When it comes to fanworks, I think it's fair for people to say things like "OG canon only" or "Remake canon compliant". You could even label it "English version compliant" versus "Japanese version compliant." Did Cloud and Co find President Shinra stabbed at his desk, or did Barret rescue him from certain death, only for them both to be skewered by Sephiroth? If, indeed, FFVIIR is a timeline shenanigans continuation of the Compilation and not a remake or re-set or whatever people want to call it, then everything in the OG happened first time around - the Remake doesn't replace it - and if people want to limit their canon to the OG part of the Compilation, what's to stop them?
I mean it’s for this exact reason that I consider the OG and remake to be separate continuities as they have events that play out in conflicting ways but it’s also why we shouldn’t confuse
continuity with
canon, with canon being the lore that informs the story and continuity being how the events of the story play out. It’s common to use the two terms interchangeably and usually you can get away with that but I’d definitely treat FF7R as an exception.
For example, the novella that came out recently. Did that information exist when the OG was made? It wouldn’t surprise me if some of those ideas may have been thought of back then before being cut, but either way, the
continuity of the OG does not include the events of Trace of Two Paths, as well as other Remake-specific events. But additions like that
are still based on the
canon of the whole FF7 universe, so I think it’s fair to at least treat additions like that as further insight into what the devs originally wanted to convey with the story.
As far as fanworks go I’d say they’ve got far more freedom to be loose with continuity, like maybe using the OG’s version of one event but the remake’s version of another. Not something I’d do, but far from the most outlandish thing I’ve heard of (y’all oldheads still need to educate me about some weird infamous Cloud and Aerith fanfiction, something about ghost sex and the Lifestream?)
That's however not how it happened. It's once they dedcided to kill Aerith, they added Tifa to make her stick with the hero until the end. And said like that, this alone proves that they intended Tifa to be Cloud's canon choice - they started building the story that way and entwined their backstories so much that people often accused Tifa of not having one (hence the "she's not important" twist when she is one of the two heroines).
Pretty much what I said but in a different order lol so I imagine the conversation went like this:
“Nah, we can’t kill the Black guy, it’s too obvious. So…the flower girl.”
“We’ll need another chick for these horny teenagers to get off to, though.”
“Well, we can take some leftover ideas from the first girl, add some new stuff, etc. etc.”
“Okay, so hear me out. We can’t make her the mysterious new girl, we already have that. So we make the second girl…the childhood friend.”
“Yes, YES! *snorts cocaine* So we can kill one girl and make the other one the ACTUAL ‘first girl’. We’ll reveal our MC is just as horny for her as the players will be!”
“Hold up. TWO love interests? So we can
have our cake…AND eat it too?!”
