I mean, it's not a mystery to me. People on this page are desperately hoping the Love Triangle is already over (which does not help Tifa's ship btw, sucking out all the drama in the near-term) and so they take issue with me saying the game framing Aerith as the explicitly secondary protagonist makes that prediction unlikely. Not impossible but unlikely. Especially since the love triangle is really marketable.
As far as I can tell, no one is framing you for "highlight Aerith's importance", but for trying to use it to diminish other characters at a few points here.
Also, this "LTD is over" topic is pretty recent while this conversation about Aerith has been going on for quite a while, so I think you confusing topics and arguments here.
Glad to know
@Theozilla and
@Yumelinh think my argument is disingenuous but do such a bad job at confronting that. "Agree to disagree" lol. Not that I really thought that stance was an honest one to begin with.
*sigh* Look, what you don't seem to be noticing is that we aren't confronting each other arguments or even debating anything... we're running in circles here. Repeating the same thing over and over again with different words, while one doesn't seem to understand clearly what the other was trying to convey. Idk about you, but I'm sure as hell don't want to be wasting my time on something that's going absolutely nowhere.
I can't speak for
@Theozilla, but he might as well feel the same way.
I was tempted to just rephrase your point about love interests as "how come when I ask you X you say A, but when I bring up Y you say B?" You don't seem to get two separate questions are two separate questions and so an answer to one is not an answer to both. But I will elaborate further.
But this is why I get so tired of repeating myself. The argument I made before is simply not what you were ascribing to me. The fact that I might make a similar argument if you asked me something that was not the subject before is really not gonna change that. And I even said it's largely based on perspective toward the question rather than an ironclad position.
Please, refer to my point above.
To get specific though, I was arguing Cloud's interest in Aerith is used to highlight her importance to the player. And knowing she will continue to be important makes it hard to imagine the devs will drop whatever drama or intrigue they could have with her and Cloud (which has always been romantic, not platonic). If you asked if I thought Aerith was the main love interest, which was not the argument we were having, then I would say yes and give my reasons.
And yes if you were to hypothetically argue Cloud didn't love her at all like that, not the same claim as her being a main love interest btw, you are downplaying her role. I don't see how that's controversial. It's arguing a subplot involving her is less impacting precisely where it concerns her.
I mean I don't even get how this would be missed by you. "what I'm trying to say is that Aerith importance to the story or to Cloud has nothing to do with if he loved her romantically or not." Yes it would. Whether he loves her or not is relevant to her importance to him. It makes her a bigger deal to him than just a dear friend would be.
It wouldn't! I tried to be very clear in my point by stating the nature of the love I was talking about aka romantic love.
Whether Cloud loved Aerith ROMANTICALLY or not is the part that doesn't matter
in this particular topic (ie Aerith's importance to plot and Cloud to be very specific this time), because he loved her anyway. Love comes in many forms and none of them are more or less important than romantic love. Even more so when it comes from a medium that came from and is rooted in Japanese culture, where this type of theme/love is widely more used (refer to anime/mangas).
And before you come at me from what I said above: I'm not saying Cloud didn't love Aerith romantically, that's up for debate. What I'm trying to say, once again...one more time here, is that Aerith's importance to the plot or to Cloud and his reaction to her death wouldn't have changed a single bit if turns out his feelings for her weren't romantic, because he cared and loved her anyway. I can even go as far as to give you an example of this very same point I'm trying to convey in the game itself: Zack Fair. His death was a turning point in Cloud's life and he dragged the guilt of letting such a dear person to him die even up to AC/C, however, I don't think you will argue that he wasn't important to Cloud because he didn't love him romantically, right?
This is rather strange for you to say because I often think people here want to say Cloud loving Aerith is groundless but know better. So they talk around it and try to subtly trivialize her relationship to him. I went from not being misunderstood at all to constantly misunderstood and bickered with for saying scenes where Aerith gets Cloud to do things against his nature are "shippy", and I don't think that was an honest exercise.
It's not bc we "know better", it's just because we don't have a consensus for that. Simple.
And, since we also don't have any direct confirmation of the nature of Cloud's feelings for Aerith as let's say, we have for his feelings for Tifa. We can only go by our own interpretations of this matter.
However, as far as I can tell, the vast majority of people here in this thread agree that Cloud had at least some feelings for Aerith. Whether it was just attraction or went as far as becoming love (in a
ROMANTIC way) is where we don't get into a consensus.
Don’t take it personally.
