#about riv

[vynnyal]

Some comics

[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. 

[euthymiya]

They animated this with one hand for sure

[ask-the-colony-tree-siblings]

Why does Inv have his ears covered? Saint has the same fluffy tips and his poke out from under his hat, so wouldn't it be fine for Inv's ear tufts to be on display?

Inv: Well, I’m not trying to hide the tufts, I’m trying to hide the colouration because it’s unusual. I always thought my ears looked pretty, but…

Inv: They are weird compared to other slugcat’s.

[snailfen]

I think you have my favorite gourmand design they look like they give the best hugs

they do............

[velen-abera]

Arti is getting really tired of this (boom) Cat and (wet) Mouse chase....

I've made a larger pice of my Arti and Ruffles designs because people seem to like my previous one.

The water is a bit weird, but otherwise it looks good in my opinion

(some progress pics below)

Needed a bit of color correcting, because my phone camera didn't pick up right colors

[thecampfirescene]

Keanu talking about River on reddit

2013

2023

❤🩹

[paradoxbeta]

Can I Pleeaaasssee have a Rivulet design? Pretty please? I’m interested to see how you’d draw the eyes, like would they be buggy or sprite accurate? Also SOS would be cool. THX! Wait I mean thanks not-

OH GOD the thx sonic boom

so this ask sent me on a Journey... what was supposed to be a quick drawing spiraled into a whopping 15 different rivulet designs. the full thought process is under the cut, but if you want just the favorite, here's a rivulet based off of a flatworm!

(ps you should totally check out my character design rambles because theres a jetfish rivulet and a shrimp rivulet too and many more)

so the first thing i tried to do was a very simple rivulet design:

however something in this just wasnt enough. im not sure if it was/is the body type similarity to the other slugcats or the fact that i didnt even address the eyes, but i tried to fix it by making the eyes more canon accurate

unfortunately this was Still Wrong. it just felt like i was redrawing the canon rivulet when i KNEW i could make it more visually distinctive. my biggest issue was trying to get the eyes to be sprite adjacent while still remaining buggy because its not rivulet if it doesnt have those big sopping wet pathetic orbs. so there were a Lot Of Eyes

somehow along the way i got distracted and after a long bout of doing something completely irrelevant (trying to make a pupil system for sprite accurate eyes??? it looked bad) i decided to tinker with the body more. leech rivulet came to mind and i drew it because i thought it would be awful in a funny way, but it was...

...not bad?

while it wasnt really rivulet, it was still a step in the right direction: mixing and mashing rivulet with aquatic species appeared to yield interesting results. so after doing the next reasonable step and making a sockeye salmon rivulet which was only mildly cursed,

i started playing god with various aquatic species off the top of my head

+ shrimp

(not pictured: attempts at a horseshoe crab, a barrel-eye fish, and a rivulet with eyes on the top of its head like a halibut which ended up looking like a scav grown out of a test tube. those 3 did not look good)

i did also end up with 2 extras, which i wasnt sure if they were freaky in a fun way or freaky in an "oh dude wtf" way

and finally, there was a jetfish rivulet

which, excluding the flatworm, should be an exhaustive list of the nonsense i did with riv's design. the flatworm ended up being my favorite because the wavy sides and riv's blue color just make it look too much like waves to pass up.

[segasys]

you know what, you get to have the refs I've made of the vanilla slugcats now. I wanted to wait and show them when i get all the scugs done, but i honestly don't think ill be able to get any others made any time soon, and i really like these and want to show them.

if you want to know anything about my headcanons/stories for them, then please ask, id love to share what i have made, and it will help me develop them more

[dromaeo-sauridae]

i lied i have more rain world art

pebbles :(

[birdcatt]

funny slugs who are cats

[getvalentined]

The result of that flash poll I did the other day, Riv wound up winning so here he is!

Random OC lore below for anyone interested.

Riv is the oldest of the aur, a species unintentionally formed from the energetic aftershocks of the creation of his planet. Because there was only so much of that energy to go around, there are a limited number of "souls" available for their species, and thus the aur have a static population. Although functionally immortal, they do lose neuroelasticity over time, which eventually makes living pretty unpleasant, so they inevitably opt to pass away and allow a new member of the species to be born.

Several thousand years ago, Riv contracted a particularly dangerous magical condition that left him discolored—he used to be a very pale apricot color and his hair was opalescent white—and with chronic pain, but also keeps him from losing neuroelasticity, allowing him to live basically forever without experiencing the ennui that is the literal death of the rest of his species.

Travelers of other species who came across the aur in ancient times wound up essentially engaging in a millennia-long game of telephone that led to a gross misunderstanding of what they actually looked like, which is where the concept of unicorns comes from. When the aur finally went public as a species to get people to stop killing each other, everyone was very surprised to find that they look nothing like horses or deer. (Although they do have hooves, which is what led to the mistranslation that brought about that misconception in the first place.)

[14dayswithyou]

Is there any character from the cast Ren is willing to tolerate or maybe even starts some kind of friendship with them over time?

✦゜ANSWERED: Probably only River — but even then — it's extremely unlikely ^^; Ren genuinely doesn't have the ability nor capacity to feel empathy for anyone other than Angel, so any form of friendship would be strictly one-sided and doomed for failure T_T

[ask-the-colony-tree-siblings]

For everyone!

Do you guys have any unique abilities? Any powers or skills you're unusually good at?

For Saint - who's your favorite?

Artificer: I can blow shit up!

Gourmand: I can craft things!

Saint (Inv): Inv can warp things an highjack people’s minds!

Inv: And Saint can ascend stuff!

(Saint’s favourite is Inv ofc! :D)

[vividviolence]

shoutout to my first pieces of rain world fanart from like. over a year ago. I still have all of my monk campaign doodles too

[qinhayuu]

arranged marriage with ayato where, when the two of you have truly, helplessly fallen in love with each other, he leads you to the beach or under the sakura or wherever, gets down on one knee, and proposes to you. it doesn’t matter to him that you’ve been legally bound to each other for two — going on three — years now; when you smile and cup his face in your hands and lean down to kiss him with a giddy ‘ yes ’ escaping your lips, he knows he will spend the rest of his life devoted to you and only you.