LicoriceAllsorts
Donator
Oh fuck I forgot about the Vulcan mind-meld.
There’s a difference between heavy handed foreshadowing with a large slathering of meta winking to the audience, and characters actually being consciously aware of their future fates/deaths though. I already stated why, despite some anxieties, I have faith the developers won’t make Aerith’s death a “Jesus-Death”, but if the developers own past statements aren’t enough for you, then I am certainly not going to be able to convince you to have faith/confidence.
Well, if I am truly misremembering the OG, this is a Remake change I do think is for the better. As I just don’t think Ifalna wouldn’t have told Aerith the same important things she told Gast in the OG. As for Red XIII he just has knowledge in the Remake because of his weird mind-meld with Aerith in Chapter 16.
Cloud’s backstory is still important though, as it gives important explanation to how Sephiroth is exactly connected to Jenova, as Aerith only has knowledge of Jenova’s origins in the Remake and only a vague notion of Sephiroth being “wrong”, she doesn’t know the important details of Sephiroth that Cloud does.
Tetsujin, I think you've gone a little too far/rude in presuming that people (myself included) who are confident that the skeleton of the OG plot will be retained in the Remake are just willfully ignorantly in denial. You may not have intended that way, but I felt very disrespected by that implication.
Letting Aerith have foreknowledge of her death would be like re-writing the Lion King so that Simba knows all along that Scar killed Mufasa, or re-writing Macbeth so that he resists the temptation to kill Duncan. You can have every single other plot beat but that one, but if it's missing, it becomes a totally different story.
Tifa looked doubtful. "But... Tseng, you know - if it weren't for Aerith, we'd all be dead. No one else could have cast Holy."
"She didn't have to die to cast Holy."
"If she hadn't gone to the Forgotten City - "
"She didn't have to go there. She could have cast it from the church. I would have taken her down there if she'd asked me. I would have taken her to the Forgotten City if that's where she wanted to go. All she had to do was ask me. She didn't need to die. I know she didn't want to die. Aerith was no saint. She was a girl who loved life and wanted to live it. If we start believing she had to die in order for the rest of us to be saved, then we'll be turning her into something she never was."
Zack's death wasn't a sacrifice in the original, he just got shot. He did sacrifice himself in Crisis Core. It did not make him a virginal pure pink fairy princess. In my opinion anyway.I feel you're probably right, Eliza Maza. And I have nothing against anyone who likes this version of events. I just don't like it.
Cloud remembered killing Sephiroth in the OG - in Kalm. Bugenhagen told the party Red XIII was a child in the OG - in Cosmo Canyon. Hojo recognised Cloud - in Costa del Sol. (TBH I was unclear whether the rest of the party heard Hojo spilling the beans, since he was silenced and carried away by the Whispers).
At no point in the OG did Aerith hint that she was going to her death as a willing sacrifice to save the Planet. I'm well aware that right since the very beginning a section of the fandom has believed she did exactly that - possibly the same section that likes to portray her as a virginal pure pink fairy princess - but the game is pretty lcear that she went off to the Forgotten City fully intending to return and live her life to the full.
I feel so strongly about this that I put it into a fanfic (not the greatest recommendation, I know, but it pretty much sums up how I feel. Tseng and Tifa are having a conversation, post-Meteor:
However, I get it that the game developers feel they need to do something about this deterministic bind they're in, in which Aerith very much does need to die in order for the plot to stay true to the original. I just hate the idea of turning her into Pink Jesus.
I'd certainly hope premonitions like Cloud had just looking at the Sector Seven pillar are a thing of the past but Aerith and Sephiroth actually forgetting what they knew a day before seems less likely.well now that the party broke free of their destiny (because reasons), will Aerith still have premonitions or knowledge about the future?
She also says in the remake "The future is always a blank page." Which made no sense because then the Whispers would not exist.
Which leads me to believe, it is just something she tells herself. This is actually in line with past events of her seeming to know that the plate was going to fall regardless but she never stopped them from trying to stop the inevitable.More than that, it was the complete opposite of what she had said like 15 minutes ago
Strange that Aerith recognize him as a SOLDIER and a "Merc", but Reno who is a Turk and works for Shinra must be told by Aerith in that very same scene that Cloud is a Soldier. Logically you are right, IRL we can recognize someone from the military by their looks and so on, but this is a video game. By your logic, Jessie, Biggs and Wedge should also have recognized Roche as a Soldier which they did not.If I bumped into anyone dressed like Cloud in Midgar, I'd know they were a SOLDIER. When you've lived in Midgar as long as we have, you recognise these Shinra types when you see them. I'd recognise a Turk, too, and the various Shinra troopers.