Hey so I've been thinking a lot about Aeris and Ifalna's four-to-seven year stint at Shinra HQ. While it seems Aeris strongly prefers the slums (which says enough) we don't really get to know what exactly their living conditions were like. They couldn't have been just Hojo's pincushions, could they?
What do you think an early childhood at Shinra HQ looked like? How did it make Aeris the person she became?
Weren't they captured when Aerith was only a few weeks old, according to the icicle inn cutscenes anyways so I'm going to guess it was 7 full years they were held there.
I dunno part of me would like to believe that they we're treated well, but then Ifalna did die while escaping with her daughter, did she die because they were attacked on the way if the Shinra army were asked to capture her, we know from Crisis Core that they like to overdo it with these things or from exhaustion from the effort of escaping.
Or did she die from the treatment/experiments performed on her in the lab and her body just couldn't take it anymore, I would say she would have shielded her child quite a lot from Hojo's experiments and she probably would have got the full brunt of them given she ws a pureblood Ancient as opposed to Aerith's halfblood status.
I think Sprites makes a good point that Ifalna was the one Hojo was interested in; maybe allowing her to keep Aerith made her more amenable? Aerith doesn't seem to have been a psychologically damaged child - although maybe her unwillingness to acknowledge her special gifts stemmed from what she'd seen Hojo and his minions do to her mother? Is her hatred of Shinra personal (you killed my mother!) or more ideological (you're killing the Planet!)? She never seems to be all that bothered about the way her mother died, or out for revenge (unlike Barret and Tifa, for instance).
As with most things FFVII, the available evidence leaves sufficient scope to imagine almost anything. In my fanfic they lived quite comfortably in a small apartment on a heavily guarded floor; Ifalna was not allowed to leave the floor, but Aerith could go all over the building if accompanied by a Turk. In my headcanon Veld protected her for seven years by convincing President Shinra that it would be best if they could persuade Ifalna to cooperate of her own free will, and (in my headcanon) it was when the President lost patience and threatened to hand them both over to Hojo that Ifalna made a run for it with her child. And thus (in my headcanon) it was Ifalna's death (the loss of such a rare asset) that made the President agree to support the Turks softly-softly approach towards wooing Aerith's cooperation. They didn't want to make the same mistake with the child that they had made with the mother. But that's all my own hypothesis, not supported by any facts.
I tend to look at characters and only assume trauma if there are signs of it and it makes sense in light of a characters current behavior. I won't write trauma lightly, exploring it if it seems necessary to understand the character or likely to have occurred in light of how the character acts. Aerith doesn't seems fairly balanced as an adult, which to me doesn't suggest that she endured anything too horrifying before the age of seven.
Obviously, you can't tell trauma survivors at a glance in real life and plenty of survivors of trauma grow up to be perfectly wonderful, functional people myself and my husband included. I don't want to imply that a character couldn't be traumatized or make any blanket statements about survivors of trauma. People are free to read her however they want and explore whatever issues they want to address.
That said, I do think that trauma leaves a mark and it's never implied that Aerith has personal issues that stem from her time at ShinRa. She never mentions it and she could have discussed it. Other characters talk about their trauma. FFVII is in many ways a game about recovery. If Aerith remember any terrible things done to her and her mother I feel like it would be part of the narrative of the game. Obviously, seeing your mother die in front of you would be traumatic. The death of a parent should be traumatic, but that seems softened for Aerith because her mother is still "with her". I imagine Ifalna comforting Aerith after her death by telling her that she'd never leave her even though she couldn't be there the same way, but now she'd have another mother too and it would be all right.
As for my head canon, I've essentially adopted Lic's head canon insofar as ShinRa was willing to do things gently for a long time, and it was only when they switched to a more aggressive tactics that Ifalna fled. Losing her made the President rethink using aggressive tactics, which does explain why ShinRa was willing to leave Aerith alone for so long. Although I do like the idea that Ifalna was experimented on to some extent for those 7 years but she shielded Aerith from what was happening. Maybe telling her she was just going to work all day and hiding what actually went on. Although I like to think things were fairly mild, not harmful, and it was only when things were going to get bad and/or Aerith was threatened that Ilfana fled.
Either way, I imagine that Aerith was actually fairly sheltered.
While it seems Aeris strongly prefers the slums (which says enough) we don't really get to know what exactly their living conditions were like.
I grew up in the projects and I was happy there (which is not to say there wasn't a lot of what I term 'fucked up shit going down"). I was happy because it was my home.
I am not trying to say that poverty is fine and we shouldn't improve the living conditions for the poor (we should, but I'm not going to go on a tangent about social issues). What I am trying to say is that preferring the slums doesn't meant ShinRa was so horrifying that living in poverty was preferable. It could just mean this is the only life she's known and she's uncertain about leaving home/the world she knows.
Not to mention, Aerith's mom lived in a nice part of the slums and seems to have had a good income.
Wow, that's both completely plausible and very disturbing.
She never mentions it and she could have discussed it. Other characters talk about their trauma. FFVII is in many ways a game about recovery. If Aerith remember any terrible things done to her and her mother I feel like it would be part of the narrative of the game.
Well, Aeris is the type to keep secrets. She never tells Zack or Cloud she's an Ancient, we have to learn that from Elmyra and Cissnei. She also has a strong aversion to being seen as 'different', so it's quite likely she wouldn't bring up that kind of thing unless she had to. I'm not saying that she's necessarily traumatised, but it's plausible that she wouldn't advertise it.
Elmyra:You used to see this kind of thing a lot during the war.
That to me implied that she'd been mistaken for a refugee, war wounded don't have time to die on train platforms on the far side of the world in great numbers. So maybe they'd escaped for a while by then, and had been trying to get by by herself.
There's a possibility Ifalna escaped because Aeris got old enough to join in on the experiments.
As with most things FFVII, the available evidence leaves sufficient scope to imagine almost anything. In my fanfic they lived quite comfortably in a small apartment on a heavily guarded floor; Ifalna was not allowed to leave the floor, but Aerith could go all over the building if accompanied by a Turk. In my headcanon Veld protected her for seven years by convincing President Shinra that it would be best if they could persuade Ifalna to cooperate of her own free will, and (in my headcanon) it was when the President lost patience and threatened to hand them both over to Hojo that Ifalna made a run for it with her child. And thus (in my headcanon) it was Ifalna's death (the loss of such a rare asset) that made the President agree to support the Turks softly-softly approach towards wooing Aerith's cooperation. They didn't want to make the same mistake with the child that they had made with the mother. But that's all my own hypothesis, not supported by any facts.
I actually really like this idea, in my head though I'd say they were kept isolated from nearly everyone except Hojo and the people in his lab, there's something about the way Hojo always talks about his 'precious' experiments and how greedy the President was that makes me feel they wouldn't be willing to share the last Ancient and her daughter with anyone else, that includes interacting with other people in Shinra, if they had, in my head Aerith would have bumped into Sephiroth on at least one occasion as a child and let's face it he's not hard to forget, is he?
Little known fact: Elmyra was in Shinra's pay all along.
That's quite a disturbing thought, but I dunno, something about that just doesn't sit right with me, if that was the case why not just hand her straight back over to Tseng again when he came knocking, unless it was just a way to make Aerith trust her, but even then I still don't feel right about that, there's nothing that ever suggests to me that Elmyra was working for Shinra. The 'softly-softly' approach however does sound very plausible.
Well, Aeris is the type to keep secrets. She never tells Zack or Cloud she's an Ancient, we have to learn that from Elmyra and Cissnei. She also has a strong aversion to being seen as 'different', so it's quite likely she wouldn't bring up that kind of thing unless she had to. I'm not saying that she's necessarily traumatised, but it's plausible that she wouldn't advertise it.
True, but surely she wouldn't have to worry about seen as different by someone like Nanaki. I think if you're different it's easier to share with other people who are different too, and when it comes to trauma sharing with someone who might have similar experiences can be a great release because a) you're not alone and b) someone else gets it. I think you could have a great scene between them, but I do understand we're limited by what they'd say in front of Cloud. All the same, it seems like something the writers could work in if they wanted to explore it. It would have been a nice bonding moment.
I actually really like this idea, in my head though I'd say they were kept isolated from nearly everyone except Hojo and the people in his lab, there's something about the way Hojo always talks about his 'precious' experiments and how greedy the President was that makes me feel they wouldn't be willing to share the last Ancient and her daughter with anyone else, that includes interacting with other people in Shinra, if they had, in my head Aerith would have bumped into Sephiroth on at least one occasion as a child and let's face it he's not hard to forget, is he?
I don't see her being able to mingle with other people around the lab. There's a risk she and Sephiroth would influence each other or something that Hojo would want to control for...
In my head canon the Turks are allowed access and Tseng gets to meet Aerith when she's a baby. This is mostly because I like to draw parallels between Aerith and Rufus in my fics by setting up head canons that mirror each other. (Also stealing a bit from Lic)
Well, when we rescue Aeris from Hojo's lab, wasn't he trying to mate her with Red XIII or some such? The experiments probably started getting a little bit too profane for Ifalna to put up with. I mean, I didn't see any mention of artificial insemination when the Red/Aeris mating plot was revealed. He just threw them into a tube together and said "get it done". If he was doing similar things to Ifalna, and/or suggesting doing any such thing to Aeris, then it makes sense that she made a mad dash with her daughter.
Hmm I don't think Tseng would have met Aerith when she was a baby in any case maybe a few years later when Aerith is 9/10 he just doesn't strike me as being any older than perhaps Sephiroth in the game.
He is older, though - or he could be. On his first appearance in Crisis Core he is anywhere between 20-25, according to a SE "Crisis Core Book" snippet I translated for someone recently. He could in fact be as much as ten years older than Aerith, so depending on how old you want him to be when he joins the Turks, he could indeed have known Aerith before she and Ifalna fled the building.
He definitely knew at least Ifalna while she was in the building. Episode:Shin-Ra from On the Way to a Smile specifies that his trying to use forceful methods to procure her cooperation led to her death and made him a more principled person.
He would have been in his teens at the time of Ifalna's death, somewhere between 12 and 17. Probably closer to 17 since Cissnei was the youngest person recruited to the Turks, and I can't imagine she was younger than 13.
Actually 13 doesn't seem shockingly young in a world where you can join the military around 13 or 14 (Zack is 16 at the beginning of CC right, this is a world where adult hood comes much earlier).
My head canon is that Cissnei was literally raised Shinra as part of a social experiment, basically can we create a super soldier simply by raising children to be warriors in a controlled environment without genetic augmentation. Sort of a nature vs nurture. Cissnei was the only survivor of Hunger Games esc training programs, but he President shut down the program when it became clear that no "normal" person could ever be as strong as SOLDIER. He didn't want a "Black Widow" he wanted a "Captain America" or stronger. However, he recognized that Cissnei's abilities might be useful to the Turks so he offered her to Veld at age eight. If Veld had refused, she would have been put down.
So Cissnei, in my head canon, joined the Turks at 8 and Veld spent years trying to undo the phycological damage ShinRa had done and teach her to trust.
What we know about her backstory in canon is this:
As a young girl, Cissnei was discovered in an orphanage, was raised and trained to become a Turk. Encouraged to believe everyone's a potential enemy, she took her training seriously and became the youngest member ever to join the Turks. Her colleagues reformed her life views, particularly her paranoia, allowing her to realize not everyone is against her.
Taking a child and raising them specifically to become a Turk and to see everyone as an enemy doesn't seem like Veld's MO. Veld seems to recruit people who all ready have skills he wants who want to be Turks (for most of them because it's the best option they have). Veld is the sort of guy who sees a kid try to pull and outrageous heist of the ShinRa building and offers him a job because he likes his potential. You can't gage the potential of a child.
Even if Veld
(which is Lic's background for Tseng in her fic, and it works, I'm not saying you can't do this)
, it wouldn't make sense for the child to be raised with trust issues. The Turks are a group organization, they have to trust their partners and superiors. Cissnei had to learn to trust her colleagues, so it makes sense that she was raised to be a Turk, but not by and within the Turks themselves. This is why it is my head canon that Cissnei was raised and trained to become a Turk (i.e. have all the necessary skills to be a highly efficient operative) by ShinRa, but was not actually given to the Turks until she became one. She is the youngest to become a Turk because she was raised to have a skill set, where as most recruits didn't acquire a useful skill set until at least their teens.
As for Tseng, my head canon is that Tseng is 25 at the start of Crisis Core (he's all ready second in command of the organization), which would make him 10 years older than Aerith. In my head canon, he meets Aerith as a baby because he was taken in by Veld when he was 7 after his mother, a friend of Veld's who was working as an informant for Veld, was murdered by gangsters who found out she was reporting to ShinRa. Veld raised Tseng because he felt a responsibility to him and also thought having a Wutain Turk who he knew for a fact had no ties to Wutai, would be useful.
(I wrote a fanfic about this for a contest at a con and won second place, unfortunately, I wrote it on paper which got lost so I'll need to actually rewrite this at some point).
Tseng didn't become a Turk until he was much older but Veld introduced him to Rufus and Aerith when they were both children in the hopes that he grow up with a sense of duty to them. Veld saw that Tseng was prone to be protective so he tried to foster that into something useful. But that's just my head canon.
Even without a head canon to have Tseng around at a young age, it's feasible that he became a Turk at 14, and could have know her at age 4 or that that he was a Turk at 17 and knew her at age 7. However, canon does say:
The first time Aerith spoke to him was when she was still just a child.
“Thank you for your hardwork as always.”
Tseng was suspicious of the words he just heard from the young girl. Seeing how silent he stayed, Aerith continued.
This is their first canon interaction, which takes place after she's with Elmyra but still young, so Tseng is definitely a lot older than Aerith. This is also the reason I have my Tseng meet Aerith when she's still a baby, so I can keep this as their first cannon conversation. But then again, I'm one of those writers that bends over backwards trying to work within cannon.
True, but surely she wouldn't have to worry about seen as different by someone like Nanaki. I think if you're different it's easier to share with other people who are different too, and when it comes to trauma sharing with someone who might have similar experiences can be a great release because a) you're not alone and b) someone else gets it. I think you could have a great scene between them, but I do understand we're limited by what they'd say in front of Cloud. All the same, it seems like something the writers could work in if they wanted to explore it. It would have been a nice bonding moment.
What people should worry about and what they do worry about can be very different, and 'easier' isn't 'easy'. Could've been a nice captivity, might not have, we have no idea either way.
However, he recognized that Cissnei's abilities might be useful to the Turks so he offered her to Veld at age eight. If Veld had refused, she would have been put down.
I don't know about that part, there are plenty of uses for a super well trained child apart from the Turks, killing her after all those years would be a waste. Just induct her into the army or DG.
An elite spy with trust issues seems like it'd be pretty useful, to me. Not for their mental health, but they would have their uses. You would need them to trust her colleagues, but with regard to the general population, mistrust can be useful. Stops stuff like the Chelsea situation.
Good point, maybe instead of put down she would have been given to Hojo for augmentation, over the objections of the professor who began the no augmentation project. Maybe the professor who raised her pressed Veld to take her because he didn't want his "master piece" metaled with because he was pro human capacity. I may tweak my head canon there...
I just think Veld might have hesitated to take someone mentally unstable who had trouble functioning in a group. Of course, he did take her, she is useful. My main head canon is mostly that she wasn't raised by the Turks per se.
