You know I just realized, in Intermission, if you try to enter Seventh Heaven, the whispers will push you away. Yet even after being touched by them, Yuffie can't see them. If we take Toriyama's response about who can see the whispers to its logical conclusion, then it would appear Yuffie isn't essential to the fate of the planet.
It essentially said the two prerequisites for being able to see them are a) touching them and b) being important to the flow of the planet's destiny. Toriyama says Cloud is able to see them when he touches the whispers themselves, not when he touches Aerith, although the cinematic focus in that scene certainly makes it look otherwise. It's up to you how much stock you want to put in a secondary source like the Ultimania.
) as now she is merely a temporary conduit, on the other hand it makes it easier to imagine that Aerith wouldn't have accidentally given hundreds of people the sight over the course of her lifetime.
So if Cloud had touched Aerith when the Whispers were not around, he would not have automatically been given the sight. On one hand this moderately diminishes the joke of Aerith as a spreader of Spiritually Transmitted Diseases (
Yes, only select main characters are able to get the sight in the first place, but I think it's more elegant to imagine that touching Aerith does not automatically make you see the Whispers.
But she touches the whispers, which according to the most recent Ultimania interview is enough to let *important* characters see them.
Maybe simply touching the "wall" the Whispers generate is not enough. Maybe the wall is like some Windaja spell and so touching that one isn't to strictly speaking get in contact with a Whisper? I dunno. Maybe Yuffie just isn't important. Or it doesn't count because that scene of Yuffie "touching" the Whispers-wall at the entrance to 7th Heaven is optional.
If we infer "destiny" to mean "the plot of the original ff7," then no, she really isn't actually. You never have to recruit her, so her presence is immaterial to the original progression of events. Also see: My horrified reaction to the fact that everything the turks do after Midgar is totally optional or pointless in the overall story.
Literally nothing they do after that matters, and they would have done that regardless of if they saw ghosts or not. It's kind of hilarious actually.
If she hadn't been injured, Cloud wouldn't have gone on the mission to reactor 5. I guess that's why she became someone "important." Similar to why Wedge had to be shoved out a window. His survival was an issue.
Yeah but that's the remake's version of events, which evidently aren't going to strictly be in-line with """DESTINY""" so any newfound relevance these characters have there doesn't matter to the whispers and their plot STD.
