idk how to word this properly but wrt the fanfic thing you reblogged earlier. Why do fanfic writers have such different expectations than any other content hosting platform?
Like lets take youtube as a point of comparison, Engagement like comments and likes largely exists to boost the works place in algorithm, thats why youtubers put in calls to action and other engament bait. Few with decent reach even read the comments and the audience shouldnt try to develop any weird parasocial relationship with the youtuber. Fanfic authors ask for likes (kudos, because the websites gotta use nonstandard language for some reason) and comments despite them not having any impact on an algorithm, and seem to want the audience to try and develop a relationship with the author based on tumblr posts like that one.
Why the radical difference in behaviour away from the norm? And honestly with all the (usually) metaphorical blood spilled online about parasociality why are authors really surprised that the audience tries to keep their distance as is best practice with any other content producer?
okay I am going to answer this as kindly and as calmly as I can and try to assume that you are asking this in good faith. because my friend, the fact that you feel the need to ask is, to me, The Problem.
[this is, for the record, in response to this post]
fanfiction writers are not *posting content.* (I also have reservations about engaging with the term "content producer" or "content creator" but let's put that aside for now, I'll circle back to it.) you say "they seem to want the audience to try and develop a relationship with the author" as though it is strange, off-putting, and incomprehensible to you, when in fact that is the point of writing fanfiction. it is a way of participating in fandom. it is a way of building community and exchanging ideas and becoming closer with people.
if authors wanted to solely ~generate content~ that would get them attention (?? to what end, the dynamic you have described seems to equate algorithmic supremacy as winning for winning's sake, as though all anyone wants to do is BUILD an audience without ENGAGING with them, which I cannot fathom but let's pretend for a moment that is, in fact, true) then like. if that were the case why on earth would they choose a medium in which they categorically cannot succeed and profit, because it isn't their IP?
you are equating two things that are not at all the same thing. to the degree that parasocial relationships are to be avoided, and "that person is not trying to be your friend they are trying to entertain you, please respect their boundaries" is a real dynamic -- which it is!! -- like. you have to understand that the reason that is true for the people of whom it is true is because it is their JOB. they are storytellers by profession, and they are either through direct payment, or sponsorship, or advertising, or through some other means, profiting off of your attention. i don't say this to be dismissive, many wonderful artists and actors and comedians and any number of a thousand things that i enjoy very much go this route but they do so as a *career choice.* and so when you violate the public/private boundary with them, you are presuming to know a Person rather than their Worksona. the people who work at Dropout or who stream their actual play tabletop games or who broadcast on TikTok or YouTube are inviting me to feel like i know them to the degree to which that helps them succeed in their medium and at their craft, but there MUST be a mutual understanding that that's a feeling, not a fact.
however.
a fanfiction writer is not an influencer, not a professional, and is not looking to garner "success." there is no share of audience we are trying to gain for gain's sake, because we are not competition with one another, because there is nothing to win other than the pleasure of each other's company. we are doing this for no other reason than the love of the game; because we have things we want desperately to say about these worlds, these characters, these dynamics, and because we *want more than anything to know we are not alone in our thoughts and feelings.* fanfiction is a bid for interaction, engagement, attention, and consideration. it is not meant to be consumed and then moved on from because we are NOT paid for our work, nor do we want to be. the reward we seek is "attention," but attention as in CONVERSATION, not attention as in clicks. we are not IN this for profit, or for number-go-up. there is no such thing: legally there cannot be. we are in this because we want to be seen and known.
like. please understand. i am now married to someone i met because of mutual comments on fanfiction. our close friend and roommate, with whom i have cohabitated for over a decade now, is someone I met because of mutual comments on fanfiction and livejournal posts. that is my household. beyond my household, the vast majority of my closest personal friends are people with whom I built relationships in this way.
you ask why fanfiction writers want THIS and not "the norm," but the idea of everything being built to cater to an algorithm to continue to build clout, as though the only method of reaching people is Distant Overlord Creator and Passive Receptive Audience being "the norm" is EXTREMELY NEW. this is not how it has always been!! please think of the writers of zines in a pre-internet fandom, using paper and glue and xerox to try and meet like-minded people in a world that was designed for you to only ever meet people in person, by happenstance, in your own hometown. imagine the writers of the early internet, building webrings from scratch to CREATE a community to find each other, despite distance. imagine livejournal groups, forums, and -- yes, indeed, of course -- comment threads IN STORIES -- as places where people go to *converse.* in the past, we had an entire Type Of Guy that everyone knew about, the BNF ("Big Name Fan") whose existence had to be described via meme because it was SO DIFFERENT THAN THE NORM. treating fellow fans like celebrities or people too cool for the regular kids to know was an OUTLIER, and one commonly understood to lead to toxicity.
in the past, I have likened writing fanfiction to echolocation. i am not screaming because I like hearing the sound of my own voice, though i can and do find my voice beautiful. i am screaming so that the vibrations can bounce back to me and show me the world. the purpose is in the feedback. otherwise it is just noise.
does this make any sense? can you see, when i describe it that way, why an ask like yours makes me feel despair, because it makes us all sound so horribly separate from one another?
perhaps I will try another metaphor:
a professional chef who runs a restaurant will not have her feelings hurt if you never fight your way into the kitchen to personally tell her how much you enjoyed the meal. that would, indeed, violate a boundary. professional kitchens are a place of work, and you have already showed her you enjoyed the meal by paying for it, or by perhaps spreading your enjoyment by word of mouth to your friends so they, too, can have good meals. you show your appreciation by continuing to come back. if a bunch of people sitting around randomly happen to have a conversation about how much they love the food, it wouldn't hurt that chef's feelings to not be included in the conversation. however: EVEN IN THIS INSTANCE, it is ADVISABLE AND APPROPRIATE to leave a good review! you might post about how much you like this restaurant on Yelp, and it would probably make the chef feel great to see those positive comments. but the chef doesn't NEED them, because the chef is, again, *also being paid to cook.* that's why she started the restaurant, to be paid to cook!
i am not being paid to cook.
i am at home in my own kitchen, making things for a community potluck where i hope everyone will bring something we can all enjoy together. some people at the potluck are better bakers, some better cooks; some can't cook at all but are great at logistics and make sure there's enough napkins for everyone; some people come just to enjoy the food, because that's what the party is for. and if I, as this enthusiast chef who made something from my heart for this reason alone, learned after the fact that a bunch of people got together in the parking lot to rave about my dish but no one of them had ever bothered to tell me while I sat alone at my table all night, occasionally seeing people come by to pick up a plate but never saying anything to me -- of course that would bother me, because I am not otherwise profiting off the labor I put in. this is not a bid to be paid, because if someone WERE to say "hey, great cake!! here's five bucks for a slice" i would say no, friend, that is not the point and give them the money back. i'm not trying to Get Mine. I am in it to see the look on your face. I'm in it so you can tell me what about it moved you, so that I can say back what moved me to make it in the first place. so we can TALK about it.
because what happened in the first place is this: one time I had a cake whose sweetness, richness, flavor, intensity, and composition moved me so much that I *taught myself to bake.* so I could see how much vanilla and sugar was too much, so I could learn how to make things rise instead of fall flat, so I could even better appreciate the original cake by seeing for myself the effort and talent and inspiration that goes into making one even half as good.
learning to do so is a satisfying accomplishment in and of itself, yes.
but I also did it because at the end of the day we should EAT the cake. and it's a lonely thing, to eat alone when a meal was always designed and intended to be shared.
so, to answer your last question: i'm not surprised, i'm just sad. because somehow two things that were never meant to be seen as the same have been labeled "content," and thus identical. and it diminishes both the things that ARE intended to be paid for AND the things that are not, because it removes any sense of intimacy or meaning from the work.
i hope you know i'm not mad at you for asking. but i'm frustrated we've come to live in a world where the question needs to be asked, because the answers are no longer intuitively obvious because we're so siloed.
Decided to keep fiddling with an alternative Lucrecia Crescent design based off her OG sprite. Itâs certainly not perfect but itâs been a fun design exercise. My plan is to do the background as the Shinra manor greenhouse but then I remembered Iâm terribly out of practice when it comes to drawing backgrounds.
i never see art about sephiroth and barret so i wanted that to change. this is a piece where fire is both a cleansing force and a means of annihilation. barret wishes to tear down the institution of shinra to preserve the future. sephiroth's only desire is to burn it all down.
Drew this for Turk Week - Day 2 (Dual Action) but ended up late because my drawing tablet broke! The original concept is from Fallen Arazil on bsky - you can find her post here: https://bsky.app/profile/fallen-arazil.bsky.social/post/3mgxvyubjjk2m
AO3 saying they will not be banning AI-generated works on their platform
I agree with them and I respect them for this. no, I am not a fan of AI-generated fics, but as Iâve said many times before in the past:
AO3 was built with the âcomplete anti censorshipâ stance. them banning AI-generated works would be them going against their own core values of âno censorshipâ. and âno censorshipâ means nothing is censored. and that includes works you dislike for ethical or whatever reasons.
as of now, most (I believe) of creators who use AI to write for them properly tag their works as âAI-generatedâ. so you can safely filter these works out if you donât wish to consume them. but I have no doubt the majority (if not all) of them will stop tagging their works as AI if AO3 actually bans AI works, which means these AI works will be untagged. you can never know for sure if the fic you read is AI or not, since they arenât properly tagged anymore.
whether or not you like it, AI is getting better and more human-like, meaning itâs getting harder to spot when a fic is AI.
speculation, witch hunts, wrongful accusations and harassment harm real writers, as well as writing community as a whole, as much as AI does, if not more.
itâs impossible for AO3 to effectively ban and remove âonly AI-generated worksâ without innocent human-made works getting wrongly marked as AI and deleted in the process. so if AO3 were to ban AI-generated works, it would mean
there was a chance of a human-made work getting wrongly marked as AI and taken down
there was a chance of an AI-generated work being wrongly accepted as human-made
fandom drama could and would cause innocent writers to get their human-made works falsely reported as AI
human-made fics that âupset peopleâ, in terms of contents, could and almost certainly would be reported as AI, because there were people who âfound the fics inappropriate/disgusting and wanted them taken downâ â and the only way they could do that was by falsely reporting these fics as AI
AO3 volunteers would have to decide which works were AI âbased on vibes aloneâ. and not only was it impossible for them to always make the correct judgement, there simply werenât enough volunteers and time for every single work that was reported as AI to be thoroughly read by a human volunteer
no, âAI detectorâ is unreliable and the machine itself is also AI â itâs known to have incorrectly marked human-made works as AI and AI-generated works as human-made.
TL;DR â no matter how much you hate AI-generated fics, banning them would do more harm than good.
Fanfiction is supposed to be cringy. You're allowed to write bad. You're allowed to be cringe. Fanfiction is supposed to be self indulgent. You're allowed to be cringe. Let yourself be cringe. Fanfiction is supposed to be fun. Stop putting arbitrary rules on yourself and be free.
The turks and rufus does cloud's job in advent children, who is the first to mess or get fired?
*Reeve is behind the wheel of Cloudâs pickup truck*
Reno: Thanks again for being our driver for the day, man. You know, Tseng thought taking over for Cloud while heâs sick was a bad call, but I feel like we owe the guy after all heâs done.
Reeve: I understand! Itâs no problem at all. Iâm familiar with most of these delivery points, and itâll be nice to get out of the WRO office for the day. You can count on me!
Reno: Okay, great! So first stop is a delivery to the bookstore in Kalmâ
*A car cuts them off abruptly, Reeve slams his hand on the horn*
Reeve: WHERE DID YE GET YER LICENSE, YE ABSOLUTE BAWBAG?! DID YE BUY IT FROM A CEREAL BOX?! GET OFF THE ROAD BEFORE I SHOVE THAT STEERING WHEEL UP WHERE THE SUN DINNAE SHINE!
Reno: ...What the hell was that?
Reeve: Oh! Road rage. Hehe. I get severely irritated behind the wheel, so I donât usually drive.
Rufus: Should Reno maybe take over and you give him directions instead?
Reeve, waving him off: No, no! This little road trip is fun! Iâll be fine! So the first stop is Kalm. Whatâs the address?
Reno: Right, so we have a package for the bookstore and a table for the bar next doorâ
*Another driver honks at them and Reeve sticks his head out the window*
Reeve: AH, YE THINK YER HORN MAKES YE IMPORTANT, DO YE?! IâLL RIP IT OUT AND SHOVE IT DOWN YER THROAT, YE MANKY SHITE!
Rufus: OKAY, I really think you should let one of us take overâ
Reeve: Nonsense! Itâs just a little healthy yelling to release tension! OH, YE JUST CUT ME OFF, DID YE?! IâLL PUT A BULLET IN YER ENGINE BLOCK, YE USELESS PIECE OFâ Rude, please hand me that weapon in the backseat.
*Rude reaches back and pulls out Cait Sith*
Rude: ??
*Reeve hurls Cait Sith out the window at the offending car. It explodes in a massive fireball near the vehicle, which swerves off the road in panic*
Reno: YOâ
Reeve: Pretty neat, huh? I imbued that model with a built-in grenade for situations exactly like this! Now no one dares toâ WHAT IN THE NAME OF SHIVAâS FROZEN ARSE IS THAT SILVER-HAIRED BASTARD DOING STANDING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD?!
*Reeve floors it, the figure goes flying over the hood*
Rule: List the first line of your last 10 fics (posted or WIP) and see if there's a pattern. If you don't have 10 fics, then as many first lines as you do have!
I was tagged by @aelkurai-art, thank you :D
Smell the Roses (Jessie & Tifa) - âJessie?â Tifaâs voice broke into her reverie.
So We Beat On (Tseng & Elena) - There is a hand in your hand. You squeeze. Count. One, two, three, four.
Fertile Soil (Reno & Rude, Reno & Tifa) - Rufus had called it a plaza, but it was no more than a well-trodden dirt circle surrounded by some of the more ambitious of Edgeâs construction sites.
New Growth (Reno & Marlene) - Marlene wound her way through the chaos of early morning Edge.
Lethal Ambition (Rufus, Tseng, Godo, the Turks and the Wutai War) - âThe quarterly projections demonstrate that we can expect to see another 3.2% rise in profits, attributable to the number of people moving to Midgar from elsewhereâŚâ
Wild Card (WIP) (Reno/OC, Reno & Tseng) - There was a flood light on the other side of the warehouse car park, and its light was starting to dim as the sky lightened.
Rude's Night Out (WIP) (Rude & Reno) - âWe could go to that place over south-side? Brass Beaver?â Reno threw the last of the construction equipment into the back of the truck and slammed the tailgate closed. âThey got a band on, I think.â
Still You Listen For Her Song (WIP) (Cissnei & Reno, Cissnei/Barret) - The tree, growing precariously at the top of a rocky outcropping, gave her a good view.
The Death God and The Dragon (WIP) (Legend & Godo) - His chocobo rounded the bend in the mountain road, and the town of Wutai came into view.
The Rain (WIP) (Reno & Tifa) - He was sprawled out in a booth, that, by the feel of it, had been salvaged from somewhere upmarket in Midgar.
Is there a pattern? I like to open with dialogue or setting location by the looks of it! One sentence turns out to not be a lot. I should probably attempt to write better hooks! Also I have a lot of WIPs...
Tagging: @thilien @poodlemoney @insulindian-phasmid @phantasmacabre and anyone else who wants to do it!
If you don't know me and stumbled upon this post by chance, you can find all my writings on A03.
My fic reading list just got some new additions! New Growth is one of my favourite Reno fics of all time. If you've never read any of Interfaceleader's fics, please treat yourself, they're a superb writer
Final Fantasy VII gives Reno a very specific mix of qualities that shouldn't coexist as neatly as they do: he's funny, stylish, lazy-seeming, competent, and directly implicated in some of the ugliest things Shinra does. That combination is what keeps him memorable. He's one of the clearest examples in VII of a character whose charisma doesn't erase his moral compromise, but does make the player want to keep watching him. He's a prominent Turk, ranking just below Tseng, and across the Compilation he keeps turning up as a recurring antagonist, occasional uneasy ally, and one of the faces most associated with Shinra's covert arm.
In the original game, his role is fairly straight-forward at first; he's one of the human faces of Shinra's power. Sephiroth is mythic, Jenova is cosmic horror, Hojo is clinical monstrosity - Reno feels much more immediate than that. He's the company man sent to do the ugly work on the ground. He goes after Aerith, fights Cloud, and plays a direct part in the Sector 7 plate operation. That gives him a different kind of menace. He doesn't feel abstract, he feels like the kind of person an ordinary citizen of Midgar could actually be destroyed by.
What complicates him is that the series never leaves him as just the smirking corporate hitman. Before Crisis, Advent Children, and the Remake project all expand him into someone with a stronger internal life, clearer loyalties, and visible strain around what Shinra has done. Advent Children, in particular, makes a point of Reno and Rude talking about Shinra's need to atone for "putting the world into its current, pathetic state". That doesn't wipe his slate clean, but it does matter. The series is interested in him as someone who can keep functioning inside a rotten structure long enough that his conscience dulls, then slowly starts scraping back into awareness after the worst damage is already done.
Archetypally, Reno sits somewhere between the trickster enforcer, the charming lieutenant, and the battle-flirt rival. He's not the cold professional type like Tseng or the stoic bruiser type like Rude. He's the Turk with the biggest social presence. He needles people, talks casually in tense situations, and often comes across as though he's treating the whole world like a conversation he can't quite be bothered to take seriously. That attitude is part-image, part-defense mechanism, and part-genuine temperament. It makes him very easy to like, and very easy to underestimate.
Psychology
Reno's psychology is built around compartmentalisation. More than anything else, that's the trait that explains how he functions. He works in a job that requires intimidation, surveillance, kidnapping, and mass violence in service of Shinra. He also retains a loose, unserious, almost playful social manner much of the time. Those two sides only coexist because he's very good at splitting action from feeling. He does the job first. Whatever moral reaction he has gets pushed down, redirected into sarcasm, or dealt with later if there's time.
That tendency is especially visible around Sector 7. In the original game and Remake, Reno is one of the Turks directly involved in the pillar operation, which makes him complicit in a mass-casualty atrocity. Remake adds something the original only gestures at more lightly: visible guilt. In the Shinra Building, Tseng tells Reno to rest because he's injured, and both Reno and Rude express guilt over their role in the plate drop while Tseng tries to ease their consciences. This confirms Reno isn't emotionally untouched by what he does. The problem isn't absence of all feeling, it's that he keeps working anyway.
Reno doesn't strike me as a character clearly written around a specific disorder in the way some others are. What feels most plausible is chronic emotional suppression combined with stress habituation. He's spent years in a job where moral injury would be almost unavoidable, and the way he copes seems to involve irony, casualness, and heavy reliance on his team. He often gives the impression of someone who keeps things moving forward by never fully stopping to process what they mean.
A trauma-informed read makes some sense, especially across the wider Compilation, because the Turks as a whole are repeatedly exposed to violence, catastrophe, and morally compromising work. If I had to argue for symptoms, emotional numbing and avoidance would be the strongest. He can be glib in situations where a more openly affected person would break tone completely. That kind of glibness can be personality, but it can also be regulation. It's often how people keep control when the alternative would be feeling too much.
I don't think ASPD or anything in that area fits him well. Reno can be callous and he can absolutely be cruel in the course of his work, but his later guilt, his loyalty to other Turks, and his capacity for unease all work against a strongly antisocial reading. He doesn't read as someone devoid of conscience, he reads as someone who's learned to work around conscience for the sake of survival, loyalty, and professional identity.
His relationship to danger is also worth mentioning. Reno's very comfortable in high-risk situations. He seems energised by fast conflict, banter in combat, and the general adrenaline of Turk work. That can look thrill-seeking on the surface, and some of it probably is. It also reads like someone who's most comfortable when the situation is external and immediate. Quiet aftermaths seem harder for him than active crisis.
Strengths and Flaws
Reno's biggest strength is competence. The relaxed presentation can distract from that, but he's extremely capable. He's a senior Turk, a recurring boss-level threat, and consistently treated as one of Shinra's most reliable operatives. His weapon and fighting style are distinctive, he keeps functioning under pressure, and he remains effective across multiple major crises. He also appears in Compilation material as an experienced field operative with skills extending beyond just fighting.
He's also socially smart. Reno knows how to control tone, unsettle opponents, and keep a kind of upper hand in conversation even when he's technically losing ground. That's a real asset in a series where personality often shows up through combat banter and brief confrontations rather than long, introspective scenes. He's quick, adaptive, and hard to fluster for long.
Another strength is loyalty. It's selective loyalty, not moral loyalty, but it's still one of the clearest steadying features in him. Reno's bonds with Rude, Tseng, and the Turks more broadly are among the most consistent things about him. When his professional world starts destabilising, those ties are a large part of what keeps him coherent. In Advent Children and later material, that loyalty extends into helping with damage control and atonement, which suggests that once Shinra as a corporate machine collapses, the human relationships matter more to him than the institution itself.
His flaws are serious. The biggest is moral passivity in the face of authority. Reno isn't some true believer in Shinra's ideology, but he does the work. That distinction matters less than he probably wants it to. A lot of his worst actions happen because he accepts the logic of the system he serves and keeps moving inside it. He may joke, complain, or feel bad afterward, but he still participates.
He's also emotionally avoidant. His humour is one of the main reasons people love him, but it's also one of the main ways he avoids vulnerability. Reno rarely presents himself plainly. There's almost always a layer of attitude between him and the situation. That makes him entertaining. It also makes him hard to fully trust, because it's never obvious how much of what he's projecting is sincerity and how much is management.
There's a streak of carelessness in him, too, or at least the appearance of it. Sometimes that's calculated looseness rather than genuine sloppiness, but either way it contributes to his image as someone who can be too casual about deadly serious situations. In a man with a cleaner moral record, that would come off as rogueish charm. In Reno, it can also make him look disturbingly comfortable with violence.
Relationships
RUDE
This is easily Reno's most important relationship in canon. Rude is his regular partner, his opposite in temperament, and the person he feels most natural beside. Reno is talkative, expressive, needling, and loose; Rude is terse, reserved, steady, and much harder to read. The pairing works because each of them gives the other definition; Reno feels livelier next to Rude, and Rude feels warmer next to Reno. The series leans on that dynamic constantly, and for good reason.
There's genuine trust there. They fight together, plan together, and keep showing up as a unit. Their banter and coordination suggest long familiarity rather than mere co-worker professionalism. Advent Children especially leans into this by giving them a semi-comic double act while also making it clear they're still operating as a serious team. When the Turks start showing more visible regret and a desire to make amends, Reno and Rude move through that transition together. Neither of them has to explain much to the other.
Emotionally, Rude is also one of the few people around whom Reno seems least performative. He still jokes, obviously, but the dynamic feels settled. Reno doesn't have to dominate the social tone with Rude the way he often does with everyone else. The relationship is probably the clearest evidence that there's something solid in him underneath the attitude.
TSENG
Tseng is Reno's superior and one of the main people structuring his professional life. Reno works directly beneath him, and that makes their relationship important for understanding Reno's psychology. Tseng represents authority that Reno actually accepts; he may be flippant in speech, but he follows Tseng's lead and seems to trust his judgment more than he trusts Shinra in the abstract. Reno's loyalty often looks less like devotion to the company and more like loyalty to the Turk hierarchy and the people inside it.
There's also a strong implication that Tseng is one of the few people who can cut through Reno's surface casualness. In Remake, after the plate fall, Tseng is the one in the office with Reno and Rude as they express guilt, and he's the one trying to manage that atmosphere. That scene says a lot about the internal structure of the Turks; Tseng is the person who absorbs pressure from below and transmits orders from above, and Reno, in turn, seems to accept that arrangement even when the moral cost is obvious.
So their relationship is respectful, functional, and not especially emotionally open. Even so, Tseng clearly matters to him; in later Compilation material, concern for missing or injured comrades repeatedly includes Tseng, which reinforces that these aren't disposable work ties for Reno, but are among the central loyalties of his life.
ELENA
Elena brings out a slightly different side of Reno because she's newer, less seasoned, and more openly eager. Reno often comes across with her the way an older, more experienced team member does around someone still proving herself: more teasing, more dismissive at times, but still firmly within the same group. She helps show that Reno isn't just Rude's other half; he's also one of the more established Turks, someone operating from a position of familiarity within the team.
Their dynamic tends to be less emotionally central than Reno/Rude or Reno/Tseng, but it's useful because Elena's seriousness highlights how performative Reno's looseness can be. She often takes the job very straight; Reno rarely does, at least on the surface. That contrast makes his professionalism easier to miss until you remember he's still one of the people she's learning from and working beside.
CLOUD STRIFE
Reno's relationship with Cloud is one of those recurring rival dynamics that VII is very good at. It starts in the church when Reno arrives to capture Aerith and recognises Cloud as ex-SOLDIER by his eyes. From there, Cloud becomes one of the main people disrupting Reno's work, embarrassing him, and forcing direct confrontation. Reno's manner toward Cloud has a taunting, lightly amused edge a lot of the time, which helps make their encounters memorable.
What's interesting here is that Reno never treats Cloud as just another obstacle after that initial point. There's a sort of recurring professional recognition there; Cloud is dangerous, unusual, and inconvenient, and Reno clearly registers that quickly. Their fights have more personality than many standard hero-villain encounters because Reno approaches them with banter rather than solemn hatred.
By the time you get into later material, especially Advent Children-era territory, their relationship shifts into a less purely antagonistic space because the Turks themselves shift. They don't become Cloud's friends, exactly, but the old Shinra-vs-AVALANCHE binary has weakened. Reno can therefore interact with Cloud more as a chaotic former enemy than as a pure antagonist.
AERITH GAINSBOROUGH
Reno's connection to Aerith is important because it shows both his role within Shinra's machinery and some of the limits inside him. He's one of the Turks sent to monitor and capture her, which places him directly in the long history of Shinra's exploitation of Aerith as the last Cetra. In the church encounter, though, there's a telling detail; he warns his troops not to step on her flowers. It's a small moment, but one players tend to remember because it suggests a degree of care, restraint, or at least awareness that sits oddly beside his role as captor.
I wouldn't over-romanticise that - he's still there to take her, he's still participating in something oppressive. Even so, the flower warning is useful because it captures Reno's whole deal: moments of recognisable humanity sitting inside clearly inhumane work. He can notice something delicate and preserve it in one breath while enforcing Shinra's will in the next.
RUFUS SHINRA
Reno's relationship to Rufus is less emotionally vivid than his ties to the other Turks, but it's still important. After Shinra's collapse, the remaining Turks continue to work for Rufus rather than simply vanishing, and Advent Children frames that work partly in terms of repaying Shinra's debt to the world. That suggests Reno's allegiance to Rufus survives the fall of the old corporate order, though in a changed form.
Rufus represents another kind of authority from Tseng; Tseng is close, immediate, operational, while Rufus is the larger political figure the Turks orbit. Reno following him even after everything implies either deep habit, genuine trust in Rufus specifically, or simply the fact that the Turks don't really know how to stop being Turks. Probably all three.
Just For Fun / Typology
MBTI - ESTP
He's fast, responsive, socially agile, highly comfortable in conflict, and very tuned in to immediate situations. He talks in the moment, reacts in the moment, and seems to enjoy the give-and-take of direct engagement. His energy is outward, practical, and kinetic rather than reflective or system-building.
The Ti side of ESTP also works. Reno doesn't come across as sentiment-led in his decision-making most of the time. He improvises, reads angles, and keeps himself emotionally slippery. He's not cold, exactly, but he does prefer staying clever and mobile over staying emotionally transparent.
I can see arguments for ENTP because of the banter and the playful verbal style, but ESTP still feels stronger because he's so grounded in action, immediate pressure, and real-time adjustment. He feels like someone who lives through contact with the situation in front of him rather than through abstraction.
MORAL ALIGNMENT - Lawful Evil shifting to True Neutral
During Shinra's active rule, Reno is very hard to place anywhere but on the Evil side of the chart. He works for an oppressive regime, carries out kidnappings and violent enforcement, and is complicit in atrocities, including the Sector 7 plate operation. At the same time, he's disciplined enough, institution-bound enough, and team-loyal enough that Chaotic doesn't fit him well. He's casual in manner, but not actually anti-structure. He functions inside hierarchy very effectively.
Later material complicates that. Once Shinra falls, Reno and the remaining Turks continue operating, but the tone shifts toward clean-up, protection, and atonement rather than domination. That doesn't erase what came before, though it does make a strict ongoing Evil read less exact for post-VII Reno than for original-game Reno. If I were to pick one stable label across all phases, Lawful Evil is still the safest because it captures the era that defines him most, but as a more developmental read he moves toward True Neutral in Advent Children-era material.
Conclusion
Reno stays popular because he's genuinely fun to watch, and because the series gives him just enough conscience to keep him from becoming boringly cruel. He's sharp, competent, loyal, and charismatic. He's also compromised, avoidant, and willing to keep doing terrible work far past the point where he can claim not to understand its cost. The guilt is there. The problem is that the guilt usually arrives after the action, not before it.
That tension is the whole point of him. Reno feels human in ways that make his complicity more interesting, not less serious.
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