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nimbostrxtus · 3 years

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Since the subject of Tifa’s character has come up once again, I felt like throwing in my two pence because I had a similar conversation with a friend a while back about why the internet adores Aerith but far too often shoves Tifa to the side.

I appreciate Square Enix turning Tifa into a role model. She is the most heroic character out of the rosta; with Cloud only being in it for the money, Barret being blinded by his hatred for ShinRa and hiding behind the excuse he's fighting for the planet, and Aerith who is dealing with her own issues at the moment and is the damsel in distress in later chapters. Tifa is the only one whose moral compass never sways and she is a pillar of support for the other characters to lean on. She knows what the right thing to do is and will not compromise her morals, even for the greater good.

Tifa as a character is fine, she's one of the best in both the original and remake, her role as "Team Mum" keeping the party together and her friendship with Aerith and eventual grief over losing her best friend is just as tragic as Cloud's loss.

The only reason fans seem to take issue with Tifa as a character and put Aerith on a pedestal is because Tifa does not have a backstory. Let me re-phrase that. Tifa does not have a backstory that belongs to her and her alone. Tifa’s entire character revolves around her relationship with other people and supporting their character arcs. Every other character in the party is dealing with baggage that is unique to them. Aerith is the last of the Cetra and the only one who can stop Sephiroth, Barret lost his home town and had to raise his best friend's daughter by himself while becoming an eco-terrorist, Nanaki was experimented on by Hojo, is the last of his species and has issues with his father, Cait Sith is a ShinRa employee who wants to help the people in Midgar but feels trapped, Cid never got to fulfil his life long dream of going into space before Shinra cut the space program budget, Vincent has an entire backstory revolving around Lucretia and shines some light on Sephiroth's own backstory, and Yuffie's home of Wutai is a major factor in the game's lore since the very beginning. In comparison, Tifa doesn't have a backstory that belongs to her and her alone.

Now, Tifa obviously has a history, but the problem is her backstory is Cloud's backstory. Tifa's loss over her mother, Cloud leaving her, her father dying at Sephiroth's hands and her hometown burning to the ground isn't given as much weight as it deserves, because we only see it from Cloud's perspective and we're meant to feel his pain over the events, not hers. A lot of fans seem to forget Tifa knows Sephiroth and has just as much grudge against him as Cloud does. It just takes a backseat over Cloud's rivalry with Sephiroth.

You can take Tifa out of Cloud's backstory, but you can't take Cloud out of Tifa's backstory. Cloud still exists without Tifa. We still have his friendship with Zack and the damage Zack's death left on Cloud's fragile psyche and shaped him into the person we see at the beginning of the game, as well as his hero-worshipping over Sephiroth and the eventual betrayal he feels when Sephiroth kills his mother and burns Nibleheim. You don't really need to know anything about Nibleheim to understand Cloud as a character.

Tifa, in contrast, lost her mother at a young age and went into the mountains to go and be with her, leading to her and Cloud falling off the bridge. But this backstory only exists to further push the idea into Cloud's head that had he been stronger he would have saved Tifa. Tifa’s own turmoil about her mother is never brought up again after that flashback. Even her martial arts instructor, Zangan, we only ever see in a flashback sequence and is only brought up again when you find a letter he left Tifa in her piano. He only exists to explain to the audience why Tifa fights monsters with only her fists.

And that is very disappointing because there is a lot to work with here. The game never flat out states whether Tifa was feeling suicidal or genuinely thought her mother was waiting for her in the mountains, but her perspective of events after her friends abandoned her on the bridge and the bullied outcast was the only one who tried to rescue her would have been interesting. Tifa wanting to get close to this kid who proved to be her only friend and feeling lonely after he leaves would have been good motivation for her to become stronger too. Perhaps she meant for their promise to go both ways, Cloud will come help her when she needs him and she'll do the same for him. Maybe that was the motivation behind her learning martial arts, so she can become strong enough to protect the people she loves so she'll never have to worry about them leaving her.

I really hope the remake delves deeper into Tifa's time without Cloud and how she became her own person, her relationship with her mother, the strain between her and father, and her time training under Zangan.

#[ooc] out of materia #the topic came back so I wanted to re-write this same point I brought up in the chat #Tifa is a great character and role model #but I worry the focus to make her the role model #means square doesn't wanna give her flaws or a character arc to overcome #say what you will about tifa in the original whether you liked her #or thought her actions were manipulating cloud in some way #at least she had a prescene #that she fed into Cloud's dillussion because she was scared #of losing him after she finally got him back after seven years without seeing him

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imaginative-spirit · 4 years

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hii! i found your twitter acc when i was searching for sefikura meta/analysis, and i found your tweet! i wanted to ask if you know some blog posts (or any posts) of their relationship analysis, as i am quite new to the whole ffvii series and i am intrigued by their relationship. i wanted to ask through cc but i noticed you dont have curiouscat so i’m asking through tumblr, sorry ;;

I didn’t mean to put all of this under a readmore but tumblr is being an ass so that’s what we’re doing now, I guess...

Hello!! Unfortunately I can’t really come up with anything on the spot, because despite seeing posts like that around before, I’m very unorganized and bad at keeping track of posts... so I decided to write you one on the spot instead, lmao!! I’ve been planning to write a more coherent, longer analysis for a while but still haven’t gotten around to it, but I’ll share some of my condensed thoughts here. The sefikura relationship is what intrigues me most about FFVII after all, and I usually yell quite a lot about them on twitter!

You say you’re new to FFVII, which means that I should definitely give a spoiler warning here. I’m going to address spoilery stuff from the OG, Remake and also some of the compilation material, because it’s hard to talk about their relationship without doing so. (I’ll also assume you’re familiar enough with the world of FFVII to know what I mean when I talk about stuff like SOLDIER, Shinra, Jenova, the Lifestream and such... this would get too long if I explained all of that here, lol)

Okay, so. Cloud and Sephiroth are narrative foils, which means their stories and arcs parallel each other in many ways. The most central themes surrounding them are their loneliness, sadness and how they cope with trauma.

Sephiroth was most likely raised by Hojo in a Shinra lab, and if you know Hojo, you know that there’s no way Sephiroth was treated as anything but an experiment. He never knew his mother, and the only person he had any respect for - Professor Gast - vanished when he was young and this seems to have given him abandonment issues. Cloud, on the other hand, had a mother but not much else. He felt alienated by the other children growing up in Nibelheim and seems to have been generally disliked by the adults as well, due to them blaming him for the time Tifa got hurt. In other words, they were both very lonely as children.

Shinra sent Sephiroth to war when he was very young (people disagree quite a lot on how old Sephiroth actually is but it’s assumed that he was around 12), and as the years went by, Sephiroth became the poster child of SOLDIER. We know that Cloud grew to idolize Sephiroth for how strong and brave the media made him out to be (A.K.A. had a celebrity crush on him), and that was what inspired Cloud to leave town and try to join SOLDIER.

As we see in the prequel game Crisis Core, Sephiroth at this point is well-respected by his peers after his efforts in conquering Wutai. His two only friends are Genesis and Angeal, who are also SOLDIER 1st Class, but they end up leaving SOLDIER, which means Sephiroth gets left behind. Considering that he already had abandonment issues to begin with, being abandoned by his only friends must’ve hit hard. I’d say this sets the foundation for Sephiroth’s downward spiral. However, at this point, I would argue that Sephiroth is still a good person at heart, despite all the trauma he has endured. He persists, refusing to hunt down his deserter friends, and even begins a hesitant friendship with Zack, who was Angeal’s apprentice.

Cloud befriends Zack as well, but doesn’t make it into SOLDIER and instead remains in the ordinary Shinra infantry, which is a crushing loss for him because he can’t achieve his dream. It’s at this point I like to imagine that if Zack had introduced Sephiroth and Cloud to one another, things could’ve gone better. Sephiroth is older than Cloud and outranks him, but with how isolated Sephiroth has been for his entire life I think there’s potential for a meaningful friendship here. They’re both very lonely and neither of them is really a people-person, so I think they’d get along well once Cloud gets over his hero-worship and Sephiroth manages to open up a bit. I would say that sefikura, if Nibelheim didn’t happen, has the potential to be a healthy relationship.

But of course, that’s not how canon goes. The Nibelheim mission happens, Sephiroth finds out that he’s not human and finally snaps after years of mistreatment, burning the town to the ground. Cloud manages to kill Sephiroth, ends up spending several years as an experiment, gets injected with Jenova cells, goes into a coma, wakes up just in time to watch Zack die, and ends up so traumatized that he creates a false identity for himself as a former SOLDIER 1st Class.

We’ve now reached OG FFVII. At this point, Sephiroth, while technically dead and chilling in the Lifestream, uses Jenova as a vessel to move around and takes advantage of Cloud, using him as a puppet for his own gains. He constantly dehumanizes Cloud and generally doesn’t give a damn about him as a person, while Cloud resents Sephiroth but can’t resist his manipulations. In a lot of ways, I think Sephiroth projects his own trauma onto Cloud here, because if Sephiroth had to suffer as Shinra’s puppet for his entire life, then Cloud should suffer as Sephiroth’s puppet as well. As a victim of horrific abuse, Sephiroth has a lot of justified anger, but he takes it out on the wrong person entirely. It’s definitely a very unhealthy situation.

But of course, unlike Sephiroth, Cloud doesn’t let his trauma define him. He reaches his breaking point and falls apart completely, but he gets back up, because unlike Sephiroth, he has a support system of friends who stand by his side and work together with him to defeat Sephiroth at the end of the game. For most of his life, Cloud has been chasing Sephiroth. This is where he finally catches up and surpasses him.

And here, the tables turn. Cloud kills Sephiroth but that’s never stopped Sephiroth before. This is where Sephiroth first develops his Cloud-obsession. He fixates on Cloud so hard that his hatred keeps him from completely fading away into the Lifestream. Cloud is literally his lifeline. (Isn’t it romantic? lol) He returns in the sequel movie Advent Children, where he fights Cloud one-on-one and basically just taunts him for 10 minutes before Cloud kills him again. It’s implied that Sephiroth can keep coming back as long as Cloud exists as well.

Canon beyond this has, for a long time, been unknown territory. There’s a sequel game called Dirge of Cerberus that the fandom at large pretends doesn’t exist because it’s... kinda weird to say the least, lol. And it doesn’t really have anything to do with sefikura anyway. People have written post-canon sefikura as something that continues to be toxic, but there’s also fic that offers redemption and forgiveness for Sephiroth, acknowledging that he was a victim too. It’s left very open-ended.

All of this basically explains how I see sefikura. They’re two people who were alike in many ways, who could have been friends before everything fell apart around them, if things had been different. But they never did meet, before it was too late. Instead, they keep chasing each other, full of hate even though they’re probably the only people in the world who could truly understand each other’s trauma. The only real difference is that Cloud had friends to back him up while Sephiroth was abandoned, and I really, truly wish they could get an opportunity to reach some sort of understanding. And that would basically be it...

...but then the Remake happened. Diving into speculation territory here. I firmly believe that the Sephiroth we see in the Remake is a time traveller, or is at least aware of the future to some degree, and that the remake is actually a sequel where Sephiroth is quite literally remaking OG ffvii. He’s completely obsessed with Cloud to a degree that he never was in the OG, and considering how loyal the developers stayed to the characterization of basically every other OG character this immediately stuck out to me like a sore thumb even though it took me until the end of the game to piece it together.

I’m not kidding here. Sephiroth is desperate for Cloud’s attention in the Remake. He's constantly trying to touch Cloud, everything he says to Cloud makes him sound like a pining ex-husband, and he generally doesn’t do anything to harm Cloud except scaring him shitless simply by showing up. He actually has quite a few moments when he’s very gentle with Cloud. At the end of the game he basically even proposes to Cloud by asking Cloud to join him and genuinely seems upset when Cloud rejects him. And even then, he claims he doesn’t want Cloud (nor himself) to die.

For the life of me, I can’t wrap my head around what Sephiroth’s goal is in the Remake and I have no idea what they’re planning to do with his character in future parts, but I’m very excited to find out. The sefikura content in the Remake was very delicious and at this point the only thing they could do to surpass it in the future would be to have them actually make out on screen, lmao.

I hope this is coherent enough to read, I basically just tried to condense everything I could into a neat little essay and there’s definitely things I didn’t mention here, lol. I’ll write a proper, more well-thought out analysis another time!

Also, if you want to ask me anything else or talk to me about sefikura in general, my DMs are always open, both here and on twitter ;D

#hhhhhh I didn't mean for the entire thing to end up under a readmore but tumblr is a bitch and I can't fix it >:(#adventures in answering asks #sefikura #ffvii #Anonymous

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