#even if it’s storytelling through a series of interviews with people who have left him hate comments

[pensivetense]

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#okay Conversations With People Who Hate Me has gotten a lot smoother since it began #in the current episodes Dylan really has grown into how to have and facilitate these conversations #figuring out how to showcase each individual’s viewpoint while still keeping things on topic and promoting empathy rather than argument #this being said the first season—if slightly rougher—reads as a cohesive work and an art piece #it’s episodic but almost serial in that the conversations he chooses to have and the viewpoints he chooses to showcase #all work together somehow to tell a complete story idk man it’s late and I’m sleep deprived #but this man knows his shit when it comes to storytelling #even if it’s storytelling through a series of interviews with people who have left him hate comments #help when I said I wanted a new pod to be obsessed with I meant a fictional pod #fuck I love CWPWHM

[insanehobbit]

a twenty-five thousand word post about a twenty-three year old “debate”

As time goes on, I’m baffled that it remains a commonly held opinion that:

The LTD remains unresolved

SE is deliberately playing coy, and are (or have been) afraid to resolve it.

To me, the answer is as clear as day, and yet seeing so many people acting as if it’s a question that remains unanswered makes me wonder if I’m the crazy one.

So I am going to try to articulate my thought process here, not because I expect to change any hearts and minds, but more to get these thoughts out of my head and onto a page so I can finally read a book and/or watch reruns of Shark Tank in peace.

To start off, there are two categories of argument (that are among, if not the most widely used lines of argument) that I will try NOT to engage with:

1) Quotes from Ultimania or developer interviews - while they’re great for easter eggs and behind-the-scenes info, if a guidebook is required to understand key plot points, you have fundamentally failed as a storyteller. Now the question of which character wants to bone whom is often something that can be relegated to a guidebook, but in the case of FF7, you would be watching two very different stories play out depending on who Cloud ends up with.

Of course, the Ultimanias do spell this out clearly, but luckily for us, SE are competent enough storytellers that we can find the answer by looking at the text alone.

2) Arguments about character actions/motivations — specifically, I’m talking about stuff like “Cloud made this face in this scene, which means be must be [insert whatever here].”

Especially when it comes to the LTD, these tend to focus on individual actions, decontextualizing them from their role in the narrative as a whole. LTDers often try to put themselves in the character’s shoes to suss out what they may be thinking and feeling in those moments. These arguments will be colored by personal experiences, which will inevitably vary.

Let’s take for example Cloud’s behavior in Advent Children. One may argue that it makes total sense given that he’s dying and fears failing the ones he loves. Another may argue that there’s no way that he would run unless he was deeply unhappy and pining after a lost love. Well, you’ll probably just be talking over each other until the cows come home. Such is the problem with trying to play armchair therapist with a fictional character. It’s not like we can ask Cloud himself why he did what he did (and even if we could, he’s not the exactly the most reliable narrator in the world). Instead, in trying to understand his motivations, we are left with no choice but to draw comparisons with our own personal experiences, those of our friends, or other works of media we’ve consumed. Any interpretation would be inherently subjective and honestly, a futile subject for debate.

There’s nothing wrong with drawing personal connections with fictional characters of course. That is the purpose of art after all. They are vessels of empathy. But when we’re talking about what is canon, it doesn’t matter what we take away. What matters is the creators’ intent.

Cloud, Tifa and Aerith are not your friends Bob, Alice and Maude. They are characters created by Square Enix. Real people can behave in a variety of different ways if they found themselves in the situations faced by our dear trio; however, FF7 characters are not sentient creatures. Everything they do or say is dictated by the developers to serve the story they are trying to tell.

So what do we have left then? Am I asking you, dear reader, to just trust me, anonymous stranger on the Internet, when I tell you #clotiiscanon. Well, in a sense, yes, but more seriously, I’m going to try to suss out what the creator’s intent is based on what is, and more importantly, what isn’t, on screen.

Instead of putting ourselves in the shoes of the characters, let’s try putting ourselves in the shoes of the creators. So the question would then be, if the intent is X, then what purpose does character Y or scene Z serve?

The story of FF7 isn’t the immutable word of God etched in a stone tablet. For every scene that made it into the final game, there are dozens of alternatives that were tossed aside. Let us also not forget the crude economics of popular storytelling. Spending resources on one particular aspect of the game may mean something entirely unrelated will have to be cut for time. Thus, the absence of a particular character/scenario is an alternative in itself. So with all these options at their disposal, why is the scene we see before us the one that made it into the final cut? — Before we dive in, I also want to define two broad categories of narrative: messy and clean.

Messy narratives are ones I would define as stories that try to illuminate something about the human condition, but may not leave the audience feeling very good by the end of it. The protagonists, while not always anti-heroes, don’t always exhibit the kind of growth we’d like, don’t always learn their lessons, probably aren’t the best role models. The endings are often ambivalent, ambiguous, and leaves room for the audience to take away from it what they will. This is the category I would put art films and prestige cable dramas.

Clean narratives are where I would categorize most popular forms of entertainment. Not that these characters necessarily lack nuance, but whatever flaws are portrayed are something to be overcome by the end of story. The protagonists are characters you’re supposed to want to root for

Final Fantasy as a series would fall under the ‘clean’ category. Sure, many of the protagonists start out as jerks, but they grow through these flaws and become true heroes by the end of their journey. Hell, a lot of the time even the villains are redeemed. They want you to like the characters you’re spending a 40+ hr journey with. Their depictions can still be realistic, but they will become the most idealized versions of themselves by the end of their journeys.

This is important to establish, because we can then assume that it is not SE’s intent to make any of their main characters come off pathetic losers or unrepentant assholes. Now whether or not they succeed in that endeavor is another question entirely.

FF7 OG or The dumbest thought experiment in the world

With that one thousand word preamble out of the way, let’s finally take a look at the text. In lieu of going through the OG’s story beat by beat, let’s try this thought experiment:

Imagine it’s 1996, and you’re a development executive at what was then Squaresoft. The plucky, young development team has the first draft of what will become the game we know as Final Fantasy VII. Like the preceding entries in the series, it’s a world-spanning action adventure RPG, with a key subplot being the epic tragic romance between its hero and heroine, Cloud and Aerith.

They ask you for your notes.

(For the sake of your sanity and mine, let’s limit our hypothetical notes to the romantic subplot)

Disc 1 - everything seems to be on the right track. Nice meet-cute, lots of moments developing the relationship between our pair. Creating a love triangle with this Tifa character is an interesting choice, but she’s a comparatively minor character so she probably won’t be a real threat and will find her happiness elsewhere by the end of the game. You may note that they’re leaning a bit too much into Tifa and Cloud’s past. Especially the childhood promise flashback early in the game — cute scene, but a distraction from main story and main pairing — fodder for the chopping block. You may also bump on the fact that Aerith is initially attracted to Cloud because he reminds her of an ex, but this is supposed to be a more mature FF. That can be an obstacle they overcome as Aerith gets to know the real Cloud.

Aerith dies, but it is supposed to be a tragic romance after all. Death doesn’t have to be the end for this relationship, especially since Aerith is an Ancient after all.

It’s when Disc 2 starts that things go off the rails. First off, it feels like an awfully short time for Cloud to be grieving the love of his life, though it’s somewhat understandable. This story is not just a romance. There are other concerns after all, Cloud’s identity crisis for one. Though said identity crisis involves spending a lot of time developing his relationship with another woman. It’s one thing for Cloud and Tifa to be from the same hometown, but does she really need to play such an outsized role in his internal conflict? This might give the player the wrong impression.

You get to the Northern Crater, and it just feels all wrong. Cloud is more or less fine after the love of his life is murdered in front of his eyes but has a complete mental breakdown to the point that he’s temporarily removed as a playable character because Tifa loses faith in him??? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Oh, but it only gets worse from here. With Cloud gone, the POV switches to Tifa and her feelings for him and her desire to find him. The opening of the game is also recontextualized when you learn the only reason that Cloud was part of the first Reactor mission that starts the game is because Tifa found him and wanted to keep an eye on him.

Then you get to Mideel and the alarm bells are going off. Tifa drops everything, removing her from the party as well, to take care of Cloud while he’s a catatonic vegetable? Not good. Very not good. This level of selfless devotion is going to make Cloud look like a total asshole when he rejects her in favor of Aerith. Speaking of Aerith, she uh…hasn’t been mentioned for some time. In fact, her relationship with Cloud has remained completely static after Disc 1, practically nonexistent, while his with Tifa has been building and building. Developing a rival relationship that then needs to be dismantled rather than developing the endgame relationship doesn’t feel like a particularly valuable use of time and resources.

By the time you get to the Lifestream scene, you’re about ready to toss the script out of the window. Here’s the emotional climax of the entire game, where Cloud’s internal conflict is finally resolved, and it almost entirely revolves around Tifa? Rather than revisiting the many moments of mental anguish we experienced during the game itself — featuring other characters, including let’s say, Aerith — it’s about a hereto unknown past that only Tifa has access to? Not only that, but we learn that the reason Cloud wanted to join SOLDIER was to impress Tifa, and the reason he adopted his false persona was because he was so ashamed that he couldn’t live up to the person he thought Tifa wanted him to be? Here, we finally get a look into the inner life of one half of our epic couple and…it entirely revolves around another woman??

Cloud is finally his real self, and hey, it looks like he finally remembers Aerith, that’s at least a step in the right direction. Though still not great. With his emotional arc already resolved, any further romantic developments is going to feel extraneous and anticlimactic. It just doesn’t feel like there’s enough time to establish that:

Cloud’s romantic feelings for Tifa (which were strong enough to launch his hero’s journey) have transformed into something entirely platonic in the past few days/weeks

Cloud’s feelings for Aerith that he developed while he was pretending to be someone else (and not just any someone, but Aerith’s ex of all people) are real.

This isn’t a romantic melodrama after all. There’s still a villain to kill and a world to save.

Cloud does speak of Aerith wistfully, and even quite personally at times, yet every time he talks about her, he’s surrounded by the other party members. A scene or two where he can grapple with his feelings for her on his own would help. Her ghost appearing in the Sector 5 Church feels like a great opportunity for this to happen, but he doesn’t interact with it at all. What gives? Missed opportunity after missed opportunity.

The night before the final battle, Cloud asks the entire party to find what they’re fighting for. This feels like a great (and perhaps the last) opportunity to establish that for Cloud, it’s in Aerith’s memory and out of his love for her. He could spend those hours alone in any number of locations associated with her — the Church, the Temple of the Ancients, the Forgotten City.

Instead — none of those happens. Instead, once again, it’s Cloud and Tifa in another scene where they’re the only two characters in the scene. You’re really going to have Cloud spend what could very well be the last night of his life with another woman? With a fade to black that strongly implies they slept together? In one fell swoop, you’re portraying Cloud as a guy who not only betrays the memory of his lost love, but is also incredibly callous towards the feelings of another woman by taking advantage of her vulnerability. Why are we rooting for him to succeed again?

Cloud and the gang finally defeat Sephiroth, and Aerith guides him back into the real world. Is he finally explicitly stating that he’s searching for her (though they’ve really waited until the last minute to do so), but again, why is Tifa in this scene? Shouldn’t it just be Cloud and Aerith alone? Why have Tifa be there at all? Why have her and her alone of all the party members be the one waiting for Cloud? Do you need to have Tifa there to be rejected while Cloud professes his unending love for Aerith? It just feels needlessly cruel and distracts from what should be the sole focus of the scene, the love between Cloud and Aerith.

What a mess.

You finish reading, and since it is probably too late in the development process to just fire everyone, you offer a few suggestions that will clarify the intended romance while the retaining the other plot points/general themes of the game.

Here they are, ordered by scale of change, from minor to drastic:

Option 1 would be to keep most of the story in tact, but rearrange the sequence of events so that the Lifestream sequence happens before Aerith’s death. That way, Cloud is his true self and fully aware of his feelings for both women before Aerith’s death. That way, his past with Tifa isn’t some ticking bomb waiting to go off in the second half of the game. That development will cease at the Lifestream scene. Cloud will realize the affection he held for her as a child is no longer the case. He is grateful for the past they shared, but his future is with Aerith. He makes a clear choice before that future is taken away from him with her death. The rest of the game will go on more or less the same (with the Highwind scene being eliminated, of course) making it clear, that avenging the death of his beloved is one of, if not the, primary motivation for him wanting to defeat Sephiroth.

The problem with this “fix” is that a big part of the reason that Aerith gets killed is because of Cloud’s identity crisis. If said crisis is resolved, the impact of her death will be diminished, because it would feel arbitrary rather than something that stems from the consequences of Cloud’s actions. More of the story will need to be reconceived so that this moment holds the same emotional weight.

Another problem is why the Lifestream scene needs to exist at all. Why spend all that time developing the backstory for a relationship that will be moot by the end of the game? It makes Tifa feel like less of a character and more of a plot device, who becomes irrelevant after she services the protagonist’s character development and then has none of her own. That’s no way to treat one of the main characters of your game.

Option 2 would be to re-imagine Tifa’s character entirely. You can keep some of her history with Cloud in tact, but expand her backstory so she is able to have a satisfactory character arc outside of her relationship with Cloud. You could explore the five years in her life since the Nibelheim incident. Maybe she wasn’t in Midgar the whole time. Maybe, like Barret, she has her own Corel, and maybe reconciling with her past there is the climax of her emotional arc as opposed to her past with Cloud. For Cloud too, her importance needs to be diminished. She can be one of the people who help him find his true self in the Lifestream, but not the only person. There’s no reason the other people he’s met on his journey can’t be there. Thus their relationship remains somewhat important, but their journeys are not so entwined that it distracts from Cloud and Aerith’s romance.

Option 3 would be to really lean into the doomed romance element of Cloud and Aerith’s relationship. Have her death be the cause of his mental breakdown, and have Aerith be the one in the Lifestream who is able to put his mind back together and bring him back to the realm of consciousness. After he emerges, he has the dual goal of defeating Sephiroth and trying to reunite with Aerith. In the end, in order to do the former, he has to relinquish the latter. He makes selfless choice. He makes the choice that resonates the overall theme of the game. It’s a bittersweet but satisfying ending. Cloud chooses to honor her memory and her purpose over the chance to physically bring her back. In this version of the game, the love triangle serves no purpose. There’s no role for Tifa at all.

Okay, we can be done with this strained counterfactual. What I’ve hopefully illustrated is that while developers had countless opportunities to solidify Cloud/Aerith as the canon couple in Discs 2 and 3 of the game, they instead chose a different route each and every time. What should also be clear is that the biggest obstacle standing in their way is not Aerith’s death, but the fact that Tifa exists.

At least in the form she takes in the final game, as a playable character and at the very least, the 3rd most important character in game’s story. She is not just another recurring NPC or an antagonist. Her love for Cloud is not going to be treated like a mere trifle or obstacle. If Cloud/Aerith was supposed to be the endgame ship, there would be no need for a love triangle and no need to include Tifa in the game at all. Death is a big enough obstacle, developing Cloud’s relationship with Tifa would only distract from and diminish his romance with Aerith.

I think this is something the dead enders understand intuitively, even more so than many Cloti shippers. Which is why some of them try to dismiss Tifa’s importance in the story so that she becomes a minor supporting character at best, or denigrate her character to the point that she becomes an actual villain. The Seifer to a Squall, the Seymour to a Tidus, hell even a Quistis to a Rinoa, they know how to deal with, but a Tifa Lockhart? As she is actually depicted in Final Fantasy VII? They have no playbook for that, and thus they desperately try to squeeze her into one of these other roles.

Let’s try another thought experiment, and see what would to other FF romances if we inserted a Tifa Lockhart-esque character in the middle of them.

FFXV is a perfect example because it features the sort of tragic love beyond death romance that certain shippers want Cloud and Aerith to be. Now, did I think FFXV was a good game? No. Did I think Noctis/Luna was a particularly well-developed romance? Also no. Did I have any question in my mind whatsoever that they were the canon relationship? Absolutely not.

Is this because they kiss at the end? Well sure, that helps, but also it’s because the game doesn’t spend the chapters after Luna’s death developing Noctis’ relationship with another woman. If Noctis/Luna had the same sort of development as Cloud/Aerith, then after Luna dies, Iris would suddenly pop in and play a much more prominent role. The game would flashback to her past and her relationship with Noctis. And it would be through his relationship with Iris that Noctis understands his duty to become king or a crystal or whatever the fuck that game was about. Iris is by Noctis’ side through the final battle, and when he ascends the throne in that dreamworld or whatever. There, Luna finally shows up again. Iris is still in the frame when Noctis tells her something like ‘Oh sorry, girl, I’ve been in love with Luna all along,” before he kisses Luna and the game ends.

(a very real scene from a very good game)

Come on. It would be utterly ludicrous and an utter disservice to every character involved, yet that is essentially the argument Cloud/Aerith shippers are making. SE may have made some pretty questionable storytelling decisions in the past, but they aren’t that bad at this.

Or in FFVIII, it would be like reordering the sequence of events so that Squall remembers that he grew up in an orphanage with all the other kids after Rinoa falls into a coma. And while Rinoa is out of commission, instead of Quistis gracefully bowing out after realizing she had mistaken her feelings of sisterly affection for love, it becomes Quistis’ childhood relationship with Squall that allows him to remember his past and re-contextualizes the game we’ve played thus far, so that the player realizes that it was actually Quistis who was his motivation all along. Then after this brief emotional detour, his romance with Rinoa would continue as usual. Absolutely absurd.

The Final Fantasy games certainly have their fair share of plot holes, but they’ve never whiffed on a romance this badly.

A somewhat more serious character analysis of the OG

What then is Tifa’s actual role in the story of FFVII? Her character is intricately connected to Cloud’s. In fact, they practically have the same arc, though Tifa’s is rather understated compared to his. She doesn’t adopt a false persona after all. For both of them, the flaw that they must learn to overcome over the course of the game is their fear of confronting the truth of their past. Or to put it more crudely, if they’re not lying, they’re at the very least omitting the truth. Cloud does so to protect himself from his fear of being exposed as a failure. Tifa does so at the expense of herself, because she fears the truth will do more harm than good. They’re two sides of the same coin. Nonetheless, their lying has serious ramifications.

The past they’re both afraid to confront is of course the Nibelheim Incident from five years ago. Thus, the key points in their emotional journeys coincide with the three conflicting Nibelheim flashbacks depicted in the game: Cloud’s false memory in Kalm, Sephiroth’s false vision in the Northern Crater, and the truth in the Lifestream.

Before they enter the Lifestream, both Cloud and Tifa are at the lowest of their lows. Cloud has had a complete mental breakdown and is functionally a vegetable. Tifa has given up everything to take care of Cloud as she feels responsible for his condition. If he doesn’t recover, she may never find peace.

With nothing left to lose, they both try to face the past head on. For Cloud, it’s a bit harder. At the heart of all this confusion, is of course, the Nibelheim Incident. How does Cloud know all these things he shouldn’t if Tifa doesn’t remember seeing him there? The emotional climax for both Cloud and Tifa, and arguably the game as a whole, is the moment the Shinra grunt removes his helmet to reveal that Cloud was there all along.

Tifa is the only character who can play this role for Cloud. It’s not like she a found a videotape in the Lifestream labeled ‘Nibelheim Incident - REAL’ and voila, Cloud is fixed. No, she is the only one who can help him because she is the only person who lived through that moment. No one else could make Cloud believe it. You could have Aerith or anyone else trying to tell him what actually happened, but why would he believe it anymore than the story Sephiroth told him at the Northern Crater?

With Tifa, it’s different. Not only was she physically there, but she’s putting as much at risk in what the truth may reveal. She’s not just a plot device to facilitate Cloud’s character development. The Lifestream sequence is as much the culmination of her own character arc. If it goes the wrong way, “Cloud” may find out that he’s just a fake after all, and Tifa may learn that boy she thought she’d been on this journey with had died years ago. That there’s no one left from her past, that it was all in her head, that she’s all alone. Avoiding this truth is a comfort, but in this moment, they’re both putting themselves on the line. Being completely vulnerable in front of the person they’re most terrified of being vulnerable with.

The developers have structured Cloud and Tifa’s character arcs so that the crux is a moment where the other is literally the only person who could provide the answer they need. Without each other, as far as the story is concerned, Cloud and Tifa would remain incomplete.

Aerith’s character arc is a different beast entirely. She is the closest we have to the traditional Campbellian Hero. She is the Chosen One, the literal last of her kind, who has been resisting the call to adventure until she can no longer. The touchstones of her character arc are the moments she learns more about her Cetra past and comes to terms with her role in protecting the planet - namely Cosmo Canyon, the Temple of the Ancients and the Forgotten City.

How do hers and Cloud’s arcs intersect? When it comes to the Nibelheim incident, she is a merely a spectator (at least during the Kalm flashback, as for the other two, she is uh…deceased). Cloud attacking her at the Temple of the Ancients, which results in her running to the Forgotten City alone and getting killed by Sephiroth, certainly exacerbates his mental deterioration, but it is by no means a turning point in his arc the way the Northern Crater is.

As for Cloud’s role in Aerith’s arc, their meeting is quite important in that it sets forth the series of events that leads her to getting captured by Shinra and thus meeting “Sephiroth” and wanting to learn more about the Cetra. It’s the inciting incident if we’re going to be really pedantic about it, yet Aerith’s actual character development is not dependent on her relationship with Cloud. It is about her communion with her Cetra Ancestry and the planet.

To put it in other terms, all else being the same, Aerith could still have a satisfying character arc had Cloud not crashed down into her Church. Sure, the game would look pretty different, but there are other ways for her to transform from a flirty, at times frivolous girl to an almost Christ-like figure who accepts the burden of protecting the planet.

Such is not the case for Cloud and Tifa. Their character arcs are built around their shared past and their relationship with one another. Without Tifa, you would have to rewrite Cloud’s character entirely. What was his motivation for joining SOLDIER? How did he get on that AVALANCHE mission in the first place? Who can possibly know him well enough to put his mind back together after it falls apart? If the answer to all these questions is the same person, then congratulations, you’ve just reverse engineered Tifa Lockhart.

Tifa fares a little better. Without Cloud, she would be a sad, sweet character who never gets the opportunity to reconcile with the trauma of her past. Superficially, a lot would be the same, but she would ultimately be quite static and all the less interesting for it.

Let’s also take a brief gander at Tifa’s role after the Lifestream sequence. At this point in the game, both Tifa and Cloud’s emotional arcs are essentially complete. They are now the most idealized versions of themselves, characters the players are meant to admire and aspire to. However they are depicted going forward, it would not be the creator’s intent for their actions to be perceived in a negative light.

A few key moments standout, ones that would not be included if the game was intended to end with any other romantic pairing or with Cloud’s romantic interest left ambiguous:

The Highwind scene, which I’ve gone over above. It doesn’t matter if you get the Low Affection or High Affection version. It would not reflect well on either Cloud or Tifa if he chose to spend what could be his last night alive with a woman whose feelings he did not reciprocate.

Before the final battle with Sephiroth, the party members scream out the reasons they’re fighting. Barret specifically calls out AVALANCHE, Marlene and Dyne, Red XIII specifically calls out his Grandpa, and Tifa specifically calls out Cloud. You are not going to make one of Tifa’s last moments in the game be her pining after a guy who has no interest in her. Not when you could easily have her mention something like her past, her hometown or hell even AVALANCHE and Marlene like Barret. If Tifa’s feelings for Cloud are meant to be unrequited, then it would be a character flaw that would be dealt with long before the final battle (see: Quistis in FF8 or Eowyn in the Lord of the Rings). They would not still be on display at moment like this.

Tifa being the only one there when Cloud jumps into the Lifestream to fight Sephiroth for the last time, and Tifa being the only one there when he emerges. She is very much playing the traditional partner/spouse role here, when you could easily have the entire party present or no one there at all. There is clearly something special about her relationship with Cloud that sets her apart from the other party members.

Once again, let’s look at the “I think I can meet her there moment.” And let’s put side the translation (the Japanese is certainly more ambiguous, and it’s not like the game had any trouble having Cloud call Aerith by her name before this). If Cloud was really expressing his desire to reunite with Aerith, and thus his rejection of Tifa, then the penultimate scene of this game is one that involves the complete utter and humiliation of one of its main characters since Tifa’s reply would indicate she’s inviting herself to a romantic reunion she has no part in. Not only that, but to anyone who is not Cl*rith shipper, the protagonist of the game is going to come off as a callous asshole. That cannot possibly be the creator’s intention. They are competent enough to depict an act of love without drawing attention to the party hurt by that love.

What then could possibly be the meaning? Could it possibly be Cloud trying to comfort Tifa by trying to find a silver lining in what appears to be their impending death? That this means they may get to see their departed loved ones again, including their mutual friend, Aerith? (I will note that Tifa talks about Aerith as much, if not even more than Cloud, after her death). Seems pretty reasonable to me, this being an interpretation of the scene that aligns with the overall themes of the game, and casts every character in positive light during this bittersweet moment.

Luckily enough, we have an entire fucking Compilation to find out which is right.

But before we get there, I’m sure some of you (lol @ me thinking anyone is still reading this) are asking, if Cloti is canon, then why is there a love triangle at all? Why even hint at the possibility of a romance between Cloud and Aerith? Wouldn’t that also be a waste of time and resources if they weren’t meant to be canon?

Well, there are two very important reasons that have nothing to do with romance and everything to do with two of the game’s biggest twists:

Aerith initially being attracted to Cloud’s similarities to Zack/commenting on the uncanniness of said similarities is an organic way to introduce the man Cloud’s pretending to be. Without it, the reveal in the Lifestream would fall a bit flat. The man he’s been emulating all along would just be some sort of generic hero rather than a person whose history and deeds already encountered during the course of the game. Notably for this to work, the game only has to establish Aerith’s attraction to Cloud.

To build the player’s attachment to Aerith before her death/obscure the fact that she’s going to die. With the technological limitations of the day, the only way to get the player to interact with Aerith is through the player character (AKA Cloud), and adding an element of choice (AKA the Gold Saucer Date mechanic) makes the player even more invested. This then elevates Aerith’s relationship with Cloud over hers with any other character. At the same time, because her time in the game is limited, Cloud ends up interacting with Aerith more than any of the other characters, at least in Disc 1. The choice to make many of these interactions flirty/romantic also toys with player expectations. One does not expect the hero’s love interest to die halfway through the game. The game itself also spends a bit of time teasing the romance, albeit, largely in superficial ways like other characters commenting on their relationship or Cait Sith reading their love fortune at the Temple of the Ancients. Yet, despite the quantity of their personal interactions, Cloud and Aerith never display any moments of deep love or devotion that one associates with a Final Fantasy romance. They never have the time. What the game establishes then is the potential of a romance rather than the romance itself. Aerith’s death hurts because of all that lost potential. There so many things she wanted to do, so many places she wanted to see that will never happen because her life is cut short. Part of what is lost, of course, is the potential of her romance with Cloud.

This creative choice is a lot more controversial since it elevates subverting audience expectations over character, and understandably leads to some player confusion. What’s the point of all this set up if there’s not going to be a pay off? Well, that is kind of the point. Death is frustrating because of all the unknowns and what-ifs. But, I suppose some people just can’t accept that fact in a game like this.

One last note on the OG before we move on: Even though this from an Ultimania, since we’re talking about story development and creator intent, I thought it was relevant to include: the fact that Aerith was the sole heroine in early drafts of the game is not the LTD trump card so people think it is. Stories undergo radical changes through the development process. More often than not, there are too many characters, and characters are often combined or removed if their presence feels redundant or confusing.

In this case, the opposite happened. Tifa was added later in the development process as a second heroine. Let’s say that Aerith was the Last Ancient and the protagonist’s sole love interest in this early draft of Final Fantasy VII. In the game that was actually released, that role was split between two characters (and last I checked, Tifa is not the last of a dying race), and Aerith dies halfway through the game, so what does that suggest about how Aerith’s role may have changed in the final product? Again, if Aerith was intended to be Cloud’s love interest, Tifa simply would not exist.

A begrudging analysis of our favorite straight-to-DVD sequel

Let’s move onto the Compilation. And in doing so, completely forget about the word vomit that’s been written above. While it’s quite clear to me now that there’s no way in hell the developers would have intended the last scene in the game to be both a confirmation of Cloud’s love for Aerith and his rejection of Tifa, in my younger and more vulnerable years, I wasn’t so sure. In fact, this was the prevailing interpretation back in the pre-Compilation Dark Ages. Probably because of a dubious English translation of the game and a couple of ambiguous cameos in Final Fantasy Tactics and Kingdom Hearts were all we  had to go on.

How then did the official sequel to Final Fantasy VII change those priors?

Two years after the events of the game, Cloud is living as a family with Tifa and two kids rather than scouring the planet for a way to be reunited with Aerith. Shouldn’t the debate be well and over with that? Obviously not, and it’s not just because people were being obstinate. Part of the confusion stems from Advent Children itself, but I would argue that did not come from an intent to play coy/keep Cloud’s romantic desires ambiguous, but rather a failure of execution of his character arc.

Now I wasn’t the biggest fan of the film when I first watched a bootlegged copy I downloaded off LimeWire in 2005, and I like it even less now, but I better understand its failures, given its unique position as a sequel to a beloved game and the cornerstone of launching the Compilation.

The original game didn’t have such constraints on its storytelling. Outside of including a few elements that make it recognizable as a Final Fantasy (Moogles, Chocobos, Summons, etc.) and being a good enough game to be a financial success, the developers pretty much had free rein in terms of what story they wanted to tell, what characters they would use to tell it, and how long it took for them to tell said story.

With Advent Children, telling a good story was not the sole or even primary goal. Instead, it had to:

Do some fanservice: The core audience is going to be the OG fanbase, who would be expecting to see modern, high-def depictions of all the memorable and beloved characters from the game, no matter if the natural end point of their stories is long over.

Set up the rest of the Compilation - Advent Children is the draw with the big stars, but also a way to showcase the lesser known characters from from the Compilation who are going to be leading their own spinoffs.  It’s part feature film/part advertisement for the rest of the Compilation. Thus, the Turks, Vincent and Zack get larger roles in the film than one might expect to attract interest to the spinoffs they lead.

Show off its technical prowess: SE probably has enough self awareness to realize that what’s going to set it apart from other animated feature films is not its novel storytelling, but its graphical capabilities. Thus, to really show off those graphics, the film is going to be packed to the brim with big, complicated action scenes with lots of moving parts, as opposed to quieter character driven moments.

These considerations are not unique to Advent Children, but important to note nonetheless:

As a sequel, the stakes have to be just as high if not higher than those in the original work. Since the threat in the OG was the literal end of the world, in Advent Children, the world’s gotta end again

The OG was around 30-40 hours long. An average feature-length film is roughly two hours. Video games and films are two very different mediums. As many TV writers who have tried to make the transition to film (and vice-versa) can tell you, success in one medium does not translate to success in another. 

With so much to do in so little time, is it any wonder then that it is again Sephiroth who is the villain trying to destroy the world and Aerith in the Lifestream the deus ex machina who saves the day?

All of this is just a long-winded way to say, certain choices in the Advent Children that may seem to exist only to perpetuate the LTD were made with many other storytelling considerations in mind.

When trying to understand the intended character arcs and relationship dynamics, you cannot treat the film as a collection of scenes devoid of context. You can’t just say - “well here’s a scene where Cloud seems to miss Aerith, and here’s another scene where Cloud and Tifa fight. Obviously, Cloud loves Aerith.” You have to look at what purpose these scenes serve in the grander narrative.

And what is this grander narrative? To put it in simplistic terms, Aerith is the obstacle, and Tifa is goal. Cloud must get over his guilt over Aerith’s death so that he can return to living with Tifa and the children in peace.

The scenes following the prologue are setting up the emotional stakes of film - the problem that will be resolved by the film’s end. The problem being depicted here is not Aerith’s absence from Cloud’s life, but Cloud’s absence from his family. We see Tifa walking through Seventh Heaven saying “he’s not here anymore,” we see Denzel in his sickbed asking for Cloud, we see a framed photo of the four of them on Cloud’s desk. We see Cloud letting Tifa’s call go to voicemail.

What we do not see is Aerith, who does not appear until almost halfway through the film.

Cloud spends the first of the film avoiding confrontation with the Remnants/dealing with the return of Sephiroth. It’s only when Tifa is injured, and Denzel and Marlene get kidnapped that he goes to face his problems head on.

Before the final battle, when Cloud has exorcised his emotional demons and is about to face his physical demons, what do we see? We see Cloud telling Marlene that it’s his turn to take care of her, Denzel and Tifa the way they’ve taken care of him. We see Cloud telling Tifa that he ‘feels lighter’ and tacitly confirming that she was correct when she called him out earlier in the film. We see Cloud confirming to Denzel that he’s going home after this is all over.

What we do not see is Cloud telepathically communicating with Aerith to say, “Hey boo, can’t wait to beat Sephiroth so I can finally reunite with you in the Promised Land. Xoxoxo.” Aerith doesn’t factor in at all. Returning to his family is his goal, and his fight with Bahamut/the Remnants/Sephiroth/whatever the fuck is the final obstacle he has to face before reaching this goal.

This is reiterated again when Cloud is shot by Yazoo and seemingly perishes in an explosion. What is at stake with his “death”? We see Tifa calling his name while looking out the airship. We see Denzel and Marlene waiting for him at Seventh Heaven. We do not see Aerith watching over him in the Lifestream.

Now, Aerith does play an important role in Cloud’s arc when she shows up at about the midpoint of the film. You could fairly argue that it’s the turning point in Cloud’s emotional journey, the moment when he finally decides to confront his problems. But even if it’s only Cloud and Aerith in the scene, it’s not really about their relationship at all.

Let’s consider the context before this scene happens. Denzel and Marlene have been kidnapped by the Remnants; Tifa was nearly killed in a fight with another. This is Cloud at his lowest point. It’s his worst fears come to pass. His guilt over Aerith’s death is directly addressed at this moment in the film because it is not so much about his feelings for Aerith as it is about how Cloud fears the failures of his past (one of the biggest being her death) would continue into the present. If it was just about Aerith, we could have seen Cloud asking for her forgiveness at any other time in the film. It occurs when it does because this when his guilt over Aerith’s death intersects with his actual conflict, his fear that he’ll fail the the ones he loves. She appears when he’s at the Forgotten City where he goes to save the children. The same location where he had failed two year before.

This connection is made explicit when Cloud has flashes of Zack and Aerith’s deaths before he saves Denzel and Tifa from Bahamut. Again, Cloud’s dwelling on the past is directly related to his fears of being unable to protect his present.

Aerith is a feminine figure who is associated with flowers. That combined with the players’ memory of her and her relationship with Cloud in the OG, I can see how their scenes can be construed as romantic, but I really do not think that it is the creators’ intent to portray any romantic longing on Cloud’s part.

If they wanted to suggest that Cloud was still in love with Aerith or even leave his romantic interest ambiguous, there is no way in hell they would have had Cloud living with Tifa and two kids prior to the film’s events. To say nothing of opening the film by showing the pain his absence brings.

A romantic reading of Cloud’s guilt over Aerith’s death would suggest that he entered into a relationship with Tifa and started raising two children with her while still holding a torch for Aerith and hoping for a way to be reunited with her. The implication would be that Tifa is his second choice, and he is settling. Now, is this a dynamic that occurs in real life? Absolutely. Is this something that is often depicted in some films and television? Sure - in fact this very premise is at the core of one my favorite films of the last decade - 45 Years — and spoiler alert — the guy does not come off well in this situation. But once again, Cloud is not a real person, and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is not a John Cassavettes film or an Ingmar Bergman chamber drama. It is a 2-hour long straight to DVD sequel for a video game made for teens. This kind of messy, if realistic, relationship dynamic is not what this particular work is trying to explore.

(one of these is a good film!)

By the end of Advent Children, Cloud is once again the idealized version of himself. A hero that the audience is supposed to like and admire. We are supposed to think that his actions in the first half of the movie (wallowing in his guilt and abandoning his family) were bad. These are the flaws that he must overcome through the course of the film, and by the end he does. If he really had been settling and treating his Seventh Heaven family as a second choice prior to the events of the film, that too would obviously be a character flaw that needs to be addressed before the end of the film. It isn’t because this is a dynamic that only exists in certain people’s imaginations.

If the creators wanted to leave the Cloud & Aerith relationship open to a romantic interpretation, they didn’t have to write themselves into such a corner. They wouldn’t have to change the final film much at all, merely adjust the chronology a bit. Instead of Cloud already living as a family with Tifa, Marlene and Denzel prior to the beginning of the film, you would show them on the precipice of becoming a family, but with Cloud being unable to take the final step without getting over his feelings for Aerith first. This would leave space for him to love both women without coming off as an opportunistic jerk.

This is essentially the dynamic with Locke/Rachel/Celes in FFVI. Locke is unable to move on with Celes or anyone else until he finally finds closure with Rachel. It’s a lovely scene that does not diminish his relationships with either woman. He loved Rachel. He will love Celes. What the game does not have him do is enter into a relationship into Celes first and then when the party arrives at the Phoenix Cave, have him suddenly remember ‘Oh shit, I’ve gotta deal with my baggage with Rachel before I can really move on.’ That would not paint him in a particularly positive light.

Speaking of other Final Fantasies, let’s take a look another sequel in the series set two years after the events of the original work, one that is clearly the story of its protagonist searching for their lost love. And guess what? Final Fantasy X-2 does not begin with Yuna shacked up and raising two kids with another dude. And it certainly doesn’t begin with his perspective of the whole situation when Yuna decides to search for Tidus.

Square Enix knows how to write these kind of stories when they want to, and it’s clearly not their intent for Cloud and Aerith. Again, the biggest obstacle in the way of a Cloud/Aerith endgame isn’t space and time or death, it’s the existence of Tifa Lockhart.

A reasonable question to ask would be, if SE is not trying to ignite debate over the love triangle, why make Cloud’s relationship with Aerith a part of Advent Children at all? Why invite that sort of confusion? Well, the answer here, like the answer in the OG, is that Aerith’s role in the sequel is much more than her relationship with Cloud.

In the OG, it wasn’t Cloud and the gang who managed to stop Sephiroth and Meteor in the end, it was Aerith from the Lifestream. In a two-hour long film, you do not have the time to set up a completely new villain who can believably end the world, and since you pretty much have to include Sephiroth, the main antagonist can really only be him. No one else in the party has been established to have any magical Cetra powers, and again, since that’s not something that can be effectively established in a two-hour long film, and since Aerith needs to appear somehow, it again needs to be her who will save the day.

Given the time constraints, this external conflict has to be connected with Cloud’s internal conflict. In the OG, Cloud’s emotional arc is in resolved in the Lifestream, and then we spend a few more hours hunting down the Huge Materia/remembering what Holy is before resolving the external conflict of stopping Meteor. In Advent Children, we do not have that luxury of time. These turning points have to be one and same. It is only after Aerith is “introduced” in the film when Cloud asks her for forgiveness that she is able to help in the fight against the Remnants. Thus the turning point for Cloud’s character arc and the external conflict are the same. It’s understandably economical storytelling, though I wouldn’t call it particularly good storytelling.

As much as Cloud feels guilt over both Zack and Aerith’s deaths, it’s only Aerith who can play this dual role in the film. Zack can appear to help resolve Cloud’s emotional arc, but since he has no special Cetra powers or anything, there’s little he can do to help in Cloud’s fight against the Remnants. More time would need to be spent contriving a reason why Cloud is able to defeat the Remnants now when he wasn’t before or explaining why Aerith can suddenly help from the Lifestream when she had been absent before. (I still don’t think the film does a particularly good job of explaining this part, but that is a conversation for another time).

Another reason why Zack could not play this role is because at the time of AC’s original release, all we knew of Cloud and Zack’s relationship was contained in an optional flashback at the Shinra mansion after Cloud returns from the Lifestream. If it was Zack who suddenly showed up at Cloud’s lowest point, most viewers, even many who played the original game, would probably have been confused, and the moment would have fallen flat. On the other hand, even the most casual fan would have been aware of Aerith and her connection to Cloud, with her death scene being among the most well-known gaming moments of all time. Moreover, Aerith’s death is directly connected to Sephiroth, who is once again the threat in AC, whereas Zack was killed by Shinra goons. Aerith serves multiple purposes in a way that Zack just cannot.

Despite all this, though Aerith is more important to the film as a whole, many efforts are made to suggest that Zack and Aerith are equally important to Cloud. One of the first scenes in the film is Cloud moping around Zack’s grave (And unlike the scene with Aerith in the Forgotten City, it isn’t directly connected with Cloud’s present storyline in any way). We have the aforementioned scene where Cloud has flashes of both Aerith’s and Zack’s deaths when he saves Tifa and Denzel. Cloud has a scene where he’s standing back to back with Zack, mirroring his scene with in the Forgotten City with Aerith, before the climax of his fight with Sephiroth. In the Lifestream, after Cloud “dies,” it’s both Aerith and Zack who are there to send him back. Before the film ends, Cloud sees both Aerith and Zack leaving the church.

Now, were all these Zack appearances a way to promote the upcoming spin-off game that he’s going to lead? Of course. But the creators surely would have known that having Zack play such a similar role in Cloud’s arc would make Cloud’s relationship with Aerith feel less special and thus complicating a romantic interpretation of said relationship. If they wanted to encourage a romantic reading of Cloud’s lingering feelings for Aerith, they would have given Zack his own distinct role in the film. Or rather, they wouldn’t have put Zack in the film at all, and they certainly wouldn’t have him lead his own game, but we’ll get to the Zack of it all later.

The funny thing is, in a way, Zack is portrayed as being more special to Cloud. Zack only exists in the film to interact with Cloud and encourage him. Meanwhile. Aerith also has brief interactions with Kadaj, the Geostigma children and even Tifa before the film’s end. Aerith is there to save the whole world. Zack is there just for Cloud. If it’s Cloud’s relationship with Aerith that’s meant to be romantic, shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Let’s take a look at Tifa Lockhart. What role did she have to play in the FF7 sequel film? If, like some, you believed FF7 to be the Cloud/Aerith/Sephiroth show, then Tifa could have easily had a Barret-sized cameo in Advent Children. And honestly, she’s just a great martial artist. She has no special powers that would make her indispensable in a fight against Sephiroth. You certainly would not expect her to be the 2nd billed character in the film. Though of course, if you actually played through the Original Game with your eyes open, you would realize that Tifa Lockhart is instrumental to any story about Cloud Strife.

Unlike Aerith’s appearances, almost none of the suggestive scenes and dynamics between Cloud and Tifa had to be included in the film. As in, they serve no other plot related purpose and could have easily been cut from the final film if the creators weren’t trying to encourage a romantic interpretation of their relationship.

It feels inevitable now, but no one was expecting Cloud and Tifa to be living together and raising two kids. In the general consciousness, FF7 is Cloud and Sephiroth and their big swords and Aerith’s death. At the time, in the eyes of most fans and casual observers, Cloud and Tifa being together wasn’t a necessary part of the FF7 equation the way say, an epic fight between Cloud and Sephiroth would be. In fact, I don’t think even the biggest Cloti fans at the time would have imagined Cloud and Tifa living together would be their canon outcome in the sequel film.

Now can two platonic friends live together and raise two children together? Absolutely, but again Cloud and Tifa are not real people. They are fictional characters. A reasonable person (let’s use the legal definition of the term) who does not have brainworms from arguing over one of the dumbest debates on the Internet for 23 years would probably assume that two characters who were shown to be attracted to each other in the OG and who are now living together and raising two kids are in a romantic relationship. This is a reasonable assumption to make, and if SE wanted to leave Cloud’s romantic inclinations ambiguous, they simply would not be depicting Cloud and Tifa’s relationship in this manner. Cloud’s disrupted peace could have been a number of different things. He could have been a wandering mercenary, he could have been searching for a way to be reunited with Aerith. It didn’t have to be the family he formed with Tifa, but, then again, if you were actually paying attention to the story the OG was trying to tell, of course he would be living with Tifa.

Let’s also look at the scene where Cloud finds Tifa in the church after her fight with Loz. All the plot related information (who attacked her, Marlene being taken) is conveyed in the brief conversation they have before Cloud falls unconscious from Geostigma. What purpose do all the lingering shots of Cloud and Tifa in the flower bed in a Yin-Yang/non-sexual 69ing position serve if not to be suggestive of the type of relationship they have? It’s beautifully rendered but ultimately irrelevant to both the external and internal conflicts of the film.

Likewise, there is no reason why Cloud and Tifa needed to wake up in their children’s bedroom. No reason to show Cloud waking up with Tifa next to him in a way that almost makes you think they were in the same bed. And there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for a close-up of Tifa’s hand with the Wolf Ring on her ring finger while she is admonishing Cloud during what sounds like a domestic argument (This ring again comes into focus when Tifa leads Denzel to Cloud at the church at the end - there are dozens of ways this scene could have been rendered, but this is the one that was chosen.) If it wasn’t SE’s intent to emphasize the family dynamic and the intimate nature of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship, these scenes would not exist.

Let’s also take a look at Denzel, the only new character in the AC (give or take the Remnants). Again, given the film’s brief runtime, the fact that they’re not only adding a new character but giving him more screen time than almost every other AVALANCHE member must mean that he’s pretty important. While Denzel does have an arc of his own, especially in ACC, he is intricately connected to Cloud and Tifa and solidifies the family unit that they’ve been forming in Edge. Marlene still has Barret, but with the addition of Denzel, the family becomes something more real albeit even more tenuous given his Geostigma diagnosis. Without Denzel in the picture, it’s a bit easier to interpret Cloud’s distance from Tifa as romantic pining for another woman, but now it just seems absurd. The stakes are so much higher. Cloud and Tifa are at a completely different stage in their lives from the versions of these characters we met early on in the OG who were entangled in a frivolous love triangle. And yet some people are still stuck trying to fit these characters into a childish dynamic that died at the end of disc one along with a certain someone.

All this is there in the film, at least the director’s cut, if you really squint. But since SE preferred to spend its time on countless action sequences that have aged as well as whole milk in lieu of spending a few minutes showing Cloud’s family life before he got Geostigma to establish the emotional stakes, or a beat or two more on his reconciliation with Tifa and the kids, people may be understandably confused about Cloud’s arc. Has Cloud just been a moping around in misery for the two years post-OG? The answer is no, though that can only really be found in the accompanying novellas, specifically Case of Tifa.

Concerning the novellas, which we apparently must read to understand said DVD sequel

I really don’t know how you can read through CoT and still think there is anything ambiguous about the nature of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship. The “Because I have you this time,” Cloud telling Tifa he’ll remind her how to be strong when they’re alone, Cloud confidently agreeing when Marlene adds him to their family. Not to mention Barret and Cid’s brief conversation about Cloud and Tifa’s relationship in Case of Barret, after which Cid comments that “women wear the pants,” which Barret then follows by asking Cid about Shera. Again, a reasonable person would assume the couple in question are in a romantic relationship, and if this wasn’t the intent, these lines would not be present. Especially not in a novella about someone else.

Some try to argue that CoT just shows how incompatible Cloud and Tifa are because it features a few low points in their relationship. I don’t think that’s Nojima’s intent. Even if it was, it certainly wouldn’t be to prove that Cloud loves Aerith. This isn’t how you tell that story. Why waste all that time disproving a negative rather than proving a positive? We didn’t spend hours in FF8 watching Rinoa’s relationship with Seifer fall apart to understand how much better off she is with Squall. If Cloud and Aerith is meant to be a love story, then tell their love story. Why tell the story of how Cloud is incompatible with someone else?

Part of the confusion may be because CoT doesn’t tell a complete story in and of itself. The first half of the story (before Cloud has to deliver flowers to the Forgotten City) acts as a sort of epilogue to the OG, while the second half of the story is something of a prologue to Advent Children (or honestly its missing Act One). And to state the obvious, conflict is inherent to any story worth telling. It can’t just be all fluff, that’s what the fanfiction is for.

Tifa’s conflict is her fear that the fragile little family they’ve built in Edge is going to fall apart. Thus we see her fret about Cloud’s distance, the way this affects Marlene, and Denzel’s sickness. There are certainly some low moments here --- Tifa telling Cloud to drink in his room, asking if he loves her -- all ways for the threat to seem more real, the outcome more uncertain, yet there’s only one way this conflict can be resolved. One direction to which their relationship can move.

Again, by the end of this story, both characters are supposed to be the best versions of themselves, to find their “happy” endings so to speak. Tifa could certainly find happiness outside of a relationship with Cloud. She could decide that they’ve given it a shot, but they’re better off as friends. She’s grateful for this experience and she’s learned from this, but now she’s ready to make a life for herself on her own. It would be a fine character arc, though not something the Final Fantasy series has been wont to do. However, that’s obviously not the case here as there’s no indication whatsoever that Tifa considers this as an option for herself. Nojima hasn’t written this off ramp into her journey. For Tifa, they’ll either become a real family or they won’t. Since this is a story that is going to have a happy ending, so of course they will, even if there are a lot of bumps along the way.

Unfortunately, with the Compilation being the unwieldy beast that this is, this whole arc has to be pieced together across a number of different works:

Tifa asking herself if they’re a real family in CoT

Her greatest fear seemingly come to life when Cloud leaves at the end of CoT/beginning of AC

Tifa explicitly asking Cloud if the reason they can’t help each other is because they’re not a real family during their argument in AC. Notably, even though Cloud is at his lowest point, he doesn’t confirm her fear. Instead he says he that he can’t help anyone, not even his family. Instead, he indirectly confirms that yes he does think they’re a family, even if is a frustrating moment still in that he’s too scared to try to save it.

The ending of AC where we see a new photo of Cloud smiling surrounded by Tifa and the kids and the rest of the AVALANCHE, next to the earlier photo we had seen of the four of them where he was wearing a more dour expression.

The ending of The Kids Are All Right, where Cloud, Tifa, Denzel and Marlene meet with Evan, Kyrie and Vits - and Cloud offers, unsolicited, that even if they’re not related by blood, they’re a family.

The ending of DVD extra ‘Reminiscence of FFVII’ where Cloud takes the day off and asks Tifa to close the bar so they can spend time together as a family as Tifa had wanted to do early in CoT

Cloud fears he’ll fail his family. Tifa fears it’ll fall apart. Cloud retreats into himself, pushing others away. Tifa neglects herself, not being able to say what she needs to say. In Advent Children, Tifa finally voices her frustrations. It’s then that Cloud finally confronts his fears. Like in the OG, Cloud and Tifa’s conflicts and character arcs are two sides of the same coin, and it’s only by communicating with each other are they able to resolve it. Though with the Compilation being an inferior work, it’s much less satisfying this time around. Such is the problem when you’re writing towards a preordained outcome (Cloud and Sephiroth duking it once again) rather than letting the story develop organically.

Some may ask, why mention Aerith so much (Cloud growing distant after delivering flowers to the Forgotten City, Cloud finding Denzel at Aerith’s church) if they weren’t trying to perpetuate the LTD? Well, as explained above, Aerith had to be in Advent Children, and since CoT is the only place where we get any insight into Cloud’s psyche, it’s here where Nojima expands on that guilt.

Again, this is a story that requires conflict, and what better conflict than the specter of a love rival? Notably, despite us having access to Tifa’s thoughts and fears, she never explicitly associates Cloud’s behavior with him pining after Aerith. Though it’s fair to say this fear is implied, if unwarranted.

If Cloud had actually been pining after Aerith this whole time, we would not be seeing it all unfold through Tifa’s perspective. You can depict a romance without drawing attention to the injured third party. We’re seeing all of this from Tifa’s POV, because it’s about Tifa’s insecurities, not the great tragic romance between Cloud and Aerith. Honestly, another reason we see this from Tifa’s perspective is because it’s dramatically more interesting. Because she’s insecure, she (and we the reader) wonder if there’s something else going on. Meanwhile, from Cloud’s perspective it would be straightforward and redundant, given what we see in AC. He’s guilty over Aerith’s death and thinks he doesn’t deserve to be happy.

Not to mention, the first time we encounter Aerith in CoT, Tifa is the one breaking down at her grave while Cloud is the one comforting her. Are we supposed to believe that he just forgot he was in love with Aerith until he had to deliver flowers to the Forgotten City?

And Aerith doesn’t just serve as a romantic obstacle. She’s also a symbol of guilt and redemption for both Cloud and Tifa. Neither think they have the right to be happy after all that’s happened (Aerith’s death being a big part of this), and through Denzel, who Cloud finds at Aerith’s church, they both see a chance to atone.

I do want to address Case of Lifestream: White because it’s only time in the entire Compilation where I’ve asked myself — what are they trying to achieve here? Now, I’d rather drink bleach than start debating the translation of ‘koibito’ again, but I did think it was a strange choice to specify the romantic nature of Aerith’s love for Cloud. I suppose it could be a reference her obvious attraction to Cloud in the OG, though calling it love feels like a stretch.

But nothing else in CoLW really gives me pause. It might be a bit jarring to see how much of it is Aerith’s thoughts of Cloud, but it makes sense when you consider the context in which it’s meant to be consumed. Unlike Case of Tifa or Case of Denzel, CoLW isn’t meant to be read on its own. It’s a few scant paragraphs in direct conversation with Case of Lifestream: Black. In CoLB, Sephiroth talks about his plan to return and end the world or whatever, and how Cloud is instrumental to his plan. Each segment of CoLW mirrors the corresponding segment of CoLB. Thus, CoLW has to be about Aerith’s plan to stop Sephiroth and the role Cloud must play in that. In both of these stories, Cloud is the only named character. It doesn’t mean that thoughts of Cloud consume all of Aerith’s afterlife. Case of Lifestream is only a tiny sliver of the story, a halfassed way to explain why in Advent Children the world is ending again and why Cloud has to be at the center of it all.

Notably, there is absolutely nothing in CoLW about Cloud’s feelings for Aerith. Even if it’s just speculation on her part as we see Sephiroth speculate about Cloud’s reactions in CoLB. Aerith can see what’s going on in the real world, but she says nothing about Cloud’s actions. If Cloud is really pining after her, trying to find a way to be reunited with her, wouldn’t this be the ideal story to show such devotion?

But it’s not there, because not only does it not happen, but because this story is not about Aerith’s relationship with Cloud. It is about how Aerith needs to see and warn Cloud in order to stop Sephiroth. By the end of Advent Children, that goal is fulfilled. Cloud gets his forgiveness. Aerith gets to see him again and helps him stop Sephiroth. There’s no suggestion that either party wants more. We finally have the closure that the OG lacked, and at no point does it confirm that Cloud reciprocated Aerith’s romantic feelings, even though there were plenty of opportunities to do so.

I don’t really know what else people were expecting. Advent Children isn’t a romantic drama. There’s not going to be a moment where Cloud explicitly tells Tifa, ‘I’ve never loved Aerith. It’s only been you all along.” This is just simply not the kind of story it is.

Though one late scene practically serves this function. When Cloud “dies” and Aerith finds him in the Lifestream, if there were any lingering romantic feelings between the two of them, this would be a beautiful bittersweet reunion. Maybe something about how as much as they want to be together, it’s not his time yet. Instead, it’s almost played off as a joke. Cloud calls her ‘Mother’, and Zack is at Aerith’s side, joking about how Cloud has no place there. This would be the perfect opportunity to address the romantic connection between Cloud and Aerith, but instead, the film elides this completely. Instead, it’s a cute afterlife moment between Aerith and Zack, and functionally allows Cloud to go back to where he belongs, to Tifa and the kids. Whatever Cloud’s feelings for Aerith were before, it’s transformed into something else.

Crisis Core -- or how Aerith finally gets her love story

The other relevant part of the Compilation is Crisis Core, which I will now touch on briefly (or at least brief for me). In the OG, Zack Fair was more plot device than character. We knew he was important to Cloud — enough that Cloud would mistake Zack’s memories for his own -- we knew he was important to Aerith — enough that she is initially drawn to Cloud due to his similarities to Zack — yet the nature of these relationships is more ambiguous. Especially his relationship with Aerith. From the little we learn of their relationship, it could have been completely one-sided on her part, and Zack a total cad. At least that’s the implication she leaves us with in Gongaga. We get the sense that she might not be the most reliable narrator on this point (why bring up an ex so often, unsolicited, if it wasn’t anything serious?) but the OG never confirms this either way.

Crisis Core clears this up completely. Not only is Zack portrayed as the Capital H Hero of his own game, but his relationships with Cloud and Aerith are two of the most important in the game. In fact, they are the basis for his heroic sacrifice at the game’s end: he dies trying to save Cloud’s life; he dies trying to return to Aerith.

Zack’s relationship with Aerith is a major subplot of the game. Not only that, but the details of said relationship completely recontextualizes what we know about the Aerith we see in the OG. Many of Aerith’s most iconic traits (wearing pink, selling flowers) are a direct product of this relationship, and more importantly, so many of the hallmarks of her early relationship with Cloud (him falling through her church, one date as a reward, a conversation in the playground) are a direct echo of her relationship with Zack.

A casual fling this was not. Aerith’s relationship with Zack made a deep impact on the character we see in the OG and clearly colored her interactions with Cloud throughout.

Crisis Core is telling Zack’s story, and Tifa is a fairly minor supporting character, yet it still finds the time to expand upon Cloud and Tifa’s relationship. Through their interactions with Zack, we learn just how much they were on each others’ minds during this time, and how they were both too shy to own up to these feelings. We also get a brief expansion on the moment Cloud finds Tifa injured in the reactor.

Meanwhile, given the point we are in the story’s chronology, Cloud and Aerith are completely oblivious of each other’s existence.

One may try to argue that none of this matters since all of this is in the past. While this argument might hold water if we arguing about real lives in the real world, FF7 is a work of fiction. Its creators decided that these would be events we would see, and that Zack would be the lens through which we’d see them. Crisis Core is not the totality of these characters’ lives prior to the event of the OG. Rather, it consists of moments that enhance and expand upon our understanding of the original work. We learn the full extent of Hojo’s experimentation and the Jenova project; we learn that Sephiroth was actually a fairly normal guy before he was driven insane when he uncovers the circumstances of his birth. We learn that Aerith was a completely different person before she met Zack, and their relationship had a profound impact on her character.

A prequel is not made to contradict the original work, but what it can do is recontexualize the story we already know and add a layer of nuance that may have not been obvious before. Thus, Sephiroth is transformed from a scary villain into a tragic figure who could have been a hero were it not for Hojo’s experiments. Aerith’s behavior too invites reinterpretation. What once seemed flirty and perhaps overtly forward now looks like the tragic attempts of a woman trying to recapture a lost love.

If Cloud and Aerith were meant to be the official couple of the Compilation of FF7, you absolutely would not be spending so much time depicting two relationships that will be moot by the time we get to the original work. You especially would not depict Zack and Aerith’s relationship in a way that makes Aerith’s relationship with Cloud look like a copy of the moments she had with her ex.

Additionally, with Zack’s relationship with Angeal, we can see, that within the universe of FF7, a protagonist being devastated over the death of a beloved comrade isn’t something that’s inherently romantic. Neither is it romantic for said dead comrade to lend a helping hand from the beyond.

SE would also expect some people to play Crisis Core before the OG. If Cloud and Aerith are the intended endgame couple, then SE would be asking the player to root for a guy to pursue the girlfriend of the man who gave his life for him. The same man who died trying to reunite with her. This is to say nothing of Cloud’s treatment of Tifa in this scenario. How could this possibly be the intent  for their most popular protagonist in the most popular entry of their most popular franchise?

What Crisis Core instead offers is something for fans of Aerith who may be disappointed that she was robbed of a great romance by her death. Well, she now gets that epic, tragic romance. Only it’s with Zack, not Cloud.

If SE intended for Cloud and Aerith to be the official couple of FF7, neither Zack nor Tifa would exist. They would not spend so much time developing Zack and Tifa into the multi-dimensional characters they are, only to be treated as nothing more than collateral damage in the wake of Cloud and Aerith’s great love. No, this is a Final Fantasy. SE want their main characters to have something of a happy ending after all of the tribulations they face. Cloud and Tifa find theirs in life. Zack and Aerith, as the ending of AC suggests, find theirs in death.

Cloud and Aerith’s relationship isn’t a threat to the Zack/Aerith and Cloud/Tifa endgame, nor is it a mere obstacle. Rather, it’s a relationship that actually deepens and strengthens the other two. Aerith is explicitly searching for her first love in Cloud, revealing just how deep her feelings for Zack ran. Cloud gets to live out his heroic SOLDIER fantasy with Aerith, a fantasy he created just to impress Tifa.

There are moments between Cloud and Aerith that may seem romantic when taken on its own, but viewed within the context of the whole narrative, ultimately reveal that they aren’t quite right for each other, and in each other, they’re actually searching for someone else.

This quadrangular dynamic reminds me a bit of one of my favorite classic films, The Philadelphia Story. (Spoilers for a film that came out in 1940 ahead) — The single most romantic scene in the film is between Jimmy Stewart’s and Katherine Hepburn’s characters, yet they’re not the ones who end up together. Even as their passions run, as the music swells, and we want them to end up together, we realize that they’re not quite right for each other. We know that it won’t work out.

More relevantly, we know this is true due to the existence of Cary Grant’s and Ruth Hussey’s characters, who are shown to carry a torch for Hepburn and Stewart, respectively. Grant and Hussey are well-developed and sympathetic characters. With the film being the top grossing film of the year, and made during the Code era, it’s about as “clean” of a narrative as you can get. There’s no way Grant and Hussey would be given such prominent roles just to be left heartbroken and in the cold by the film’s end.

Hepburn’s character (Tracy) pretty much sums it herself after some hijinks lead to a last minute proposal from Stewart’s character (Mike):

Mike: Will you marry me, Tracy?                      

Tracy: No, Mike. Thanks, but hmm-mm. Nope.

Mike: l've never asked a girl to marry me. l've avoided it. But you've got me all confused now. Why not?

Tracy: Because l don't think Liz [Hussey’s character] would like it...and l'm not sure you would...and l'm even a little doubtful about myself. But l am beholden to you, Mike. l'm most beholden.

Despite the fact that the film spends more time developing Hepburn and Stewart’s relationship than theirs with their endgame partners, it’s still such a satisfying ending. That’s because, even at the peak of their romance, we can see how Stewart needs someone like Hussey to ground his passionate impulses, and how Hepburn needs Grant, someone who won’t put her on a pedestal like everyone else. Hepburn and Stewart’s is a relationship that might feel right in the moment, but doesn’t quite work in the light of day.

I don’t think Cloud and Aerith share a moment that is nearly as romantic in FF7, but the same principle applies. What may seem romantic in the moment actually reveals how they’re right for someone else.

Even if Aerith lives and Cloud decides to pursue a relationship with her, it’s not going to be all puppies and roses ahead for them. Aerith would need to disentangle her feelings for Zack from her attraction to Cloud, and Cloud would still need to confront his feelings for Tifa, which were his main motivator for nearly half his life, before they can even start to build something real. This is messy work, good fodder for a prestige cable drama or an Oscar-baity indie film, but it has no place in a Final Fantasy. There simply isn’t the time. Not when the question on most players’ minds isn’t ‘Cloud does love?’ but ‘How the hell are they going to stop that madman and his Meteor that’s about to destroy the world?’

With Zerith’s depiction in Crisis Core, there’s a sort of bittersweet poetry in how the two relationships rhyme but can’t actually coexist. It is only because Zack is trying to return to Midgar to see Aerith that Cloud is able to reunite with Tifa, and the OG begins in earnest. In another world, Zack and Aerith would be the hero and heroine who saved the world and lived to tell the tale. They are much more the traditional archetypes - Zack the super-powered warrior who wants to be a Capital-H Hero, and Aerith, the last of her kind who reluctantly accepts her fate. Compared to these two, Cloud and Tifa aren’t nearly so special, nor their goals so lofty and noble. Cloud, after all, was too weak to even get into SOLDIER, and only wanted to be one, not for some greater good, but to impress the girl he liked. Tifa has no special abilities, merely learning martial arts when she grew wise enough to not wait around for a hero. On the surface, Cloud and Tifa are made of frailer stuff, and yet by luck or by fate, they’re the ones who cheat death time and time again, and manage to save the world, whereas the ones who should have the role, are prematurely struck down before they can finish the job. Cloud and Tifa fulfill the roles that they never asked for, that they may not be particularly suited for, in Zack and Aerith’s stead. There’s a burden and a beauty to it. Cloud and Tifa can live because Zack and Aerith did not.

All of this nuance is lost if you think Cloud and Aerith are meant to be the endgame couple. Instead, you have a pair succumbing to their basest desires, regardless of the selfless sacrifices their other potential paramours made for their sake. Zack and Tifa, and their respective relationships with Aerith and Cloud, are flattened into mere romantic obstacles. The heart wants what it wants, some may argue. While that may be true in real life, that is not necessarily the case in a work of fiction, especially not a Final Fantasy. The other canon Final Fantasy couples could certainly have had previous romantic relationships, but unless they have direct relevance to the their character arcs (e.g., Rachel to Locke), the games do not draw attention to them because they would be a distraction from the romance they are trying to tell. They’ve certainly never spent the amount of real estate FF7 spends in depicting Cloud/Tifa and Zack/Aerith’s relationships.

At last…the Remake, and somehow this essay isn’t even close to being over

Finally, we come to the Remake. With the technological advancements made in the last 23 years and the sheer amount of hours they’re devoting to just the Midgar section this time around, you can almost look at the OG as an outline and the Remake as the final draft. With the OG being overly reliant on text to  do its storytelling, and the Remake having subtle facial expressions and a slew of cinematic techniques at its disposal, you might almost consider it an adaptation from a literary medium to a visual one. Our discussions are no longer limited to just what the characters are saying, but what they are doing, and even more importantly, how the game presents those actions. When does the game want us to pay attention? And what does it want us to pay attention to?

Unlike most outlines, which are read by a small handful of execs, SE has 23 years worth of reactions from the general public to gauge what works and what doesn’t work, what caused confusion, and what could be clarified. While FF7 is not a romance, the LTD remains a hot topic among a small but vocal part of the fanbase. It certainly is an area that could do with some clarifying in the Remake.

Since the Remake is not telling a new story, but rather retelling an existing story that has been in the public consciousness for over two decades, certain aspects that were treated as “twists” in the OG no longer have that same element of surprise, and would need to approached differently. For example, in the Midgar section of the OG, Shinra is treated as the main antagonist throughout. It’s only when we get to the top of the Shinra tower that Sephiroth is revealed as the real villain. Anyone with even a passing of knowledge of FF7 would be aware of Sephiroth so trying to play it off like a surprise in the Remake would be terribly anticlimactic. Thus, Sephiroth appears as early as Ch. 2 to haunt Cloud and the player throughout.

Likewise, many players who’ve never even touched the OG are probably aware that Aerith dies, thus her death can no longer be played for shock. While SE would still want the player to grow attached to Aerith so that her death has an emotional impact, there are diminishing returns to misdirecting the player about her fate, at least not in the same way it was done in the OG.

How do these considerations affect the how the LTD is depicted in the Remake? For the two of the biggest twists in the OG to land in the Remake — Aerith’s death and Cloud’s true identity in the Lifestream — the game needs to establish:

Aerith’s attraction to Cloud, specifically due to his similarities to Zack. This never needs to go past an initial attraction for the player to understand that the man whose memory Cloud was “borrowing” is Zack. Aerith’s feelings for Cloud can evolve into something platonic or even maternal by her end without the reveal in the Lifestream losing any impact.

Cloud’s love for Tifa. For the Lifestream sequence to land with an “Ooooh!” rather than a “Huh!?!?”, the Remake will need to establish that Cloud’s feelings for Tifa were strong enough to 1) motivate him to try to join SOLDIER in the first place 2) incentivize him to adopt a false persona because he fears that he isn’t the man she wants him to be 3) call him back to consciousness from Make poisoning twice 4) help him put his mind back together and find his true self. That’s a lot of story riding on one guy’s feelings!

The player’s love for Aerith so that her death will hurt. This can be done by making them invested in Aerith as a character by her own right, but also extends to the relationships she has with the other characters (not only Cloud).

What is not necessary is establishing Cloud’s romantic feelings for Aerith. Now, would their doomed romance make her death hurt even more? Sure, but it could work just as well if Cloud if is losing a dear friend and ally, not a lover. Not to mention, her death also cuts short her relationships with Tifa, Barret, Red XII, etc. Bulking those relationships up prior to her death, would also make her loss more palpable. If anything, establishing Cloud’s romantic feelings for Aerith would actually undermine the game’s other big twist. The game needs you to believe that Cloud’s feelings for Tifa were strong enough to drive his entire hero’s journey. If Cloud is shown falling in love with another woman in the span of weeks if not mere days, then the Lifestream scene would be much harder to swallow.

Cloud wavering between the two women made sense in the OG because the main way for the player to get to know Aerith was through her interactions with Cloud. That is no longer the case in the Remake. Cloud is still the protagonist, and the player character for the vast majority of the game, but there are natural ways for the player to get to know Aerith outside of her dialogue exchanges with Cloud. Unless SE considers the LTD an integral part of FF7’s DNA, then for the sake of story clarity, the LTD doesn’t need to exist.

How then does the Remake clarify things?

I’m not going go through every single change in the Remake — there are far too many of them, and they’ve been documented elsewhere. Most of the changes are expansions or adaptations (what might make sense for super-deformed chibis would look silly for realistic characters, e.g., Cloud rolling barrels in the Church has now become him climbing across the roof support). What is expanded and how it’s adapted can be telling, but what is more interesting are the additions and removals. Not just for what takes place in the scenes themselves, but how their addition or removal changes our understanding of the narrative as a whole vis-a-vis the story we know from the OG.

Notably, one of the features that is not expanded upon, but rather diminished, is player choice. In the OG, the player had a slew of dialogue options to choose from, especially during the Midgar portion of the game. Not only did it determine which character would go on a date with Cloud at the Gold Saucer, but it also made the player identify with Cloud since they’re largely determining his personality during this stage. Despite the technological advances that have made this level of optionality the norm in AAA games, the Remake gives the player far fewer non-gameplay related choices, and only really the illusion of choice as a nod to the OG, but they don’t affect the story of the game in any meaningful way. You get a slightly different conversation depending on the choice, but you have to buy the Flower, Tifa has to make you a drink.

So much of what fueled the LTD in the OG came from this mechanic, which is now largely absent in the Remake. Almost every instance where there was a dialogue branch in the OG has become a single, canon scenario in the Remake that favors Tifa (e.g., having the choice of giving the flower to Tifa or Marlene in the OG, to Cloud giving the flower to Tifa in the Remake). Similarly, for the only meaningful choice you make in the Remake — picking Tifa or Aerith in the sewers — Cloud is now equidistant to both girls, whereas in the OG, his starting point was much closer to Aerith. In the OG, player choice allowed you to largely determine Cloud’s personality, and the girl he favored — and seemingly encouraged you to choose Aerith in many instances. In the Remake, Cloud is now his own character, not who the player wants him to be. And this Cloud, well, he sure seems to have a thing for Tifa.

In fact, one of the first changes in the Remake is the addition of Jessie asking Cloud about his relationship with Tifa, and Cloud’s brief flashback to their childhood together. In the OG, Tifa isn’t mentioned at all during the first reactor mission, and we don’t see her until we get to Sector 7.

Not only does this scene reveal Tifa’s importance to Cloud much earlier on than in the OG, but it sets up a sort of frame of reference that colors Cloud’s subsequent interactions. Even as Jessie kind of flirts with him throughout the reactor mission, even with his chance meeting Aerith in Sector 8, in the back of your mind, you might be thinking — wait what about his relationship with this Tifa character? What if he’s already spoken for?

Think about how this plays out in the OG. Jessie is pretty much a non-entity, and Cloud has his meet-cute with the flower girl before we’re even aware that Tifa exists. It’s hard to get too invested in his interactions with Tifa, when you know he has to meet the flower girl again, and you’re waiting for that moment, because that’s when the game will start in earnest.

After chapter 1 of the Remake, a new player may be asking — who is this Tifa person, and, echoing Jessie’s question, what kind of relationship does she have with Cloud? It’s a question that’s repeated when Barret mentions her before they set the bomb, and again when Barret specifies Seventh Heaven is where Tifa works — and the game zooms in on Cloud’s face — when they arrive in Sector 7.

It’s when we finally meet her at Seventh Heaven in Ch. 3 that we feel, ah now, this game has finally begun.

It’s also interesting how inorganically this question is introduced in the Remake. Up until that moment, the dialogue and Cloud are all business. Then, as they’re waiting for the gate to open, Jessie asks about Tifa completely out of the blue, and Cloud, all of a sudden, is at a lost for words, and has the first of many flashbacks. That this moment is a bit incongruous shows the effort SE made to establish Tifa’s importance to the game and to Cloud early on.

One of the biggest changes in the Remake is the addition of the events in Ch. 3 and 4. Unlike what happens in Ch. 18, Ch. 3 and 4 feel like such a natural extension of the OG’s story that many players may not even realize that SE has added an whole day’s and night’s worth of events to the OG’s story. While not a drastic change, it does reshape our understanding of subsequent events in the story, namely Cloud’s time spent alone with Aerith.

In the OG, we rush from one reactor mission to the next, with no real time to explore Cloud’s character or his relationships with any of the other characters in between. When he crashes through the church, he gets a bit of a breather. We see a different side of him with Aerith. Since we have nothing else to compare it to, many might assume that his relationship with Aerith is special. That she brings something out of him that no one else can.

That is no longer the case in the Remake. While Cloud’s time in Sector 5 with Aerith remains largely unchanged though greatly expanded, it no longer feels  “special.” So many of the beats that seemed exclusive to his relationship with Aerith in the OG, we’ve now already seen play out with both Tifa and the other members of AVALANCHE long before he meets Aerith.

Cloud tells the flowers to listen to Aerith; he’s told Tifa he’s listening if she wants to talk; told Bigg’s he wants to hear the story of Jessie’s dad. Cloud offers to walk Aerith back home; he offered the same to Wedge. Cloud smiles at Aerith; he’s already smiled at Tifa and AVALANCHE a number of times.

Now, I’m under no illusion that SE added these chapters solely to diminish Aerith’s importance to Cloud (other than the obvious goal of making the game longer, I imagine they wanted the player to spend more time in Sector 7 and more time with the other AVALANCHE members so that the collapse of the Pillar and their deaths have more weight), but they certainly must have realized that this would be one effect. If pushing Cloud/Aerith’s romance had been a goal with the Remake, this would be a scenario they would try to avoid. Notably, the other place where time has been added - the night in the Underground Shinra Lab, and the day helping other people out around the slums — are also periods of time when Aerith is absent.

Home Sweet Slums vs. Budding Bodyguard

Since most of the events in Ch. 3 were invented for the Remake, and thus we have nothing in the OG to compare it to (except to say that something is probably better than nothing), I thought it would be more interesting to compare it to Ch. 8. Structurally, they are nearly identical — Cloud doing sidequests around the Sectors with one of the girls as his guide. Extra bits of dialogue the more sidequests you complete, with an optional story event if you do them all. Do Cloud’s relationships with each girl progress the same way in both chapters? Is the Remake just Final Waifu Simulator 2020 or are they distinct, reflecting their respective roles in the story as a whole?

A lot of what the player takes away from these chapters is going to be pretty subjective (Is he annoyed with her or is he playing hard to get), yet the vibes of the two chapters are quite different. This is because in Ch. 3, the player is getting to know Tifa through her relationship with Cloud; in Ch. 8; the player is getting to know Aerith as a character on her own.

What do I mean by this? Let’s take Cloud’s initial introduction into each Sector. In Ch. 3, it’s a straight shot from Seventh Heaven to Stargazer Heights punctuated by a brief conversation where Tifa asks Cloud about the mission he was just on. We don’t learn anything new about Tifa’s character here. Instead we hear Cloud recount the mission we already saw play out in detail in Ch. 1 But it’s through this conversation that we get a glimpse of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship — unlike the reticent jerk he was with Avalanche, this Cloud is much more responsive and even tries to reassure her in his own stilted way. We also know that they have enough of a past together that Tifa can categorize him as “not a people person” — an assessment to which Cloud agrees. Slowly, we’re getting an answer to the question Jessie posed in Ch. 1 — just what kind of relationship does Cloud have with Tifa?

In Ch. 8, Aerith leads Cloud on a roundabout way through Sector 5, and stops, unprompted, to talk about her experiences helping at the restaurant, helping out the doctor, and helping with the orphans at the Leaf House. It’s not so much a conversation as a monologue. Cloud isn’t the one who inquires about these relationships, and more jarringly, he doesn’t respond until Aerith directly asks him a question (interestingly enough, it’s about the flower she gave him…which he then gave to Tifa). Here, the game is allowing the player to learn more about the kind of person Aerith is. Cloud is also learning about Aerith at the same time, but with his non-reaction, either the game itself is indifferent to Cloud’s feelings towards Aerith or it is deliberately trying to portray Cloud’s indifference to Aerith.

The optional story event you can see in each chapter after completing all the side quests is also telling. In Ch. 3, “Alone at Last” is almost explicitly about Cloud and Tifa’s relationship. It’s bookended by two brief scenes between Marle and Cloud — the first in which she lectures him about how he should treat Tifa almost like an overprotective in-law, the second after they return downstairs and Marle awards Cloud with an accessory “imbued with the fervent desire to be by one’s side for eternity” after he makes Tifa smile. In between, Cloud and Tifa chat alone in her room. Tifa finally gets a chance to ask Cloud about his past and they plan a little date to celebrate their reunion. There is also at least the suggestion that Cloud was expecting something else when Tifa asked him to her room.

In Ch. 8’s “The Language of Flowers,” Cloud and Aerith’s relationship is certainly part of the story — unlike earlier in the chapter, Cloud actually asks Aerith about what she’s doing and even supports her by talking to the flowers too, but the other main objective of this much briefer scene is to show Aerith’s relationship with the flowers and of her mysterious Cetra powers (though we don’t know about her ancestry just yet). Like a lot of Aerith’s dialogue, there’s a lot of foreshadowing and foreboding in her words. If anything, it’s almost as if Cloud is playing the Marle role to the flowers, as an audience surrogate to ask Aerith about her relationship with the flowers so that she can explain. Also, there’s no in-game reward that suggests what the scene was really about.

If there’s any confusion about what’s going on here, just compare their titles “Alone At Last” vs. “The Language of Flowers.”

I’ll try not to bring my personal feelings into this, but there’s just something so much more satisfying about the construction of Ch. 3. This is some real storytelling 101 shit, but I think a lot of it due to just how much set up and payoff there is, and how almost all of said payoff deepens our understanding of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship:

Marle: Cloud meets Tifa’s overprotective landlady towards the beginning of the chapter. She is dubious of his character and his relationship with TIfa. This impression does not change the second time they meet even though Tifa herself is there to mediate. It’s only towards the end of the chapter, after all the sidequests are complete, that this tension is resolved. Marle gives Cloud a lecture about how he should be treating Tifa, which he seems to take to heart. And Cloud finally earns Marle’s begrudging approval after he emerges from their rooms with a chipper-looking Tifa in tow.

Their past: For their first in-game interaction, Cloud casually brings up that fact that it’s been “Five years” since they’ve last, which seem to throw Tifa off a bit. As they’re replacing filters, Cloud asks Tifa what she’s been up to in the time since they’ve been apart, and Tifa quickly changes the subject. Tifa tries to ask Cloud about his life “after he left the village,” at the Neighborhood Watch HQ, and this time he’s the one who seems to be avoiding the subject. It’s only after all the Ch. 3 sidequests are complete, and they're alone in her room that Tifa finally gets the chance to ask her question. A question which Cloud still doesn’t entirely answer. This question remains unresolved, and anyone’s played the OG will know that it will remain unresolved for some time yet, as it is THE question of Cloud’s story as a whole.

The lessons: Tifa starts spouting off some lessons for life in the slums as she brings Cloud around the town, though it’s unclear if Cloud is paying attention or taking them to heart. After completing the first sidequest, Cloud repeats one of these sayings back to her, confirming that he’s been listening all along. By the end of the chapter, Cloud is repeating these lessons to himself, even when Tifa isn’t around. These lessons extend beyond this chapter, with Cloud being a real teacher’s pet, asking Tifa “Is this a lesson” in Ch. 10 once they reunite.

The drink: When Cloud first arrives at Seventh Heaven, Tifa plays hostess and asks him if he wants anything, but it seems he’s only interested in his money. After exploring the sector a bit, Tifa again tries to play the role of cheery bartender, offering to make him a cocktail at the bar, but Cloud sees through this facade, and they carry on. Finally, after the day’s work is done, to tide Cloud over while she’s meeting with AVALANCHE, Tifa finally gets the chance to make him a drink. No matter, which dialogue option the player chooses, Tifa and Cloud fall into the roles of flirty bartender and patron quite easily. Who would have thought this was possible from the guy we met in Ch. 1?

This dynamic is largely absent in Ch. 8, except perhaps exploring Aerith’s relationship with the flowers, which “pays off” in the “Language of Flowers” event, but again, that scene is primarily about Aerith’s character rather than her relationship with Cloud. The orphans and the Leaf House are a throughline of the chapter, but they are merely present. There’s no clear progression here as was the case with in Ch. 3. Sure, the kids admire Cloud quite a bit after he saves them, but it’s not like they were dubious of his presence before. They barely paid attention to him. In terms of the impact the kids have on Cloud’s relationship with Aerith, there isn’t much at all. Certainly nothing like the role Marle plays in developing his relationship with Tifa.

The thing is, there are plenty of moments that could have been set ups, only there’s no real follow through. Aerith introduces Cloud around town as her bodyguard, and some people like the Doctor express dubiousness of his ability to do the job, but even after we spend a whole day fighting off monsters, and defeating Rude, there’s no payoff. Not even a throwaway “Wow, great job bodyguarding” comment. Same with the whole “one date” reward. Other than a quick reference on the way to Sector 5, and Aerith threatening to reveal the deal to cajole Cloud into helping her gather flowers, it’s never brought up again, in this chapter, or the rest of the game.

Aerith also makes a big stink about Cloud taking the time to enjoy Elmyra’s cooking. This is after Cloud is excluded from AVALANCHE’s celebration in Seventh Heaven and after he misses out on Jessie’s mom’s “Midgar Special” with Biggs and Wedge. So this could have been have been the set up to Cloud finally getting to experience a nice, domestic moment where he feels like he’s part of a family. And this dinner does happen! Only…the Remake skips over it entirely. Which is quite a strange choice considering that almost every other waking moment of Cloud’s time in Midgar has been depicted in excruciating detail. SE has decided that either whatever happened in this dinner between these three characters is irrelevant to the story they’re trying to tell, or they’ve deliberately excluded this scene from the game so that the player wouldn’t get any wrong ideas from it (e.g., that Cloud is starting to feel at home with Aerith).

Speaking of home, the Odd Jobs in Ch. 3 feel a bit more meaningful outside of just the gameplay-related rewards because they’re a way for Cloud to improve his reputation as he considers building a life for himself in Sector 7. This intent is implicit as Tifa imparts upon him the life lessons for surviving the slums, and then explicit, when Tifa asks him if he’s going to “stick around a little longer” outside of Seventh Heaven and he answers maybe. (It is later confirmed when Cloud and Tifa converse in his room in Ch. 4 after he remembers their promise).

Despite Aerith’s endeavors to extend their time together, there’s no indication that Cloud is planning to put down roots in Sector 5, or even return. Not even after doing all the Odd Jobs. If anything, it’s just the opposite — after 3 Odd Jobs, Aerith, kind of jokingly tells Cloud “don’t think you can rely on me forever.” This is a line that has a deeper meaning for anyone who knows Aerith’s fate in the OG, but Cloud seems totally fine with the outcome. Similarly, at the end of the Chapter 8, Elmyra asks Cloud to leave and never speak to Aerith again — a request to which he readily agrees.

Adding to the different vibes of the Chapters are the musical themes that play in the background. In Ch. 3, it’s the “Main Theme of VII”, followed by “On Our Way” — two tracks that instantly recall the OG. While the Main Theme is a bit melancholy, it's also familiar. It feels like home. In Ch. 8, we have an instrumental version of ‘Hollow’ - the new theme written for the Remake. While, it’s a lovely piece, it’s unfamiliar and honestly as a bit anxiety inducing (as is the intent).

(A quick aside to address the argument that this proves ‘Hollow’ is about Cloud’s feelings for Aerith:

Which of course doesn’t make any damn sense because he hasn’t even lost Aerith at this point the story. Even if you want to argue that there is so timey-wimey stuff going on and the whole purpose of the Remake is to rewrite the timeline so that Cloud doesn’t lose Aerith around — shouldn’t there be evidence of this desire outside of just the background music? Perhaps, in Cloud’s actions during the Chapter which the song plays — shouldn’t he dread being parted from her, shouldn’t he be the one trying to extend their time together? Instead, he’s willing to let her go quite easily.

The more likely explanation as to why “Hollow” plays in Ch. 8 is that since the “Main Theme of FFVII”  already plays in Ch. 3, the other “main theme” written for the Remake is going to play in the other chapter with a pseudo-open world vibe. If you’re going to say “Hollow” is about Cloud’s feelings for Aerith then you’d have to accept that the Main Theme of the entire series is about Cloud’s feelings for Tifa, which would actually make a bit more sense given that is practically Cloud’s entire character arc.)

Both chapters contain a scripted battle that must be completed before the chapter can end. They both contain a shot where Cloud fights side by side with each of the girls.

Here, Cloud and Tifa are both in focus during the entirety of this shot.

Here, the focus pulls away from Cloud the moment Aerith enters the frame.

I doubt the developers expected most players to notice this particular technique, but it reflects the subtle differences in the way these two relationships are portrayed. By the end of Ch. 3, Cloud and Tifa are acting as one unit. By the end of Ch. 8, even when they’re together, Cloud and Aerith are still apart.

A brief (lol) overview of some meaningful changes from the OG

One of the most significant changes in the Sector 7 chapters is how The Promise flashback is depicted. In the OG, Tifa is the one who has to remind Cloud of the Promise, in a rather pushy way, and whether Cloud chooses to join the next mission to fulfill his promise to her or because Barret is giving him a raise feels a bit more ambiguous.

In the Remake, the Promise has it’s own little mini-arc. It’s first brought up at the end of Ch. 3 when Cloud talks to Tifa about her anxieties about the upcoming mission. Tifa subtly references the Promise by mentioning that she’s “in a pitch” — a reference that goes over Cloud’s head. It’s only in Ch. 4, in the middle of a mission with Biggs and Wedge, where Tifa is no where in sight, that a random building fan reminds him of the Nibelheim water tower and the Promise he made to Tifa there. There’s also another brief flashback to that earlier moment in the bar when Tifa mentions she’s in a “pinch.” Again, the placement of this particular flashback at this particular moment feels almost jarring. And the flashback to the scene in the bar — a flashback to a scene we’ve already seen play out in-game — is the only one of its kind in the Remake. SE went out of the way to show that this particular moment is very important to Cloud and the game as whole. It’s when Cloud returns to his room, and Tifa asks him if he’s planning to stay in Midgar, that this mini-arc is finally complete. He brings up the Promise on his own, and makes it explicit that the reason he’s staying is for her. It’s to fulfill his Promise to her, not for money or for AVALANCHE — at this point, he’s not even supposed to be going on the next mission.

The Reactor 5 chapters are greatly expanded, but there aren’t really any substantive changes other than the addition of the rather intimate train roll scene between and Cloud and Tifa, which adds nothing to the story except to establish how horny they are for each other. We know this is the case, of course, because if you go out of your way to make Cloud look like an incompetent idiot and let the timer run out, you can avoid this scene altogether. But even in that alternate scene, Cloud’s concern for Tifa is crystal clear.

Ch. 8 also plays out quite similarly to the OG for the most part, though Cloud’s banter with Aerith on the rooftops doesn’t feel all that special since we’ve already seen him do the same with Tifa, Barret and the rest of AVALANCHE. The rooftops is the first place Cloud laughs in the OG. In the Remake, while Cloud might not have straight out laughed before, he’s certainly smiled quite a bit in the preceding chapters. Also, with the addition of voice acting and realistic facial expressions, that “laughter” in the Remake comes off much more sarcastic than genuine.

It’s also notable that in the Remake, Cloud vocally protests almost every time Aerith tries to extend their time together. In the OG, Cloud says nothing in these moments, which the player could reasonably interpret as assent.

One major change in the Remake is how Aerith learns of Tifa’s existence. In the OG, Cloud mentions that he wants to go back to Tifa’s bar, prompting Aerith to ask him about his relationship with her. In the Remake, Cloud calls Tifa’s name after having a random flashback of Child Tifa as he’s walking along with some kids. Again the insertion of said flashback is a bit jarring, prompting Aerith to understandably ask Cloud about just who this Tifa is. In the OG, this exchange served to show Aerith’s jealousy and her interest in Cloud. In the Remake, it’s all about Cloud’s feelings for Tifa and his inability to articulate them. As for Aerith, I suppose you can still read her reaction as jealous, though simple curiosity is a perfectly reasonable way to read it too. It plays out quite similarly to Aerith asking Cloud about who he gave the flower to. Her follow ups seem indicate that she’s merely curious about who this recipient might be rather than showing that she’s upset/jealous of the fact that said person exists.

For the collapsed tunnel segment, the Remake adds the recurring bit of Aerith and Cloud trying to successfully complete a high-five. While this is certainly a way to show them getting closer, it’s about least intimate way that SE could have done so. Just think about the alternatives — you could have Cloud and Aerith sharing brief tidbits of their lives after each mechanical arm, you could have them trying to reach for each other’s hand. Instead, SE chose an action that is we’ve seen performed between a number of different platonic buddies, and an action that Aerith immediately performs with Tifa upon meeting her. Not to mention, even while they are technically getting closer, Cloud still rejects (or at least tries to) Aerith’s invitations to extend their time together twice — at the fire and at the playground.

One aspect from these two Chapters that does has plenty of set up and a satisfying payoff is Aerith’s interest in Cloud’s SOLDIER background. You have the weirdness of Aerith already knowing that Cloud was in SOLDIER without him mentioning it first, followed by Elmyra’s antipathy towards SOLDIERs in general, not to mention Aerith actively fishing for information about Cloud’s time in SOLDIER. (For players who’ve played Crisis Core, the reason for her behavior is even more obvious, with her “one date” gesture mirroring Zack’s, and her line to Cloud in front of the tunnel a near duplicate of what she says to Zack — at least in the original Japanese).

Finally, at the playground, it’s revealed that the reason for all this weirdness is because Aerith’s first love was also a SOLDIER who was the same rank as Cloud. Unlike in the OG, Cloud does not exhibit any potential jealousy by asking about the nature of her relationship, and Aerith doesn’t try to play it off by dismissing the seriousness. In fact, with the emotional nuance we can now see on her face, we can understand the depth of her feelings even if she cannot articulate them.

This is the first scene in the Remake where Cloud and Aerith have a genuine conversation. Thus, finally, Cloud expresses some hesitation before he leaves her — and as far as he knows, this could be the last time they see each other. You can interpret this hesitation as romantic longing or it could just as easily be Cloud being a bit sad to part from a new friend. Regardless, it’s notable that scene is preceded by one where Aerith is talking about her first love who she clearly isn’t over, and followed by a scene where Cloud sprints across the screen, without a backwards glance at Aerith, after seeing a glimpse of Tifa through a tiny window in a Chocobo cart that’s about a hundred yards away.

The Wall Market segment in the Remake is quite explicitly about Cloud’s desire to save Tifa. In the OG, Aerith has no trouble getting into Corneo’s mansion on her own, so I can see how someone could misinterpret Cloud going through all the effort to dress as a woman to protect Aerith from the Don’s wiles (though of course, you would need to ask, why they trying to infiltrate the mansion in the first place?). In the Remake, Cloud has to go through herculean efforts to even get Aerith in front of the Don. Everyone who is aware of Cloud’s cause, from Sam to Leslie to Johnny to Andrea to Aerith herself, comments on how hard he’s working to save Tifa and how important she must be to him for him to do so. In case there’s any confusion, the Remake also includes a scene where Cloud is prepared to bust into the mansion on his own, leaving Aerith to fend for herself, after Johnny comes with news that Tifa is in trouble.

Both Cloud and Aerith get big dress reveals in the Remake. If you get Aerith’s best dress, Cloud’s reaction can certainly be read as one of attraction, but since the game continues on the same regardless of which dress you get, it’s not meant to mark a shift in Cloud and Aerith’s relationship. Rather, it’s a reward for the player for completing however many side quests in Ch. 8, especially since the Remake incentives the player to get every dress and thus see all of Cloud’s reactions by making it a Trophy and including it in the play log.

A significant and very welcome change from the OG to the Remake is Tifa and Aerith’s relationship dynamic. In the OG, the girls’ first meeting in Corneo’s mansion starts with them fighting over Cloud (by pretending not to fight over Cloud). In the Remake, the sequence of events is reversed so that it starts off with Cloud’s reunion with Tifa (again emphasizing that the whole purpose of the infiltration is because Cloud wants to save Tifa). Then when Aerith wakes, she’s absolutely thrilled to make Tifa’s acquaintance, hardly acknowledging Cloud at all. Tifa is understandably more wary at first, but once they start working together, they become fast friends.

Also interesting is that from the moment Aerith and Tifa meet, almost every instance where Cloud could be shown worrying about Aerith or trying to comfort Aerith is given to Tifa instead. In the OG, it’s Cloud who frets about Aerith getting involved in the plot to question the Don, and regrets getting her mixed up in everything once they land in the sewers. In the Remake, those very same reservations are expressed by Tifa instead. Tifa is the one who saves Aerith when the platform collapses in the sewer. Tifa is the one who emotionally comforts Aerith after they’re separated in the train graveyard. (Cloud might be the one who physically saves her, but he doesn’t even so much give her a second glance to check on her well-being before he runs off to face Eligor. He leaves that job for Tifa). It almost feels like the Remake is going out of its way to avoid any moments between Cloud and Aerith that could be interpreted as romantic. In fact, after Corneo’s mansion, unless you get Aerith’s resolution, there are almost no one-on-one interactions at all between Cloud and Aerith. Such is not the case with Cloud and Tifa. In fact, right after defeating Abzu in the sewers, Cloud runs after Tifa, and asks her if what she’s saying is one of those slum lessons — continuing right where they left off.

Ch. 11 feels like a wink-wink nudge-nudge way to acknowledge the LTD. You have the infamous shot of the two girls on each of Cloud’s arms, and two scenes where Cloud appears as if he’s unable to choose between them when he asks them if they’re okay. Of course, in this same Chapter, you have a scene during the boss fight with the Phantom where Cloud actually pulls Tifa away from Aerith, leaving Aerith to defend herself, for an extended sequence where he tries to keep Tifa safe. This is not something SE would include if their intention is to keep Cloud’s romantic interest ambiguous or if Aerith is meant to be the one he loves. Of course, Ch. 11 is not the first we see of this trio’s dynamic. We start with Ch. 10, which is all about Aerith and Tifa’s friendship. Ch. 11 is a nod to the LTD dynamic in the OG, but it’s just that, a nod, not an indication the Remake is following the same path. Halfway through Ch. 11, the dynamic completely disappears.

Ch. 12 changes things up a bit from the OG. Instead of Cloud and Tifa ascending the pillar together, Cloud goes up first. Seemingly just so that we can have the dramatic slow-mo handgrab scene between the two of them when Tifa decides to run after Cloud — right after Aerith tells her to follow her heart.

The Remake also shows us what happens when Aerith goes to find Marlene at Seventh Heaven — including the moment when Aerith sees the flower she gave Cloud by the bar register, and Aerith is finally able to connect the dots. After seeing Cloud be so cagey about who he gave the flower to, and weird about his relationship with Tifa, and after seeing how Cloud and Tifa act around each other. It finally makes sense. She’s figured it out before they have. It’s a beautiful payoff to all that set up. Any other interpretation of Aerith’s reaction doesn’t make a lick of sense, because if it’s to indict she’s jealous of Tifa, where is all the set up for that? Why did the Remake eliminate all the moments from the OG where she had been noticeably jealous before? Without this, that interpretation makes about as much sense as someone arguing Aerith is smiling because she’s thinking about a great sandwich she had the night before. In case anyone is confused, the scene is preceded by a moment where Aerith tells Tifa to follow her heart before she goes after Cloud, and followed by the moment where Cloud catches Tifa via slow-motion handgrab.

On the pillar itself, there are so many added moments of Cloud showing his concern for Tifa’s physical and emotional well-being. Even when they find Jessie, as sad as Cloud is over Jessie’s death, the game actually spends more time showing us Cloud’s reaction to Tifa crying over Jessie’s death, and Cloud’s inability to comfort her. Since so much of this is physical rather than verbal, this couldn’t have effectively been shown in the OG with its technological limitations.

After the pillar collapses, we start off with a couple of other moments showing Cloud’s concern over Tifa — watching over her as she wakes, his dramatic fist clench while he watches Barret comfort Tifa in a way he cannot. There is also a subtle but important change in the dialogue. In the OG, Tifa is the one who tells Barret that Marlene is safe because she was with Aerith. Cloud is also on his way to Sector 5, but it’s for the explicit purpose of trying to save Aerith, which we know because Tifa asks. In the Remake, Tifa is too emotionally devastated to comfort Barret about Marlene. Cloud, trying to help in the only way he can, is now the one to tell Barret about Marlene. Leading them to Sector 5 is no longer about him trying to help Aerith, but about him reuniting Barret with his daughter. Again, another moment where Cloud shows concern about Aerith in the OG is eliminated from the Remake.

Rather than going straight from Aerith’s house to trying to figure out a way into the Shinra building to find Aerith, the group takes a detour to check out the ruins of Sector 7 and rescue Wedge from Shinra’s underground lab. It’s only upon seeing the evidence of Shinra’s inhumane experimentation firsthand that Cloud articulates to Elmyra the need to rescue Aerith. In the OG, they never sought out Elmyra’s permission, and Tifa explicitly asks to join Cloud on his quest. Rescuing Aerith is framed as primarily Cloud’s goal, Tifa and Barret are just along for the ride.

In the Remake, all three wait until Elymra gives them her blessing, and it’s framed (quite literally) as the group’s collective goal as opposed to just Cloud’s.

In the aptly named Ch. 14 resolutions, each marks the culmination of the character’s arc for the Part 1 of Remake. While their arcs are by no means complete, they do offer a nice preview of what their ultimate resolutions will be.

With the exception of Tifa’s, these resolutions are primarily about the character themselves. Their relationships with Cloud are secondary. Each resolution marks a change in the character themselves, but not necessarily a change in Cloud’s relationship with said character. Barret recommits to AVALANCHE’s mission and his role as a leader despite the deep personal costs. Aerith’s is full of foreshadowing as she accept her fate and impending death and decides to make the most of the time she has left. After trying to put aside her own feelings for the sake of others the whole time, Tifa finally allows herself to feel the full devastation of losing her home for the second time. Like her ultimate resolution in the Lifestream that we’ll see in about 25 years, Cloud is the only person she can share this sentiment with because he was the only person who was there.

Barret does not grow closer to Cloud through his resolution. Cloud has already proved himself to him by helping out on the pillar and reuniting him with Marlene. Barret resolution merely reveals that Barret is now comfortable enough with Cloud to share his past.

Similarly, Cloud starts off Aerith’s resolution with an intent to go rescue her, and ends with that intent still intact. Aerith is more open about her feelings here than before, it being a dream and all, but these feelings aren’t something that developed during this scene.

The only difference is during Tifa’s resolution. Cloud has been unable to emotionally comfort Tifa up until this point. It’s only when Tifa starts crying and rests her head upon his shoulder that he is able to make a change, to make a choice and hug her. Halfway through Tifa’s resolution, the scene shifts its focus to Cloud, his inaction and eventual action. Notably, the only time we have a close-up of any character during all three resolutions (I’ll define close-up here as a shot where a character’s face takes up half or more of the shot), are three shots of Cloud when he’s hugging/trying to hug Tifa. Tifa’s resolution is the only one where Cloud arcs.

What of the whole “You can’t fall in love with me” line in Aerith’s resolution? Why would SE include that if not to foreshadow Cloud falling in love with Aerith? Or indicate that he has already? Well, you can’t just take the dialogue on its own, you how to look at how these lines are framed. Notably, when she says “you can’t fall in love with me,” Aerith is framed at the center of the shot, and almost looks like she’s directly addressing the player. It’s as much a warning for the player as it is for Cloud, which makes sense if you know her fate in the OG.

This is followed directly by her saying “Even if you think you have…it’s not real.” In this shot, it’s back to a standard shot/reverse shot where she is the left third of the frame. She is addressing Cloud here, which, again if you’ve played the OG, is another bit of heavy foreshadowing. The reason Clould would think he might be in love with Aerith is because he’s falsely assuming of the memories of a man who did love Aerith — Zack.

For Cloud’s response (”Do I get a say in all this?”/ “That’s very one-sided” depending on the translation), rather than showing a shot of his face, the Remake shows him with his back turned.

Whatever Cloud’s feelings may be for Aerith, the game seems rather indifferent to them.

What is more telling is the choice to include a bit with Cloud getting jealous over a guy trying to give Tifa flowers in Barret’s resolution. Barret also mentions both Jessie and Aerith in their conversation, but nothing else gets such a reaction from Cloud.

It also should go without saying that if Aerith’s resolution is meant to establish Cloud and Aerith’s romance, there should have been plenty of set-up beforehand and plenty of follow-through afterward. That obviously is not the case, because again, the Remake has gone out of its way to avoid moments where Cloud’s actions towards Aerith could be interpreted romantically.

Case in point, at around this time in the OG, Marlene tells Cloud that she thinks Aerith likes him and the player has the option to have Cloud express his hope that she does. This scene is completely eliminated from the Remake and replaced with a much more appropriate scene of father-daughter affection between Marlene and Barret while Tifa and Cloud are standing together outside.

The method by which they get up the plate is completely different in the Remake. Leslie is the one who helps them this time around, and though his quest to reunite with his fiance directly parallels with the trio’s desire to save Aerith, Leslie himself draws a comparison to earlier when Cloud was trying to rescue Tifa. Finally, when Abzu is defeated again, it is Barret who draws the parallel of their search for Aerith to Leslie’s search for his fiance, making it crystal clear that saving Aerith is a group effort rather than only Cloud’s.

Speaking of Barret, in the OG, he seems to reassess his opinion of Cloud in the Shinra HQ stairs when he sees Cloud working so hard to save Aerith and realizes he might actually care about other people. In the Remake, that reevaluation occurs after you complete all the Ch. 14 sidequests and help a bunch of NPCs. Arguably, this moment occurs even earlier in the Remake for Barret, after the Airbuster, when he realizes that Cloud is more concerned for his and Tifa’s safety than his own.

Overall, the entire Aerith rescue feels so anticlimactic in the Remake. In the OG, Cloud gets his big hero moment in the Shinra Building. He’s the one who runs up to Aerith when the glass shatters and they finally reunite. In the Remake, it’s unclear what the emotional stakes are for Cloud here. At their big reunion, all we get from him is a “Yep.” In fact, when you look at how this scene plays out, Aerith is positioned equally between Cloud and Tifa at the moment of her rescue. Cloud’s answer is again with his back turned to the camera. It’s Tifa who gets her own shot with her response.

Another instance of the Remake being completely indifferent to Cloud’s feelings for Aerith, and actually priotizing Tifa’s relationship with Aerith instead.

It is also Tifa who runs to reunite with Aerith after the group of enemies is defeated. Another moment that could have easily been Cloud’s that the Remake gives to Tifa.

Also completely eliminated in the Remake, is the “I’m your bodyguard. / The deal was for one date” exchange in the jail cells. In the Remake, after Ch. 8, the date isn’t brought up again at all; “the bodyguard” reference only comes up briefly in Ch. 11 and then never again.

In the Remake, the jail scene is replaced by the scene in Aerith’s childhood room. Despite the fact that this is Aerith’s room, it is Tifa’s face that Cloud first sees when he wakes. What purpose does this moment serve other than to showcase Cloud and Tifa’s intimacy and the other characters’ tacit acknowledgment of said intimacy?

(This is the second time where Cloud wakes up and Tifa is the first thing he sees. The other was at Corneo’s mansion. He comes to three times in the Remake, but in Ch. 8, even though Aerith is right in front of him, we start off with a few seconds of Cloud gazing around the church before settling on the person in front of him. Again, while not something that most players would notice, this feels like a deliberate choice.)

Especially since this scene itself is all about Aerith. She begins a sad story about her past, and Cloud, rather than trying to comfort her in any way, asks her to give us some exposition about the Ancients. When the Whispers surround her, even though Cloud is literally right there, it's Tifa who pulls her out of it and comforts her. Another moment that could have been Cloud that was given to Tifa, and honestly, this one feels almost bizarre.

Throughout the entire Shinra HQ episode, Cloud and Aerith haven’t had a single moment alone to themselves. The Drums scenario is completely invented for the Remake. The devs could have contrived a way for Cloud and Aerith to have some one-on-one time here and work through the feelings they expressed during Aerith’s resolution if they wanted. Instead, with the mandatory party configurations during this stage - Cloud & Barret on one side; Tifa & Aerith on the others, with Cloud & Tifa being the respective team leaders communicating over PHS, the Remake minimizes the amount of interaction Cloud and Aerith have with each other in this chapter.

On the rooftop, before Cloud’s solo fight with Rufus, even though Cloud is ostensibly doing all this so that they can bring Aerith to safety, the Remake doesn’t include a single shot that focuses on Aerith’s face and her reaction to his actions. The game has decided, whatever Aerith’s feelings are in this moment, they’re irrelevant to the story they’re trying to tell. Instead we get shots focusing solely on Barret and Tifa. While the Remake couldn’t find any time to develop Cloud and Aerith’s relationship at the Shinra Tower (even though the OG certainly did), it did find time to add a new scene where Tifa saves Cloud from certain death, while referencing their Promise.

A lot of weird shit happens after this, but it’s pretty much all plot and no character. We do get one more moment where Cloud saves Tifa (and Tifa alone) from the Red Whisper even though Aerith is literally right next to her. The Remake isn’t playing coy at all about where Cloud’s preferences lie.

The party order for the Sephiroth battle varies depending on how you fought the Whispers. All the other character entrances (whoever the 3rd party member is, then the 4th and Red) are essentially the exact same shots, with the characters replaced. It’s the first character entrance (which can only be Aerith or  Tifa) that you have two distinct options.

If Aerith is first, the camera pans from Cloud over to Aerith. It then cuts back to Cloud’s reaction, in a separate shot, as Aerith walks to join him (offscreen). It’s only when the player regains control of the characters that Cloud and Aerith ever share the frame.

On the other hand, if Tifa is first, we see Tifa land from Cloud’s POV. Cloud then walks over to join Tifa and they immediately share a frame, facing Sephiroth together.

Again, this is not something SE would expect the player to notice the first or even second time around. Honestly, I doubt anyone would notice at all unless they watched all these variations back to back. That is telling in itself, that SE would go through all this effort (making these scenes unique rather than copy and pasting certainly takes more time and effort) to ensure that the depictions of Cloud’s relationships with these two women are distinct despite the fact that hardly anyone would notice. Even in the very last chapter of the game, they want us to see Cloud and Tifa as a pair and Cloud and Aerith as individuals.

Which isn’t to say that Aerith is being neglected in the Remake. Quite the opposite, in fact, when she has essentially become the main protagonist and the group’s spirtual leader in Ch. 18. Rather, her relationship with Cloud is no longer an essential part of her character. Not to mention, one of the very last shots of the Remake is about Aerith sensing Zack’s presence. Again, not the kind of thing you want to bring up if the game is supposed to show her being in love with Cloud.

What does it all mean????

Phew — now let’s step back and look and how the totality of these changes have reshaped our understanding of the story as a whole. Looking solely at the Midgar section of the OG, and ignoring everything that comes after it, it seems to tell a pretty straightforward story: Cloud is a cold-hearted jerk who doesn’t care about anyone else until he meets Aerith. It is through his relationship with Aerith that he begins to soften up and starts giving a damn about something other than himself. This culminates when he risks it all to rescue Aerith from the clutches of the game’s Big Bad itself, The Shinra Electric Company.

This was honestly the reason why I was dreading the Remake when I learned that it would only cover the Midgar segment. A game that’s merely an expansion of the Midgar section of the OG is probably going to leave a lot of people believing that Cloud & Aerith were the intended couple, and I didn’t want to wait years and perhaps decades for vindication after the Remake’s Lifestream Scene.

I imagine this very scenario is what motivated SE to make so many of these changes. In the OG, they could get away with misdirecting the audience for the first few hours of the game since the rest of the story and the reveals were already completed. The player merely had to pop in the next disc to get the real story. Such is not the case with the Remake. Had the the Remake followed the OG’s beats more closely, many players, including some who’ve never played the OG, would finish the Remake thinking that Cloud and Aerith were the intended couple. It would be years until they got the rest of the story, and at that point, the truth would feel much more like a betrayal. Like they’ve been cruelly strung along.

While they’ve gone out of their way to adapt most elements from the OG into the Remake, they’ve straight up eliminated many scenes that could be interpreted as Cloud’s romantic interest in Aerith. Instead, he seems much more interested in her knowledge as an Ancient than in her romantic affections. This is the path the Remake could be taking. Instead of Cloud being under the illusion of falling in love with Aerith, he’s under the illusion that the answer to his identity dilemma lies in Aerith’s Cetra heritage, when, of course, the answer was with Tifa all along.

Hiding Sephiroth’s existence during the Midgar arc isn’t necessary to telling the story of FF7, thus it’s been eliminated in the Remake. Similarly, pretending that Cloud and Aerith are going to end up together also isn’t necessary and would only confuse the player. Thus the LTD is no longer a part of the Remake.

If Aerith’s impact on Cloud has been diminished, what then is his arc in the Remake? Is it essentially just the same without the catalyst of Aerith? A cold guy at the start who eventually learns to care about others through the course of the game? Kind of, though arguably, this is who Remake!Cloud is all along, not just Cloud at the end of the Remake. Cloud is a guy who pretends to be a selfish jerk, but he deep down he really does care. He just doesn’t show this side of himself around people he’s unfamiliar with. So part of his arc in the Remake is opening up to the others, Barret, AVALANCHE and Aerith included, but these all span a chapter or two at most. They don’t straddle the entire game.

What is the throughline then? What is an area in which he exhibits continuous growth?

It’s Tifa. It’s his desire to fulfill his Promise to Tifa. Not just to protect her physically, but to be there for her emotionally, something that’s much harder to do. There’s the big moments like when he remembers the Promise in Ch. 4., his dramatic fist clench when he can’t stop Tifa from crying in Ch. 12, and in Ch. 13 when he watches Barret comfort Tifa. It’s all the flashbacks he has of her and the times he’s felt like he failed her. It’s the smaller moments where he can sense her nervousness and unease but the only thing he knows how to do is call her name. It’s all those times during battle, where Tifa can probably take care of herself, but Cloud has to save her because he can’t fail her again. All of this culminates in Tifa’s Resolution, where Tifa is in desperate need of comfort, and is specifically seeking Cloud’s comfort, and Cloud has no idea what to do. He hesitates because he’s clueless, because he doesn’t want to fuck it up, but finally, he makes the choice, he takes the risk, and he hugs her….and he kind of fucks it up. He hugs her too hard. Which is a great thing, because this arc isn’t anywhere close to being over. There’s still so much more to come. So many places this relationship will go.

We get a little preview of this when Tifa saves Cloud on the roof. Everything we thought we knew about their relationship has been flipped on its head. Tifa is the one saving Cloud here, near the end of this part of the Remake. Just as she will save Cloud in the Lifestream just before the end of the FF7 story as a whole. What does Tifa mean to Cloud? It’s one of the first questions posed in the Remake, and by the end, it remains unanswered.

Cloud’s character arc throughout the entire FF7 story is about his reconciling with his identity issues. This continues to develop through the Shinra Tower Chapters, but it certainly isn’t going to be resolved in Part 1 of the Remake. His character arc in the Remake — caring more about others/finding a way to finally comfort Tifa — is resolved in Ch. 14, well before rescuing Aerith, which is what makes her rescue feel so anticlimactic. The resolution of this external conflict isn’t tied to the protagonist’s emotional arc. This was not the case in the OG. I’m certainly not complaining about the change, but the Remake probably would have felt more satisfying as a whole if they hewed to the structure of the OG. Instead, it seems that SE has prioritized the clarity of the Remake series as a whole (leaving no doubt about where Cloud’s affections lie) over the effectiveness of the “climax” in the first entry of the Remake.

This is all clear if you only focus on the “story” of the Remake -- i.e., what the characters are saying and doing. If you extend your lens to the presentation of said story, and here I’m talking about who the game chooses to focus on during the scenes, how long they hold on these shots, which characters share the frame, which do not, etc --- it really could not be more obvious.

Does the camera need to linger for over 5 seconds on Cloud staring at the door after wishing Tifa goodnight? Does it need to find Cloud almost every time Tifa says or does anything so that we’re always aware of his watchfulness and the nature of his care? The answer is no until you realize this dynamic is integral to telling the story of Final Fantasy VII.

I don’t see how anyone who compares the Remake to the OG could come away from it thinking that the Remake series is going to reverse all of the work done in the OG and Compilation by having Cloud end up with Aerith.

Just because the ending seems to indicate that the events of the OG might not be set in stone, it doesn’t mean that the Remake will end with Aerith surviving and living happily ever after with Cloud. Even if Aerith does live (which again seems unlikely given the heavy foreshadowing of her death in the Remake), how do you come away from the Remake thinking that Cloud is going to choose Aerith over Tifa when SE has gone out of its way to remove scenes between Cloud and Aerith that could be interpreted as romantic? And gone out of its way to shove Cloud’s feelings for Tifa in the player’s face? The sequels would have to spend an obscene amount of time not only building Cloud and Aerith’s relationship from scratch, but also dismantling Cloud’s relationship with Tifa. It would be an absolute waste of time and resources, and there’s really no way to do so without making the characters look like assholes in the process.

Now could this happen? Sure, in the sense that literally anything could happen in the future. But in terms of outcomes that would make sense based on what’s come before, this particular scenario is about as plausible as Cloud deciding to relinquish his quest to find Sephiroth so that he can pursue his real dream of becoming at sandwich artist at Panera Bread.

It’s over! I promise!

Like you, I too cannot believe the number of words I’ve wasted on this subject. What is there left to say? The LTD doesn’t exist outside of the first disc of the OG. You'll only find evidence of SE perpetuating the LTD if you go into these stories with the assumption that 1) The LTD exists 2) it remains unanswered. But it’s not. We know that Cloud ends up with Tifa.

What the LTD has become is dissecting individual scenes and lines of dialogue, without considering the context of said things, and pretending as if the outcome is unknown and unknowable. If you took this tact to other aspects of FF7’s story, then it would be someone arguing that because there a number of scenes in the OG that seem to suggest that Meteor will successfully destroy the planet, this means that the question of whether or not our heroes save the world in the end is left ambiguous. No one does that because that would be utterly absurd. Individual moments in a story may suggest alternate outcomes to build tension, to keep us on our toes, but that doesn’t change the ending from being the ending. Our heroes stop Meteor. Cloud loves Tifa. Arguments against either should be treated with the same level of credulity (i.e., none).

It’s frustrating that the LTD, and insecurities about whether or not Cloud really loves Tifa, takes up so much oxygen in any discussion about these characters. And it’s a damn shame, because Cloud and Tifa’s relationship is so rich and expansive, and the so-called “LTD” is such a tiny sliver of that relationship, and one of the least interesting aspects. They’re wonderful because they’re just so damn normal. Unlike other Final Fantasy couples, what keeps them apart is not space and time and death, but the most human and painfully relatable emotion of all, fear. Fear that they can’t live up to the other’s expectations; fear that they might say the wrong thing. The fear that keeps them from admitting their feelings at the Water Tower, they’re finally able to overcome 7 years later in the Lifestream. They’re childhood friends but in a way they’re also strangers. Like other FF couples, we’re able to watch their entire relationship grow and unfold before our eyes. But they have such a history too, a history that we unravel with them at the same time. Every moment of their lives that SE has found worth depicting, they’ve been there for each other, even if they didn’t know it at the time. Theirs is a story that begins and ends with each other. Their is the story that makes Final Fantasy VII what it is.

If you’ve made it this far, many thanks for reading. I truly have no idea how to use this platform, so please direct any and all hatemail to my DMs at TLS, which I will then direct to the trash. (In all seriousness, I’d be happy to answer any specific questions you may have, but I feel like I’ve more than said my piece here.)

If there’s one thing you take away from this, I hope it’s to learn to ignore all the ridiculous arguments out there, and just enjoy the story that’s actually being told. It’s a good one.

#cloti

[veronicamarsconfessions]

TV remakes and reboots have seen a steady increase over the last few years. It’s gotten to the point that, long before their predecessors have had a chance to collect dust, a reboot is announced. The CW staples such as Roswell and Charmed have all been resurrected, with modern twists. The return of Veronica Mars, however, posed a different challenge.

As an eight-episode revival on Hulu, the former UPN series brought back its original cast as a continuation of not just the series, but the 2014 movie of the same name. With the writers seemingly committed to the mystery rather than their own characters driving the story, the final minutes of the season finale became a prime example of lazy writing. If nothing else, Season 4 of Veronica Mars failed its protagonist, and its antiquated ideas about relationships and race, and Logan’s shocking last-minute death, proved that being brought back from TV cancellation was a disservice.

When it premiered in 2004, Veronica Mars was hailed as trailblazing. It had a female protagonist who was capable, resourceful, and was given space to develop on her own terms (as much as a teenager could, anyway). Like so many shows, Veronica Mars wasn’t perfect, despite being lauded and securing a loyal fanbase. While it explored the class divide in Neptune, a town in southern California where the middle class was touted as being nonexistent, the series struggled to abstain from racial stereotypes, with Wallace (Percy Daggs III) as the Black best friend who never got any focus, and Weevil (Francis Capra) as the Latino gang member whose storyline lacked nuance.

Even when it got things right, the series had a lot to learn about writing women and minority characters, though it was admittedly a product of its time. The problems that plagued its original run desperately needed an update, but even with the revival set in 2019, it was 2004 all over again.

Sarcastic, sharp, determined, and often evasive of revisiting and sorting through her own trauma, Veronica (Kristen Bell) stood out like a sore thumb in Neptune. While she rubbed many people the wrong way, she was also a pillar of strength in an increasingly corrupt town, but as a show goes on, characters must evolve or else risk being fossilized in time.

Veronica Mars’ fourth season committed that exact crime when it came to Veronica’s development and her relationship with Logan (Jason Dohring). Five years after the movie, she was in the same place we left her: back in Neptune, closed off, clinging unhealthily to the past. She still had trust issues, which pushed her new friend Nicole (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) away, and she kept a safe distance from acknowledging her emotions.

When Logan suggests she go to therapy or brings up her unwillingness to move forward in their relationship, Veronica tells Logan she preferred his angry, bottled-up self to the person he is now.

His anger was something familiar to her, a facet of himself she relished in. Rather than acknowledging all of the progress he’d made to move past his demons, Veronica wanted him to remain in the past with her, unwilling to consider therapy for herself, and unable to get past everything that had happened to her. In fact, Logan, the character fans loved to hate back in Season 1, was the one who had arguably shown the most maturity and character growth in the revival.

He was seeing a therapist, had a stable job, wanted to marry Veronica, and his fist didn’t meet the wall every chance he got. When compared to every other character, his progress was startling in its authenticity and added to why his death was so frustrating.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Veronica. Revisiting characters at different stages in their lives is always a treat, but no one wants to watch a show where the protagonist is the same person later in life as she was in Season 1. Season 4 of Veronica Mars ultimately stymied Veronica’s growth, choosing to recycle trauma rather than work to organically develop her into a fully realized character at a new stage in her life.

Logan’s death in the Season 4 finale gave Veronica fresh pain to contend with, without allowing her space to overcome her past agony. It was lazy writing, and skipping a whole year ahead in the last minutes of the finale left the exploration of her grief on the sidelines and offscreen, a cheap shot to eliminate the chances of falling into old patterns. Choosing to focus on the noir mystery instead of the characters’ personal relationships was detrimental to what made Veronica Mars a show fans cared about to begin with.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, series creator Rob Thomas insinuated that he had to kill Logan for Veronica to move forward. “There is something romantic about that solitary P.I. figure out in the world and, also, I think there’s a reason that shows tend to end when they get their romantic leads together.” However, the death played out as nothing more than shock value, rather than an emotionally impactful moment.

The idea that Veronica must always be isolated and unhappy to continue doing her job is antiquated and bleak. It exemplifies regressive ideas regarding a woman’s choice between her career and personal growth and happiness. This is a stark contrast to shows such as Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Superstore, and Jane the Virgin, all of which have done much better by their female characters and also highlight how couples getting together don’t doom a show.

It ultimately speaks to Thomas’ lack of creativity with regards to developing Veronica as a person and allowing her relationship with Logan to support her growth. Instead, Thomas subscribes to old-school thinking about romantic relationships and how they lose their impact after a couple finally gets together, when, in fact, it’s the exact opposite.

There’s so much storytelling to mine from a relationship. Logan was clearly making strides to be a better person and was persuading Veronica to do the same. With his death, that has all been thrown away and even its aftermath skipped over, sending Veronica right back to square one. Thomas’ interest is in romanticizing a woman’s pain rather than taking a beat to explore it, happy for his female protagonist to be frozen in time as opposed to allowing her enough agency to endure her present.

With the revival, the series had an opportunity to provide an updated take on a beloved heroine, and it failed. If anything, the revival proved that some shows should be left in the past rather than tarnish their relative goodwill. If Thomas isn’t willing to develop the series past its bad habits, to take Veronica to the next well-deserved stage in her life, then it has no place in the present.

#Veronica Mars #Rob Thomas #Logan Echolls #VMars #Veronica Mars Revival #news

[letterboxd]

Work Horse.

Taking on a rare leading role in his decades-spanning career, national treasure Tim Blake Nelson speaks with Mitchell Beaupre about demystifying heroes, reinventing genres and something called a quiche Western.

“This film is unapologetic about all the tropes that it’s deploying in service of telling the story... You’ve got a satchel full of cash. You’ve got gunslinging, physical violence, and feeding somebody to the pigs.” —Tim Blake Nelson

Described by Letterboxd members as “a national treasure” who “makes everything better”, Tim Blake Nelson is a journeyman actor who has tapped into practically every side of the industry since making his feature debut in Nora Ephron’s This Is My Life back in 1992. Whether you are a Marvel fanatic, a history buff or a parent trying to get through the day, the actor’s distinctive presence is a charming sight that’s always welcome on the screen.

Tim Blake Nelson is one of those rare actors who unites all filmgoers, a man genuinely impossible not to love, which certainly seems to be the case for Hollywood. Checking off working relationships with directors ranging from Terrence Malick and Ang Lee to Hal Hartley and Guillermo Del Toro, Nelson has covered the boards, even crossing over into directing and writing, both in films and on the stage.

Yet, despite being a renowned talent who can take a smaller supporting role in a massive Steven Spielberg blockbuster starring Tom Cruise and carry the film, Nelson-as-leading-man sightings have been few and far between. In fact, it’s quite a struggle to find a film with Nelson in a leading role, as even playing the titular role for directors who understand his greatness still results in him only appearing in the opening section of an anthology feature.

At last, the leading role Nelson fans were in need of has arrived in the form of Old Henry, a new Western from writer/director Potsy Ponciroli. Nelson plays the eponymous Henry, a widowed farmer with a mysterious past who makes a meager living with his son (Gavin Lewis), doing his best to leave his old life behind and hide away from the world. Things get complicated when Henry stumbles upon a satchel of cash and a wounded stranger (Scott Haze), bringing them both into his home. Soon, a dangerous posse led by an intimidating Stephen Dorff comes calling, setting the stage for an old-fashioned throwdown in this twisty Western siege thriller.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, Old Henry has been warmly received on Letterboxd. “Old Henry feels like the culmination of Tim Blake Nelson’s twenty-plus-year career, but from another dimension, where he’s highly regarded as a leading man”, writes Noah, speaking not only to the strength of Nelson’s performance, but also to the fact that this leading role shouldn’t be such a rarity. Todd awards Nelson the prize for “Best Facial Hair in a 2021 film”, before applauding the actor for pouring “every emotion in his body to play Henry”.

Letterboxd’s East Coast editor Mitchell Beaupre saddled up for a chat with Nelson about the intentional hokiness of the Westerns that made him fall in love with filmmaking, how the Coen brothers put other directors on notice, and the fatherly joy of keeping it all in the family.

I’ve seen a lot of interviews with you discussing your career as an actor, a writer, and a director. You always speak with such reverence for the art. Where does that passion come from for you? What made you want to pursue this field? Tim Blake Nelson: It’s funny, doing these interviews for Old Henry has been reminding me of my introduction to filmmaking as an art. I’ve realized that I had never quite located it, but it really started with the Sergio Leone Westerns, which I would see on television when I was growing up in Oklahoma in the ’70s. Before that, going to the cinema was always invariably a treat, no matter what the film, but I would just be following the story and the dialogue.

The Sergio Leone movies were the first ones that exposed subjectivity in telling stories on film to me. That was where I became aware of the difference between a closeup and an extreme closeup, or how you could build tension through a combination of the angle on a character with the editorial rhythm, with the lens size, with the music in addition to the dialogue and the story.

How old were you when this shift in your understanding of cinema was happening? I think it was across the ages of ten and eighteen, where I suddenly realized that this was an auteur here, Leone. There was a guy behind all these movies I was seeing—and in Oklahoma, you could see a Sergio Leone movie every weekend. This was a man making deliberate and intelligent decisions in everything that I was seeing.

I started noticing that a character was in a duster that goes all the way down to his boots, even though that’s not necessarily accurate to the Old West. That’s something else. Also, why is he wearing it in the desert? Would that have been very practical? And look at that cigar Clint Eastwood is smoking. It’s not smooth, it looks like it was a piece of tree root. Then later I learned it’s a particular kind of Italian cigar, but somehow it was defining this genre of Western. I marveled at that, and found it unbelievably thrilling to discover. I loved the stories and the dialogue and the intentional hokiness of it all. All of it was conspiring to teach me to venerate this form.

Sergio Leone, his daughters, and Clint Eastwood on the set of ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966).

The connection there is interesting between the Leone Westerns to where Old Henry is at now. You’ve talked before about how the Western genre is one that is reinvented over and over throughout the years— Oh, you do your homework!

I try my best! What would you say defines the current era of Westerns that we’re seeing, and how the genre is being reinvented? Well, Joel and Ethan [Coen] did a lot of mischief, in a good way, with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Genres are always about genres, in addition to their story. So, I would say that Buster Scruggs is the quintessential postmodern Western, if you look at it as one movie instead of as an anthology, because it celebrates the history of the form. The magic of that movie is that it engages you in each story while also being a meditation on death. That’s what connects each one of those tales, and then it’s also a meditation on storytelling to boot. In the final chapter, you have a character talking about why we love stories, and he’s telling it to a bunch of people who you’ll learn are all dead.

The stories are a way of delaying the inevitable mortality. I mean, look at that. It’s such an accomplishment. With that movie, I think Joel and Ethan put filmmakers on notice that Westerns had better always be also about Westerns, because whether you like it or not, they are. I think they probably came to understand that when they were making True Grit, although knowing the two of them they probably understood it already.

Do you feel there’s a direct correlation between a movie like Buster Scruggs and Old Henry, in this era of postmodern, revisionist Westerns? How it impacts a movie like Old Henry is that you have Potsy embracing the Western-ness of the movie. This film is unapologetic about all the tropes that it’s deploying in service of telling the story. You’ve got the cantankerous old man hiding a past, who’s a maverick who wants to keep the law and the bad guys off his property. He wants to be left alone. You’ve got a satchel full of cash. You’ve got gunslinging, physical violence, and feeding somebody to the pigs. Yet, it’s all accomplished without irony in a very straightforward way that is utterly confident, and in love with the genre.

I think ultimately that’s why the movie works, because it’s very front-footed. It’s not hiding from you. It’s not deceiving you and trying to tell you it’s something that it isn’t. It’s a good, straightforward Western.

Tim Blake Nelson as the titular singer in ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ (2018).

That’s a bit different from those Leone Westerns, with all of their anachronisms. I remember when the movie Silverado came out when I was growing up, and people were calling it a “quiche Western”, which was funny. That was what they would call it in Oklahoma because it had a bunch of movie stars in it, who weren’t known for being in Westerns. It was the Sergio Leone crowd calling it that. I went and saw it, wondering, “Well, if it’s a quiche Western, then why is everybody talking about it?” I saw it, and I loved it. Those folks putting it down like that were wrong. It’s actually a straightforward, hard-boiled, hardcore unapologetic Western. You don’t like some of the movie stars in it, but get over it. The reason that movie works is because it’s straight-ahead and well-told, and I think that movie holds up.

Old Henry is the same kind of animal. It’s more in the tradition of Sergio Leone—or, actually, I would say more in the tradition of Unforgiven. That was a big influence on Potsy.

Unforgiven was marvelous in the way it demystified that old black hat/white hat mentality of Westerns, opening up a more multi-dimensional understanding. You’re no stranger to that. A series like Watchmen takes that approach with superheroes, who in a sense hold the position now that Western heroes used to hold culturally. Do you find there’s more of a demand these days to challenge those archetypes who used to be put on pedestals—be they superheroes, cowboys, police—and provide a deeper analysis? Absolutely, yes. At the same time, I think the demystified Western hero goes back to John Wayne in The Searchers. I think it really started with that character, one of the greatest characters ever in a Western. There’s One-Eyed Jacks, with Marlon Brando, which was made just after The Searchers, and again embracing this concept of an extremely complicated man. I don’t think you get the Sergio Leone movies without that.

I always think of McCabe & Mrs. Miller as a Western that was doing something totally different than anything I had seen before. That’s another one, with that final image with the character smoking opium, going into oblivion after the demise of Warren Beatty’s very flawed character, after you’ve watched what it has taken to really build that town. You have a director, Robert Altman, making the deliberate choice to shoot in order so that they can build the town while they’re shooting the movie, and you really get the cost of it. I think there’s a lot of history to get to a place where a movie like Unforgiven can happen. Then Clint comes along and, as he often does, moves it forward even more.

Gavin Lewis as Henry’s son Wyatt in ‘Old Henry’.

That’s a film that tackles legacy, as does Old Henry, which at its core is ultimately about the relationship between a father and his son. You got to work on this film with your own son, coincidentally named Henry, who was part of the art department. What is that experience like, getting to share your passion with your son on a project together? Well, I think something that is true for the character of Henry and for myself, and perhaps all of us, is that we all want our kids to have better lives than ours. I want that to be true in every respect. Mostly, I want them to be more fulfilled than I have been. My kids look at me when I say that and say, “Thanks a lot Dad for raising that bar”, because they see that I have a pretty good life. Which I do, but I still think they can be more fulfilled than I am, and I want that for them. One of the great privileges of this movie was to watch my son—who was the on-set decorator—work his ass off.

Those are the words of an incredibly proud father. He’s a work horse, and he’s learning about filmmaking, and I think on his current trajectory he will go beyond where I’ve gone as a filmmaker, directing more movies than I’ve been able to direct. Do a better job at it, too. He’s also a singer-songwriter, and I think he can have a venerable career doing that if he wants, but he wants to make movies too, and I hope that’s going to happen for him. It was a thrill to watch him do the work, the twelve- and fourteen-hour days, and after every take resetting and making sure everything was right. It felt like an accomplishment to see him take on that responsibility and do the real work every day.

Related content

SJ Holiday’s lists of Essential Neo-Westerns and Essential Modern Westerns

The Best Neo-Westerns of the 21st Century, according to JS Lewis

Our interview with Slow West director John Maclean

Follow Mitchell on Letterboxd

‘Old Henry’ is in US theaters now and on VOD from Friday, October 8.

#tim blake nelson #old henry #western #westerns #western movies #sergio leone #clint eastwood #stephen dorff #letterboxd #mitchell beaupre #coen brothers #coen bros #buster scruggs #joel coen #ethan coen

[four-loose-screws]

An Interview with Mr. Toshiyuki Toyonaga about Fire Emblem (Claude‘s Japanese VA), Pg. 7

Chatting As Just a Player

As a player, how did you play “Three Houses?”

Toyonaga     When I started, I planned to complete two playthroughs, and on my first playthrough, I didn’t look up anything at all.  Because of that, I didn’t know things like how to scout the characters from the other classes. Someone told me “It seems like you’re missing something,” and I thought, then maybe I have to raise their support level? But even when I did that, I still couldn’t recruit them, so next I thought that maybe it had to do with stats, and did a lot of trial and error. I only realized that it might have something to do with weapon proficiency (skill levels) and support levels during the latter half of the Academy Phase. Because of all of that, I was filled with wishes that I had recruited this character and that character as I was thrust into the War Phase, and I was filled with regret during the three-way battle. (Chapter 17 and the battle at Gronder)

Because you encountered the other students as enemies, right?

Toyonaga     Yes. I remember thinking “Curse you!!” when Bernadetta attacked from the ballista because I didn’t scout her. Laughs. Having to fight the characters that I wanted to come to my side was really painful as I cleared the map. And so, that was how I played the game. I remember thinking it was a particularly pure playthrough. I also remember thinking “There’s so, so many of these!” as I collected the fallen items from around the monastery. When I think of the lost items, I remember stuff like the fish. Laughs. Fishing was fun too, and so was growing things in the greenhouse… though I forgot about it a lot, so there were some plants that didn’t grow. As you can guess, I ended up harvesting what I planted before the time skip five years later, after returning to Garreg Mach.

Which difficulty level did you choose?

Toyonaga     On my first playthrough, I chose normal classic. I play with the thought process that has followed me throughout the series, that I can’t let anyone die, so I have never once chosen casual mode.

We’d like to ask you about what impressions you were left with when you played normal mode.

Toyonaga     I thought that even normal was hard too! I progressed through the game without utilizing the free maps much at all. I only leveled up by completing the main maps and paralogues, so the War Phase was tough. There were many times where Claude and Byleth did nearly all of the work. I also gave Lysithea Lorenz’s Thyrsus Staff, giving her four range, so there were also a lot of situations where her magic did a lot of work even from far away. There ended up being a huge gap between Leonie and Ignatz’s levels and everyone else’s, and felt sorry about that as I continued through the game.

Did you make Lorenz a physical or a magic unit?

Toyonaga     I made Lorenz a Dark Knight. He was closer to a dark mage cavalry unit. Also, I remember thinking it was kinda cool that Grappler Raphael could attack four times in a row as he punched his enemies with all his might. Marianne fulfilled the role of the healer, and Hilda swung around her axe with great force. However, my Hilda’s defense didn’t grow very much, so I kept it in my mind that she couldn’t go out on many risky missions as I played.

What scenes did you like, or what scenes left an impression on you?

Toyonaga     I liked the mystery of the scenes where Byleth and Sothis spoke in the place that resembled a throne room, that was a sort of spirit world. I also really liked Seteth and Flayn’s conversations.

They’re all characters that are all similar to each other in some way!

Toyonaga     They are. When their allies learned of Flayn and Seteth’s true identities and relationship, a lot happened, and their allies changed a bit… Aside from that, because Claude is an archer, I also really liked being able to hear his conversations with Shamir, as they are both archers. It felt like she was a big sister.

The developers said that this game’s storytelling, and the creation of how noble society functions, among other aspects, were developed with Genealogy of the Holy War in mind, so what sort of impression did that have on you, as someone who has many memories of that game?

Toyonaga     There were many times where I thought that might be the case, that Three Houses was based on Genealogy, but as we talk about it now, I sort of think that might be why it was so easy for me to become fond of Three Houses… They both feature a type of war that doesn't really feel rewarding at all… And questions like “Who’s really behind all of this?” and “Is fighting this fight really what’s right?”, that deepened Genealogy's story, were things I also felt really strongly during the War Phase of Three Houses.

We agree! And you can even play the villain’s side of the story.

Toyonaga     About that, I thought that Hubert and Dedue’s roles were so unfair! They are considered the closest confidants to Edelgard and Dimitri respectively, existing as their right-hand men. The Golden Deer don’t have anyone in that position… Lorenz would never be someone like that.

Both     Laugh.

Toyonaga     Lorenz finally comes to support Claude during the War Phase, but the way that Hubert and Dedue are so devoted because they are right-hand men is really moving, and as men, it’s so cool! Oh, I mean “man,” as in “manly man...”* I could talk on and on like this for five minutes about just one character. Laughs.

(above) Hubert and Dedue both serve their lord without any concern for their own well-being. Also, Mr. Toyonaga also told us that he didn’t choose a different class from the Golden Deer even for his second playthrough, so we showed him scenes like how manly (!?) Hilda acts when she faces Claude as an enemy.

It feels weird to hear your own voice

Did your impression of Claude change after recording?

Toyonaga     My original impression of Claude was that his core personality cannot be changed, but aside from that, he gives off the mood that he has the flexibility to accept the opinions of many types of people… That sort of image. That part didn’t change the entire time we were recording, so after recording, I don’t think my thoughts changed then, either. I just thought from time to time that he says some pretty snobby things. Laughs.

He does. Laughs.

Toyonaga     He talks like that to the professors, to his fellow students in his class… ‘He… He can say nasty things like that?!’ I thought. But I think it’s still a good part about him, or not bad, at least.

So your image for performing Claude’s role was consistent from beginning to end. Does that mean that you didn’t have to do many retakes?

Toyonaga     We hardly did any retakes. I corrected myself on my own when I mispronounced town names that were difficult to say, and things like that, but aside from those physically difficult to perform lines, I don’t feel that we did that many retakes.

So how did you feel as a player when you heard Claude’s voice?

Toyonaga     This much is obvious, but when I first heard my own performance in a Fire Emblem game, it felt weird. And on top of that, I don’t know why exactly, but I wanted Claude to get married and have a paired ending, and I chose Professor Byleth. So I ended up confessing to myself! Laughs.

Laughs.

Toyonaga     I enjoyed the game in a way that only I could. But it was really weird the entire time. Hm, how do I put it… I wanted to express myself in the world of Fire Emblem, and wanted to confirm that I did a great job of that, so I listened really carefully to my own performance as I played the game.

That’s the point you discussed before, that you wanted a portrayal that made the game feel like it really happened in history, right?

Toyonaga     Yes. Was I able to express what I wanted how I wanted? I played the game with that thought in my head. ...And lastly, this is completely unrelated, but as I played the game, I was also thinking “Ingrid sure is really cute!” the entire time. Laughs.

#fire emblem #fe #fe3h #fe16 #claude #claude von reigen #toshiyuki toyonaga #toyonaga toshiyuki #nindori #nintendo dream #nintendo #switch #nintendo switch #japan #japanese #translation #claude va interview

[alyblacklist]

We are sad and angry about Elizabeth's death and it’s sad for Ressler. Now something else, what do you think of all this Redrina thing…. Seriously Red is Kat ?!?! I know both episodes strongly suggest this. I refuse to believe it. I know you've been following the show ever since the beginning. That question has come up many times and that you've always stood up against Redrina. But with the final, has your point of view changed?

I have not changed my view that Redarina is so wholly inconsistent with so much of what we were shown and told over the life of the series that if that is the narrative that JB was trying to sell on his way out the door, he did an abominable job of it. I think they left the ending ambiguous enough that no one should be doing a victory lap and the door is wide open for JE and NBC to move in a different direction even if that was the big "twist" JB wanted. We'll never know since he quit. No post-finale interviews from him or JE boasting about their big reveal, no trail of "breadcrumbs" explaining how they got to this supposedly pivotal moment. Radio silence. A HUGE contrast to their original imposter reveal in S5. That in itself speaks volumes. No one is willing to own this reveal (or Liz’s death for that matter) and go on record to defend it. 

Maybe in the end Liz saw what she wanted to see in her dying moments, just like Dom on his deathbed saw the woman he believed was his daughter who we’ve now been told was the imposter Tatiana. Maybe she simply felt a parental type of love through Red’s touch and it made her think of her parents. We'll never know because they denied her (and us) that certainty and I keep trying to see through my rage on that and I can't. They couldn't even give her the dignity of Red whispering in her ear like he did to Kirk. Instead, we are left to assume that Red somehow magically knew what Liz was seeing in her dying visions. 

If Red is Redarina he is the most selfish person on earth to deny Liz the truth after all the suffering and pain she has endured since he entered/re-entered her life. For what? Because he’s embarrassed and ashamed of his own choices? The same man who otherwise struts around like he owns the earth, who proudly proclaims “I am who I am” could not trust his own daughter - one of the most forgiving people on earth, who told him five seasons ago that keeping the truth from her about her mother was the one thing that was unforgivable? It’s absurd. That’s not good storytelling, that’s bad gimmickry. 

#anon #anti-Redarina #8.22

[aotopmha]

Some prefacing: This ask is for clarification’s sake. I’m not that anon, but Isayama never said Levi is the most emotional character. This is misinformation that has been spread around for years now, and I’ve never seen a source for it. I assume this is some fandom curated headcanon to ascribe depth to his character where it’s not needed. That’s all. Thanks for the great meta posts. They’re sobering and a nice change of pace from the pro-genocide supporters and their binary outlook.

Yeah, I've seen the claim that Isayama has said Levi is the most emotional character of the story around, but I don't think I've ever seen it backed up by actual interview material, either and I've looked for it as I really love the series and eat up pretty much every little morsel of information about it.

If anyone does have a source, please link it.

I know there's the speculation about his age (Isayama supposedly claimed he is around his 30s), the confirmation that he likes tall people which is wonderfully vague for all of the shippers, something like an explanation for his Ackerbond with Erwin in the databooks and the explanation for why he is holding his cup the way he is (he saved up for one when he was young and then broke it, which is why he wants to be more careful in the present day).

I actually think this idea about his character exists because some people want to make his character seem more "human", not necessarily more complex, but the latter might also be true.

I've found it's sort of a typical way for people to treat the stoic character which appeals to fangirls. I've seen for example Sasuke and Trafalgar Law get this kind of treatment, too.

But it's also actually not a very good way to treat the character in my eyes because I feel like that's not what his character is myself.

The fact that Levi is this stoic, sarcastic, sometimes overly violent character that is sometimes irrational is what makes him a good character.

Wanting to make a character seem more human can result in wiping away a character's flaws and that kind of can actually take away from the complexity of a character.

You can imagine him as this really vurnable knight on a white horse, everyone has their own interpretation of a story, but personally I just think that stuff might actually take away from his character.

Cool you like my perspective on things!

As I said a little bit time ago, at this point I think the whole pro-genocide thing is one of these things:

1) Actual extremists wanting their wonderful fantasy of genociding the world to be depicted in a popular story and the blank-faced non-human protagonist to be held as the true ideal the story agrees with. Their interpretation of Eren is the uber-powerful god who kills everyone without mercy and goes back home to his item of a wife (Historia) to presumably make more children.

Basically a power fantasy that they want their lives to be.

2) Edgy teens and 20-somethings that want their story to be "different" on principle and just because, as being "different" is automatically good storytelling. Violence just for shock value.

3) People who want Eren to win because they see it as an opportunity for better storytelling and think the theme of the story can be expressed better through Eren winning. They feel the way the story has gone just isn't very interesting. It's sort of tied to group #2, but this group just has genuine concern for the state of the story.

4) People who root for Eren just on the principle that he has always been the main character. I think this group either generally quite doesn't grasp the scale and harm of a genocide or shelf the moral elements as this just being fiction.

I'm most understanding of group #3, but the reasons why I disagree with all of these is that:

1) I think it is actually much more interesting storytelling that Eren isn't actually this stone-faced non-human entity and his ultimate belief in freedom is what will probably be his downfall.

The whole point why Eren did this was because of his friends. We see the flashback to the train scene like 4 times. I think the situation is much more interesting when a character does reprehensible things for selfless reasons and is bound to their consistent beliefs.

Eren believes his friends are entitled to freedom just as much as he is. This is excellent tragic character writing. Like most big turning points in the story, it is also rooted in who the character is.

2) I don't think you can make a "the world is cruel, but beautiful" thematic conclusion with Eren destroying the world even if you make the point that he is completely destroyed by it. Historia is completely miserable about having that child and if you suddenly change that to happiness, that would be really tonally jarring, not just because Historia is miserable, but also because the rest of humanity is gone.

I don't think you could cycle back to the story's main theme like that without it seeming completely tone deaf unless you use something like the "but what did it cost" or "the cycle continues despite the struggle and sacrifice" angles, which I think could somewhat work, as a cautionary tale kind of thing.

A Fate/Zero kind of ending if you know that series.

But I feel like the strongest ending would be if the story cycled back to "the world is cruel, yet beautiful".

Something like there actually being some twist next chapter and some characters needing to die for Eren to be fully stopped and Eren dying with a moment of clarity in Mikasa's arms.

The curse of Ymir is ended and the Eldians are freed from Marleyan internment camps, but there will still be prejudice left to be fought and those still left alive will continue the fight.

So, the path to freedom took sacrifices and will take some more, but at least the Titans have been stopped.

I'm basically done with the pro-genocide side of things because I feel like a lot of that side actually just want their shitty violent fantasy to come true and the story is bad because they're not getting it, not some specific actual complaint about the story.

Thank you for the ask!

#Attack on Titan #Shingeki no Kyojin #Levi #Levi Ackerman #AoT #SnK #Asks

[violethowler]

The Elephant in the Room

In my previous essays, I have covered how the Kingdom Hearts narrative follows Maureen Murdock’s template of the Heroine’s Journey, as well as how various characters and story elements tie in with the overarching themes of the framework. Before I can continue to dig further into other themes and archetypes, there is something I need to address first. While I have avoided directly touching on the topic in my previous essays, I have now reached the point where it is no longer possible to talk about the Heroine’s Journey in full without acknowledging the elephant in the room: 

Romance.

In ongoing serialized stories such as TV shows and video games, conversations about potential relationships in canon are often treated as inconsequential to the overall story. Something that is separate from the main plot. At worst, I have seen fans who openly center a ship in their analysis and theories be dismissed and criticized as biased - or worse, delusional. They are treated as being so obsessed with their pairing that they try to make everything about their ship and jump on any excuse to declare that it’s viable in canon. 

Among the Kingdom Hearts fandom in particular, this has often taken the form of someone trying to dismiss other fans’ hope for a ship to be canon by saying that the series is about friendship, not romance.

While friendship is absolutely an important theme in the Kingdom Hearts series, to insist that this is mutually exclusive from depicting the development of romantic relationships ignores the continued presence of canon Disney romances in almost every game in the series. In each “main” game where Sora is playable, he has directly or indirectly been involved in getting those Disney couples together in the KH universe. So it’s not out of the realm of possibility for the series to turn the tables and give some attention to his romantic interests for a change. 

A story having other major themes is not mutually exclusive from showcasing the development of a romantic relationship. There are many popular movies, shows, books, comics, and video games in which a romantic relationship plays a central role in the narrative but there are still other plotlines going on that are equally as important as the romance. This is especially true for Disney and Square Enix.

The reason why it’s impossible to fully talk about the Heroine’s Journey without acknowledging romance elements is best encapsulated by this quote from She-Ra showrunner Noelle Stevenson about her show’s endgame pairing in an i09 interview after the release of the final season:

“The show’s not a romance show. It is about a lot of things. It’s about choice, destiny, fighting, tyrants, you know, all of these other things. I grew up with so many stories—like sci-fi and fantasy—that I was so passionate about. And it would be considered no big deal to have the hero get the girl and to have a kiss at the end, without it suddenly becoming a romance or ‘Oh, the shippers got what they wanted.’ It was just a part of the story. And to actually see it be a central part of the plot and to fulfill the arcs of the characters in a way that felt satisfying. I really want to take it beyond ‘Oh, the shippers got what they want.’ Like, it’s not just a ship for me. It is a plot point. It is the necessary conclusion of each character’s arc, separate and together.[1]”

While not every story known to follow the Heroine's Journey features a romance for the main protagonist, those that do make the romance an integral part of the narrative. It’s not something thrown in at the end to please shippers, but a central component of the story. Therefore, when analyzing a Heroine’s Journey story, it is vital to acknowledge and discuss textual support for potential romantic relationships in order to have a full understanding of the narrative.

Even if one is not aware of the Heroine’s Journey, Sora’s repeated interactions with Disney romances indicate that there is a high probability that he will be in a romantic relationship himself by the end of the series. Every story I know of that follows the Heroine’s Journey broadly adheres to a pattern in regards to how the romantic relationships of a main character are set up.

By examining the series through these patterns, we can narrow down who Sora’s endgame romantic partner will be. 

Because the themes and character dynamics emphasize resolving internal conflict through balance, the Heroine’s Journey lends itself extremely well to Beauty-and-the-Beast, rivals-to-lovers, and enemies-to-lovers relationship dynamics. A major component of the Heroine’s Journey is the main character learning to accept themselves, and since the Animus as a Shadow figure can represent the parts of themselves that they haven’t accepted yet, it is simpler to symbolize that self-acceptance via a romance with the Animus rather than attempting to build a separate relationship on top of the existing story framework.

For these reasons, the Animus is more often than not the main character’s endgame love interest, their feelings for each other made into critical aspects of their respective character arcs. The only Heroine’s Journey stories with romance that I know of where this wasn’t the case are ones where executive meddling resulted in the finale being rewritten to kill off the Animus despite established narrative set up for them to have a happy ending together[2], while the protagonist was either forced into a relationship with a different character or left single.

And like I said in previous essays, the one character in the series who fulfills all criteria for the Animus role within this storytelling framework…. 

Is Riku.

[Image Description: Sora supporting Riku as they walk toward the ocean on the Dark Margin at the end of Kingdom Hearts II. End Description.]

As mentioned in my earlier analysis, this narrative framework emphasizes the importance of balancing contrasting attributes, which fits in extremely well with Kingdom Hearts’ focus on balance between light and darkness. For stories that follow the Heroine’s Journey in a visual medium, that dichotomy is often incorporated into the characters’ look. Height differences are common, while their color schemes and outfits are designed to make them complement each other. Further adding to the focus on balance between light and darkness, the visuals of the story frame the romantic leads with imagery associating each one with light or darkness to create Yin-Yang symbolism when they are finally in balance. 

In Re: Chain of Memories, Vexen openly calls Riku the “Hero of Darkness[3]” as a counterpart to Sora’s role as the “Hero of Light”, and their combination attack in Kingdom Hearts II utilizes moves that reflect both elements. In the Ultimania for the original game, Tetsuya Nomura said that Riku’s look was intentionally designed to balance Sora’s[4], and the contrast between their respective color schemes is maintained in each of their new outfits. In Kingdom Hearts II and Dream Drop Distance, Riku wears white and blue, while Sora in those same games wears black and red. Two different pairs of contrasting colors. Kingdom Hearts III has them both in outfits that are primarily black and grey, but still emphasize the blue and red that have been part of their respective outfits since the first game. 

In a Heroine’s Journey, the love interest is typically an active character in the story and usually serves as the deuteragonist. This fits with Riku having been a mandatory playable character in multiple games since 2004. In addition, series producer Shinji Hashimoto said before the release of the HD 1.5 Remix collection[5] that the main focus of the series is how Sora and Riku develop both as individuals and as a pair, which fits with how the central conflict of the Heroine’s Journey revolves around the dynamic between the Protagonist and their Animus. 

A common viewpoint held by many fans of the series is that Kairi is Sora’s love interest, and it’s not hard to see why people get that impression. He has sacrificed himself to save her in two separate games now. He’s charged enemies head on in order to rescue her whenever she’s been captured. He even got down on his knees and begged for her freedom when Saix demanded he show how important she was to him. Multiple characters have talked about how special she is to him, and Roxas refers to her as “that girl he(Sora) likes.” 

However, there are multiple elements in the narrative that point to them not being the endgame romance. Kingdom Hearts III foreshadows the final shot of them sitting on the paopu together at the end of the game with Sora disappearing from the cover of the 100 Acre Wood storybook, textually framing Winnie the Pooh as a parallel to Kairi. While many fans regarded their sharing paopu fruits in the base game as the beginning of a relationship between them, he still only refers to her as a friend in Re:Mind, and even compares his bond with her to the bond between Ventus and Chirithy. 

Sora also does not treat his promises to her with the seriousness he would if they were going to end up together. The promises to return her lucky charm and to come back to her that he makes in the first game are never treated as anything urgent when he awakens in Kingdom Hearts II. Instead, he declines the opportunity to return to the islands and check in with her in favor of searching for Riku. When Kairi says in The World That Never Was that they’ll be together every day, Sora agrees, yet he was content to spend the rest of his life on the dark beach at the end of the game as long as he was with Riku. 

Meanwhile, the most consistent theme regarding Kairi in relation to the Destiny Islands trio is the idea of childhood friends drifting apart as they get older[6][7]. This is particularly highlighted in Kingdom Hearts III, with Kairi writing letters to Sora that she never sends, thereby keeping her thoughts to herself. Merlin also emphasizes this when he talks about forging new connections after Sora’s visit to 100 Acre Wood. This parallel frames the ending of Re:Mind as the two of them recognizing they’ve drifted apart and choosing to put in the effort to renew their friendship by spending time together.

On a structural level, her portrayal does not fit with how love interests are typically depicted in the Heroine’s Journey, both as an individual and in relation to the main protagonist. There is no contrast between her and Sora’s designs or roles the way there is between his and Riku’s. Her color scheme is predominantly pink, which does not have the same contrast with Sora’s red as Riku’s blue. Because she’s a Princess of Heart, there is no dark and light contrast, and the combination attack she shares with Sora in Re:Mind only utilizes light-based moves. It took 17 years after her first appearance in the series for her to be made a playable character, and even then, playing as her is not mandatory. They are never portrayed as equals, and she is not an active force in his emotional growth. 

The Heroine’s Journey was crafted for narratives revolving around identities that have been Othered by society for one reason or another. Murdock designed her template as a tool to help women deal with being shamed by society for expressing and pursuing their desires. In a similar way, LGBTQ+ people also face stigma from society for expressing and pursuing their desires. So it makes perfect sense that a framework for narratives of people overcoming internalized stigma against important parts of themselves would be ripe for stories featuring LGBTQ+ protagonists of any gender.

As mentioned in previous essays, stories that follow the Heroine’s Journey challenge the biases and blind spots of the audience. A relationship between Kairi and Sora does not challenge anything because she has largely been regarded as the endgame love interest by default since the beginning. Meanwhile, a romantic relationship between Sora and Riku challenges players to recognize heteronormativity within themselves and in the media around them. It challenges people to examine the lens through which they perceive the story and rethink how they look at what’s happening in the narrative.

In summary, the portrayal of Kairi and her bond with Sora is not consistent with how love interests are commonly depicted in the Heroine’s Journey, while the portrayal of Riku and his bond with Sora is. If Sora’s story is going to continue on this storytelling formula to the end, the structure of the Heroine’s Journey narrative leaves Riku as the only thematically viable candidate for the role of endgame love interest. 

Now, as some people bring up in conversations about Soriku, there is a potential obstacle in the form of corporate executives. It is entirely possible that Disney will drag their heels and try to force the development team to downplay or remove any open same-sex relationship the series may try to depict. They do not have a strong track record of LGBTQ+ representation that isn’t a minor character who only appears for one scene. Given that their last IP to follow the Heroine’s Journey - the Star Wars sequel trilogy - crashed and burned at the end, executive meddling is my greatest fear for this franchise.

But the thing to keep in mind is that Tetsuya Nomura is stubborn as hell. One of the reasons the long gap between Kingdom Hearts II and Kingdom Hearts III was because he was holding out for permission to include Pixar movies in the game, outright refusing to start work on KH3 until they were given that go ahead[8]. If you want further proof of how stubborn he can be, this is how he described the meeting where he first pitched the series to Disney in a 2012 interview with the late president of Nintendo[9]:

Iwata: Their ideas were different from yours, naturally…

Nomura: Yes. They appeared to believe that we would make whatever they wanted us to make and came up with rather specific requests such as, "We'd like the game to feature this character." They were really excited, explaining their ideas... To be honest, though, I wasn't really interested in any of them. (laughs) 

Both: (laughter)

Iwata: You wanted to borrow Disney's characters in order to make a new game that could compete with Mario 64, and you already had a vision of what this game would look like. I suppose their ideas didn't fit in with this vision.

Nomura: They didn't, no. In the end, I actually stopped a presentation halfway through. We didn't have that much time, and it looked like it was all going to get taken up by various Disney presentations. So, I interrupted them and told them the conclusion by saying, "I won't make such games."

Talk about nerves of steel. This man basically said “we do this my way, or we don’t do it at all” TO MOTHERFORKING DISNEY, AND. HE. WON. If there is any human being with enough force of will to make the Mouse House cave in and allow the depiction of an openly LGBTQ+ relationship in the Kingdom Hearts series, it is Tetsuya Nomura.

I cannot say with 100% certainty how things will go. But everything I know about storytelling patterns and narrative structure is telling me that Kingdom Hearts is a textbook Heroine’s Journey with a romance between Sora and Riku at its core. A relationship between the protagonist and the Animus does not truly begin until the “Integration” stage at the end of the Journey, and we are rapidly approaching the point in the narrative where the two leads traditionally become aware of and acknowledge their feelings in order to be on the same page for the finale.

Sources: 

[1] “She-Ra's Noelle Stevenson Tells Us How Difficult It Was to Bring Adora and Catra Home” May 18, 2020

https://io9.gizmodo.com/she-ras-noelle-stevenson-tells-us-how-difficult-it-was-1843419358

[2] “Death of a Dark Youth, Desecration of the Animus”; December 20, 2018. https://www.teampurplelion.com/death-of-a-dark-youth/

[3] Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories. Square Enix, 2007. 

[4] “A Look Back: Kingdom Hearts Ultimania Gallery Comments Part 1″; August 30, 2019;

https://www.khinsider.com/news/A-Look-Back-KINGDOM-HEARTS-Ultimania-Gallery-Comments-Part-1-15519

[5] “How Kingdom Hearts III Will Grow Up With Its Players;” September 24, 2013.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/09/25/how-kingdom-hearts-iii-will-grow-up-with-its-players.

[6] “E3 2018: Tetsuya Nomura on If Kingdom Hearts 3 Is the End of Sora's Story”; June 14, 2018.

https://www.ign.com/articles/2018/06/14/e3-2018-tetsuya-nomura-on-if-kingdom-hearts-3-is-the-end-of-soras-story

[7] “Character’s Report Vol. 1 Translations”; Jul 16, 2014

https://www.khinsider.com/forums/index.php?threads/characters-report-vol-1-translations.195560/

[8] “Edge Magazine Features Kingdom Hearts III Cover Story”; January 9, 2019. https://www.khinsider.com/news/Edge-Magazine-Features-Kingdom-Hearts-III-Cover-Story-14331

[9] “Iwata Asks: Nintendo 3DS: Third Party Game Developers, Volume 12: Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], Part 2: It’ll definitely be fun”; April 2012. 

https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interviews/#/3ds/creators/11/1

#kingdom hearts meta #kingdom hearts theory #kh speculation #kingdom hearts analysis #kingdom hearts and the heroine's journey #soriku

[yeoldontknow]

🖊writerly conversation tag

tagged by @j-pping to do this amazing interview/reflections tag. of course she put together one of the most amazing tags ever because she is brilliant. thank you for tagging me angel! 

questions below the cut!

2020

what was the most challenging part of writing this year?

gosh...i think for me the hardest bit was staying both motivated and inspired. a lot of my inspiration comes from being out in the world. im an introvert but i enjoy being out in the city around the noise and the people and the buildings on my own. the majority of my writing used to be done while riding the subway or on a weekend after id gone out somewhere. a lot of my fics are inspired by locations, and experiences within those locations. being inside for the majority of the year made it hard for me to remember how...people interact with or relate to the spaces around them. so i felt like a lot of the time staying inspired was coming from places within just me that felt inauthentic. i think my writing benefits from my ability to see multiple perspectives, so i felt like a lot of dialogue or writing itself was suffering just coming from me alone. it took a lot of work to ensure that it wasnt like that. 

and then, motivation was also so hard. the internet and the news and everything about america, the planet, the everything was unrelenting and draining. we as people were privy to so much trauma this year, to the collapse and fracture of communities, lives, governments. there were several weeks at the end of may and into june where i just...couldnt. i had no energy for anything. it happened again in november after the election and the windfall of it. energetic tensions were so high it just felt so hard to push out words when things were breaking everywhere. like there were more important things i needed to focus on, and healing was one of them.

what was the most enjoyable/rewarding part of writing this year?

i enjoyed the new community of writers/friends i found by writing for bts again. they challenged me and pushed me to better myself. @jamaisjoons is so inspirational in the way she generates community and encourages relationships between storytellers. doing the summer bucket list pushed me out of my hermit hole for camp nano, and i cranked out molotov cocktail and felt so proud of it. it mattered so much to me because it was the first long thing id written after a period of feeling deceased, and it was so enjoyable because there was a sense of community around it. its easy to forget how essential having a support system in your creative community is.

what piece has left the most impact on you and why?

probably ciperion. words cannot express how proud i am of that story and the direction its going in. i read it back sometimes and i realize that my writing was elevated because of that piece. tbh molotov was responsible for that lift, but ciperion was just a whole other tier. ive also never written anything like that story before and it felt so good exploring the themes of seafaring and pirates. 

what have you learned about yourself through the process of writing in the past year?

that i absolutely am someone who took for granted how inspiring the world is even if i see it as a stressor. but also that writing isnt necessarily about being inspired. its about pushing on when its hard. some of my best pieces came from that kind of push this year. 2020 felt like...a slog through most of it, but i kept pushing myself to write even when i was low and tired. i realized that some of my best writing comes from that push, when its not easy and when its difficult and i have to think harder. thats where i grow. 

how has your writing changed in the past year? how have you grown?

i think im more syntax and detailed focused than i used to be. lately ive been experimenting with making the act of reading feel like pleasure. my favourite books are the ones where i read a sentence, and im moved because it felt nice to read or it felt powerful. the sentence itself had power, not the image it was trying to convey. somehow separate, if that makes sense. theres a lot i need to learn before i could go off comfortably and try to write a book, and this is what ive been trying to master. my attention to detail has grown, and sometimes i think thats a detriment. i think sometimes im too detailed and i dont leave my reader enough power on their own. im still finding that balance, but i think im pleased right now with what im trying to push myself to master.

2021

ignoring your wips for a second, if you had all the time and energy in the world to write your magnum opus piece, what would it be about? why is that the dream story you’d write, all other things controlled for?

ive had two books in my mind forever. one was originally being written as a fanfic in a different fandom before i stopped and realized its too big and so much more important, and is worth being a book id like to write. if i wrote an opus like this it would actually be a book id submit to publishers but ~

- hundreds of years in the future, society has learned how to cure most diseases. for those we cannot, the sick person can be cryogenically frozen for a period of time until a cure is found. there is, however, a limit to the length of time they are frozen. no one has ever been frozen for over 100 years, and the main character is a scientist embarking on the experiment to do just that. it is, effectively, time travel. the main character is rash, selfish, sarcastic - not a very nice person; invested in their work and science and little else. they freeze themselves and wake up in the future. during their time in rehab they have to confront the horror theyve made of themselves, the horror people have made of the future, learn to be vulnerable. they end up falling in love with another scientist etc etc. theres so much more to this story and the world is enormous. one day ill revisit it

- a fictional play on orpheus in the underworld where a female main character’s brother was sold by their mother to the goddess of the underworld (helena instead of hades) for eternal youth. the gods all live in a hotel (the concept of this main thing is being used in elysian fields but its not remotely the same) after they were removed from the heavens. main character (ophelia) must gather several totems from the gods to prove her worth and survive her trip into the underworld to rescue him. id like to not focus on a woman finding romance, and instead a woman finding herself, her strength, her devotion to family, her power, and connecting with her history.

how do you want to grow in your writing this year?

this year id like to find balance, like i mentioned above, with my need for detail and my trust in my readers. the balance between detail and dialogue. i want to try to condense my writing again so not everything is a goddamn series. the ideas i have are huge and thats great but i need to remember how to parse things again, while still maintaining impact.

what’s one thing you’d wish to see in the fan-writing community this year?

i want more community, in general. as a multi fan, i see pockets in the kpop fandom where it exists and im well and truly aware that its recently become incredibly hard to foster on the exo side. ill just say that. maybe i dont witness it or its happening amongst blogs i havent found or have not found me. i want to see less dialogue about ‘popular blogs,’ whatever that means; less focus on notes; less worries about statistics. i want people to remember that fandom is not about numbers, and the moment you make it about that is the moment you stop having fun. i want less fear from writers regarding sharing work they read and liked, less shame around it. i want to see more vocal communication for the things people like and don’t like, more engagement and more interaction. the concept of popular blogs is so ridiculous to me, because no one has any control over the metrics. no one has control over who follows them or reads their work except the person doing the actual reading. i want people to realize they hold so much power - a person with 10k notes has as much power as a person with 2 notes because sharing is what fosters community. i want this fandom to remember to share again.

name one new thing you want to try doing in your writing this year.

gosh i really love postmodernism in writing. think like mark z danielewski, who plays with the shapes of words or the act of holding a book - the physicality of it. id like to maybe write a choose your own adventure, or do something that encompasses multiple platforms. or even, more importantly, finish as still as sound and time runner. those are more reasonable goals. time runner actually is done, i just need to stop pressuring myself about it and edit it to get it up. asas, too, is largely done i just need to get my ass together. i have so many other ideas no one has ever seen i need to finish what ive started. thats a real goal.

tagging: @yehet-me-up @jamaisjoons @kyungseokie @jenmyeons @luffles424 @yoonia @shadowsremedy @chillingkoo @onherwings @inkedtae @ninibears-erigom @imdifferentshadesofpurple @readyplayerhobi @ditzymax @sugaurora @snackhobi @yeojaa @sahmfanficbts @xjoonchildx @johobi and anyone else who wants to do this. as always please only do so if comfortable or you want to!

#writer conversation tag

[minaminokyoko]

I know I’m screaming into the void here, but

Can we talk about the lack of HarriKarri content in Peace Talks?

Spoilers for Peace Talks below. Also, a very long rant.

Disclaimer: Recently, the reading community has been having conversations about expectations related to professional authors backed by one of the Big Six or equivalent traditional publishing companies. The points I’m about to bring are not me being entitled. I understand that Jim Butcher is not obligated to give me everything I want. I will not demand that he do so. I just want to have a conversation about something I feel is oddly dissatisfying about the content in Peace Talks related to Harry and Murphy, which is my own opinion, and said opinion isn’t going to be slung at the author or anything distasteful like that.

Right, so, to give some context, I’m not a fan of Peace Talks. I read it once and then just sat on my couch for several hours after trying to figure out what to even do with myself because I waited six years for what I consider to be an underwhelming book that was mostly just set up for Battle Ground. I mention it because I admit that if we get Battle Ground in September and all the content in Harry and Murphy’s relationship that was missing in Peace Talks is in Battle Ground, fine, I’ll retract my statements. Some fans have already expressed that they can’t really review Peace Talks or give opinions on it because it feels so much like a companion piece that you can’t evaluate it until you’ve read Battle Ground, as the book seems to be nothing but the precursor to Battle Ground. It doesn’t stand on its own very well, at least not in my eyes, but let me get to the point.

The reason I’ve been feeling angry and betrayed by Peace Talks’ lack of HarriKarri content isn’t just because I’m the Queen of the Harry/Murphy trashpile. I’m not speaking strictly as a shipper this time. Y’all know me. I mean, look, I’ve written 185k words of Harry/Murphy fanfiction, most of which was written during the incredibly long wait between Skin Game and Peace Talks. Yes, I know, it’s hypocritical of me to say I’m not writing this post because I’m a big dumb shipper queen. I do mean it that I sincerely think it’s outright bizarre that we got so little insight into how these two best fire-forged friends and lovers are doing in a romantic relationship.

Let me make my case here. Okay, so the first thing is that romance is a huge element in this series. Harry’s love life is important not only to him as a character, but it actually plays directly into the plot, from Susan’s selfish stupidity to Elaine’s mistrust to Luccio’s mysterious manipulation to Lasciel’s Heel Face Turn. If someone wanted to argue the reason we didn’t see much of Harry and Murphy together as a couple is because romance isn’t the primary focus of the series, that’s not going to hold water. The connection between Harry and his paramours has always been a large element in each of these books in various ways. That’s probably the first thing that signaled that something was off about Peace Talks.

Think about the previous books. Harry’s relationships are both a source of comfort and conflict for him, allowing him to learn and grow as a character, and none moreso than his relationship with Murphy. I have so many of their scenes vividly memorized by now because of how important both friendship and love are to Harry and to Murphy as well. There are milestones that they’ve reached starting from Storm Front onward. I would honestly argue it is the most developed relationship in the series, in terms of how much these two trust and respect and love one another and understand where they fit into the other person’s life. I remember reading that bit in White Night where Bob says they swapped souls through a hug and that left a huge impression on me because I think that’s what soulmates would look and sound like in real life (wouldn’t know, I am single af and going to die an old cat lady.) It’s to a point where, in my honest opinion, there is no Harry without Murphy. She is the other half of his soul. Where he is weak, she is strong, where she is weak, he is strong, and they move forward through every conflict knowing that about each other. And I think the reverse is true. We saw how Murphy took Harry’s disappearance and death—it fucking broke her. Her entire personality and beliefs came crashing down and while she was still able to function in his absence, she was just as much a ghost as he was.

So why the fuck wasn’t there anything in Peace Talks illustrating just how vital this relationship is?

I’m not keen on reading the book again, but from what I remember, we were given roughly three significant interactions between Harry and Murphy that had anything to do with their romance: Harry at the house while she’s recovering, the scene where she takes the casts off, and then her talking to him after Ebenezar almost kills him. And…that’s it. Do they still interact in the book? Yes. But it’s nothing memorable, aside from the threesome suggestion (in all fairness, that was hilarious, and it was even more hilarious to me that both Harry and Murphy didn’t outright say no).

Why is that weird? Because I can seriously name book by book how many significant conversations and scenes that Harry and Murphy have that develop their dynamic, sexy, fun, beautiful relationship…and yet the book where they’re actually together, after sixteen goddamn books, has almost nothing.

And it shouldn’t be like that at all.

I know my own bias. Really, I do. I’ve written so many Harry/Murphy fics that I was bound to be let down when we actually got the canon relationship, but the difference between me being let down and me feeling betrayed is that it feels like it’s for no reason. There are plenty of spots in the book considering it’s kind of short where Butcher could have given us insight into the way they hooked up for the first time. I know I don’t speak for the entire fandom, but I do know there are enough of you who like me wanted to know about their first “official” date or seeing how the people in his life reacted to them finally getting together after so many years. That’s not just shipper trash. That’s satisfying storytelling payoff. It is extremely important to us as readers and to the actual narrative itself that we see what it’s like for Harry and Murphy to be in a mature romantic relationship. Both of them have been longing and pining for each other for ages, and yet Butcher doesn’t give us the meaty bits we’re dying to chomp our teeth into. For God’s sake, Harry was hung up on the little things about Murphy, like her riding her motorcycle or her cute nose and ear lobes or the way she smiles or how she gives him the sass right back to his face. Yet we don’t get any indication of the momentous event of the first time he actually got to second base (or more) with her. We don’t see any of the things that we were clamoring for because these are two best friends giving in to serious feelings and that’s a huge deal since they’ve both pretty much been smitten since Storm Front.

It’s not a matter of appeasing shippers at this point. This relationship is a huge change that is important to both of them, and we didn’t get jackshit about the transition from friends to lovers. Hell’s bells, there’s an entire genre of fics in every work of fiction devoted to this trope and yet Butcher just skipped over it. I swear I’m not making mountains out of molehills. It doesn’t make sense that all the previous books with the exception of Dead Beat (since Murphy was out of town) have significant moments between Harry and Murphy that build on their friendship and partnership yet the moments in Peace Talks are way too short and aren’t anything groundbreaking or memorable. And this is them canonically together, heading for the iceberg, being with the person they love dearly. I want to know what that’s like because I care about them and it feels inorganic that it’s brushed off for plot or other things instead.

I don’t get it. I truly don’t. If Butcher is waiting to unleash the content I want in Battle Ground, I guess that’ll help, but after so much build up, why in God’s name wouldn’t you explore all the things we want to know about how their romance is going? Harry and Murphy have been through literal hell together, for God’s sake. They’re both cagey and in extremely stressful situations—especially poor Karrin—and yet it’s just brushed aside time and time again. It would keep us grounded to see how they handle it as it is one of the few nice things in their lives that they have left.

Those of you who know Butcher know that he’s one of the sadist authors. I know that too. He thinks it’s funny to make us angry and frustrate us and he may have already said it in an interview or a podcast why he chose not to go into detail about the romance (feel free to link me if he has) but for the first time in my life, I think that’s not good enough. It’s not a good enough excuse for Butcher to giggle and intentionally not give us the content we want just because he thinks it’s funny. Yes, as the author, you choose what you write, but this is a slap in the face to people who have been reading these books for so many years and rooting for Harry and Murphy to get their shit together and be happy. We know how the series is gonna end—fucking bloody as hell—so these precious moments are that much more important. If he’s said he didn’t include romantic elements in this book because “haha trollface,” then he can fuck off. We’ve invested time in this series. We care about the relationship and there are so many creative, fun things that could have come out of seeing them together after all this build up.

And yeah, I know, I can write another 185k words of fix it fics and missing scenes. I probably will anyway. I’m frustrated because this isn’t just some shallow checkmark romance in an urban fantasy series. These two are incredible characters and it’s a negative reflection on the work itself when Butcher spent all the time in previous books building up the sexual tension and the pining and the deeply felt affection only to just cut to curtains fluttering when they’re about to get to the hanky panky or just have a quick “I love you” in the tub or the brief talk about family at the end. There are so many conversations they could have had. There are so many scenarios with the potential for romance even with their chastity belts firmly in place due to Murphy’s injuries. This isn’t about sex. This is about fulfilling a precedent that Butcher purposely set up and then just seemed to wave it off for some reason. I’m not saying the book is bad because we didn’t get the content; I’m saying it would’ve been a lot goddamn better if we’d gotten that content. 

Butcher’s gonna Butcher. No one can change it. I can’t make demands. My fifteen bucks doesn’t mean I get to call the shots and tell the man what to write.

But I just want to note that I thought it was a pretty shitty choice to exclude it.

Sigh. See you guys in Battle Ground, I guess.

And also AO3.

I’m gonna write a fuckton of missing scenes and no one can stop me.

#The Dresden Files #Dresden Files #Peace Talks #Jim Butcher #Harry Dresden #Karrin Murphy #HarriKarri #Harry/Murphy #rant #spoilers #spoiler alert

[these-are-the-first-steps]

“The Rise of Skywalker”- A Review from Memory

So it’s been a week since I’ve had to live with this film in front of my eyes, and a week and a half that I’ve had to grapple with the brunt of its sins. With a heavy sigh, I think I’m ready to go through the play-by-play of every plot hole in this film that I can manage from memory without the thing in front of me. And even then, the laundry list is hefty. Keep in mind that this is a FILM-BASED review only- I have tried to refrain from including new information we have learned since its release last Thursday in an effort to keep this as focused and topical as possible.

+The first scene of this film is weird. I’m all for watching Adam Driver wild out on some dudes, but it is never explained who these guys are and if it’s just Kylo ‘committing more slaughter’ (as the casual audience is wont to think) or if there’s something significant here. As the movie goes on and Kylo makes it clear that he’s under no one’s thumb, *and* that the object he was after was Sith, you start to get an idea that maybe those guys at the intro are No Good, but this is never explained or confirmed. To a casual audience with no interest in additional materials, it just looks like Bad Ole Kylo Doing More Bad Ole Stuff. *sigh*

+Exogol and Palpatine’s hideout looks like the Borg Cube from Star Trek: First Contact from 1996. This really smacked me in the face how similar it was.

+Snoke’s significance getting sniped by Palpatine in one fell swoop felt like two five year olds arguing over action figures in the sandbox. “No! He’s dead now! Now the good guys can go on their quest!” “Well if he’s dead now, it’s only because MY guy was the REAL bad guy! DOOSHDOOSHDOOSHDOOSH!!” Like….really? At least Palpatine’s never-spoken-of Snoke manufacturing lab was vaguely interesting. Too bad we never saw anything about that- what a story of intergalactic puppet-masters that would have made! We’re not here for clever storytelling, though, so moving on…

+I don’t think they should have included Leia in this film. It really added to the disjointed nature of this movie with flat audio, crippled dialogue, and CGI where Leia only really had one facial expression for 90% of her appearances. It really wasn’t worth it. I know Star Wars doesn’t do flashbacks (which, frankly, I appreciate a lot), but I think they could have utilized the IDEA of Leia better than her actual self. Leia was forced, it showed, and it wasn’t good. Honestly they did a WAY better job reviving Tarkin in RO.

+An incredibly unnecessary amount of new information for the third act of a series was introduced in this film, starting with Leia suddenly being a well-trained Jedi or something. At least enough to ‘train’ Rey, which…frankly wasn’t believable. Leia having the force was a given. That she distanced herself from active application of the Force as a residual reaction to the bombshell of Darth Vader being her father is what is, and always has, made sense. THAT is a nuanced perspective, but it gets thrown out in favor of not just shoe-horning Leia in to the movie, but also because they had no idea what else to do with her at all in this film. This is also why Leia shouldn’t have been in this movie the way she was.

+Oh, you knew Palpatine was behind all this the whole time, Leia? Really? Always there, huh? When in TFA it was always snoke? Obvious dialogue lift is obvious, but the use of it was just Bad and inconsiderate to the story.

+Poe’s backstory was published on December 18th, 2015 in a book called “Before The Awakening” that details the lives of Poe, Finn, and Rey leading up to TFA. Poe is the son of two famous Rebel fighters and he grows up with a nice quiet life on Yavin 4 learning about ships and loving to fly. He goes straight from his home world to joining the Republic navy. It’s a handful of months before Leia Organa picks up on him and brings him into the Resistance. Now…this is a backstory that is JJ Abrams approved, has been out since 2015, and yet Oscar Isaac said he ‘never knew’ Poe’s backstory, and JJ somehow thinks four years later that there is space in this incredibly concise timeline for him to become a drug runner. What?? This was possibly the BIGGEST wtf moment for me in this film. What in the actual world. WHAT.

+Sidelining old characters to pointlessly introduce new ones does not serve a story, it clogs it up, drags down its rhythm, and confuses the hell out of it. As seen by Zorri and Jannah. And out of those two, only Jannah carried any kind of actual literary weight, because for Finn, he’s found more people like himself. This sort of setup is a typical play to foreshadow where Finn eventually settles down and goes at the end of the war. But this is never expounded on or explained further. It’s just, BOOM, more former troopers and a girl who is suddenly irrationally attached to him at all times.

+Rose gets replaced by Jannah, a brand new character that we only know one single thing about, and who gets to latch on to Finn out of the blue while Rose is left at home or on a ship. It was weird. It was obvious. It was incredibly awkward to watch. There was no point to Jannah clinging to Finn like this. She was reduced from a strong character to a cringy clingy one, while Finn’s love interest was completely ignored.

+The ‘Journey to The Rise of Skywalker’ comics released a couple weeks before the film heavily implied we’d get a lot of great Rose and Rey team time. We received none of it. It felt like someone had jerked a present away from us and it was a gross omission.

+It is only by the very end of the film and after multiple watches that you THINK they are trying to hint that Kylo is spiraling, thus why Leia steps in in death, but it never ever gets shown. Never once are we let in on Kylo’s state of mind. In fact, never once are we let in on *any* of these characters’ states of mind. We never really see what they are feeling or thinking or going through. Kylo is nothing but action when in TFA and TLJ we see him falling apart. This is what bad direction looks like, and it takes a Real Talent to fuck up directing an actor like Adam Driver. Another big sigh…

+There are only two cool things about this movie- The bleeding of reality between Kylo and Rey, and Palpatine’s shadow senate. When Kylo and Rey fight and the red bits go flying on the floor, it screamed serious TLJ aesthetics to me that I had to blink a moment. I think this ‘Bleed-through’ of their realities is the only TLJ hold-over we were allowed. It was a genuinely fascinating touch, which is how you know it didn’t come from *this* film’s production office.

+When you stick three people in a closet together, you expect some sort of progress in two-thirds of the potential relationships in such a cramped space. We received no such thing. Forced Trio Time resulted in no character development and seemed more like an unnecessary comic relief vehicle than anything.

+In ‘Before The Awakening’ and ‘Rey’s Survival Guide’, both publications printed under JJ Abrams’s  blessing, we learn Rey named *herself* after a helmet she found in the desert. How is it Rey’s alleged parents know her fake name? Gross, gross plot-hole.

+Four years was spent emphasizing that you don’t have to come from anywhere ‘special’ to be Important to a big story. Then they threw it out. Post-TROS interview with JJ reveals it was because they ‘couldn’t think of how else to get rey engaged in fighting palpatine’. Because he wasn’t a nasty enough dude on his own? Seriously? This is pure negligence.

+Four years was also spent emphasizing that you also don’t even NEED the force to be important to the big story and make a huge difference to the future. But let’s throw that out, too, and give Finn the force. Clearly regular people are absolutely worthless in the Star Wars Universe, according to JJ Abrams.

+Finn is only used to babysit Rey the entire time they share screen time together. The number of times he shouts her name could be turned into a drinking game. It’s one thing to care about somebody, and another thing entirely to act like you’re their high school chaperone. The whole thing was weird and awkward.

+Zorri Bliss sounds like a stripper name and she served no purpose other than to shoehorn Felicity into a star wars movie. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Babu Frik is the only true-to-star-wars critter in this whole film.

+Leia literally goes and lays down on her own funeral spread? What was that about. And that’s what that was because why would her bed be out in the open like that? That was really, really weird. And the RoTJ medal throwback was just a tacky tether to the past.

+Everyone seems so irrationally tethered to the past in this film. Kylo Ren’s spent two movies desperate to ‘leave the past behind’ and I don’t blame him at this point because it’s getting exhausting.

+As stated previously, it’s only vaguely suspected but Kylo seemed to SUPPOSED to be spiraling. Adam Driver plays Kylo like a man finally free of the voices in his head, but the plot and dialogue point to an entirely different direction saying that REALLY the monsters have allegedly doubled-down and he’s even more unhinged than before. Here is a MAJOR indication of story re-working after the film has already been shot. Adam Driver, and Daisy for that matter, is a PRECISE actor. It seems almost impossible to tell a story with him that you did not originally MEAN to tell. And it shows. JJ tried to U-Turn the story but it absolutely failed- Adam’s Kylo Ren is a calm, free man, focused, who finally knows what his purpose in life is, and that is uniting with his Dyad in the force. When really JJ tried very hard to suggest that he was spiraling so hard and so ‘lost’ in the Dark Side that it took his mother’s last breath to swing him back around. No one is going to see that narrative. The only reason why I see this shoddy attempt is because I’ve been absolutely immersed in this shit since December 2015. But the main audience? This was absolutely not conveyed.

+Seeing Dark Side Rey was nothing but a ‘cool’ moment and actually served zero function to the plot. Rey was always shown as being Grey in the force and someone who struggled to maintain balance. If that whole scene was removed, it wouldn’t change anything.

+Kylo was never in a position to kill Rey on the Death Star, and Rey taking her cheap shot to stab him while he heard his mother’s voice is an attempt to convey how much seeing her Sith self affected her than Kylo’s already very faded aggression in this film but it failed. It was weird and out of character, and even coming to that conclusion took may rewatches to come to because there is NEVER a ramp-up to Rey’s darkside taking over long enough to stab Kylo- there’s no fire, no red eyes, no teeth, none of it, to indicate she was ‘overcome’ so it just looked like bad mischaracterization. Yikes.

+Kylo and Han’s moment on the Death Star is the most moving scene of the entire film. The dialogue starts out rather familiar, and it almost seems like a cop-out, until you realize….how many times has Ben had this conversation with himself?? He doesn’t seem shocked at all that his father is there. Not at all. In fact, that Last Conversation on the bridge of Starkiller comes off as a well-rehearsed dance that Ben puts himself through regularly. And every time he hopes it’ll be affirmation enough that it’s all been worth it. But here, at the last reenactment of the worst day of his life, the script changes. He surrenders. He says dad. And he rejects Kylo Ren forever. Harrison Ford and Adam Driver are two beautifully matched, talented actors and I’d watch a movie with the two of them in it any day. God bless them.

+Hux has been wasted for the past two films. He was Terrifying in TFA and Dom gave him such significant presence that I was genuinely terrified for what he might try in the future. But instead he was lost as comic relief. When it is comically delivered that HE is the spy, every single person in my movie theatre shouted “WHAT??” in a way that was not a Good what, but in a “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me” kind of what, and I will never ever forget that. I hate seeing Star Wars diminished like this.

+Luke rehashing Obi-wan’s speech to him about how Rey MUST confront the Big Bad was an obvious rehash, and way too convenient to what Palpatine wanted. This whole appearance of Luke is very suspect, but that would be crediting them again with clever storytelling, which again this is not.

+Luke claims that Leia saw ‘the death of her son’ at the end of her Jedi Path, which one can assume why she threw it away. But then Luke says something bizarre about ‘hoping someone else would pick up her path someday’. Is that...is that not the same path leading to Ben’s death that she was avoiding in the first place? And if someone else picks it up, is that not no longer Leia’s path but that other person’s? Therefore, is not the outcome automatically going to be different and thus *avoid* Ben’s death? This was an attempt at supposedly clever foreshadowing or Mystical Talk or some shit, but all it was was dialogue that backfired in meaning spectacularly due to looping-in on itself too many times. Luke negates himself at the same time he tries to prove his point...which he then negates in the same breath. What a mess.

+All of Ben Solo’s lines were cut the last act of the film to stuff more pointless exposition at the END of film and to give more screen time to Ian McDiarmid. Ian’s great, but he’s not the main character of this series, and cutting Ben’s lines for this was Gross.  

+Space Horses? Really?? I didn’t like them in TLJ but at least there they had context- they had zero context here. The size of the horses and the ship they came off of was absurdly mismatched. Is that ship the TARDIS? That whole bit was so unnecessary and ridiculous, especially with zero setup. Which is amazing because this film is 90% set-up.

+All those ships at the end? That’s all it took? After books and comics going on about how everyone’s too terrified to help Leia because of FO scorched earth policy? Jesus it was weak, and too obvious a Deus ex Machina with THAT many ships.

+Palpatine’s Shadow Senate is cool. The idea that this guy trapped on an ugly planet stuck on Sith life-support couldn’t go two seconds without attention and praise to the point where he had to recreate the exact same senate he destroyed years ago is a concept I like. Is the Shadow Senate just in the *shape* of the old senate but filled with animated Sith proxies? Or is it actually comprised of the enslaved souls of former Senators now forced to attend the Emperor for eternity? Either way, destroying the Shadow Senate at least either set those souls free or sent them back to wherever they came from. That was actually interesting, and it’s a shame we didn’t get to learn more about such a genuinely creepy thing.

+Palpatine’s ‘we’re family’ routine drops the moment he realizes Ben and Rey are a dyad. This is suspicious, but considering the whole movie so far, it seems incorrect to giver JJ and Torrio credit for a possible mis-direct.

+Rey and Ben’s realities bleeding into each other is experienced again in swapping the light saber. This is cool. This is probably the coolest moment in the film. And then the coolness literally gets thrown into a pit when, instead of the both of them, as a Dyad, defeating Palpatine, Rey is left to carry the burden alone.

+Oh hey look a cop-out to save Rey from being bad- just have her reflect his own power back at him so it’s like he’s killing himself, wow, so original! The second Palpy revealed his gameplan about wanting to die, this became the obvious choice to both kill him and avoid giving him what he wanted. Eh….

+The Star Wars 9-movie series is the story of one man desperately begging anyone within hearing range to kill him, apparently. This is so, so old by the 9th friggin movie. 

+Ben Solo spends his entire life begging for guidance from his ancestors only to be ignored and Rey get all their attention instead. Ben Solo spends his entire life since the womb being a burden to his parents by merely existing and being manipulated by gross sith ghosts. But nah, let’s be parents to Rey and help out Rey. This is not to say she doesn’t deserve any of this, but to say there are priorities here- Rey has had a lonely life, but at least she had her sanity and was self-sufficient. Ben had neither his sanity or any control over his own life whatsoever. And to place Rey above Ben is a literal mess. The two of them were meant by the Force to rise TOGETHER, and it didn’t happen.

+Rey doesn’t disappear when she ‘dies’ after using the last of her life force to both feed Palpatine, fight him, AND defeat him. And yet while Rey has two strikes in her before kicking it, Ben, someone who is RADICALLY more trained in the force, its lore, and mechanics, only has one? This doesn’t make any sense.

+Rey has no reaction to the literal other half of her soul vanishing in front of her. Because this is a mangled JJ Abrams Finale(tm) and why should anyone, let alone his own characters, have any space to Feel? I mean, that’s not what movies are even about, right? Feeling and Telling A Story? It’s not that, right? Right?? JJ Abrams covers up Rey’s reaching-hands scar on her arm for the entire film, doesn’t address it, and apparently hates the shit out of it. I don’t know how the King of Cheese could possibly hate something like that. It was a weird and obvious omission, and frankly disappointing because the scar had come to mean something at the end of TLJ and it, like a lot in this film, got thrown in the trash.

+More forced trio time in the form of a group hug where nothing gets actually expressed because we ran out of space for dialogue 30 pages back.

+Anakin Skywalker viewed Tatooine, his place of enslavement, as the worst place in the galaxy. Luke Skywalker spent his entire youth trying to escape. Leia hated it on principle because it was where Darth Vader came from and where she herself had been enslaved in a gross gold bikini for a giant slug. Rey spent 14 years of her life dreaming of leaving the sand planet she was trapped on. But I guess that’s a fitting place to bury some memories, yeah? The place where nothing good ever, ever happened. That’s a nice spot, right?

+Rey Skywalker isn’t explained, is never led up to, and feels like a gross gimmie after four years of trying to create a Better Message that names don’t matter. HEAVY SIGH.

+Rey watches the two suns set as she is left with little more than she started- alone, on a sand planet, but this time taunted by the Twin Suns of Tatooine that the other half of her soul is literally missing and that she is now left with a gaping wound in her Force signature and her own spirit worse than if she’d just lost a Force Bonded mate.

+Ben Solo is left missing, vanished on a world that is supposedly a thin spot in the force, with no ghost, no presence, and no one to mourn him- not even by the other half of his very soul. THREE GENERATIONS of Skywalkers over NINE FILMS died to try and rescue their future embodied in the form of Ben Solo and it looks like it was for nothing. Instead, the incessant bad guy no one can move on from looks like he ultimately wins the day through an alleged granddaughter, and even that claim is on shaky ground considering the mistakes in the vision and how quickly the family conversation vanished upon the revelation that Ben and Rey are a dyad. Ben is lost, so every family member died for nothing, apparently. But hey, this is a Fun and Hopeful narrative, right?

+While the Final Order fleet is destroyed at the end, the First Order is.....still out there? It’s still out there. Nothing in that department has changed whatsoever. Leaders die. They get replaced. The cycle goes on. We spent three movies batting at a fly we didn’t even kill. Amazing.

Overall this movie is BRUTAL. Every other scene is a plot hole served to us on a silver platter, with the biggest insult being that they are plot points JJ created HIMSELF 4-6 years ago. This man literally shot himself in the face and then said it was fine as he bled out all over the film reels and it shows. If you were anyone who came along for the Additional Materials ride of the past four years, you were greeted by this film with a hard, swift, and REPEATED, backhand to the face. There was no reward here at the end of this road for fans, old and new, who actually paid attention and took an interest in the deeper lore surrounding this sequel trilogy. There was just a big fat Disney-branded middle finger as all your hard work and cash was ripped from you with a trademark villain laugh.

And that is what we’re left with.

This review does not go into detail over what we’ve discovered since the release of the film, either. That it was never finished in the editing room. That a current comic series, Rise of Kylo Ren, and what’s in the new TROS visual dictionary maddeningly contradict themselves. That allegedly SIX different endings were shot for this movie, and in the end the one they chose looks like it was *literally* reverse-engineered to confusingly kill, as JJ once called him, ‘The Other Half of Our Protagonist’. There is no time to go into detail about how Oscar Isaac just told us that noone in the cast knew that Rey Palpatine was going to be endgame except for maybe Adam when they made him do ADR declaring it with a masked face on screen (convenient). There is no room to show you the collective cast reaction they all gave to the end of the movie- none of them good, and John Boyega looking like he was holding back from punching something (he loved Kylo/Ben as much as the audience did and more). And there is no room to include what we will continue to find out as the days roll on about the tangled mess of a film that was edited and reedited, and how word on the street is a cocky director demanded Carte Blanche from Kathleen Kennedy, and I guess the story group too given the state of things, and then promptly self-destructed in the grossest, messiest end to a 40+ year series in cinema history.

There’s just no space.

But there IS a lesson.

And the lesson is this: No matter what, never stop investing in Story. Never stop caring about the details and about plot and about moving a story FORWARD. Never be afraid to move FORWARD. Look at TROS, the mess it is and the potential it had it in itself to be, and then look at the beauty that is TFA and the love that went into TLJ, and study that shit until it burns into your brain- Do not repeat those mistakes. Go out into the world and write better, shoot better, direct better, and BE BETTER. Because these producers and directors? They’re old and they’re on their way out. Just like the stable boy at the end of TLJ who secretly has the Force, know and realize that those of you out there reading this are the next generation of storytellers. YOU. And YOU, and I, and others out there like us who loved this series with our whole heart and who are watching it bleed out now on a floor that doesn’t give two shits about it, have the ability to make sure this NEVER happens again. But in order to do that….we have to pick up that pen. Pick up that pencil. Pick up that camera. Jot down that story idea and share it with likeminded friends. Go out there and CREATE, and create BETTER. Because it’s up to us now- the future of cinema is up to us. And my god, we have so much potential….

#reylo #@starwars #star wars #TROS #The Rise of Skywalker

[aion-rsa]

Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer Review – Richard Ramirez Docuseries Speaks Plainly

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Netflix dives into one of the most horrifying cases of multiple murders with its eyes wide open in Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer. The documentary is told from the perspective of the investigators at the heart of the case, particularly a veteran homicide detective and his young, enthusiastic partner. They had nothing going into the case, and when they did dig out the clues, they often lost what they had because of its newsworthiness. The series works because it treats the audience the same way as the cops were treated: infuriatingly.

Every clue, setback, and recalculation in Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer is satisfyingly frustrating. We all know the story by now, so director Tiller Russell can leisurely fill in the plot. We don’t even get the name of the serial killer until the end of the third episode. It’s not in the title, and if the detectives don’t know it, the series won’t disclose it. This is an internal affair, and early disclosures to the media contaminate clues like dancing on a crime scene in a pair of size 12 Avia sneakers.

The four-part series opens in a hot and happy Los Angeles, filled with glossy tinsel and hair metal. The city hosted the Olympics in 1984, and the Lakers were international superstars. Archival weather reports continually update a sweltering heat wave, and the citizens cool off leisurely and diversely. But not after dark, where the bulk of the docu-series is set. That is LA Noir. The same kind of darkness that crept into the headlines when the Black Dahlia murder struck, but more similar to the Manson Family killings. 

One bad boy, who will later be described as having incredible sex appeal, rips the nightlife apart. At the time, though, all anyone knows about him is he has bad teeth, smells like a goat, and loves AC/DC. Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer captures the mid-eighties period well, with archival TV news and clips of then-current shows. When the events turn creepy, Max Headroom is playing on a black and white TV in the distance, almost out of focus.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Detective Gil Carrillo and renowned homicide cop Frank Salerno are great storytellers whose obvious gravitas centers the documentary. There is one other standout from law enforcement. San Francisco Police Department homicide Inspector Frank Falzon actually breaks down what it’s like to be goaded into punching a possible witness. He completely explains the forces which lead him to do it. The frustration, the horrid images of the case which flashed into his mind. The disgust he felt at the actual details. Carrillo has a similar incident, convinced of a suspect who fits too perfectly only to be told “He’s a freak, but not your freak.” But his defining moment probably comes when he can’t bear to even listen to a discussion of putting a child who had been sexually assaulted on the stand to testify.

Even though we know how it ends, the limited docu-series captures the race against the clock tension of the summer of 1985. Initially tagged “The Walk-In Killer” and “The Valley Intruder” by the press, the satanic beast prowling Los Angeles came to be known as “The Night Stalker.” His crimes seemed disconnected because the victims were so varied. Serial killers usually have a specific type of victim. The Night Stalker’s crimes appeared to be random. “There was no pattern,” a detective bemoans in an interview.

The detectives get blowback from inside and out. We hear about an important theory being laughed out of a meeting. Investigators have to deal with cops in different districts not sharing information, as multiple jurisdictions spark “a pissing match between Type A dudes.” The investigators don’t only have to deal with the media blowing the case. They get the information from a politician who releases details which tip off the suspect.  Many of these details have never been told. 

We also get to hear Laurel Erickson and Paul Skolnick, the journalists who covered the story from the beginning, explain why they were so eager for details, and where they drew the line. Like the Hillside Strangler, who had recently been caught by Salerno’s homicide team, the Night Stalker was a once-in-a-lifetime case. Not only to the press, police and politicians, but to the community, which ultimately plays the most emotionally satisfying part in the documentary. When the suspect is caught in East Los Angeles, he tells the arresting officers “Thank God you came.”

The mystery unfolds through first-person interviews with victims who lived through the attacks, some of whom were allowed to survive. One woman remembers being dropped off at a gas station to call someone to take her home after the killer had sexually assaulted her in a dingy room. She was a child when that happened, one of the youngest of the Night Stalker’s victims. They ranged in age from six to 82; were men, women and children; some affluent, others poor; and of a mix of races. Anyone could be the next victim. The persistent updates on the heatwave accentuate this, because in a town under siege no one can sleep with their windows open. After Charles Manson had been caught, the people in Los Angeles didn’t feel the need to lock their doors, the documentary asserts. Now residents barred their windows.

Read more

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The assailant also varied his weaponry, using knives, hammers, tire irons, and a .22 caliber pistol. The savage specter takes on an almost occult status when the investigators find pentagrams drawn and carved on walls, and occasionally on victims. The killer gouged the eyes out of one woman. He used thumb cuffs, which comes as a visual surprise to the detective recounting it. He relives that one moment of discovery with both a personal revulsion and a cop’s curiosity. He still hasn’t gotten his head around it, and it’s only one detail. Like an Avia sneaker, size 11 and a half, the only one shipped to Los Angeles since the company was founded.

There have been several features on the notorious killer at the center of Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer. Chris Fisher’s film Nightstalker (2002), Ulli Lommel’s Nighstalker from 2009, and Megan Griffiths’ The Night Stalker (2016). His story was dramatized in the 1989 TV movie Manhunt: Search for the Night Stalker. Zach Villa played Ramirez on American Horror Story: 1984. Director Russell, whose father worked in the Dallas DA’s office, grew up in courthouses, jails and police precincts.He keeps his focus steadily on the investigators and the victims.

Russell presents the evidence plainly. Emotionally, he wants to present the feel that anyone in the horrific footage could have been a viewer or someone they know. He never treats the victims like statistics. We get personal stories, like one told by a granddaughter remembering how she preferred a grandma who did cartwheels over any necklace heirloom which could be bequeathed. The documentary occasionally lets the camera wander around recreated footage too long, and takes leisurely pauses of action with only music over grim background sets to amplify the atmosphere. We also get the occasional emotion-cam closeup, with a frozen face willing a testimony into a camera wordlessly.

The first glimmer of a name the documentary provides for the suspect is Richard Mena, who is being treated for an impacted tooth. Richard Ramirez actually doesn’t get much screen time. We get a very curt statement on why he turned out the way he did. “All the things that could poison a child were part of his life,” a detective explains. The only detail is a recollection of how Ramirez was tied to a cross in a cemetery overnight as a reprimand from his religious father. Ramirez explains himself throughout, although without credit until we learn the quotes and affirmations come from a recorded interview the Night Stalker gave from prison. But we never learn how Satan was “a stabilizing force in his life,” which prompted “a motivational charge.”

The documentary explores the killer-groupie phenomenon, but it is from the amazed and uncomprehending reactions of the investigating officers, and the families of the victims. They don’t get it. The journalists who covered it have never seen anything like it. It proves everything about the case is unprecedented.  We see Ramirez, upon sentencing, tell the families, as well as the judge, jurors and investigating officers: “You don’t understand me. You are not expected to. You are not capable of it. I am beyond your experience.” The doc cuts his last lines, “I will be avenged. Lucifer dwells in us all.” What replaces it is a snippet of Ramirez requesting a promise that his recorded interviews be erased after his death.

Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer is a satisfyingly exhaustive account of the investigation into the Richard Ramirez murder-and-assault-spree. But know it is limited to the crimes and the cities they were committed in. Los Angeles is a bigger character in the documentary than Ramirez. The docu-series isn’t about him. It’s about what he did, and the people he did it to. Survivors describe his very presence in the court as “evil,” and the documentary resolutely chalks the case up as a triumph for good. By following the timelines so deliberately, Russell lays out the arc of a perfect detective story. That being said, I could have watched two more installments on the villain and collateral damage.

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Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer streams on Netflix on Jan. 13.

The post Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer Review – Richard Ramirez Docuseries Speaks Plainly appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

[geraltcirilla]

Your latest daisy/sousa gifset ? Gorgeous, is the quote you used from a showrunner chloe or is it like from someone in the fandom also ie agent carter, everyone was white like the two main female characters were right and so was everyone else, and I don't think it had anything to do with the time period there are shows set way before that are 1000% more inclusive like anne with an e or black sails also no lgbtq characters although that's an issue aos had as well

Thank you!! :’) The quote I used is from Maurissa Tancharoen from this interview with Hypable. I’ll go ahead and give you the entire Daisy portion of that interview because it’s filled with gold.

On the romantic side of things, Chloe Bennet (and several of her co-stars) couldn’t be happier with Daisy’s choice of Daniel Sousa as her partner.

“He’s so stable, and so supportive, and so willing, and so understanding of who she is,” Bennet says. “[Daisy needs] that kind of stability in her life, and that support. And I think it doesn’t hurt that he’s a strapping young man!”

“She has become such a kind of a power house, physically,” Bennet continues. “I love that he kind of brings her down to Earth a little bit.”

For Enver Gjokaj, Sousa’s relationship to Daisy’s power was a crucial factor in their developing bond.

“They don’t seem to have a lot of [things] in common,” he notes, “But the fact that he’s attracted to strong women, and that he’s worked with strong women in his past, and that’s who he is — I think that becomes the foundation for a relationship. The fact [that Daisy’s power is] not threatening to him at all, that that’s actually a positive, that… made total sense to me.”

“And [Gjokaj] played it with such a quiet confidence, and just you’re so grounded,” Bennet continues. “Sousa is so grounded in himself, and he’s not threatened by her as an entity and by Quake, and it actually finds it slightly amusing. which I think is really sweet, actually.”

Clark Gregg also expressed a certain relief at Daisy’s choice, which he feels reflects maturity on the part of friend and castmate Bennet.

“One of the things that happens, especially when you do play a character for 200 years as I have… is that the life and art blend together,” he says, noting that it was challenging to repeatedly “watch Chloe/Daisy go through these various things and get her heart broken, and have people die.”

So “to have Enver show up and create — recreate — the new version [of Sousa], dealing with different kinds of stuff, was just cool!” Gregg says. The character’s new incarnation on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. was “tough. Not calling attention to himself. It felt so real, and I love so much what he did, and the way that [he and Chloe] just kind of quietly backed into this thing that everybody has been rooting for. [It’s] such a testament to their work in the chaotic final season, and how lucky we were to get Enver. It’s just facts!”

For their part, showrunners Jeff Bell, Maurissa Tancharoen, and Jed Whedon felt it was critical that their cast of female characters be seen as much more than partners in relationships, regardless of how matters concluded.

“They’ve had relationships [but] we never defined them by that,” says Bell. “But Daisy hasn’t had great luck in the past, bad things that happened or it hasn’t worked out. And so when Enver showed up, it was more than we could have imagined. We’d hoped that they would have chemistry, and the fact that it worked so well was great.”

Bell also observes that even more significant than the romantic developments was Daisy’s re-formation of a new kind of family for herself.

It was important, he says to let Daisy’s sister “Kora come over at the end and [give] Daisy family to continue. So it wasn’t just ‘Now I have a boyfriend!’ It was like she had a new unit. I think that was something that happened organically through the force of the storytelling that was a nice thing that we hadn’t foreseen.”

“The whole drive of Daisy’s character arc was, she was in search for her identity. She was in search for her family and where she came from,” agrees Tancharon. “And what she stumbled upon was new one, and so at the end, it’s very clear that she is actually starting her own little family in space, with the man she loves and her actual sister.”

I really love this interview and I’ve loved EVERY interview the cast has done post-series. I don’t think I’ve ever shipped a couple quite so beloved by every single cast member, even people totally uninvolved like Clarke Gregg and Elizabeth Henstridge. This interview was especially sweet because Maurissa confirmed that Sousa and Daisy are in love, which we all though but it’s nice to get the showrunners backing that.

//

Re: Agent Carter, even when it comes to the female characters Peggy Carter was the only one listed as main cast. Peggy, Jarvis, Jack, Sousa, and Dooley are main cast, Angie, Dottie, and Ana are credited as reoccurring. And Angie was only in s1 (she made a brief cameo in s2 in a dream sequence), and Ana was only in s2. Only Dottie was in both seasons 1 and 2 and she was a villain. So I don’t think I can even give Agent Carter credit for having white women in the show. It’s really bad if you can’t even have white women in your main cast.

Agent Carter had an issue with lack of women, lack of BIPOC cast, and lack of LGBT characters (like you said AOS also has that last issue). The writers of the show actually claimed at the time (because even back then people were calling them out for this) that they were just being “truthful to the time period”, which we all know is a crock of shit. As you said BIPOC and LGBT didn’t suddenly spring into existence in the 2000s and lots of other period piece shows include them as characters. 

Also as I said in my previous post, the writers have this unsettling need to woobify and coddle bigots because “they’re a product of their time” and the writers are constantly justifying their behavior and actions and trying to make them seem sympathetic. 

But not only that, the feminism felt incredibly shallow and performative.

For example, one of the famous “feminist” lines of the show was “I know my worth. Anyone else’s opinion doesn’t really matter.” Peggy said this after Jack Thompson took all the credit for her work and effort in s1. I remember at the time people were livid because that was a terrible message to be sending women and girls. It’s okay if a man steals your work so long as you believe in yourself...? No. Hell no. That’s not how society progresses forward. Peggy should NOT have accepted that outcome and should have FOUGHT Jack to demand he give her her proper credit. But she didn’t. She rolled over and took it, and we as an audience were supposed to applaud her for it.

Another “feminist moment” is when Sousa catches Peggy helping Howard Stark and the SSR think that she’s a terrorist. So after they arrest her they all take turns interviewing her and she calls them out, saying: “I conducted my own investigation because no one listens to me. I got away with it because no one looks at me, because unless I have your reports, your coffee, or your lunch, I’m invisible.” Except this isn’t exactly true. She wasn’t invisible to Sousa and she didn’t get away with it because he literally caught her. Since episode one Sousa was investigating a strange blonde-haired woman with a scar on her right shoulder who he believed was helping Howard Stark. That woman was Peggy. And he actually figured that out in episode 1x05 and tried to arrest in her 1x06. Given that this is only an 8 episode season Sousa knew about Peggy for almost half the season, but was hunting her for technically the whole season. How is that you being invisible? How is that you getting away with it? How?? 

Peggy continues and says: “You think you know me, but I've never been more than what each of you has created. [At Dooley] To you, I'm the stray kitten, left on your doorstep to be protected. [At Jack] The secretary turned damsel in distress. [At Sousa] The girl on the pedestal, transformed into some daft whore." This statement was also weird as fuck to me because Sousa never thought she was a whore, never called her a whore, and never accused her of being a whore, etc. When the SSR found out Peggy was helping Howard Stark they were trying to figure out why she would do it. A working theory was she was in love with him (a fair theory given Howard’s a bit of a womanizer and actually has hit on Peggy in the past). So Sousa (along with literally everyone else interviewing her) accused her of having an affair with Howard. But somehow only Sousa received that scalding drag, when technically it was true of everyone. Also how was he viewing her on a pedestal when he called her out all the time (during their “quirky banter”) and once again, investigated her for terrorism. Some pedestal huh. (This quote actually bugs me a lot because some people to this day will reference it as a reason to hate Sousa - “He was obsessed with her and then when he thought she was with Howard he called her a whore!” That never happened, that’s Peggy’s false version of events. I have eyes and a working brain and I watched the season myself and it’s simply untrue.)

Peggy will just say stuff that sound Cool and Empowering but if you break it down and analyze it, make no sense and mean absolutely nothing. It’s just cringey.

And let’s not even get in to the ableist implications of Peggy fantasizing about Sousa suddenly having two legs and being able to walk perfectly. That was her romantic vision of him. A version that could not only walk, but dance. Who throws aside his cane like it was just an accessory. Okay.

I really did not like Agent Carter at all (problematic stuff aside the actual plot sucked) but I watched the whole thing because I was a fan of Peggy Carter and Jarvis and I really wanted to make it work. When it was cancelled I didn’t cry about it, I was actually relieved I wouldn’t have to watch a third season. That show was just such a cringey, embarrassing mess.

Sorry for the long rant about it. It’s been a long time since I talked about this show and it still bothers me to this day because people reflect on the show so fondly and are still making petitions to bring it back as if it’s wasn’t a heaping mess.

Thank God Sousa was saved from that show. lol

Disclaimer to anyone reading this: Me hating the Agenter Carter show is not me hating Peggy Carter. Obviously I love my mans Sousa, and I also love Jarvis and Angie. I loved a lot of the characters and my issues with the show has to do with the showrunners and the writing.

#ask #anon #long post #Anonymous #mine #text

[recentanimenews]

FEATURE SERIES: My Favorite One Piece Arc with Steve Yurko

  I love One Piece and I love talking to people who love One Piece. And with the series going on 23 years now, there is a whole lot to talk about. As the series is about to publish its 1000th chapter, a true feat in and of itself, we thought we should reflect upon the high-seas adventure and sit down with some notable names in the One Piece fan community and chat about the arcs they found to be especially important, or just ones they really, really liked.

  Welcome to the next article in the series "My Favorite One Piece Arc!"

  My next guest in this series is Steve Yurko, co-host of The One Piece Podcast, a podcast with a subject you can probably guess. He's also a former storyboard artist for Rick & Morty and is currently working for Netflix Animation. As a ride-or-die Sanji fan, Steve chose the Baratie Arc, where Luffy and the gang run into an East Blue restaurant with a cool chef that loves to cook and kick.

  A note on spoilers: If you haven't seen the Baratie arc yet, this interview does contain major plot points. Watch the Arlong Park arc starting RIGHT HERE if you'd like to catch up or rewatch!

    Dan Dockery: So a friend tells you, "I'm done with the Syrup Village arc and I'm not sure if I want to watch this next one. I think I might be tapped out on this whole One Piece thing. In one sentence, how do you get them to stay and watch the Baratie arc?

  Steve Yurko: The Baratie arc laid down the foundation and created the formula of the One Piece arc as we know it.

  That's pretty good!

  Yeah, I’d say that, when I first started it, One Piece was my third favorite. I was more of a fan of series like Shaman King and Naruto, but after Baratie, things shifted. It was a turning point for me. I would hope that it would do the same for anyone who’s, say, previously apathetic towards the series.

    How old were you when you first read it? Or watched it?

  It feels weird to say this, but my introduction to One Piece was Chapter 1. Like Dragon Ball Z, the first episode I can remember watching was, like, Yamcha training on King Kai’s planet, and I’d get Goku and Yamcha confused and stuff, because I had just dived in. So for me to start a story like One Piece from the beginning is kind of rare. I was 15, I think.

  So, we're jumping into Baratie, and we first see the guy with the brass knuckles, Fullbody. He's trying to act cool on a date and he's being mean to everyone else. And then we have Sanji being typical Cool Sanji and Fullbody acts up and Sanji just tears through him. How did you react? Did you know immediately that you'd like this waiter?

  Well, I don't want to alarm you here, but my first thought was “Sanji’s cool!” I’d seen images of him before, and I saw his black suit and blond hair and I figured, “Oh, another crew member, probably. Looks distinct enough.” So I often have to look back and wonder “Did I like him because of his edgy coolness?” but I think now it’s because there were more layers to him. Like, he definitely stands out from the other Straw Hats, but he also has this distinct fighting style with cool reasoning. He’s a cook and he doesn’t want to bust up his hands trying to punch people in the face, so he uses his feet. So, he does like these cool capoeira kicks, which only gets better as they go along because I feel like so many anime characters, the stronger they get, the more they start to fight the same with fast volleys of punches and laser blasts. So Sanji’s kicks are a great way to differentiate himself from the main cast and other anime heroes. 

  So, then we have Luffy, he shows up by damaging the Baratie. Enter: Zeff. Full disclosure: In my infinite naivete when I first watched One Piece, I thought Zeff was going to be the new crew member. And then I thought Gin was going to join the Straw Hat crew. And then when Sanji finally joined, I was like, "This guy? Really? Dark horse candidate over here."

  You didn’t know yet?

    I guess I hadn't watched the first ED yet — when the crew slowly shows up and stands beside one another.

  You saw Usopp’s silhouette appear and thought, “Eh, I’ve seen enough.”

  "That must be all of them."

  It happens.

  So, you meet Zeff, and you learn about Sanji and Zeff's relationship, and we get a big One Piece flashback. What do you think of that? Because it would become a staple of the series to kinda pause, see what happened to an important guy, and then come back.

  Such an incredible story and so gruesome and terrifying. Sanji’s original flashback is so underrated because it could happen to anyone! Like, you’d have to go out of your way to get stranded on an island, but going days and weeks without food or any real comfort? I think people underestimate how traumatizing that would be. And then Zeff losing his leg because he hacked it off for food, it’s brutal. Just thinkin’ about that, I feel it in my shins. Because that almost happened to me with a minor injury. I let a minor injury get infected, and I could’ve been close to losing a leg.

    Wait, what? Gahd.

  I was doing box jumps at a gym, and my shin hit the corner of this wooden crate.

  Yeah, those things have no give in them.

  Absolutely. And at the time, I thought it was just this dark spot on my shin. And I figured it was, ya know a bruise. So I let it be. And then I picked at the scab and I realized “Wow, that’s a little deeper than I thought. I guess I’ll go to the doctor if it gets worse.” And I kept going to the gym, wearing pants over like this open wound. And my left leg is so swollen. So I went to two different doctors, as the first one did tests and then sent me to another one. And when this doctor saw me, the look on her face said “Oh, this is bad.” So I laughed out loud about how dumb I was and the doctor turned to me and said “This isn’t funny. This IS SERIOUS.” It had gotten infected with bacteria and it was spreading, and she just took a sharpie and drew around the infected area, and gave me antibiotics and was like “You have to keep this elevated, and if the redness goes outside of this line, go to the hospital.” But luckily, I recovered, even though the doctors were like “Honestly, we thought you’d go to the hospital.” So when Zeff severs his foot with a rock, how does anyone not feel that? 

  Do you think that's one of the reasons Luffy is fascinated by Sanji at first? His mentor, Shanks, lost his arm and was cool about it. Zeff lost his leg and was cool about it. Basically twins.

  That’d be an interesting conversation that we never got to see. Just two dudes talking about how weird it is that both their father figures did that, with only Luffy thinking it’s cool. 

    Don Krieg's ship gets blown in half by an incomprehensibly cool character, Mihawk, the first Warlord to appear in the show. You see Mihawk arrive — what is your reaction to him? Because it's not a case of "The villain of the villain is my friend," but rather "Oh, he did that to the villain? I hope he does not do that to us, as that would suck."

  It’s almost like the good guys meeting the bad guys, and then a tornado comes in. But here’s the thing: I missed the issue of Jump where Zoro fought Mihawk. So I assumed that Zoro had just won. The greatest swordsman in the world shows up and Zoro beats him. Boom. The climax of his character arc has been achieved. Nothing left for Zoro. 

  He just did it.

  I didn’t find out until so much later that Zoro lost. I wasn’t quite aware of what made for a captivating story yet. At that time, an obstacle appears, an obstacle gets taken out, ya move on. I almost want to apologize to Mihawk. 

  I love how One Piece does this though. They do it with Smoker and Aokiji and the like. It reminds me of The Witcher III when you go off the path a little bit, and you're at a Level 4 and then a Level 39 Gryphon swoops down and decapitates you. It keeps the "power levels" interesting.

  Luffy starts up Breath of the Wild and goes right for Calamity Ganon. But Mihawk is like the analogy for the Grand Line. He represents it, without revealing too much. Mihawk is like a Pizza Hut demo disc of danger.

  I really like that. And no one knows, to this day, exactly how powerful he is. Over 20 years later, and we're still wondering how he matches up against Shanks or Blackbeard or whatever. One Piece has so many characters where Oda hasn't shown his full hand in regards to them, yet we're totally emotionally invested in them. That's good storytelling.

  He’s doing something right. And I love that Mihawk has a little character arc here, too, where he shows up nonchalantly slicing up Krieg’s ships, probably doesn’t expect much, and then he’s taken aback by Zoro’s gusto, because he hasn’t seen anyone like that in a while. And he slices Zoro down. But he respects him, when in the beginning, he clearly didn’t respect anyone around. Mihawk wants to see him be better and try to take him down one day. For him to willingly build someone up like that is rare. Like Frieza wouldn’t do that.

    So, Don Krieg — what were your opinions of him at the time? Because he's a really bad guy surrounded by more morally grey guys like Mihawk and Gin.

  What I like about the East Blue saga is that every main villain is an antithesis of Luffy and what makes Luffy a truly great captain. Buggy is all about treasure. Kuro is about ambition and the fortitude to be a pirate. Krieg is about might and strength, and Krieg thinks he has both of those because of his weapons and armor. But Luffy has willpower and ambition and doesn’t let the world change his views. Luffy is incorruptible whereas Krieg is willing to poison his own crew when stuff starts going south. Krieg isn’t fondly remembered, but he really serves his purpose in the story.

  So, after Krieg is defeated, Sanji turns down Luffy's offer to join the Straw Hat crew. Now, he knows this is a bad idea. He's not gonna find the All Blue floating around on the Baratie. Why doesn't he go immediately?

  Well, he knows it’s a bad idea but he’s completely misinterpreting Zeff’s sacrifice. He feels that since Zeff sacrificed his leg, he has to repay him by working for him indefinitely. But the reason that Zeff did that was because he wants Sanji to live on and chase his dream. That’s why Zeff took pity on him in the first place. He’s an older, worn-down man now, and he stopped chasing his dream. And now he wants to see Sanji or someone get a win. It lifts his spirit to see Sanji and live kinda vicariously through him. 

  So, the second time I ever cried over One Piece was during Sanji's goodbye and Zeff's "Don't catch a cold." The first time was when that little dog was trying to protect his dead owner's shop in Orange Town, but that's a different story. But this shot of Sanji on his knees thanking Zeff with all the cooks surrounding them is so iconic, and Sanji's acting like it's a gift that Zeff gave him that Sanji could never repay, while as you said, Zeff just wants Sanji to be happy. What did you get out of that? I assume that you're a human with human emotions.

  I cry every time I watch that. When I first saw it, I was like “How? How is a series this good?” And there’s so much to that ending sequence. Because the Baratie is built on this rough, angry masculinity. Just these dudes being mean and fighting each other and customers all the time. There’s never a time or a place for lending a shoulder to someone else. No emotional embraces of any kind. Just everyone berating everyone. No one can open up — just stupid man babies. And then you get to this moment where Sanji is leaving and they’re all trying to be cool while playing it off. Especially Zeff, who can’t give a legitimate goodbye, but rather a “Don’t catch a cold.” But there’s so much to that statement and the facade crumbles. All these grown men start bawling. 

    I've never thought about it that way. There's all these little hints of kindness, like feeding the bad guys, and it's a masculinity powder keg. And then Sanji, in an ultimate display of putting his heart out there, bows to the man who saved him and the keg explodes. That's really cool.

  ONE PIECE LIGHTNING ROUND!

  Favorite One Piece character?

  Sanji

  Favorite One Piece villain?

  Enel

  Favorite One Piece moment?

  March to Arlong Park

  Favorite Straw Hat Crew pairing?

  Luffy and Zoro

  Favorite moment of the new Wano anime arc?

  Soba Mask’s debut

  If you could eat one Devil Fruit, what would it be?

  Whatever Kanjuro’s fruit is

  Moment that made you cry the hardest?

  Sanji leaving the Baratie

  Moment that made you cheer the loudest?

  Straw Hats at the Tower of Justice standing across from Robin

  One Piece location that you'd like to live in?

  Whole Cake Island. Ya eat well, ya know, you can survive Big Mom

  Favorite fight scene?

  Sanji vs Mr. 2, of course

      Stay tuned for the next installment of "My Favorite One Piece Arc" as we speak with Botchamania creator Maffew about his favorite One Piece arc: Alabasta!!

        Daniel Dockery is a Senior Staff Writer for Crunchyroll. Follow him on Twitter!

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features.

By: Daniel Dockery

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

[garp20-evie]

The Hero’s Journey Timeline in the Mandalorian

When comparing books, films and more from the twenty-first century to Greek mythology, one major connection is the hero’s journey chart, originally created by Joseph Campbell (Campbell, Cousineau and Brown, 1990). Every story has a beginning, middle and ending, the hero’s journey chart states smaller moments that happen in between that structures the journey a character goes on, such as the call to adventure, a helper, challenge and temptations, and the return, calling it “the one great story of mankind.” (Campbell, Cousineau and Brown, 1990). The hero’s journey chart can be identified throughout every Greek mythological story, but also throughout history “there is a stereotypical journey that the archetype or hero goes on” (Barton-Steel, 2018). Greek mythological stories have survived through reinvention, by being presented in different forms that reflect current topics, in order to help us in our own lives (Hero’s journey, 2020).

In an interview with GQ, the director of the 2019, Disney+ show, The Mandalorian, Jon Favreau spoke of his focus on getting to the heart and true roots of the series, that George Lucas- the creator of the Star Wars franchise, was trying to achieve, “We had a long talk with each other. One thing he said to me was, ’remember, Jon, the real audience for all stories and all myths is the kids that are coming of age’, because he’s really a Joseph Campbell adherent.” (Mullally, 2019)

As both Favreau and Lucas enjoy Joseph Campbell’s work, Favreau spoke on how The Hero’s Journey is used in the Mandalorian, “storytelling is about imparting the wisdom of the previous generations on to the children who are becoming adults, and giving them a context for how to behave and how to learn the lessons of the past without making the mistakes on their own. That’s the hope, that you can teach them how to avoid all the hardship but garner all the wisdom.” he goes on to say, “That’s the mono-myth and that’s the hero’s journey, and ultimately the reward for a life well-lived. I take comfort in those themes, and I like it, and I love sharing that with the next generation and knowing that will be left behind even as our generation passes,” says Favreau (Mullally, 2019). 

So lets look into it…

1. The Mandalorian

The Hero’s journey chart is separated into three sections: the ordinary world/the known, the special world/the unknown and the return, with multiple subsections in each that give more detail to the hero’s journey. These can be viewed as a setting, for the hero’s physical and/or mental journey. 

In a lecture from The Mythos Series, Joseph Campbell speaks about the tale of Percival and The Holy Grail, and its use of the Hero’s Journey chart. There is a great link between this tale and The Mandalorian, with the character Dyn Jarren being our hero. “Black and white are the qualities of every act, every act has both good and evil. What are you going to do living, since everything you do has two effects? All we can do is lean towards the good.” (Parzival: A Tale with Many Tellings, 2019). 

Campbell goes onto discuss how Percival’s journey is about finding God within himself whilst on the quest for the holy grail, which King Arthur’s knights of the round table, are called to search for, “There was no path, but if there is a path it is someone else’s path and you are not on the adventure.” (Parzival: A Tale with Many Tellings, 2019), ultimately this means that King Arthur’s Knights have not started on their ‘hero’s journey’ yet. 

Campbell goes onto explain how someone who doesn’t have a path, can get clue’s from people who have also followed paths, and in the case of The Mandalorian, this person is Greek Karga: the leader of the Bounty Hunters Guild form the planet Navarro, who sends Dyn Jarren on missions in order to complete jobs as a bounty hunter, effectively leading him down paths.

When following the Hero’s Journey chart, we see under the ‘ordinary world’ the first subsection comes as ‘the call to adventure’. In the Disney+ show, this is presented as a dangerous mission with a big bounty and leads our hero, Dyn Jarren, to the planet of Arvala-7. It is there that he meets the mentor Kuiil, who informs him he must continue on a path that his great ancestors took. Kuiil represents the next step of the Hero’s Journey, as the ‘supernatural-aid’.

2. The Child

Nature takes you where you need to go. This applies to both Dyn Jarren and Percivil, who both have to ride an animal and let the animal lead the way, going as far as it can go and ultimately leading Dyn Jarren to the bounty- a small alien of an unknown species, referred to as ‘The Child’, but also goes by the fan-given name of ‘Baby Yoda’- as it is of the same species as the character Yoda, who is also from the Star Wars universe. The Child does not necessarily take the form of The Holy Grail, but rather helps to show Dyn Jarren that ‘the Holy Grail’ is not a physical form, but instead comes as a lesson that he learns later on in the series, and ultimately completes the cycle of The Hero’s Journey.

3. The Sin

Eventually, Dyn Jarren returns to the planet of Navarro, in order to return the bounty-The Child, and get paid. By this point the audience is only in the first three episodes, which cover the first third of the heroes journey cycle- The Known. There is only one way in and out of Navarro, and that is by walking underneath a giant archway- this is an important symbol representing the the Hero’s Journey cycle, and how whenever the Hero travels from one world to the next they must pass through a threshold of sorts (The Mandalorian: Explained, 2020). Even though we previously see Dyn Jarren pass through the arch way, he only truly crosses the ‘threshold’ whenever he is with The Child. This happens when Dyn Jarren decides to not hand over The Child and the duo escapes the planet, ultimately excepting the call to adventure, and entering the second phase of the Hero’s Journey- the special world/the unknown.

4. Sanctuary

The title of this episode informs the audience of how the duo now face sanctuary from other bounty hunters who want The Child, on the planet Sorgan. It is here that Dyn Jarren’s creed is questioned and his honour is put to the test by the possibility of settling and finding a woman’s love, in the character Omera, “You have found your bliss, but it has disengaged you from your world of duties.” (Parzival: A Tale with Many Tellings, 2019). This often happens with knights, as they put their passions before their honour and forget about their knightly duties and the court (The Mandalorian: Explained, 2020). Dyn Jarren is reminded of his true purpose when he is faced with an attack on The Child at the end of the episode, just like how King Arthur’s Knights find Percival and remind him of his knightly duties. This results in the duo leaving the planet and continuing their search for safety, and leaving the ‘temptation’ phase of the Hero’s Journey chart behind them.

5. The Gunslinger

This episode acts as ‘atonement’ stage within the Hero’s Journey guide- where the protagonist would come face to face with a father figure. As Dyn Jarren is a father figure to The Child, this step is inverted, and Dyn Jarren has to kill a younger version of himself in order to move on from his past and except his new found compassion, in order to continue on his journey (The Mandalorian: Explained, 2020). His younger self is presented as Riot Mar- a young bounty hunter hoping to become a Mandalorian, who eventually double crosses Dyn Jarren by taking The Child and attacking the duo's ship, but is later killed by the Mandalorian after a brief fight (List of The Mandalorian characters, 2020).

6. The Prisoner

In this episode, Dyn Jarren refuses to return to the ordinary world/the known world. The protagonist meets multiple shadows of his previous self as a Mandalorian- the crook, the monster, the sadist and the soldier, and later on in the episode we meet the traitor- who represents Dyn Jarren’s current self. By the end of the episode, Dyn Jarren has dealt with all five ‘shadows’ by locking them up in a facility, symbolising how he is leaving the past versions of himself behind and can move forward.

7. The Reckoning

Finally, Dyn Jarren excepts his call back to the ordinary/known world and gathers his allies from throughout the series, to help him protect The Child. It is here that The Mentor- Kuiil, dies whilst protecting The Child- but it is through his death, that Dyn Jarren learns and excepts everything his mentor has taught him in order to complete his Hero’s Journey.

8. Redemption

“The spontaneous act of a noble heart, whose impulse is not that of ego, but of love. And love in the sense of not a sexual love, but of compassion.” (Parzival: A Tale with Many Tellings, 2019) This quote perfectly describes how The Child is able to protect the team of allies at their final hurdle, effectively repaying his dept for the allies having protected him throughout the series. When Dyn Jarren is later trapped inside a burning building, he symbolically dies and enters the underworld, physically and spiritually “No living thing has seen me without my helmet since I sworn the creed.” To which IG-11 replies “I am not a living thing.” (The Mandalorian: Explained, 2020). It is here that the protagonist finally receives his sigil- something he has yearned for since the first episode, as The Childs father. This sigil acts as a combination of his compassion and his honour, it is the middle ground and is something that all knights must learn (The Mandalorian: Explained, 2020). As the group of heroes come to the final threshold in the Hero’s Journey chart, and in order to come out from the underworld and back into the ordinary world, IG-11’s sacrifice to save our story’s hero resurrects Dyn Jarren, resulting in him learning the true value of life- the Holy Grail (The Mandalorian: Explained, 2020).

Even though the ending we are given is not the true ending, as a second season is due to be released in October 2020, this story does complete the full cycle of the Hero’s Journey chart. As well as echoing information from the Star Wars universe, The Mandalorian shows how the cycle can continue again for a new hero, possibly The Child, and how the Hero’s Journey cycle could appear in every season, just presented in different ways. But this is a theory, and I look forward to the second season.

I have spoken.

References:

Barton-Steel, J., 2018. What's So Ancient About Greek Mythology?. [online] Ted.com. Available at: <https://www.ted.com/talks/james_barton_steel_what_s_so_ancient_about_greek_mythology> [Accessed 30 March 2020]. 

Campbell, J., Cousineau, P. and Brown, S., 1990. The Hero's Journey. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

En.wikipedia.org. 2020. List Of The Mandalorian Characters. [online] Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Mandalorian_characters#Guest_characters> [Accessed 1 September 2020].

Mullally, W., 2019. Here’S What Jon Favreau And George Lucas Have Been Talking About For The Mandalorian. [online] Gentlemen's Quarterly. Available at: <https://www.gqmiddleeast.com/culture/heres-what-jon-favreau-and-george-lucas-have-been-talking-about-for-the-mandalorian> [Accessed 1 September 2020].

YouTube. 2019. Parzival: A Tale With Many Tellings. [online] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN_NWTV2liA> [Accessed 1 September 2020].

YouTube. 2020. The Mandalorian: Explained. [online] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dEcYXrZc9c&t=105s> [Accessed 1 September 2020].

#the mandalorian

[straykidsupdate]

Stray Kids are shaking up K-pop’s status quo

The South Korean pop band Stray Kids are clustered around a laptop for a Skype interview, pale in the screen’s glow as heavy rain turns New York City to grey. It’s a fitting backdrop for the group: from their 2017 pre-debut release “Hellevator” to the latest single, the snarling, trumpeting EDM of “MIROH”, the K-pop group have made similarly dystopian environs their visual backdrop, where neon and CCTV screens flicker and the group are hemmed in by skyscrapers, tarmac, and tunnels as they attempt to escape or defy their surroundings.

This concept – of attaining freedom – is central to the group, and it’s an idea that’s rooted in reality. The group’s leader, Bang Chan, handpicked each member for the group from their parent label JYP Entertainment’s roster of trainees, a process unheard of in K-pop, where that power lies with executives and creative directors. Stray Kids write and produce all their material, too, and are one of the few idol groups to do so. Their music focuses unflinchingly on their youth – the anger and frustration, the ecstatic highs and ragged lows – while questioning their own shifting sense of identity.

With bleached bangs falling into one eye, Bang Chan recalls not the gravitas of the opportunity to form his own group, but the pressure of picking wisely. “There was a lot on my mind,” says the 21-year-old, speaking during the band’s run of sold-out North American concerts. “Choosing the right people was a must, because I’m going to be with them for a long time. Because I’d been a trainee for so long,” – seven years – “I think I had the ability to figure out what potential they had.” He turns to his bandmates and namechecks them: Woojin, the eldest at 22; Lee Know; Changbin; Hyunjin; Han; Felix; Seungmin; and the youngest, I.N, who turned 18 in February. “With everyone around me right now, I’m really glad we’ve become this team.”

Bang Chan and 18-year-old Felix, whose cavernously deep voice is at odds with his Bambi-innocent looks, were both raised in Australia, and the broad twang of their accent conveys a cheerful, anything-is-possible resonance. It’s the former who helms the conversation. He’s an engaging speaker and a careful listener, stopping to translate questions for the non-English speakers. At times he falters, and at others he deflects to well-worn answers (a reflection of their newness), but he’s unmistakably a leader, a role he wears effortlessly.

As a whole, Stray Kids are known for their friendly, indefatigable rambunctiousness, but with nearly a dozen rookie awards and five EPs in just over 12 months, it’d be foolish to underestimate their tenacity. Their start was a baptism of fire. On Stray Kids, the eponymously-named survival TV show that they were formed through, they were required to write tracks and perfect performances to short deadlines, then ruthlessly critiqued by the CEO of their label, JYP Entertainment. Two of the group members, Felix and Lee Know, were initially eliminated, although eventually reinstated in the final episode via a public vote. Felix, axed due to his less-than-fluent Korean, hasn’t forgotten the sting. “I still think about my Korean and how I use the language,” he sighs. “I try to learn, and fix it.”

You can see his determination when Stray Kids appear on Korean variety shows to showcase their work and their personalities. Felix’s shyness in speaking had resulted in less camera time but, in recent months, his studying has appeared to pay off and he’s a far more confident presence, able to convey the charm that's endeared him to their fans. It’s the result of constant help from his bandmates, he says, radiating positivity (which is, delightfully, Felix’s default setting). Lee Know, however, who’d had only a short idol training period and was cut early in the series, favours a more stoic approach. “I think I’m here thanks to that feedback. I worked really hard then, and I’m still trying to work hard now too,” he says, and although his small smile seemingly hints at something more pronounced, he settles on a double thumbs up and sits back.

“Choosing the right people was a must... With everyone around me right now, I’m really glad we’ve become this team” – Bang Chan, Stray Kids

Their rough-meets-polished sound was set up by the darkly anthemic “Hellevator”, but the thundering EDM and guitar riffs of their official debut, “District 9”, cemented them as a fresh force in K-pop. In its music video, they flee a clinical-looking prison and use a school bus to smash through to the safety of the titular District 9, although even there they’re left searching. “I don’t know who I am, it’s frustrating, it always worries me / Answer me, then give me an answer that will clear it all,” Hyunjin raps with a volatile urgency.

This ceaseless quest weaves through last year’s EP trilogy (I Am NOT, I Am WHO, I Am YOU) and into their latest EP, Clé 1: MIROH, the clear narrative allowing for sonic experiments (from the minimalist electronica of “3rd Eye” to the bright pop drawl of “Get Cool”) without losing momentum. In their song “NOT!”, they celebrate breaking out the “system” – the status quo – and the strength of being different. For Stray Kids, this is more about ambiguous storytelling than holding a deliberate ’us versus them’ mentality. “We usually don’t compare (ourselves) to others,” says vocalist Seungmin, in English. “Like in the song ‘My Pace’, we’re saying we don’t care about others’ (achievements), we’re just talking about Stray Kids’ own way.”

While Stray Kids have definitely created a richly empathetic musical tapestry, their chosen path raises a pertinent observation: in breaking out of one “system”, they’ve joined another. The idol system that they’re now a part of often appears more restrictive than the one they leave behind, and as they move towards the bubble of fame and money, there’s also the potential to lose a sense of oneself. Both feel paradoxical to their story. Bang Chan pauses. “Well, honestly, we wouldn’t call it a system, let’s say a ‘world’, and we’d call it a decision that we made. In order for us to get out of the main system, we chose being idols, and through K-pop we can show the message we want to express.”

Han, the 18-year-old rapper, singer, and songwriter/producer, drapes himself, cat-like, over Felix’s head and neck to get close to the camera. “I think fame and success can be dangerous to a person, depending on how they feel about it, but we’re going to try to always be positive and good natured about it,” he opines, gesticulating rapidly. “We’re still lacking so much, but we’re going to try really hard to understand other people’s feelings and be a good influence.”

Given Stray Kids’ formation, creative freedom, and growing success makes them something of an anomaly, might their presence provoke change in the idol world? Bang Chan furrows his brow. “I suppose so,” he says with the questioning tone of someone presented with an unfamiliar concept. “I guess it’s up to how people take it in.”

Stray Kids, evidently, have been more preoccupied with looking inward, and, when examining their new EP, it’s apparent their gaze has been in flux. Clé 1: MIROH, which Bang Chan describes as “us being really confident because all nine of us are together”, presents a new fearlessness on tracks like “Boxer”, “MIROH” and “Victory Song”, where Han triumphantly raps:“A laidback victor, a smile spreads on my face / Who else is like me, there’s no one.”

“When I was becoming a singer, some people didn’t support my dreams, so I was sad. I remember that and put those feelings into this song” – Changbin, Stray Kids

They pose fewer existential questions than on previous EPs, but, says Bang Chan, “if you look at tracks like ‘Chronosaurus’ and ‘Maze Of Memories’, it shows nervousness or anxiety, and a feeling of being lost as well.” The latter, its doomy hip hop propelled by tense piano and bursts of foreboding strings, was an emotional outlet for their silver-tongued rapper, Changbin. “When I was becoming a singer,” he says, in English, “some people didn’t support my dreams, so I was sad. I remember that and put those feelings into this song.”

Yet despite sieving emotions and thoughts through the music, their biggest questions, says Changbin, remain unanswered. “But we’re trying,” he smiles. He points to the close presence of their fans, known as STAY. “Maybe we can find the answer soon, through STAY.” How does he intend to discover deeply personal epiphanies through others? “I’m young and lack a lot of experience,” replies Changbin, reverting to Korean. “There are still a lot of childish elements about me as well. By watching those around me, I can find out what I like through them. I feel like I can find myself through (others’ journeys).”

For now, Stray Kids simply continue doing what they’ve done so well thus far – capturing the human condition, including tackling difficult subjects like depression (“Hellevator”), anxiety (“Rock”), and negative thoughts (“Voices”), all of which, Bang Chan says, they’ve experienced first-hand. The group’s core writing team (Han, Changbin, and Bang Chan, together known as 3RACHA) have not only refined their style over the past year but, according to I.N, “improved on their speed of making songs. They’ve gotten really fast,” he says with a sunny grin.

3RACHA’s Soundcloud days are far behind them, although, to their credit, they haven’t deleted the handful of songs that were posted pre-debut. Some will remain just enthusiastic learning curves, but others were raw and powerful, such as “Broken Compass”, which was refashioned into “Mixtape #4” for Clé 1: MIROH.

The “Mixtape” songs, which are only found on the physical versions of their EPs, are where, Hyunjin says, “we all contribute, and fill our individual verses with our personal stories”. In January, 3RACHA revisited a few songs during a Vlive broadcast, and cringed to the point of sweating profusely. As Changbin and Han crease up, Bang Chan covers his face, mock-groaning. “We can’t listen to them now!” But there’s a glint in his eye. “We do have to do episode two of that,” he adds, grinning.

It’s not just the songwriters who are evolving; from being wide-eyed, ambitious and nervous trainees who didn’t always get along, as Hyunjin recently revealed, Stray Kids have become compelling performers with close bonds. They’d clung tightly to Bang Chan during their survival show, but do Stray Kids today feel less lost – or at least more secure in their responsibilities? “I’ll just leave the room so the guys can talk more freely,” jokes Bang Chan, even as Changbin, owner of a bone-dry sense of humour, simply yells, “No!” Vocalist Woojin leans in. “He was very good to us while we were filming the show. At that time we always followed him very well, and relied on him a lot.”

“I don’t have a lot of confidence but when he’s next to me, I know I can do this,” adds Felix, as they ready to depart for the next schedule in a packed day. “But,” Woojin says, “now we’re all developing our own selves, too.”

Source

#stray kids #190606 #era: clé 1 miroh #t: article #dazed