Character Design, Revising for Emotional Impact, and Aeris’ new choker
There’s a post going around pointing out that Aeris’ new choker design features a forget-me-not, which when coupled with a Brave Exvius item description, appears to be in memory of Zack. This seems like an innocuous change - if it were just to add a flower, I’d say that it mostly was. But if we proceed under the assumption that it is intended as a memento of Zack (probable), it’s a change with some far-reaching consequences.
In the original game, here’s what Aeris tells us about Zack’s disappearance:
“It’s all in the past now. I was just worried because I heard he’s been missing. I think it was 5 years ago. […] He loved women, a real lady’s man. He probably found someone else…”
Now, Aeris is not the most forthcoming of characters, but even if you read these lines allowing that she might be covering up her own feelings on the subject, she tells us point-blank that:
She doesn’t know what happened to Zack
Her own explanation of events is that he just ghosted her, maybe leaving for another woman
Her explanation is interesting for two reasons. The first is that we know it’s incredibly wrong, so it lends a note of tragic irony to the situation. The second is that it’s not a sentimental explanation, but a pretty brutally realistic one - it would suck for her to admit it, but she does so readily enough to suggest she’s had the time and distance to come to a crappy but mundane conclusion about what happened. It’s sad, but she’s practical about it, and that communicates something about her perspective and the type of person she is.
Giving Aeris a memento of Zack negates both of the two points we can extract from her dialogue above. After all, a forget-me-not necklace is not an appropriate keepsake for your teen boyfriend who walked out on you and didn’t have the decency to tell you face-to-face. This means Aeris’ knowledge of the situation and her whole perspective on her relationship with Zack has to be rewritten to accommodate the presence of such a memento. We’ll see what it winds up actually being when the game is releaesd, but the conclusions we can draw already are:
She may know Zack is dead, and at least assumes he’s blameless for his disappearance (despite this being a less likely scenario)
After 5 years of no contact whatsoever, she carried enough of a flame for him and for their relationship that she felt he was worth a memento
These two facts paint a different portrait of who Aeris is by radically altering the conclusions she draws from the same initial situation. That’s reason enough to have a bone to pick with this particular change… but there’s more.
Character design is a tool to communicate tone, identity and role about a character. Like prose, it’s deliberately crafted to impart certain impressions and convey intangible or emotional information. From a design perspective, the change in Aeris’ necklace also subtly alters her place in the story. It connects her more closely to Zack and makes both him and their past relationship more prominent.
That comes with a subtle cost; a previously unmarked aspect of Aeris’ character design has now been converted into a signifier for Zack. Its purpose is no longer to communicate something or represent Aeris’ specifically, but rather to represent the story between her and Zack (and the story between Zack and the audience by reminding players of Zack’s death, an emotionally resonant moment for many).
This isn’t the only instance of a change meant to increase Zack’s presence in the narrative. Crisis Core was full of them; with Zack as it’s main character and his fate a foregone conclusion, CC set out to make a variety of revisions to the meaning of certain story elements in order to maximize his emotional impact. The Buster Sword is the most glaringly revised, the changes surrounding it altering Cloud’s decision to emulate Zack from mostly internal and self-motivated to mostly external and circumstantial (another essay), but Aeris has also been changed significantly through incidental alterations to her design and circumstances.
According to Crisis Core, Aeris wears her iconic ribbon because Zack bought it for her, her iconic colour because Zack suggested it, and took up her profession (how she is introduced, how she literally introduces herself to others, an integral part of her character concept) after he proposed it. Again, these changes were made to bring Zack’s role in the story to greater prominence by increasing the degree to which he was important in the lives of other characters. However, the net result is that Aeris’ identity and role in the story has shifted. Symbols and elements that were strongly associated with Aeris are instead being used to communicate her past relationship, and her character and perspective on that relationship has changed in turn.
If it weren’t for all of this, maybe I could write off the necklace change. With the context we have, it’s another undeniable shift in her writing. An Aeris who wears a memento of her ex boyfriend and who dresses in a colour signifying her reunion with him cannot be reconciled with an Aeris who assumed her ex abandoned and replaced her. They’re two completely different emotional and behavioural profiles.
There’s a host of of other creeping changes in her character that have been caused by prioritizing Zack as well. Making it so that she never thought of selling flowers on her own feels contradictory with the slightly dishonest but entrepreneurial savvy Aeris demonstrates when she sells flowers at wildly different price points to men who are interested in her in Wall Market; making it so that we have several indicators that Aeris actively memorializes Zack makes the loss of her mother (previously a huge component in her backstory) feel like Ifalna is comparatively less important to her.
To conclude, I want to say it is entirely possible to be fine with all of these changes, but one shouldn’t deny that they are happening, and they are the product of actively-made directorial and design decisions. My hope at this point is that they have fewer implications on who Aeris is than I fear they might.
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