Magos-Dominus
Rookie Adventurer
- AKA
- Magos
(This gets rambling, introspective and philosophical by end. Stream of consciousness will do that to you, sometimes.)
So, realization I've come to after reading more literal translations of the Japanese Script: Whenever Cloud refers to AVALANCHE in Japanese, its usually as 'Tifa-Tachi' or Tifa's Group/Friends. Combined with the scene in Chapter 3 where you are barred from the AVALANCHE party in Seventh Heaven, its a callback (call forward?) to the fact that Cloud was the loner kid in Nibelheim and, despite being friends with Tifa, was never really included in their peer group. (Referenced both in Cloud's flashback in Reactor 1 and in another flashback overlaid with the children in Sector 5) That, on top of the fact that they're literally neighbors again after Cloud moves into her apartment complex, the broad strokes recreation of their dynamic in Nibelheim is basically complete. Also, 'Stargazer Heights' is Not Subtle, and the artistic decision to have the night sky during the Cloud/Tifa promise flashback be the same combination of Blue/Green as Cloud's eyes was not lost me.
That, and the more obvious reference of Cloud and Tifa's repeated hand-reach/catch scenes being a deliberate callback (call forward?) to Tifa falling off a cliff when they were kids and Cloud failing to catch her, which her father blamed him for, which led Cloud blaming himself for the accident, which led to him wanting to be stronger, which led to him wanting to be like Sephiroth, which led to him wanting to join SOLDIER, which led to...
I'm gonna go have good cry. Thank you for coming to this morning's episode of 'Magos Gets Choked Up About Symbolism.'
Apart from that, though, I've seen a lot of complaints about the final sequence that is Chapter 18 being too much like Advent Children, particularly the fight choreography, and theories about how the Whisper sub-bosses are manifestations of Kadaj/Loz/Yazoo and Bahamut SIN from the movie, but I'd argue it actually goes a lot further than that.
The Whispers, within the mystical, surrealist pseudo-reality manifested by the Lifestream in Chapter 18, symbolically manifest, from antagonists to setting, the conflicts in Advent Children to oppose Aerith, Barret, Cloud, and Tifa as incarnations of the future they are trying to preserve. The symbolic nature of the Latin-Word Themed Whisper sub-bosses I don't think are in contest here, but it goes further than that. Not only does the encounter take place in the same ruined-Midgar setting as the movie's climax, the Chapter shares the film's washed out, monochrome color pallet, in addition to the over-the-top high-powered fight sequence between Cloud and Sephiroth where they're fighting through and with titanic chunks of urban rubble and blasting apart house-sized chunks of debris with single strokes, despite the rest of the game being fairly low-powered as far as the party's strength is concerned (See: Cloud and Barret wailing on a metal door in Chapter 17 to no avail).
The 'Chapter 18 as Advent Children Themed Fever Dream' continues after the Harbinger is defeated and the fight with Sephiroth begins, with him manifesting the now-iconic singular black wing from the movie, the recreation of the fight through the crumbling remnants of the Shin-Ra building, down to (and I'd have to go back and check this, but its likely given the care taken with the scene from Crisis Core) a few frame-for-frame recreations of some of the shots in that final fight, and the fact that this version of Sephiroth has at least the broad strokes knowledge of the future, AVALANCHE is metaphorically, symbolically, and to a degree literally, fighting the Sephiroth from the end of Advent Children.
Despite my own various grievances with the movie (mostly undoing and retreading a lot of the game's best moments of character development, the fact that its become the iconic version of FFVII, and that I've had to endure a constant stream of Cloud-Is-An-Absent-Father-And-He-And-Tifa-Have-A-Broken-Marriage fic for the past 15 years instead of the tooth-rotting domestic or action/adventure fluffthey deserve I've been wanting, but those last two aren't really the movie's fault), my continued frustrations with the Tetsuya Nomura the developers being cute with the wordplay (The double meaning of the REMAKE subtitle and the 'Advent Children is the Heart of FFVII: REMAKE' being the most grievous offenders), and a philosophical disagreement with the direction taken with the inclusion of the Whispers (I don't think iterative storytelling is a bad thing, but as people who've told this story before I can understand and respect where Kitase, Nojima, and Nomura coming from), I confess that its pretty well put together, even with the pacing missteps and the fact that its super hard to parse in-the-moment, even if you're like me and have a solid working understanding of the Compliation's main plot beats and a passion for literary and cinematic deconstruction and analysis (tooting my own horn a bit, I'm aware).
Now that my overblown, apoplectic rage over my initial read of the ending (a time-travel-plot that was gonna steam-roll over the important character arcs and beats that makes the original not just a well-loved piece of gaming history, but a genuinely well-put-together and meaningful piece of art and storytelling in its own right) has passed, and I've been able to sit with it and think for the last two weeks, I've made peace with the changes and am genuinely looking forward to where the story goes from here, though my lingering desire that the REMAKE would ignore the majority of the Compilation tastes a bit of Monkey Paw given that we've now witnessed the characters we all fell in love with the first go around symbolically slam-dunk it through the floorboards.
Finally, to weigh in on the ongoing 'Are Biggs, Wedge, Jessie, Zack, and/or Aerith Alive Now/Going to Live?', my projections going forward are 'Yes, No, Maybe, Absolutely Not, and Never In a Million Years.' Biggs, I feel is self-evident, we see him alive in the closing cinematic, no ambiguity there. Jessie is up in the air, given that Biggs was on the Pillar as well and we see some of her affects at his bedside, and the telegraphed decision of Cloud, Tifa, and Barret to not investigate the remains of the pillar when they go on their rescue mission in Chapter 13 is setup for the Biggs reveal so Jessie very well might be in the cards as well. Wedge, on the other hand, I don't think makes it, despite the obvious read of an off-screen fall being cinematic shorthand for a not-death, I think our chain is being yanked, given that that's the most emotionally impactful function the Whispers have in the narrative. Wedge, a man who is mostly comic relief for the majority of the running time, a fact he is aware of to the point of self-deprecation, finally mustering up his courage where the original had him die to be the hero he's wanted to be and save a good chunk of the citizens of Sector 7, and later prove a welcome bit of assistance to the party during their infiltration of Shin-Ra HQ, only to be cut down unceremoniously off-screen after he's grown on the audience and begun to come into his own is the kind of cruel, pointless, closure-denying tragedy that was the original's stock and trade. Biggs and Jessie do, however, get the more cinematic farewells, Biggs being a known shell-game at this point and Jessie being the most built-up loss of the game, given the dramatically increased about of detail her character receives, and the fact that she anchors the thematics of AVALANCHE's role in the death's of countless innocent lives as the result of the direct and indirect fallout of their actions and the attendant guilt, a role she shares with Tifa, which makes their tearful goodbye all the more heartbreaking.
It's a noticeable change in execution from the major deaths in the original, namely Aerith, Zack, and even themselves, where an important thematic point is that they're there on moment and gone the next, but the deaths of the original Biggs, Jessie, and Wedge in the OG don't really have a huge amount of emotional impact, mostly owing to the fact that you've known them for all of three hours, it doesn't sink in the way it does with Aerith, who the audience has likely spent 20+ hours with as a character and who the game spends an inordinate amount of resources into getting you to care about, or with Zack, who after being teased about the importance of for 90% of the game, the audience gets a brief, five minute sequence that manages to endear them to him as a character before he gets shot dead in a ditch on the side of the road, or the way it plays out with Wedge, that a little flagrant Hollywood emotional manipulation is the more emotionally impactful choice for these two. Muddles the theme a bit, but I imagine that was a calculated trade-off.
Onto Aerith and Zack, though. Remember what I said about Wedge being an exercise in yanking our collective chain? That's just gonna get worse. First off, mechanical and narrative construction considerations: Zack is Dead. Like, No-He's-Fine-He-Just-Went-To-Live-On-A-Farm-Upstate-Here's-A-New-Puppy-Stop-Crying Dead. For those of you not in the know, the official timeline on events from Zack's Last Stand to the Reactor 1 Bombing Mission is September to December. Cloud has been on his own for a few months, and in Tifa's care for at least a few weeks while he recovered from his long brine in the thought-juice. This is never actually addressed in the text of the OG or any of the Compilation material, but it is in one of the Ultimanias, and given the loving attention to detail in recreating the end-scene from Crisis Core, I'm laboring under the assumption that everything previously detailed as Canon up until the end of REMAKE still holds true for the most part.
That's a immense amount of time for things to play out differently for Zack and Cloud, and tremendous amount of narrative resources that would need to be dumped into explaining a timeline rewrite where he survives in a satisfying way without Part 2 just being a retelling of Part 1 But With Zack Fair This Time, which begs the question of if that's the plan going forward, why tell the story of Part 1 at all? This isn't even getting into his presence single-handedly turning the original plot inside out. The core narrative cannot cross paths with Zack Fair without tearing itself apart under the strain. Our boy is gone, and we need to accept that.
Which brings us to Aerith. Could Aerith survive and the plot still play out basically the same without any major changes? Absolutely she could. Is her death required to save the planet from Meteor? Though I've seen that argument, I'd say the answer is no, given the fact that she's an Ancient and the final battle takes place within the lifestream, she's perfectly capable of asking the planet for help while alive. There's no mechanical reason why she couldn't still do that and save the world.
As a thematic aside, looking only at the OG, I never got the sense that it was literally Aerith that saved them, but the Planet itself, given that you are laboring under the assumption that Holy may well just kill everyone as well, but keep going because its still the right thing to do, and holding onto that stubborn hope and fighting for each other, moreso than fighting for the planet, is a big theme once we hit the endgame. Cloud does a big speech about it before the final fight, one where he explicitly calls out the fact that wanting to defeat Sephiroth for revenge, or to in the name of Aerith's memory is garbage reason to keep going and if that's what was pushing any member of the party to stay, they should just stay home. They needed to move on from their grief, and find someone or something they could still fight and live for. I interpret Cloud's statement about how he's going anyway to 'finish this' to be less about a personal revenge motivation and more guilt-driven responsibility. The man is super hard on himself, and despite being actively manipulated into handing over the Black Materia, he still feels like this is his mess to clean up. The final glimpse of Aerith we see, the same closeup of her face we open the game with to book end the narrative, I don't interpret as her literal presence, but a reminder that the people we love are still with us, even after they've died, her presence and absence impossible not to note at the same time as every group shot, even the character select menu, post Forgotten Capital retains a gap where another person should be. She is, in all meaningful senses, gone. But the things and people she cared about are still there, and the actions she took to protect them do not have to be in vain.
Where was I going with this? (Besides getting into a detailed list of why AC bothers me and doesn't fit well thematically with the OG.)
I remember, now.
Aerith isn't making it. The fact that she entirely could and the game still play out without a hitch, and the fact that her survival is the one collective lizard-brain desire of the FFVII fanbase Is. The. Point. Final Fantasy VII is a story about Grief, and moving on from it. Every character arc in the game: Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Nanaki, Reeve, Yuffie, Vincent, Cid, etc. is defined by the experience of some heartbreaking loss and their journey in coping with and coming to terms with it. Even borderline one-dimensional megalomaniac Sephiroth is defined by his grief, or rather, his inability or unwillingness to process it. Much as he goes on at length to Cloud about how he's just a puppet, Sephiroth doesn't even get the dignity of being manipulated. He's just a tool (zing), used by everyone around him, from Shin-Ra, to Hojo, to JENOVA to further their plans, his Pride is the only thing that really defines him as an independent person, and the end of the Wutai War, and his relevance as a warrior, reduced to clean-up operations in the middle of nowhere despite being the strongest man who ever lived, and then the revelation in the Shin-Ra Mansion's basement that the things he prides himself in, the things that make him special, are the results of someone else's work, or have nothing to even do with him at all, sends him over the deep end. He concocts steadily more grandiose titles and goals to emotionally shield himself from that blow to his psyche. First, he's the Last of the Ancients, Sole True Heir to the Planet, here to reclaim it from the unworthy (re: everyone he feels beneath him, or just: everyone). Then, he's Heaven's Dark Harbinger, Avatar of Jenova, here to finish his Mother's Great Work. By the end of the game, his goal has shifted to full-on aspirations of apotheosis, to make the god-complex he's committed every atrocity and told every lie, even to himself, to protect a reality. He even slips between these a couple times mid-narrative because none of them are actually important to him as more than self-justification. It's horseshit all the way down. Come REMAKE, he's only gotten worse, now that he's got at least partial access to the planet's non-linear perception of time, being able to alter Destiny or Fate is just just another thing to feed his ego. It's probably why he's more mouthy to Cloud this time around, as toying with him effortlessly as a show of superiority is now more of a balm to his ego, now that he's at three losses to some blonde kid nobody from nowhere instead just the one. First time he could write it off as a fluke, now its a pattern, one he wants to gloat about how easily he can break it now. (He can't, his inability to process his grief is reflective of his inability to grow or change as a person, so his just gonna make the same, but different mistakes this time around).
But back to Aerith. She's not gonna make it because her death is the thematic cornerstone of this entire narrative. Did you know that they floated Barret as the character to die mid-game during development? Do you know why they chose Aerith instead?
Its because it hurt more. In a manner unique to the medium of video games, we grieved for a fictional character. It wasn't sympathetic grief, where we felt for Cloud and Tifa and the rest of the party and suffered as they suffered, but because over the course of the game, she wasn't just friends with the rest of the motley found family that was AVALANCHE, she was yours, in whatever small way a collection of code and color and sound can be, and you felt that alongside the rest of the cast. I feel that, we, the audience, occupy those gaps where Aerith used to be in party. Those empty spaces where we're together with the cast, bonded by a shared loss, Cloud's final speeches and sentiments to us, the audience, as much as they are to AVALANCHE. While I was spoiled of this twist, having not actually sat down to play the game until 2015, and took pains to avoid stepping into that emotional bear trap on the way, I still stop every time I get back to Forgotten Capital, like I imagine a few of you might, and set aside a save before I get it over with. Maybe this time it'll be different, I tell myself. Maybe this time I can do something. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
But you can't, only re-live that bargaining stage one more time and see her mission out to the end. REMAKE feels more and more like that the more I sit with it, like your brain trying to reason and bargain and explain your way out of an old, unprocessed grief, but it can't. At some point, you gotta accept that those maybes aren't real, they're just ghosts you haunt yourself with because its better to think you could've done something and imagine than accept that there was never anything you could do, and that is was always going to end like this. It's like the man said, himself, "We have to move on from Aerith's memory."
We have to go on without her. Only thing left to do is finish the work she lost her life doing, and give our girl the sendoff she deserves one last time.
So, realization I've come to after reading more literal translations of the Japanese Script: Whenever Cloud refers to AVALANCHE in Japanese, its usually as 'Tifa-Tachi' or Tifa's Group/Friends. Combined with the scene in Chapter 3 where you are barred from the AVALANCHE party in Seventh Heaven, its a callback (call forward?) to the fact that Cloud was the loner kid in Nibelheim and, despite being friends with Tifa, was never really included in their peer group. (Referenced both in Cloud's flashback in Reactor 1 and in another flashback overlaid with the children in Sector 5) That, on top of the fact that they're literally neighbors again after Cloud moves into her apartment complex, the broad strokes recreation of their dynamic in Nibelheim is basically complete. Also, 'Stargazer Heights' is Not Subtle, and the artistic decision to have the night sky during the Cloud/Tifa promise flashback be the same combination of Blue/Green as Cloud's eyes was not lost me.
That, and the more obvious reference of Cloud and Tifa's repeated hand-reach/catch scenes being a deliberate callback (call forward?) to Tifa falling off a cliff when they were kids and Cloud failing to catch her, which her father blamed him for, which led Cloud blaming himself for the accident, which led to him wanting to be stronger, which led to him wanting to be like Sephiroth, which led to him wanting to join SOLDIER, which led to...
I'm gonna go have good cry. Thank you for coming to this morning's episode of 'Magos Gets Choked Up About Symbolism.'
Apart from that, though, I've seen a lot of complaints about the final sequence that is Chapter 18 being too much like Advent Children, particularly the fight choreography, and theories about how the Whisper sub-bosses are manifestations of Kadaj/Loz/Yazoo and Bahamut SIN from the movie, but I'd argue it actually goes a lot further than that.
The Whispers, within the mystical, surrealist pseudo-reality manifested by the Lifestream in Chapter 18, symbolically manifest, from antagonists to setting, the conflicts in Advent Children to oppose Aerith, Barret, Cloud, and Tifa as incarnations of the future they are trying to preserve. The symbolic nature of the Latin-Word Themed Whisper sub-bosses I don't think are in contest here, but it goes further than that. Not only does the encounter take place in the same ruined-Midgar setting as the movie's climax, the Chapter shares the film's washed out, monochrome color pallet, in addition to the over-the-top high-powered fight sequence between Cloud and Sephiroth where they're fighting through and with titanic chunks of urban rubble and blasting apart house-sized chunks of debris with single strokes, despite the rest of the game being fairly low-powered as far as the party's strength is concerned (See: Cloud and Barret wailing on a metal door in Chapter 17 to no avail).
The 'Chapter 18 as Advent Children Themed Fever Dream' continues after the Harbinger is defeated and the fight with Sephiroth begins, with him manifesting the now-iconic singular black wing from the movie, the recreation of the fight through the crumbling remnants of the Shin-Ra building, down to (and I'd have to go back and check this, but its likely given the care taken with the scene from Crisis Core) a few frame-for-frame recreations of some of the shots in that final fight, and the fact that this version of Sephiroth has at least the broad strokes knowledge of the future, AVALANCHE is metaphorically, symbolically, and to a degree literally, fighting the Sephiroth from the end of Advent Children.
Despite my own various grievances with the movie (mostly undoing and retreading a lot of the game's best moments of character development, the fact that its become the iconic version of FFVII, and that I've had to endure a constant stream of Cloud-Is-An-Absent-Father-And-He-And-Tifa-Have-A-Broken-Marriage fic for the past 15 years instead of the tooth-rotting domestic or action/adventure fluff
Now that my overblown, apoplectic rage over my initial read of the ending (a time-travel-plot that was gonna steam-roll over the important character arcs and beats that makes the original not just a well-loved piece of gaming history, but a genuinely well-put-together and meaningful piece of art and storytelling in its own right) has passed, and I've been able to sit with it and think for the last two weeks, I've made peace with the changes and am genuinely looking forward to where the story goes from here, though my lingering desire that the REMAKE would ignore the majority of the Compilation tastes a bit of Monkey Paw given that we've now witnessed the characters we all fell in love with the first go around symbolically slam-dunk it through the floorboards.
Finally, to weigh in on the ongoing 'Are Biggs, Wedge, Jessie, Zack, and/or Aerith Alive Now/Going to Live?', my projections going forward are 'Yes, No, Maybe, Absolutely Not, and Never In a Million Years.' Biggs, I feel is self-evident, we see him alive in the closing cinematic, no ambiguity there. Jessie is up in the air, given that Biggs was on the Pillar as well and we see some of her affects at his bedside, and the telegraphed decision of Cloud, Tifa, and Barret to not investigate the remains of the pillar when they go on their rescue mission in Chapter 13 is setup for the Biggs reveal so Jessie very well might be in the cards as well. Wedge, on the other hand, I don't think makes it, despite the obvious read of an off-screen fall being cinematic shorthand for a not-death, I think our chain is being yanked, given that that's the most emotionally impactful function the Whispers have in the narrative. Wedge, a man who is mostly comic relief for the majority of the running time, a fact he is aware of to the point of self-deprecation, finally mustering up his courage where the original had him die to be the hero he's wanted to be and save a good chunk of the citizens of Sector 7, and later prove a welcome bit of assistance to the party during their infiltration of Shin-Ra HQ, only to be cut down unceremoniously off-screen after he's grown on the audience and begun to come into his own is the kind of cruel, pointless, closure-denying tragedy that was the original's stock and trade. Biggs and Jessie do, however, get the more cinematic farewells, Biggs being a known shell-game at this point and Jessie being the most built-up loss of the game, given the dramatically increased about of detail her character receives, and the fact that she anchors the thematics of AVALANCHE's role in the death's of countless innocent lives as the result of the direct and indirect fallout of their actions and the attendant guilt, a role she shares with Tifa, which makes their tearful goodbye all the more heartbreaking.
It's a noticeable change in execution from the major deaths in the original, namely Aerith, Zack, and even themselves, where an important thematic point is that they're there on moment and gone the next, but the deaths of the original Biggs, Jessie, and Wedge in the OG don't really have a huge amount of emotional impact, mostly owing to the fact that you've known them for all of three hours, it doesn't sink in the way it does with Aerith, who the audience has likely spent 20+ hours with as a character and who the game spends an inordinate amount of resources into getting you to care about, or with Zack, who after being teased about the importance of for 90% of the game, the audience gets a brief, five minute sequence that manages to endear them to him as a character before he gets shot dead in a ditch on the side of the road, or the way it plays out with Wedge, that a little flagrant Hollywood emotional manipulation is the more emotionally impactful choice for these two. Muddles the theme a bit, but I imagine that was a calculated trade-off.
Onto Aerith and Zack, though. Remember what I said about Wedge being an exercise in yanking our collective chain? That's just gonna get worse. First off, mechanical and narrative construction considerations: Zack is Dead. Like, No-He's-Fine-He-Just-Went-To-Live-On-A-Farm-Upstate-Here's-A-New-Puppy-Stop-Crying Dead. For those of you not in the know, the official timeline on events from Zack's Last Stand to the Reactor 1 Bombing Mission is September to December. Cloud has been on his own for a few months, and in Tifa's care for at least a few weeks while he recovered from his long brine in the thought-juice. This is never actually addressed in the text of the OG or any of the Compilation material, but it is in one of the Ultimanias, and given the loving attention to detail in recreating the end-scene from Crisis Core, I'm laboring under the assumption that everything previously detailed as Canon up until the end of REMAKE still holds true for the most part.
That's a immense amount of time for things to play out differently for Zack and Cloud, and tremendous amount of narrative resources that would need to be dumped into explaining a timeline rewrite where he survives in a satisfying way without Part 2 just being a retelling of Part 1 But With Zack Fair This Time, which begs the question of if that's the plan going forward, why tell the story of Part 1 at all? This isn't even getting into his presence single-handedly turning the original plot inside out. The core narrative cannot cross paths with Zack Fair without tearing itself apart under the strain. Our boy is gone, and we need to accept that.
Which brings us to Aerith. Could Aerith survive and the plot still play out basically the same without any major changes? Absolutely she could. Is her death required to save the planet from Meteor? Though I've seen that argument, I'd say the answer is no, given the fact that she's an Ancient and the final battle takes place within the lifestream, she's perfectly capable of asking the planet for help while alive. There's no mechanical reason why she couldn't still do that and save the world.
As a thematic aside, looking only at the OG, I never got the sense that it was literally Aerith that saved them, but the Planet itself, given that you are laboring under the assumption that Holy may well just kill everyone as well, but keep going because its still the right thing to do, and holding onto that stubborn hope and fighting for each other, moreso than fighting for the planet, is a big theme once we hit the endgame. Cloud does a big speech about it before the final fight, one where he explicitly calls out the fact that wanting to defeat Sephiroth for revenge, or to in the name of Aerith's memory is garbage reason to keep going and if that's what was pushing any member of the party to stay, they should just stay home. They needed to move on from their grief, and find someone or something they could still fight and live for. I interpret Cloud's statement about how he's going anyway to 'finish this' to be less about a personal revenge motivation and more guilt-driven responsibility. The man is super hard on himself, and despite being actively manipulated into handing over the Black Materia, he still feels like this is his mess to clean up. The final glimpse of Aerith we see, the same closeup of her face we open the game with to book end the narrative, I don't interpret as her literal presence, but a reminder that the people we love are still with us, even after they've died, her presence and absence impossible not to note at the same time as every group shot, even the character select menu, post Forgotten Capital retains a gap where another person should be. She is, in all meaningful senses, gone. But the things and people she cared about are still there, and the actions she took to protect them do not have to be in vain.
Where was I going with this? (Besides getting into a detailed list of why AC bothers me and doesn't fit well thematically with the OG.)
I remember, now.
Aerith isn't making it. The fact that she entirely could and the game still play out without a hitch, and the fact that her survival is the one collective lizard-brain desire of the FFVII fanbase Is. The. Point. Final Fantasy VII is a story about Grief, and moving on from it. Every character arc in the game: Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Nanaki, Reeve, Yuffie, Vincent, Cid, etc. is defined by the experience of some heartbreaking loss and their journey in coping with and coming to terms with it. Even borderline one-dimensional megalomaniac Sephiroth is defined by his grief, or rather, his inability or unwillingness to process it. Much as he goes on at length to Cloud about how he's just a puppet, Sephiroth doesn't even get the dignity of being manipulated. He's just a tool (zing), used by everyone around him, from Shin-Ra, to Hojo, to JENOVA to further their plans, his Pride is the only thing that really defines him as an independent person, and the end of the Wutai War, and his relevance as a warrior, reduced to clean-up operations in the middle of nowhere despite being the strongest man who ever lived, and then the revelation in the Shin-Ra Mansion's basement that the things he prides himself in, the things that make him special, are the results of someone else's work, or have nothing to even do with him at all, sends him over the deep end. He concocts steadily more grandiose titles and goals to emotionally shield himself from that blow to his psyche. First, he's the Last of the Ancients, Sole True Heir to the Planet, here to reclaim it from the unworthy (re: everyone he feels beneath him, or just: everyone). Then, he's Heaven's Dark Harbinger, Avatar of Jenova, here to finish his Mother's Great Work. By the end of the game, his goal has shifted to full-on aspirations of apotheosis, to make the god-complex he's committed every atrocity and told every lie, even to himself, to protect a reality. He even slips between these a couple times mid-narrative because none of them are actually important to him as more than self-justification. It's horseshit all the way down. Come REMAKE, he's only gotten worse, now that he's got at least partial access to the planet's non-linear perception of time, being able to alter Destiny or Fate is just just another thing to feed his ego. It's probably why he's more mouthy to Cloud this time around, as toying with him effortlessly as a show of superiority is now more of a balm to his ego, now that he's at three losses to some blonde kid nobody from nowhere instead just the one. First time he could write it off as a fluke, now its a pattern, one he wants to gloat about how easily he can break it now. (He can't, his inability to process his grief is reflective of his inability to grow or change as a person, so his just gonna make the same, but different mistakes this time around).
But back to Aerith. She's not gonna make it because her death is the thematic cornerstone of this entire narrative. Did you know that they floated Barret as the character to die mid-game during development? Do you know why they chose Aerith instead?
Its because it hurt more. In a manner unique to the medium of video games, we grieved for a fictional character. It wasn't sympathetic grief, where we felt for Cloud and Tifa and the rest of the party and suffered as they suffered, but because over the course of the game, she wasn't just friends with the rest of the motley found family that was AVALANCHE, she was yours, in whatever small way a collection of code and color and sound can be, and you felt that alongside the rest of the cast. I feel that, we, the audience, occupy those gaps where Aerith used to be in party. Those empty spaces where we're together with the cast, bonded by a shared loss, Cloud's final speeches and sentiments to us, the audience, as much as they are to AVALANCHE. While I was spoiled of this twist, having not actually sat down to play the game until 2015, and took pains to avoid stepping into that emotional bear trap on the way, I still stop every time I get back to Forgotten Capital, like I imagine a few of you might, and set aside a save before I get it over with. Maybe this time it'll be different, I tell myself. Maybe this time I can do something. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
But you can't, only re-live that bargaining stage one more time and see her mission out to the end. REMAKE feels more and more like that the more I sit with it, like your brain trying to reason and bargain and explain your way out of an old, unprocessed grief, but it can't. At some point, you gotta accept that those maybes aren't real, they're just ghosts you haunt yourself with because its better to think you could've done something and imagine than accept that there was never anything you could do, and that is was always going to end like this. It's like the man said, himself, "We have to move on from Aerith's memory."
We have to go on without her. Only thing left to do is finish the work she lost her life doing, and give our girl the sendoff she deserves one last time.