuated by a brief conversation where Tifa asks Cloud about the mission he was just on. We don’t learn anything new about Tifa’s character here. Instead we hear Cloud recount the mission we already saw play out in detail in Ch. 1 But it’s through this conversation that we get a glimpse of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship — unlike the reticent jerk he was with Avalanche, this Cloud is much more responsive and even tries to reassure her in his own stilted way. We also know that they have enough of a past together that Tifa can categorize him as “not a people person” — an assessment to which Cloud agrees. Slowly, we’re getting an answer to the question Jessie posed in Ch. 1 — just what kind of relationship does Cloud have with Tifa?

In Ch. 8, Aerith leads Cloud on a roundabout way through Sector 5, and stops, unprompted, to talk about her experiences helping at the restaurant, helping out the doctor, and helping with the orphans at the Leaf House. It’s not so much a conversation as a monologue. Cloud isn’t the one who inquires about these relationships, and more jarringly, he doesn’t respond until Aerith directly asks him a question (interestingly enough, it’s about the flower she gave him…which he then gave to Tifa). Here, the game is allowing the player to learn more about the kind of person Aerith is. Cloud is also learning about Aerith at the same time, but with his non-reaction, either the game itself is indifferent to Cloud’s feelings towards Aerith or it is deliberately trying to portray Cloud’s indifference to Aerith.

The optional story event you can see in each chapter after completing all the side quests is also telling. In Ch. 3, “Alone at Last” is almost explicitly about Cloud and Tifa’s relationship. It’s bookended by two brief scenes between Marle and Cloud — the first in which she lectures him about how he should treat Tifa almost like an overprotective in-law, the second after they return downstairs and Marle awards Cloud with an accessory “imbued with the fervent desire to be by one’s side for eternity” after he makes Tifa smile. In between, Cloud and Tifa chat alone in her room. Tifa finally gets a chance to ask Cloud about his past and they plan a little date to celebrate their reunion. There is also at least the suggestion that Cloud was expecting something else when Tifa asked him to her room.

In Ch. 8’s “The Language of Flowers,” Cloud and Aerith’s relationship is certainly part of the story — unlike earlier in the chapter, Cloud actually asks Aerith about what she’s doing and even supports her by talking to the flowers too, but the other main objective of this much briefer scene is to show Aerith’s relationship with the flowers and of her mysterious Cetra powers (though we don’t know about her ancestry just yet). Like a lot of Aerith’s dialogue, there’s a lot of foreshadowing and foreboding in her words. If anything, it’s almost as if Cloud is playing the Marle role to the flowers, as an audience surrogate to ask Aerith about her relationship with the flowers so that she can explain. Also, there’s no in-game reward that suggests what the scene was really about.

If there’s any confusion about what’s going on here, just compare their titles “Alone At Last” vs. “The Language of Flowers.”

I’ll try not to bring my personal feelings into this, but there’s just something so much more satisfying about the construction of Ch. 3. This is some real storytelling 101 shit, but I think a lot of it due to just how much set up and payoff there is, and how almost all of said payoff deepens our understanding of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship:

Marle: Cloud meets Tifa’s overprotective landlady towards the beginning of the chapter. She is dubious of his character and his relationship with TIfa. This impression does not change the second time they meet even though Tifa herself is there to mediate. It’s only towards the end of the chapter, after all the sidequests are complete, that this tension is resolved. Marle gives Cloud a lecture about how he should be treating Tifa, which he seems to take to heart. And Cloud finally earns Marle’s begrudging approval after he emerges from their rooms with a chipper-looking Tifa in tow.

Their past: For their first in-game interaction, Cloud casually brings up that fact that it’s been “Five years” since they’ve last, which seem to throw Tifa off a bit. As they’re replacing filters, Cloud asks Tifa what she’s been up to in the time since they’ve been apart, and Tifa quickly changes the subject. Tifa tries to ask Cloud about his life “after he left the village,” at the Neighborhood Watch HQ, and this time he’s the one who seems to be avoiding the subject. It’s only after all the Ch. 3 sidequests are complete, and they're alone in her room that Tifa finally gets the chance to ask her question. A question which Cloud still doesn’t entirely answer. This question remains unresolved, and anyone’s played the OG will know that it will remain unresolved for some time yet, as it is THE question of Cloud’s story as a whole.

The lessons: Tifa starts spouting off some lessons for life in the slums as she brings Cloud around the town, though it’s unclear if Cloud is paying attention or taking them to heart. After completing the first sidequest, Cloud repeats one of these sayings back to her, confirming that he’s been listening all along. By the end of the chapter, Cloud is repeating these lessons to himself, even when Tifa isn’t around. These lessons extend beyond this chapter, with Cloud being a real teacher’s pet, asking Tifa “Is this a lesson” in Ch. 10 once they reunite.

The drink: When Cloud first arrives at Seventh Heaven, Tifa plays hostess and asks him if he wants anything, but it seems he’s only interested in his money. After exploring the sector a bit, Tifa again tries to play the role of cheery bartender, offering to make him a cocktail at the bar, but Cloud sees through this facade, and they carry on. Finally, after the day’s work is done, to tide Cloud over while she’s meeting with AVALANCHE, Tifa finally gets the chance to make him a drink. No matter, which dialogue option the player chooses, Tifa and Cloud fall into the roles of flirty bartender and patron quite easily. Who would have thought this was possible from the guy we met in Ch. 1?

This dynamic is largely absent in Ch. 8, except perhaps exploring Aerith’s relationship with the flowers, which “pays off” in the “Language of Flowers” event, but again, that scene is primarily about Aerith’s character rather than her relationship with Cloud. The orphans and the Leaf House are a throughline of the chapter, but they are merely present. There’s no clear progression here as was the case with in Ch. 3. Sure, the kids admire Cloud quite a bit after he saves them, but it’s not like they were dubious of his presence before. They barely paid attention to him. In terms of the impact the kids have on Cloud’s relationship with Aerith, there isn’t much at all. Certainly nothing like the role Marle plays in developing his relationship with Tifa.

The thing is, there are plenty of moments that could have been set ups, only there’s no real follow through. Aerith introduces Cloud around town as her bodyguard, and some people like the Doctor express dubiousness of his ability to do the job, but even after we spend a whole day fighting off monsters, and defeating Rude, there’s no payoff. Not even a throwaway “Wow, great job bodyguarding” comment. Same with the whole “one date” reward. Other than a quick reference on the way to Sector 5, and Aerith threatening to reveal the deal to cajole Cloud into helping her gather flowers, it’s never brought up again, in this chapter, or the rest of the game.

Aerith also makes a big stink about Cloud taking the time to enjoy Elmyra’s cooking. This is after Cloud is excluded from AVALANCHE’s celebration in Seventh Heaven and after he misses out on Jessie’s mom’s “Midgar Special” with Biggs and Wedge. So this could have been have been the set up to Cloud finally getting to experience a nice, domestic moment where he feels like he’s part of a family. And this dinner does happen! Only…the Remake skips over it entirely. Which is quite a strange choice considering that almost every other waking moment of Cloud’s time in Midgar has been depicted in excruciating detail. SE has decided that either whatever happened in this dinner between these three characters is irrelevant to the story they’re trying to tell, or they’ve deliberately excluded this scene from the game so that the player wouldn’t get any wrong ideas from it (e.g., that Cloud is starting to feel at home with Aerith).

Speaking of home, the Odd Jobs in Ch. 3 feel a bit more meaningful outside of just the gameplay-related rewards because they’re a way for Cloud to improve his reputation as he considers building a life for himself in Sector 7. This intent is implicit as Tifa imparts upon him the life lessons for surviving the slums, and then explicit, when Tifa asks him if he’s going to “stick around a little longer” outside of Seventh Heaven and he answers maybe. (It is later confirmed when Cloud and Tifa converse in his room in Ch. 4 after he remembers their promise).

Despite Aerith’s endeavors to extend their time together, there’s no indication that Cloud is planning to put down roots in Sector 5, or even return. Not even after doing all the Odd Jobs. If anything, it’s just the opposite — after 3 Odd Jobs, Aerith, kind of jokingly tells Cloud “don’t think you can rely on me forever.” This is a line that has a deeper meaning for anyone who knows Aerith’s fate in the OG, but Cloud seems totally fine with the outcome. Similarly, at the end of the Chapter 8, Elmyra asks Cloud to leave and never speak to Aerith again — a request to which he readily agrees.

Adding to the different vibes of the Chapters are the musical themes that play in the background. In Ch. 3, it’s the “Main Theme of VII”, followed by “On Our Way” — two tracks that instantly recall the OG. While the Main Theme is a bit melancholy, it's also familiar. It feels like home. In Ch. 8, we have an instrumental version of ‘Hollow’ - the new theme written for the Remake. While, it’s a lovely piece, it’s unfamiliar and honestly as a bit anxiety inducing (as is the intent).

(A quick aside to address the argument that this proves ‘Hollow’ is about Cloud’s feelings for Aerith:

Which of course doesn’t make any damn sense because he hasn’t even lost Aerith at this point the story. Even if you want to argue that there is so timey-wimey stuff going on and the whole purpose of the Remake is to rewrite the timeline so that Cloud doesn’t lose Aerith around — shouldn’t there be evidence of this desire outside of just the background music? Perhaps, in Cloud’s actions during the Chapter which the song plays — shouldn’t he dread being parted from her, shouldn’t he be the one trying to extend their time together? Instead, he’s willing to let her go quite easily.

The more likely explanation as to why “Hollow” plays in Ch. 8 is that since the “Main Theme of FFVII”  already plays in Ch. 3, the other “main theme” written for the Remake is going to play in the other chapter with a pseudo-open world vibe. If you’re going to say “Hollow” is about Cloud’s feelings for Aerith then you’d have to accept that the Main Theme of the entire series is about Cloud’s feelings for Tifa, which would actually make a bit more sense given that is practically Cloud’s entire character arc.)

Both chapters contain a scripted battle that must be completed before the chapter can end. They both contain a shot where Cloud fights side by side with each of the girls.

Here, Cloud and Tifa are both in focus during the entirety of this shot.

Here, the focus pulls away from Cloud the moment Aerith enters the frame.

I doubt the developers expected most players to notice this particular technique, but it reflects the subtle differences in the way these two relationships are portrayed. By the end of Ch. 3, Cloud and Tifa are acting as one unit. By the end of Ch. 8, even when they’re together, Cloud and Aerith are still apart.

A brief (lol) overview of some meaningful changes from the OG

One of the most significant changes in the Sector 7 chapters is how The Promise flashback is depicted. In the OG, Tifa is the one who has to remind Cloud of the Promise, in a rather pushy way, and whether Cloud chooses to join the next mission to fulfill his promise to her or because Barret is giving him a raise feels a bit more ambiguous.

In the Remake, the Promise has it’s own little mini-arc. It’s first brought up at the end of Ch. 3 when Cloud talks to Tifa about her anxieties about the upcoming mission. Tifa subtly references the Promise by mentioning that she’s “in a pitch” — a reference that goes over Cloud’s head. It’s only in Ch. 4, in the middle of a mission with Biggs and Wedge, where Tifa is no where in sight, that a random building fan reminds him of the Nibelheim water tower and the Promise he made to Tifa there. There’s also another brief flashback to that earlier moment in the bar when Tifa mentions she’s in a “pinch.” Again, the placement of this particular flashback at this particular moment feels almost jarring. And the flashback to the scene in the bar — a flashback to a scene we’ve already seen play out in-game — is the only one of its kind in the Remake. SE went out of the way to show that this particular moment is very important to Cloud and the game as whole. It’s when Cloud returns to his room, and Tifa asks him if he’s planning to stay in Midgar, that this mini-arc is finally complete. He brings up the Promise on his own, and makes it explicit that the reason he’s staying is for her. It’s to fulfill his Promise to her, not for money or for AVALANCHE — at this point, he’s not even supposed to be going on the next mission.

The Reactor 5 chapters are greatly expanded, but there aren’t really any substantive changes other than the addition of the rather intimate train roll scene between and Cloud and Tifa, which adds nothing to the story except to establish how horny they are for each other. We know this is the case, of course, because if you go out of your way to make Cloud look like an incompetent idiot and let the timer run out, you can avoid this scene altogether. But even in that alternate scene, Cloud’s concern for Tifa is crystal clear.

Ch. 8 also plays out quite similarly to the OG for the most part, though Cloud’s banter with Aerith on the rooftops doesn’t feel all that special since we’ve already seen him do the same with Tifa, Barret and the rest of AVALANCHE. The rooftops is the first place Cloud laughs in the OG. In the Remake, while Cloud might not have straight out laughed before, he’s certainly smiled quite a bit in the preceding chapters. Also, with the addition of voice acting and realistic facial expressions, that “laughter” in the Remake comes off much more sarcastic than genuine.

It’s also notable that in the Remake, Cloud vocally protests almost every time Aerith tries to extend their time together. In the OG, Cloud says nothing in these moments, which the player could reasonably interpret as assent.

One major change in the Remake is how Aerith learns of Tifa’s existence. In the OG, Cloud mentions that he wants to go back to Tifa’s bar, prompting Aerith to ask him about his relationship with her. In the Remake, Cloud calls Tifa’s name after having a random flashback of Child Tifa as he’s walking along with some kids. Again the insertion of said flashback is a bit jarring, prompting Aerith to understandably ask Cloud about just who this Tifa is. In the OG, this exchange served to show Aerith’s jealousy and her interest in Cloud. In the Remake, it’s all about Cloud’s feelings for Tifa and his inability to articulate them. As for Aerith, I suppose you can still read her reaction as jealous, though simple curiosity is a perfectly reasonable way to read it too. It plays out quite similarly to Aerith asking Cloud about who he gave the flower to. Her follow ups seem indicate that she’s merely curious about who this recipient might be rather than showing that she’s upset/jealous of the fact that said person exists.

For the collapsed tunnel segment, the Remake adds the recurring bit of Aerith and Cloud trying to successfully complete a high-five. While this is certainly a way to show them getting closer, it’s about least intimate way that SE could have done so. Just think about the alternatives — you could have Cloud and Aerith sharing brief tidbits of their lives after each mechanical arm, you could have them trying to reach for each other’s hand. Instead, SE chose an action that is we’ve seen performed between a number of different platonic buddies, and an action that Aerith immediately performs with Tifa upon meeting her. Not to mention, even while they are technically getting closer, Cloud still rejects (or at least tries to) Aerith’s invitations to extend their time together twice — at the fire and at the playground.

One aspect from these two Chapters that does has plenty of set up and a satisfying payoff is Aerith’s interest in Cloud’s SOLDIER background. You have the weirdness of Aerith already knowing that Cloud was in SOLDIER without him mentioning it first, followed by Elmyra’s antipathy towards SOLDIERs in general, not to mention Aerith actively fishing for information about Cloud’s time in SOLDIER. (For players who’ve played Crisis Core, the reason for her behavior is even more obvious, with her “one date” gesture mirroring Zack’s, and her line to Cloud in front of the tunnel a near duplicate of what she says to Zack — at least in the original Japanese).

Finally, at the playground, it’s revealed that the reason for all this weirdness is because Aerith’s first love was also a SOLDIER who was the same rank as Cloud. Unlike in the OG, Cloud does not exhibit any potential jealousy by asking about the nature of her relationship, and Aerith doesn’t try to play it off by dismissing the seriousness. In fact, with the emotional nuance we can now see on her face, we can understand the depth of her feelings even if she cannot articulate them.

This is the first scene in the Remake where Cloud and Aerith have a genuine conversation. Thus, finally, Cloud expresses some hesitation before he leaves her — and as far as he knows, this could be the last time they see each other. You can interpret this hesitation as romantic longing or it could just as easily be Cloud being a bit sad to part from a new friend. Regardless, it’s notable that scene is preceded by one where Aerith is talking about her first love who she clearly isn’t over, and followed by a scene where Cloud sprints across the screen, without a backwards glance at Aerith, after seeing a glimpse of Tifa through a tiny window in a Chocobo cart that’s about a hundred yards away.

The Wall Market segment in the Remake is quite explicitly about Cloud’s desire to save Tifa. In the OG, Aerith has no trouble getting into Corneo’s mansion on her own, so I can see how someone could misinterpret Cloud going through all the effort to dress as a woman to protect Aerith from the Don’s wiles (though of course, you would need to ask, why they trying to infiltrate the mansion in the first place?). In the Remake, Cloud has to go through herculean efforts to even get Aerith in front of the Don. Everyone who is aware of Cloud’s cause, from Sam to Leslie to Johnny to Andrea to Aerith herself, comments on how hard he’s working to save Tifa and how important she must be to him for him to do so. In case there’s any confusion, the Remake also includes a scene where Cloud is prepared to bust into the mansion on his own, leaving Aerith to fend for herself, after Johnny comes with news that Tifa is in trouble.

Both Cloud and Aerith get big dress reveals in the Remake. If you get Aerith’s best dress, Cloud’s reaction can certainly be read as one of attraction, but since the game continues on the same regardless of which dress you get, it’s not meant to mark a shift in Cloud and Aerith’s relationship. Rather, it’s a reward for the player for completing however many side quests in Ch. 8, especially since the Remake incentives the player to get every dress and thus see all of Cloud’s reactions by making it a Trophy and including it in the play log.

A significant and very welcome change from the OG to the Remake is Tifa and Aerith’s relationship dynamic. In the OG, the girls’ first meeting in Corneo’s mansion starts with them fighting over Cloud (by pretending not to fight over Cloud). In the Remake, the sequence of events is reversed so that it starts off with Cloud’s reunion with Tifa (again emphasizing that the whole purpose of the infiltration is because Cloud wants to save Tifa). Then when Aerith wakes, she’s absolutely thrilled to make Tifa’s acquaintance, hardly acknowledging Cloud at all. Tifa is understandably more wary at first, but once they start working together, they become fast friends.

Also interesting is that from the moment Aerith and Tifa meet, almost every instance where Cloud could be shown worrying about Aerith or trying to comfort Aerith is given to Tifa instead. In the OG, it’s Cloud who frets about Aerith getting involved in the plot to question the Don, and regrets getting her mixed up in everything once they land in the sewers. In the Remake, those very same reservations are expressed by Tifa instead. Tifa is the one who saves Aerith when the platform collapses in the sewer. Tifa is the one who emotionally comforts Aerith after they’re separated in the train graveyard. (Cloud might be the one who physically saves her, but he doesn’t even so much give her a second glance to check on her well-being before he runs off to face Eligor. He leaves that job for Tifa). It almost feels like the Remake is going out of its way to avoid any moments between Cloud and Aerith that could be interpreted as romantic. In fact, after Corneo’s mansion, unless you get Aerith’s resolution, there are almost no one-on-one interactions at all between Cloud and Aerith. Such is not the case with Cloud and Tifa. In fact, right after defeating Abzu in the sewers, Cloud runs after Tifa, and asks her if what she’s saying is one of those slum lessons — continuing right where they left off.

Ch. 11 feels like a wink-wink nudge-nudge way to acknowledge the LTD. You have the infamous shot of the two girls on each of Cloud’s arms, and two scenes where Cloud appears as if he’s unable to choose between them when he asks them if they’re okay. Of course, in this same Chapter, you have a scene during the boss fight with the Phantom where Cloud actually pulls Tifa away from Aerith, leaving Aerith to defend herself, for an extended sequence where he tries to keep Tifa safe. This is not something SE would include if their intention is to keep Cloud’s romantic interest ambiguous or if Aerith is meant to be the one he loves. Of course, Ch. 11 is not the first we see of this trio’s dynamic. We start with Ch. 10, which is all about Aerith and Tifa’s friendship. Ch. 11 is a nod to the LTD dynamic in the OG, but it’s just that, a nod, not an indication the Remake is following the same path. Halfway through Ch. 11, the dynamic completely disappears.

Ch. 12 changes things up a bit from the OG. Instead of Cloud and Tifa ascending the pillar together, Cloud goes up first. Seemingly just so that we can have the dramatic slow-mo handgrab scene between the two of them when Tifa decides to run after Cloud — right after Aerith tells her to follow her heart.

The Remake also shows us what happens when Aerith goes to find Marlene at Seventh Heaven — including the moment when Aerith sees the flower she gave Cloud by the bar register, and Aerith is finally able to connect the dots. After seeing Cloud be so cagey about who he gave the flower to, and weird about his relationship with Tifa, and after seeing how Cloud and Tifa act around each other. It finally makes sense. She’s figured it out before they have. It’s a beautiful payoff to all that set up. Any other interpretation of Aerith’s reaction doesn’t make a lick of sense, because if it’s to indict she’s jealous of Tifa, where is all the set up for that? Why did the Remake eliminate all the moments from the OG where she had been noticeably jealous before? Without this, that interpretation makes about as much sense as someone arguing Aerith is smiling because she’s thinking about a great sandwich she had the night before. In case anyone is confused, the scene is preceded by a moment where Aerith tells Tifa to follow her heart before she goes after Cloud, and followed by the moment where Cloud catches Tifa via slow-motion handgrab.

On the pillar itself, there are so many added moments of Cloud showing his concern for Tifa’s physical and emotional well-being. Even when they find Jessie, as sad as Cloud is over Jessie’s death, the game actually spends more time showing us Cloud’s reaction to Tifa crying over Jessie’s death, and Cloud’s inability to comfort her. Since so much of this is physical rather than verbal, this couldn’t have effectively been shown in the OG with its technological limitations.

After the pillar collapses, we start off with a couple of other moments showing Cloud’s concern over Tifa — watching over her as she wakes, his dramatic fist clench while he watches Barret comfort Tifa in a way he cannot. There is also a subtle but important change in the dialogue. In the OG, Tifa is the one who tells Barret that Marlene is safe because she was with Aerith. Cloud is also on his way to Sector 5, but it’s for the explicit purpose of trying to save Aerith, which we know because Tifa asks. In the Remake, Tifa is too emotionally devastated to comfort Barret about Marlene. Cloud, trying to help in the only way he can, is now the one to tell Barret about Marlene. Leading them to Sector 5 is no longer about him trying to help Aerith, but about him reuniting Barret with his daughter. Again, another moment where Cloud shows concern about Aerith in the OG is eliminated from the Remake.

Rather than going straight from Aerith’s house to trying to figure out a way into the Shinra building to find Aerith, the group takes a detour to check out the ruins of Sector 7 and rescue Wedge from Shinra’s underground lab. It’s only upon seeing the evidence of Shinra’s inhumane experimentation firsthand that Cloud articulates to Elmyra the need to rescue Aerith. In the OG, they never sought out Elmyra’s permission, and Tifa explicitly asks to join Cloud on his quest. Rescuing Aerith is framed as primarily Cloud’s goal, Tifa and Barret are just along for the ride.

In the Remake, all three wait until Elymra gives them her blessing, and it’s framed (quite literally) as the group’s collective goal as opposed to just Cloud’s.

In the aptly named Ch. 14 resolutions, each marks the culmination of the character’s arc for the Part 1 of Remake. While their arcs are by no means complete, they do offer a nice preview of what their ultimate resolutions will be.

With the exception of Tifa’s, these resolutions are primarily about the character themselves. Their relationships with Cloud are secondary. Each resolution marks a change in the character themselves, but not necessarily a change in Cloud’s relationship with said character. Barret recommits to AVALANCHE’s mission and his role as a leader despite the deep personal costs. Aerith’s is full of foreshadowing as she accept her fate and impending death and decides to make the most of the time she has left. After trying to put aside her own feelings for the sake of others the whole time, Tifa finally allows herself to feel the full devastation of losing her home for the second time. Like her ultimate resolution in the Lifestream that we’ll see in about 25 years, Cloud is the only person she can share this sentiment with because he was the only person who was there.

Barret does not grow closer to Cloud through his resolution. Cloud has already proved himself to him by helping out on the pillar and reuniting him with Marlene. Barret resolution merely reveals that Barret is now comfortable enough with Cloud to share his past.

Similarly, Cloud starts off Aerith’s resolution with an intent to go rescue her, and ends with that intent still intact. Aerith is more open about her feelings here than before, it being a dream and all, but these feelings aren’t something that developed during this scene.

The only difference is during Tifa’s resolution. Cloud has been unable to emotionally comfort Tifa up until this point. It’s only when Tifa starts crying and rests her head upon his shoulder that he is able to make a change, to make a choice and hug her. Halfway through Tifa’s resolution, the scene shifts its focus to Cloud, his inaction and eventual action. Notably, the only time we have a close-up of any character during all three resolutions (I’ll define close-up here as a shot where a character’s face takes up half or more of the shot), are three shots of Cloud when he’s hugging/trying to hug Tifa. Tifa’s resolution is the only one where Cloud arcs.

What of the whole “You can’t fall in love with me” line in Aerith’s resolution? Why would SE include that if not to foreshadow Cloud falling in love with Aerith? Or indicate that he has already? Well, you can’t just take the dialogue on its own, you how to look at how these lines are framed. Notably, when she says “you can’t fall in love with me,” Aerith is framed at the center of the shot, and almost looks like she’s directly addressing the player. It’s as much a warning for the player as it is for Cloud, which makes sense if you know her fate in the OG.

This is followed directly by her saying “Even if you think you have…it’s not real.” In this shot, it’s back to a standard shot/reverse shot where she is the left third of the frame. She is addressing Cloud here, which, again if you’ve played the OG, is another bit of heavy foreshadowing. The reason Clould would think he might be in love with Aerith is because he’s falsely assuming of the memories of a man who did love Aerith — Zack.

For Cloud’s response (”Do I get a say in all this?”/ “That’s very one-sided” depending on the translation), rather than showing a shot of his face, the Remake shows him with his back turned.

Whatever Cloud’s feelings may be for Aerith, the game seems rather indifferent to them.

What is more telling is the choice to include a bit with Cloud getting jealous over a guy trying to give Tifa flowers in Barret’s resolution. Barret also mentions both Jessie and Aerith in their conversation, but nothing else gets such a reaction from Cloud.

It also should go without saying that if Aerith’s resolution is meant to establish Cloud and Aerith’s romance, there should have been plenty of set-up beforehand and plenty of follow-through afterward. That obviously is not the case, because again, the Remake has gone out of its way to avoid moments where Cloud’s actions towards Aerith could be interpreted romantically.

Case in point, at around this time in the OG, Marlene tells Cloud that she thinks Aerith likes him and the player has the option to have Cloud express his hope that she does. This scene is completely eliminated from the Remake and replaced with a much more appropriate scene of father-daughter affection between Marlene and Barret while Tifa and Cloud are standing together outside.

The method by which they get up the plate is completely different in the Remake. Leslie is the one who helps them this time around, and though his quest to reunite with his fiance directly parallels with the trio’s desire to save Aerith, Leslie himself draws a comparison to earlier when Cloud was trying to rescue Tifa. Finally, when Abzu is defeated again, it is Barret who draws the parallel of their search for Aerith to Leslie’s search for his fiance, making it crystal clear that saving Aerith is a group effort rather than only Cloud’s.

Speaking of Barret, in the OG, he seems to reassess his opinion of Cloud in the Shinra HQ stairs when he sees Cloud working so hard to save Aerith and realizes he might actually care about other people. In the Remake, that reevaluation occurs after you complete all the Ch. 14 sidequests and help a bunch of NPCs. Arguably, this moment occurs even earlier in the Remake for Barret, after the Airbuster, when he realizes that Cloud is more concerned for his and Tifa’s safety than his own.

Overall, the entire Aerith rescue feels so anticlimactic in the Remake. In the OG, Cloud gets his big hero moment in the Shinra Building. He’s the one who runs up to Aerith when the glass shatters and they finally reunite. In the Remake, it’s unclear what the emotional stakes are for Cloud here. At their big reunion, all we get from him is a “Yep.” In fact, when you look at how this scene plays out, Aerith is positioned equally between Cloud and Tifa at the moment of her rescue. Cloud’s answer is again with his back turned to the camera. It’s Tifa who gets her own shot with her response.

Another instance of the Remake being completely indifferent to Cloud’s feelings for Aerith, and actually priotizing Tifa’s relationship with Aerith instead.

It is also Tifa who runs to reunite with Aerith after the group of enemies is defeated. Another moment that could have easily been Cloud’s that the Remake gives to Tifa.

Also completely eliminated in the Remake, is the “I’m your bodyguard. / The deal was for one date” exchange in the jail cells. In the Remake, after Ch. 8, the date isn’t brought up again at all; “the bodyguard” reference only comes up briefly in Ch. 11 and then never again.

In the Remake, the jail scene is replaced by the scene in Aerith’s childhood room. Despite the fact that this is Aerith’s room, it is Tifa’s face that Cloud first sees when he wakes. What purpose does this moment serve other than to showcase Cloud and Tifa’s intimacy and the other characters’ tacit acknowledgment of said intimacy?

(This is the second time where Cloud wakes up and Tifa is the first thing he sees. The other was at Corneo’s mansion. He comes to three times in the Remake, but in Ch. 8, even though Aerith is right in front of him, we start off with a few seconds of Cloud gazing around the church before settling on the person in front of him. Again, while not something that most players would notice, this feels like a deliberate choice.)

Especially since this scene itself is all about Aerith. She begins a sad story about her past, and Cloud, rather than trying to comfort her in any way, asks her to give us some exposition about the Ancients. When the Whispers surround her, even though Cloud is literally right there, it's Tifa who pulls her out of it and comforts her. Another moment that could have been Cloud that was given to Tifa, and honestly, this one feels almost bizarre.

Throughout the entire Shinra HQ episode, Cloud and Aerith haven’t had a single moment alone to themselves. The Drums scenario is completely invented for the Remake. The devs could have contrived a way for Cloud and Aerith to have some one-on-one time here and work through the feelings they expressed during Aerith’s resolution if they wanted. Instead, with the mandatory party configurations during this stage - Cloud & Barret on one side; Tifa & Aerith on the others, with Cloud & Tifa being the respective team leaders communicating over PHS, the Remake minimizes the amount of interaction Cloud and Aerith have with each other in this chapter.

On the rooftop, before Cloud’s solo fight with Rufus, even though Cloud is ostensibly doing all this so that they can bring Aerith to safety, the Remake doesn’t include a single shot that focuses on Aerith’s face and her reaction to his actions. The game has decided, whatever Aerith’s feelings are in this moment, they’re irrelevant to the story they’re trying to tell. Instead we get shots focusing solely on Barret and Tifa. While the Remake couldn’t find any time to develop Cloud and Aerith’s relationship at the Shinra Tower (even though the OG certainly did), it did find time to add a new scene where Tifa saves Cloud from certain death, while referencing their Promise.

A lot of weird shit happens after this, but it’s pretty much all plot and no character. We do get one more moment where Cloud saves Tifa (and Tifa alone) from the Red Whisper even though Aerith is literally right next to her. The Remake isn’t playing coy at all about where Cloud’s preferences lie.

The party order for the Sephiroth battle varies depending on how you fought the Whispers. All the other character entrances (whoever the 3rd party member is, then the 4th and Red) are essentially the exact same shots, with the characters replaced. It’s the first character entrance (which can only be Aerith or  Tifa) that you have two distinct options.

If Aerith is first, the camera pans from Cloud over to Aerith. It then cuts back to Cloud’s reaction, in a separate shot, as Aerith walks to join him (offscreen). It’s only when the player regains control of the characters that Cloud and Aerith ever share the frame.

On the other hand, if Tifa is first, we see Tifa land from Cloud’s POV. Cloud then walks over to join Tifa and they immediately share a frame, facing Sephiroth together.

Again, this is not something SE would expect the player to notice the first or even second time around. Honestly, I doubt anyone would notice at all unless they watched all these variations back to back. That is telling in itself, that SE would go through all this effort (making these scenes unique rather than copy and pasting certainly takes more time and effort) to ensure that the depictions of Cloud’s relationships with these two women are distinct despite the fact that hardly anyone would notice. Even in the very last chapter of the game, they want us to see Cloud and Tifa as a pair and Cloud and Aerith as individuals.

Which isn’t to say that Aerith is being neglected in the Remake. Quite the opposite, in fact, when she has essentially become the main protagonist and the group’s spirtual leader in Ch. 18. Rather, her relationship with Cloud is no longer an essential part of her character. Not to mention, one of the very last shots of the Remake is about Aerith sensing Zack’s presence. Again, not the kind of thing you want to bring up if the game is supposed to show her being in love with Cloud.

What does it all mean????

Phew — now let’s step back and look and how the totality of these changes have reshaped our understanding of the story as a whole. Looking solely at the Midgar section of the OG, and ignoring everything that comes after it, it seems to tell a pretty straightforward story: Cloud is a cold-hearted jerk who doesn’t care about anyone else until he meets Aerith. It is through his relationship with Aerith that he begins to soften up and starts giving a damn about something other than himself. This culminates when he risks it all to rescue Aerith from the clutches of the game’s Big Bad itself, The Shinra Electric Company.

This was honestly the reason why I was dreading the Remake when I learned that it would only cover the Midgar segment. A game that’s merely an expansion of the Midgar section of the OG is probably going to leave a lot of people believing that Cloud & Aerith were the intended couple, and I didn’t want to wait years and perhaps decades for vindication after the Remake’s Lifestream Scene.

I imagine this very scenario is what motivated SE to make so many of these changes. In the OG, they could get away with misdirecting the audience for the first few hours of the game since the rest of the story and the reveals were already completed. The player merely had to pop in the next disc to get the real story. Such is not the case with the Remake. Had the the Remake followed the OG’s beats more closely, many players, including some who’ve never played the OG, would finish the Remake thinking that Cloud and Aerith were the intended couple. It would be years until they got the rest of the story, and at that point, the truth would feel much more like a betrayal. Like they’ve been cruelly strung along.

While they’ve gone out of their way to adapt most elements from the OG into the Remake, they’ve straight up eliminated many scenes that could be interpreted as Cloud’s romantic interest in Aerith. Instead, he seems much more interested in her knowledge as an Ancient than in her romantic affections. This is the path the Remake could be taking. Instead of Cloud being under the illusion of falling in love with Aerith, he’s under the illusion that the answer to his identity dilemma lies in Aerith’s Cetra heritage, when, of course, the answer was with Tifa all along.

Hiding Sephiroth’s existence during the Midgar arc isn’t necessary to telling the story of FF7, thus it’s been eliminated in the Remake. Similarly, pretending that Cloud and Aerith are going to end up together also isn’t necessary and would only confuse the player. Thus the LTD is no longer a part of the Remake.

If Aerith’s impact on Cloud has been diminished, what then is his arc in the Remake? Is it essentially just the same without the catalyst of Aerith? A cold guy at the start who eventually learns to care about others through the course of the game? Kind of, though arguably, this is who Remake!Cloud is all along, not just Cloud at the end of the Remake. Cloud is a guy who pretends to be a selfish jerk, but he deep down he really does care. He just doesn’t show this side of himself around people he’s unfamiliar with. So part of his arc in the Remake is opening up to the others, Barret, AVALANCHE and Aerith included, but these all span a chapter or two at most. They don’t straddle the entire game.

What is the throughline then? What is an area in which he exhibits continuous growth?

It’s Tifa. It’s his desire to fulfill his Promise to Tifa. Not just to protect her physically, but to be there for her emotionally, something that’s much harder to do. There’s the big moments like when he remembers the Promise in Ch. 4., his dramatic fist clench when he can’t stop Tifa from crying in Ch. 12, and in Ch. 13 when he watches Barret comfort Tifa. It’s all the flashbacks he has of her and the times he’s felt like he failed her. It’s the smaller moments where he can sense her nervousness and unease but the only thing he knows how to do is call her name. It’s all those times during battle, where Tifa can probably take care of herself, but Cloud has to save her because he can’t fail her again. All of this culminates in Tifa’s Resolution, where Tifa is in desperate need of comfort, and is specifically seeking Cloud’s comfort, and Cloud has no idea what to do. He hesitates because he’s clueless, because he doesn’t want to fuck it up, but finally, he makes the choice, he takes the risk, and he hugs her….and he kind of fucks it up. He hugs her too hard. Which is a great thing, because this arc isn’t anywhere close to being over. There’s still so much more to come. So many places this relationship will go.

We get a little preview of this when Tifa saves Cloud on the roof. Everything we thought we knew about their relationship has been flipped on its head. Tifa is the one saving Cloud here, near the end of this part of the Remake. Just as she will save Cloud in the Lifestream just before the end of the FF7 story as a whole. What does Tifa mean to Cloud? It’s one of the first questions posed in the Remake, and by the end, it remains unanswered.

Cloud’s character arc throughout the entire FF7 story is about his reconciling with his identity issues. This continues to develop through the Shinra Tower Chapters, but it certainly isn’t going to be resolved in Part 1 of the Remake. His character arc in the Remake — caring more about others/finding a way to finally comfort Tifa — is resolved in Ch. 14, well before rescuing Aerith, which is what makes her rescue feel so anticlimactic. The resolution of this external conflict isn’t tied to the protagonist’s emotional arc. This was not the case in the OG. I’m certainly not complaining about the change, but the Remake probably would have felt more satisfying as a whole if they hewed to the structure of the OG. Instead, it seems that SE has prioritized the clarity of the Remake series as a whole (leaving no doubt about where Cloud’s affections lie) over the effectiveness of the “climax” in the first entry of the Remake.

This is all clear if you only focus on the “story” of the Remake -- i.e., what the characters are saying and doing. If you extend your lens to the presentation of said story, and here I’m talking about who the game chooses to focus on during the scenes, how long they hold on these shots, which characters share the frame, which do not, etc --- it really could not be more obvious.

Does the camera need to linger for over 5 seconds on Cloud staring at the door after wishing Tifa goodnight? Does it need to find Cloud almost every time Tifa says or does anything so that we’re always aware of his watchfulness and the nature of his care? The answer is no until you realize this dynamic is integral to telling the story of Final Fantasy VII.

I don’t see how anyone who compares the Remake to the OG could come away from it thinking that the Remake series is going to reverse all of the work done in the OG and Compilation by having Cloud end up with Aerith.

Just because the ending seems to indicate that the events of the OG might not be set in stone, it doesn’t mean that the Remake will end with Aerith surviving and living happily ever after with Cloud. Even if Aerith does live (which again seems unlikely given the heavy foreshadowing of her death in the Remake), how do you come away from the Remake thinking that Cloud is going to choose Aerith over Tifa when SE has gone out of its way to remove scenes between Cloud and Aerith that could be interpreted as romantic? And gone out of its way to shove Cloud’s feelings for Tifa in the player’s face? The sequels would have to spend an obscene amount of time not only building Cloud and Aerith’s relationship from scratch, but also dismantling Cloud’s relationship with Tifa. It would be an absolute waste of time and resources, and there’s really no way to do so without making the characters look like assholes in the process.

Now could this happen? Sure, in the sense that literally anything could happen in the future. But in terms of outcomes that would make sense based on what’s come before, this particular scenario is about as plausible as Cloud deciding to relinquish his quest to find Sephiroth so that he can pursue his real dream of becoming at sandwich artist at Panera Bread.

It’s over! I promise!

Like you, I too cannot believe the number of words I’ve wasted on this subject. What is there left to say? The LTD doesn’t exist outside of the first disc of the OG. You'll only find evidence of SE perpetuating the LTD if you go into these stories with the assumption that 1) The LTD exists 2) it remains unanswered. But it’s not. We know that Cloud ends up with Tifa.

What the LTD has become is dissecting individual scenes and lines of dialogue, without considering the context of said things, and pretending as if the outcome is unknown and unknowable. If you took this tact to other aspects of FF7’s story, then it would be someone arguing that because there a number of scenes in the OG that seem to suggest that Meteor will successfully destroy the planet, this means that the question of whether or not our heroes save the world in the end is left ambiguous. No one does that because that would be utterly absurd. Individual moments in a story may suggest alternate outcomes to build tension, to keep us on our toes, but that doesn’t change the ending from being the ending. Our heroes stop Meteor. Cloud loves Tifa. Arguments against either should be treated with the same level of credulity (i.e., none).

It’s frustrating that the LTD, and insecurities about whether or not Cloud really loves Tifa, takes up so much oxygen in any discussion about these characters. And it’s a damn shame, because Cloud and Tifa’s relationship is so rich and expansive, and the so-called “LTD” is such a tiny sliver of that relationship, and one of the least interesting aspects. They’re wonderful because they’re just so damn normal. Unlike other Final Fantasy couples, what keeps them apart is not space and time and death, but the most human and painfully relatable emotion of all, fear. Fear that they can’t live up to the other’s expectations; fear that they might say the wrong thing. The fear that keeps them from admitting their feelings at the Water Tower, they’re finally able to overcome 7 years later in the Lifestream. They’re childhood friends but in a way they’re also strangers. Like other FF couples, we’re able to watch their entire relationship grow and unfold before our eyes. But they have such a history too, a history that we unravel with them at the same time. Every moment of their lives that SE has found worth depicting, they’ve been there for each other, even if they didn’t know it at the time. Theirs is a story that begins and ends with each other. Their is the story that makes Final Fantasy VII what it is.

If you’ve made it this far, many thanks for reading. I truly have no idea how to use this platform, so please direct any and all hatemail to my DMs at TLS, which I will then direct to the trash. (In all seriousness, I’d be happy to answer any specific questions you may have, but I feel like I’ve more than said my piece here.)

If there’s one thing you take away from this, I hope it’s to learn to ignore all the ridiculous arguments out there, and just enjoy the story that’s actually being told. It’s a good one.

[lassieposting]

Bit late and random but it's the anon you leave food out for here to give away I am also bi and I think exactly the same as you about bi val pretty much, every time Derek offers me representation my reaction is to slowly, hesitantly take it and say "thaaaaaaaaanks..." while rolling my eyes, in much the same way one accepts their least favourite flavour of sweet from an annoyingly enthusiastic uncle-type-individual. Ironically I feel I had more in common with her before the bi shit started up.

What I find really amusing is that Landy actually did reasonably well at representation when (and only when) he wasn’t trying. 

Oh god, this got long, anon, my ass rambled.

tldr; I'm glad actual bi people dislike bi val (or how Laundry handled bi val) as much as me, this will probably offend at least one person but i don't really care, Dirty Laundry wrote better rep when he didn't mean to write rep at all, and if he ever starts trying to "represent" groups I'm part of I'll take him out back like a dying horse and shoot him.

Like, yes. He had stupid and potentially offensive shit - I say potentially because what offends one member of a group won’t necessarily offend all of them. His attitude to mentally ill people is, frankly, disgusting. We’ve had “Skulduggery can’t be abused, he doesn’t have feelings”. We’ve had “eVeRyOnE iS bI eVeNtUaLlY”. We had Ping, who seemed to be pretty much universally offensive. And that's what's always going to happen when a straight, cis, white, wealthy, male author tries to write marginalised groups he doesn't know shit about, because inevitably he's going to fall back on stereotypes.

But we also had:

SEXUALITY REP: Phase One's nonstraight characters were treated like the straight ones, and like, isn't that the whole point? There was no need for a massive Coming Out Story TM to grab for those sweet sweet Woke Points, because sexuality isn't supposed to be important to mages. I never understood why Val needed that whole Coming Out Panic storyline. Like...Des and Melissa are ridiculously supportive, encouraging, loving parents. They accepted you dating a ~19 year old when you were ~16. They accepted you revealing you could do fucking magic and that you'd been lying to them for like seven years. They took your undead buddy in stride and the most pressing question your dad had was whether magic toilets exist. There is zero reason to think that "I'm bisexual" is gonna be the thing that makes them flip and throw you into the streets in disgrace, Valkyrie. Come on.

Tanith had girlfriends and it was just mentioned casually, because it's normal.

China had massive UST with Eliza. That was an opportunity right there to not only include a f/f relationship, but also to bring back one of the few precious surviving characters from Phase One, using characters and a relationship that already had several books' worth of setup and tension and interest from fans.

The Monster Hunters have a casual conversation about which one of the Dead Men they'd date.

Ghastly has a conversation with Fletcher about the pain he's been through being in love. He never uses any pronouns.

It was confirmed at one point re: the Dead Men that at this point, after 300-odd years, everyone's been with everyone else at some point.

Thrasher is gay, and while Scapegrace's...everything...is treated as a joke/comedic relief, Thrasher's love for him isn't. He's completely devoted to Scapegrace, and that in itself is not played for laughs, even though the rest of the scene usually is. Thrasher's description of their first meeting is essentially a love-at-first-sight situation for him.

"ABNORMAL" RELATIONSHIP REP: Age gap relationships are normal for mages. Off the top of my head, using only canon, canon-implied or almost-canon ships:

Ghastly/Tanith (~350 year age difference)

Tanith/Sanguine (~250+ year age difference)

Tanith/Saracen (~350 year age difference)

Caisson/Solace (~250 year age difference)

China/Gordon (~400 year age difference)

Kierre/Temper (~500+ year age difference)

If you include fan ships, there's also things like Mevolent/Serpine or my Mevolent/Vile, which are both ~600 year minimum age gaps based on the timeline, or Valdug (and its variations) which is ~400 years.

Now, whether you consider this kind of rep positive or negative is up to you, but it’s there.

MENTAL ILLNESS REP: more like "Which characters in this series don't have a mental illness or a personality disorder?" I have some of these issues, but not all of them, so this is just how I read it, but:

ADHD: Skulduggery

Dissociative Identity Disorder: Skulduggery & Vile

Dissociation: Skulduggery again, most notably in DD and DB

Schizophrenia (or similar): Valkyrie & Darquesse, Valkyrie "seeing" Darquesse's ghost thing in Phase Two

Impostor Syndrome: Reflectionie

Autism: Clarabelle

Trauma/PTSD/CPTSD: Skulduggery, Valkyrie, China, Ghastly, Erskine...pretty much everyone has a believable, understandable, morally grey trauma response in this series. People struggling with trauma are spoilt for choice of characters to see themselves in.

TRAUMA REP: This series is a trauma conga line, but everyone has a believable, understandable, morally grey trauma response in this series. I see little bits of myself in more than one Phase One character.

Childhood Abuse (of varying degrees & types): Skulduggery, Carol & Crystal, Omen, Fletcher, Ghastly, China, Bliss, Sanguine...

Estranged Family: Skulduggery abandoning his crest, Fergus & Gordon, China & Bliss

Bad Romantic Relationship: Skulduggery is also very clearly an abuse victim. He’s got a solid history of romantic attachments to women who manipulate, use and gaslight him for their own agendas.  There's a whole paragraph in SPX about how Abyssinia broke him down, isolated him from his friends and preyed on his desperate need to be loved, all classic abuse tactics.

And I’m personally a huge fan of this backstory for two reasons:

1) Society likes a plucky victim in media. The "My suffering made me stronger" type of victim. And it's not always like that in real life. Not all survivors come out of their abuse stronger or kinder or more understanding. Some of us come out cold and fucked up. Some of us end up as emotionally stunted, bloodied-nails-and-bared-teeth survivors, broken in ways that can't be fixed and sustained by enough rage to power a small sun. But society doesn't like to tell the story of that kind of survivor, because we're not usually a likeable protagonist. When we're shown in media, we're usually the sympathetic villain, or maybe the antihero. But Skug is someone who's done awful things and lost pretty much all his faith in humanity and been burned more times than he can count, and he still makes the conscious choice to try and be the good guy when he could so easily go Evil Supervillain on the world, and I don't know about any of y'all, but I've modelled myself on him in that. I've made the choice to do something good when all I really want to do is just become a horrible, shrivelled ball of nastiness and revenge. And that's because I saw him do it and realised that I could do that too.

Skug is an incredibly capable, strong, masculine Man's Man. He gets in fights all the time, and he usually wins. He's military, an industry that's Really Bad for stigmatizing weakness and mental illness, and he's right up at the top of the hierarchy. Almost everyone is afraid of him. He's a straight up cold-blooded killer. Skulduggery Pleasant is precisely the type of person who's not normally portrayed as a victim of anything. Nothing about him screams "victim" at all. But his abuse history is insidious. He's so conditioned to respond in a certain way to abuse from the women in his life, probably from a very young age, that despite all that strength and capability and stubbornness and ego, he just goes along with it. And it's an established pattern going back hundreds of years. He keeps going back to China, even though he knows she's bad for him and his friends keep telling him to stay away from her. Abyssinia latched onto him when he was traumatized and vulnerable and weaponized it against him to make him easier to control - and when she reappears, hundreds of years later, she jumps straight back into using, tmanipulating and gaslighting him and not only does he let her, he doesn't even seem to realise that behaviour is abusive. He thinks it's normal! That's how he's always been treated by his long-term girlfriends, with the notable exception of Wifey. Even when Val is being fucking nasty to him in the first couple books of Phase Two, sniping and lying and blaming him for everything under the sun, he just takes it. There's no attempt to tell her she's being unreasonable, no telling her to fuck right off and give her head a wobble, no defending himself even when she's bitching over something that isn't even his doing. And this is a man who has an absolutely gleaming steel spine the rest of the time; Skug has no problem saying no to anybody else, but he can't get past the way he's been taught to treat the important ladies in his life. Skug is a walking reminder that anyone can be a victim of abuse, even the ones who seem least likely to be susceptible.

GENDER REP: This one is the most iffy out of the bunch and definitely was not done very well in the eyes of the people who matter most, but I'll include it anyway because it mattered to some.

So there's Nye, who's...agender? Genderless? And uses "it" pronouns? Nye was generally considered horrible rep because it's also a war criminal and experiments on people and I've seen people say "Well I don't want to be seen like that" but? It's still possible to be a war criminal and also genderless. I never saw the two things as being related or relevant to each other.

There's also Mantis, who's in exactly the same gender/pronouns boat as Nye and always seems to be forgotten about, which sucks because Mantis is a war hero. It fought for the Sanctuary during the War and they never lost a battle when it was in command. It's called out of retirement to fight for the Supreme Council in LSODM, ends up fighting alongside Skulduggery during the Battle of Roarhaven, and ultimately dies attempting a very brave, very risky strategy. Mantis is, unreservedly, one of the good guys. It was also my introduction to sentient beings using "it" pronouns, and did it in a way that felt natural, so when I met my first person online who used "it" pronouns and hated to be referred to as he/she, it was...weird, but not as weird as it would otherwise have been, because I was like, "Oh yeah, like the Crenga. Okay."

And then there's the Scapegrace sex change plotline, which...I might have an unpopular opinion on this one. From what I’ve seen, trans people don’t seem to think was handled well or with any sensitivity at all. I’m not trans, so if the trans community says he was being offensive to them, I’m not going to claim otherwise. But...I first read the Scapegrace plotline as a young teenager in a tiny rural school with zero diversity, going through a period of being deeply confused about my own gender identity. He was more or less my first introduction to the idea that genitals =/= gender. I was relieved, at that point in my life, to read someone having a lot of the same thoughts I was having about being in the wrong body. So while it may have been badly done and yeah, the series would probably have been better without it, it did make at least one kid suspecting she might not be cis go “Huh! So there are other people who feel like this.”

Thrasher is also implied to be legitimately trans/gender-questioning, and that's not played for laughs either.

So? Phase One, while it absolutely had faults and issues and things that were just "Oh god why", was actually full of rep, at least compared to the other series that I read as a child/teen. But? As soon as Dirty Laundry started trying to be woke? He fucking sucks ass at it. Aside from confirming Phase One's hints that Skug has a background of abusive relationships, every single attempt at shoehorning rep into Phase Two is Bad.

The painfully OOC, forced, badly-written awkwardness of Val suddenly being rabidly horny for women out of fucking nowhere. The stilted, forced cringiness between her and any of the women she's flirted with - contrast that with Sorrowscorn's interactions, full of natural chemistry that had us all like 👀 I mean, I never shipped Val/Melancholia, but I could always see why people did - they had miles more chemistry than Val/anyone in Phase Two.

The fucking mess that is v*litsa, because if someone says "I'm really not interested in friendships/relationships right now", clearly the route to true love is to bulldoze their boundaries and forcibly insert yourself into their life and proceed to treat them like a delicate soft uwu flower, completely ignoring the horrible things they've done, while gleefully damning their best friend as an irredeemable monster for the exact same things, which is. You know. Gonna affect your so-called love's self-confidence and self-esteem because she knows she's no different to him. Y'all know I love an angsty ship, an unhealthy ship, a ship with fucked power dynamics, but I literally cannot roll my eyes any further back in my head at this shit. I never read Demon Road, but from what I've heard from friends who did, it does seem like every time Laundry tries to write an f/f ship, he comes up with a cringey abusive/manipulative caricature and tries to call it rep, and he needs to Stop.

Val's Mental IllnessTM arc. It's funny how he wrote Skulduggery as a wonderfully complex character with deep-rooted psychological damage and long-lasting trauma, but believes he wrote a character with "no feelings" - but when he tries to delve into the damage the world of magic has done to Val, he turned her into a weak, whiny drug addict who treats everyone around her like garbage and is so selfish and dislikeable that I? Honestly can't even reconcile Phase Two val with Phase One val. They're two completely different people. He's shown on Twitter that he doesn't have any respect for mentally ill people, and it shows. Other mentally ill people might see it differently, but the whole thing just makes me go "yikes".

Never, who has no personality outside of being genderfluid, and whose pronouns make no sense. I'm sorry, I have never met an nb person who insists that you change from male to female pronouns multiple times in a sentence, every time you refer to them. It's confusing as fuck. Now I have been told that Never has apparently received some character development in the last couple books, and if so, fair play, but I quit reading after Midnight, and Never and the rest of the personality-less new characters introduced in Phase Two who just seemed to be 2D Stereotypes to snag Woke Points were a big part of why, so. Development too late, I'm afraid.

(Now, if anyone is looking for a well-written genderfluid character, I recommend the Tawny Man trilogy by Robin Hobb. I have a lot of issues with her as a writer, and unfortunately I hate her POV character which puts me off the series as a whole, but she wrote the Fool/Amber/Lord Golden and their gender identity/approach to sexuality with so much more respect and realism. That is the kind of rep nb people should be getting: 3D, complex, realistic characters whose gender is only a tiny fragment of their personality, not the be-all-and-end-all of their existence. You know. Like cis people get. Nobody wants to be represented by a 2D cardboard cutout stereotype.)

Anyway idk how much sense this makes it just really amuses me that Laundry would include all this rep completely unintentionally and then go on Twitter and remind us all that actually he's a massive asshole via insensitive/offensive tweets about the groups he'd actually done a fair job of including (i.e. Skulduggery has no feelings, mentally ill people should find another series to read, the bullshit about Val being "heteromantic bisexual" on Twitter and then spouting all the "the woman she loved uwu" shit in the books (proving he has no idea what he's talking about), eVeRyOnE iS bI eVeNtUaLlY. He can only write half-decent rep when he's not trying and he inevitably outs himself as having a really shitty attitude towards those people anyway, proving that ultimately it's all either unintentional rep or performative wokeness.

[dangermousie]

Prior to 2010 kdrama rec post

@walkwithheroes84 asked: “What are some dramas (Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, and/or Korean) that are older (pre-2010) that you wish more people would watch.”

Ooooh boy, we are gonna be here all day so I am just going to do Korea and save the rest for later. I had to really cull!

A Love to Kill (2005) - I own Japanese DVDs of this, I was so obsessed. A dark, intense melo in which Rain gets a job as a bodyguard to a rising young star played by Shin Minah. His plan is to seduce and wreck her to avenge his dead brother (who he believes killed himself after she heartlessly left him for fame), but he recons without his own impossible feelings for her or the extent of SMA’s internal damage. They remain one of the most impossible, messed-up, intense, doomed OTPs I’ve ever shipped. Stock tissues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJox8iEcFMs

All In (2003) - he is a gangster, she is a nun. Have I gotten your attention yet? This was a huge hit and Lee Byung Hun and Song Hye Kyo are out of this world together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuVDFLOytQI

Beautiful Days (2001-2002) - a super classic, grown up melo about a plucky poor girl and a tortured workaholic and Choi Ji Woo and Lee Byung Hun set the screen on fire.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3skKcivjJs

Capital Scandal (2007) - somehow both frothy and deeply emotional, this centers on freedom fighters and playboys and spies in 1930s Seoul. If you don’t love it, you have no heart.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN-0tERlaNM

Chuno/Slave Hunters (2009) - possibly my favorite sageuk (it’s a threeway tie atm), this story about an aristocrat turned slave hunter, a general turned slave, and a slave woman turned an aristocrat, all involved with rebellion, court secrets and sheer desperation of their lives is amazing. Beyond amazing. Jang Hyuk, Oh Ji Ho and Lee Da Hae are all on fire and if you ever watch only one sageuk, make it this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vAGdXpN6no

City Hall (2009) - Kim Sun Ah as a small town civil servant and Cha Seung Won as an amoral fixer for a powerful politician sparkle beyond words in the most grown up, smart kdrama romcom I have ever seen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLek2pnv8yY

Coffee Prince (2007) - Yoon Eun Hye is a woman dressing as a man, Gong Yoo as a man horrified to discover he likes her while thinking she is a boy. This was a mad hit for a reason.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKSupXmez5w

Damo (2003) - my first sageuk, this is as good as ever. Ha Ji Won is a police tea servant, a noble lady whose family was executed and she came down in the world; Lee Seo Jin as her noble superior who loves her silently. She infiltrates a conspiracy led by the charismatic, tortured Kim Mim Joon, and epic tragedy follows. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGkglLvjJ9k

Delightful Girl Chunhyang (2005) - back when Hong Sisters were consistently good, this is a modern take on the famous folk tale. Our heroine is a studious poor girl and our hero a ne��er-do-well son of a local prosecutor. There is arranged marriage, true love surviving some insane sacrifice, one of my all time favorite OTPs, and a heroine and hero that grow into people I was obsessed with. Confession time - I wrote fanfic for this drama!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kTGHJZIUvA

East of Eden (2008-2009) - a sprawling multigenerational epic they don’t make much of any more, this has its flaws but the plots and brotherhood and romances and the characters and the revenge are so worth it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6LBIo16-e8

Emperor of the Sea/Sea God (2004-2005) - a larger than life sageuk epic they don’t make any more. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j53vbAxW3d4

Family’s Honor (2008) - Kdrama does North and South. Our heroine is a widow from an aristocratic family, our hero is a noveau riche ruthless businessman who gets attracted to her. This is so so good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrAMgTKg_As

Fashion 70s (2005) - period drama about a bunch of intense cool peeps, fashion and love. Just watch it. 

https://youtu.be/qly7vkFUv3g

Friend Our Legend (2009) - the most criminally underrated drama on this list, about a group of childhood friends turned gangsters and the tragic fall out.I want a rewatch rn tbh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJQx3tA5cGs

Goong (2005) - a giddily fun take on an alternate universe where an icy modern crown prince and a bubbly commoner have to get married.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAjz-5b4P6A

Green Rose (2005) - this tale of a man (Go Soo) trying to get revenge and get back to his love (Lee Da Hae) is a modern take on Monte Cristo and has one of my fave opening scenes ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epJt6jCIOlU

Hello My Teacher (2005) - Gong Yoo is a student in love with Gong Hyo Jin’s teacher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNFoENWvEEk

Hong Gil Dong (2008) - starts out wacky, ends up by making me cry. A wonderful take on Korean Robin Hood and the OTP omg the OTP!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ingEOTBSnt0

IRIS (2009) - in the running for my favorite kdrama of all time, with definitely the most tortured hero, this starts out as a fun routine actioner until our hero’s life details in a horrifying fashion and even his attempts to right the world are doomed in this horrifyingly bleak, intense, romantic drama. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kesXxZOBzQ

Jumong (2006-2007) - the DADDY of all traditional sageuks, with insane ep count (81) and equally insane and deserved ratings. See our hero go from zero to hero and an awesome king.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILBnGNxtwXw

The Kingdom of the Winds (2008-2009) - Song Il Gook’s last sageuk (so far, though I don’t think he’s gonna bother to come back), a story about a cursed prince and his quest for love and throne, this is wonderful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1qfC0yFIf0

Last Scandal (2008) - they dated in high school. Now she is an exhausted ahjumma with a deadbeat husband and he is a huge star. A second chance romance that starts out hilarious but turns profound follows. One of my all time faves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zquHf8-p3ZU

The Legend (2007) - I’ve raved about it elsewhere; it is arguably my favorite sageuk of all time (or maybe even just plain fave kdrama), smart and passionate and hugely epic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=853sc-s2hHE

Lobbyist (2007) - one of the very few actioners I’ve ever liked, and with more whump than you can shake a stick at, Song Il Gook is a tough as nails international arms dealer with an even tougher OTP (JJY) and this is a heaven of plot and love and hurt/comfort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8puRJNmey4

Loveholic (2005) - a student/teacher romance AND a story about a man going to jail to protect the woman he loves all rolled into one. What more could you want?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6nVH75IRCM

Lovers (2006) - if it’s a smart adult love story you want, come right in!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgpe4VkbtNk

Mawang/The Devil/Lucifer (2007) - meet possibly my n1 kdrama of all time. Haunted past, tragedy, revenge, complicated characters and plot. If there is a perfect kdrama, this is it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkn1KYaCjVk

My Girl (2005) - Lee Dong Wook and Lee Da Hae set the screen on fire in a romcom with hidden identities and plot twists. PS it is funny but when the drama starts, I literally bawled.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0jpSCN72Wg

One Fine Day (2006) - Sung Yuri and Gong Yoo in a lovely, angsty romance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVeUG5U3oCU

Piano (2001-2002) - this is like who is who before they got to be big stars - Go Soo and Kim Hae Neul are in love but can’t be together because they are stepsiblings, Jo In Sung is a young gangster, tragedy and melo all around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRG_4Uxl4Zo

Que Sera Sera (2007) - Eric and Jung Yumi play the ultimate dysfunctional couple. He uses his good looks to date rich generous women, she is a neighbor who is neither. Their levels of obsession with each other are insane.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4XqW14_A7k

Queen Seon Duk (2009) - want a female centric sageuk that is intense and epic and amazing? Look no further!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwIY4poVBNw

Resurrection (2005) - a tight, complex revenge thriller that more people should see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_ZbmVAk8zQ

The Return of Iljimae/Moon River (2009) - Jung Il Woo’s debut, this is arguably my favorite take on Korean Robin Hood ever and except for Someday and Friend Our Legend, the most underrated drama on this list.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YjgmHVO3n0

Robber (2008) - Jang Hyuk and Lee Da Hae break my heart and then heal it in this intense story of a man preying on desperate women and a broken widow. Yes, it’s another two messed up people heal each other story. I love those!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDyy3UtUWeM

Romance (2002) - a teacher/student romance, with gorgeous young Kim Jae Won and Kim Ha Neul.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LBs1tnc5Js

Sang Do, Let’s Go to School - Gong Hyo Jin is a teacher, Rain is a gigolo taking gigs to support his son; they used to be each other’s first loves. It’s wistful and slice of life and utterly tragic. Written by Lee Kyung Hee of the A Love to Kill and Thank You fame. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRg1q3RULWk

Save the Last Dance for Me (2004-2005) - I binged 17 episodes of this baby at a go, a record that has not yet been surpassed. Ji Sung is a rich man who is in an accident and gets amnesia, being cared for and falling for Eugene. However when he recovers his memory and forgets his amnesia time - he will end up meeting her again and falling for her all over again (hilariously, his RL wife Lee Bo Young plays the psycho secondary girl in this.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekfBrvJil8c

Say You Love Me (2004) - a much better attempt at Dangerous Liasons than the wretched Tempted. Kim Rae Won and Yoon So Yi, naive and tragic young lovers, come across a pair of jaded sophisticates; the female half of whom is intrigued by the fresh faced KRW and envious of uncomplicated young love and asks her partner to take YSI away from KRW for kicks. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niL2WJ_oAIU

Seoul 1945 (2006) - from WW2 to the Korean war, this is intense and smart and pulls no punches.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYsotv2rFQI

Shining Inheritance/Brilliant Legacy (2009) - Han Hyo Joo is a young woman tormented by her family; Lee Seung Gi is a spoiled rich boy who needs to grow up. I was obsessed with this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_sWhVZA3DY

Snow Queen (2006-2007) - Hyun Bin and Sung Yuri do a tragic romance melo right. He is a poor, smart kid, she is a brittle rich girl with a terminal illness. It hurts so good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEkAbJLYVpk

Someday (2006) - a sheltered cartoonist suffering from a writer’s block meets a sort-of small time private detective. They are both haunted by their pasts but find hope and healing with each other. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLVijs891dw

Spring Day (2005) - a very solid melo where Jo In Sung ends up stealing the girl from the original leading man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps7l27OBnVQ

Spring Waltz (2006) - the last and, imo, best of the seasons dramas, possibly in my all time top 10 kdramas, it follows a haunted young pianist and his OTP and their shared tragic past and hope for the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IGO0DST8dk

Swallow the Sun (2009) - Ji Sung as the haunted mercenary wanting revenge on his father, Sung Yuri as his tough, common-sense girlfriend, one of my fave secondary OTPs (mercenary x stripper) etc etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C51efR5Iq5I

Thank You (2007) - Gong Hyo Jin is an island woman living with the stigma and agony of having an HIV positive child. Jang Hyuk is a surgeon haunted by the death of his girlfriend. Two lost souls find and heal each other in one of my all time favorites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVk1TjvZZOw

Time Between Dog and Wolf (2007) - Lee Jun Ki is tortured a lot on his path to revenge and love. I loooove this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v24-57tLFH4

Tree of Heaven (2006) - only ten eps but bring your tissues for this tender and tragic and gorgeous love story between Park Shin Hye and Lee Wan, stepsiblings for a brief time; they reconnect when she’s a cleaner and he’s a gangster. I was sooooo obsessed with it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnAZlXZjFcw

What Happened in Bali (2005) - Ha Ji Won, Jo In Sung and So Ji Sub are a trio of desperately damaged people entangled with each other in what is probably still the darkest melo I have seen out of Korea. Money grubbing poor woman played by HJW, high-strung, abused rich son played by JIS, or a cold, ambitious man on the rise SJS - pick any of them, there is enough damage to level a city.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKHcYvK5qZM

Will It Snow for Christmas (2009) - a melodrama with Go Soo and Han Ye Seul by Lee Kyung Hee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvQ14gtCqvw

Worlds Within/The World That They Live In (2008) - the last candidate for my n1 kdrama of all time. By Noh Hee Kyung, with seemingly mundane lives of TV station personnel. But every character is someone you feel you know and Hyun Bin and Song Hye Kyo are both real and unreal as the OTP.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBHrjZ8T6a4

Congrats if you made it to the end!

[aion-rsa]

Cruella 2: How to Make the Villain Evil Enough to Kill Puppies

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Cruella was a vibrant, funny, and raucous ride which saw scrappy young seamstress and designer Estella go head to head with snooty fashion high priestess, and all round bad person, The Baroness in a funky, punky, spiky take on the protege outdoing the mentor trope. Emma Stone and Emma Thompson fizz and spark as the warring fashionistas, the outfits are fabulous, and the soundtrack is banging.

Oh yeah, and at some point in the future, the plucky, if slightly deranged, upstart you’ve been rooting for the whole time is going to become a puppy murderer. But shhhh, try not to think about that too much.

While Cruella was generally well received, there’s a definite disconnect between the Cruella de Vil we get at the end of the movie and the fur-crazed demon we meet in 101 Dalmatians, and now that news has arrived that Disney is already working on a Cruella 2, consideration is no doubt being put into how that gap might be bridged.

The key could be in flipping our understanding of exactly who, or indeed what, Cruella is.

The short version. What if 101 Dalmatians-Cruella isn’t actually the designer formerly known as Estella at all? What if someone else were to take on the Cruella brand? Bear with us and we’ll show our working.

The age disparity

Though we have at least one more movie before we get into 101 Dalmatians territory, Emma Stone’s Cruella is way too young. 

At the end of Cruella, we see in a mid-credits scene that Cruella has sent a Dalmatian puppy to her school friend Anita (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and one to the Baroness’ former lawyer Roger (Kayvan Novak). These dogs, we are told, are Pongo and Perdita, and we assume they are the two that will meet when they are grown, and like their owners, fall in love. 

Estella was 12 in 1964, and we understand that the main events of Cruella begin 10 years later, making grown up Estella 22 when her adult adventures begin. Even if the movie takes place over a number of years, the character is almost certainly still in her early 20s by the time the film ends.

Dalmatians on average live for 10-13 years. So even if Pongo and Perdita are relatively mature dogs when they have their litter, 101 Dalmatians Cruella is only going to be in her 30s—a lot younger than the de Vil we are used to in animation. And if nothing else, Emma Stone is currently 32 and isn’t suddenly going to be in her 40s or 50s by the time Cruella 2 begins filming.

Now, okay, Disney is allowed to change the ages of its heroes and villains if it wishes, but it feels like a stretch to make her that much younger if the studio is trying to please fans of the animated cartoon or, indeed, the previous live-action version where Glenn Close was in her late 40s when she took on the role for the 1996 film.

The feel bad factor

While pure villain origin stories can certainly work, Disney tends to opt for a retelling which suggests the villain is not as bad as you think they are. Maleficent is the most obvious recent example which paints Sleeping Beauty’s bad fairy as a wronged woman who regrets her decision to curse Aurora and who ultimately saves her.  Similarly,The Wizard Of Oz retelling musical, Wicked, gives the Wicked Witch of the West a sympathetic backstory, opting for the ‘she was nice all along, it was just propaganda’ approach. It even gives the character a happy ending.

It’s hard to see how this would actually work in Cruella’s case. Although Estella’s mum was (sort of) killed by Dalmatians, the logic that this would make her a puppy killer doesn’t land. Not to mention the fact that 1. Estella has a beloved dog of her own, and 2. Ultimately gets on just fine with the Baroness’ Dalmatians.

So unless the plan is to retell 101 Dalmatians so that Cruella’s puppy killing intentions are a misunderstanding or similar (which is really going to take the joy out of a 101 Dalmatians remake) then one other option would be to go ‘full Joker.’

Yep, beaten down by the Thatcherite years in Britain, Cruella loses her job and becomes depressed and disenfranchised. With inadequate access to mental health care and railing against the inequalities of the world, she decides to take matters into her own hands and… make herself a really fancy coat.

We joke. But a Cruella 2 in which our loveable (anti-)hero ACTUALLY becomes a full on monster sounds, well, it sounds about as depressing as Joker was. Which is not going to be a good look for Disney.

Who is Cruella, really…?

There’s another option. Cruella is the name embraced by Estella when she launches her fashion label. Cruella becomes a mysterious icon—no one really knows who she is. And when it appears that the Baroness has thrown poor Estella to her death, Cruella truly comes into her own, thanks to the inheritance her dear friend Estella has left to her. RIP Estella, long live Cruella…

If Estella can become Cruella—an entirely constructed persona—what’s to say someone else couldn’t steal that persona? Someone like the Baroness, perhaps?

Say yes to the Baroness

At the end of the movie, Cruella has framed the Baroness for the murder of Estella (even though she’s not dead) as retribution for the actual murder of Estella’s adoptive mother. The Baroness is Estella’s biological mother, but she gave the child up at birth with the intent that Estella be killed. While Cruella and her mother the Baroness have a great deal in common—they are both brilliant, ostentatious, a little bit ruthless, quick-witted and of course, fabulous—the one major thing they do not have in common is that the Baroness is a murderer.

She has murdered at least one person but the implication in the film is that it’s probably significantly more, and indeed she even attempts to kill Cruella, her own daughter. Twice. Much as Cruella fears that she’s like her birth mother, in this respect she is not—the mother that brought her up and the wonderful friends she’s made, Jasper, Horace, and Artie, have kept her on the straight(-ish) and narrow(-ish).

The Baroness is in prison but has vowed her revenge. The Baroness knows Cruella’s true identity. The Baroness is the only other designer anywhere near as good as Cruella. And it is entirely easy to believe that the Baroness would have it in her to kill a puppy or 10.

If ‘Cruella’ is a brand as much as an identity, it would make sense for Cruella 2 to see the Baroness escape prison and somehow steal Cruella’s identity as well as Hell Hall, perhaps discrediting Estella’s alter-ego along the way. 

Unlike our current Cruella, she would be a formidable villain for a 101 Dalmatians remake, particularly if she emerges from prison half-crazed and bent on revenge. Then we can keep our cool, rebel, punk fashionista Cruella and have our deranged dog-bother to boot.

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Cruella is out now in cinemas and available to stream with a premium on Disney+

The post Cruella 2: How to Make the Villain Evil Enough to Kill Puppies appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[secretlyatargaryen]

ASOIAF and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

I don’t know if anyone has talked about this, but I know that there’s been some discussion of GRRM being influenced (directly or indirectly) by Mark Twain and, specifically in his novel Fevre Dream, which certainly invokes Huck Finn. I’ve also seen a review of Tyrion’s ADWD journey described as “a drunken Huckleberry Finn.” Which is a flippant description that, on the surface, refers to Tyrion’s literal riverboat journey, but Tyrion’s narrative also carries with it a Twainian edge of satire, and his journey in ADWD is one that deals with classism, slavery, and exile in similar ways as Twain’s famous novel, while Tyrion, like Huck, also occupies a liminal space where he is positioned to understand issues of privilege and marginalization.

But I think a greater comparison could be made between one of Twain’s somewhat lesser known novels and also one of my favorites, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Most people know this story by its many screen adaptations, as a time-travel comedy, and it is, but it’s also, as is consistent with Twain, a witty, brilliant social satire. In Connecticut Yankee, Twain uses the backdrop of Arthurian England to brutally deconstruct social issues, and tackles classism, slavery, and chivalry in ways similar to GRRM. The first time I read about the Yankee I read it as an adventure story, then I read it in college for a dystopian lit class, and it was the only book on the reading list that isn’t technically dystopian literature, but the society it portrays, like the one in A Song of Ice and Fire, is definitely a feudal dystopia. I’m going to start with some surface level thematic similiarities.

On words:

Here’s Connecticut Yankee:

“Words are only painted fire, a look is the fire itself.”  

And ASOIAF (multiple times)

“Words are wind.”

On the human heart:

Connecticut Yankee:

“You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.”

GRRM:

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself” (quoting William Faulkner)

On rulership:

Here’s where it gets meaty and where I think the two stories have the most in common.

Connecticut Yankee:

The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can't knock it out of him.

and

Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in safe hands. The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect government, and earthly despotism would be the absolute perfect earthly government if the conditions were the same; namely the despot the perfectest individual of the human race, and his lease of life perpetual; but as a perishable, perfect man must die and leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect successor, an earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it is the worst form that is possible.

ASOIAF frequently deconstructs the idealization of kings and queens, and the noble class is repeatedly portrayed as fallable and only human, sometimes to tragic ends. There’s an extended plotline in Connecticut Yankee where the Yankee and the King disguise themselves in order to live among the common folk and figure out how to build a better government, at one point ending up enslaved. GRRM also forces several of his noble-born characrters, especially the ones who are positioned to be rulers, to be confronted with the lives of the smallfolk, live among them (sometimes in disguise) or be confronted with the reality of slavery or even live as slaves themselves.

Connecticut Yankee again:

There was a slight noise from the direction of the dim corner where the ladder was. It was the king descending. I could see that he was bearing something in one arm, and assisting himself with the other. He came forward into the light; upon his breast lay a slender girl of fifteen. She was but half conscious; she was dying of smallpox. Here was heroism at its last and loftiest possibility, its utmost summit; this was challenging death in the open field unarmed, with all the odds against the challenger, no reward set upon the contest, and no admiring world in silks and cloth of gold to gaze and applaud; and yet the king’s bearing was as serenely brave as it had always been in those cheaper contests where knight meets knight in equal fight and clothed in protecting steel. He was great now; sublimely great. The rude statues of his ancestors in his palace should have an addition—I would see to that; and it would not be a mailed king killing a giant or a dragon, like the rest, it would be a king in commoner’s garb bearing death in his arms that a peasant mother might look her last upon her child and be comforted.

And that, my friends, is how you deconstruct feudalism, chivalry, classism, divine right of rulership and what makes a hero a hero.

Here’s Dany in ASOIAF:

“Go if you wish, ser. I will not detain you. I will not detain any of you.” Dany vaulted down from the horse. “I cannot heal them, but I can show them that their Mother cares.”

Jhogo sucked in his breath. “Khaleesi, no.”

The bell in his braid rang softly as he dismounted. “You must not get any closer. Do not let them touch you! Do not!”

Dany walked right past him. There was an old man on the ground a few feet away, moaning and staring up at the grey belly of the clouds. She knelt beside him, wrinkling her nose at the smell, and pushed back his dirty grey hair to feel his brow. “His flesh is on fire. I need water to bathe him. Seawater will serve. Marselen, will you fetch some for me? I need oil as well, for the pyre. Who will help me burn the dead?”

Contrast Dany and the King in disguise, doing something as simple as showing compassion to the sick and dying, behaving more like a hero than any knight on a battlefield, with the riot in King’s Landing where a mother presents her dead child as an indictment of the failings of the ruling class.

Halfway along the route, a wailing woman forced her way between two watchmen and ran out into the street in front of the king and his companions, holding the corpse of her dead baby above her head. It was blue and swollen, grotesque, but the real horror was the mother's eyes. Joffrey looked for a moment as if he meant to ride her down, but Sansa Stark leaned over and said something to him. The king fumbled in his purse, and flung the woman a silver stag. The coin bounced off the child and rolled away, under the legs of the gold cloaks and into the crowd, where a dozen men began to fight for it. The mother never once blinked. Her skinny arms were trembling from the dead weight of her son.

Sansa tries to influence Joffrey here, but of course she can’t make Joffrey show real compassion or truly understand the plight of the smallfolk. And even though Sansa is sympathetic to their plight, those who get abused by those in power don’t see her as any different than the sadistic ones, like Joffrey.

On heredity and inheriting the sins of the past:

Connecticut Yankee:

We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.

ASOIAF:

It all goes back and back, Tyrion thought, to our mothers and fathers and theirs before them. We are puppets dancing on the strings of those who came before us, and one day our own children will take up our strings and dance on in our steads. 

On knighthood:

A Connecticut Yankee:

“You see, he was going for the Holy Grail. The boys all took a flier at the Holy Grail now and then. It was a several years' cruise. They always put in the long absence snooping around, in the most conscientious way, though none of them had any idea where the Holy Grail really was, and I don't think any of them actually expected to find it, or would have known what to do with it if he had run across it.”

In Twain’s novel, the knights are mostly ridiculous, violent idiots obsessed with honor and pointless questing.

In ASOIAF:

"He likes the stories where the knights fight monsters."

“Sometimes the knights are the monsters.”

In Connecticut Yankee, there is an incredible subplot where the Yankee is convinced by a princess to go on a quest to slay a bunch of ogres who have supposedly captured princesses and held them in a castle. When they get there, it turns out that the “castle” is a pigsty, the “princesses” the pigs, and the “ogres” some poor swineherds.

I left Sandy kneeling there, corpse-faced but plucky and hopeful, and rode down to the pigsty, and struck up a trade with the swine-herds. I won their gratitude by buying out all the hogs at the lump sum of sixteen pennies, which was rather above latest quotations. I was just in time; for the Church, the lord of the manor, and the rest of the tax-gatherers would have been along next day and swept off pretty much all the stock, leaving the swine-herds very short of hogs and Sandy out of princesses. But now the tax people could be paid in cash, and there would be a stake left besides. One of the men had ten children; and he said that last year when a priest came and of his ten pigs took the fattest one for tithes, the wife burst out upon him, and offered him a child and said:

“Thou beast without bowels of mercy, why leave me my child, yet rob me of the wherewithal to feed it?”

This is satire at its most ridiculous and over-the-top, but it’s also a pretty searing deconstruction of the futility of chivalry, more obsessed with romantic notions of honor and fighting against imagined monsters than its supposed goal of protecting the weak.

A Connecticut Yankee ends in a failed attempt at revolution but with the possibility of hope for the modern world. Perhaps this is what GRRM is trying to tell us as well.

[sanerontheinside]

Written for @caffeinewitchcraft‘s caffeine challenge! 

[Prompt: A story told from the POV of someone who’s not part of the hero’s journey. No, their role is much worse. They’re the hero’s tragic backstory and they realize it a week before their death.]

* 

He came to study with me in the winter, when the snows had crawled down from the caps and frozen and dried my garden. I wasn’t sure what he expected to learn from me, in this dormant time of year, before he knew his herbs and beetles. I told him so, and sent him down to the cellar to learn from the dried plants and the old books.

Not a single university-educated bone in the boy’s body. Which was partly just as well—those children think they know so much. But they only teach certain things at universities these days, and I’m not all that keen on teaching complex geometries myself. Then come the lunar orbits and the rotations of other celestial bodies nearby, and the interactions of plants, and drying and heating and—

And that’s if you’re lucky enough to find a student who knows the world does not revolve around them, but around a burning celestial flame. Alchemy is a complex art, built on everything at once. It’s the making of magic from science and maths, exploring the chaos within the order, and not the reverse. It isn’t for the faint of heart. 

But he came with the recommendation of his village’s witch, a practical woman and an old friend. I suppose that’s the best I could expect, if I’d ever wanted a student.

(I didn’t).

She talked me into it anyway. In a letter. Awful wench, not even the decency to do it in person.

Addie has always had what I had not—a way with people, of inspiring trust and warmth. Or rather: one day I stopped trying, and discovered an immense freedom in speaking my mind. I lost my place as the court physician, and no longer had to curry to the whims of my betters. I lost my friends, and realised they’d never been friends to me at all.

I found Addie barely a month after that. I discovered the person I had once wanted to be, alive and well and thriving out in the great wide world, whereas I had felt throttled and sidelined since the day I came into the city.

He reminded me of you, she wrote. He sees that the world is broken and wants so very badly to fix it.

“And he thinks alchemy is the way to do that?” I muttered aloud in my kitchen.

Yes, he wants the power of this gift; he still thinks that power is the way to fix things. Yes, I know it should frighten me, you may keep your grumbly lecture.

I know you will not let him abuse your art.

Addie would never steer me wrong. 

And she knew how to throw down a challenge, which certainly never hurt.

Her protégé was worthy of her praise. He learned fast, and he had a knack for it, much to my surprise. Instead of learning his herbs and beetles he sat that and charted and muttered and cross-referenced my many old books. Corrected half the Celestial Atlas in tiny marginalia. Found my old journals where I’d done my own calculations, and started studying those instead. 

It is rare to have a student so willing and stubborn. Patient enough that he will wait for you to warm up to him, certain of his charm. He cared for my goats and chickens, kept my hearth clean, fixed my rickety gate and dusted the shelves. If nothing else, it was good to have the company. 

And on late nights, the sky was high and clear, and he argued about the paths of the celestial flames with me, and argued about what it was that the gods were burning. Clever boy—I could see why Addie liked him. He told such fine stories, when he was finally sure I would listen. 

He was hopeful. He was hopeful and certain and brilliantly clear in a way that I no longer was. He had a purpose and a belief, a fire lit from within. Sitting beside him on the long solstice nights, I felt like the cold of these mountain winters had seeped into my very bones. Or perhaps it was the cold and damp of the city and the king’s court, and I’d never really warmed through, even after all these years tending to my own, comfortable, clean fire. 

Maybe he would burn strong enough for it to last. Maybe he could go out into the world, even down into the city, and light the way for better days. He was already so serious and so solemn, sometimes. He had the makings of that patient, constant force that whittles away stone and marks the passage of time with no more than an absent gesture. 

And he made me miss one plucky village witch. Made me feel the way I had when I first met her, and realised that someone like her truly could exist. That unforgettable feeling, like filling your lungs full with air so cold and sharp and rarified that it feels like your heart might burst. They’ll be the death of me, I sometimes think, with their kind and solemn eyes, their unearthly patience. 

* 

Spring came, cold and grey and eerily still. I’d begun to send the boy out to the mountainsides, to investigate what enterprising young things had sprouted, what had braved the first thaw and would likely die the next frost, for Winter hadn’t quite finished with our corner of the world just yet. He wasn’t much for herbal lore, though I could tell Addie had tried to teach him. 

We get few travelers in these parts; the ones who are lost rarely make it this far, and the locals try to avoid me. They’re not too overfond of mages, never mind that alchemists aren’t any such thing (well, only peripherally). A village witch succeeds in part because she can convince the villagers that she is harmless, and I have never been able to do any such thing. 

They know. They only come to me when there is no one else to help them. A child sick with fever whom even the mages could not save, a plague among the cattle—these are the things that overcome the bounds of any fear. 

I did not take the boy with me for this. 

It was sheer misery: bitter cold and stillborn foals, cattle poisoned by polluted water. I was asked to do what even a mage couldn’t fix. There was one in the town’s inn, still, unwilling to give up or admit defeat. He looked haggard. It takes much from a being, tending to the fevered and the ailing. 

But where a mage goes to the cattle, I go first to the water. 

This is not what we called you for, the elders tell me. 

“But you called me, so allow me to do my work.” To purify, to separate out what they cannot see is killing them. 

This is what I would not have that young boy see: the way they shy from me. Maybe they will never hide from him, because he is not like me. He draws people to himself without so much as thinking of it. But I do not wish for him to ever see this gift we share as a thing of which to be ashamed. 

“I remember you,” the mage said to me one day. “I saw you once, in the city. You were a member of the king’s court.” 

The chill wind rippled across my back. 

“You were well known for your work. We studied it, in my school.” 

“That’s very flattering,” I said, still wary. 

He chuckled. “Hardly. You were renowned, and a Master at the University, read around the kingdom.” 

“I was renowned, and a Master at the University, and they burned my books when I left the city,” I told him. 

It had taken me days to realise that he was actually quite young. Perhaps he did not know the story—how I left, and why. 

Some days I still regard it as a terrible mistake. Days like this, when I am up to my elbows in poisoned water and pushed to the limit of my tolerance for cold stares. Days when I remember Addie’s patience, and the patience of that boy looking after my hearth and my goats, waiting for me to teach him. 

I felt—these days, very often—that it was my greatest failure. How could I have dared to turn around and throw away everything I’d ever worked for? How could I, when I’d already done so much? 

The mage frowned at me. “My school did not burn your books. Our Masters told us about you. You were... remarkable. I’ve always wanted to meet you.” 

“Ah.” I shrugged, and squinted at my work. “Well, you know what they say about meeting one’s heroes.” 

I bent down to fix the water filter into place. It was still too difficult to do, I couldn’t possibly expect the women of this town to have the time to fiddle with this thing as much as I had... 

“I do,” he said. I heard him rise from my workbench, and move toward the door. “They’re far better in person.” 

By the time I looked up again, he was gone. 

* 

The villagers paid me what I asked, with dark looks and hand-signs to avert evil. How kind of them, I think to myself with the slightest of smiles, to wish me on my way well-protected from meddling spirits. 

The mage walked with me to the village boundary, still asking me about the filters, how to use them, where to put them. It was a strange thing, to enjoy teaching once again. Despite the misery of that place, I left it feeling a little lighter. 

Just not for very long. 

As I mounted the last hill between me and home I discovered that my hands were shaking. My heart raced too fast. Surely, I grumbled, I cannot be that old. 

The cold sweat and the sudden gripping fear was what propelled me forward. The blinding terror made me run, dropping my satchels and precious tools haphazard on still-frozen ground. 

There are rules that any mountain-dweller knows. You do not cross the path of certain things, you do not speak to masters of the mountain. If something speaks to you, you are polite, but you do not leave your answer open to another question. 

You don’t invite a stranger in. 

Rarely is there anything that wanders in these parts looking to make mischief. But young magicians are forever a target for such beings. Especially those of great potential. 

The shadows are a hungry thing, here among the ice and rock, but no shadow can abide a fire. I sent embers spewing from my hearth, threw a rain of sparks through the unnaturally dark room. They fell upon the shadow-creature and it did not burn, but it pulled its tendrils tight, as if in pain. By the faint light I could just make out the child’s pale and frightened face—

—and the fine-scaled golden features of the thing that hovered over him. 

Another rule: you do not show your fear. Oh, it smells fear on the wind—but you do not show it. 

“There is a sign on my gate, and a rune on my door, and even the goats in my yard would have told you that you are not welcome. It is time for you to depart.” 

It bared its teeth at me in something like a smile, wrapped the dark about itself and vanished without a word. 

Too easy. 

“Achim.” 

The boy was curled in on himself in the corner, so small. 

With a sigh, I crossed to the table and picked up my kettle. I set it to heat, and banished the soot from my floors. There was something to be said for heat and sweetness and spice, after such things. I approached him slowly and crouched down to tuck a blanket about his curved shoulders. “Achim, look at me.” 

I nudged his chin up until I could see his eyes. “It isn’t coming back.”

“It—told me I could never—run far enough,” he stammered out through chattering teeth. 

“And I’m telling you that I keep my word. Any being that does not keep to the contract is one you can bring low. This is your first lesson, child.” 

First, and perhaps the last. 

He watched me, wide-eyed, as I set the table. Watched me as evening fell. Watched me clean and hum and read until he fell asleep. 

And when I was sure he did not dream, I pulled my shawl about my shoulders, and walked out the door to the edge of my grounds, to the garden gate that he had fixed for me. 

The creature was still lurking there. 

Actually, it loitered, rather as if it owned the place. It had a vaguely human shape, though of course appearance was the last thing you could trust. It leaned against the fence as if propped up at hip and elbow, lounging like an uninvited lover at the gate. The cloak of shadows hung from its shoulders, hood fallen free of the being’s head. 

Mischief-maker, quicksilver trickster. People used to come up all this way into the mountains, searching for gold. There were stories of the yellow demon they saw glimmers of in the mountain streams. 

“You are owed nothing. You came onto my lands at the invitation of one who did not even own them. Why do you linger?” 

“He is young and powerful,” the golden creature said, “and the future that awaits him must not be.” 

Another, less acknowledged rule: such beings are old and powerful, and if they speak of troubled times, perhaps it is worth a listen. Perhaps, or perhaps not. It is certainly a folly to ignore such warnings. The being that delivers it is never one that cares for your wellbeing. But if it worries for its own, then you may be sure: a mortal will not survive what follows. 

“What future do you see?" 

“Death to the mages and witches,” it said, without hesitation. “He will do what is right, he will bring light into the darkness, as you believe him capable of doing. But with that light, great unintended evils will spread through the world. The extinction of those who use magic, those who are magic, is not a change that this world can sustain.” 

“And I suppose you are here out of enlightened self-interest,” I blurted, and cursed myself for my thoughtless mouth. 

The being only smiled. 

“That boy has a better chance than most,” I rallied. “He has a gift, and it isn’t just his magic or his knowledge. He has a chance at gaining enough wisdom to keep it in balance.”

“Maybe so. But you have always known that your faith is not enough to save anyone. Sometimes, there is simply nothing that you can do.” 

I leaned heavily against the gatepost. “And if you know so much of me, you know I cannot let you take him. Because you have to try.” 

That Achim should have come to me—that Addie should have sent him here—was a chance as slim as starfall landing in one’s yard. I had discovered not long afterward that the King had set his hounds to thinning out the ranks of learned folk outside the city. Achim’s parents had died for “spreading lies”—insisting that the factories had tainted the village water—and the only thing that saved their son was that he’d been practicing a little bit of simple trick-magic at Addie’s fire. 

I must have been among the first to fall in the King’s war on the educated, five years ago. One of the learned folk whose names had been used to justify the slaughter of traitors, snobs, and liars—the evil that would bring the kingdom down. 

Those who did not leave the city, as I had, had simply been murdered. 

“Name a different price,” I told the shadow-creature from the mountains, and it laughed. 

“A price for what? I did not come here for a deal.” 

“Yet you will make one, because I have asked it of you,” I said. “I will abandon my charges no longer. So you will tell me what the price is for me to keep them safe.” 

“Them,” the creature echoed, and raised a golden eye-ridge. “Who are they?” 

The people I left behind in the city. The boy I refused to teach for so long, and now might never really get a chance to teach at all. Addie and that tired, curious mage who still thought me a hero. 

The being stared at me. 

“Come out, fair lady, dance with me,” the golden creature said at last with a wide, inhuman grin, and stretched out a long-clawed hand. “I find yours is a better mind to dance with than a child’s.” 

I laughed, terrified, because I did not know what else to do. “That is your offer?” 

Dancing, what was that supposed to mean? 

It twitched its shoulders, like a shrug, and pointed up at the moon. “Until it turns, you have time to think on it.” It made a show of straightening out, dusting off its sleeves, and turned to go. “Seven nights, I believe, and remember that they grow ever shorter.”

“Wait! How am I not abandoning anyone if I am off—dancing?” 

There were tales of diaphanous things dancing on the mountain winds, through the shadows in the canyons. The souls of dead climbers, some still think. There were stories of souls that danced with death. I had always thought the truth must be somewhere in between. 

This wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind, however. 

The being looked over its shoulder, and blinked at me, slowly, like a mountain cat. “The only truth you know of what lies beyond this place is that you can’t return to where you’ve been. You do not step into the same water twice in a mountain stream, Tali, yet you have never made the mistake of thinking that there is nothing beyond the stream.”

Between one breath and the next, the creature vanished. 

I stayed and watched the moon for a long time, too numb to feel the cold. I thought, I’d never given you my name. 

No—I don’t remember giving you my name. 

I wasn’t sure which thought was the more terrifying. 

Back in the house behind me, a young boy slept a dreamless sleep. In response to a nameless, shapeless threat against him, I’d thrown all caution to the winds, somehow bargained with my life. All in the name of a potential none could grasp. 

And with a being that had the advantage of me, no less. 

I won’t be able to teach him, I thought, and dropped that regret like a stone at the gate; one of those smooth, small stones that weighs far more than it looks like it ought to. Another rounded, heavy stone: I won’t be the one to watch him grow. 

I’d waited too long, again. Old fool, still making the same mistakes as always. 

I had a week to get my old journals in order. At least, as a university master, I’d been an obsessive scribe for my own affairs. 

* 

There was a tale I once heard, about a woman who learned the name of the fae that she’d entered into a bargain with, and that was what freed her from their deal. I did not recall making a deal with anything. 

But then, I did once somewhat carelessly offer my heart and soul in exchange for being permitted to learn the secrets of the universe... 

[dispetal]

every even number :^)

Boy oh boy – here we go! Under cut, ‘cause it gets LONG.

PHYSICAL PRESENCE AND GESTURE.2. How much physical space do they use, active and at rest?

Oh, Ruby usually uses all the space around her. She’s very sporadic and will use up all the space around her because it’s hard for her to stand still (it’s the good good ADHD). At rest she’ll still tend to use up her space in small ways, she has to constantly be moving and doing things with her hands.

4. What is their size and build? How does it influence how they use their body, if it does?

She’s relatively small - 5′2″ - and I headcanon her as a little rounder than the series portrays her as? Like, she’s toned but still has chubby cheeks and chubby upper arms and a little bit of tummy. She’s round. Because she’s not nearly as good at hand to hand combat as, say, Yang, she’s a little softer and a little more weak, especially in her core. ( She’s not entirely dependent on her weapon, but she’s mostly dependent on it! )

6. What are they like in motion–in different environments, and in different activities? What causes the differences between these?

Fast. She’s speedy quick, like, all the time. As mentioned earlier, she has to be moving constantly or doing something to keep her mind stimulated. The only times she really isn’t moving a lot is when she’s over exerted herself, so say, after battles and stuff.

8. Where and when do they seem most and least at ease? Why? How can you tell?

Ooh! This is easy! This comes in two parts. For one: she’s most at ease around the people she loves, normally when relaxing. Like, if she’s playing video games with Yang and Qrow, or if she’s hanging out with RNJR or RWBY just chilling. Alternatively, she’s most at ease when she knows she’s got a battle or fight. When she’s fighting, she’s in her element. Oddly enough, she’s also least at ease when she’s fighting a fight she doesn’t know how to win – or if she’s doing something she doesn’t know how to do. She’s not exactly comfortable in social situations, especially ones that have a lot of sarcasm.

10. What energizes and drains them most?

Motivation and lack of motivation. That good ol Hyperfixation™ feeling. She grapples with executive dysfunction quite often when it’s something she doesn’t particularly care about. ( Classes at Beacon were particularly hard because of this, it wasn’t that she didn’t want to learn, it’s that sometimes her brain wouldn’t let her learn ).

12. How are they bodily expressive? How do they use nonverbal cues such as their posture, stance, eyes, eyebrows, mouths, and hands?

As mentioned before, she’s Everywhere. Her hands are always fiddling with something or playing with the hem of her “combat skirt” and she’s also prone to looking around. Her mind wonders so it takes her a while to really focus in unless it’s something she’s hyperfixated on.

DISPOSITION AND TEMPERAMENT.14. What do they care deeply about? What kind of loyalties, commitments, moral codes, life philosophies, passions, callings, or spirituality and faith do they have? How do these tend to be expressed?

She has a strong sense of morality and she cares deeply about helping the people who can’t be helped. She’s got an almost romanticized view of being a huntress – at least at the beginning – and would do anything to become one and serve justice in a way she sees fit. She grew up with all of the fairy tales and stories told to her by her family and that imbued a sense of almost childlike wonder in her. She is willing to lend a hand and gives second chances because she believes in the inherent good in people and that it can be accessed even if tedious. That, however, also makes her hard to deal with because she’s stubborn. She’s optimistic ( read more about that here ) but that also goes to her detriment as well. As far as passions and callings go, easily – EASILY her biggest passion / calling is being a huntress. Spirituality works a bit different for her, the beliefs that she holds are more in people than incorporeal beings. In this, though, her love of fairy tales can also be considered a belief of some kind or a spirituality / faith at its core. The fairy tales and legends she grew up on had become a sort of faith to her. She revered the heroes in the stories and wanted to lead by their example – ergo, a following.

16. Do they dream? What are those dreams like?

She does dream, but the dreams vary. Lately she’s had more nightmares than real dreams but rarely addresses them, they’re all of her friends dying or the worst possible scenario. When she was a kid she used to have dreams about her mother or her family reuniting or her becoming a huntress as an older girl. Now, her dreams are less dreams and more nightmares, her past and passed friends all in shambling corpses, telling her how little she did to save them – that she could’ve done more. That’s why she wakes early. That’s why she likes being awake. Not because she doesn’t get tired – it’s because she doesn’t want to dream. Not anymore. She’d much prefer to be awake.

18. What kind of person could they become in the future? What are some developmental paths that they could take, (best, worst, most likely?) what would cause them to come to pass, and what consequences might they have? What paths would you especially like to see, and why?

Ooh, interesting question! I think the most likely path is for her to realize the err of her coping mechanisms and get help with the help of her team. Bad end though, is something I’d want to see. Bad end Ruby would probably break ( because of the loss of another party member – more than likely Qrow or anyone from RWBY though at this point it could be ANY one of her friends ) and the silver eyes would end up doing more harm than good. Salem could brainwash her and use her as a minion. There are millions of ways she could get corrupted and I’m interested in exploring them, but I’m also interested in exploring one where she admits to her faults and gets help. I’d like to see Ruby put herself first for once.

CONNECTIONS WITH OTHERS.20. What kind of individual relationships do they have with others, and how do they behave in them? How are they different between intimate relationships like friends, family, and lovers versus more impersonal relationships?

Oh boy, that’d have to be a post for another time, because I could go into every single interaction she has. I’ll keep this one broad though and say she’s pretty easy to get along with and pretty easy to make friends with. She’s always looking for new friends and new opportunities to talk to people. She’s very curious and invested in the people she likes! More intimate relationships will see different sides of her but most see her as the cheery girl she presents as – the girl who wants to help others out. She also forms personal relationships but they’re all based from a very real and pure heart that loves to make friends.

22. How do people respond to them, and why might these responses differ?

There are people who think Ruby’s Too Much All Of The Time because of her bouncy / plucky / optimistic nature. She’s also very loud – it’s hard for her to control her volume and sometimes more difficult to read social cues which can kind of put people off. But, most of the time, they see her as an open, cheery girl who loves people, and sometimes that pisses people off. She’s a good person though, at heart, and that draws people in.

24. How do they present themselves socially? What distinguishes their “persona” from their “true self”, and what causes that difference?

Oof. This is a good one. She presents herself, as mentioned above, as a bubbly, optimistic, loud, fun-loving person. In actuality, she’s very sad. She’s very sad and developed several unhealthy coping mechanisms that from the outside look totally healthy. Whereas Qrow depends on cynicism and alcoholism as his way to deal with grief, Ruby does the opposite. She relies on optimism and hope in an unhealthy way. ( Sidenote: she also eats a lot out of a way to deal with her grief: fun fact ). Not many people – if anyone – have seen the really sad part of her because she’s repressed it so far. What she doesn’t realize is sadness when repressed often leads to anger unprompted. She’s repressed enough at this point to get very, very angry at another, and that’s horrifying to think about.

26. How do they view and feel about relationships, and how might this manifest in how they handle them, if it does?

She’s “open” with relationships. In that she’s totally okay with the other person being open and she’s very warm and welcoming and excitable, but she puts most of if not all of her focus into that other person and how they feel in the relationship. Romantically, she isn’t actively looking for a partner, though she wouldn’t mind one. ( I will say, I doubt that her having a partner at this time is healthy. ) It’s hard for her to read people so the person who has the crush would have to straight up say “hey, let’s date” because otherwise it’s a lost cause. Usually she’s very flattered even if the feelings aren’t returned! Someone having a crush never ruins a friendship for her.

ACTIVITIES AND PREFERENCES.28. What are they likely to do if they have the opportunity, resources, and time to accomplish it? Why? 

Anything, if she really wants to. She’s a determined person. 

30. What is their preferred level of activity and stimulation? How do they cope if they get either too little or too much?

Ooh! She’s got a lot of activity needed but if it’s unprompted and sudden it can trigger a sensory overload. Large crowds make her uncomfortable for that reason. She can be around people but only really when she’s prepared herself to do so. Even then, it can be hard for her. Stimming helps with that! Her most common stims are spreading her hands out, hands flapping, or playing with something in her hands! Tapping also helps.

32. Do they have any “props” that are a significant part of their life, identity, activities, or self-presentation somehow? What are they, how are they used, and why are they so significant? How would these props’ absence impact them, how would they compensate, and why?

 Other than the obvious being crescent rose, her cape is symbolic as hell. I’m gonna get into that in a separate post.

THINKING AND LEARNING.34. How do they understand the world–what kind of worldview and thought processes do they have? Why?

I think I’ve pretty much already answered this one? Check 14 again. ( I will go into her opinion on Faunus rights -- spoiler, she’s completely for them -- later. )

36. How much do they rely on their minds and intellect, versus other approaches like relying on instinct, intuition, faith and spirituality, or emotions? What is their opinion on this?

Emotions, emotions, emotions. She is lead by her heart almost completely. Sometimes she’s prone to thinking things out rationally but most of the time? She’s all heart bapey. She doesn’t mind people thinking logically but sometimes she wonders why people don’t listen to their hearts more, unaware that it can be as harmful as it can be good.

38. Is there anything they wish they could change about their worldview or thought processes? What, and why?

I think if she totally snapped that could all change but it’d take quite a lot of time to get that way.

40. What do they wonder about? What sparks their curiosity and imagination, and why? How is this expressed, if it is?

Everything! She’s a very curious girl and asks a lot of questions! It’s not because she’s completely unaware but more that she’s totally interested in the things around her. It doesn’t take much to spark curiosity and imagination but things like semblances or fighting styles are things that pique her curiosity. 

[lupinealpineipa]

Some re-drawings of my characters from ‘The Finest Heroes’. my obsession with Yu-gi-oh, street fighter, and Sailormoon all rolled up in one very plot hole heavy story.

Mitzi is a plucky 14-year-old who’s ready for her last year of middle school to be over. She’s a sunny over-excitable child, her cheeriness does hide her low self-esteem. she regularly berated for her overweight by both teachers and her mother and finds it difficult to make new friends much to everyone's surprise. that why she prefers to spend much of her after-school time playing videos games with her childhood best friend Gavin. Mitzi’s faith in people often beats out her rationale side, always willing to help out others before herself. She likes to think that one day she’ll have enough self-confidence to admit that she has a crush on Gavin, and maybe bet him in Mario Cart. (probably the later)

Mitsuki was a talented young apprentice to her teacher. he taught her many forms in self-defense and attack, encouraging her to improvise in dire situations and making sure she always believed in herself first. Mitsuki dreamed of the day when she would take over the school and teach other young girls like herself the value of ones inner and outer strength. unfortunately, her town was struck with disaster leaving her without her beloved school and her parental figure. she began to compete in fighting rings to save money to send to her hometown in hope to restore the damage that the storm left them in. Her experience traveling earned her the title on the lone hero, later being approached by an organization that fights against evil, they are called The Finest Heroes. years later Mitsuki finds herself trapped in a video game With NO memories to help her in her predicament, she has an incredible affinity with the earth.

Rosalette is an older teen, barely turning 19. she used to be the girlfriend of a popular gamer who won on competitive levels. she realized quickly into their relationship that he had let a lot of the fame and influx of fans get to his head, because of her close relationship with the gamer she was often put under mass scrutiny and constantly slut-shamed for her appearance. she eventually decided to leave the relationship and pursue her own passions, game development. being herself an incredible gamer she always had a talent for coding. Rosalette isn't someone to be messed with when it comes to competitive gaming, making a name for her self in the community. although many trolls still take her negatively she has found a great and caring community of her own.

Rosie Posie was born to a rich family, but she doesn't like talking about that. Instead, ask her what the specials are in her bakery for today or where she got the cute fabric for her dress. Rosie has worked hard in her life so that she could live to be her authentic self and cherish each moment she has with others. she has an insatiable sweet tooth and many of her patrons would agree, some go as far as stealing or even vandalizing her bakery. but not to worry Rosie is always prepared, using her adorable umbrella as a staff and it’s incredible properties for greater damage. She can always put cretins in their place and isn't afraid of getting dirty if need be, But she much rather solves everyone's problems with some good apple pie. because of her abilities and the courageous actions she performed she was approached to join the Finest heroes. Years later she finds herself trapped in a video game with only a FEW memories of the past, she has an incredible affinity with air

Kevin Sampson is the son of a CEO of a distributing company. now they have focused their sights on distributing data and software engines to create a smooth and elegant gaming experience. Kevin has jumped on board becoming the sponsor of many popular gamers and helping them succeed in their careers. but it’s not all good for both parties. on contractile obligations, Kevin owns the brands of many gamers resulting in many of them not being able to extend or market themselves. His company though still adhered for its innovations in technology has been slowly becoming a sore in the gaming community but many still know that if they what to receive more publicity the only way to do so quickly is partnering with Kevin. His general attitude and dislikes fo many gaming venues have earned him a very dislikeable stance with many people. He has a very short temper and prefers to handle business situations himself, making him a ticking time bomb. Though he acts as though he has a dislike for casual gaming he is a very talented player and because of his general background, he can easily pick up and learn new systems.

S.K.Y has always been a thorn in other peoples sides, his ego can only be challenged by his sheer sense of self. Though he is a good fighter even held up amongst the greatest, he can often be found making large allegations of himself ‘having the strength of twenty men’ or ‘fighting two bears at once’. S.K.Y grew up as the prodigy of a humble monk who constantly praised S.K.Y for his sense of justice but once he was recognized by an elite fighting group, The Finest Heroes S.K.Y abandoned his poor beginnings and began to make a name for himself in the arena. He still has his inner core of fighting for what's right but its often muted by his larger more demanding desire to constantly be held in the limelight. He’s afraid to be ridiculed for his inabilities not having finished his general studies and difficult reading, his extreme form of dyslexia disadvantages him in many conversations and makes writing an impossibility. years later he finds himself trapped in a video game with a FEW memories of his past he has an incredible affinity with Fire

Xavier Montoya is a young 16-year-old boy who wants to make it out alive in high school. with the support of his aunt and cousin, he was able to socially transition. He even had top surgery after his Freshman year.  because of the mistreatment, he had to go through with his parents he is still trying to deal with his sense of self-worth. the only times he feels as though he can be himself is when he’s in the water of competing in his swim team. Montoya works as a waiter in a small family-owned Italian restaurant where he learned to mask his troubles with a fake smile ad chippy attitude his only favorite customers are a young Hispanic couple and their overactive daughter who reminds him a lot of himself. Montoya’s constantly has to battle with his own demons that constantly try to berate him down but he doesn't press anyone with his issues not wanting to depend on others, he prefers if people felt comfortable coming to him if they had problems they want to work out. He volunteers at an animal shelter on the weekends

M.A.R is a quiet and often forgot member of the finest heroes. he often plays to his strengths in planning and calculating for the team. he is very punctual and is never seen without his pocket watch. Though he may seem distant he is very protective of his close one going as far as taking cathartic measures to make sure they're safe. He very frequently feels as though his intellect and leadership skills aren't being used to their fullest potential by the organization, making him very resentful of those above him. he is very tactful and manipulative making people do things for him without them even knowing. he does have a soft spot for anyone who’s worked hard for everything they have, he himself coming from poverty and learning everything he could to help him leave his circumstances. there are many people who do not approve of his malicious tactics and would prefer if he leaves the team. he spends much of his time studying patterns being able to efficiently coordinate a sequence of cause and effect. Years later he found himself trapped in a video game with MANY memories of his past. He has a strong affinity with water

Gavin is a sweet young boy in the same grade as Mitzi only being a year younger than her. On his Bar mitzvah he was allowed to invite his school friends, at the time his only friend was Mitzi. His parents' joke that she will also be the only girl at his wedding. Gavin shares many of his video games with Mitzi being a kind and compassionate kid. he introduced Mitzi to the iconic and popular videogame known as ‘ Midnight: The Finest Heroes’. he is a supportive and trust-worthy friend and thinks very highly of Mitzi. He is a golden retriever personified

Shannon Ortiz was Mitzi’s friend from elementary school. she, Gavin, and Mitzi were inseparable until eventually Shannon felt embarrassed by her friends. playing video games and talking about playing card games when other kids their age were beyond that. she began taking out her frustrations on Mitzi, slowly tearing away their friendship. eventually, Shannon found a new group of friends away from Mitzi and Gavin and began becoming an annoyance to them. nowadays Mitzi and gain avoid her as much as they can. 

[threewaysdivided]

Idea for an Age-swap AU

We’ve recently seen some age-swap and role-swap AUs floating around the DP fandom.  The most common of these are the direct reversals, where Vlad is the teenage protagonist and Danny is the adult villain.   Now, I’m not the hugest fan of the straight-swap versions because it’s not particularly interesting or in-keeping with the canon characters.  If Danny becomes the amoral villain and Vlad the plucky protagonist then you basically just have the original Danny Phantom again, except with the characters wearing each other’s skins.

However, a version of the age-swap that keeps the characters closer to their canon personalities has great comedy potential.

Imagine this:

Young!Vlad is a disaffected but highly intelligent freshman whose ‘genius’ is seemingly unrecognised by everyone in town.  Pretty much everything sucks for him - he’s bored at home because his parents are always away on work, he’s bored in class because he finds the material too easy, the school’s head jock and posse make a policy of ruining his day, the student body president is ‘inept’, and - despite Vlad’s intelligence and apparent ability to analyse people - he never seems to make it into the spheres of the influential or popular classmates.    He’s aloof and vaguely disdainful towards everyone around him, except for his two best friends; the naive and eccentric but occasionally brilliant Young!Jack, and the beautiful and sharply intelligent Young!Maddie.  He hangs out with them partly due to their mutual interest in the paranormal, but also because Maddie is the only person in town he sees as an equal and he really wants to date her (too bad she’s always making eyes at Jack).   [If you’re looking for a reference he’s basically a cross between Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole and Velma Dinkley from Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated]

Like in the original series, the three of them attempt to build a proto-ghost portal as a step in their research.  This one goes even worse (after all, it was built by teenagers) and Jack rushing to activate it gets Vlad blasted with way more ectoplasm than in canon.  Just like the original it lands him in hospital for a bit - but in this case only a few months.  On coming back to school he is very resentful (mostly towards Jack though he’s a bit miffed that Maddie didn’t come to visit his room while he was awake) both for the accident and the Danny-like power-problems he’s experiencing.  Although in Vlad’s case he hides them from his friends and outwardly acts like everything’s been forgiven.

As he gains controls of his powers, Vlad decides to put them to use ‘correcting’ some of the ‘wrongs’ in his life; serving disproportionate comeuppance to the jocks, subtly embarrassing Jack in from of Maddie, scheming and manipulating his way through the school’s systems, and generally messing with people to alleviate his boredom.

It basically turns into a Deathnote-like moral situation, in which Vlad is a nominal ‘hero’ on the best days and an entitled, arrogant person at worst.  He may be the protagonist but he’s sure not the ‘good guy’ of this story. (He still makes himself a vampire-style suit and goes by Plasmius in ghost-mode because despite being highly intelligent he’s also a dumb 14-year-old who unironically thinks it looks cool.)

How does Danny get involved?

While Vlad is still in the nominally-heroic part of the story (dishing out retributions to people who actually had it coming, chasing away some minor ghosts that were attracted by the portal explosion, manipulating outcomes that fix genuine problems etc.) he starts to notice an older person hanging around and following him. At first Vlad’s concerned - has someone caught on?  Is it an enemy ghost?  A rival trying to take out the competition? - until Phantom introduces himself.  Danny’s a lot of things but subtle is not one of them.

Older!Danny is in his early 30s.  His parents were some of the first modern ecto-scientists and successfully built a working portal (the source of the accident that gave him his powers) but because the hauntings stayed localised near the portal (never spreading beyond his own hometown) their ecto-research didn’t reach mainstream science beyond a few ‘professional ghost-hunters’, paranormal aficionados and an obscure branch of government that mostly just makes messes bigger in their attempts to ‘contain and study all unauthorised ectoplasmic entities’.

Despite his unease, Danny is honestly happy to meet another half-ghost. He might have reservations about actual teaching (“I’ve got an Engineering degree, not a Dip. Ed.”) but he genuinely wants to help this new kid through what he remembers being a tough period of power-adjustment and guide him to use his abilities productively.   Unfortunately, Vlad is having none of it - who is this condescending fool to tell him what to do?  In his eyes Phantom is either trying to recruit him so that he can use his power (after all, that’s what Vlad would do) or he’s an idiot for wasting such potential. Actually, he must be an idiot either way because who else would try to manipulate someone of Vlad’s intelligence?

Eventually this devolves into a cat-and-mouse game in which Young!Vlad uses his brains and abilities in attempts to manipulate his way into Maddie’s affections, positions of influence and possession of powerful items, with Phantom having to step in and ‘defeat Plasmius’ before someone gets hurt.  Unlike in canon, where Vlad mostly toys with Danny to demonstrate his superiority, Young!Vlad learning techniques from their fights is intentional on Older!Phantom’s part. Phantom really wants to give this kid a chance to turn things around, and figures that letting Plasmius experiment with his powers in a relatively safe space might help Vlad get under control and avoid the temptation to do something truly stupid.  Unfortunately, all this actually does is teach his accidental-arch-rival to be a more competent villain.

Shenanigans ensue:

Vlad deliberately creating dangerous situations so that he can impress Maddie by ‘dramatically rescuing’ her from the ‘evil Plasmius’.  What he forgets is that, under her pretty face, Maddie is a top-tier asskicker - at least a third of the time the love of his life hands his ecto-hide to him long before Phantom can intervene. He’d find it attractive if it wasn’t so humiliating.

Jack also proves disturbingly competent with his ‘anti-creep stick’.  It’s literally just a baseball bat with a cross-stitched handle and the club logo sprayed on the side but Vlad still makes a point of stealing and destroying them whenever Jack makes a new one.

Maddie concludes that Plasmius and Phantom are both evil and working together.  

Vlad: “Of course, but as the older and stronger, Phantom is clearly in charge.  If we get rid of him then surely Plasmius will leave.”

This results in Vlad doing a very careful dance whenever he and Danny are in ghost mode while Maddie and/or Jack can see them.

In attempt to ‘eliminate the competition’ Vlad considers alerting the Guys in White to Phantom’s status.

Danny: “Look, kid. Vlad. If you go to them with that intel they’re going to wonder how you got it.  I might survive - my company holds the patents for a lot of their tech - but you’re a high-schooler.  You really want to risk outing both of us?”

This is one of the few things they eventually agree on: Under no circumstances is anyone to intentionally involve the GIW.

Vlad tries to recruit other ghosts in attempt to keep Phantom distracted.

This mostly consists of him failing to intimidate Skulker with his scrawny teen stature, then flattering him into it because “surely as the first and strongest of his kind Phantom would be a much worthier prize for such a skilled hunter.”

He has more luck with the resentful Yiddish vultures, although they can’t do much beyond being a nuisance.

The Box Ghost offers his services.  Repeatedly.

Vlad travels to Amity Park in attempt to steal ecto-tech from Fentonworks.  On arrival he is horrified to see just how haunted the town is due to its permanently active portal.  He beats a fast retreat after getting cornered and resolves to come back with better plans.

Vlad returns to Amity Park in attempt to recruit more minions from the thronging masses. This is somewhat successful, but a few rogue ghosts follow him home - forcing him to try to contain the situation while hiding it from Maddie and Jack.

Youngblood starts messing with Vlad’s schoolmates (interfering with some of his social schemes in the process).  As an adult Danny is incapable of seeing him, and Maddie and Vlad’s tendency to act older than their age means that Jack is the only one with a real handle on the situation.  Eventually (to his intense horror) Vlad has to do things Jack’s way to solve the problem

Jack: “You know what V-Man, I’m glad to have you back.  You’ve been so serious these last few months, I was worried you’d forgotten how to have fun!”

Vlad: *audible teeth-grinding*

Vlad refuses to swear because he thinks it’s a sign of inferior intellect and therefore beneath him.  Danny doesn’t swear because he’s desperately trying not to teach this kid any more bad habits.

Vlad makes a deal with Technus to steal some software for use in a financial scheme. Too bad that they make this arrangement in the same week that local Information Technology rising-star Tucker Foley is invited to speak at the school’s career day.

Vlad’s plans failing because his ‘superior intellect’ leads him to over-engineer excessively complex schemes.

Danny: “You know you could just have done this, right?”

Plasmius later tries Phantom’s suggestion and Danny is kicking himself because darn it I was trying to get him to knock it off, not give him pointers.

Vlad attempting subtler social schemes (e.g. overshadowing staff and student council members to make changes).  These sometimes work but other times Jack messes up the plan with his overenthusiastic support for his ‘best friend’.

Danny eventually recruiting one of Vlad’s classmates Red-Huntress-style because look, I’m running my parents company, volunteering at the observatory and trying to keep the ghosts under control.  I can’t be constantly flying to another town to make sure Plasmius isn’t bringing on the ecto-apocalypse.

Out of respect for Vlad’s privacy Danny doesn’t reveal the secret identity thing. Instead he asks them to keep Plasmius under control and also look out for Vlad Masters because the ghost might be interested in him.

What Danny didn’t notice was that this kid really doesn’t like Masters and has a pretty big grudge against Plasmius after being on the receiving end of one of his schemes.  What should have been a simple recon job instead ends up with them aggressively pursuing an intense rivalry with both of Vlad’s halves.  They also get overzealous in their ecto-hunter task and start going after Phantom as well.  So now Danny has two problems.

Jazz Fenton (a qualified and practicing psychologist in this AU) takes a job as the school’s councillor.

While there she works to convince Vlad of the benefits of altruism, tries to wheedle him into confessing his connection to Plasmius (Danny told her everything) and attempts to foil his social manipulations.  The first two aren’t met with much success but she does get in the way of the third a few times.

For his part Vlad tries different schemes to get her fired or make her leave so that he can continue plotting without interference.

Vlad sneaks into the Ghost Zone in attempt to steal a powerful item (Ring of Rage, Pandora’s box, the Fright Knights Soul Shredder etc.).  This goes about as badly you’d expect.  Unlike in canon, where Vlad bails and makes Danny deal with it, Older!Phantom drags Young!Plasmius back by the ear because you made this mess so now you’re going to help clean it up.

Phantom: “So, did we learn anything today?”

Plasmius: “I should do more research before handling powerful objects.”

Phantom: *aggrieved sigh* “You know kid, I honestly thought you were smarter than this.”

Whether Young!Vlad eventually learns his lesson or keeps spiralling until he becomes a canon!Vlad level criminal chessmaster is something that could go either way.  

What I’m getting at is:  Can someone please do a version of the age-swap AU where Vlad Masters/Plasmius is an intellectually snobbish, overly theatrical, entitled adolescent ‘mastermind’ (who isn’t quite as bright as he thinks) and Danny Fenton/Phantom is the well-intentioned and experienced adult hero (but poor teacher) who really wants to give this kid a second chance but is getting more and more done with all the villainy nonsense.

[lunarrpmemes]

Adventure Time: Elements Starters

Skyhooks

“That was definitely the longest adventure we’ve ever done.” “Let’s go take hot showers!” “Look at this fish. It’s... gummy?” “We’ve gotta get to the bottom of this hot shower.” “Home always looks different after a long trip.” “Everything being pink is probably not a big deal, and also I’m tired.” “Why do you worry so much, worry baby?” “Don’t worry, we’re only teasing you because you’re a baby.” “Hey! You look like me!” “Welcome, stranger! It’s so cool that you’re inside our house!” “We’ve obviously stumbled into an alternate dimension where everyone’s a different version of themselves. Yawn.” “I’m in control of my emotions.” “Drink up, babies!” “I used to have a LOT of fear and sadness - but now I’m FINE!” “No! That is body juice.” “What’s that? Do you spurn my fluids?” “Looks like someone’s feeling a little SOUR.” “Stop striding! It just keeps you agitated!” “Hey! You’re meat!” “They look so happy. Like dogs.” “Something smells nice. Nice and toasty.” “She’s everywhere.” “You fixed ‘em? But they’re your friends!”  “Goodbye, boys! It’s better this way!” “They’ll be back. They have nowhere else to go.” 

Bespoken For

“Why does it look like a four-way pizza?!” “Everyone is not dead. It’s much worse.” “What am I gonna do without my besties around?” “Bird watching sounds cool.” “I’m going out to get some magic ingredients.” “Cool. Bring me a snackie.” “You a toucan?” “I’ve tried so hard to help you.” “It’s saddening, it’s maddening, I’m rapping, and- and--” “No, I don’t remember who she is. But I know how to find out.” “It’s okay. I know you don’t remember me.” “Hey, wanna go on a date with me tonight?” “I think she might be an exotic bird.” “You need to get a nice bespoked suit.” “No, that’s just the muumuu, dawg. I’m jacked.” “Pretty fly for an ice guy.” “I’m really into skulls and old teeth in jars, too.” “Well, that was terrifying.” “Maybe you’re going after someone who doesn’t exist anymore.” “Why not take him as he is? After all, you’ve been through a lot of changes yourself.” “It sounds depressing when you say it that way. Think of a different way to say it.” “I don’t wanna be that guy who just hangs out with his girlfriend all the time and doesn’t see his friends... Man, I wanna be that guy so bad.” “These are some low-grade fairies.” “Where did the weird lady go?” “I wonder if my roomie has any more of these soothing donuts.” 

Winter Light

“We’ll enter via the sewer line.” “This is a place mat from a seafood restaurant - and this word search is way too hard!”” “I made these sweaters and ear muffs for you guys. They’re bespoke.” “It’s a lot colder now, too.” “Oh, I get it. The top one’s fake.” “This is crazy. It’s like being at the bottom of an ocean.” “Ice to meet you.” “You betta believe it, bucko.” “Do you wanna come with us? We’re on a secret mission.” “She’s, like, ruined the whole world and all our friends.” “Yes, I draw elves. It’s what I like to do!” “It’s not a sewer, but it’ll have to do.” “Oh no, you have an icicle. You look like your kids!” “Back in my old basement, where it all began.” “Cool boy say what?” “They denied their precious birthright.” “Instead of embracing their powers, they were overrun by them.” “Monstrous. Like life itself.” “If you’re so upset about this, you should fix it.” “The universe is an abyss of suffering.” “Best Friends Gang, retreat!” “Everyone leaves, except me. I remember Father made me stay at the table until all the eggs were eaten.” “Well, that sucks and I hate it.” “The goose... Is loose.” “My mystic soup is great for combating Ice Magic.” “I feel drained like a dirty bath tub.” “Ancient magic was actually my major.”

Cloudy

“Woah, neat-o.” “Graduate student? What the heck is that? You graduated, but you’re still a student? Doesn’t make any sense.” “Can the Dog do anything about this?” “What are you doing? Swaddling me?” “Look what happens when you go to sleep!” “Turn around! I can’t go when you’re looking at me.” “Yes sir. I sure like cuttin’ hair.” “All this stuff happened because I acted selfishly.” “I was talking about important stuff!” “I’ve been trying to distract you from all this, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy with the way things are going!” “You know what I’ve been thinking? What if we’re dead?” “I try to keep my worries hidden, but where does that send ‘em? To my kidneys? That can’t be good.” “I can get into that. Maybe when I’m thirty-five.” “I don’t care, don’t look in this direction. It makes me feel like you can hear my most private business.” “Since when is it such a hassle just to take a whiz?” “Are you being digested in there?” “Thanks for not digesting me.” “Nothing happened to us, so now we get to fix it.” 

Slime Central

“Here’s some trail mix for the road.”  “They’re two wack-a-doodle peas in a wack-a-doodle pod.”  “Something about it makes me feel weird in the ethics.” “You don’t wanna stare at happiness too hard, yaknow? Cuz it stares back, man...” “This smells like a locker room for a dead fish.”  “Okay, you look dope.”  “You guys on a team, yet?”  “No, you can’t be on my team!”  “You got something to say?”  “As always, the prize is absorption into the body of our bumpin’ leader.”  “Skate to assimilate!” “Isn’t assimilation amazing?”  “It might be comfy, like a hug that turns you into a hug.” “She can’t absorb us if we’re self-absorbed.” “You need a three person team to compete, and I’m taken.”  “But I’m the plucky underdog!”  “No, you’re just terrible.”  “No, wait! Discontinue the beat!” “They love me! I’m a true Cinderella story!”  “Today’s losers will now be punished with shameful absorption.”  “It’s like being in a warm bath full of snot.”  “It’ll work out somehow.”  “May as well give in to it...”  “This isn’t an uplifting underdog ending.”  “I’m not assimilating!”  “She’s gonna be rejecteeeed.”  “No, I totally faked it.”  “Even though I shoplifted this super cool outfit, I still didn’t fit in...”  “I guess I don’t fit in anywhere.”  “Whatever happened, he was always like... ‘it’ll work out.’“ “Stop being so selfish, I’m the one hurting here!” Happy Warrior“He’s probably having fun, and doing way better without you.”  “Your laugh is really annoying.” “Don’t talk that way about the skyhooks!” “Please keep your hands and bags away from the cloud’s edge.” “Don’t torture yourself! And don’t drop your phone into Fire Kingdom, dummy.” “If I don’t, you’ll die. Hah!”  “So... You guys wanna do something? Got any music?”  “You guys aren’t just, like, boring and old, right?”  “This doesn’t look so bad.”  “You see that bird? Gross.” “No, I’m just super cool.” “I got RAGE!”  “You cannot defeat me!” “Let’s take his armor.”  “I’m going, but I swear vengeance, okay?”  “Your cooking stinks!” “Man, this place used to be nice... er.” “I can’t, she’s like family!” “My flame shield protected me from the Change. The rest of the kingdom... Is lost.”  “She is spicy with anger.”  “We used to really bond over music, and.... Stuff.”  “This is as far as I go.”  “She said some... Hurtful things.”  “I’ll give her a good talking to. I’ll talk her into next week.”  “My wolf is also a loner.”  “When did he get cool? Everyone slept on that.”  “Die in a ditch!” “You used to be about the laughs!” “You can’t run the saw, then stay outta my woodshed.”  “The duck found a secret tunnel!”  “We’re just friends, and I’m proud of that friendship. Getting there took a lot of trust building and emotional growth.”  “... Do you do squats?”  “That big, gross dragon is your ex?!”  “This place is a toxic, aggro-macho-scape.” “That was messed up, and not who you really are!” “The only friend I have is violence, and the only thing we do when we hang is FIGHT!”  “I’m gonna ruin your universe.”  “Honestly, I could still see those two working out.”  “This is terrible, nobody’s paying attention to me!” “That’s a huge extrapolation from what I said.” “Surely, this is the end of all things.”

Hero Heart

“Is this about your ex?” “This is about the purity of battle.”  “Just listen to the beat of your hero heart!” “I only hear the drums of war.” “You’re hurting me physically and emotionally.” “Becoming a crazy, fiery bad boy has made you even more of a babe.”  “It’s a real magic flying carpet!”  “We lost him to the flames of war!” “You got any lotion? Your skin is so... Hydrated.”  “Aw man, I don’t think you should play this game ever again.”  “Look at all these thirsty customers!” “Ice cream pies for all our hot new friends.”  “Jeez, who sneezed in your cornflakes?”  “Look, weird lady - I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, but we’re the only sane people left in this crazy, mixed-up world.” “Lets get in there and mash their potatoes!”  “My children have come home.”  “Oh, a dragon, how fun!” “I see you’ve been playing with matches.” “Fight me, nerd!”  “Ooh! Are we wrastlin’? Fun!”  “Everyone I know is spazzing out on each other.” “Is this the end? Will I be the last witness to the glory of this world that I chose above all others?” “I don’t think I can save the world on my own.”  “Curse these superior genes.”  “Your face tastes like my happy place.”  “My little Sugarplum - you’ve returned to accept your sweet fate!” “This charade has run it’s course.” “In your hearts, you are all sweet!”

Skyhooks II

“You left my friend down there.” “Don’t worry, I’ve got a new plan - a plan where nothing that happens here matters.” “He sees me like a handsome older brother.”  “Its me! I’m saving your tight butt!” “Maybe you’re not made of the same stuff as us.” “No more learning!” “Huh, musta dozed off. And bound myself.” “People say ‘you shouldn’t live in the past.’ But I say ‘why not?’“ “This book is strange, but when you puzzle it out, it’s mostly all charges and frequencies.” “My wonderful ___ will never become this sad, pathetic creature strewn before me.” “I thought I could do it, but I can’t. Being with you is like looking at my old life through a funhouse mirror.”  “I think you need to be the most ‘you’ that you’ve ever been.”  “I do believe in myself. I’m a blossoming debutante on the war path.” “Just relax, you’ll be obliterated soon.” “I - I guess I’m a special person, and I am worthy of respect!” “Can you turn this off and we can talk, maybe?”  “Boy, did I fail deep.” “Maybe I’ll try again in another thousand years.” “I’m not sticking around to see how this ends.” “I didn’t like being ditched earlier.” “I already saved your life, so quit telling me what to DO!”  “You mean these jewels love me more than they love those dum dums?”  “You bossed him back to normal!”  “The jelly is out of the tube!” “Oh, blessings. What a trip.” “Uh... Did you recently get a haircut?”  “Please be careful with yourself.” “I’m... A hero.”  “You really donked up.” “You and I can fix whatever this is, together. Whenever.”  “I was really scared when you left.” “I love you.”

[theky2aqw-blog]

Goblin Slayer ep 1 review and its review from Anime Feminazis

Yay I am back from the dead for some laughs and giggles before I will send some scary Pilipino, Japanese, Melayu, Indo, and ancient Greco-Roman Stories that will either put you on the edge or make you laugh to death.

But for now let us go and either debunk or give a two cents from our famous misandrists from Anime Feminist - Yay my internal sarcasm will not let me laugh.

Because you know every rape depiction in fiction is to be banned even though there is parental guidance for shit like these

and we have a cute depiction of Goblin Slayer killing goblins.

Well before we start --

At the start of the episode we get to see what a fantasy anime can show, well at the very first start would be the shittiest hero introduction I can imagine. Maybe, just maybe if they were not simple dipshits who do not underestimate their opponents I will not probably tackle the bland first quarter of episode 1. Well they went off for an adventure to slay goblins, but the sad news is that their overconfidence caused them to be defeated and the party almost being wiped out by goblins - A common mistake by beginners that can kill you in the first move.

Well I can fill you in the two quarters of the episode, Goblins raped the Fighter girl, killed the dumbass fuckboy who thinks a sword longer than a spatha or as long as a Tai Chi can work well in cramped spaces(mind you they are beginners with a confidence level that can annoy you to the bone) in a very brutal fashion and manner, their mage was stabbed in the gut by a poisoned blade in a fast swing of events starting with mage, then fuckboy, and then fighter who got raped.

In these seemingly dark turn of events, our beloved Priestess tries to carry Female Mage and try to escape but was shot in the shoulder by a poisoned goblin arrow. All hope was lost until

Our Hero, Goblin Slayer came to save the day. He proceeded on granting Female Mage’s wish to die and giving Priestess the Antidote despite her protests. She then assisted him in slaying more goblins to save her last surviving friend. Of course when the killing of baby goblins was shown, she protested on thinking there are some good goblins, but Goblin Slayer just said:

Well soon, she became his one and only party member and the series will start from here.

Well of course you guys wanted me to go on Anime Feminists article? Ok I will

Ok now I have pretty much laughed on any article that contains their own buzz words and their supporters being too morally superior in the argument but it is better for me to dissect and if there are dubious claims I will debunk them Shall we(also I will not put the entire words of the article word by word just snippets of it as I point out the arguments the article will make.):

1.”Y’all, I’ve got something that’s gonna blow. Your. Mind. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.Okay so it’s like. An MMO—Okay that’s not the part I meant.So it’s like an MMO, right, but it’s like. What if when you got overwhelmed in a raid it was, like, REAL LIFE, and there was BLOOD—” - Yeah your Sarcasm is never straight to the point. No wonder why I added this snippet for fun, its pretty obvious its not an mmo in its genre just pointing that out.

2.  “ My point is that GOBLIN SLAYER, putting aside its repugnant content, is a brainless copycat loudly braying about its cleverness despite being incapable of a single original thought. It would be pathetic if it weren’t so nasty, like a parasitic worm only worth grinding under your heel. “

 - umm its a no on the copycat shit thing. - Also Brainless???? I cannot stop trying to laugh had it not been for my tooth extraction preventing me from doing so. - Single Original thought? Umm almost every fantasy genre in anime/manga/light novels have ever shown this level of savagery and brutality in its first episode, a few did like GATE:JSDF, and sorry to say this Shit, but it is Sword - -- oh wait my friend said it was just like Berserk - pathetic? well its opinionated grounds but I have seen more hentai far pathetic than this outside from

Please not this bullshit of a yaoi hentai....known as Boku no Pico.

ok....off track already...

4. “ It is laughably obvious that GOBLIN SLAYER longs to be Berserk, with its lone, implacable monster slayer and excessive focus on rape as an increasingly meaningless vehicle for cheap shock horror. Except that Berserk had a striking visual style, at least attempted to use assault in a meaningful way early on, and was a pioneer in its genre. Meanwhile, Goblin Slayer is limping in decades late with broken pacing and visuals so generic I look forward to people misattributing the GIFs of it on hentai blogs three seasons from now. ”

- umm article its not focusing on *Hears Boku no Pico Music* ahh fuck this I will just continue debunking....*internal death* Its not trying to be berserk in any shape or form...please stop this boku no pico music..... Also your sentences just implies it is going full Boku no Pico and Aki Sora on this. I am just cringing while listening to Boku no Pico since the pacing is pretty generic yes but not broken and you are just thinking about boku no pico

before I continue I just talked about Boku no Pico many times.....please I am dying internally.

5. “  It can’t even hit the basic watermark of the famous tentacle rape porno Legend of the Overfiend, which in addition to being very boring had genuinely impressive, fleshy-looking monster designs that turned the stomach to look at. Goblin Slayer has generic fantasy orcs and a boner for its own nonexistent cleverness. “ - I digress on the non....ok I will play with you because the song of Pico is killing me that I will just play along with your dubious claims. Well since its overly subjective. I will let you off for this dubious claims.

6.  “  The show’s treatment of women is upsetting, but not in any new or noteworthy ways. If I tell you that this Edgy Edgelord Show starts out with three untrained female characters getting in over their heads, I bet you can fill in the rest (you can even have “the one male adventurer dies offscreen while the women are tortured at length in full view of the camera” for free!). “

 - It just shows what goblins should be projected, a band of savages that is a threat to humanity. Also women in the older days are a profitable treasure that must be used to its fullest extent. I cannot say more since you are going to cherry pick me.

7. “  I bet you didn’t guess the deliberate close-up of our unnamed healer peeing her pants in terror, because this is nothing if not a fetish porn without the courage of its convictions, but two out of three ain’t bad. “ - What else do you want them to depict, them comforting her?! I cannot stop laughing while the cringy yaoi shit is playing in my ears, Won’t you pee in fear when your life is at its greatest edge writer? especially in her shoes that she cannot do anything...ok this is getting long...I need to contain myself from sarcasm and laughing.

8. “  Oh, and I’ll also throw in the end-episode reassurance that the kidnapped women are all broken for life with no hope of recovery, because these kinds of male-empowerment fantasies view women as a collection of holes dragging a punchline behind them. Because it can’t even bother with being a lazy “rape is the only trauma we can think of to have women grow strong from” story. “ 

- I cannot comprehend this feminazi anymore, I can easily debunk this by saying that once a woman who broken of rape and has PTSD because of her brutal experience from the beasts IDK like giants or what. What do you think, can you easily overcome such trauma? Oh wait you don’t because you are virtue signalling now.

- Also the last phrase is not lazy, its a simple pretext of how actual trauma and fear works. I cannot say more since I do not want to drag this on with Morals vs Logic arguments.

9.  “  And I’m just gosh-darned invested in the plucky and still-unnamed healer’s decision to go on more adventures with him so that the show can scar her in new and ever more masturbatory ways. “

- She called Priestess you dimwit. I cannot spoil the manga or anime for you kids, but soon she is the very person Goblin Slayer - Sama would care and protect 24/7 in his adventures killing goblins.(So No more Arguments I want to tackle, yay)

aaaaannnnd that is how “I can talk to you on this shitstorm

Well I wanted to add more but since the shit music of boku no pico has finally stopped I can now take more than 2 cents about this than before. Goblin Slayer is the anime where I can say its never gonna be shown to children obviously well they would still watch it because its an anime. I cannot talk in a straight face because my laughter on how they think this is a copycat and an edgelord anime/manga/light novel is legit stupid and deserves another level of insults from these real world goblins. 

Time to see you next time

[screamingatanemptyroom]

The Hero Trap

The following is a short story I wrote in response to a prompt idea sent to me by @sockknitteranon regarding twisting the typical “choose between the your girlfriend and random innocent civilian” scenario in super hero stories. Thank you for the suggestion! I really really hope you like what I wrote for it! 

The plan was perfect.

One of the most well-known, feared super villains in the city waited patiently for his adversary to arrive. Every piece of his elaborate trap was in place. All that was left was for the hero to show up.

“Why did you lure me here, fiend? I will protect the city from your evil plots!” The Hero’s voice was proud and sure, carrying well across the large trap chamber. 

The Villain smiled. Now he had the Hero right where he wanted him. He cracked his knuckles and stretched, chuckling grimly to himself. This was his favorite part. 

“Now.”

Quiet, barely over a whisper, the Villain’s voice somehow seemed louder than the Hero’s brazen shout.  At his command the barred door slammed shut, sealing the Hero in the trap chamber, and with a reluctant flicker, floodlights turned on, revealing the true nature of the Hero’s predicament.

“You see, Hero, I’ve been expecting you.” The Villain gestured grandly to the center of the large room where two struggling figures hung suspended in metal cages. Below the cages sat a vat of toxic sludge, its luminescent green contents slowly melting the solid iron container that held it. Even from the distance he stood it was hard to look at, but it fulfilled its role of appearing sinister, as well as a credible threat to the lives of the people hanging above it.

“You claim to have such wonderful morals, but forgive me sir, if I feel the need to put them to the test.” The Villain mocked his adversary with a sarcastic bow, before turning back to look at the cages above.

“In cage number one we have the beautiful love of your life, Ms Clarice Whitling. A renowned scientist with a heart of gold and the looks of a supermodel.” The woman in question struggled against the bonds holding her hands and feet, and tried to shout something past the gag bound across her mouth. “Now, now, patience Ms. Whitling. You will get your turn to talk… depending on lover boy’s decision.”

“YOU HEARTLESS SCOUNDREL!” The Hero’s face was red with anger, “SHE BELONGS TO ME!”

The Villain raised an eyebrow at the choice of words and smiled as he heard a dissatisfied jumble of noises from the first cage. “I’ll let you work out your relationship issues with your partner in your own time, Hero. I still have to tell you about cage #2!”

The figure in the second cage was quiet, although she still tugged against her bonds like the first captive. Her eyes though told a different story. A piercing gaze, struck him, and for a brief moment he felt a pang of regret before continuing the introduction.

“Our second contestant is an innocent civilian, Ms…” He checked the card his henchman had handed him, “Erica Slade. She’s a plucky young woman who devotes her time to charity, helps the homeless and the elderly, and works as a kindergarten school teacher.” He winced, feeling slightly remorseful at her capture.

“And that is where the true dilemma comes in, Hero. You can only save one. The woman you love, but keep in mind that she’s the one who chose to enter into a relationship with you knowing you were a hero, knowing that it put her at risk for attacks like this.”

“BAST…”  

“Or…” The Villain interrupted the Hero mid-profanity, “You can save this stranger, a young, innocent woman who has nothing to do with all of this. She is the very representation of what you swore to protect.” The Villain walked closer, now only a few feet away. “What will you do, Hero? Will you be selfish and protect your own interests? Will you throw away the woman you love to uphold your ideals?” He pressed a button, and both cages moved slowly down towards the glowing green vat.

The Villain studied his opponent’s face carefully. Now was the crucial moment of the plan. He had to convince the Hero that both women were in mortal danger, thus pushing the love vs duty choice upon him.  In reality, cages were wired to drop just to the side of the vat at the last moment, neither would be harmed, but by then hopefully the damage would be done. The Hero would be trapped in a mental and moral puzzle of his own making, unable to save either. He would be destroyed as a hero.

The Hero stared blankly at the moving cages, his face strangely blank of emotion. The Villain was glad that he was the one in control, if it were him standing there, having to choose between two innocent peoples lives… well it was impossible, it made him grateful that he was the villain in the room.

“Let the freak die.” 

The flat, short statement sounded wrong, it took the Villain a moment to register the words. He paused the cages descent,  staring at the Hero in confusion.

“What did you say?”

“I said let that cripple die.” He pointed up at the second cage impatiently. The Villain followed the direction he indicated, studying his captive more carefully. Her hands were bound, but the rope was tied around her thighs, instead of her ankles. When he looked closer he noted it was because her left leg ended just above the knee. She leaned against the wall for support, uncomfortable. Two metal structures leaned against the side of the cage. Forearm crutches. He noted with a sigh.

The Hero wasn’t done talking. “People like that are just a drain on resources anyways. They are worthless, taking handouts from healthy people and not contributing anything to society.” His voice was dismissive, he looked up at the woman like she was something less than human. “Better off dead, if you ask me. So return my beautiful girlfriend, kill the trash and I’ll be on my way.”

The Villain looked up at Ms. Slade again, his ears ringing strangely and his vision blurry. He could still make out her face, at the last thing he remembered before everything went dark was the expression there, clear despite the gag covering her mouth: It wasn’t anger at the Hero’s betrayal, or fear for her own death. It was a tired resignation. It was the look of a woman who had expected to be told she was worthless.

He was ten, living at an underfunded orphanage for cast offs like him. The other kids beat up on Jack, his friend, because he has trouble saying words clearly. They ignore the girl who looks different than them; steal things from the child that walks with a cane. They laugh and make faces at the little boy who shares his room, who couldn’t see. All of this was done under the watchful and approving eyes of the adults, as they snickered behind their hands and pretended there was nothing they could do. The powerful grew more powerful and the weak and different shrunk and became resigned. That was when he learned the only lesson they bothered to teach at this facility:

Never trust the authorities.

He was a foolish man, an evil man sometimes. He made no excuses for his behavior, he knew what he was. But the ones who pretended to be heroes, the ones who said they cared about everyone when all they saw were people who looked and spoke like them… they were even more horrible in his eyes.

The Villain came to, realizing that he had jumped on top of the Hero, punching him repeatedly in the face. There was anger and frustration behind each attack, adding weight to his fist. But there was something else, some dark hidden sadness bubbling behind the fiery anger. Tears streamed down his face as he slowly got up, leaving the hero broken and bloody on the floor.

“The only trash I see here is you.” He took his remote out, pushing several buttons, which lowered the cages to the ground. His minions got to work releasing Ms. Whitling, while he quickly moved forward to cut the ropes holding Ms. Slade hostage. He freed her, and handed her crutches to her silently.

“I’m sorry.” 

SLAP! Her hand cracked across his face with a loud noise. She sighed loudly, glaring up at him.

“That’s for kidnapping me and threatening to drop me in toxic waste, idiot!”

The Villain nodded slowly, he supposed he deserved that much.  To his surprise she leaned forward gave him a quick kiss on the cheek she just slapped. “And that’s for beating the crap out of that jerk over there.”

She moved passed him, leaving him staring off silently at the now empty cage, shocked.

“Clarice!” The hero’s voice sounded odd with his bloody nose and broken jaw, but he called out to his girlfriend as clearly as he could. The woman in question quickly walked up, her red heels clicking on the floor beneath her.

STOMP! The Hero screeched at clutched at his crotch, where Ms. Whitling had just ground the heel of her shoe into.

“We’re breaking up, you worthless scum.” She glared at him for a few extra moments, before marching towards her fellow captive. “Erica, was it? So sorry that he spoke to you like that, please ignore him.”

Ms. Slade smiled and waved an arm. “ Oh believe me, he’s ignored.”

“Great! Let’s go get coffee.” They moved together towards the door, and once they reached the locked metal gate turned to face me.

“Unless you want to continue to detain us?” The Villain shuddered at Ms. Whitling’s cheerful voice, wincing at the thought of facing any more of either woman’s wrath. He pressed the button, which opened the gate.

“I thought so.” They started to leave.

“Wait…” he called out without thinking. With both of them staring again he started to stutter. “I mean… I’m sorry I kidnapped you two… um… if you guys ever need any help, just let me know.”

Ms. Slade laughed. “You want to join us for coffee?”

He stared at her in shock. “Really?! Can I ? I...I would be honored.”

With that the three of them headed out to drink coffee. The Villain wasn’t sure what to expect from here on out, but no matter what, it was sure to be interesting.