Hi Fury, I love your FF7 writing and commentary lol. I discovered you on AO3 while I was looking for a good cloti fic and none really... felt true to the actual characters. Lots of them were well written, but just didn’t feel like the iconic characters from the game, especially Cloud. (Ex: Turned Cloud into a hopeless cuck or fuckboy with national debt sized ANGST). I'm curious what you think are the most common misconceptions fans have of each of the Avalanche characters?
This message arrives at a funny time, I've been thinking to myself I should go back and edit some of Cloud's angst out of my longfic because it's too cringe lol. Glad it didn't seem too over the top to you.
Honestly as with many fandoms the misconceptions are many and they vary according to different sub populations. FF7 is even worse because we get totally different versions of the characters via the compilation so some people are just writing from a totally different framework to begin with. But yeah sure I'll take a swing at this question and try to share what I think are the most important anchors for everyone.
Cloud tends to be written as excessively vulnerable and sad and soft. His insecurity gets mistaken as a lack of confidence, which I think he has in abundance in OG where he's routinely a cocky little shit. I'm playing ff7 rebirth now and it's bizarre how this game has made him so dysfunctional at talking to people that the girls regularly have to bail him out. I think he's a pretty funny and empathetic person, which is what shines through any tough guy act and draws people to him. I think he understands how others are feeling easily and it's a part of why internally he's so sensitive to this perceived distance between himself and others, and fears he'll never measure up. He's stubborn, a bit selfish, and he carries a lot of shame, but he has a bias to action and gets easily invested in the people around him, sometimes despite himself.
Tifa's similar, tends to either get amplified as a badass by people who like that she's a martial arts girl and want her to be tough or made into perfect waifu material on the other side. She's both. Tifa's pretty emotionally indecisive in her personal life and very well anchored in her view of the world. She wants to grapple with the complexity of the things she sees happening around her without reaching for an easy answer. She's a "two disparate things can be true" character with a worldview to match. In another contrast she has a lot of conviction but she's very prone to self doubt and finds herself drowning in it easily.
Aeris gets either turned into this very soft-spoken naive vulnerable feminine girl (more popular in the crisis core era) or she's all sass all the time. Sad truth is I think the girls feature mostly in shipping and in all of Aeris' ships people tend to like her as a more subdued partner who can highlight cloud/tifa/Zack/Sephiroth/whoever's strength and complexity which is just sad. Anyway, Aeris is curious, independent, lonely, and deeply unforthcoming. She keeps secrets and can be quite cunning. She likes people but seldom lets them in. One of the only characters who doesn't personally give us her backstory, but has it shared by someone else. She behaves like someone who has already learned that the world is dangerous and in the end you can only rely on yourself, and I think that internal sense of self reliance is amplified by the knowledge that she's literally very different from other people. I think her optimism and cheer is strategic more than it is organic.
Barret gets ignored to the point that people who bother to write about him tend to do it well. He comes off well in the remake too which certainly helps. Barret spells out a lot of what drives him. He's angry at an unjust and unwise world and he's angry at himself for having ever believed in it and for letting others get hurt. He's committed to his course of action to fight for the future (and Marlene) but he can see all of the complexities and contradictions in what he's doing. He tends to rationalize them and move on. Unlike Tifa, he avoids spending too much time in his own head, just convinces himself he's doing what he has to and moves on to doing it.
Red. I don't know what people are doing with Red, I haven't really read anything that digs into him. I am not there yet but I think rebirth made the call to make him seem more childish and like overtly putting on an act, and I think that might be supported by a register shift in the Japanese script... But in the English my sense of things was never that he really hid anything, and being kind of quiet and measured was in his personality. I think Red cares a lot about dignity. He finds responsibilities for himself and takes them very seriously, and clearly admires and loves Bugenhagen but is still too naive to appreciate all the wisdom he's trying to impart. Red is thoughtful though and in a rush to learn and do his family proud.
Yuffie is usually too cute. More remake influence here where she's largely a genki girl and mood maker. She is those things but she's got a real mean streak in OG. She's sneaky, underhanded, and thinks the ends justify the means, especially her ends and her means. She is extremely proud and the most important thing to her is power. She lents Wutai's lost culture and tradition but she's modern and rebellious rather than traditional herself (thus her psuedo gyaru stylings). She does not care easily about other people and could become a tyrant someday but it's all tempered by the fact that she's 16 and really funny. For Yuffie I like to remember that she's got limits like Doom of the Living and Bloodfest and write accordingly.
Cait Sith/Reeve. Honestly I don't know again. But I'm going to guess that he goes the way of most Shinra characters in fic, which is to say he's probably not enough of a bastard. Reeve may have tried to stop platefall and he may feel for the people of Midgar, but let's not pretend he feels for all of them equally. He has always been the guy in position to do something about the plates and he did not do that. Actually I think one thing both fic and compilation canon tend to do is position Reeve as Shinra's saviour, the guy who is going to fix it all because he has a good heart. He's not though. He's complicit and he kidnapped and threatened a 4 year old to get what the company wanted. IDK about Cait Sith, I kind of see them as continuous so that'll have to do.
Vincent is usually valorized. In fic Hojo is responsible for everything more often than not and Vincent is therefore mostly depressed and rather blameless. Sometimes he's the mechanism for fixing everything where if he had only saved Sephiroth (who is definitely his son because Hojo is an uggo), everything would have worked out. Vincent's also often cast as unusually wise or patient or understanding which I think people like in him as a romantic protagonist particularly. He tends not to do anything too bad, only enough to be angsty but forgivable about later. I think what's usually missing is his really sardonic sense of humour (he's very flat and funny in between being philosophical and floral) and, once again, the sense that he is kind of a bastard. Vincent blames himself excessively, sure, but he is not blameless. He killed people for a living and only cared when company bullshit blew back on someone he cared about. He is correct in his own assessment that he is dangerous. The berserker limit breaks are a bit of a metaphor for how poorly controlled his demons are and I think that's something else that also gets missed, or those demons are treated like external forces that act on him rather than parts of him. There is a lot of ugliness in Vincent. I wish we saw it more.
Cid. Man. Back in the day everybody had Cid be a big Dukes of Hazzard fan. I feel like I would have to read more Valenwind to speak authoritatively on what folks do with Cid now. I can say I think we've all shied away from Shera though. It isn't comfortable but it's a big part of Cid. He's a prickly, resentful asshole at the best of times who is too busy being lost in his own pain to care about how he treats others. But of course that's not all he is. He's also incredibly idealistic and his emotional volatility comes from being a very emotional guy, in every direction. Sometimes that's awe and wonder in human potential and the universe as a whole. They're two sides of the same coin in Cid.
Aaaaand Sephiroth. Where to start. People usually make him a sadist or the most tragic man alive, or both in quick succession. His actions are understood as Jenova's doing or a personal obsession with Cloud or, once again, both. Comp Sephiroth is just not even the same character so there's a lot of drift, but OG Sephiroth to me is a dark mirror to Avalanche. He hates Shinra and he hates the world that created it and he cannot stomach his own hate and pain so he needs to transmute it into something else. All of his grandiose speeches have a rhyme and reason to them - he's always talking about what he is or what he is becoming, and he's also always casting what he's doing as just, or understandable, or a necessary precondition for the world's transformation. Everyone will live on as a part of him so he isn't really doing anything wrong, you see. He doesn't connect to others and doesn't understand their feelings in part because he doesn't understand his own, and part of why Cloud keeps making him uncomfortable is that he keeps reaching out. But Sephiroth doesn't particularly care about Cloud or about anyone. This was one of the big twists of the game right? They've gone back on it now but to Sephiroth all of that torment was just a means to an end and he doesn't even bother talking to the party once he has what he wants. Sephiroth might have just killed himself if he could accept that he was sad and hopeless, but he can't, so he has to kill everyone instead. Could get into Jenova too but this is already too long sorry sorry sorry
Every time it's hot out and i complain about the summer sun and heat someone's always like "Well can't you wear something other than all black all day every single day" NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
