Perfect analogy, thank you, I'm stealing it...wait, i actually think i may have made the same comparison in the past, its so accurate.Ugh, "people are allowed to move on after their first love" has got to be one of the dumbest straw man arguments in LTD. Just a way for CAs to feel like they have the more mature take over CT, honestly. It's not that people en masse can't appreciate a "moving on" theme, it's that clearly, FFVII ain't that story.
I mean damn, millions of people were tuned in for The Mother when HIMYM was at its peak, and that's because the story had set her up for years as the ultimate Last Girl Wins trope. But then the writers bamboozled everyone by making Ted go back to Robin, one of the biggest fumbles in TV history.
FFVII, by contrast, has never set up Aerith as the Last Girls Wins. If anything, it did everything it could to set up Tifa as the First Girl Wins.
Thing is, I actually thought the HIMYM twist was quite clever in concept. The problem is that reality got in the way of it. If the show had been SEVERAL seasons shorter and had properly focused on Ted and Robin as being this perfect star-crossed couple where everyone feels like they should be together and is upset that they're not, then I totally believe the twist could work.
But the story became too popular, too many seasons were forced through, Robin and Ted were too deeply explored and shown to just be friends, her relationship with barney was too set-up and likable, the identity of the mother became too much of an investment and when she was introduced the chemistry was too good. And as a result, no, Ted and Robin are not allowed to move on and end up with each other, because while it's a clever twist that momentary spark of "oeh clever" is overshadowed by the sensation of everything we've seen the past 6 seasons being essentially a meaningless waste of time.
It's scarily similar to ffvii.