#tossawary ff7

[tossawary]

I keep bouncing off of watching playthroughs of Final Fantasy VII, because while there's stuff there that I really like (I know the broad strokes of the plot), I am just not vibing with the voice acting / dialogue style in the Remake and the original is mostly just text so I can't listen to it while I'm working. (I watched my way through the original yeaaaaars ago, so I'm due for a proper refresher.)

Anyway! With the disclaimer that I don't 100% know what I'm talking about: I think one of the absolute funniest potential "Sephiroth is saved" Canon Divergence AUs + "Sephiroth / Original (Audience Insert) Character" AUs would be an AU where Sephiroth gets together with Cloud's Mom.

On the Nibelheim mission, the plot forces Cloud back home for some reason, then Cloud is forced to introduce Sephiroth and Zack to his mom for whatever reason. I've seen some fics where Cloud's Mom was a teen single mom, so this woman could still be in her thirties, and even if she was older... Uh, there are arguments to be made here about Sephiroth being into a MILF. There definitely might be something resembling "mommy issues" among his many other "being a super soldier experiment from birth and later an actual child soldier" issues.

Zack, watching Sephiroth quietly hit it off with Cloud's very pretty Mom: "What... what is happening right now?"

Proceed in this Canon Diverence AU to orchestrate scenarios in which Sephiroth ends up not getting sufficiently close to the last straw that is Jenova for some reason. Some reason being partially that he's too busy flirting with / hooking up with Cloud's Mom. Sephiroth needs (excuse the pun) a fucking break. Poor Cloud Strife does NOT know what to make of his childhood hero / current boss sliding into the beginnings of a step-dad position. What the hell.

[tossawary]

Thinking about a form of Role Reversal AU (more of a Canon Divergence AU with a few backstory Universe Alterations) for "Final Fantasy 7", which I frankly don't know quite enough about to work out all the details perfectly but find compelling to think about nevertheless! I like to pick a few elements to do a reversal on in these AUs, but try to keep certain backstory elements intact for characterization purposes.

I think it would be fun to make Cloud Strife the star SOLDIER of the SHINRA company, but keep his country boy origins. So, he's older than he is in canon by about 10+ years or so. SHINRA came to Nibelheim for some of their human experimentation projects (earlier days of the company, the reputation wasn't quite so bad yet) and Cloud signed up WAY too young, out of a desire to prove himself and maybe for money for his mother. He went through some HEAVY shit to be augmented (multiple teenage years in a mako tank, perhaps?), but he still had an ordinary childhood before that.

While the country boy backstory and cool General Strife persona is VERY popular (thanks to SHINRA PR), Cloud is NOT as cooperative in some of SHINRA's ventures as the company would like. Cloud has still been forced into some shit he's not proud of, he's being ground down by some of the corporate and political forces around him, but he has disagreed with and disobeyed orders before. There's serious tension in the company due to this.

Which is not helped by the fact that "General Cloud Strife, SOLDIER First Class" is backed up by two other First Class SOLDIERs: Tifa Lockhart and Aerith Gast.

(I imagined Tifa and Aerith as Angeal and Genesis and nearly swooned. There is absolutely a public love triangle debate being fueled by Midgar tabloids: "Team Tifa or Team Aerith???" Some people don't like the idea of stupid relationship drama being on the frontlines of a military campaign, but SHINRA pumps it up as a shiny distraction from their colonial capitalist bullshit. There have been fist fights over love triangle shipping by fans.)

Tifa signed on to the Nibelheim experiments in some sneaky way, without parental permission, and then it was too late to stop her. She can rip tanks apart with her bare hands and has done so. She is SO buff. SHINRA hasn't cottoned on to the fact that Tifa is the one pulling Cloud away from the company's corruption and was the first one to start actively working against SHINRA, rather than Tifa just being Cloud's follower. (Cloud is possibly having major memory issues due to various mako experiments.)

Aerith (is still an Ancient? and) was basically born into the company and never escaped. She could be an orphan or her parents could have survived, but they're hostages or they've been twisted by the company. Maybe Ilfana died and Gast (working closely with Jenova materials) became obsessed with finding the Promised Land to reunite with his wife. Either way, Aerith got shoved into the SOLDIER program. (Maybe her would-be adoptive mother is hanging around as a SHINRA employee trying to show some care for Aerith.)

Aerith is meant to lead them all to the Promised Land someday and her magic is TERRIFYING, but Cloud is the General because SHINRA has sexist views against women and Aerith's bubbly persona in charge of the army freaks people and the public the fuck out. Aerith is more than a little burnt out and jaded, after so long, but she's good at not showing it.

The point here is not necessarily to make these characters into "the bad guys" but to play with the moral mess that already exists in the game for many characters. This Role Reversal could follow Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith as the protagonists still, as they meet up with alternate versions of friends and enemies, and struggle to do good after doing bad. Alternatively, the story could follow Sephiroth as the protagonist!

Sephiroth is still Professor Hojo's experiment from birth, quite a bit younger than these other SOLDIERs First Class, and if he's a member of SHINRA, he's viewed internally as something of a lab-grown freak. Unnatural. Artificial. Other SOLDIERs don't like the idea that SHINRA is just going to grow their own replacement warriors instead of investing in "real people".

Option 1) for Sephiroth's story path here is that SHINRA wanted someone better at following orders. A teenage Sephiroth (and Genesis and Angeal?) becomes the replacement General when Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith turn against the company. If Cloud is the protagonist of this AU, Sephiroth is still an antagonist, and Cloud really doesn't want to have to kill this manipulated and abused kid created to be his replacement. If Sephiroth is the protagonist, he's struggling against the company who now wants him to kill the person he's secretly always viewed as his hero rather than a rival, even though it seems like Cloud has turned against SHINRA for good reasons.

Option 2a) is that Hojo is working for someone else who wanted their own SOLDIERs to fight SHINRA, possibly the earlier AVALANCHE. Hojo is probably a former SHINRA employee and has some sort of personal vendetta against Professor Gast for getting him kicked out of the company or something.

Option 2b) Hojo is still a former SHINRA employee, probably with some stolen fragment of Jenova (or maybe even Ilfana?), but he's working against SHINRA because the company is destroying the planet and he LIVES HERE. Hojo is a more rational scientist trying to save the world. Maybe he's working with AVALANCHE, maybe he broke away from them, maybe he's always been more or less working alone! I think he should be accompanied by Lucretia and possibly also by Vincent.

Hojo and Lucretia have gone to extreme (unethical) lengths to produce a secret, new, artificial Ancient to fight SHINRA and heal the world. A man-made "Chosen One". Sephiroth is a kid out of his depth and not good at making friends. Maybe Vincent is hanging around the place as a weird uncle figure to Sephiroth, or maybe Vincent is a relatively unknown figure who haunts their basement, because Vincent was Hojo and Lucretia's first attempt at making a super-powered hero to save the world and it did not go well. At all.

Sephiroth must gather his party and blindly venture forth! This party probably includes Angeal and Genesis in some form.

I don't know where Zack fits into this yet, but he is absolutely not growing flowers in a church, because that is way too close to making him just another version of Aerith instead of an alternate version of Zack. He could be Aerith's secret long distance country boy boyfriend. He could be a SOLDIER partially mentored by Cloud, who moved on to mentor Angeal. In canon, he has connections to many of the characters I've listed above, he's deep in the den of monsters, so maybe a funny reversal would be that Zack isn't a part of SHINRA and doesn't know any of these people. He's some random burly chocobo farmer who finds teenage Sephiroth and party in a tough spot, helps them out, and then gets dragged into a whole bunch of bullshit he DID NOT sign up for. Oh, shit, is he the ADULT in this adventure???

[tossawary]

At the beginning of "FF7 Remake", Barret asks how old Cloud is and Cloud can't(?) answer (he answers with his presumed SOLDIER rank at first), so Barret cracks a joke about how for all he knows, a SOLDIER's rank could be the same as their age. Presumably this is a reference to the company's known mad science practices / child soldiers. Barret compares Cloud to a toddler as more joking / needling.

And, you know, that seems well within the bounds of FF7. You could do an AU where protagonist Cloud is a Superboy-style OG!Cloud-Zack clone. Transferring / implanting memories seems like something that this world / company might have a materia for, with side effects that Cloud is obviously suffering (the flashbacks).

I don't know what the plot / larger point of this AU would be, but it would fun purely for the "Oh Goddess, fuck, we actually took a one-year-old on our 'eco-terrorism' mission" AVALANCHE reactions.

EDIT: I would also probably keep both OG!Cloud and Zack alive in this AU. They're hiding somewhere out in the countryside or something after successfully escaping Hojo's labs, but they lost the Buster sword at some point or it was shipped back to Midgar very early on as "proof" of Zack's death in Nibelheim. Clone!Cloud has it for some reason or another.

So, as the story continues, there are an increasing number of clues that the protagonist Cloud maybe isn't the same Cloud. Tifa: "Your face looks different as an adult. Guess you grew up, huh?" (It's the Zack influence in Clone!Cloud.) And there also seems to be a second party of mysterious heroes / rebels somewhere out there in the world also working against SHINRA. Clone!Cloud gets partially recognized by a few people for things he definitely didn't do.

And then the Clone!Cloud and Tifa party runs into the OG!Cloud and Zack party, and both parties go, "Oh... shit..."

[tossawary]

I'm fascinated by little overlaps of character experiences in a timeline. In "Final Fantasy 7" as I vaguely remember it, Sephiroth is born in Shinra Manor in Nibelheim. The house has a secret basement laboratory, but people can't really spend months locked inside a house without losing it, so there must have been SOME interaction between the scientists in the manor and the people of the local village.

Like, they would have needed to get food somehow? And Shinra could be delivering all of their food by helicopter or something once a week, among other supplies, sure, but it's also possible that they might have had their food delivered through the village. Over the months or years that they were there, someone must have gone out drinking at the local pub or gone out to buy cigarettes at least once. There are different levels of lockdown that all seem feasible. It's possible that the situation was chill enough that Shinra employees might have semi-regularly gone out to eat dinner in town and simply not talked about what they were working on while out and about (Project S / the Jenova Project).

According to the wiki, Cloud is 21 during FF7, which means he was 17ish during the Nibelheim mission, I think? Some additional materials somewhere suggest that Cloud's Mom was only THIRTY-THREE (33) when she died, so I'm putting him at 17 because that means she would have been 16 when he was born. Which, depending on how old Sephiroth is exactly (wiki puts him at 25-30ish during FF7, which means he's probably 21-26ish during the Nibelheim mission), means that Claudia Strife would have been 7-12 years old in Nibelheim when Sephiroth was born.

It's perfectly possible that Claudia Strife at some point met Vincent Valentine, Hojo, or even a heavily pregnant Lucretia. She was supposedly a precocious girl with big dreams (before apparently becoming a teen mom), so she might have tried to hang around Shinra Manor at some point, and, idk, Vincent on his smoke break might have casually told her to fuck off for her own good. If the Project S people stayed in Shinra Manor for several years, it's very possible that one of the security guards or someone else there might be Cloud's father, who slept with a 15yo local and eventually left when he got sick of rural life. In which case, Claudia Strife might even have had the motivation to belatedly try to record who was at Shinra Manor and when, as part of an effort to find and contact her baby's deadbeat dad again.

(It's also possible that Cloud's Mom paid zero attention to any of the Shinra people back then and knows nothing about them, of course. Small towns are small, but also, sometimes you do the smart thing and just don't go poking around the mysterious corporate compound on the edge of town. That's just none of her business.)

Anyway, I think it's funny that Sephiroth is trying to figure out the secrets of his past, and they (Sephiroth, Zack, Cloud) could have potentially easily learned both Lucretia Crescent and Vincent Valentine's names if Zack had had one (1) conversation with Cloud's Mom. Claudia Strife was around back then as an adventurous young girl! She might honestly know a little something! Cloud, go home and talk to your mother!

[tossawary]

The AVALANCHE group in "Final Fantasy 7: Remake" keeps cracking me up. They're not wearing any face masks to hide their identities when busting into secure SHINRA facilities full of surveillance cameras??? They don't even change outfits when they're not running missions??? It's killing me.

Assuming that they are not outright killing every SHINRA trooper they encounter (maybe they are, idk), even if they weren't being caught on a bunch of surveillance cameras (the opening mission shows this happening), there's like dozens of people who should be able to give relatively detailed descriptions of them??? (Also, I laugh every time the screen says that Cloud has "defeated" a SHINRA trooper. If he's a super soldier swinging that much sharp metal around at high speeds, he should (realistically) be cutting people in half. It is amusing to me to see the people enemies just fall over and the machine enemies get trashed. I find it very cartoony.)

(I am still failing to properly watch my way through this series during work. I personally don't super love the hyperrealistic dolls design style and I don't think it jives all that well with the incredibly cartoony world building, clumsy "as you know" exposition, and wacky gameplay execution so far. It's just not my thing. Yet I found "Ace Attorney" utterly intolerable to watch but very fun to actually play through the wackiness, so I'll give FF7 the benefit of the doubt there and say, "Sure, I assume this is still really fun to actually play and that the world is immersive enough that way.")

This game is a "AAA" remake of a super popular game in a super popular franchise, but they apparently couldn't be bothered to make secondary "civilian" models for Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge? What is this? A cheaply made cartoon series? These characters are waltzing around the slums in their matching bright red bandanas and Jessie, who is apparently a former performer and therefore especially recognizable, is always wearing her silly tit-sculpted armor. AVALANCHE took a crowded passenger train home from their opening terrorist mission when they should rightfully all smell and look awfully beat-up and suspicious after fleeing a massive reactor explosion???

Like, I don't really care if the characters think they're hacking the camera systems here or if the game wants pretty character faces to be visible at all times. I also don't really care about faithfulness to the original setup. They could yank facemasks down during specific cutscenes? Cloud could lose his facemask at a dramatic moment during a cutscene? And Jessie could exclaim over how cute Cloud is at the end of the mission or whatever; you can frame all of their faces as a rewarding reveal at the end of the opener. I know that character models removing clothing is super hard in 3D animation, especially games, but there are storyboarding and model swap tricks for that. You can fake ripping off a facemask relatively easily.

If the point is for SHINRA to know it's them all along and to set them up to take the fall for something later, then AVALANCHE taking greater precautions and the Turks catching them out anyway could be used to make both AVALANCHE and the Turks look more competent / dangerous. Maybe you could generously interpret SHINRA's apparent failure to catch our protagonists out as the corporation being a bloated wreck of greed and incompetent, overly reliant on their technology and wealth, but that still doesn't really excuse for me making the AVALANCHE characters look this reckless. Jessie later visits her SHINRA employees PARENTS' HOUSE in her TERRORIST UNIFORM??? JESSIE, NO!!! That's so dangerous.

There's so much detail in the backgrounds here already! If it's a matter of resources, surely some random mob NPC models could be cut so that I could see Jessie, Biggs, and Wedge in cute civilian wear outside of their missions! I am already suspending so much disbelief for so much of FF7's wacky worldbuilding, but these little details are what's really tripping me up for some reason, like, come on. SHOW ME that these characters are good at what they do by having them take some basic precautions.

I laughingly shared these thoughts with someone and they said (jokingly critical of the game as well) that Barret probably doesn't bother with secrecy because he's already apparently the only big black guy around and almost certainly the only big black guy with a gun for an arm. Which is a point! But also, BARRET!!! YOU'RE A FATHER!!! SUNGLASSES ARE NOT SUFFICIENT ANONYMITY HERE!!! THINK OF MARLENE, MAN!!!