Not quite self strawmanny enough, but you're getting there.
I'll work on it.
The Deepground left because reinforcements were coming and they'd gotten what info they'd needed. The defeat of the WRO was not considered worth delaying their plan, I think. Turns out that was STUPID of them, but it's a believably fuckup.
I would have thought the main purpose of the attack was to wipe out the WRO, though. At that point, they already had the Protomateria. All else that they could have been concerned with would be Shelke and Azul, and it doesn't seem like Azul had any trouble getting out.
You make a good enough point about the reinforcements that were on the way, though.
If nothing else, though, the transition is extremely jarring. We go from Vincent and Shelke making a run for it while Shalua gets beaten into a door by Azul -- the impression being that the WRO is trying to escape a base lost to them -- to Vincent and Reeve casually talking about not giving up, Deepground absent just as they had their most powerful opponent abandoning ship.
This. A thousand times this. I even made a picture of all this so I wouldn't have to type it again.
Glad to be of service.
No treaty, it's just considered rude to 'make fun' of specific individuals who can't- or rather, won't- fight back personally.
Ah. Well, I wasn't going so much for taking the piss out of the individual whose comments I paraphrased, so I hope they don't take it that way. I was just using their post as an example of what I was referring to.
I think most of the problems with consistency stems from the fact that the creators enjoy looking at their scenarios and storylines from differing perspectives and viewpoints, according to the character.
For example, the Nibelheim Incident. The Nibelheim Incident has two fundamental perspectives. The Turk perspective as seen in LO and BC, and the original perspective, as shown by Zack, and Cloud.
Certainly that can be enjoyable, but they take it beyond looking at it from different perspectives. It becomes completely different realities, with details that couldn't possibly accomodate one another.
When I think of different perspectives of the same events, I don't think of different histories emerging that are irreconcilable. It's one thing to show the same event from a different point of view, but another to show it from a completely separate foundation in reality.
Reality, of course, is subjective and co-mediated, but for the Turks to have had a perspective on the Nibelheim incident at all, one of them had to be there, right? A detail like that goes beyond interpretation of the individual. Crisis Core, then, should have included this, but doesn't.
LO and BC's depiction of the event is not the one they show or discuss in most Ultimania's now, as the true telling of events. They refer to these scenarios as either the Turk's recollection of events, or Tseng's recollection of events, as per the 10th Anniversary Ultimania.
But because of the text in the file Tseng was looking at in LO, we know that what LO showed wasn't what the Turks thought had happened. The same is true of BC.
In both LO and BC, Sephiroth jumps in. Also in both, the Turks concluded that he had been beaten and knocked in by Cloud.
Honestly, I think that comment in the 10th Anniversary Ultimania was SE trying to cover their rears on what they'd decided was a bad retcon. Of course, they underestimated their fanbase if they didn't think attention would be payed to what the text said in the file Tseng looked at, or that a comparison wouldn't be made between what BC actually showed and what the Turk there informed Tseng had happened
I'd even argue that Crisis Core isn't necessarily broadcast straight from Zack's eyes. He wasn't there when Tseng and Cissnei spoke on top of the Shin-Ra headquarters, after all. He couldn't have a perspective on that.
I think they do this because it's a way of freshly telling a story, that they've already told before. They enjoy it. Even in real life, you can hear a lot of differing variations and interpretations regarding a single a event. I think that's what they like doing but they know that they have to keep a few fundamentals the same for it to make sense.
I don't know what it is, really. I'm sure they enjoy portraying it different ways, but since their claim of different perspectives doesn't hold up with regard to the Turks, I honestly think that sometimes they just make mistakes and realize it themselves later.
As for Genesis not grabbing the Jenova specimen himself, he probably intended to but due to Sephiroth's appearance and his failure to convince him, decided to back off until he saw what he was gonna do. Until...well, you know the rest.
So the best explanations we have for the villains making stupid villain mistakes are that they're stupid? XD
Sometimes it really seems like SE lets the plot outline do more of the driving in these new games than the characters themselves.
EDIT: Oh, almost forgot. Aerith sucks. Keep staying dead, Aerith. We don't want you.
