cloud-data

[cloud-data]

an objective analysis of ship content in ff7 remake!

i am a long time fan of ff7 and with rebirth rolling around the corner and ff7 fans all over the internet getting into arguments, i decided it would be a fun project to look at "shipping" content and make a judgement on which of the three most contentious ff7 ships has the most """"support""" in the current remake material!

a little background about this project: i was curious to see if there was an objective way to determine which ships of the 3 that are most commonly debated as canon (CloTi, Zerith, and Clerith) have the most content, as someone who is not aligned with any one ship. i didn't include other popular ships like AerTi and Zakkura because, as far as i know, the content for those ships is not commonly disputed! these ships, as well as the ships i did include in this post, are valid in their own right therefore this feels like a good time to explain that this is not a project meant to challenge the validity of any one ship! this is simply a thought experiment, by me, to see if there was a way that someone could objective determine which ship had the most irrefutable official content. whether you find that to be compelling enough to call one or more of these ships "canon" is not a judgement i can make. ultimately, there's no way to be completely objective. determining one scene as romantic and another as not romantic is not a purely scientific process. but i will outline the process that i used below!

how did i determine what media was included

not all ff7 content was included here. i decided to go with media i thought was representative of the remake continuity. the reason for this was to avoid doubling up on the same events, and also to be more in line with the new content, which is considered separate from the old content. i did not include the ultimania because despite this post proving the contrary, i do have a life, and going through all the ultimania plus their various translations sounded exhausting.

ff7 remake and intermission -- obviously, this was included as the central piece of media in the new continuity

crisis core -- having been recently remastered, this was included; i also felt that having been remastered spoke to its overall importance to the new content

advent children -- the developers of ff7 have noted that advent children is a piece of the new compilation as well, so it was included

trace of two pasts and picturing the past -- these two novellas told from tifa and aerith's perspective are the most recent additions to the ff7 remake franchise and were included

additionally, i included all four trailers for ff7 rebirth because of personal and fandom interest!

what scenes were included

to be as objective as possible, i looked at multiple sources to make judgements on what could be included "shipping content" for each ship. this meant browsing social media, for the most part. this way, i was not relying solely on whether or not i interpreted scenes as romantic.

initially, a tally across all 4 works yielded the following content/scene count (shown on the first graph above!):

CloTi: 54

Clerith: 35

Zerith: 30

to get this count, all scenes were included regardless of 1) whether they were interpreted for multiple ships, and 2) whether they were optional. this is simply a total of all scenes across all content.

how i narrowed it down

for the sake of maintaining objectivity, i made a few adjustments to the first tally. not all scenes could be considered objectively ship content, even with the benchmarks i was using. so additional rules were put in place and scenes were taken out if they met the following conditions:

optional: all optional scenes were removed. neither tifa nor aerith's resolution was included in the final count. the train sequence with tifa and cloud was also removed.

one-sided: this one hurt my heart a little.... but for the sake of objectivity, any scenes that were one-sided on tifa and aerith's part were removed. you might be wondering "why not cloud"? and the simple answer is because the love triangle debate about canon is centered around him. regarding Zerith, i removed scenes that were one-sided on zack's part using the same logic. i want to be clear that in no way am i criticizing any of these characters for having one-sided or unreciprocated ship scenes, nor am i of the mindset that cloud's affection has more or less value than anyone else's. this was just the best way to achieve an objective result and answer the question i posed.

multiple interpretations: scenes that can be interpreted as being for multiple of the included ships were not included for either ship. a notable example would be: cloud and aerith's scene in the park which can be counted as both Clerith and Zerith content. another example would be leslie's flower necklace, which is often attributed to both Clerith and CloTi.

the final tally

after eliminating those scenes, the new number of scenes for each ship was as follows (shown on the second graph above!):

CloTi: 33

Clerith: 22

Zerith: 19

as you can see by comparing the graphs, the results did not change much.

conclusion: based on the metric of current total romantic scenes together across the current remake ff7 compilation, CloTi has the majority of content at 44.6%, followed by Clerith with 29.7% and Zerith with 25.7%.

what does this mean? basically nothing -- a ship having the most content is not necessarily an indication of "who ends up with who". like real life, fictional romantic is dynamic and rarely ever linear. a couple that has many scenes together in the first half of a movie might not see each other for 40 minutes of run time toward the end. realistically, the same could be said here. at the same time, what is shown above could very well indicate the tone of the story moving forward -- there is no way to predict where the plot will go!

but i had fun looking into this from an objective pov and i hope you found this interesting, if not thought-provoking!

final thoughts

maths and numbers and whatnot is a fun little interest of mine, as is ff7! i am open to adding to this work (for example, calculating totals for each work individually, comparing them, etc.) if there's enough interest :)

additionally, i am opening my ask box for questions and comments! think i may have missed something? let me know!!!