#hashtag cait sith is not reeve 2k24

[getvalentined]

hi! i'm actually really interested in the "is cait sith reeve" debate and was fascinated by your post since you firmly believe cait sith is his own person.

i'm playing through dirge right now so i can't comment fully on what transpires there, but based on rebirth alone i'm having trouble believing cait sith isn't controlled by him. i know your post said rebirth excluded a scene that made it clear cait sith is his own person, but I'm not sure what you're referring to exactly. The only thing I can think of is the original game, where Cait Sith sacrifices himself and says not to forget him even if another Cait Sith comes along...which is a good point, though one could potentially argue that Reeve is just sentimental.

Anyway, what I want to know is: if Cait Sith has a personality separate from Reeve and can move independently while Reeve is busy, then why does Cait Sith repeatedly go offline in Rebirth while Reeve is busy? This is the main argument I see and one of my favorites, so I think answering that could help your own. The only arguments I can think up are either that the devs wanted to give players clear hints that Reeve controls Cait Sith, or that he wants to make sure he's monitoring Cait Sith when the cat interacts with the party. But besides that, Cait Sith really doesn't act like a different person. Sure, he has an accent and is silly, but he doesn't make any comment whatsoever (as far as I know) that indicates he isn't Reeve himself. In fact, the party treats Cait Sith and the Shinra employee controlling him as the same person, and Cait Sith doesn't attempt to rebuke it. (Outside of maybe lying that he's a mere amusement park attraction?)

i do admit, if dirge seriously contradicts this interpretation, it's weird for the devs to go against it...but as someone who once believed cait sith and reeve were separate and changed their mind after rebirth, I just don't think there's enough evidence based on rebirth alone to claim that cait sith is his own person.

on that note, you mentioned cait sith has his own likes and dislikes separate from reeve and i'm actually really curious about that! do you have an example of that? :D It sounds like fun trivia lol (i really like reeve and cait sith...)

anyway thank you for reading till the end! sorry if this is unwelcome

There's a scene in Dirge where Reeve and Cait walk out of the same room together, reacting to one another independently:

Further, Cait Sith only goes into stasis twice in the entirety of Rebirth as far as I can recall? Once at the end of a board meeting that Reeve was active in, but seemingly not for the entirety of the board meeting, as Cait Sith appeared to be mid-conversation and trailed off when Reeve got bad news—this makes sense if he's connected to Cait Sith and has the capacity to control him directly as needed, but not if he had to do so actively 100% of the time. The other time is in Cosmo Canyon, because he's clearly not interested in their woo-woo metaphysical nonsense, and he cites it as taking time to recharge his batteries.

Reeve is still working as Director of Urban Planning during all of this, so I find it super hard to believe that he's spending 99.9999% his time at a computer or mentally controlling and speaking through a doll while also running the department that is trying to put Midgar back together after the plate drop—particularly not since we have official meta stating that he's an Inspire, which I cited in a reblog.

Beyond that, there's this bit in the OG, which Cait Sith says to himself, in an empty room:

There is no explanation for this if Cait Sith is entirely remote controlled. There's no one else here to hear it, no reason for him to express these feelings—or even have feelings in the first place!

In Rebirth it's even more clear, because he expresses physical strain as he's literally holding the Temple up by keeping himself wedged under the platform. He's uncomfortable, he's physically taxed, he's in pain. Again, most of this occurs in an empty room, and would not happen if he was just a toy that Reeve had to control directly like a complex RC car or something.

The concept of likes and dislikes that are independent is less solidly shown in-canon, but they have distinctly different personalities, and Reeve is very clearly not interested in things like prophecies and the Promised Land and all that—he is a scientist at the end of the day, a civil and mechanical engineer—and yet Cait Sith's whole shtick is to tell fortunes! This is also something that he seems to enjoy doing quite a bit, even if he's not very good at it. (He gets better. Kinda.)

Cait Sith is obviously connected to Reeve, but it's equally obvious that he's not analogous. Presumably Cait Sith doesn't care when he's equated to Reeve because he is Reeve's eyes and ears in the field, even when he's not in direct control. The fact that he only really talks about himself as an individual when he's alone kind of implies that he'd rather the others not know, because he doesn't want them to be upset about what's going to happen to him; if he were nothing more than a glorified RC toy, this wouldn't be a concern, because he wouldn't have concerns at all.