#they're two sides of a coin and i love dream and desire's dynamic a lot.

[acanthectomy]

rereading overture just reaffirms desire has braincells and dream has none. desire played him like a cheap kazoo when dream’s own reckless and honor-bound nature was going to condemn all of creation. desire was really out here doin all the work for their older brother all while reading dream to filth.

where’s my spinoff neil? where’s desire’s story where dream is the dumb stupid villain who does dumb stupid stuff that desire is constantly dealing with the backlash of?

[silver-wield]

tbh after playing the remake, I get the appeal of CA, because it's a familiar manic pixie dream girlfriend type love story. It even plays into the tragic boy loses girl trope which helps frame it as some grand romantic story. and yeah they're cute, and they definitely have a special connection. I think I could ship it if not for the whole rest of the story. It's a relationship that has the potential to become romantic, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. 1/5

The remake is doing a great job on untangling a lot of the ambiguity the OG left us with. Yes, Cloud could develop feelings for Aerith and vice versa, but the remake is planting so many seeds that confirm he currently has feelings for Tifa (which she reciprocates) and I don't think it's possible for any feelings he might develop for Aerith to overcome these feelings he has harboured since childhood. 2/5

Unfortunately those feelings are something he cannot fully understand because of his comprimised mental state. But you can clearly see that his deep affections for Tifa and desire to protect her stay with him despite that (as can Aerith). The problem with the OG (other than having to potray this incredibly complex subversive nuanced story through text and polygons) is that the LS scene recontextualize so much of who Cloud is, but by that time people had already made their conclusions. 3/5

With the remake you can see them trying to fix this by having a constant thread of romantic undertones to all of cloti's interactions. The CA relationship meanwhile is potrayed with these moments that play into romantic tropes and expectations. The bridge scene is flashy and grand and draws the attention, but it doesn't carry the substance that a single hand-clech does. 4/5

It's meant to be a smokescreen to the real story - just as Cloud is not the hero you think he is, the love story is also not the one you think it is. And that's what makes FF7 so great. It's all about the subversions of what you expect - it's about the truth underneath these grand and compelling illusions that is complicated and real but still just as beautiful. 5/5

Okay, first off I don’t see how anyone can play Remake with Cloud being biggest mood around Aerith and find that appealing. Personally I think it’s the most toxic and harmful behaviour in the entire game when he’s alone with her and she’s literally trying to force him to act like her dead boyfriend. There is zero appeal in that and it’s not cute how she behaves, it’s arrogant and self serving. Like I said in a different post (or maybe a tweet) both Sephiroth and Aerith use Cloud to fulfill their own selfish desires. Sephiroth needs Cloud to destroy the planet by getting him the black materia, and Aerith wants Cloud to emulate Zack so she can fool herself into believing he didn’t die. In both cases what Cloud wants doesn’t even factor into things. That harmful dynamic doesn’t give them a special relationship. It mirrors Cloud’s relationship with Sephiroth in that it hurts him. Aerith and Sephiroth are two sides of a coin and the whole isn’t anything that benefits Cloud. Even after they’re both dead they continue to harm him through their obsession with him. It’s only at the end of AC when they’re both truly gone from his life completely that he’s able to smile and be at peace. He has no stalkers in DC and that’s why he’s so cheerful. He gets to live happily with Tifa and not worry about ghosts coming after him. It has zero potential to become anything because to make that a thing, you need to totally destroy everything else about the story and characters themselves. You have to take away Zack being Cloud’s best friend and saviour, at which point he’s just dead. You have to take away Tifa being his motivation to become a soldier, at which point he’s dead cause Sephiroth still comes to Nibelheim and burns it. Point is, there is no way that dumdum dinghy is possible without removing Cloud and most of his personality from FF7, at which point he’s just a pretty face, so people should just go write AU fanfiction and admit they wanna bang the pretty boy and not deal with his canon personality and story. 

There wasn’t any ambiguity in OG because 7R is FF7 and the devs have said multiple times the story is the same as before. The problem back then was a poor translation, bad advertising and people refusing to follow the narrative to its proper conclusion. Cloud at no point in OG or any of the compilation could develop feelings because it’s shown in the entire compilation that he has always and will always love Tifa. Before Crisis he loves Tifa. Crisis Core he loves Tifa. OG he loves Tifa. AC he loves Tifa. DC he loves Tifa and Remake he loves Tifa. There’s zero room for anything with Aerith because his entire character arc is consumed with his desire for Tifa. It’s literally shown in the damn game that he’s in love with her. So, no, there never was any chance for Aerith, and I’m tired of people trying to entertain one by saying “if she lived”. Sorry, not sorry, if she lived Cloud is still in love with Tifa, so he never would, could or want to develop any feelings for Aerith. 

Cloud loves Tifa. It’s the goddamn plot. 

There isn’t any problem with the lifestream scene being the big reveal at that point in that game. The problem, again, is that people refused to follow the narrative to its logical conclusion and got hung up on their dumbass headcanon about Aerith. The entire premise of the game is built on illusion vs reality and yet some people still refuse to wake up and see reality. The game spells it out for everyone. They got so triggered over her dying that they acted like the game ended at that point instead of it carrying on and reaching the actual true culminating arc where we find out Cloud wasn’t himself this entire time. People seem to think Aerith dying is the plot and that she’s the main character or something. It’s Cloud’s game. The plot revolves around him. That’s why the lifestream scene is the apex of it. 

It’s Cloud’s story, not Aerith’s. 

I’ve pointed out several times how Aerith’s optional scenes in Remake show that Cloud is barely even a fixture. Her language of flowers you barely have Cloud in shot while she’s doing all that talking. She’s basically talking to the player. Her optional dress scenes show the illusion for what it is. That bridge is tiny and yet in the red dress is looks like this massive structure. I laughed my ass off when I spotted it. The pink dresses perspective shortens drastically for each one, with the funeral dress having Cloud standing nearest to Aerith, so that one’s probably closer to reality than that ott scene with random fireworks and fans popping up from nowhere. Not to mention the fact Aerith’s entire figure is padded out to fill that dress and she’s got hair extensions in and a ton of make up and the ost is actually called a mess of makeup or something like that and not a certain gaudiness. I mean, Madam M tried to turn Aerith into Tifa to win the bride contest and beat Sam. The game makes things very clear that the illusion is Aerith and the reality is Tifa, and players can’t turn Aerith into Tifa to make Cloud notice her no matter how hard they wanna believe they can. Her resolution literally has her repeating her OG lines from the GS about how Cloud isn’t himself, but she also arrogantly assumes he fell in love with her or would because she’s arrogant. It’s a character trait that again mirrors Sephiroth’s arrogance. It’s what gets them both killed in the end. Aerith underestimates Sephiroth and Sephiroth underestimates Cloud. 

And we already saw what Cloud had to say about her declaration cause he only ever refers to her as a friend and didn’t show any romantic behaviour when he rescued her. Unless “Yep” is the height of romance now. It’s not that the romance isn’t the one you think it is. It’s that it’s the one you ignored and acted like wasn’t important because you hate the heroine. Tifa and Cloud are together from start to finish, but because people decided the pink girl was more important they acted like Tifa had no right to what was hers from the beginning. She didn’t get between Cloud and Aerith. There never was any Cloud and Aerith. It was always Tifa. She just took what was always hers and kept it. 

Anyone who doesn’t understand that should try playing the game cause it’s clear they didn’t.