Gotta say, reading some takes on both Aerith and Tifa is a really unpleasant reminder that being a fictional woman sounds almost as exhausting as being a real woman, lol. It irks me because yes, the game is written by (old) men primarily for men, that was always the case and it should be pointed out, but at the end of the day there are still three main characters to this story – you remove just one of them and the plot breaks. And while Cloud is the main POV character, he’s also the most passive actor of the three until very late game, and his entire character arc struggles to justify its existence even as a concept if you remove Tifa from the equation… Yet it’s Tifa and Aerith that have to jump through so many hoops just to be considered little more than love interests, each and every action they take is constantly scrutinized and distorted beyond recognition, and they get absolutely no passes for not being able to deal with every traumatizing or difficult situation they find themselves in like a walking psychology textbook – but when Cloud does it oh it’s so fascinating! I also understand that people are annoyed and frustrated with the LTD, especially now that they’re killing it with flamethrowers and somehow it still moves, but you can’t complain that the LTD makes everything worse and dumber, then proceed to reduce every layered interaction between Cloud/Tifa/Aerith to “just the romance” and a new bullet point for the LTD.
That said, I thought there were still some really interesting points being raised in this thread about Aerith — some of which made me think harder about what certain choices could imply. I don’t necessarily think that the devs earned the benefit of the doubt with this game and many things could have been handled better, but my impression is that some of the frustrations I've seen raised at her are due to the fact that she suffers from what I would call the "OG Tifa problem”: because she seems to be tied to the “new” mystery, some key moments that would help contextualize certain scenes and choices more clearly are purposefully missing or are presented in a misleading way, to be resolved (one would hope) in the final game. Ironically, Tifa really shone bright in this game at least partly, I feel, because there's less of a necessity to save her for the surprise factor, as the game is written on the assumption that at least part of the audience already knows about it. Of course, the original plot twist involving Tifa was written much more... elegantly and didn’t require you to wait a decade and more than a hundred hours of playtime to get to the damn point, but.
For example, the games are openly toying with the idea that Zack is “alive”, so you view scenes with certain assumptions – but if he actually just died like he always did, and CC is canon to this continuity, that means that Aerith knows it on some level and that, more than simply reliving her lost romance in a new way with Cloud, with all the complexities that entails, she finds herself grieving Zack through Cloud’s warped facsimile. And if at any point she tried to tell herself that he just ghosted her to go live a happy life and then suddenly died five years later… by talking with Tifa as the game progresses she can now correctly assume that something really bad happened to him in Nibelheim that prevented him from getting back to her. What’s more, the one person that might be able to give her answers and closure – someone she’s grown genuinely attached to and that helped change her life in ways she might have never thought possible – is in no state to do so. Like Tifa would say, “it’s a little more complicated” than who does Aerith like the most and to what degree. This is of course just a possible interpretation and may not turn out to be correct, but I think it goes to show how things may not be as clearcut as they seem and we’re not getting the full picture.
Regarding her “dream date” with Cloud, I personally found this specific scene intriguing and bittersweet, but it's fair that people question the fact that what is (maybe?) one of her last few impactful scenes seemingly revolves entirely around Cloud, or even Zack, or just romance in general. I feel like that's a valid concern, and so is the fear that tying her death to Cloud’s mental state might diminish it to nothing more than fridging (which I’d really, really hate). Unfortunately, I don’t think we can fully address these points without the bigger context of Part 3, though I will say that I doubt this was really the last that we'll see of Aerith (for better or worse).
For what it’s worth, not only there are actual plot reasons as to why Aerith needed to get Cloud there somehow (the whole white materia thing that I honestly don’t give two shits about), but I feel like this is another one of those instances where some context is probably missing, or is apparently altered or misplaced. If you cut down the trippy bullshit and the “dreams” that the game bombards us with, Aerith's last real life interactions with Cloud range between creepy and outright violent. In the OG, we know that he brutally attacks her at the Temple, then almost kills her at the altar, and then she dies right in front of him. In Rebirth, what actually happens after they both fall at the Temple seems weird and muddled, to the point where I'm not entirely sure what went on (what if he tried to attack her still, but we just haven’t seen it yet?)… but I think it's safe to say that he's still quite horrible to her. It’s not beyond the realm of possibilities that she would want to give herself (and hopefully him, in time) one last good memory in which he's not being a deranged madman at her, while trying to get some shred of closure for once in her miserable existence.
About her death and the role it may play in Cloud’s mental collapse and general arc, I… think that especially Rebirth shows that they want to debunk a lot of the bad readings and misconceptions on the source material that have piled on over the years. If you’ve been in this fandom for as long as I have, you should be very familiar with all the discourse surrounding Tifa and her silence regarding Cloud’s recollection of the Nibelheim incident, and Rebirth went out of its way to show why that was kind of missing the point of the situation. And it’s interesting that now this ending seems to build up another common misconception: this idea that it was Aerith’s death that caused Cloud’s mind to break. Now, it’s very possible that they’ll double down on it and make it aaall about him, I wouldn’t be shocked if they did, but… would you say it’s really needed? Cloud seems so far gone already, way more than in the OG, and Sephiroth didn’t need it the first time around anyway. I mean, if I were him and I knew shit that I shouldn’t, maybe I’d try to use her death to break… someone else… you know, the real threat to my plan that I’ve been targeting for an entire game.
I also think that part of the issue is that Aerith’s and (to a much lesser extent) Zack’s deaths have become bigger than the characters themselves. And because these are games that are quite aware of the fact that they’re interactive experiences, the interactive element – our input and reaction to it – is part of the story. Actually, this whole project feels more and more like a post-mortem analysis of both the original and people’s experience with it. With that in mind, Sephiroth murdering her is not just one of Cloud’s perceived personal failures, but something that belongs to our own collective memory: we are the ones who couldn’t save her, because she was never ours to be saved, and we’re the ones that are being called to come to terms with it once again 30 years after the fact, through Cloud. I will also add that her death being reduced to the failure to save her could be considered a bad reading of the material, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Remake and Rebirth talk about it so openly precisely to debunk this particular take in the last installment.
Hopefully, once Aerith’s role in that particular conversation is played, Aerith-the-character will be disentangled from Cloud and mourned in-game for who she was, for what she meant to each character either directly or indirectly, and her death will be unquestionably presented as a waste rather than a noble sacrifice for the greater good (another wildly common misconception, at least to me). As to why they immediately showed Aerith being “fine” and not really gone in the last scene – I definitely think the OG was much more poignant in its simplicity, and braver in the way it firmly denied any real closure with death, like… they’re not even in the same league, but… I think it’s possible that they’re trying to do it almost in reverse: you get the consolation first (see? She’s not fully gone, and she’s more or less at peace! But you knew that already because we’ve been here before), to only later realize that it doesn’t really change things in all the ways that matter. Actually, Aerith says it best right after the Trials: “knowing the people that we love aren’t really gone […] doesn’t make it any easier to let them go”. Will it even work, will they make it feel meaningful at all? I don’t know – personally, I felt nothing when I played this ending. I can only hope they stick the landing better than they did with these first two games, but I do think there is a point that they’re trying to make.
And speaking of reverse, this kinda brings me to my last point (we finally made it!). Another interesting question that was raised was… what is even Aerith’s arc in this entire trilogy? I’ve been wondering about that for a while, because Remake already changed things quite a bit and it’s not linear at all.
So her original arc went pretty much like this: just a girl, uncomfortable with her identity, throughout the game she grows to accept it and comes into her own, but the more she embraces her heritage, the more isolated she becomes – and that’s how she dies, fundamentally alone, knowing things she never gets to tell the party, engulfed in this unbearable loneliness that she can’t share with anyone and that she seems to have accepted as an inescapable part of her life. In Remake, she almost felt like was at the end of her original arc: someone who’s keenly aware of her identity and her role, knowing things she’s not telling, doing “Cetra things” that we don’t quite understand, and probably being the loneliest she’s ever been. In Rebirth, the original arc is mirrored a bit more, though I think now there was an attempt to stress that her Cetra heritage is something that she really doesn’t want, has absolutely no idea how to use, and doesn’t exactly embrace – more like “resigns” herself to, all to save the people she loves. If they really want to give people full closure this time, then maybe one way to end her arc, after everything is said and done, could be to transition from “super Cetra goddess” to someone who’s finally free to be just herself, finding her personal promised land – where she can meet everyone she’s ever loved again. I guess we’ll see.
