I think this is the core reason we disagree so much. Stamp of approval from the developers or not, the Ultimanias are not a substitute for what's said and shown in the games. As Hian said, time and the involvement of multiple people can muddle the interpretations given for in-game events, largely amounting to rationalizations that don't necessarily reflect the original intention of the work. Think about the Star Wars universe and all the changes, reinterpretations and contradictions that resulted from stuff like George Lucas tweaking his movies, all the spinoff material that's gone from not canon to canon to not canon again and how everyone's still mad about the whole midichlorian thing. Like fan assumptions shaped how they went about ACC and their general depiction of Cloud in other media, fan assumptions may also have affected the interpretations given in the Ultimanias as well.
I think the reason we disagree so much is you've been carrying around your headcanon for so long that you use it to make judgments about canon without realizing it or thinking about whether the contradiction at hand is just between canon and fanon when something doesn't line up with your headcanon.
I'm basing what I say on observations of canon material, not fanfiction. That you think I'm incapable of making the distinction is rather insulting. The way you reference the Ultimanias gives the impression that you don't always consider what's said and shown outside of them when you should, ending discussion on a matter too early to be sure if the conclusion is as complete as it could be. In the end, the Ultimanias are guide books, not the actual games.
I told you, we can do the literary interpretation thing (i.e. not consult anything outside the games/films) until the cows come home in threads explicitly for that purpose if you'd like, but if we're going to discuss canon then we're going to discuss canon.
Considering the issue we're discussing on this thread is largely about the in-universe and writing aspects of the issues making the CBS guard hiding under the OBS guard part of Cloud's memory issues would pose based on observations within canon, I'd say my analysis of the situation absolutely has its place in this discussion, whether it's considered literary analysis or not. I find it unreasonable to dismiss my explanation of Cloud's issues when you keep insisting that him just being crazy somehow justifies it.
Anyway, I don't see how looking at what's shown in the games and how it relates to real life examples of an element of canon that is actually portrayed somewhat realistically isn't discussing canon. Canon isn't just about what's said, but also what's shown. To ignore one wouldn't be looking at the whole picture, especially in a medium that includes visual elements.
There was a lot -- a whole lot -- of fanfiction of FFVII in the years between it and the Compilation. There are things that became ingrained in the fandom that have no place in the setting, and which still rear their head to this day. I saw a post here at TLS from as recently as July in which a forum member -- discussing the possible ages of Angeal, Genesis and Sephiroth at the start of the Wutai War -- said they can't swallow the idea that Sephiroth may have been a general at 12.
Nowhere in any official sources -- games, Ultimanias or otherwise -- has it been said that Sephiroth was a general. Yet the idea has been there in the fandom from the beginning, and in the memory of some, it's as canon as Red XIII.
I can understand the general misconception considering CC gives the impression that Sephiroth is next in line after Lazard for being in charge of SOLDIER, meaning he probably has to help run SOLDIER to some extent even if he still has to answer to whichever department head is in charge of SOLDIER, which after Lazard would be Heidegger. That doesn't mean I'm under any illusion that the whole general thing is anything but a commonly recurring headcanon.
So, don't think I'm taking issue with you personally. It's not just you who does this. We can discuss FFVII as an interpretive work if you'd like (I would enjoy that), but in trying to draw conclusions about the canon, we aren't going to force fanon on the canon.
I really don't see why you'd be so willing to throw out better reasoning based on the source material whenever a book meant to enhance rather than replace canon instead adds to the contradictions already present throughout the compilation.
Because I want to discuss canon right now. If I want to do a literary interpretation, I'll do that in its proper place.
For the record, by and large, the Ultimanias do not make continuity more of a mess. There are occasional issues (in fact, there's a significant one that I will be making a thread for in a little while -- which I very much want you to participate in, by the way), but for the most part, they affirm what we already had enough information to figure out.
We are discussing canon. Like I said above, observations of what's shown in canon matter too. Besides, this issue is being examined from both an in-universe aspect and a writing one so it's not like how things took place canonically is the only thing being discussed.
Occasional issues is what I would consider a mess. What's a matter of debate is how big that mess is.
The thought of possibly having lengthy debates across more than two threads at once is rather unappealing and I still mean to post a thread of my own, so my level of participation in your thread will remain to be seen.
And sometimes they tell us we were wrong. That doesn't mean there's a contradiction, though -- it just means we were wrong.
You can't really claim that until you've looked at the whole picture, weighed information from multiple sources and made sure there aren't any contradictions, which is not something you can do by relying on the Ultimanias alone. That's why I want to make sure you've considered as many other sources as are available before coming to your conclusions.
Starling said:
You even seem to be describing the arrival of the Ultimanias like a tremendous loss of in-depth, engaging discussions and then just accept that the Ultimanias somehow stop that from happening when that doesn't have to be the case.
When we're discussing canon, it absolutely has to be the case. I don't know how long you've been part of this fandom, but I've been having discussions about FFVII's plot online since before Advent Children was announced, and I remember well the difference between then and now.
Fan analysis of canon used to be a much different animal. There was a lot more room for ideas that were drastically different but somehow still equally valid, for the simple reason that we didn't know what was canon.
That kind of analysis is still possible while still accounting for new material pertaining to canon. Not every aspect of canon is fully explained despite all the new information so there's always room to examine things like how the mako reactors work, the apparent cultural background of various locations and whether or not normal people can use materia without slotting them. The Ultimanias are not infallible and shouldn't be treated as the final word on canon. When discussing something they bring up, it's important to compare what they say with other sources, think about how and why things are the way they are and figure out what to do about any inconsistencies relating to the matter before you can really give a final verdict on the whole thing. You don't just go "Oh well, the Ultimania says this so that's that." without further debate, which is how you make it sound, whether intentionally or not.
Starling said:
Now addressing the mako poisoning, it doesn't actually go against what I said. While the mako poisoning did contribute to the vulnerability of Cloud's mental state, it's the trauma that actually led to the amnesia. In BC, a Turk is out for a few years due to mako poisoning and it's not like they forgot everything about themselves. From what's said and shown of mako poisoning, it seems to be characterized by exhaustion and loss of consciousness to the point of catatonia more than it is to loss of memory. If the mako poisoning Cloud sustained in Hojo's lab and when he was found in Mideel are to be counted as separate cases then that implies that he'd recovered from the first case at some point, meaning the underlying cause of his memory and identity issues would have to be something else.
His mind collapsed. That was due to the mako poisoning. Inarguably. His subconscious then used the Jenova cells to (imperfectly) rebuild his consciousness.
That's not inarguable fact. See above about the Ultimanias and canon.
It's the combination of the mako poisoning shattering his consciousness along with his subconscious being able to use the power of Jenova to cherrypick memories that made him a mess. It picked the ones that allowed him to be his ideal self (
(caption on screenshot of Ifalna saying "He approached other Cetra clans...... infecting them with... the virus...")
イファルナの話によると、ヴィルスを与えられた古代種は心を失い、モンスターと化したという。
(caption on screenshot of Sephiroth saying "Inside of you, Jenova has merged with Tifa's memories, creating you")
ティファと会ったクラウドが新たな人格を形成したことについては、竜巻の迷宮でセフィロスが語るとおり。
Jenova's mimicry ability
Jenova possesses a mimicry ability to read the memories and thoughts of others, as well as transform to assume their appearance and voice. Jenova once used this ability to make the acquaintance of the Ancients in order to infect them with a virus, leading to their deaths.
This ability is also present in Jenova's physical matter, so those who carry Jenova cells have it as well, albeit in a more limited form. Shortly before the beginning of the game, when Cloud's mind had collapsed, Tifa ran into him and he immediately "returned" to a seemingly normal state; this was because the Jenova cells inside Cloud read the image of him Tifa had in her memories along with his own ideal vision of himself, forming a new personality.
(caption on screenshot of Ifalna saying "He approached other Cetra clans...... infecting them with... the virus...")
According to Ifalna, the Ancients given the virus lost their minds and turned into monsters.
(caption on screenshot of Sephiroth saying "Inside of you, Jenova has merged with Tifa's memories, creating you")
Cloud forming a new personality when he met Tifa is spoken of by Sephiroth in the Whirlwind Maze.
----
That citation only goes on about the Jenova cells giving Cloud the ability to unconsciously retrieve memories when constructing his false persona. It doesn't attribute his mental state to the mako poisoning. Again, cherry picking seems to imply conscious decisions to include or exclude particular memories rather than dealing with associations to trauma that while still going at it a particular way, don't really involve any conscious decisions.
Now, had he been allowed to lay there in the wasteland long enough to recover without dying from dehydration, exposure to the elements or attack by creatures in the waste, he may have recovered with his memories intact just like that Turk in Before Crisis. His subconscious didn't have three years to wait for him to recover, so it made use of what was available and did what it needed to keep him alive.
A person's subconscious is incapable of making a conscious decision that it needs to do a particular thing in order to create a mental state capable of fulfilling survival necessities as your wording seems to suggest. That's the domain of the conscious mind. The unconscious mind processes information without the capacity for introspection. This is why the stuff I said explaining how dissociation works matters to this discussion.
Cloud had recovered sufficiently to react to Zack's death in what is clearly grief, with his muddled mental state being apparent after Zack's death. That Cloud didn't form a new persona until he met Tifa should tell you that mako poisoning isn't the sole contributing factor. As I said, it certainly didn't help but it's not what shattered his mind.
The second time he recovered, Tifa was able to help him rebuild his consciousness, and to do so with his memories in their proper place, sorted from what had belonged to Zack. He came back right that time.
What Tifa did was basically a fictional equivalent of counselling. She got Cloud to face his false memories, recognize that they weren't his memories and set straight the part where Zack was there instead of him. Then, she got him to believe in himself about his identity by having him recall a memory he couldn't have gotten from her and then they revisited the memories of the Nibelheim incident to figure out what happened. A very important moment in that was to remember who Zack was, which would be the first step to dealing with the trauma pertaining to his death.
Starling said:
Additionally, it's not like Cloud forgot everything before Zack died and then forgot about that too. Zack's death is a huge factor in the occurrence and is, again, what Cloud's amnesia and identity issues are centred around rather than just something that happened to get roped into it. If Zack didn't die, then most of Cloud's memory and identity issues as seen in the OG wouldn't really be able to take place even before accounting for the support Zack would likely provide. That his death is so vital for Cloud to have the memory and identity issues he had in the OG is something I'd call reasonable basis for considering it the primary cause regardless of what the Ultimania does or doesn't say about it.
Leaving the Ultimanias out of things for a moment, if restoring Cloud's proper consciousness had required calling up the memory of Zack's death and coming to terms with it, you might have the beginnings of a reasonable argument. That didn't happen, though, and this idea is definitely not supported in supplementary official materials.
They were originally going to have Cloud remember Zack's death and such during the Lifestream sequence or at least around the end but made those scenes something you'd find elsewhere for time constraints. In any case, by that point Cloud had to figure out who he was and which memories were or weren't his before he could deal with the trauma of Zack's death. In real life you have to address the dissociation before you can make progress on the trauma so it's not unreasonable to expect the same here. That part of the Lifestream sequence was about remembering Zack is still progress in that regard.
Starling said:
I actually addressed that. Dissociation isn't just about amnesia. What Cloud didn't forget about the Nibelheim incident was made more bearable by using Zack's perspective instead of his own, even if he still remembered it as his hometown being burned down and his mom dying. Thinking he was a SOLDIER first class when it happened instead of a Shinra MP that didn't make it into SOLDIER and had to return home a failure lessened the helplessness and self-doubt tied to his perspective of the events, making the whole thing bearable enough to cope without having to supress memory of the entire thing like he did with the lab and Zack's death. When dissociative amnesia is involved, the entire trauma doesn't necessarily have to be forgotten and it's not always the only thing either. Forgetting aspects of personal identity happens a lot even though those memories wouldn't necessarily be considered traumatic. It's all about the person distancing themselves from the trauma, whether that means just forgetting the traumatic event, repressing memories of themselves, creating a different identity better able to cope with the situation or becoming emotionally numb about it.
Your response is extremely underwhelming. See above about the Ultimanias and canon.
Starling said:
The Shinra building thing was something of a poorly thought out way of hinting at the inconsistencies, considering Shinra MPs have reason to go to Shinra HQ as well and Cloud would've had to have spent time in Midgar at some point rather than only be in Junon. It was even retconed in CC when they decided that Cloud had been to the Shinra building before. Chances are they'll revise that in the remake and have him say something more to the effect of being less familiar with particular floors than the building itself. Right now that example's a bit up in the air.
It's been retconned by CC. We can't even say for sure if it's still canon. Considering Zack and Cloud were friends and that BC shows him being assigned to do stuff in Midgar, it makes more sense that he actually has been to Shinra HQ at least a few times, further retconning that. It's not really a valid example right now.
Starling said:
See above about Cloud's memories of visiting the store. From what I found, inconsistencies in false identities resulting from dissociative amnesia seems to be pretty typical, as one of the characteristic symptoms is confusion and lack of certainty over one's identity or lack thereof, as well as discomfort when said identity is challenged. So even real life occurrences of that kind of thing aren't perfect, nor should they be expected to be as it's not like the mind intelligently discriminates what information is repressed based on whether or not it lines up with other information. Memory largely works through associations, some of which aren't readily apparent and may vary depending on an individual's thought processes and what associations they make. For example, there are cases of people who suffered brain damage that prevents them from interacting with people in a language they knew but doesn't harm their ability to use a different one because they don't process the two languages the same way. Likewise, a seemingly innocuous memory could be repressed due to an association the person made with something that's being repressed and so has to be repressed as well. The mind can be tricky like that.
Instead of being snarky and saying something like "I've never seen a word of this in an Ultimania, sorry" again, I'm going to reiterate a kinder sentiment I've already expressed: This is truly fascinating stuff. Let's discuss it in a thread that asks for literary analysis, not a discussion that hopes to reach a conclusion about canon.
That snarkiness was a rather bad decision on your part and I don't appreciate the dismissal. See above about the literary analysis thing and canon.
Starling said:
Again, that doesn't contradict what I'm saying, though I have to say again that I feel that you rely a bit too heavily on the Ultimanias when deciding what's canon and what's not.
I rely too much on official sources in determining official narrative?
If I want to know what time a restaurant closes, I call that restaurant or check their website. I don't call the gas station down the street from them.
You don't rely enough on sources outside the Utimanias. In your analogy, the Ultimania is the gas station and the compilation proper is the restaurant. You seem to have it backwards. Yes, the Ultimanias still deal with canon but as I've said before, they're supposed supplement it, not replace what the games and ACC say on those matters. If the Ultimanias and the games disagree on something, all information on the matter has to be considered and discussed before you can really decide what to do about it. I keep getting the impression that's not how you approach it.
Starling said:
If the Ultimanias create contradictions and lessen the enjoyment of canon as it's meant to be, then they aren't really doing their job now are they?
Enjoyment is pretty irrelevant to the matter. The restaurant I mentioned calling doesn't care if it will hamper your enjoyment of the evening that they are closing in 5 minutes. That's when they close. You can't stick to your own reality and make everyone else live there too.
See above about your analogy and then further up about the Ultimanias.
Plenty of people's enjoyment of FFVII was to some degree dependent on the ambiguous fate for humans at the end.
Plenty of fans' enjoyment was to some degree dependent on the idea that Jenova was actually in control of Sephiroth the entire game, making her the real enemy (taking the literary analysis approach back when that was all we had, I was quite the champion of this theory).
I always disagreed with that one so my enjoyment was improved by it being debunked. The ambiguity about humanity's survival isn't something I'm really upset about losing either, as I see the appeal of both the ambiguity and knowing that everyone survived for sure.
Plenty of fans' enjoyment of FFVII involved thinking the Cloud we know through the whole game was a literal clone of Sephiroth.
If you mean literal clone then I don't get why people ever thought that, considering an actual clone of Sephiroth would look like Sephiroth so Cloud was always a partial copy at best.
All these things have been shut down harder than Midgar.
Canon doesn't care about your enjoyment. If it did, Before Crisis, Crisis Core and Dirge of Cerberus would never have happened.
That's debatable. There's some enjoyment to be had with the compilation but not nearly as much as if they were written better. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they wanted to add to the enjoyment of FF7 and the compilation wasn't just a cash grab. Anyway, your examples aren't exactly what I had in mind when I said what I did. I was thinking more stuff that gets immediately shut down with an Ultimania citation without really comparing the citation to what's observed in the compilation.
Starling said:
I'd hardly call them canon over the OG and to truly discuss canon would be to compare sources and figure out the best way to sort out contradictions than to take the Ultimanias as gospel without second-guessing them.
Given that I am probably the only fan to have compiled an extensive list of known continuity conflicts between the Ultimanias and the primary sources -- and given that I have recently shown you that list -- this comment is not only blatantly false and insulting to me, but you embarrass yourself with it. You're better than this.
And you're better than this. When I read this post I was disappointed to see someone I was enjoying debating with be so dismissive and patronizing of what I was saying. A whole paragraph unnecessarily dismissed by a snarky sentence without even addressing the content properly, for example. You try to excuse something with bad writing and say writing has nothing to do with the discussion. You try to excuse something as probable based on Cloud simply being crazy and how being crazy means his actions don't have to follow any particular logic or pattern, then dismiss my explanation of how his psychological issues work as irrelevant. What exactly am I supposed to take away from that?
I've put in effort to read what I could despite the hard time I have with Gamefaq's format and while interesting, some of it could use a different perspective, especially since it was written quite a few years ago. The way you've been referencing the Ultimanias in our debates gives the impression that you're not looking at the whole picture and re-examining the compilation on the matter, regardless of the analysis you've done some years ago. That you have the gall to say I'm embarrassing myself in a post that is filled with dismissals and patronizing remarks while saying you respect me as someone to have in-depth discussions with astounds me.
Starling said:
Your previous posts gave the impression you were at least partly attributing Cloud's memory and identity issues to the mako and Jenova cells ...
Like I said, I brought it up in a previous post, which included points I was elaborating on. I'd already brought it up and felt it was relevant so I included it for the sake of thoroughness. I don't see what's wrong with that.
Starling said:
I happen to think it's relevant and worth the time to think about. The point's been pretty well made about all the issues that would arise from having Cloud replace the Buster Sword's guard as part of his identity issues, including the writing contrivances that would be necessary for it to happen in the first place as opposed to simply having it be an aesthetic change akin to Cloud modifying his SOLDIER uniform.
The only point that has been made is "It would be bad writing." Which means nothing when Before Crisis, Crisis Core and Dirge were allowed to exist, and made by these same people.
The existence of bad writing elsewhere doesn't excuse the further allowance of bad writing, especially when it would involve replacing something better written in the OG with it in the remake. They are being serious about not wanting to screw up the remake after all, so they've hopefully learned from their mistakes in the compilation, which they have the opportunity to fix to an extent.
hian's main point there was that the stuff it would take to make this whole thing happen would be unnecessary, would add nothing to the story and then you dismissed that saying that trying to apply reasoning to Cloud's actions would lose the plot and be a waste of time despite how I managed to explain the matter quite well and reasonably. I find both the issue of the writing contrivances it would take to make it happen from a writing perspective and the logic issues it would take from an in-universe perspective worth considering when discussing why taking that route for the CBS being hidden under OBS shouldn't happen. In this case I'm also taking issue with how your reply to hian dismissed something that I actually explained in the manner you seem to think isn't doable.
The "he did it before Tifa found him" thing is also a line of reasoning that you have been pushing, not something I proposed:
I simply responded to your claim that it was problematic. I pointed out that it isn't, said it could have been done for the identity reason either before Tifa found him or after, and agreed that it could have simply been done as part of his "cutting out his own path" thing.
I never made a proposal for when or why he did it until after you had already decided when and why. That has been your strawman to tear down, not some pet theory of mine.
I'd brought it up as happening before Tifa found him because she's seen the Buster Sword before and could potentially recognize it, Cloud's false memories and persona are already in place by the time he'd be able to do it post meeting Tifa and she'd likely notice if Cloud covered up the guard and then forgot why or that he did it in the first place. The option of having it happen after Tifa found him seemed even less viable to me than having it happen before and I didn't think anyone would try to place it past that point when considering that. Either way you still have the issue of why Cloud would even forget that he covered the CBS guard in the first place if we're going with the whole thing being part of his memory and identity issues, which is an issue I've gone over.
In that first post I was simply disagreeing with the need to make such a big deal in-story about the CBS guard being revealed under the OBS one and finding the juxtaposition of it with Cloud's memory and identity issues was unnecessary. I didn't expect the whole thing to blow up the way it did and had to take a moment to think about what exactly I'd gotten myself into. In the second post I was specifically taking issue with the notion of explaining things away with Cloud's memory and identity issues as if that's an acceptable excuse without even considering how and why Cloud's issues are the way they are. I take issue with the use of it to explain the discrepancies between the CC and OG versions of the Nibelheim incident as well, specifically Genesis' presence in the reactor.
Starling said:
Are we not discussing the in-universe viability of this and whether or not it makes sense from a storytelling perspective?
No, we are not. Again, see Before Crisis, Crisis Core or Dirge. Canon doesn't care about enjoyment or whether "it makes sense from a storytelling perspective."
I could include a lot more than that (like FFX-2.5 ~Cost of Eternity~, FFXIII-2 and Lightning Returns), but I'm trying to keep this pared down to just the Compilation in making this point.
You're missing the point. What exactly do you think we're discussing, then? Your whole "Cloud is crazy so it could totally happen" claim is certainly about the in-universe viability of Cloud covering up the Buster Sword's guard as part of his memory issues. Disagreement over in-universe viability of it and the writing issues have been part of this debate from the start. You even referenced my first two posts, which should've refreshed your memory on the matter.
Starling said:
I've also already brought up the issue with using the mental instability of a character as a convenient excuse to ignore any issue pertaining to their actions and reasoning without accounting for underlying factors in their behaviour.
Whether you like it or think it's good writing is separate from whether it's plausible. It's already been demonstrated that the guy's behavior went beyond instability.
And then you dismissed what I said about how psychological issues work as irrelevant to what we're discussing. If we're using logic about this matter then it very much is. You don't get to ignore that and just go "well he's pretty unstable so anything goes". Like I said, you have to consider why Cloud behaved the way he did. It's not random and he's not just unpredictably unstable. This stuff can be explained by comparing his behaviour to actual, existing psychological disorders.
Starling said:
Whether or not Nomura decides to fly in the face of everything said here is something to be dealt with when we see for ourselves what direction the remake ends up going and shouldn't render reasoning about whether or not it makes sense in-universe and from a storytelling perspective irrelevant.
Seriously, you have to leave the question of whether it's good writing at the door. You can call out something as being bad writing without utilizing that as a (flawed) qualification for its viability, like I did when talking about CC's ending here.
You think you can excuse things through bad writing and then say I can't argue that bad writing doesn't excuse something as a reasonable occurrence? Considering how in this case the bad writing involves retconning a reasonable series of events into a less reasonable one, I'd say it has merit. My main issue from the very beginning was and still is the notion that anything can be excused by Cloud's memory issues, even if it doesn't make sense pertaining to why his memory issues occurred in the first place. That's not just a matter of bad writing but also involves contradicting what's shown of his issues throughout the OG.
Starling said:
You think bad storytelling is cool enough to justify just because Nomura comes up with out of nowhere plotpoints?
Not only is this a non sequitur (seriously, how would "because Nomura comes up with out of nowhere plotpoints" make something cool?), it doesn't sound remotely like what I said.
It was certainly the impression I got. You called the idea whacky enough to be cool, after all.
Starling said:
But would Tifa really do that? Her role in Cloud's issues is that she didn't take action when she had the chance, didn't say anything about the discrepancies she noticed rather than actively hiding them. Tifa hiding the guard would only be slightly less flimsy than Cloud doing it.
Almost something we can agree on here too. Whether Cloud doing it is more flimsy or less than Tifa doing it (or whether it's flimsy at all) set aside, Tifa doing it to actively hide Cloud's past from him would be to tarnish her character, perhaps irrevocably.
It's probably best we agree to disagree about the flimsiness of Tifa doing that rather than debate it too, especially since we agree on the more important matter of why it shouldn't be done.
Just read it now, the Ultimania entry you posted, in fact does give a reason why Cloud choose not to recall that memory, just like the other memories he din't recall (aside from the Midgar HQ thing). That hardly supports the "Cloud's just crazy, he can do anything and it'll make sense." argument.
It fully supports it. Anything the subconscious of this hopelessly insecure young man with a massive inferiority complex -- and now with a fragile psyche hanging by a thread -- perceived as a threat to him would be revised.
That's not how psychology works. How you can dismiss what I said on the matter and then say things like this is beyond me.
Cloud's insecurities and inferiority issues are specifically about having been blamed for what happened to Tifa when they were younger until he genuinely thought it was entirely his fault. He wanted to be noticed and wanted to become stronger so he could help Tifa. Those issues tie into his guilt issues but it all amounts to how he was treated in Nibelheim and later how he feels about his inability to save Zack and Aerith. When talking about his memory and identity issues, they only really factor in for creating a more positive self-image and feel less helpless about what happened in Nibelheim, which is why most of his memories about his less positive reception and contradicting his being a SOLDIER are repressed. After that it's just a matter of his mind trying to avoid cognitive dissonance as part of the dissociation rather than treating inconsistencies as a threat and actively revising them.
I find your wording somewhat overstates how helpless his insecurities would make him without the trauma considering he managed to kill Sephiroth in the end despite what that night must've been like for him. It's largely the trauma as I've explained.
His subconscious didn't just stop once he was ambulatory again. It was working around the clock until Sephiroth shattered his illusion, revising things as he tried to recall them and even deleting new memories wholesale (e.g. when he passes out in the Honey Bee Inn).
He formed his false persona around when Tifa found him. Anything after that was dealing with cognitive dissonance until the false identity was strained to breaking point by depriving him of Tifa's affirmation that he was who he thought he was.
Dude was fucking nuts. I'm not sure what's so unbelievable about him doing things that are fucking nuts based on a flimsy, paranoid justification -- he's doing it from the moment we meet him!
Do you even realize how unreasonable that explanation sounds? Things don't happen just because he's crazy with nothing more to it. There is a reason his issues are the way they are and As you can see, I'd like you to properly address my explanation on the matter instead of brushing it off.
Boba Fett said:
The his mind shattering shortly before the beginning of the story part meaning because of the Mako poisoning he sustained in Nibelheim.
"Shortly before the game began" modifies "Tifa ran into him," not "when Cloud's mind had collapsed."
The thing it's saying happened "shortly before the game began" is Tifa running into him, not the moment his mind shattered. The timing of their reunion was while he was in a state of mental collapse. That's being referenced because it's talking about why he recovered.
EDIT: I've adjusted the wording to be more clear. Sorry for the confusion.
It doesn't really make that much difference. The whole "shortly before the game" could be a month for all we know as we don't have a specific time for when the train station scene happened besides being between Zack's death and the start of the game. I'm pretty sure Zack's death would also qualify as shortly before the game. Like I said further up, the citation only specifies his mind was in pieces at the point where Tifa met him, not that it was caused by mako poisoning or the exact moment it happened.
Boba Fett said:
No version of Cloud could have been strutting around Midgar, reviewing his appearance, deciding the gold hilt of Buster Sword would have to go to keep his secrets safe and then making those changes before he met Tifa.
It's fortunate then that no one has been championing that, even when discussion of the possibility of it happening before Tifa found him has taken place.
You guys simply randomly decided a while back that if this thing happened, it was done at that time and for the identity reason, and have been strawmanning this discussion to death with it ever since.
It wasn't random. While either way poses problems, there aren't quite as many before Cloud meets Tifa as there would be after. I'd hardly call that strawmanning. It's fairly reasonable to think it was the timeframe referenced when saying Cloud's memory issues would make the whole thing possible as more than just something that was done with the uniform modifications.
Really, go back and read through the thread. The suggestion didn't come from me. As near as I can tell, it started with this post from Starling (I know she references it having been brought up earlier, but, really, read through the thread -- this was the first time it came up). I responded that it wouldn't be hard to believe from this chucklefuck, and the next thing you know, this has been "my" theory all along and you're offering a suggestion that makes it at least plausible to you guys in the form of "Like the modifications he made to his uniform, it's just a thing to to set him apart from Shinra's SOLDIER" -- which I've agreed would be the most simple approach to take.
Again, I never suggested a when or why until you guys decided I had. You've basically been arguing against your own proposal.
When I said it was brought up before I was going by memory as I'm pretty sure it's come up in another thread if not this one. Again, my point of objection has always been centred around your reasoning for it being plausible, not a mistaken belief that you don't think Cloud modifying the Buster Sword along with his uniform for purely aesthetic reasons or some practical reason isn't the better way to go. Of course when you argue about canon when dismissing my objections, it makes me wonder.
For myself, it wouldn't have any impact if it were at one of those other times, though. To actually register on my radar as out of place at this point, Cloud would have had to do something so outlandish and beyond the pale that I honestly can't think of an example. It's hard to get worse than what he did with Zack's memory, especially after the depiction in the ending of Crisis Core.
I think he's pretty messed up, but it's all for Tifa's sake. To impress her with SOLDIERyness. If she's already seen the Zack's Buster Sword, Cloud's subconcious isn't gonna help him fool anyone else.
I'll have to disagree with you on Cloud's identity issues being about impressing Tifa, as it's more that he relied heavily on her for support in reaffirming his identity. Of course, Cloud having wanted to join SOLDIER so she'd notice him and he'd be able to protect her, along with the promise likely contributed to how things turned out. I just don't think his subconscious would factor in trying to impress Tifa when trying to cope with all that trauma.
I never said you're incapable of making the distinction. I said that you haven't been making the distinction (for whatever reason), and that this then is why we disagree so much.
Perhaps I shouldn't have made a guess as to why, but I felt that it would seem less like I was accusing you of something negative (e.g. the very thing you took me to mean anyway) if I explained that my guess about it is that you've been accustomed to a particular understanding of those things for so long that they just seem more definitive in your memory than they actually are.
Unlike my bit of snark a bit of the way down, I genuinely wasn't trying to be a dick here.
You simply have your understandings about things like the timeline of events surrounding Sephiroth's birth or Cloud's mental state, and so far, rather than incorporate canon into that or adjust your understanding to match canon, you have said the official descriptions are contradictions and therefore wrong, and dismissed them -- even though what they're contradicting is your understanding rather than other canon material.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that you simply remember things wrong after being so used to a particular understanding for so long. I'm not assuming that you lack the ability to make a distinction here, I promise. I'm sorry if I didn't get that particular distinction across myself.
Starling said:
The way you reference the Ultimanias gives the impression that you don't always consider what's said and shown outside of them when you should, ending discussion on a matter too early to be sure if the conclusion is as complete as it could be. In the end, the Ultimanias are guide books, not the actual games.
If I hadn't already analyzed the games to hell and gone, why would I be at this additional stage of consulting Ultimanias -- and putting in the effort to do the translations -- for further details and clarifications?
Starling said:
Considering the issue we're discussing on this thread is largely about the in-universe and writing aspects of the issues making the CBS guard hiding under the OBS guard part of Cloud's memory issues would pose based on observations within canon, I'd say my analysis of the situation absolutely has its place in this discussion, whether it's considered literary analysis or not. I find it unreasonable to dismiss my explanation of Cloud's issues when you keep insisting that him just being crazy somehow justifies it.
No one has said you can't or shouldn't discuss the topic from an out-of-universe perspective as well. I've been doing the same when I appeal to asking why these design choices with the sword were made.
Of course, I will certainly continue to remind you that identifying something as bad writing isn't enough to write off the possibility (not because I'm attached to it; because it just isn't), but there's absolutely no harm in or discouragement toward waxing meta.
What I challenged from you is your insistence upon a fact that is not a fact. That's all.
Starling said:
Anyway, I don't see how looking at what's shown in the games and how it relates to real life examples of an element of canon that is actually portrayed somewhat realistically isn't discussing canon. Canon isn't just about what's said, but also what's shown. To ignore one wouldn't be looking at the whole picture, especially in a medium that includes visual elements.
You've been ascribing canon status to your personal interpretations of things that are shown. Which I honestly wouldn't care about if you weren't ascribing as much or more significance to those unverified -- or outright refuted -- interpretations as to what's said in official sources.
Which, again, is not to say there is no value in what you're saying -- there absolutely is. Just not by the measure of canon (this applies to my interpretations too).
Starling said:
We are discussing canon. Like I said above, observations of what's shown in canon matter too.
You haven't been citing observations, though. You've been citing interpretations about observations.
For example, an observation about canon is, "Sometime after Zack's death in late 09/0007 but before the start of the game on 12/7/0007, Tifa finds Cloud at the Sector 7 train station suffering from mako poisoning."
There's literally no room to be wrong about that. It's not interpretive in the slightest. It's just an observation.
An interpretive expansion on that observation is, "After witnessing Zack's death in late 09/0007, the trauma caused Cloud's psyche to shatter and disassociate from the traumatic memory, resulting in his subconscious restructuring his memories of his own identity with himself in Zack's role. Sometime between that event and the beginning of the game on 12/7/0007, Tifa found him at the Sector 7 train station."
Starling said:
Occasional issues is what I would consider a mess. What's a matter of debate is how big that mess is.
The thought of possibly having lengthy debates across more than two threads at once is rather unappealing and I still mean to post a thread of my own, so my level of participation in your thread will remain to be seen.
Also fair enough. The new thread, if you haven't seen it already, is more of a sequel to the other discussion anyway (which has pretty much run its course now, I believe). It will be of interest to you.
Starling said:
You can't really claim that until you've looked at the whole picture, weighed information from multiple sources and made sure there aren't any contradictions, which is not something you can do by relying on the Ultimanias alone. That's why I want to make sure you've considered as many other sources as are available before coming to your conclusions.
Again, if I hadn't already mined the primary sources, why would I be taking the next step with the Ultimanias? Translating material from source books isn't the behavior of a casual fan, and I definitely have never heard of anyone who aims to experience only the Ultimanias, translating them without intention of experiencing the games they're about.
Starling said:
That kind of analysis is still possible while still accounting for new material pertaining to canon. Not every aspect of canon is fully explained despite all the new information so there's always room to examine things like how the mako reactors work, the apparent cultural background of various locations and whether or not normal people can use materia without slotting them. The Ultimanias are not infallible and shouldn't be treated as the final word on canon. When discussing something they bring up, it's important to compare what they say with other sources, think about how and why things are the way they are and figure out what to do about any inconsistencies relating to the matter before you can really give a final verdict on the whole thing. You don't just go "Oh well, the Ultimania says this so that's that." without further debate, which is how you make it sound, whether intentionally or not.
Are you unfamiliar with my work in this fandom? Have you noticed who wrote most of the analytical articles here at TLS, or the research methods used in them?
I'm not saying that in a "I'm kind of a big deal" sort of way. I'm asking because I can't imagine you would be saying this if you were familiar with half -- or even a quarter -- of the analysis I've done in my lifetime with just Final Fantasy.
I've been at this longer and more extensively than anyone else. Again, I'm not saying that as though it makes me some kind of infallible authority. If anything, analyzing more and having more theories just means I've had more stuff to be wrong about than anyone else too.
I say it because it's a verifiable observation that I've done more of this kind of work with FF than anyone. Genuinely, I have. I know most of the dialogue to FFVII, VIII and X in particular by heart just because I've looked over it so much. It's embarrassing how much of my life I've given to analyzing these games -- so much so I took about three years away from it at one point and still have to remind myself that it's okay to do this stuff now.
I appreciate the validity of what you're saying up there (really, it's spot on!) -- you're just making these points to someone who has an extensive portfolio that will never land me a job of writing and sharing articles, in this fandom and others, that do exactly what you're speaking to.
I know as well as any fan in any fandom that discussion of canon often requires reconciling contradictory details (for example, see "When did the opening to Dirge of Cerberus take place?"). You think working with FFVII is tough? Try being a lifelong Marvel fan.
I'll be the first to say, by the way, that fan theories are often way better than canon. This is especially true with Necron from FFIX.
It is inarguable fact, though. It just is. We've been told exactly that more than once. We've been told what you claim exactly zero times.
Starling said:
That citation only goes on about the Jenova cells giving Cloud the ability to unconsciously retrieve memories when constructing his false persona. It doesn't attribute his mental state to the mako poisoning.
Here's another from pg. 294 of the Crisis Core Complete Guide, which I just translated for you:
(photo of the relevant passage)
----
魔晄中毒
セフィロス・コピー実験によってクラウドが発症した症状。高濃度の魔晄を浴び続ける、ライフストリームの流れに巻き込まれるなどで引き起こされる。これは星が蓄えていた膨大知識がライフストリームを通じて対象の脳内に流れ込むためで、脳内がその情報量によってパンクし、対象の精神が崩壊にまで至るのである。
Mako poisoning
An illness that manifested in Cloud due to the Sephiroth Copy experiment. It is caused by being continuously exposed to a high concentration of mako, being caught up in the flow of the Lifestream, etc. This is because the vast knowledge flowing through the Lifestream within the planet pours into the subject's central nervous system, overloading it with the volume of information and resulting in the subject's mind collapsing.
----
Starling said:
Again, cherry picking seems to imply conscious decisions to include or exclude particular memories rather than dealing with associations to trauma that while still going at it a particular way, don't really involve any conscious decisions.
Well, that's obviously not what I'm suggesting by my use of "cherrypicking." I'm deriding the haphazard assembly.
Starling said:
A person's subconscious is incapable of making a conscious decision that it needs to do a particular thing in order to create a mental state capable of fulfilling survival necessities as your wording seems to suggest. That's the domain of the conscious mind. The unconscious mind processes information without the capacity for introspection. This is why the stuff I said explaining how dissociation works matters to this discussion.
As always, this is fascinating stuff, but it doesn't help us here.
We're talking about a fictional setting where a surge in emotion allows people to project their lifeforce as a weapon. "That's not how it works in real life" is not a valid counterargument.
Starling said:
Cloud had recovered sufficiently to react to Zack's death in what is clearly grief, with his muddled mental state being apparent after Zack's death.
Why would it? He was absorbing stuff from Zack but hadn't got enough to form a complete picture until he ran into Tifa -- who helpfully had memories about Cloud.
That his new persona formed instantly upon meeting Tifa should tell you that it was the mako poisoning that broke him. Which, again, is what we have had spelled out for us. Extensively.
Starling said:
What Tifa did was basically a fictional equivalent of counselling. She got Cloud to face his false memories, recognize that they weren't his memories and set straight the part where Zack was there instead of him. Then, she got him to believe in himself about his identity by having him recall a memory he couldn't have gotten from her and then they revisited the memories of the Nibelheim incident to figure out what happened. A very important moment in that was to remember who Zack was, which would be the first step to dealing with the trauma pertaining to his death.
He comes to terms with who he really is before remembering Zack's death. He becomes himself again. Pinning Cloud's identity issues primarily on disassociation from a specific trauma that doesn't even come up in the course of correcting his identity issues makes no sense, whether we're talking real-world psychology or the writing of the story -- particularly when added on top of that, it's never referenced in official materials that discuss Cloud's ordeal.
From neither angle does this claim hold up. It especially can't be said that it's as canon an explanation as mako poisoning+Jenova cells+inferiority complex.
Starling said:
They were originally going to have Cloud remember Zack's death and such during the Lifestream sequence or at least around the end but made those scenes something you'd find elsewhere for time constraints.
Do you have a source for this? I remember a couple of interviews where Zack's role was discussed, but not this.
I find it unlikely since the flashback of Zack's death wasn't in the original release of the game at all, just like the flashback of Tifa finding Cloud at the train station.
They added the train station scene in for the later releases of the game, and didn't tuck it away outside the main narrative. They could have as easily placed Zack's death into the Lifestream sequence if that's where they wanted it. Kitasehas said it was easy in those days to go back and add stuff.
Starling said:
It's been retconned by CC. We can't even say for sure if it's still canon. Considering Zack and Cloud were friends and that BC shows him being assigned to do stuff in Midgar, it makes more sense that he actually has been to Shinra HQ at least a few times, further retconning that. It's not really a valid example right now.
Was it ever canon? Why should we think so? What makes that claim from DisC1oud more trustworthy than anything else he said about his military career?
There's really no need for that claim to be written out of the remake any more than "I was 1st Class in SOLDIER" needs to be.
Starling said:
That snarkiness was a rather bad decision on your part and I don't appreciate the dismissal. See above about the literary analysis thing and canon.
...
And you're better than this. When I read this post I was disappointed to see someone I was enjoying debating with be so dismissive and patronizing of what I was saying. A whole paragraph unnecessarily dismissed by a snarky sentence without even addressing the content properly, for example.
I will agree that it was unnecessary. I would also ask you, though, to consider how I felt at that time between the discussion we were having in this thread and the other.
In one, I was feeling insulted by your remarks that not enough effort has been put into doing translations here. In both threads, I had you dismissing the content of new translations I took the time to do specifically for our discussion.
I may have been a dick with that snarky comment, but please consider whether I'd felt pretty insulted up to that point. I've honestly made an effort to practice restraint.
Starling said:
You try to excuse something with bad writing and say writing has nothing to do with the discussion.
...
You think you can excuse things through bad writing and then say I can't argue that bad writing doesn't excuse something as a reasonable occurrence?
Who is trying to "excuse" anything? "Is this good writing?" and "Is this canon?" are two separate questions that have nothing to do with each other, just like "Is what's on the news good news?" and "Did what's on the news happen?"
Actually, that's a pretty close comparison now that I think about it.
Canon asks for and requires no excuses. Bad writing does. And there is plenty of bad writing in the Compilation that is still canon, sadly. The clusterfuck that is the whole scenario with Dinne shows that.
Starling said:
You try to excuse something as probable based on Cloud simply being crazy and how being crazy means his actions don't have to follow any particular logic or pattern, then dismiss my explanation of how his psychological issues work as irrelevant. What exactly am I supposed to take away from that?
In my analogy, you (or me, if you prefer) is the gas station, a source with no authority to decide the matter at hand. The restaurant is official sources.
If you would like, you could say the restaurant is the actual games and the restaurant's website is the Ultimanias -- but that website is still going to trump the gas station attendnant if, for whatever reason, I found myself asking them about the restaurant's hours. Maybe I hit the wrong auto-dial link from Google, ended up talking to them, and said "Sorry, I have the wrong number. I meant to call The Restaurant and ask them when they close."
Maybe they reply with a series of observations and a reasonable interpretation of those observations -- e.g. "Oh, they closed at 9:00. It's 9:45 now and I haven't seen any new cars pull in since about 8:50. It was a couple who walked as far as the door, then turned around and left. The last new car before that was about 8:30. Yeah, they're already closed. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news."
Now, suppose in the course of listening to the attendant, I'm checking The Restaurant's website to see what the right phone number is, and I happen to notice that it says The Restaurant is open up to 11:00.
Despite how reasonable that interpretation of those observations may be, it's not definitive. I have no reason to give it more weight than the website, nor should I assume l that the website must be wrong. The possibility of being open until 11:00 is still there without contradicting what the attendant observed -- it could be a slow night and that couple may have changed their minds about where they were eating.
This is by no means a perfect analogy, but the point, I think, is clear: So long as what the website (i.e. the Ultimanias) says is compatible with what is observed at The Restaurant (i.e. the games), that detail from the website should be taken as true -- even if a seemingly more reasonable interpretation of those observations is available.
Canon is a question of authority. You and I have none, so even when we find contradictions, at best what we can seek to do is conceive of ways to make as much as possible fit. That may require determining the least of what has to be viewed as "not true" in order make the most of what remains fit, but we're nonetheless ultimately still deferring to the smallest authority that is above us.
Starling said:
Yes, the Ultimanias still deal with canon but as I've said before, they're supposed supplement it, not replace what the games and ACC say on those matters. If the Ultimanias and the games disagree on something, all information on the matter has to be considered and discussed before you can really decide what to do about it. I keep getting the impression that's not how you approach it.
Then you have read nothing I ever wrote before our discussions, and little of what I've said during them.
While on that subject, how many times in our discussions have I had to point out something to the effect of "I didn't say that" or "That's not what I'm referring to"? How many times in just this post? Quite a lot.
Starling said:
If you mean literal clone then I don't get why people ever thought that considering an actual clone of Sephiroth would look like Sephiroth so Cloud was always a partial copy at best.
Because they based it on "observations of canon material," as you'd say. They believed what their eyes showed them could only be interpreted the way they initially understood, much as with your lengthy recap and steadfast interpretation of Vincent's flashback sequence. They observed Cloud being called a "Sephiroth clone" and Hojo confirming it, and that was the end of it for them.
The fact that "clone" ("copy" in Japanese; literally, the English word "copy") could have a specific meaning in the context of FFVII that differs from what they would normally understand it to mean went unconsidered despite the explanations, and -- often enough when it was pointed out -- was laughed off as a ridiculous suggestion because "'clone' has an obvious meaning" or some such reason.
When Crisis Core came out, that interpretation was still popping up, and was reinforced for many because Genesis Copies actually did look like Genesis. Pointing out that "Sephiroth clones" were "Sephiroth Copies" in Japanese didn't help at that point when these folks' eyes told them that the same word was being applied to these flunkies who did look like their namesake.
Starling said:
Anyway, your examples aren't exactly what I had in mind when I said what I did. I was thinking more stuff that gets immediately shut down with an Ultimania citation without really comparing the citation to what's observed in the compilation.
I don't have any examples like that, as doing that would be stupid.
Starling said:
That you have the gall to say I'm embarrassing myself in a post that is filled with dismissals and patronizing remarks while saying you respect me as someone to have in-depth discussions with astounds me.
But we'll just ignore all the times you've talked down to, dismissed or misrepresented me, right?
Starling said:
The existence of bad writing elsewhere doesn't excuse the further allowance of bad writing, especially when it would involve replacing something better written in the OG with it in the remake. They are being serious about not wanting to screw up the remake after all, so they've hopefully learned from their mistakes in the compilation, which they have the opportunity to fix to an extent.
I really don't know where this "excuse" idea came from, but what it does do is give us an idea of what we might realistically expect. Especially since we're being told to anticipate more overt ties to the Compilation.
Starling said:
I find both the issue of the writing contrivances it would take to make it happen from a writing perspective and the logic issues it would take from an in-universe perspective worth considering when discussing why taking that route for the CBS being hidden under OBS shouldn't happen.
...
I'd brought it up as happening before Tifa found him because she's seen the Buster Sword before and could potentially recognize it, Cloud's false memories and persona are already in place by the time he'd be able to do it post meeting Tifa and she'd likely notice if Cloud covered up the guard and then forgot why or that he did it in the first place. The option of having it happen after Tifa found him seemed even less viable to me than having it happen before and I didn't think anyone would try to place it past that point when considering that.
...
Considering how in this case the bad writing involves retconning a reasonable series of events into a less reasonable one, I'd say it has merit.
Step 1: Cloud "recovers"
Step 2: Tifa knows dick about SOLDIER and their equipment
Step 3: Cloud customizes his (i.e. Zack's) equipment
Not exactly the breaking of the Book of Revelation's Seven Seals. Even if you threw an optional (i.e. unnecessary-yet-possible) Step 2.5 in there where Cloud's subconscious compels him to do Step 3, it's astoundingly uneventful for all the hemming and hawwing that's gone on.
Starling said:
Either way you still have the issue of why Cloud would even forget that he covered the CBS guard in the first place if we're going with the whole thing being part of his memory and identity issues, which is an issue I've gone over.
Depending on when or why it was done, he doesn't need to forget that he did it.
Starling said:
In that first post I was simply disagreeing with the need to make such a big deal in-story about the CBS guard being revealed under the OBS one and finding the juxtaposition of it with Cloud's memory and identity issues was unnecessary.
Of course it isn't necessary. What does that influence, though?
A lot that Nomura did with symbolism in Advent Children was unnecessary, and frankly, fucking stupid. All the wolf stuff was awkward, heavyhanded and dumb as shit. The lack of color everywhere was a jarring departure from the colorful setting of the original game. The ribbon under that hideous arm curtain (a transgression all on its own) was just ... I don't even know what to say about that.
Starling said:
I didn't expect the whole thing to blow up the way it did and had to take a moment to think about what exactly I'd gotten myself into. In the second post I was specifically taking issue with the notion of explaining things away with Cloud's memory and identity issues as if that's an acceptable excuse without even considering how and why Cloud's issues are the way they are. I take issue with the use of it to explain the discrepancies between the CC and OG versions of the Nibelheim incident as well, specifically Genesis' presence in the reactor.
I'm no fan of Genesis being there either, but that one really isn't all that problematic. Maybe Cloud didn't get those memories or maybe he did and just considered those details irrelevant to the story he was telling since he was supposed to be talking about Sephiroth rather than Genesis (who he may have believed to be dead by that point anyway).
Starling said:
You're missing the point. What exactly do you think we're discussing, then? Your whole "Cloud is crazy so it could totally happen" claim is certainly about the in-universe viability of Cloud covering up the Buster Sword's guard as part of his memory issues. Disagreement over in-universe viability of it and the writing issues have been part of this debate from the start. You even referenced my first two posts, which should've refreshed your memory on the matter.
Perhaps I spoke too hastily: My objective wasn't to discuss "whether or not it makes sense from a storytelling perspective." It's a genuine surprise for me that anyone still has that kind of faith in Nomura, much less the whole Compilation team.
After Dinne's role in BC and Lucrecia's shameful incompetence and shrill buffoonery in DC, it seems like a moot point.
Cloud could have hopped up from that spot at the train station, fornicated with the materia slots on the sword and then ran off cackling to find a smithy to modify it with Tifa in hot pursuit -- and it still wouldn't come close to the absurdity of Dinne. And the sad thing is, I'm only exaggerating a little bit.
Starling said:
It was certainly the impression I got. You called the idea whacky enough to be cool, after all.
Mako poisoning isn't how psychology works. Yet it is a factor in psychology in this setting. If you won't accept the conceits of the fiction, how can you discuss it?
Starling said:
Cloud's insecurities and inferiority issues are specifically about having been blamed for what happened to Tifa when they were younger until he genuinely thought it was entirely his fault. He wanted to be noticed and wanted to become stronger so he could help Tifa. Those issues tie into his guilt issues but it all amounts to how he was treated in Nibelheim and later how he feels about his inability to save Zack and Aerith. When talking about his memory and identity issues, they only really factor in for creating a more positive self-image and feel less helpless about what happened in Nibelheim, which is why most of his memories about his less positive reception and contradicting his being a SOLDIER are repressed. After that it's just a matter of his mind trying to avoid cognitive dissonance as part of the dissociation rather than treating inconsistencies as a threat and actively revising them.
I find your wording somewhat overstates how helpless his insecurities would make him without the trauma considering he managed to kill Sephiroth in the end despite what that night must've been like for him. It's largely the trauma as I've explained.
Waxing interpretive here, as you did, the fact that he had managed to kill Sephiroth of all people yet had to forget it -- even while retaining his memories of all the traumatic things that took place that night, and believing "I couldn't have killed him" (as he says in Kalm) -- is perhaps the reddest flag as relates to why avoiding trauma was not the cause of his identity crisis.
Despite what a boon that should have been for his insecurities, remembering what happened to Sephiroth would have demanded answering what happened to himself after -- and that would have unraveled when and how he actually got his superhuman strength, which would have compromised his need to believe that he had been in SOLDIER.
As you may recall, when he and Tifa emerge from the Lifestream, giving an explanation for how he got his strength -- a memory tied to the actual crescendo of his journey of self-discovery (rather than Zack's death being said crescendo) -- is one of the only things he shares with the others. Confessing his weakness is his preoccupation, not talking about Zack.
Why would it? He was absorbing stuff from Zack but hadn't got enough to form a complete picture until he ran into Tifa -- who helpfully had memories about Cloud.
Cloud tells us in the game that he heard a story from his friend Zack, I don't see why we should call it "absorbing". He listening to Zack while still in comatose state, why make it more then that?
The story of a SOLDIER First Class would then prove very useful when he found himself in SOLDIER First Class uniform in front of the girl he spent a very long time impressing by trying to become a SOLDIER First Class (even more important now that everyone else he cares about it superdead), at which point the Jenova cells inside him make their move. That's logical cause and effect. It becomes needless convenience when we assume he was already forming the new Cloud persona and was looking for a final ingredient and just after he collapsed again he stumbles unto the perfect cache of fake memories.
Fair enough. I guess we don't know whether Cloud's Jenova read Zack's mind too or at exactly what point it started absorbing from others.
I kind of assumed it was all along since Cloud more or less perfectly remembers events, including dialogue, he wasn't present for (e.g. Zack with Seph in the reactor or the library), but that doesn't have to be the case.
Step 1: Cloud "recovers"
Step 2: Tifa knows dick about SOLDIER and their equipment
Step 3: Cloud customizes his (i.e. Zack's) equipment
Not exactly the breaking of the Book of Revelation's Seven Seals. Even if you threw an optional (i.e. unnecessary-yet-possible) Step 2.5 in there where Cloud's subconscious compels him to do Step 3, it's astoundingly uneventful for all the hemming and hawwing that's gone on.
This is, really, the long and short of it. For all that Starling appears to think that having the Compilation sword underneath will require mental gymnastics and retcons...maybe Cloud just wanted to customize his equipment and it doesn't have anything at all to do with his unwitting false persona or Zack.
Now, as Tres has alluded to, Nomura may well try to shoehorn a lot of meaning into it. But if it was simply this, I don't see how there would be anything strange about it.
Fair enough. I guess we don't know whether Cloud's Jenova read Zack's mind too or at exactly what point it started absorbing from others.
I kind of assumed it was all along since Cloud more or less perfectly remembers events, including dialogue, he wasn't present for (e.g. Zack with Seph in the reactor or the library), but that doesn't have to be the case.
It could have still been stories from Zack. Imagine a chatty extrovert like Zack travelling the entire planet with nobody to talk to but coma!Cloud. He talked to Cloud in CC on screen a lot (as far as I remember). He might have re-hashed the Nibelheim incident -- and more -- at Cloud after getting out of the mansion.
I'm pretty sure the "absorbing" memories thing is just another ret-con addition made to post-original material to smooth out another fundamental flaw with the original plot that the writers didn't spot the first time around.
If Jenova could absorb memories for Cloud to help him build a new persona, he wouldn't need Tifa's memories to begin with, since there is no moment of the Nibelheim incident involving Tifa's perspective that could not have been filled in by Zack's memories.
Furthermore, it begs the question why Cloud can't remember how "he"(Zack) joined soldier etc.
Yeah, sure, you could create some sort of limiter on Jenova cells ability to absorb memories (like it taking more time the longer back the memories go etc.) but it's such a shoddy patch for the plot, when they could just as easily have made the paragraph state that the Jenova cells absorbed Zack's memories directly, rather than Tifa's.
There really is no point in trying to superimpose sense on the plot of FF7 - it's a train-wreck.
It really is a prime example of what I like to call "writing yourself into corners" I.E making a world and plot with so many distinct and disjunct fantastical elements that they cannot exist together coherently no matter what you do, and where every attempt at rationalizing them lead to more problems down the line.
The easiest, and probably most reasonable path for the plot of FF7 to have gone if it wanted to make sense in my option, is if the following were true -
1. Cloud's mental state (his "crazy" so to speak) and catatonic state are two separate problems - the former being largely due to trauma, the latter is due to the experiment done to him.
This would reasonably explain the extent of Cloud's problems, and create a dynamic relationship between two forces that adequately accounts for why Cloud develops the specific persona he does.
After all, if you jot it all down to mako-poisoning, there is no reason why Cloud would choose that specific persona over any other strong persona - in fact, it would be a stretch to imagine the Jenova cells influencing Cloud to develop a persona so attached to various things in his life that could end up breaking the illusion, when he could literally just build "Cloud the person who failed to join SOLDIER but went on a personal journey, overcame his insecurities and became a bad-ass", if his trauma had nothing to do with anything.
If you jot it all down to trauma though, you get left with tons of questions in regards to how the hell he managed to construct the version of events he did, when he wasn't even present for many of them.
2. He builds a unique SOLDIER persona based on what he knows about Zack, a SOLDIER he didn't really know much about and likely only met once he was assigned the Nibelheim mission.
This would account for why Coud's post memory-fix persona is so different from Zack's, and why Cloud only seems to know things about Zack directly pertaining to Nibelheim and the period after, and nothing prior)
After all, as far as I can remember, in the original Cloud only refers to Zack as a friend once and that can easily be passed of as a natural title given to the person who fought Sephiroth with him, spent several years in glass tubes with him, broke him out of the Shinra mansion and then died helping Cloud to safety, even if they had no other relationship beyond that.
3. He builds this persona hastily and shoddily in the heat of the moment when he meets Tifa, spurred on by the Jenova cells.
The bits and pieces of information he couldn't have known, he receives because of the Sephiroth/Jenova Cells and the mako-poisoning, since A.) Sephiroth would have several of those memories, and B.) Zack, who is dead, would be in the life-stream and so would his memories, meaning that these could very well have been part of the information that he was overloaded with when mako-poisoned.
Depending on how the lore works - I think a good "fix" here would be to say that memories pertaining closely to Cloud would be more likely to come through than many others I.E Zack's memories of being in Nibelheim during the incident.
Now, just drop all of CC and AC, and the mess that is the plot surrounding Cloud's mental state, and his adopted persona, are all but solved and self-contained.
Alas, that's not the route they chose to go.
That's the head-canon refuge I escape to when the plot of the original combined with the plots of the compilation get to F'ed up to bear though (which is essentially any time I see or hear people talk about it).
I'm not gonna pretend it's perfect, and I'm sure people can find plot-holes with that as well using only the original's narrative - but as far as I'm concerned it torpedoes any attempt done by SE since they started bloating the title into a franchise.
Because it was never simply a matter of Jenova copying whatever memories the cells could find. Cloud's will was part of it all along. Both his deep subconscious that was fighting against Jenova all along (the voices he hears in the game, and the one that knows the truth in the Lifestream). And the Jenova actually reading minds is a debatable point anyway, and not one that is firmly established in the game or Compilation. How is that a retcon? That's a fan interpretation. The only time it's described like that is by Sephiroth in the Northern Crater. But at that point Sephiroth is trying to convince Cloud that he never existed at all and it copied Tifa's memories of the well and such. But we already know that Cloud truly did remember that.
That's why it's not a full, complete, persona and that's why it's not like Zack. Cloud influenced it. He has his own memories as a child that didn't get wiped away, and even with Crisis Core, he still doesn't know Zack well. He's with him in Modeoheim and Nibelheim, and then briefly in Junon. I don't know why you think this turns what was once an acquaintance to best buds. The lion's share of their relationship is still Zack talking to a comatose Cloud for a year. So the SOLDIER persona is based on what Zack tells him, probably some of what he saw of pre-crazy Sephiroth, and what HE imagined himself to be as a SOLDIER.
He didn't have a memory of how he joined SOLDIER because A, none previously existed, and B, one hadn't been needed until that moment (and after a freakout, one is created. "That's, it didn't matter because..."). Similar to how the persona didn't exist at all until he sees Tifa and needs to create one.
I'm not saying it's air tight, but it's not a "train-wreck." None of your three points are appreciably different from what actually happens, so I don't understand what your issue is.
The only time it's described like that is by Sephiroth in the Northern Crater. But at that point Sephiroth is trying to convince Cloud that he never existed at all and it copied Tifa's memories of the well and such. But we already know that Cloud truly did remember that.
Jenova's ability to copy traits of others onto herself is not a fabrication on Sephiroth's part, that's what the Cetras had to deal with. I don't like throwing out the only plot point this ability is actually used for in Cloud and Sephiroth's story, even if Tifa's memories didn't get the mileage they could have had. You still see some of it, with Cloud and Barret's fighting lining up very well with Tifa's memories of young Cloud, but lacking the history between young Cloud and Tifa's friends that she didn't herself know about. That's be one of the things I hope they do more with this time around.
Ifalna speaks to that ability of Jenova as well when talking about how the creature got close enough to the Cetra to infect them. She says it took the forms of people close to them. I always interpreted that to mean there must have been a telepathic ability involved.
What I didn't do -- what I doubt any of us did -- is believe Sephiroth when he said Tifa's memories had anything to do with who Cloud was. We all probably rejected everything he said wholesale as a lie to break Cloud.
So, I don't think the story was so much not there as it was that bits and pieces weren't presented as clearly as they needed to be. That's every Final Fantasy since VII to some extent, though, honestly. For most, it isn't a big problem (it was with XIII), and a lot of it can even be figured out given enough time and thought, but there's always something that won't be -- this thing with Tifa's memories for example, or Terra being inside of Gaia in FFIX. Always something where it's actually shown, just not in the most obvious of ways.
Because it was never simply a matter of Jenova copying whatever memories the cells could find. Cloud's will was part of it all along. Both his deep subconscious that was fighting against Jenova all along (the voices he hears in the game, and the one that knows the truth in the Lifestream). And the Jenova actually reading minds is a debatable point anyway, and not one that is firmly established in the game or Compilation. How is that a retcon? That's a fan interpretation. The only time it's described like that is by Sephiroth in the Northern Crater. But at that point Sephiroth is trying to convince Cloud that he never existed at all and it copied Tifa's memories of the well and such. But we already know that Cloud truly did remember that. .
I know this is a part of it - which is why my head-canon conforms to this.
I also didn't refer to that as a retcon - I was specifically calling the comment of the Ultimania guide about Jenova reading Tifa's mind, a retcon because that was never stated in the original, nor I think, implied.
I realize now that I used the term much too loosely for it is not applicable since the original material has not been directly altered - but I have no good word for it (the act of adding something that was not originally planned to a work on a later date, which for one reason or another don't work with, or create issues with continuity)
It is literally a fact added years later to make sense of something that already made relative sense within the original going simply by what we knew about the effects of mako-poisoning, Cloud taking on Sephiroth/Jenova cells, and his relationship with Zack.
That's why it's not a full, complete, persona and that's why it's not like Zack. Cloud influenced it. He has his own memories as a child that didn't get wiped away, and even with Crisis Core, he still doesn't know Zack well. .
I know this as well. In fact I've advocated several places, probably here as well, that post memory-fix Cloud is a distinct character - not just a copy of Zack which is in fact a very common opinion among fans online (go no further than pretty much any youtube comment section on any video that has Zack in it).
As for how well he knows Zack in CC - One can certainly make the argument that in that game Zack is portrayed as being relatively close to Cloud.
I think this perspective has validity to it, again, because of the large amount of people, some even on this forum, who describe Zack as Cloud's best friend etc.
The lion's share of their relationship is still Zack talking to a comatose Cloud for a year. So the SOLDIER persona is based on what Zack tells him, probably some of what he saw of pre-crazy Sephiroth, and what HE imagined himself to be as a SOLDIER.
I agree completely. I'm sort of on the fence about the year thing though - as far as I remember the original is not clear on the time-span of their travels back to Midgar, and it certainly does not take a year to travel from Nibelheim to Midgar.
He didn't have a memory of how he joined SOLDIER because A, none previously existed, and B, one hadn't been needed until that moment (and after a freakout, one is created. "That's, it didn't matter because..."). Similar to how the persona didn't exist at all until he sees Tifa and needs to create one.
My point here is that there is no reasonable plot-explanation for why Cloud would need to make that specific persona upon meeting Tifa and with the added focus on Jenova and Mako influencing him to make it, more so than trauma (which in this case would be the better explanation) that chosen persona is a contrived and counter-productive.
I'm not saying it's air tight, but it's not a "train-wreck." None of your three points are appreciably different from what actually happens, so I don't understand what your issue is.
First things first - my train-wreck comment pertains to FFVII as a whole - not just this one plot-point. That's why it's a train-wreck, because regardless of the extent of problems involved here, it's just one of a very long line of problems riddled throughout the entirety of the story.
Secondly, I agree that they're appreciably different from what actually happens in the original - my point however, is that the changes and additions from the compilation have driven the story further and further away from this by, as per the Twilight Mexican has argued throughout this exchange, through a focus away from Cloud's identity being largely a product of his own trauma with the rest simply being background noise fueling already existing problems of Cloud, to being more immediate concerns and the trauma taking a back-seat.
This is where the plot stops making clear sense to me.
As I said - depending on the nature of Jenova and Mako's influence, and Cloud's level of clarity is the metric for how we reasonably consider whether Cloud conducts and rationalizes his new persona in a way that is believable and makes sense.
Introducing Jenova's mind-reading abilities, not just the minds of the bodies she inhabits mind you, but the minds of completely separate entities, and her and Sephiroth's plans and how the involve Cloud (why Sephiroth/Jenova would spur Cloud on to do anything if they didn't already have some plan involving him is a mystery) begs questions like why did they have him inhabit a persona that is likely to break apart on a modicum of scrutiny, or why they'd spur Cloud on to make this persona upon meeting Tifa, the very person in the best position to call the charade into question.
But, this is all rather pointless to discuss - as I said, FFVII's plot isn't salvageable without major rewrites in either case.
I simply prefer the original plot as is, divorced from the rest of the compilation - interpreted minimalistically, rather than in an expansive way.
My argument was to illustrate this.
Ifalna speaks to that ability of Jenova as well when talking about how the creature got close enough to the Cetra to infect them. She says it took the forms of people close to them. I always interpreted that to mean there must have been a telepathic ability involved..
It's just as easy to imagine Jenova killing, or infected one person, and then using that person's memories etc. to mimic their appearance etc. or that of other people to continue killing.
Ifalna does not explicitly state, nor could she possibly know, that Jenova would have consistently done this all the time for every person she killed, and it's rather implausible to think Jenova would.
I imagine, based on Jenova's writing and the connection of FFVII's development material to Parasite Eve, that Jenova was imagined much like a parasitic organism at first, that took over the central nervous system of the first creature that came into contact with it, and then started on a killing spree using that being to come into contact with the next, taking in new information with each new victim - evolving as it were. The original Jenova design from the Nibelheim reactor seems to line up with that seeing as it literally looks like a human (perhaps cetra) woman who's had an alien symbiotic life-form grow out of control and envelope her body.
Or perhaps she's a being more in line with the Yoma from the Claymore manga - demons who eat humans, take their shape and in so doing, have access to their memories.
In the original game, I can't think of Jenova ever being shown to read the minds of anyone she's not already inside through that person being exposed to her cells.
Same thing with Sephiroth - So I don't really see why she would need telepathic skills outside of the influence she exerts through her biology once her cells have taken hold on another life-form.
What I didn't do -- what I doubt any of us did -- is believe Sephiroth when he said Tifa's memories had anything to do with who Cloud was. We all probably rejected everything he said wholesale as a lie to break Cloud.
Still a lot of fans outside this forum who seemed to take this literally.
If only I had 50 cents for all the people who use the "Cloud is just a Sephiroth clone" literally...
So, I don't think the story was so much not there as it was that bits and pieces weren't presented as clearly as they needed to be. That's every Final Fantasy since VII to some extent, though, honestly. For most, it isn't a big problem (it was with XIII), and a lot of it can even be figured out given enough time and thought, but there's always something that won't be -- this thing with Tifa's memories for example, or Terra being inside of Gaia in FFIX. Always something where it's actually shown, just not in the most obvious of ways.
I agree that the story is "all there" as much as it can be, if you find all the flash-backs in the game.
However, the story being all there, doesn't change the fact that it's incoherent a lot of the time.
I know we've limited this discussion to Cloud's mental state, but one could easily expand it to Sephiroth's magically teleporting sword, Rufus's helicopter escape, FF7's world lack of infrastructure to support life, the way the journey is segmented by artificial constraints that make no real sense, or how technology and magic is constantly being used loosely for plot purposes with no regards to impact and world consistency etc.
And many of these issues aren't nit-picks - they're issues, that if this had been a novel rather than a video-game, it would be heavily criticized for. It gets a pass because of the times, the medium, and the presentation. I'm fine with that. I love the game after all.
It is however, I think, rather undeniable.
Can the story be figured out? If you mean by this, figured out in the sense that we know the "whats" of the story and the purported reasons for those things happening? Yes, certainly.
If you mean the why's and how's from a perspective of in-world consistency, or plausible story-telling - no, certainly not.
There is no reasonable way of explaining why Jenova has Masamune in Shinra HQ after Sephiroth clearly took it with him when he fell into the Mako pool.
There is no explaining how, after it was magically transported to president Shinra's hands, it's suddenly back in Jenova/Sephiroth's hands when it later kills Aerith.
Can it be post-hoc rationalized? Sure. Somehow it can. That's different though.
Just quickly, being "Cloud's best friend" is a very low bar. He doesn't appear to have any other friends before FF7 that we know of. So Zack being Cloud's best friend isn't an especially tall feat. Now, I know what you're saying, that people have the image of them being very close, but that's not what I came out of Crisis Core with. Cloud certainly feels close to him because Zack spoke to him endlessly while he was out of it and protected and died for him. But, as for Zack being so friendly to him before that...well, Zack's friendly to everybody.
I understand that we are in agreement about the other stuff. When it comes to quality of the writing, I'm not totally sure what set of standards you're holding the narrative against, but it certainly did something to captivate so many people. I'm not desperate to defend it or anything, people are free to like or dislike whatever they please, but I'm dubious of unilateral judgments of writing being objectively bad.
I would say he was far friendlier to Genesis than Genesis ever deserved. I don't remember him being unkind to Reno and Rude but I could be wrong. As for Hollander and Hojo, I meant Zack was friendly, not mentally damaged. (Although he can do all of those strength data simulations for Hojo without being ordered to )
Not sure if this is relevant, but when Cloud and Tifa fell into the Lifestream and Tifa went into Cloud's mind*, Tifa said that if Cloud remembers something and Tifa can confirm it from her own memory, then it proves Cloud is real (or was this only about piecing together the correct memories? I gotta replay that part). If they believed Sephiroth when he said that Cloud's Jenova cells read Tifa's memory, then Cloud remembering correctly what Tifa also remembers wouldn't prove a thing.
* How in the world does that even work, seriously? Why didn't Tifa get Mako poisoning? Why did the return of Cloud's memory fix his Mako poisoning?
EDIT: Tifa's wikia page says it was Aerith's doing. Sounds good to me I guess.
My point here is that there is no reasonable plot-explanation for why Cloud would need to make that specific persona upon meeting Tifa and with the added focus on Jenova and Mako influencing him to make it, more so than trauma (which in this case would be the better explanation) that chosen persona is a contrived and counter-productive.
Just going with trauma being the cause would have probably been better, yeah. Far more simple anyway, but also more relatable than tying things so heavily into the mechanics/metaphysics of the setting.
hian said:
Secondly, I agree that they're appreciably different from what actually happens in the original - my point however, is that the changes and additions from the compilation have driven the story further and further away from this by, as per the Twilight Mexican has argued throughout this exchange, through a focus away from Cloud's identity being largely a product of his own trauma with the rest simply being background noise fueling already existing problems of Cloud, to being more immediate concerns and the trauma taking a back-seat.
This is where the plot stops making clear sense to me.
While it does make for a less interesting story this way, Cloud still had existing problems that made all this possible. If not for his insecurities and his ideal self being more like that douchebag he was at the beginning of the game than who he normally is, he wouldn't have come back from the brink so wrong the first time.
hian said:
Introducing Jenova's mind-reading abilities, not just the minds of the bodies she inhabits mind you, but the minds of completely separate entities, and her and Sephiroth's plans and how the involve Cloud (why Sephiroth/Jenova would spur Cloud on to do anything if they didn't already have some plan involving him is a mystery) begs questions like why did they have him inhabit a persona that is likely to break apart on a modicum of scrutiny, or why they'd spur Cloud on to make this persona upon meeting Tifa, the very person in the best position to call the charade into question.
That's taking the extent of Jenova's (conscious) involvement far beyond what canon has explained, though, so you may unnecessarily be giving yourself a reason to dislike the plot here.
The cells were simply a convenient tool available for Cloud's subconscious to use. Every cell inherently has the basic physical properties of Jenova, like The Thing from John Carpenter's movie of the same name.
Think about how the cells were used in SOLDIER or in the Genesis and Angeal Copies, for instance. Jenova didn't have an active participation in all that. The cells just do certain things in a given situation because of what they are.
hian said:
But, this is all rather pointless to discuss - as I said, FFVII's plot isn't salvageable without major rewrites in either case.
I simply prefer the original plot as is, divorced from the rest of the compilation - interpreted minimalistically, rather than in an expansive way.
I think a lot of us do. Things like the Lifestream Internet have not been boons to the setting.
hian said:
It's just as easy to imagine Jenova killing, or infected one person, and then using that person's memories etc. to mimic their appearance etc. or that of other people to continue killing.
Regardless, Ifalna says that the creature took on the forms of dead loved ones. To get those images, the creature must have had some telepathic abilities even in the original game.
hian said:
Ifalna does not explicitly state, nor could she possibly know, that Jenova would have consistently done this all the time for every person she killed, and it's rather implausible to think Jenova would.
It probably wasn't the only tactic used, no (something more overt must have happened eventually to prompt the baseline humans to flee from Jenova's approach), but Ifalna does specify that Jenova approached multiple Cetra tribes in this way.
And of course she would know about it. She's a Cetra. The planet talks to her.
hian said:
Still a lot of fans outside this forum who seemed to take this literally.
If only I had 50 cents for all the people who use the "Cloud is just a Sephiroth clone" literally...
That misunderstanding was the bane of my existence when I was younger (and had nothing more important to concern myself with).
Actually, writing an essay to correct that misunderstanding was my first forray into FF analysis now that I think about it -- and that led to me loving writing, debate, research, etc. So, in a way, I have a lot to thank those folks for.
I agree that the story is "all there" as much as it can be, if you find all the flash-backs in the game.
However, the story being all there, doesn't change the fact that it's incoherent a lot of the time.
I know we've limited this discussion to Cloud's mental state, but one could easily expand it to Sephiroth's magically teleporting sword, Rufus's helicopter escape, FF7's world lack of infrastructure to support life, the way the journey is segmented by artificial constraints that make no real sense, or how technology and magic is constantly being used loosely for plot purposes with no regards to impact and world consistency etc.
And many of these issues aren't nit-picks - they're issues, that if this had been a novel rather than a video-game, it would be heavily criticized for. It gets a pass because of the times, the medium, and the presentation. I'm fine with that. I love the game after all.
It is however, I think, rather undeniable.
When you think of impediments the party dealt with in the original game that in no plausible way should have been a problem for any of them -- Cloud especially -- after what we've seen in the Compilation, you can't help but laugh at what is endearing to us in its absurdity now, but would see the game ridiculed endlessly if they tried to play that stuff straight today.
hian said:
Can the story be figured out? If you mean by this, figured out in the sense that we know the "whats" of the story and the purported reasons for those things happening? Yes, certainly.
If you mean the why's and how's from a perspective of in-world consistency, or plausible story-telling - no, certainly not.
There is no reasonable way of explaining why Jenova has Masamune in Shinra HQ after Sephiroth clearly took it with him when he fell into the Mako pool.
There is no explaining how, after it was magically transported to president Shinra's hands, it's suddenly back in Jenova/Sephiroth's hands when it later kills Aerith.
Can it be post-hoc rationalized? Sure. Somehow it can. That's different though.
That's actually the least problematic thing. Weapons can be forged out of spirit energy and raw material (for that matter, spirit energy can even become raw material). We see Sephiroth transmutate Kadaj's sword into a Masamune in Advent Children. We also see Kadaj and his brothers create clothes and weapons seemingly out of thin air from the Negative Lifestream. Etc.
And none of that is inconsistent with the original game for that matter. Look at the Weapons: enormous creatures born from the planet and hibernating in materia (crystallized spirit energy), with at least one of them clearly made entirely of metal. In Dirge, we actually see a ton of spirit energy coalesce and manifest into Omega -- an even more enormous Weapon, complete with a biological system and antibodies -- who eventually turns to stone.
Anything can be done with spirit energy, basically.
I realize this explanation highlights what might be considered a flaw in FFVII's world building, though: that anything can be justified with "spirit energy did it" to an extent that even "Metal Gear Solid 4" didn't take nanomachines. For myself, this doesn't break the fiction for me because the rules (or lack thereof, I'm sure some would say) remain internally consistent going back even to the original game.
There we see in Bugenhagen's explanation of the Lifestream that without spirit energy, a planet doesn't even have the gravity to hold together; the dead rock just crumbles apart in space. The similar depiction in Dirge of Cerberus (with much higher production values, naturally) shows us that this was more than just a visual liberty being taken with physics to illustrate the point -- it's literally as Bugenhagen said: spirit energy is what allows planets to be planets.
Really, it seems all the ideas about physics and metaphysics, if there can even be said to be a distinction between the two in this setting, were there from the beginning. We just didn't recognize them at the time for what they were, whether that be due to presentation, assumptions we brought in with us or what have you.
Not important to any argument/debate being had but Sephiroth actually forms the Masamune out of thin air, not by changing Kadaj's sword. Kadaj doesn't pick up his sword (which he lost earlier in the scene) before the transformation to Sephiroth.
A few frames later:
So when Cloud lands his strike in that shot, it looks like he is hitting an invisible force field.
I don't know why that part's dumb. Sephiroth just manifested himself out of nothingness, why would his sword be hard to believe?
And, actually, I always thought it was cool that he stops Cloud's attack before his sword appears. A lot of people asked why Sephiroth didn't utilize his telekinesis, well, right there he did. And the amount that the pipe/structure under him buckles shows how much force was behind Cloud's attack.
Not important to any argument/debate being had but Sephiroth actually forms the Masamune out of thin air, not by changing Kadaj's sword. Kadaj doesn't pick up his sword (which he lost earlier in the scene) before the transformation to Sephiroth.
A few frames later:
So when Cloud lands his strike in that shot, it looks like he is hitting an invisible force field.
What kills me is that I must have corrected this very thing a hundred times. I guess I heard it so many times it convinced me.
Anyway, so there we go. Perfect illustration of the point I was trying to make before (and could have made more easily had I remembered this correctly). That's how he makes his swords: spirit energy.
Not important to any argument/debate being had but Sephiroth actually forms the Masamune out of thin air, not by changing Kadaj's sword. Kadaj doesn't pick up his sword (which he lost earlier in the scene) before the transformation to Sephiroth.
A few frames later:
So when Cloud lands his strike in that shot, it looks like he is hitting an invisible force field.
I always thought it was cool that he stops Cloud's attack before his sword appears. A lot of people asked why Sephiroth didn't utilize his telekinesis, well, right there he did. And the amount that the pipe/structure under him buckles shows how much force was behind Cloud's attack.
Well if you read the Turks Lateral Biography: The Kids Are Alright, there's a lot more believable evidence to support the fact that Kadaj, Yazoo and Loz don't know Sephiroth when he's the one who brought them forth.
IIRC The three remnants were all once normal guys that died already, and Sephiroth brought back what was left of them in the lifestream and infilled them with his own purpose (and apparently their looks changed to match his more, as Kyrie could recognize Kadaj still but she acknowledged he was different here and there, appearance-wise). They are just puppets, after all; not Sephiroth himself, but infused with his intentions. Not hard for me to believe at all that they don't know him.
And this has nothing to do with the actual discussion, but anyway, carry on!
I never said you're incapable of making the distinction. I said that you haven't been making the distinction (for whatever reason), and that this then is why we disagree so much.
Perhaps I shouldn't have made a guess as to why, but I felt that it would seem less like I was accusing you of something negative (e.g. the very thing you took me to mean anyway) if I explained that my guess about it is that you've been accustomed to a particular understanding of those things for so long that they just seem more definitive in your memory than they actually are.
Unlike my bit of snark a bit of the way down, I genuinely wasn't trying to be a dick here.
You simply have your understandings about things like the timeline of events surrounding Sephiroth's birth or Cloud's mental state, and so far, rather than incorporate canon into that or adjust your understanding to match canon, you have said the official descriptions are contradictions and therefore wrong, and dismissed them -- even though what they're contradicting is your understanding rather than other canon material.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that you simply remember things wrong after being so used to a particular understanding for so long. I'm not assuming that you lack the ability to make a distinction here, I promise. I'm sorry if I didn't get that particular distinction across myself.
Behaviour is one of those things that has to remain consistent with real life. Otherwise, your characters won't be as relatable, which is something no storywriter wants. After all, the relatability of the characters plays a large role in how invested people will be in the story. Plenty of fictional characters go through trauma and you don't need anyone to tell you outright when they're affected by something traumatizing, they simply are. All you need to know is that the traumatizing event occurred and note how it affects the character's behaviour.
With Cloud, we've seen those traumatizing events and how he reacted to them. There's no questioning that trauma has occurred and has had a noticeable effect on him. You might as well throw out all understanding of behaviour and emotions if you're going to deny that.
Again with the Shelke example I've brushed upon before, we know that she spent 10 years in Deepground, that Deepground is a hellhole and that she dissociated to cope. Do we need an Ultimania quote to tell use that? No.
Starling said:
The way you reference the Ultimanias gives the impression that you don't always consider what's said and shown outside of them when you should, ending discussion on a matter too early to be sure if the conclusion is as complete as it could be. In the end, the Ultimanias are guide books, not the actual games.
If I hadn't already analyzed the games to hell and gone, why would I be at this additional stage of consulting Ultimanias -- and putting in the effort to do the translations -- for further details and clarifications?
Because you can. If you let yourself get too caught up in what the Ultimanias say or don't say, you might forget what the games say or show amidst all that analysis. This whole whole issue seems to boil down to show vs tell and remembering to compare sources before making a statement.
Starling said:
Considering the issue we're discussing on this thread is largely about the in-universe and writing aspects of the issues making the CBS guard hiding under the OBS guard part of Cloud's memory issues would pose based on observations within canon, I'd say my analysis of the situation absolutely has its place in this discussion, whether it's considered literary analysis or not. I find it unreasonable to dismiss my explanation of Cloud's issues when you keep insisting that him just being crazy somehow justifies it.
No one has said you can't or shouldn't discuss the topic from an out-of-universe perspective as well. I've been doing the same when I appeal to asking why these design choices with the sword were made.
Of course, I will certainly continue to remind you that identifying something as bad writing isn't enough to write off the possibility (not because I'm attached to it; because it just isn't), but there's absolutely no harm in or discouragement toward waxing meta.
What I challenged from you is your insistence upon a fact that is not a fact. That's all.
Like I said above, you can't really deny that the trauma occurred and affected Cloud the way it did without throwing out real-life knowledge of behaviour and emotions. That situations capable of causing stress beyond someone's ability to cope are traumatizing and that trauma affects people in particular ways is pretty basic and definitely still applies in fiction.
For example, we don't need to be told that Lucrecia's relationship with Hojo was emotionally abusive. In the OG she mentions not being able to die and in DoC we see for ourselves the toll dealing with what Hojo did to Vincent, not being able to hold her son and being stuck in Hojo's general vicinity was taking on her before she left. It's plain as day.
Starling said:
Anyway, I don't see how looking at what's shown in the games and how it relates to real life examples of an element of canon that is actually portrayed somewhat realistically isn't discussing canon. Canon isn't just about what's said, but also what's shown. To ignore one wouldn't be looking at the whole picture, especially in a medium that includes visual elements.
You've been ascribing canon status to your personal interpretations of things that are shown. Which I honestly wouldn't care about if you weren't ascribing as much or more significance to those unverified -- or outright refuted -- interpretations as to what's said in official sources.
Which, again, is not to say there is no value in what you're saying -- there absolutely is. Just not by the measure of canon (this applies to my interpretations too).
You haven't been citing observations, though. You've been citing interpretations about observations.
For example, an observation about canon is, "Sometime after Zack's death in late 09/0007 but before the start of the game on 12/7/0007, Tifa finds Cloud at the Sector 7 train station suffering from mako poisoning."
There's literally no room to be wrong about that. It's not interpretive in the slightest. It's just an observation.
An interpretive expansion on that observation is, "After witnessing Zack's death in late 09/0007, the trauma caused Cloud's psyche to shatter and disassociate from the traumatic memory, resulting in his subconscious restructuring his memories of his own identity with himself in Zack's role. Sometime between that event and the beginning of the game on 12/7/0007, Tifa found him at the Sector 7 train station."
Because any observation that can be made of unspoken aspects of the game are automatically interpretations that somehow don't matter in a discussion about canon? I feel like to you, what can be seen in the games is somehow inferior to an Ultimania quote, being treated as non-canon interpretations no matter how obvious it is or how well I explain its presence. Never mind that the Ultimania Omega says stuff that isn't canon like how Zack and Aerith met or that they make mistakes that further compromise their reliability.
Isn't the first bombing mission December 9, 0007? See above about trauma not being as interpretive as you seem to think.
Starling said:
The thought of possibly having lengthy debates across more than two threads at once is rather unappealing and I still mean to post a thread of my own, so my level of participation in your thread will remain to be seen.
Also fair enough. The new thread, if you haven't seen it already, is more of a sequel to the other discussion anyway (which has pretty much run its course now, I believe). It will be of interest to you.
I'd say there're still some things to wrap up in the other thread.
Starling said:
You can't really claim that until you've looked at the whole picture, weighed information from multiple sources and made sure there aren't any contradictions, which is not something you can do by relying on the Ultimanias alone. That's why I want to make sure you've considered as many other sources as are available before coming to your conclusions.
Again, if I hadn't already mined the primary sources, why would I be taking the next step with the Ultimanias? Translating material from source books isn't the behavior of a casual fan, and I definitely have never heard of anyone who aims to experience only the Ultimanias, translating them without intention of experiencing the games they're about.
Like I said above, spending too much time analyzing those Ultimanias can make you lose sight of what the games show and tell. I don't really get how someone could rely on the Ultimanias as fact on things that don't have any other source.
Starling said:
That kind of analysis is still possible while still accounting for new material pertaining to canon. Not every aspect of canon is fully explained despite all the new information so there's always room to examine things like how the mako reactors work, the apparent cultural background of various locations and whether or not normal people can use materia without slotting them. The Ultimanias are not infallible and shouldn't be treated as the final word on canon. When discussing something they bring up, it's important to compare what they say with other sources, think about how and why things are the way they are and figure out what to do about any inconsistencies relating to the matter before you can really give a final verdict on the whole thing. You don't just go "Oh well, the Ultimania says this so that's that." without further debate, which is how you make it sound, whether intentionally or not.
Are you unfamiliar with my work in this fandom? Have you noticed who wrote most of the analytical articles here at TLS, or the research methods used in them?
I'm not saying that in a "I'm kind of a big deal" sort of way. I'm asking because I can't imagine you would be saying this if you were familiar with half -- or even a quarter -- of the analysis I've done in my lifetime with just Final Fantasy.
I've been at this longer and more extensively than anyone else. Again, I'm not saying that as though it makes me some kind of infallible authority. If anything, analyzing more and having more theories just means I've had more stuff to be wrong about than anyone else too.
I say it because it's a verifiable observation that I've done more of this kind of work with FF than anyone. Genuinely, I have. I know most of the dialogue to FFVII, VIII and X in particular by heart just because I've looked over it so much. It's embarrassing how much of my life I've given to analyzing these games -- so much so I took about three years away from it at one point and still have to remind myself that it's okay to do this stuff now.
I appreciate the validity of what you're saying up there (really, it's spot on!) -- you're just making these points to someone who has an extensive portfolio that will never land me a job of writing and sharing articles, in this fandom and others, that do exactly what you're speaking to.
I know as well as any fan in any fandom that discussion of canon often requires reconciling contradictory details (for example, see "When did the opening to Dirge of Cerberus take place?"). You think working with FFVII is tough? Try being a lifelong Marvel fan.
It's been a while since I've consulted most of the not so recent articles, especially since I don't necessarily have time to read and re read stuff like that whenever I feel like it. That should be evidenced simply by how long I take to post my replies. I've definitely read quite a few articles on the site, though I wouldn't be able to tell you off the top of my head how many of them were written by who. I've definitely read at least a few of your articles but I'm pretty sure Shademp and Makoeyes wrote a fair few as well.
Considering comics are in the habit of retcon-inducing crossovers on a regular basis, I feel like keeping track of their continuity is something of a waste of time unless you're simply talking about comic history and the varying depictions of a character throughout the years. Maybe that's why I prefer the shows, where I can enjoy a chunk of comic continuity without having to care about all the retcons and needing to look through decades-worth of comics to understand what's going on, though the option remains if I feel like it. I also prefer DC, though I enjoy the Marvel heroes as well.
About the DoC opening, dealing with that is a simple mater of weighing evidence for it being right after killing Hojo vs evidence that it happened the day Sephiroth was defeated and if the latter is more likely, adjust it so it takes place after Meteor has already been stopped. Either that or figure out some means by which Yuffie and Vincent could get to Midgar before the Highwind.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure what I said earlier in the post covers the rest of what you said here. Just so you know, the discussion examples are things I've actually talked about in other threads.
I'll be the first to say, by the way, that fan theories are often way better than canon. This is especially true with Necron from FFIX.
I was under the impression Necron was one of those things people just pretend doesn't exist, like how people occasionally do that with Deepground. Didn't canon have an actual explanation for Necron that they just didn't convey in the story? If they did, would he still be as terrible or would it help enough to be tolerable?
See above about why you don't need to be told when someone is put through severe trauma and how said trauma affects them.
Starling said:
That citation only goes on about the Jenova cells giving Cloud the ability to unconsciously retrieve memories when constructing his false persona. It doesn't attribute his mental state to the mako poisoning.
Here's another from pg. 294 of the Crisis Core Complete Guide, which I just translated for you:
(photo of the relevant passage)
----
魔晄中毒
セフィロス・コピー実験によってクラウドが発症した症状。高濃度の魔晄を浴び続ける、ライフストリームの流れに巻き込まれるなどで引き起こされる。これは星が蓄えていた膨大知識がライフストリームを通じて対象の脳内に流れ込むためで、脳内がその情報量によってパンクし、対象の精神が崩壊にまで至るのである。
Mako poisoning
An illness that manifested in Cloud due to the Sephiroth Copy experiment. It is caused by being continuously exposed to a high concentration of mako, being caught up in the flow of the Lifestream, etc. This is because the vast knowledge flowing through the Lifestream within the planet pours into the subject's central nervous system, overloading it with the volume of information and resulting in the subject's mind collapsing.
----
From what we see of mako poisoning and how it's being described in the quotes, I get the impression they equate people being comatose from mako poisoning and possibly dying that way as mental collapse more than the memory issues Cloud ends up with. Otherwise anyone visibly affected by mako exposure to the point of losing consciousness would suffer memory loss, which doesn't seem to be the case. Basically, what qualifies as mako poisoning is the deterioration of someone's state of consciousness as a result of mako exposure, which just means they fall into a coma or similar state. If someone were to suffer from memory loss because of that state, it'd be from brain damage following physical trauma or hypoxia, which is permanent. The only method of amnesia corresponding to Cloud's issues is psychogenic amnesia, which occurs as a result of psychological trauma and dissociation.
Would it be possible for you elaborate on the uses of the term translated as mental collapse? I'm pretty sure another term is used across the given quotes so comparing their uses would help too.
Starling said:
Again, cherry picking seems to imply conscious decisions to include or exclude particular memories rather than dealing with associations to trauma that while still going at it a particular way, don't really involve any conscious decisions.
Of the false identity? Like I said, there's no way it could've been any more consistent than that. Regardless of why the memory issues took place, there's just no way to fill in all those blanks without inconsistencies that would make the whole thing fall apart the second Cloud is forced to confront the more glaring inconsistencies while no longer being able to rely on thinking Tifa knows for sure he is who he thinks he is.
Starling said:
A person's subconscious is incapable of making a conscious decision that it needs to do a particular thing in order to create a mental state capable of fulfilling survival necessities as your wording seems to suggest. That's the domain of the conscious mind. The unconscious mind processes information without the capacity for introspection. This is why the stuff I said explaining how dissociation works matters to this discussion.
As always, this is fascinating stuff, but it doesn't help us here.
We're talking about a fictional setting where a surge in emotion allows people to project their lifeforce as a weapon. "That's not how it works in real life" is not a valid counterargument.
See above about why consistency with reality on the matter is a vital aspect of storytelling. Also, what I said here does matter when discussing what the subconscious can and can't do.
Starling said:
Cloud had recovered sufficiently to react to Zack's death in what is clearly grief, with his muddled mental state being apparent after Zack's death.
My point was that he was lucid enough to grieve Zack's death and still remembered who he was at that point in time. The memory issues occurred later. Before that he's just catatonic, which isn't the same thing.
Starling said:
That Cloud didn't form a new persona until he met Tifa should tell you that mako poisoning isn't the sole contributing factor.
Why would it? He was absorbing stuff from Zack but hadn't got enough to form a complete picture until he ran into Tifa -- who helpfully had memories about Cloud.
That his new persona formed instantly upon meeting Tifa should tell you that it was the mako poisoning that broke him. Which, again, is what we have had spelled out for us. Extensively.
If the mako poisoning was what caused the memory/identity issues, it would've done so sooner. Having it take 5 years and Zack's death when he managed to recover enough to move on his own just doesn't add up. Cloud hadn't even been exposed to mako the year Zack was dragging him around. Why would mako poisoning be the deciding factor when things had been getting better up to Zack's death and the memory issues kick off shortly after it? Mako poisoning isn't the variable here, Zack being dead is.
The Ultimanias do not spell it out, or else they would've clearly said Cloud's mako poisoning caused his memory problems, which they didn't.
Starling said:
What Tifa did was basically a fictional equivalent of counselling. She got Cloud to face his false memories, recognize that they weren't his memories and set straight the part where Zack was there instead of him. Then, she got him to believe in himself about his identity by having him recall a memory he couldn't have gotten from her and then they revisited the memories of the Nibelheim incident to figure out what happened. A very important moment in that was to remember who Zack was, which would be the first step to dealing with the trauma pertaining to his death.
He comes to terms with who he really is before remembering Zack's death. He becomes himself again. Pinning Cloud's identity issues primarily on disassociation from a specific trauma that doesn't even come up in the course of correcting his identity issues makes no sense, whether we're talking real-world psychology or the writing of the story -- particularly when added on top of that, it's never referenced in official materials that discuss Cloud's ordeal.
From neither angle does this claim hold up. It especially can't be said that it's as canon an explanation as mako poisoning+Jenova cells+inferiority complex.
Like I said, dealing with the dissociation pertaining to his identity had to come before remembering Zack's death, as it and remembering Zack to begin with have to happen before he can remember Zack died and deal with that. Dissociation prevents people from properly dealing with the trauma that caused it, which means the dissociation has to be dealt with before the trauma itself can be directly addressed. It makes perfect sense to work your way back to the source starting with the most pressing issues that resulted from it.
See above about why you don't need to be explicitly told trauma has occurred for it to be a factor, below about my explanation of Cloud's insecurities. Cloud has more of a guilt complex than an inferiority one, though it blends together somewhat. If you're going to factor that into his issues, then I don't see why you can't acknowledge trauma's role in it as well. It's the only way his insecurities being part of the whole thing really works.
Starling said:
They were originally going to have Cloud remember Zack's death and such during the Lifestream sequence or at least around the end but made those scenes something you'd find elsewhere for time constraints.
Do you have a source for this? I remember a couple of interviews where Zack's role was discussed, but not this.
I find it unlikely since the flashback of Zack's death wasn't in the original release of the game at all, just like the flashback of Tifa finding Cloud at the train station.
They added the train station scene in for the later releases of the game, and didn't tuck it away outside the main narrative. They could have as easily placed Zack's death into the Lifestream sequence if that's where they wanted it. Kitasehas said it was easy in those days to go back and add stuff.
Odd that they didn't include those scenes in the Japanese release. Maybe the time constraints were that they hadn't made the scenes yet, since I remember something about them not having the time to include as much about Zack as they would've wanted to.
The inclusion of those scenes at the end of the Lifestream sequence is mentioned on p.528-529 of the Ultimania Omega, the part about a scrapped scenario where Tifa was going to have to use CPR on Cloud after they wash up on shore. Another potential issue is that the Lifestream sequence may have been a bit long if they put all that together with the stuff that follows on the Highwind. With the Kalm flashback they got to frame it in a way where it made sense to give you the opportunity to take a break halfway through without breaking up the pacing too much.
Starling said:
It's been retconned by CC. We can't even say for sure if it's still canon. Considering Zack and Cloud were friends and that BC shows him being assigned to do stuff in Midgar, it makes more sense that he actually has been to Shinra HQ at least a few times, further retconning that. It's not really a valid example right now.
Because they made a point that every inconsistency concerning Cloud's identity was that he thinks he's done things Zack did but then bits of what Cloud actually experienced that don't quite fit with that get through like when he remembers having worn the Shinra MP uniform in Junon or that the last time he slept in a proper bed was in Nibelheim.
Since there're a couple dummied versions of Cloud bringing up that he hasn't been to Shinra HQ (including one where Barret says he's been there before he lost his hand), it seems like they wanted it to be a clue to the same effect as the Junon example. With CC, we know that both Zack and Cloud have been in Shinra HQ, which fits with Cloud having been in Midgar in BC as well. The implication in the OG was that Cloud had never been there and possibly spent most of his time in Junon, while the compilation clearly shows him in the building. If they incorporate that part of the compilation and stick to the general theme of the hints that something's going on with Cloud, then they'd have to remove mention of Cloud having never been in the Shinra building.
Starling said:
That snarkiness was a rather bad decision on your part and I don't appreciate the dismissal. See above about the literary analysis thing and canon.
...
And you're better than this. When I read this post I was disappointed to see someone I was enjoying debating with be so dismissive and patronizing of what I was saying. A whole paragraph unnecessarily dismissed by a snarky sentence without even addressing the content properly, for example.
I will agree that it was unnecessary. I would also ask you, though, to consider how I felt at that time between the discussion we were having in this thread and the other.
In one, I was feeling insulted by your remarks that not enough effort has been put into doing translations here. In both threads, I had you dismissing the content of new translations I took the time to do specifically for our discussion.
I may have been a dick with that snarky comment, but please consider whether I'd felt pretty insulted up to that point. I've honestly made an effort to practice restraint.
I'm aware we've both said some things that upset the other in this discussion and I am willing to hear about any issues you specifically want to bring up. I may have been harsh in the way I talked about the Ultimania issue out of frustration that you didn't seem to be taking the other sources into consideration and how you seem to need an Ultimania quote for everything before you acknowledge it as having taken place with no mention of what the games have to say about it.
Just because I'm wondering why a thread was never made to make the scans available to whoever feels like translating doesn't mean I don't appreciate the work it took to do what's already on the site. My intention was to ask about what had or hadn't been done that could help improve the site translations. I suppose how you felt about that is probably similar to how I felt putting all that time and effort making that post about dissociation, dissociative disorders and Cloud's issues only to have it dismissed as irrelevant to the discussion, regardless of your acknowledgement that it was interesting. Imagine how I then felt when I'd read the previous post and felt like most of what I was saying was being dismissed again, but in a way that felt patronizing and deliberately insulting. Being involved in 2 discussions with lengthy posts, trying to get a lengthy thread ready to post and dealing with some IRL BS at the same time can be pretty exhausting so I don't like feeling like my time is being wasted by having my arguments get dismissed as irrelevant when they're not.
Starling said:
You try to excuse something with bad writing and say writing has nothing to do with the discussion.
...
You think you can excuse things through bad writing and then say I can't argue that bad writing doesn't excuse something as a reasonable occurrence?
Who is trying to "excuse" anything? "Is this good writing?" and "Is this canon?" are two separate questions that have nothing to do with each other, just like "Is what's on the news good news?" and "Did what's on the news happen?"
Actually, that's a pretty close comparison now that I think about it.
Canon asks for and requires no excuses. Bad writing does. And there is plenty of bad writing in the Compilation that is still canon, sadly. The clusterfuck that is the whole scenario with Dinne shows that.
My issue with the bad writing thing is that you dismissed my mentions of it while also arguing that bad writing in the compilation and Nomura's reputation for it somehow makes its in-universe viability irrelevant , seen
Work with something where reason matters. Ask the questions where a real person made a conscious, deliberate choice rather than where a fictional mentally unstable character may have done something to suit the whims of Tetsuya "Symbolism is the Story" Nomura of all people.
The guy who did that is the same guy whose decisions we're discussing now. 'Cause that's who we're really talking about here. Forget Cloud Strife for a second. Don't ask yourself "Would Cloud Strife do this?" You need to be asking "Would Tetsuya Nomura do this?"
The only point that has been made is "It would be bad writing." Which means nothing when Before Crisis, Crisis Core and Dirge were allowed to exist, and made by these same people.
Whether or not Nomura decides to fly in the face of everything said here is something to be dealt with when we see for ourselves what direction the remake ends up going and shouldn't render reasoning about whether or not it makes sense in-universe and from a storytelling perspective irrelevant.
Seriously, you have to leave the question of whether it's good writing at the door. You can call out something as being bad writing without utilizing that as a (flawed) qualification for its viability, like I did when talking about CC's ending here.
Regarding good writing, see what I told Starling above. And as you know, our concerns about good writing are not Nomura's concerns. Either he has really bad taste or he just doesn't care.
Bad writing in the remake isn't a forgone conclusion and there are things you just don't mess up without ruining everything. The one that bugged me the most was the next to last quote, as it felt like you didn't really address what I'd said.
Starling said:
You try to excuse something as probable based on Cloud simply being crazy and how being crazy means his actions don't have to follow any particular logic or pattern, then dismiss my explanation of how his psychological issues work as irrelevant. What exactly am I supposed to take away from that?
When pressed about how reason supposedly brings a strike against this suggestion, I simply pointed out -- and have continued doing -- that there is no reason to be found in the actions -- large or small; what to leave in, what to leave out --we already know Cloud to have undertaken. Thus, no matter how unreasonable one more small, unreasonable choice comes across, it fits the pattern of his behavior.[...]
Just read it now, the Ultimania entry you posted, in fact does give a reason why Cloud choose not to recall that memory, just like the other memories he din't recall (aside from the Midgar HQ thing). That hardly supports the "Cloud's just crazy, he can do anything and it'll make sense." argument.
It fully supports it. Anything the subconscious of this hopelessly insecure young man with a massive inferiority complex -- and now with a fragile psyche hanging by a thread -- perceived as a threat to him would be revised.
Dude was fucking nuts. I'm not sure what's so unbelievable about him doing things that are fucking nuts based on a flimsy, paranoid justification -- he's doing it from the moment we meet him!
What I've been getting out of that is that the pattern of behaviour you're talking about is an absence of reasoning behind his actions.
The whole anything that's a threat needs to be revised comes across like you're treating it like conscious decisions are involved, which isn't the case. Otherwise along with your mentions of self-preservation it seems like your way of referring to coping mechanisms, which are meant to deal with stress. Trauma is a stress that exceeds someone's ability to cope normally, leading to the occurrence of maladaptive coping mechanisms as seen in dissociative disorders and their relation to trauma. We know about the trauma Cloud sustained, we've seen his issues and how they involve dissociation in the same way that occurs in people who suffer the same kind of trauma as him. There's no denying the connection. Keep in mind that coping is an attempt to preserve a healthy and functional state of mind, while maladaptive coping tries the same thing but ends up encouraging an unhealthy state of mind, even if it still manages to be functional to some extent.
Starling said:
In your analogy, the Ultimania is the gas station and the compilation proper is the restaurant. You seem to have it backwards.
In my analogy, you (or me, if you prefer) is the gas station, a source with no authority to decide the matter at hand. The restaurant is official sources.
If you would like, you could say the restaurant is the actual games and the restaurant's website is the Ultimanias -- but that website is still going to trump the gas station attendnant if, for whatever reason, I found myself asking them about the restaurant's hours. Maybe I hit the wrong auto-dial link from Google, ended up talking to them, and said "Sorry, I have the wrong number. I meant to call The Restaurant and ask them when they close."
Maybe they reply with a series of observations and a reasonable interpretation of those observations -- e.g. "Oh, they closed at 9:00. It's 9:45 now and I haven't seen any new cars pull in since about 8:50. It was a couple who walked as far as the door, then turned around and left. The last new car before that was about 8:30. Yeah, they're already closed. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news."
Now, suppose in the course of listening to the attendant, I'm checking The Restaurant's website to see what the right phone number is, and I happen to notice that it says The Restaurant is open up to 11:00.
Despite how reasonable that interpretation of those observations may be, it's not definitive. I have no reason to give it more weight than the website, nor should I assume l that the website must be wrong. The possibility of being open until 11:00 is still there without contradicting what the attendant observed -- it could be a slow night and that couple may have changed their minds about where they were eating.
This is by no means a perfect analogy, but the point, I think, is clear: So long as what the website (i.e. the Ultimanias) says is compatible with what is observed at The Restaurant (i.e. the games), that detail from the website should be taken as true -- even if a seemingly more reasonable interpretation of those observations is available.
Canon is a question of authority. You and I have none, so even when we find contradictions, at best what we can seek to do is conceive of ways to make as much as possible fit. That may require determining the least of what has to be viewed as "not true" in order make the most of what remains fit, but we're nonetheless ultimately still deferring to the smallest authority that is above us.
For the analogy, what if the site is full of errors that need to be thoroughly checked and compared to other available information before you can be sure what it says is true? I mean I distinctly remember one of the pages saying a bronco is a cow, Tifa's profile saying she met Barret in Nibelheim and two different years being given for when Zack was born. Hardly what I'd call a definite authority without confirming the information with another source.
Starling said:
Yes, the Ultimanias still deal with canon but as I've said before, they're supposed supplement it, not replace what the games and ACC say on those matters. If the Ultimanias and the games disagree on something, all information on the matter has to be considered and discussed before you can really decide what to do about it. I keep getting the impression that's not how you approach it.
Then you have read nothing I ever wrote before our discussions, and little of what I've said during them.
While on that subject, how many times in our discussions have I had to point out something to the effect of "I didn't say that" or "That's not what I'm referring to"? How many times in just this post? Quite a lot.
I've read the site's articles. Like I said, it doesn't feel like you're using more than the Ultimanias most of the time to determine what you're saying is canon in this discussion and alongside the dismissals, it gets rather frustrating.
My examples of the times you basically said Cloud being crazy is enough to excuse things despite your claim that you didn't indicates that some of your corrections aren't as accurate as you may think.
Starling said:
If you mean literal clone then I don't get why people ever thought that considering an actual clone of Sephiroth would look like Sephiroth so Cloud was always a partial copy at best.
Because they based it on "observations of canon material," as you'd say. They believed what their eyes showed them could only be interpreted the way they initially understood, much as with your lengthy recap and steadfast interpretation of Vincent's flashback sequence. They observed Cloud being called a "Sephiroth clone" and Hojo confirming it, and that was the end of it for them.
The fact that "clone" ("copy" in Japanese; literally, the English word "copy") could have a specific meaning in the context of FFVII that differs from what they would normally understand it to mean went unconsidered despite the explanations, and -- often enough when it was pointed out -- was laughed off as a ridiculous suggestion because "'clone' has an obvious meaning" or some such reason.
When Crisis Core came out, that interpretation was still popping up, and was reinforced for many because Genesis Copies actually did look like Genesis. Pointing out that "Sephiroth clones" were "Sephiroth Copies" in Japanese didn't help at that point when these folks' eyes told them that the same word was being applied to these flunkies who did look like their namesake.
That misunderstanding is an incomplete observation of canon material and improper application of logic pertaining to the word clone and the context it's used in. If you can get past the confusion of the word clone, it's not that hard to realize the term copy would be more fitting for what they seem to be trying to say and obviously not exact ones. Cloud doesn't look like Sephiroth and so doesn't fit the standard use of the term clone. Sephiroth brought up that maybe he copied the real Cloud's appearance but the Lifetream sequence was all about proving that wrong and showing he was the real deal. When they use the term copy in CC, they specifically say Genesis and Angeal can copy their traits onto others, while Sephirtoh can't and even then, some of the Genesis copies barely look human and others have less prominent differences like that wing spike. This shows that even with Genesis the copies aren't quite the same. What remains consistent is simply that the copies/clones have cells from the person they're supposed to be copies/clones from. What results of that seems to vary quite a bit and shouldn't really be considered clones.
On top of that, we're told in the OG that Jenova infected the Cetra and turned them into monsters, and the whole copy thing is referenced as using that trait through Genesis and Angeal. In the OG the Sephiroth clones seem to have Jenova cells rather than cells directly from Sephiroth, like in SOLDIER. CC also brings up that Sephiroth can't actually copy his traits onto others so when they bring up the whole Sephiroth clone thing it's not quite in the same way as the Genesis and Angeal copies as far as the effects go.
My lengthy recap of the Vincent flashback is pretty straightforward and should probably be left to discuss in one thread rather than two simultaneously.
Starling said:
Anyway, your examples aren't exactly what I had in mind when I said what I did. I was thinking more stuff that gets immediately shut down with an Ultimania citation without really comparing the citation to what's observed in the compilation.
Some of your dismissals come across that way, though I'd sooner call it frustrating and unnecessary.
Starling said:
That you have the gall to say I'm embarrassing myself in a post that is filled with dismissals and patronizing remarks while saying you respect me as someone to have in-depth discussions with astounds me.
Who says I was? All you need to do is bring up what you still have grievances about and we can discus them.
Starling said:
The existence of bad writing elsewhere doesn't excuse the further allowance of bad writing, especially when it would involve replacing something better written in the OG with it in the remake. They are being serious about not wanting to screw up the remake after all, so they've hopefully learned from their mistakes in the compilation, which they have the opportunity to fix to an extent.
I really don't know where this "excuse" idea came from, but what it does do is give us an idea of what we might realistically expect. Especially since we're being told to anticipate more overt ties to the Compilation.
The compilation isn't all bad so they could just mean nods that won't cause any problems rather than adding stuff that detracts from the OG.
Starling said:
I find both the issue of the writing contrivances it would take to make it happen from a writing perspective and the logic issues it would take from an in-universe perspective worth considering when discussing why taking that route for the CBS being hidden under OBS shouldn't happen.
...
I'd brought it up as happening before Tifa found him because she's seen the Buster Sword before and could potentially recognize it, Cloud's false memories and persona are already in place by the time he'd be able to do it post meeting Tifa and she'd likely notice if Cloud covered up the guard and then forgot why or that he did it in the first place. The option of having it happen after Tifa found him seemed even less viable to me than having it happen before and I didn't think anyone would try to place it past that point when considering that.
...
Considering how in this case the bad writing involves retconning a reasonable series of events into a less reasonable one, I'd say it has merit.
Step 1: Cloud "recovers"
Step 2: Tifa knows dick about SOLDIER and their equipment
Step 3: Cloud customizes his (i.e. Zack's) equipment
Not exactly the breaking of the Book of Revelation's Seven Seals. Even if you threw an optional (i.e. unnecessary-yet-possible) Step 2.5 in there where Cloud's subconscious compels him to do Step 3, it's astoundingly uneventful for all the hemming and hawwing that's gone on.
Tifa's seen SOLDIERs before so she does at least know what they look like. Anyway, the issue is with Cloud being compelled to do the modification as part of the memory and identity issues, in which covering up the guard somehow has anything to do with whether or not Cloud can keep thinking he's a SOLDIER first class and not realize the Buster Sword belonged to Zack. If you're going the he was compelled to do it route, you'd need to assume Cloud was being controlled by an outside force or that his subconscious can make conscious decisions and we've already gone over why that doesn't make sense.
Starling said:
Either way you still have the issue of why Cloud would even forget that he covered the CBS guard in the first place if we're going with the whole thing being part of his memory and identity issues, which is an issue I've gone over.
If you're talking about it just being part of the aesthetic modifications he made to his SOLDIER uniform, then it's not our point of disagreement.
Starling said:
In that first post I was simply disagreeing with the need to make such a big deal in-story about the CBS guard being revealed under the OBS one and finding the juxtaposition of it with Cloud's memory and identity issues was unnecessary.
Of course it isn't necessary. What does that influence, though?
A lot that Nomura did with symbolism in Advent Children was unnecessary, and frankly, fucking stupid. All the wolf stuff was awkward, heavyhanded and dumb as shit. The lack of color everywhere was a jarring departure from the colorful setting of the original game. The ribbon under that hideous arm curtain (a transgression all on its own) was just ... I don't even know what to say about that.
The sleeve isn't that bad. I'm honestly more puzzled by the random bit of cloth tied to his pants. At least the sleeve has the excuse of not leaving his left arm bare, even if cloth isn't much protection. From what I understand, protecting your off-hand side while leaving your main-hand side less covered is pretty common, as you're more vulnerable on the side you don't hold your weapon with.
Since proper armour, as his arm band from the OG would likely count as can hinder mobility, he probably wanted something better suited to his use of the Fusion Swords, which allows him to quickly switch between using two swords and one.
I could've lived with the wolf if only it didn't show up when Cloud almost died. There's just no in-universe explanation I can think of to explain that, though I could probably come up with a couple decent AU fics drawing from mythology that would explain it better than "it represents Cloud's guilt" ever could. I mean, Cloud saw it at the end right? They could've passed the wolf off as some random animal that happens to have symbolic meaning if they'd only had it show up in the wastelands or forgotten city just the one time but no, it can show up in that white space Aerith and Zack talk to Cloud in, very deliberately watched Cloud and Tifa sleep in the church and might as well be yet another unexplained entity we know next to nothing about.
I accepted the ribbon mostly because people do stuff like that to remember people they care about so it doesn't seem that odd to me. Treating Aerith like a literal angel that can answer people's prayers is more problematic.
I make no excuses for the colour, though. I don't care what the movie is about, unless it's film noir or something, it needs a full palette.
Starling said:
I didn't expect the whole thing to blow up the way it did and had to take a moment to think about what exactly I'd gotten myself into. In the second post I was specifically taking issue with the notion of explaining things away with Cloud's memory and identity issues as if that's an acceptable excuse without even considering how and why Cloud's issues are the way they are. I take issue with the use of it to explain the discrepancies between the CC and OG versions of the Nibelheim incident as well, specifically Genesis' presence in the reactor.
I'm no fan of Genesis being there either, but that one really isn't all that problematic. Maybe Cloud didn't get those memories or maybe he did and just considered those details irrelevant to the story he was telling since he was supposed to be talking about Sephiroth rather than Genesis (who he may have believed to be dead by that point anyway).
Almost no one ever suggests Cloud knowing about Genesis and choosing not to mention him instead of chalking it up to Cloud's memories being inaccurate. I get that Genesis goading Sephiroth the way he did can add to Sephiroth going insane but I'd rather it happened somewhere else. When comparing the CC reactor scene with the OG one, the CC one just doesn't have as much impact. I liked how when Sephiroth started losing his cool, he started hitting stuff, angrily saying the makonoids were human, then the pod breaking as a result of what Sephiroth did. Genesis being in the reactor simply isn't an adequate substitute for that and changes the tone of the scene somewhat.
Starling said:
You're missing the point. What exactly do you think we're discussing, then? Your whole "Cloud is crazy so it could totally happen" claim is certainly about the in-universe viability of Cloud covering up the Buster Sword's guard as part of his memory issues. Disagreement over in-universe viability of it and the writing issues have been part of this debate from the start. You even referenced my first two posts, which should've refreshed your memory on the matter.
Perhaps I spoke too hastily: My objective wasn't to discuss "whether or not it makes sense from a storytelling perspective." It's a genuine surprise for me that anyone still has that kind of faith in Nomura, much less the whole Compilation team.
After Dinne's role in BC and Lucrecia's shameful incompetence and shrill buffoonery in DC, it seems like a moot point.
Cloud could have hopped up from that spot at the train station, fornicated with the materia slots on the sword and then ran off cackling to find a smithy to modify it with Tifa in hot pursuit -- and it still wouldn't come close to the absurdity of Dinne. And the sad thing is, I'm only exaggerating a little bit.
Moot if we were discussing the probability of bad writing making it into the remake, perhaps but we're discussing the viability of its inclusion, which I think is an important distinction to make. I like to think the writers learned from the compilation and know not to fuck up the plot when retelling the OG itself rather than trying to add to the events surrounding it. You may disagree and that's fine, as there's nothing we can do about what does and doesn't end up happening. What would have to be changed and how much that would hurt the remake should it happen is more my concern.
I know the bad writing throughout the compilation doesn't give much to hope for it but like I said, I really do feel like they know they have to avoid fucking this up and are really trying to live up to fan expectations as best they can on this one. They probably can't afford not to, actually. That aside, I refuse to let bad writing on the part of the compilation dictate how I should feel about the remake if I can manage that. While too much hype can be bad, the remake is something to look forward to and I choose to be optimistic rather than cynical, despite how I feel about the consistency issues in the compilation.
Starling said:
It was certainly the impression I got. You called the idea whacky enough to be cool, after all.
I wasn't really expecting that kind of phrasing in a discussion like this. It shouldn't be surprising to miss an idiom here or some sarcasm there when reading words instead of hearing them spoken. Alongside things to the effect of Nomura's writing habits making anything possible, I couldn't be sure you were joking. If you're going to keep count of times you think you have to correct me on something, then I don't see why I shouldn't start counting how many times you dismiss something I'm saying as irrelevant to the discussion/literary interpretation/etc and see if that evens things out.
Mako poisoning isn't how psychology works. Yet it is a factor in psychology in this setting. If you won't accept the conceits of the fiction, how can you discuss it?
Fictive elements don't excuse completely ignoring psychology, especially as pertaining to how people react to situations, as I've gone over in more detail above. What we see and hear about mako poisoning is that it causes disorientation, loss of consciousness to the extent or rendering people comatose for years and that it can get bad enough to kill someone. That's not the same thing as forgetting things and making up a false persona in a way you'd see in cases of dissociation faced with trauma that actually happened.
Starling said:
Cloud's insecurities and inferiority issues are specifically about having been blamed for what happened to Tifa when they were younger until he genuinely thought it was entirely his fault. He wanted to be noticed and wanted to become stronger so he could help Tifa. Those issues tie into his guilt issues but it all amounts to how he was treated in Nibelheim and later how he feels about his inability to save Zack and Aerith. When talking about his memory and identity issues, they only really factor in for creating a more positive self-image and feel less helpless about what happened in Nibelheim, which is why most of his memories about his less positive reception and contradicting his being a SOLDIER are repressed. After that it's just a matter of his mind trying to avoid cognitive dissonance as part of the dissociation rather than treating inconsistencies as a threat and actively revising them.
I find your wording somewhat overstates how helpless his insecurities would make him without the trauma considering he managed to kill Sephiroth in the end despite what that night must've been like for him. It's largely the trauma as I've explained.
Waxing interpretive here, as you did, the fact that he had managed to kill Sephiroth of all people yet had to forget it -- even while retaining his memories of all the traumatic things that took place that night, and believing "I couldn't have killed him" (as he says in Kalm) -- is perhaps the reddest flag as relates to why avoiding trauma was not the cause of his identity crisis.
Despite what a boon that should have been for his insecurities, remembering what happened to Sephiroth would have demanded answering what happened to himself after -- and that would have unraveled when and how he actually got his superhuman strength, which would have compromised his need to believe that he had been in SOLDIER.
Remembering killing Sephiroth would've required remembering getting impaled and nearly dying, then being taken to Hojo's lab, that time most certainly being traumatic in itself and leading up to Zack's death. I don't think Cloud's issues as detailed below would allow him to see past everyone in his hometown getting slaughtered or worse, having possibly thought Tifa was dead until seeing her in Midgar, his inability to keep Zack from dying as a result of everything from the Nibelheim incident up to that point to get a self-esteem boost out of killing Sephiroth.
Keep in mind that even in the OG, Cloud seemed to be aware enough to see Zack die and understand what had happened, likely understanding that the Shinra MPs didn't even think he was worth putting out of his misery and just left him there to die because they thought it was a foregone conclusion. All while he couldn't do anything about it. At that point, pretty much everyone he knew was dead, his hometown was gone, he'd spent 4 years in Hojo's lab subjected to who knows what besides being dunked in a mako tank and he was in the middle of the wastelands next to his best friend's corpse. I don't think that's a level of trauma anyone could reasonably be expected to cope with. There's just no way that trauma didn't have anything to do with Cloud's memory and identity issues, especially when said issues took the form of something very much like the dissociative disorders seen in people who've been through trauma. I'm not saying the mako poisoning didn't exacerbate the problems the trauma caused but rather that they're not the main cause, or if you still want to disagree on that, not the only one.
The false identity as a SOLDIER first class offered a means of explaining why he looked like one without remembering the time in the lab, remembering returning to Nibelheim without the poor reception and sense of failure for doing so without having become a SOLDIER, remember himself as being less helpless in the face of the Nibelheim incident as well as doing something with his memories of Zack without remembering Zack himself, which would inevitably lead to remembering Zack's death. In short, it makes sense that he'd end up with that false identity while dissociating from most of his trauma. It may not have been perfect but I don't think anything would have been, considering how much he had to try to cope with.
As you may recall, when he and Tifa emerge from the Lifestream, giving an explanation for how he got his strength -- a memory tied to the actual crescendo of his journey of self-discovery (rather than Zack's death being said crescendo) -- is one of the only things he shares with the others. Confessing his weakness is his preoccupation, not talking about Zack.
Considering he genuinely thought Tifa being in a coma for a week and almost dying after running off into the mountains looking for her mom was his fault for not being strong enough to protect her, his similar reasoning when he ended up with Geostigma after failing to find a cure for Denzel, as well as his guilt over not being able to save Zack and Aerith, I don't think his explanation about his issues being solely because he was too weak is the whole picture. He constantly expects more from himself than is actually possible in the circumstances and then thinks his inability to do better than he did means it's all his fault and that he should've been able to do more. When put in a life or death situation, all that gets thrown out the window and we get to see the kind of determination that allows him to do stuff like throw Sephiroth into the mako pit despite being impaled and suspended in the air. That's not the kind of thing anyone should be expected to be able to manage and yet he does. He's definitely selling himself short.
His guilt over what happened to Tifa all those years ago keeps him from seeing that things would've likely turned out the same way or worse if he hadn't been there. His guilt over Aerith's death fails to account for how he managed to keep Sephiroth from making him kill her, or maybe he just focuses on the fact that Sephiroth was able to try that in the first place. Cloud simply wouldn't see Zack's death as the cause of his memory issues and would simply think himself too weak to handle something most people wouldn't even survive. He consistently has trouble seeing past his perceived failures and noticing what he's managed to do in spite of that.
This is, really, the long and short of it. For all that Starling appears to think that having the Compilation sword underneath will require mental gymnastics and retcons...maybe Cloud just wanted to customize his equipment and it doesn't have anything at all to do with his unwitting false persona or Zack.
Now, as Tres has alluded to, Nomura may well try to shoehorn a lot of meaning into it. But if it was simply this, I don't see how there would be anything strange about it.
I'm not saying the CBS guard being under the OBS one isn't possible, I even brought it up being simply part of the customizations Cloud made to his equipment as the way I'd rather it be if this whole thing even happens at all.
I also said that shoehorning it in would be wholly unnecessary and that the remake shouldn't be bogged down by that. Be cynical about Nomura if you want but I'd rather not go into the remake expecting the worst possible outcome, as I feel that would mar my enjoyment even more than expecting more than what I end up with would.
ForceStealer said:
It could have still been stories from Zack. Imagine a chatty extrovert like Zack travelling the entire planet with nobody to talk to but coma!Cloud. He talked to Cloud in CC on screen a lot (as far as I remember). He might have re-hashed the Nibelheim incident -- and more -- at Cloud after getting out of the mansion.
While Zack does talk to Cloud quite a bit during that time, the whole memory copying thing's been established as a trait Jenova has and Cloud's memories of the Nibelheim incident were pretty faithful barring obvious retcons based on the other retellings of it, probably more faithful than what he could've gotten from stories alone. In the case of memory copying, it could've just been done involuntarily without any intention of creating another identity as Cloud didn't form said identity until Tifa found him.
You're right that it isn't strictly necessary, though if Zack told him everything you'd have to deal with the convenience that he described everything exactly as it happened, leaving nothing out except apparently Genesis. In the end, which one is the case doesn't really matter in relation to Cloud's memory/identity issues resulting from trauma, especially considering he got the mercenary thing from something Zack said on the truck.
After all, if you jot it all down to mako-poisoning, there is no reason why Cloud would choose that specific persona over any other strong persona - in fact, it would be a stretch to imagine the Jenova cells influencing Cloud to develop a persona so attached to various things in his life that could end up breaking the illusion, when he could literally just build "Cloud the person who failed to join SOLDIER but went on a personal journey, overcame his insecurities and became a bad-ass", if his trauma had nothing to do with anything.
If you jot it all down to trauma though, you get left with tons of questions in regards to how the hell he managed to construct the version of events he did, when he wasn't even present for many of them.
Whether Zack told him about it or Cloud copied the memories off him, he had the knowledge of those events available to get mixed into another identity thanks to the dissociation that resulted from the trauma. While people can become catatonic due to trauma, that part's definitely the mako poisoning.
I disagree with point 2 as well, as there's no reason to assume they weren't friends before the Nibelheim incident just because the OG didn't really get the chance to say much about Zack.
3. He builds this persona hastily and shoddily in the heat of the moment when he meets Tifa, spurred on by the Jenova cells.
The bits and pieces of information he couldn't have known, he receives because of the Sephiroth/Jenova Cells and the mako-poisoning, since A.) Sephiroth would have several of those memories, and B.) Zack, who is dead, would be in the life-stream and so would his memories, meaning that these could very well have been part of the information that he was overloaded with when mako-poisoned.
Since Cloud wasn't exposed to more mako between Zack's death and finding Tifa in the train station as early as later in the same day, he couldn't have gotten the memories that way. Cloud's memory issues also weren't necessarily spurred on by the Jenova cells. From what we see in the game, Sephiroth only got involved once he breaks Jenova out of the Shinra building, which is too late to contribute to the memory/identity issues.
Ifalna speaks to that ability of Jenova as well when talking about how the creature got close enough to the Cetra to infect them. She says it took the forms of people close to them. I always interpreted that to mean there must have been a telepathic ability involved.
What I didn't do -- what I doubt any of us did -- is believe Sephiroth when he said Tifa's memories had anything to do with who Cloud was. We all probably rejected everything he said wholesale as a lie to break Cloud.
I definitely never trusted anything Sephiroth said in that scene unless there was evidence to support it after the truth was determined. The reactor 5 flashback always gave me the impression he got that memory directly from Zack or Tifa, and CC seems to indicate that Zack only got in after Tifa had been cut down, which would mean Cloud would have to get it from Tifa.
hian said:
I imagine, based on Jenova's writing and the connection of FFVII's development material to Parasite Eve, that Jenova was imagined much like a parasitic organism at first, that took over the central nervous system of the first creature that came into contact with it, and then started on a killing spree using that being to come into contact with the next, taking in new information with each new victim - evolving as it were. The original Jenova design from the Nibelheim reactor seems to line up with that seeing as it literally looks like a human (perhaps cetra) woman who's had an alien symbiotic life-form grow out of control and envelope her body.
According to the early material files, Jenova was going to be a gene that granted various abilities such as magic and psychic powers. I'm not really sure at what point they decided to go with a parasitic alien organism but I feel that scrapped concept seems to be why Sephiroth can do stuff like fly around and probably why Jenova can read minds. Jenova probably does evolve from whatever it retains from its hosts after reforming though.
hian said:
Or perhaps she's a being more in line with the Yoma from the Claymore manga - demons who eat humans, take their shape and in so doing, have access to their memories.
Yoma themselves are humans turned into flesh eating monsters due to experiments done with the genetic material of a particular species that has weird biology, resulting in demonic, humanoid monsters that eat humans and absorb them into their being, then impersonating them to keep their cover. Basically, they really did used to be human at some point. Now, think back to Raki's brother at the beginning.
It's still a great example but I felt I should clarify.
hian said:
In the original game, I can't think of Jenova ever being shown to read the minds of anyone she's not already inside through that person being exposed to her cells.
From what Ifalna said, Jenova started out by approaching the Cetra with the appearance of their dead loved ones, which would require reading minds it hadn't infected yet.
Just quickly, being "Cloud's best friend" is a very low bar. He doesn't appear to have any other friends before FF7 that we know of. So Zack being Cloud's best friend isn't an especially tall feat. Now, I know what you're saying, that people have the image of them being very close, but that's not what I came out of Crisis Core with. Cloud certainly feels close to him because Zack spoke to him endlessly while he was out of it and protected and died for him. But, as for Zack being so friendly to him before that...well, Zack's friendly to everybody.
I understand that we are in agreement about the other stuff. When it comes to quality of the writing, I'm not totally sure what set of standards you're holding the narrative against, but it certainly did something to captivate so many people. I'm not desperate to defend it or anything, people are free to like or dislike whatever they please, but I'm dubious of unilateral judgments of writing being objectively bad.
Judging by the order Zack's DMW breaks down at the end of CC, it seems that Zack's friends go as such: Aerith > Cloud > Angeal > Cissnei > Tseng > Sephiroth
Yes, Zack is extroverted and as such is friendly with a lot of people but I got the distinct impression he was closer to Cloud than he was with Tseng and Cissnei. On top of that, you don't just spend 4 years in a lab with someone and haul them halfway across the world over the course of another year while making sure nothing bad happens to him and not get more attached to them than you were before. When Zack saw Cloud in Junon, he specifically invited him to get something to eat. Though the other soldiers decide to butt in, he clearly wanted to hang out with Cloud specifically, which is something friends do. As friendly as Zack is, he doesn't just hang out with every acquaintance he knows, but rather people he'd consider friends.
Not sure if this is relevant, but when Cloud and Tifa fell into the Lifestream and Tifa went into Cloud's mind*, Tifa said that if Cloud remembers something and Tifa can confirm it from her own memory, then it proves Cloud is real (or was this only about piecing together the correct memories? I gotta replay that part). If they believed Sephiroth when he said that Cloud's Jenova cells read Tifa's memory, then Cloud remembering correctly what Tifa also remembers wouldn't prove a thing.
I've seen stories where checking that kind of thing was done in a way the characters mistakenly thought would prove that someone wasn't being mind-controlled by something that could in fact access the person's memories. Anyway, Tifa made a point about following his feelings to the truth and that those couldn't be faked and may have forgotten that memory due to head trauma, considering she ended up in a week long coma and people were worried she was going to die. Basically, the emotions and being able to actually describe his thoughts at the time could prove the memories were genuine and Tifa's memory was likely unavailable for copying. I'm pretty sure she said something that indicated she didn't remember that day even back then and so never knew why Cloud kept getting into fights.
hleV said:
* How in the world does that even work, seriously? Why didn't Tifa get Mako poisoning? Why did the return of Cloud's memory fix his Mako poisoning?
EDIT: Tifa's wikia page says it was Aerith's doing. Sounds good to me I guess.
I don't remember any mention of Aerith being responsible for that so that looks like speculation based on what Aerith's done after being dead.
I always got the impression that Tifa ended up in Cloud's mind because she called out to him and he wanted to protect her. At the end, when Tifa realizes they're still in the Lifestream, Cloud seems to be affected by it while she isn't. Being in Cloud's mind, it's likely that shielded her from the effects. That Cloud didn't get even worse mako poisoning from falling into the Lifestream while already mako poisoned and even getting better thanks to counselling from Tifa is one of the reasons I think Cloud's issues had more to do with the trauma than the mako poisoning.
http://thelifestream.net/the-maiden-who-travels-the-planet-revised/6/
Can't confirm the novel's canonicity as a whole but the explanation in question is: good, non-contradictory, needed due to lack of it in OG. At least for me, as I'm really not fond of the idea that Tifa called out to Cloud and blabla, thus any Lifestream logic as we know it is ignored for the sake of it.
As you were. *leaves thread subtly*