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mandatory-blog-stop-asking · 5 months

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Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Tifa, dementia, and caretaker trauma.

Spoilers for Final Fantasy 7 original, Remake and Rebirth. Discussions about dementia, mental health, caretaker trauma and events that haven’t been covered in the remake trilogy yet. Also, I am sick and not as eloquent as i like to pretend I am – if this reads like shit, blame the virus. I just can’t get this thought out of my head. The "keep reading" is just before the Rebirth spoilers start if this somehow reached you and you don't want to read about that.

When I think about Final Fantasy 7 I usually don’t think of Tifa. I was never a massive Tifa fan like most people I talk to are.

She’s fine, don’t get me wrong, but I could never quite connect with her when I was a kid, or find her all that compelling. Over time I’ve resigned to thinking it’s because I’m just not super interested in her as a character, since she mostly relates to Cloud while everyone else is doing their own thing. So, when they decided to make a massively expanded Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy, I thought this was going to be the perfect opportunity to change my mind. I’m not that much of a hater that I want to dislike one of the most beloved characters of all time.

Remake (the game not the trilogy) came and went and I really like what they did to her as an individual: having more of a relationship with everyone else means I get to look forward to when Tifa talks, especially with Aerith. I think their fast-friends-to-battle-sisters routine rocks and Remake really hammered home how they compliment each other. I especially really like how I can’t always tell if they’ve both teasing Cloud individually or together, on purpose.

Like, the brother is not going to smash, this feels like it’s all for them. Aerith is even cracking up over it. Gals being pals with their clueless best friend. They have so many good moments together and they really bring out the best in each other.

But then comes Rebirth and all of a sudden the story is necessarily way darker. Even if Remake involved dropping a city’s worth of metal on top of… well, a city, Rebirth is when shit gets real. Sephiroth’s manipulations come into full force, everyone deals with their traumas and personal quests, and Aerith dies. Even though Rebirth stops short of starting the original’s Disk 2, it still has one hundred and fifty hours of story and character content to bite into.

And Tifa got a lot more of that this time around. She was given a much more prominent role in this narrative than she used to have: Tifa goes to the Lifestream by herself, Tifa has a whole thing with how she has a scar from her encounter with Sephiroth as a young woman, her relationship with Aerith has never been deeper, meaning that when she dies Tifa is left in shambles, and she’s pretty much the one person in the party who’s never in a position where she’s wrong about something. She’s always the rock everyone can rely on, and she knows that’s her role.

And then there’s Cloud.

I feel like the thing I’m most fascinated by with Tifa in this franchise is how she’s slowly becoming a caretaker for someone with dementia.

NOW, LOOK.

I’m not saying that’s the literal text, or that we’re going to have bathing and feeding minigames in Mideel. I don’t think the game is actually about dementia proper. But I do think the game, both the OG and the remake trilogy, do make a point about all the ways in which you can lose someone.

Final Fantasy 7 is a game about identity, environmentalism, loss, riding multicolored giant cocks that are somehow faster than cars – it’s got a lot going on and people have been interpreting its text for decades. But one of the things I feel gets mostly ignored is what Tifa is going through when Cloud becomes wheelchair-bound in his post-Crater vegetative state. She leaves the party to take care of him while the rest of the gang goes on to have wacky adventures under Cid’s leadership for a little while. It’s obviously temporary, but as far as Tifa knows, she’s going to spend the rest of her life taking care of the love of her life, never able to actually talk to him again.

And like, that’s fucked, right? That’s a major life decision that gets talked about way less than what happens right after. And I mean, with good reason – the Lifestream section of the game is one of the most fascinating parts of the experience, and it immediately cancels out what Tifa decided to do, because Cloud comes back. Fully back, too, without any asterisks. But think about what Tifa was ready to do! That’s so much!

The Remake Trilogy elaborates on every singular aspect of the original game, to good and bad results, but this has turned into showcasing Cloud slowly but surely losing his mind over the course of two to three games. What was about three or four moments in the original game that culminated with his pseudo-mental death when delivering the Black Materia is now basically two hundred full hours of Cloud becoming progressively more violent, progressively more unhinged, and progressively less connected to his friends and the world around him.

Cloud starts talking to himself through extreme headaches, he starts seeing things that aren’t there, he actually even raises his weapon at Tifa due to being convinced by the voices in his head that she’s somehow not real. And throughout it all, Tifa is begging him to come back to normal, to be the guy she remembers him as. She never leaves his side, she never gives up on him, but she also doesn’t know what to do to make him stop.

But of course, we know that’s not all she does. Throughout the games, we see Tifa actually playing along with a lot of Cloud’s delusions a lot of the times. She lets him believe his version of the events of Nibelheim because she’s scared of what will happen to him if he realizes he’s remembering everything incorrectly. She lets him lie about Zack drowning in the river – lie to himself, no less – because the lie keeps him under control. When something bad happens to Cloud, Tifa takes on a caring attitude, not necessarily a correcting one. When Aerith does it, it’s for the sake of the World. When Tifa does it, it’s for the sake of their relationship, which has to last through this latest breakdown, there is simply no other choice from her perspective.

This feels so familiar. I used to care for people with dementia professionally. Not literally every night, but for enough. Watching Tifa go through Cloud’s worsening mental state reminds me so much of watching someone progressively lose their minds, with nothing you can do for them other than making them comfortable.

Tifa’s arc of wanting to be there for Cloud but having no idea of what she can actually do for him climaxes, for me at least, with Cloud being fully engulfed in the lies he tells himself after Aerith’s death in Rebirth. He has done this before; he lies to himself so hard about who Zack is that he creates fake memories in the room he slept in in order to make sense of reality. Cloud has basically fully divorced himself from the linear progression of events in his life; he will not live a life where bad things happen to him, no matter who has to suffer for it.

And when Tifa sees him obviously going through it again, clearly not reacting to the things around him and letting himself go more and more, getting stronger headaches and becoming less reliable and less able to take care of himself…

He’s doing it again, she must be thinking. He’s never gonna stop doing it; he can’t stop doing it. This is the rest of her life. This is the man she wants to spend her days with, and every passing day, he’s less and less of himself. Cloud is not here anymore. And as far as she knows, he might never be here again.

Tifa in the original was a cool girl who was willing to do whatever she needed for her friends and chosen family, and that included staying with her beloved even when his body betrayed him. Tifa in the remakes is someone watching her loved one wither away due to something she can’t help him with, needing more and more help to communicate and work. And he needs her help, specifically, because he’s surrounded by people who came into his life without necessarily expecting to carry him through it. She’s all he’s got. Now that Aerith is gone, more than ever, she’s all he’s ever going to have.

It’s becoming more and more obvious. Barret can see it, and is visibly disturbed by it. Yuffie can see it, but she’s too young to understand. Nanaki can see it, but he’s going through the ringer himself, the world is on his back as the Guardian of the Canyon and he doesn’t know if that journey will always overlap with his friends’. Aerith could see it, but now she’s gone, and everything is worse.

Everyone asks him to please take care of himself, they keep asking him if he’s okay and if he needs a break, and he keeps just moving on because self-care would imply there’s something wrong with him, and there’s nothing wrong with him, Aerith is alive and well and she’s going to work with us and I can see her, I can see everything the way it should be–

By the time Cloud starts talking about his visual hallucinations, Tifa doesn’t even say anything anymore. It’s just another day when Cloud fades a little more, replaced with this bossy, awful person who keeps killing people while saying a bunch of nonsense, and she has to figure out a new way to keep him calm and in working condition so they can save the world or whatever. But fuck, at this point she must be starting to wonder, why bother saving the world if she’s just going to have to take care of him after that, too?

I see so much more doubt in Tifa about whether or not what she’s doing is making a difference this time around. Tifa in the OG was resolute, but also barely affected things compared to Aerith or Cloud himself. In this, Tifa is the last voice of reason in the man’s life. When everyone leaves – and they will leave, eventually – she’s the one who is going to stay behind and figure out where to go from here.

And there’s just such tragedy about the fact that she doesn’t know things will get better. She’s imagining how she’s going to keep him contained while they fight now, being so weak herself after Aerith’s demise. She’s beginning to realize this is it for the long haul and that people are starting to move away when Cloud starts talking crazy. Cloud keeps lying, to her face, and there’s nothing she can even say at this point, because everyone only hears the lies. Why correct him? Why bother demanding to be treated well if he doesn’t even live in the same reality that she does, at this point? How do you even ask for help if you don’t know what would help?

And, like, look, this reading has problems and it only goes so far – dementia is not something you “treat” and it doesn’t magically get better just because you fall into the manifestation of all the life on the planet. At least I don’t think that’s proper FDA-approved yet.

But I really think making Cloud’s mental breaks so much more clearly outside of his own control and even knowledge makes for a much more harrowing portrayal of a life being lost slowly. In the original, you can never really tell how much is Cloud just “pretending” he’s Zack and how much is Hojo’s experiments on him doing it. And, for the sake of my sanity, I’m not counting Crisis Core’s weird explanations here. But in Remake it’s… genuinely a man losing his sanity and his identity, and he doesn’t even know it.

And without knowing that herself, all Tifa knows is that the man she loves needs help. Forever. But who’s gonna help her now that Aerith is dead?

To finish this ramble, there’s this moment in Rebirth’s Cosmo Canyon section that I think really nails what they’re doing with Tifa.

Cosmo Canyon has been reimagined as a place of religion– while in the original Bugenhagen was a wise mentor with all the answers about the cosmos and honestly, kinda felt like he was a man of science to me, in the remake trilogy he’s basically a cult leader. He’s very smart, obviously, but he very specifically keeps being dismissive of Tifa’s questions about the Lifestream, a place she has been to and he hasn’t.

There’s a lot you can read here – how blind faith numbs you to others and not just the truth, how even wisened individuals aren’t always the ones you want to go to with your problems, or just, hey, don’t join a fucking cult just because it seems harmless. Even Barret, who was incredibly excited to go to the place, becomes immediately disappointed at how people there react to his work and his opinions. He wants to actually save the planet, they want to just talk about doing it and then charge their root chakras with mako or some shit.

But anyway, Tifa goes to a meeting with a bunch of other cult members after being told this was the place where she could get some answers. She sits down and listens to people’s problems and thoughts like they’re in a support group. Everyone has anxieties, doubts and things they want to share. Finally, a place where people listen!

It’s now Tifa’s turn, and she decides to share what she’s been through. Specifically how she’s anxious about the future after her experiences with the Lifestream, and how this relates to her personal history and fight for a better tomorrow.

They don’t even react.

There’s no jeering or booing or anything, there’s just silence. No one really expected her to talk about real things they could be doing, or how it has affected her daily life. This is a group for people who want to say they’re going to help, not actually do anything.

And listen, it’s a plot moment, she’s talking about the plot – but she’s also being told that her story matters, only for her to get shot down when looking for help. She keeps talking about how people need to fight back against adversity, how this planet and everyone in it is all we have, and how we have to team up and gang together and take care of each other, take care of the planet, but she doesn’t know how to do that! She’s doing her best and she just wants some pointers here, because she doesn’t feel like she’s doing it 100% correctly! Bad things keep happening to her! Is it her fault?

I really read that as her asking if things are bad because she’s not doing enough. No one elected her a hero, and it’s as much her responsibility to take care of the planet as is anyone else’s. But… if it is partially her responsibility to take care of the Planet, and the Planet is dying, what other responsibilities is she not doing properly? Is she failing the Planet? Is she failing Cloud? Is she failing herself?

And then she immediately apologizes that she’s being a bother, and tells people to forget about it. Some polite clapping ensues, and a wisened old man gives her a generic answer about challenging herself, without really engaging with what she said.

Tifa looks like she’s been alone in every room she’s walked into when she starts talking about her feelings and her doubts. There’s no one there for her. The professionals don’t care, her living friends have no idea, and she doesn’t know what to do. But someone has to do something.

Then it hit me, why I like this version of Tifa so much more: Tifa is someone who has to do something. I think that’s a really good way to expand on her character from the original. It may have also broken my heart about how much doing something is destroying her. Because at the end of the day, Tifa takes care of everyone, but no one really takes care of Tifa.

Well, anymore.

#tifa lockhart #final fantasy 7 #ff7 rebirth #ff7r #ff7 remake #spoilers #rebirth spoilers #ff7 spoilers #dementia #tw dementia #tw mental health #yes folks it's bad takes all the way down #you thought my reading comprehension was only mostly bad #the depths of me trying to find ways to like characters i don't really care for know no end #honestly a big part of the problem with of tifa for me is i never understood what tifa sees in cloud #girl you deserve better

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