#rivkae writes

[rivkae-winters]

Zack Fair, Violence, and Tragedy

Over the last month or two I’ve seen several posts about the nature of Zack Fair’s tragedy and his seeming heel-toe-turn and thought I’d chime in. 

Also like last time: this is only my interpretation of canon, there is no one true analysis to take as gospel. If you disagree/differ in opinion/even just want to talk please reblog or dm! I enjoy talking to other people about this sort of thing, fandom is all about discussion after all!

While I agree with the sentiment I’ve seen going around that Zack’s relationship to violence plays a role there are other nuances and factors at play here. I’d argue that it’s more accurate to say that Zack is becoming more aware of personal and professional culture outside of SOLDIER and outside of both ShinRa’s constraining grip and Angeal’s attempts at protection. Even then it takes great personal tragedy caused by the inherent contradictions of ShinRa’s reality for him to realize that he has functionally been on the wrong side.  

Sure he’s not callous like Cloud is in the beginning of original and Remake, but he certainly isn’t horrified at his actions just because there is violence. I’d argue the violence of his actions isn’t the main horror to him in isolation. I’d argue that even the death that results from violence isn’t what the core of the issue is either. 

Zack’s hinging point is more his loyalty and his pride. What he does for other people and what he believes in and of himself. Specifically these things in conjunction with his desire to be a good person. 

The language of Pride, the non-localized direct translation of the word hokori or 誇り(JP CC Script), is what’s going to be used here rather than Honor. 

誇り | Hokori - To take pride in; To boast of

Definition Sources: 1, 2, 3

Just keep in mind that I’ve written this from as neutral a point of view as possible on the matter of pride since the Western perception definitively does not apply. To be proud is not a crime and it is not foolish it simply is. 

Zack initially places his pride in SOLDIER- in what being a SOLDIER means to him. In how being a SOLDIER is his and that they are his people and thus he lets ShinRa policies define how he frames his morality. Thus ShinRa defines good in Zack Fair’s life. 

Zack wants to be a hero. He wants to help people. He is trusting and kind and respectful to people consistently outside of the conflict of the mass desertion. Zack genuinely wants to be a good person and help other people, good or otherwise. He is led to believe by ShinRa propaganda that the best way to help people or to be anything meaningful in this world is through them. This is a baited trap that he falls into, Zack is prime prey this trap was intended to catch. 

He is angry at Genesis and horrified by Angeal, especially at the beginning, not for cruelty or violence or even really death… He is angry at them for their betrayal. Sure he is violent and angry in the instance he thinks Angeal has murdered his own mother, as with Genesis and his parents, but that does not define his antagonism, his hatred, his regret, his sense of justice with them at all. 

 Zack does not raise his sword at Genesis for the people of Banora, he raises his sword for SOLDIER. 

Zack understandably feels, and has been, betrayed. 

He is hurt and angry and alone in a way he’s never been since he got into the SOLDIER program. He falls deeper into the illusions of ShinRa for that reason, angry and hurting and grieving the life he had with people in it who will never return. There is a deep sense of nostalgia throughout Crisis Core in the sense of the word’s initial meaning: the pain of missing home. Specifically the homes we find in people.

Even as he believes in ShinRa's twisted reality Zack wants to help. He wants to protect those he cares for. Zack wants to be good. Unfortunately in Zack Fair’s life the undisputed definition of good is now written by the ShinRa Electric Power Corporation alone.

Then he meets Aerith. 

Suddenly ShinRa’s version of right and wrong have opposition but the control that ShinRa has over his life, total and complete as it is, prevents that from sinking in. Zack is perceptive though, around Aerith he is her version of good and then he has to go back to what equates to his phase of reality. A sanctuary is not safe, not truly, when watchers are peering in through the back door ready to drag you out by your feet if you misstep. 

Zack wants to be a man Aerith or anyone won’t be scared of. He wants to do that not because he is suddenly horrified at his own violence but rather in consideration of others. Zack is highly empathetic after all once he can see someone else’s perspective. He wants to be what Aerith wants, even if he doesn’t really and truly understand it yet, because he cares about her and cares about her opinion. He cares about her comfort. Zack still puts most of his pride within SOLDIER though. That means that Aerith’s morals cannot sink through his skin to his center, not like Angeal’s had. She makes him think but she is not shaping his mind, he is left to do that himself.

 Zack spends a lot of time questioning Angeal and being upset at and about him off screen even more than on screen. We don’t get a front row seat for all of it. The big takeaway is that Zack doesn’t shed Angeal’s morals that he’s taken on himself. He can’t after all, not with ShinRa only just seeming tarnished. ShinRa would need to rust and crumble fully before he actually can let them go. Before he can be free in his own mind.

ShinRa chips and rusts in an instant under Sephiroth’s hand. The last holdout crumbled in the fight of two victims of ShinRa and someone who will become one soon. ShinRa is no longer the defined of good, not after what Zack sees is the response to the Nibelheim Incident.

ShinRa not being good, worse even ShinRa being bad breaks the entire morality system. The illusions crack and Zack is forced to examine himself, his actions, and his biases in ways Aerith made him want to but that he couldn’t afford to truly indulge in. Even more that he was scared of self introspection in a sense, of the paradigm of his reality shifting even further. 

He eventually truly reframes his actions and has to reckon with them (and himself) at the end of the game, chapter 9 and onwards. It is only then that he actually LOOKS and is fully horrified by what he sees of himself. That horror only progresses as he fights for both his and Cloud’s lives. That horror only builds as he realizes he’s exactly the person who his girlfriend SHOULD be terrified of despite his best attempts- that he’s everything she was talking about. He’s everything she was talking about even after trying to change the way he acts around her. 

To abuse the innate metaphors: Zack Fair goes to Nibelheim, a well trained attack dog, still seeing relatively little wrong with fulfilling ShinRa’s orders. Zack is only then on the cusp of figuring out that he does not want to be there, that he is the antagonist of the planet’s (and Aerith’s) story unwittingly. 

Zack Fair leaves Nibelheim beaten. He tries to go back to the safety of what was once his home prior to ShinRa only to be waylaid. 

Zack Fair leaves Banora free and irrevocably changed. 

He is free in the sense that the illusions he held himself too are crumbling even more with knowledge that his demons are men too. He is free through the knowledge that he is one of those demons. , that he has been shaped to be one, and that good intentions pave a terribly walkable path to hell. 

Zack leaves with the knowledge that he was the monster in the closet. The knowledge that his sword was not just the executioner’s blade but the enforcer’s. The sword kept clean in favor of bloody hands and higher risks is now drowning in pools of it. Zack leaves with the knowledge that he never would have been truly free. 

Yet he is in the sense that he can choose- actually choose- what he wants, what he values. He chooses Aerith and he chooses Cloud as he has each time before. He chooses violence. It is something he knows and among what he is good at. It is not all he is but it is a tool he can use. 

He chooses to pay the price of freedom. 

Crisis Core is a tragedy and Zack and Genesis both are tragic figures at its center. Zack’s arc is angled to the viewer for maximum effect but Genesis’s does mirror it in a way just on an offset path already initiated. Sephiroth is also a tragic character, undeniably so. However structure wise his role is more murky given the way he has the ability to be the god waiting in the machine, a guaranteed victory or unavoidable altered trajectory should he choose to act, for most of the story. 

And that’s a large part of why I love Zack as a character, aside from things I’ve said before about what makes him such a good narrator. Zack is the unlucky prodigy at the center of a story about wars, abusers, connections, and perspectives. He wants to be good, he wants to be a person that helps. 

He can’t, not really, not in the way he wants. 

Crisis Core is a cautionary tale about exactly that going wrong and how anyone can be taken advantage of. 

[rivkae-winters]

You Will Rot

I adore this entire scene and their entire exchange and there are plenty of other posts out there on it but I’ve never come across the points I wanted to make hence why I'm writing this. Specifically on the implications of exactly what rots since that latched into my brain and would not let me go.

As always: this is only my interpretation of canon, there is no one true analysis to take as gospel. In fact please interact with your thoughts if you have any! I enjoy talking to other people about this sort of thing, fandom is all about discussion after all!

My stance on this line is one of nuance. I tend to think Sephiroth chose the worst words he could think of without fully considering the full implications.  He said the thing he knew that would hurt Genesis the most after the entire conversation beforehand.

What does it mean to be told to rot? Or even so told you will rot. 

In the FF7 universe, most explicitly displayed in CC, bodies dissolve. Corpses, both monster and human, are depicted as dissolving to return to the Lifestream. This is re-confirmed in the remake. 

Rot is not a term for humans, it’s not a cultural concept the same way it is for us in the real world. To decay and decompose are not processes that sentient beings undergo.

Rot is something for objects- things that live but aren’t alive enough or connected enough quote-un-quote to return to the Lifestream in the same dramatic manner. Rot is for things like food and flowers and things that are below the level of humans or animals or anything with general sentience. 

Sephiroth is telling Genesis here, he is not just a monster: he is insignificant. He is telling Genesis that he is not enough of a sentient being to return to the Lifestream and he’ll continue falling apart in real time just like a piece of fruit left forgotten and rotting on the kitchen counter. He is telling Genesis that at the end of the day he’s already dead in every way that matters and is no longer a person. Sephiroth is telling Genesis that he will have no mercy given to him at the end of the day: he will rot and waste like an object lacking sentience and then he will be left there.

Sephiroth is digging into Genesis’s own deepest insecurities here. Genesis fears not just being irrelevant but being rendered a non-entity, to be kept or out of control. Genesis has defined his entire life as a journey to be someone to be enough to be someone worthy of love and praise and being seen. Objects aren’t people, and Genesis is an object to Sephiroth with that statement. 

The only person who could help him no longer considers him a person- nor a thing with sentience. 

Obviously this is all over analyzing Sephiroth’s dialogue. This line was said with calculation, yes, but it was also somewhat reflexive. Sephiroth is under a lot of stress in this scene and Genesis has been slinging everything he never wanted to be told at him in a single conversation. Genesis then has the audacity to try to act as if he did something good. While Sephiroth’s world is collapsing around him and his other defected friend acts like he did him a favor. Sephiroth is angry, who wouldn’t be angry. Sephiroth thought the world of Genesis prior to his defection, he thought the world of both of them and those illusions have been crashing down around him.

So he uses Genesis’s own grief over his former friend’s tattered life that manifests as self deprecation and self dehumanization against him. He confirms the de-humanizing rhetoric that Genesis has been attaching to his own existence. Sephiroth in his pain and anger pushes past the fears that Genesis has been externalizing to what he knows Genesis is truly afraid of. 

If Genesis considers himself a monster than by the standards of the person Sephiroth thought he knew he is already living out his worst fears. He is nothing, he is nothing without his mind. If Genesis wants to be what he once considered a non-entity: wants to wallow in the rot and non-personhood so much then he can. 

Sephiroth turns his back on, in his mind, the moving corpse of the long dead Genesis Rhapsodos and walks away. 

You will Rot You are Nothing

There is also something to be said here for the Kanji used in the original!

I’m not touching on this as much as I would have liked to but it would be criminal if I didn’t at least pull out a Kanji dictionary.

I pulled Sephiroth’s line from here; warning the website is not in English at all but easy enough to navigate via context/knowledge of story events and the characters' Japanese names. 

Sephiroth’s line is: 朽ち果てろ kuchihatero

This is translated in the official English release as “You will rot” and in a pre-US release fan translation from May of 2007 roughly the same way as “Go decay”

朽  Decay; Rot; Remain in Seclusion

果  Fruit; Reward; carry out; achieve; complete; end; finish; succeed

[1][2] [3 specifically for 朽][4 specifically for 果]

Thanks for reading!

[rivkae-winters]

Last Line Tag

Thanks for the tag @late-to-the-fandom <3 (Sorry this took me so long to get to!)

Genesis may not be long dead- Maybe even- No. Genesis was not a child fleeing to caves when his parents ignored him anymore- ShinRa wanted them both dead and gone. They sought to eradicate the problem of rabid dogs shaking off the leash in perpetuity.

Tagging: @time-official; @birdblacksocialclub; @foreststarflaime;

@errantnight; @dendrite-blues; @ilminnestrone (No pressure!)

[rivkae-winters]

Early (and long) wip wednesday

Angeal couldn’t push the anxiety from his mind, over just where Genesis was, even as Sephiroth was pressed up against his back doing his best to distract him. Still he couldn’t stop the dark thoughts bubbling over into compulsion and worry. 

The roux he was mixing split and sizzled as it dried out. The unplanned soup that he’d only started on because his dove was late was ruined. It was Genesis’s favorite. Angeal stood there, his mind shorting and starting and stopping in a doomed loop. His own heartbeats felt thunderous to his own ears as they vibrated his chest. His vision started to spin at how the lights kept buzzing and the central kitchen light kept flickering.

Rough lips ignited his skin as they pressed to the back of his neck and gentle hands pulled the creaking spatula from his white knuckled grip. The silk slip of silver hair flowed into his vision. Those hands shoved the pan to the back of the stove before the blackened contents could burn any further. Sephiroth was saying something Angeal couldn’t understand although it was comforting all the same. The eye was shut off with a deafening click that rang through his being. Sephiroth’s weight was pressed fully on him and held him between the comforting weight of the other SOLDIER and a heat that reminded him too much of the one missing.

Soon enough Angeal’s mind stopped buzzing and his skin stopped feeling a thousand tiny sparks were having a parade. Sephiroth gently humming one of Genesis’s favorite tunes was a balm filling his ears. He wondered how Sephiroth would react if he knew where the leitmotif was from, how- 

Angeal stopped himself short before he could spin his mind back into knots again thinking of his missing lover. He decided to take comfort from the moment and turned fully to capture Sephiroth’s lips with his own.

“Thanks,” He murmured against his lover’s lips. Sephiroth only responded by threading his hands through Angeal’s hair and deepening the contact. Angeal let himself lean further on Sephiroth as they stood under the bulb that needed to be replaced in their kitchen flickered as if on cue. It was the one that Genesis had bought the bulb for ages ago that sat gathering dust on the back of the counter. He wondered if Genesis was going to name it something obnoxious again; a name to yell at it each time it flickered so that someone would finally change it. 

An irrational guilt bloomed in his chest with the thought to remind him of every potential sin he could commit and had committed. The emotion wasn’t unfounded either, even when he just let his mind glance over it he felt wrong thinking so much about their absent lover while in the arms of one already. As Angeal opened his mouth to apologize, Sephiroth pressed a feather-light finger up against his mouth with slightly upturned lips.

“If you apologize,” Sephiroth’s smooth low voice filled his still over-tuned senses like a rolling fog. “I’ll tell Gen.”

Genesis’s campaign to get him to ‘stop apologizing for being alive’ sat in the open unspoken and suffocating in the absence of their partner.

It was funny and hypocritical of his dove. Genesis had the same tendency. When faced with his hypocrisy Genesis only smirked and slung toned arms around Angeal’s shoulders and promised that he’d stop if Angeal did, eyes full of faked confidence and concern. He wouldn’t be able to, they both knew, at least not easily or comfortably. Gen was like that though- making impossible and beautiful promises to Angeal their entire life.

Like Dinner, his mind facetiously and traitorously thought.

His heart sank the second the thought crossed his mind though. Sephiroth almost instantly picked up on the change in mood and Angeal hid his face in the other man’s broad shoulder to avoid the concerned glint in emerald eyes. The guilt continued to pool in his stomach like briney water. That was distinctly unfair and reactionary- Genesis wasn’t absent by choice afterall. Genesis was only absent because something was happening with his abhorrent parents, otherwise a clipped and short phone call wouldn’t be dragging on this long.

Angeal disliked the fact that Genesis let those two… Harpies have any say in his life still but the situation that he’d witnessed since they were kids hadn’t fully pulled all of Genesis’s care for them from his body. Too many nights after the last scheduled affairs Angeal had stayed up to hold his dove through tears and questions of why he couldn’t simply hate them.

I hate that I still love her. Genesis’s gasping breath had pushed out. Why can’t I stop?

[rivkae-winters]

Wip Wednesday

From a new au that I’ve been working on slowly but surely! For what’s shown here it’s pretty succinctly summarized as: Angeal Hewley is Not Okay, and other fun tales. (Humans, even Jenovoid ones, are not meant to touch the river of life and return- much less go swimming in it.)

All was as it would be and they were one of those things.

Or, at least, that’s how Genesis had put it. The florid words and witty remarks and wise thoughts stated perfectly with crisp diction and a lilt that reminded Angeal of home and soft lullabies sung by a long dead father.

Step- father, an intrusive voice in Angeal’s head stated. That would be your stepfather. He batted it back with the strength of all he wished to turn against the man who was apparently the “rightful holder of that title”.

Hollander was a matter for later, Angeal chastised himself, he needed to be here now. He brought himself back to the present. To smell and feel and hold Genesis-

Genesis, Genesis, Genesis-

Soft and supple and alive and strong and muscular and whole and hale and himself in Angeal’s arms.

More himself than Angeal ever would be again.

He didn't remember what he did to convince his past version to be replaced. He didn’t really care to much less want to. It simply didn’t matter.

He simply was.

He simply was as everything simply was and that would be enough.

Genesis was different.

Starbright eyes stared into Angeal’s own underwhelming mako blues as he pulled away, finally releasing Genesis from the pressure and trapping of his arms. Wonder at even being considered worth love, worth praise, worth-

Yes, Genesis was different.

Where Angeal was plain, and underwhelming, and odd and out of place Genesis was everything. He was the sun and Angeal was happy to finally have been placed in his orbit. Then he grew despondent, seeing his sun sputter and speed towards doom.

Then-

Yelling and Hollander’s lies and Zack’s precious, precious hope and naivety as he stepped into a world Angreal had sheltered him too much from. A plea, a bargain, a pittance, a begging-

A Legacy that would nearly outlive their very planet-

That was then though, and this was now.

[rivkae-winters]

Wip Wednesday

Some Genesis flashback angst from a post-canon AU I've been working on :3

He’d dreamed of the Nibelheim reactor, that stupid ploy he’d made trying to find some way to be well, for weeks after the last instance. Genesis really had lost all his wits when he had thought the lover he’d abandoned without a word or any acknowledgement for two years would lay down at his feet. He’d tried to patch a burned and eviscerated bridge with paper and glue by telling Sephiroth that his biggest insecurity was true: he was in fact a monster. Somewhere in Genesis’s foggy pain addled selfish mind he’d thought that them both being monsters would smooth things over- bring them back together.  Instead all he’d done was prepare an altar of ruin for a much better man than he was. At the time he’d been saddened by Sephiroth’s demise- irreparably so even according to his spotty memory. How much of that was despair of losing a man he had been in love with and how much was at never having a chance to get a cure from him Genesis didn’t want to think about. Everything had made too much sense at the time, it had all seemed so logical.  Five years later Genesis had woken up in a ShinRa Special Ops Transport and wept like he hadn’t since he was a child. 

[rivkae-winters]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

SOLDIER bonds are more than skin deep, Cloud just hasn’t been around enough other SOLDIERs yet to see it. Then the Red Mage of ShinRa is in a WRO holding cell for the extremely paranoid right in front of him when a soft sensation that’s oddly familiar enters his mind. Or: SOLDIER has an open secret underutilized by the science department. The link is a web of feelings and sensations that all who become SOLDIER may traverse freely after they are guided out of their own mind. Cloud has been alone, Cloud has been trapped.

[rivkae-winters]

Wip Wednesday

More from the same post-canon au as last week!

Genesis tried to suck in a steadying breath but even to his own ears it was a gasping death knell. He kept his head bowed, careful not to look up. He didn’t want to see what he looked like in the mirror right now. As the countertop started to creek under his fingers he peeled them off. His fists instantaneously clamped shut once they were no longer clinging to the surface. Fingers burrowed in as they fought to break the skin of his palm as if it would bring him some type of relief. He wished, but the pain didn’t even steady him. As he was now it only blurred into the rest. His insides buzzed with the static of an all encompassing ache. Only the emerging silver blade of a dehydration headache was truly distinct. It near blithely occurred to him that he should remedy that. A cup and faucet were both in his line of sight after all. How ironic- You can lead a man to water but you can’t make him drink. Especially not if he thinks he knows best. Even more so if he’s passively desperate to be hurting as if it will lessen the emotional typhoon. A distinguishable pain to distract was preferable to being too alone with his thoughts right now. It didn’t help, the persistent sharp ache only served to amplify his thoughts coming to the forefront. Genesis had sealed his fate when he’d made the fatal misstep of thinking. He’d made the fatal error of letting such thoughts in instead of forcing them back down in a split second of weakness staring at Sephiroth’s form before darting away. That only led into the mistake of mulling over the reality it seemed he was going to have to live with that he was going through now.

Was he to simply nurse his former lover back to health only to play executioner at the end of whatever plot the little Cetra had concocted?