ryvius replied to your post: ryvius replied to your post: ...
Thanks! I’m not too active on Tumblr since there are not many in depth/analytical discussions on this platorm and that’s what I go for, so I’m always glad to see someone making these types of posts in my favorite fandoms. I also remember the days where there were barely any fans on the Shinra side (especially Rufus) of the fandom to begin with, which sucked.
yep i if i can get a little sentimental here regarding rufus shinra and my experiences with being a fan of his in early fandom, let me just copypaste a comment i left on reddit not long ago:
I remember feeling so... empty before Advent Children came out.
-- Also, just as a side note, remember when Advent Children hadn't yet come out, all we had was trailers, and everyone was convinced that the guy in the wheelchair under the white cloak was Sephiroth? God, I remember being one of maybe two or three people on LiveJournal fandom at the time screaming that it was Rufus, and everyone called us stupid fangirls. And we were super right. I don't know why that just popped into my head. I feel like that's a memory that I've been repressing for fifteen years that just decided to unearth itself and say hello. ANYWAY.
But regarding the Diamond Weapon showdown, yeah, I may have spent a way longer time in the return to Midgar sequence searching for anything -- literally anything -- that could've possibly given me the tiniest hint of a notion that Rufus was still alive and the whole thing was a bait-and-switch.
A lot of people pointed to Aeris's death as being the thing that they couldn't cope with and get over in Final Fantasy VII. I did go through that to some extent (I definitely tried all of the hoaxes to bring her back), but for me? The big one was Rufus. At least people who were torn up about Aeris had a whole community to help them grieve. She had fan shrines and tons of fanart and fanfiction dedicated to her. And, at the end, at least her death meant something. The game gave us closure.
Being a Rufus fan, I had... nothing. Less than nothing. Zack had more fans than he did at that time, and back then Zack only existed as a visual reveal and an optional, missable flashback scene with a total of maybe fifteen lines.
And there was no canonical goodbye for him. We get Heidegger going, "The President's dead so fuck it ig" and the Turks lamenting that Shinra's finished, and that's... it. Not only did no one mourn his death, but his death meant nothing. It did nothing. It accomplished nothing. And no one even had the decency to say his fucking name after the fact.
I just remember thinking to myself, "They wouldn't do that. He's the fucking president of Shinra. They wouldn't just kill him like that. And he did literally so much good and bad after the Reunion happened. He needs to have a final confrontation with Cloud and the party. We need to fight him again, we need to talk to him again, we need to -- I don't know -- something!"
And nothing ever came.
And as a kid... idk it was just really hard to handle. I didn't really know why I liked him so much, because I was too young at the time to have the language to describe all of the potential I saw in his character and how I felt that his arc hadn't really completed at all, so I never said anything to anyone. No one seemed like they would've cared anyway. So I just kind of took those feelings and put them in a box in my head and didn't look at them for a long, long time.
All of those feelings came flooding back when the Advent Children trailers started dropping and I slowly pieced together that Rufus was the man in the wheelchair. I think I may have cried then. Because his death in OG wasn't fair. It wasn't fair and it didn't feel right -- but Square Enix was bringing him back to me. I had been right all along: he was important, and his story wasn't over yet.
By the time AC actually released, I knew quite a bit more about storytelling and character arc structure. I could not have been more elated than the moment when Rufus stood up out of that chair, pulled the cloak off of himself, snarked at Kadaj, threw Jenova's head over the side of a fucking building, and then jumped off himself.
Since the OG, to date, Square Enix has never done wrong by Rufus's character. Every piece of his redemption arc has been so carefully crafted and elegantly executed at every single turn. Nothing felt hamfisted or forced, no part of his road to redemption was twisted at a weird angle in order to get the pieces to fit together the way that Nojima wanted. It was all completely 100% earned by the experiences and hardships of the character, and the way in which he changed was so perfectly aligned with the pre-established traits of his character while also tying into one of the main themes of the story as a whole.
Being a video game fan is hard sometimes. A mixture of greed and fanservice has, throughout the years, ruined a not insignificant chunk of my favorite characters. But not Rufus. Never Rufus. Nojima and Nomura love him as much as I do, and that's a really, really special thing to have as a fan.
Even if Remake goes completely off the rails and the story gets garbled into an incomprehensible mess due to this whole fate/destiny/timeline shit, I'll still buy every part of the series and request time off to play them all on day one because I know that Rufus Shinra will be done right, and that's a comfort that seldom few games ever afford me anymore.
