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i can't have been the first one to make this observation, but whatever

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You know that Ada Limón poem where she’s like “i can’t help it i love the way men love”? my dad recently confessed to me that he became a shoemaker because they buried my grandma shoeless

oh.......................................

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trying and failing not to be annoyed with the jerk who thought it was cute to do really thoughtful war sketches of edelgard+hubert for crimson flower and dimitri+dedue for azure moon, then did a sloppy ass sketch of claude and hilda eating ice cream for verdant wind and had the gall to tag it claude von riegan so i had to see that offensive dismissive shit in the tag...

why would you even bother doing a sketch

just say you hate verdant wind and go

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a couple of misfits

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dedicated to a fic that SHOOK me up like a cocktail mixer. please give Stag and Wolf, Wyvern and Rabbit a read, and send deadlifts some love! 

claude and felix don’t have a support conversation, but during my first playthru, i recruited this spunky lil swordsman to the golden deer house. i like him! not as much as i like claude, but. y'know, that’s a hard one to beat. lmao

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my other unpopular bleach opinion, which i cannot believe i am typing into a tumblr post in the year 2020, is that i could’ve bought the end pairings

i could’ve

when i began bleach i liked renruki, thought ichiruki was unique and compelling but platonic, and expected ichihime even though i was mostly ambivalent to it (sometimes i liked it! sometimes eh) and preferred ishihime 

as the manga went on, i really couldn’t get behind ichihime after the hueco mundo arc esp the lust chapters, and i thought kt was getting REALLY overt with ichiruki with that goodbye as she faded away, and his memory of her with the freaking heart thing on his sweater, so i began to invest in ichiruki and feel bad for orihime (and where was renruki, basically nowhere)

but i’d seen it all at one point or another, and kt toward the very end managed to write in only a few chapters an extremely moving story for bazz b and haschwalth, like that shit shook me, OPENING HIS FIST AND REVEALING THE PIN STILL ON HIS SHEATH WHAT

so kt could have given ichihime and renruki something great in those last chapters, somehow. i seriously think he could have. it would’ve maybe felt a little ??? after the hundreds of chapters of other build up, but he’d been steadily shafting rukia long enough by then that i guess it wouldn’t have been as left field if done right, however dirty i think he really did do ichiruki fans (seriously that heart panel, what the fuck was that?)

but it was just...lazy

like other shit was rushed but he did bazz b and haschwalth solid, he could’ve* pulled something poetic out of his ass

he didn’t...was lazy and unfulfilling and as someone who once liked both pairings - like the one and only convention i went to i bought fucking renruki, ichihime, and yorusoi fanart i kid you not - 

like even if i didn’t really care about them anymore i was still shocked and disappointed.. he had it in him but he didn’t care

(the worst tho of course forever in my bias is what was done to ishida and THE AWFUL MAYURI NEMU CHAPTERS)

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what would you have wanted Ishida to be working as in the ending?

Scorching Hot Take, but I’ve never minded the fact that he’s a doctor. I think it makes sense. There’s no other profession for him that would make this much thematic and narrative sense, frankly.

I think uryuu being a doctor very much signifies reconciliation with Ryuuken, and coming to terms with Kanae’s death. For the Ishida family, who are so hounded by the trauma of separation and splintering and heartbreak, I think it signifies a break from the cycle. I think it makes sense that uryuu, who’s always been a very… diligent kind of person, didn’t manage only to get over the horrors of his childhood, but faced them head-on, and made something of it. It’s one last bit of character development, even at the very end. 

Of course, the circumstances do subvert the meaningfulness of that character development. For the cycle of trauma to truly be broken, he should’ve been with his friends, should’ve had a real family, should’ve had someplace of belonging. His friends don’t even mention him at the ending– we hear about the fact that he’s a legit workaholic from the nurses. 

The problem isn’t that he’s a doctor, it’s that he’s alone.

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He liked it when she would scratch behind his ears

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whispers claude x aerith

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I’m gonna do a bit more with them later on, but since tumblr is better at showing gifs than twitter here’s a WIP of sorts

Meh, changed my mind, I don’t think the idea I had originally actually looks better than just the 3 gifs side-by-side 

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Among the cast, Aeris is exceptional. This isn’t a matter of her heritage or her ability, however exceptional those might also be, but a matter of her outlook. By motif, Aeris is a “flower blooming in the slums,” something hopeful and tenacious and a little bit miraculous. She has grown up in bleak surroundings with an abundance of personal pain, and it certainly has an effect on her, but unlike much of the cast, she refuses to let it corrode her.

The thing to understand about Aeris is that she is not primarily kind. She’s certainly not unkind, but it’s not kindness that is her defining trait, the unique thing about her that insulates her from the darkness around her. Rather, it’s her ability to look forward with faith and inward with honesty. While the rest of AVALANCHE leaves Midgar with vengeance in mind, Aeris’ pain drives her to self-discovery. She feels her emotions without indulging in their negativity, and gets impatient with other characters (Cloud with his constant fretting or Barret when he’s lashing out) when they don’t do the same. She wants to understand herself and her history and how to carry on, questions that the rest of the cast eventually arrive at long after she’s gone, and questions that prove to be fundamentally self-healing to explore.

She does, however, insist on going through this process alone. It’s in her proclivity for self-isolation and secret-keeping that we see the way growing up “different” in a way that took her in and out of Shinra’s labs had a profound impact on her. Though she’s very friendly and usually very forthcoming with her opinions, her deepest and darkest are things she always tries to carry by herself. She’s the one character who never lays things out for us - her backstory is recounted to us by Elmyra, and she doesn’t share with us what she’s learned about the White Materia, or the details of her parentage. Her thoughts on her heritage become more sparse the more she learns about it.

Part of why she hides so many personal details must be habit born of prudence - it wouldn’t help her evade Shinra to go around telling everybody, after all - but I think that as much as she wants to understand herself and her legacy, she wants as well to be seen as normal and not exceptional. Exceptional killed her mother and saw her trapped in a lab for the formative years of her life, yes, but it’s also something vast that always risks drowning out the rest of who she is as a person. She may be an Ancient, but she is also herself, and she seems to want to be so authentically.

Characters like this, who hide the weight of their great cosmic destiny but seem cheerful on the outside, are often revealed to be hiding their struggle behind a smile. I think this is never the case with Aeris. Fierce independence and occasionally foolhardy confidence are character traits that go hand in hand with a desire to explore and experience the world around her as well as the world within. She seizes on whatever adventure is put in front of her, whether that’s flirting with the mysterious stranger that just fell through her roof or insisting on having a good time at the amusement park when they’re supposed to be hunting Sephiroth. The vibrance she shows through all of it is deeply genuine, and Tifa is right in more ways than one when she says that Aeris very much wanted to live.

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We been knew

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janaya moments in season 3:

Your arrogance is so predictable. You allowed my vessel to walk right into your court, and then you brought him directly to the source of all your power? Oh, the irony is wonderful! You’re just like your grandmother. Would you like to know the truth of her fate before you face yours? No!

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Character Design, Revising for Emotional Impact, and Aeris’  new choker

There’s a post going around pointing out that Aeris’ new choker design features a forget-me-not, which when coupled with a Brave Exvius item description, appears to be in memory of Zack. This seems like an innocuous change - if it were just to add a flower, I’d say that it mostly was. But if we proceed under the assumption that it is intended as a memento of Zack (probable), it’s a change with some far-reaching consequences.

In the original game, here’s what Aeris tells us about Zack’s disappearance:

“It’s all in the past now. I was just worried because I heard he’s been missing. I think it was 5 years ago. […] He loved women, a real lady’s man. He probably found someone else…”

Now, Aeris is not the most forthcoming of characters, but even if you read these lines allowing that she might be covering up her own feelings on the subject, she tells us point-blank that:

She doesn’t know what happened to Zack

Her own explanation of events is that he just ghosted her, maybe leaving for another woman

Her explanation is interesting for two reasons. The first is that we know it’s incredibly wrong, so it lends a note of tragic irony to the situation. The second is that it’s not a sentimental explanation, but a pretty brutally realistic one - it would suck for her to admit it, but she does so readily enough to suggest she’s had the time and distance to come to a crappy but mundane conclusion about what happened. It’s sad, but she’s practical about it, and that communicates something about her perspective and the type of person she is.

Giving Aeris a memento of Zack negates both of the two points we can extract from her dialogue above. After all, a forget-me-not necklace is not an appropriate keepsake for your teen boyfriend who walked out on you and didn’t have the decency to tell you face-to-face. This means Aeris’ knowledge of the situation and her whole perspective on her relationship with Zack has to be rewritten to accommodate the presence of such a memento. We’ll see what it winds up actually being when the game is releaesd, but the conclusions we can draw already are:

She may know Zack is dead, and at least assumes he’s blameless for his disappearance (despite this being a less likely scenario)

After 5 years of no contact whatsoever, she carried enough of a flame for him and for their relationship that she felt he was worth a memento

These two facts paint a different portrait of who Aeris is by radically altering the conclusions she draws from the same initial situation. That’s reason enough to have a bone to pick with this particular change… but there’s more.

Character design is a tool to communicate tone, identity and role about a character. Like prose, it’s deliberately crafted to impart certain impressions and convey intangible or emotional information. From a design perspective, the change in Aeris’ necklace also subtly alters her place in the story. It connects her more closely to Zack and makes both him and their past relationship more prominent.

That comes with a subtle cost; a previously unmarked aspect of Aeris’ character design has now been converted into a signifier for Zack. Its purpose is no longer to communicate something or represent Aeris’ specifically, but rather to represent the story between her and Zack (and the story between Zack and the audience by reminding players of Zack’s death, an emotionally resonant moment for many).

This isn’t the only instance of a change meant to increase Zack’s presence in the narrative. Crisis Core was full of them; with Zack as it’s main character and his fate a foregone conclusion, CC set out to make a variety of revisions to the meaning of certain story elements in order to maximize his emotional impact. The Buster Sword is the most glaringly revised, the changes surrounding it altering Cloud’s decision to emulate Zack from mostly internal and self-motivated to mostly external and circumstantial (another essay), but Aeris has also been changed significantly through incidental alterations to her design and circumstances.

According to Crisis Core, Aeris wears her iconic ribbon because Zack bought it for her, her iconic colour because Zack suggested it, and took up her profession (how she is introduced, how she literally introduces herself to others, an integral part of her character concept) after he proposed it. Again, these changes were made to bring Zack’s role in the story to greater prominence by increasing the degree to which he was important in the lives of other characters. However, the net result is that Aeris’ identity and role in the story has shifted. Symbols and elements that were strongly associated with Aeris are instead being used to communicate her past relationship, and her character and perspective on that relationship has changed in turn.

If it weren’t for all of this, maybe I could write off the necklace change. With the context we have, it’s another undeniable shift in her writing. An Aeris who wears a memento of her ex boyfriend and who dresses in a colour signifying her reunion with him cannot be reconciled with an Aeris who assumed her ex abandoned and replaced her. They’re two completely different emotional and behavioural profiles.

There’s a host of of other creeping changes in her character that have been caused by prioritizing Zack as well. Making it so that she never thought of selling flowers on her own feels contradictory with the slightly dishonest but entrepreneurial savvy Aeris demonstrates when she sells flowers at wildly different price points to men who are interested in her in Wall Market; making it so that we have several indicators that Aeris actively memorializes Zack makes the loss of her mother (previously a huge component in her backstory) feel like Ifalna is comparatively less important to her.

To conclude, I want to say it is entirely possible to be fine with all of these changes, but one shouldn’t deny that they are happening, and they are the product of actively-made directorial and design decisions. My hope at this point is that they have fewer implications on who Aeris is than I fear they might.

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what the fuck Google

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aerith and tifa lived happily ever after and i will not take criticisms

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people are so mad... i am so tired