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"Mission complete, Sir."

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if u are weird and unlikeable u need 2 survive…

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immediately already back on my tserith agenda. i have been encroaching (read: knowing nothing about yet poking the characters of) on the final fantasy fandom for like four days and am already obsessed.

what's NOT to like about hot and sexy stoic hard working morally ambiguous man having a doomed romance with a like ancient half cetra kind stubborn and determined woman, especially when they've essentially grown up together (sort of. like not really but kind of.) on opposing sides yet with an enduring connection </3 they hold hands and he is bleeding out and asks her if she's okay and they both die :(

like c'mon guys dinner is BEYOND served *freaky sonic gif*

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Cloud and Zack for the ship ask.

Thank you so much for the ask! Dances dances dances.

This is a complicated one because I have shipped it, I've read plenty of fic for it, but it waxes and wanes for me. For the past long while I haven't thought much of it, and I don't always think it's the best ship for either of them. In terms of developmental ability for their characters. So I'm going to say....

Don't Ship It

Why don't you ship it?

I don't think they're good together, both long term and short term, even more so right out the gate.

Mostly it goes like this: Cloud is desperate for identity, Zack is desperate for normalcy, for things to be the way they were before Angeal died, for purpose, he's not thinking so far ahead. Both in survival mode, Zack more so. Mostly enabling each other, and smothering from Zack to Cloud. They need to have time to experience the world, outside one another, and mature. They both were, respectively, robbed of a chunk of their formative years and now thust into their young adulthood. Lost time, though they're still youths. There's plenty of time for them to grow and develop and not be in each others pockets trying to grab onto something that's stifling them both.

I think there was potential, coulda shoulda woulda, but it's long past. Mostly, due to circumstances they couldn't have ever hoped to control. Really, they just had it taken from them without recourse. It's unfortunate and another tally to the scoreboard of tragedy in their lives.

In a relationship together they would be keeping each other stuck in molasses instead of allowing for the free form supported character development both desperately need. Cloud needs time, to learn who he is, to build his self-confidence and his selfhood. Zack needs to learn how to live with just himself—no staking his identity or worth on others, no pining for purpose, self acceptance and slowing down. This could be compatible for them both, but in a relationship it's... so tenuous. So so tenuous. You can see it, no?

What would have made you like it?

I like it when they're apart for long term, no Zack coming back from the dead and going straight into Clouds arms and Cloud running ass over headfirst for him. Though, let me be clear, this is what they would do XD Like, you don't get out of mako-test-tube-torture without gaining codependency, and you don't get out of a world trek on the run without gaining codependency either. I get it. But the key here is Cloud is older, Zack is older, they have lived lives apart, and choose to reconnect at some point. A burgeoning relationship when they're more individual people and less masses of human jello.

Well, this all being said, I do enjoy bad relationships, and failing ones/doomed ones—so their poor dispositions themselves are interesting to explore by themself too. Sometimes the ill-suited nature of the dynamic is what you want. And sometimes, I do just like them being together as a stepping stone in their lives!

Despite not shipping it, do you have anything positive to say about it?

Yes. Get it twunk, fuck that twink. You two would be such cute highschool sweethearts. Especially with how good a hypeman Zack can be. And how understanding and empathetic a young Cloud is.

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tseng & aerith for ship ask?

HELLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

I rarely get asks I'm so excited, thank you so much for sending one in!

I Ship It!

What made you ship it?

Straight up, @breserker's fic Speaking to Flowers did. She has other Tserith fics that only exacerbated the ships tantalizing nature and realistic draw to me. Tseng in canon, especially in OG 1997 game canon, has one friend and that friend is Aerith.

Aerith also has one friend who well and truly deeply understands her and that is Tseng. They are, before anything else, friends in a tenuous and strung out way. Like, it's forbidden in the way that the world is against them. Aerith is alone and has been her whole life, and Tseng is much the same. Their prospects are slim, either by design or by virtue of birth, but Aerith forcibly carves out space for herself in Tseng's mind and Tseng—albeit against his will mostly—carves out space in hers. A great aspect of why this ship appeals to me is how Aerith's the one calling the shots, leading the relationship, she gets more agency in this ship then she does in any of the other popular ones for her.

Tseng's also quite unlike the immature boy that Zack was when he and Aerith fell in together—I don't ship Zerith for this reason specifically, they were together but they don't 'belong' together forever. Were Zack to live, the relationship would have been done and over with. Tseng isn't like Zack, and he isn't like really anyone else Aerith knows including Elmyra and her soon to be friends in AVALANCHE. He's mature and reticent in a way that makes you want to take him apart. Or hit him.

What are you favourite things about the ship?

How to summarize.

Aerith truly is in the best relationship possible for her with him, he supports her, he doesn't try to stifle her, he's content and encouraging of her doing things for herself and living her life the way she desires it. He doesn't even really want to insert himself into her life, thinking it a burden, he wants her to be happy for her own sake, it's all for her. I think he knows distinctly what it's like to be locked into a life not your own. Turks certainly don't own their own lives.

Aerith forces Tseng to be human, to be a person, refuses to see anything other than a man where he wants to paint a monster or a tool or a weapon. Starting out of spite, and later just knowing better than to allow him to sink himself into a falsified role when she knows who he is better than anyone else. Because of this forcing, it makes Tseng actually feel his emotions when he would rather let them sink into background static.

They fuck nasty. Tseng, if he were a sex act, would be cunnilingus. Aerith, live it up.

Aerith's canonical feminization kink. Yeah. Her hyperventilating when Cloud's put into a dress? I can only imagine her reaction to Tseng in one. I think she would need a hospital. And Tseng deserves to have fun, fucking around with the gendered expectations they both grew up under in Midgar. Reclaim that ambiguity Tseng.

If anyone's going to break down Tseng's walls to dig into his background and give him space to actually process his pre-shinra life, well. Aerith's right here. The turbulence present in both of them internally is always ready to be soothed by the other person. If she wants, or rather needs, to embark on her own globe trot post meteor were she to survive, then Tseng would follow her at her behest. And were Tseng to take a sabbatical from the Turks and embark on his own restless globe trot, she would worm her way in there not letting him undergo the perils alone. Like. The. They. They're. starts crying. they're in each others pockets and they don't need each other, but they do want each other and they do want to be there for one another. help me.

Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

Hmmm. I feel as though it's not a big enough ship for me to butt heads with fellow shippers, instead it's more so the fandom perception of this ship that grates on me. Tseng is not creepy or weird for growing to care about his charge who's canonically only 8 years younger than him, and Aerith not fostering a teenaged crush on him would be decidedly bizarre. For Tseng to be weirded out by Aerith age would mean he infantalizes her, or is stuck in the past in a way that is grating and completely unlike himself. To look at the adult women and deny her the maturity she's gained and instead to project upon her an infantile purview. Absolutely and utterly unlike Tseng, to disrespect her like this. If any hiccups were there in his treatment of her as she crossed the threshold into becoming an adult, she'd correct him at most twice and he'd listen.

People misunderstanding Tseng in general grates on me but this in particular is a type of misogynistic and immature lens on him that reeks to me. I'm also not going to use the word I've seen Tseng called repeatedly, something which is beyond disrespectful in the way it dilutes the meaning of the term and is practically beside itself in it's racism. Zeroing in on one of the Asian men in the cast to call him a predatory sexual deviant is not, actually, cool. Get a fucking grip, maybe, guys.

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Okay here’s an ask game

Send me a ship and I’ll answer three questions based on if I ship it or not.

Ship It

What made you ship it?

What are your favorite things about the ship?

Is there an unpopular opinion you have on your ship?

Don’t Ship It

Why don’t you ship it?

What would have made you like it?

Despite not shipping it, do you have anything positive to say about it?

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Hear me out

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Prompt for day 1 of tserith week: tea (shop)!

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a little further

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《 ONE WINGED ANGEL 》

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greened out on super soldier serum

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short sketchy comic for a change. something about cloud's vague distorted memories of sephiroth and how it shapes what sephiroth is throughout the games

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you understand.

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Your opinion, who has the best ass in the company?

There are several extremely fine asses in the ShinRa Collection.

Our young president has a high-quality tail, which he got from his mummy, who had a high quality tail herself. I daresay she rivalled yours truly. And don’t think for a second I’m disqualifying myself on a technicality. I had a stalker write my ass a sonnet, once.

Just about every SOLDIER developed the sort of physique you’d expect from men and women engineered to be muscular superexamples of the species. Sephiroth was almost shy on the subject, before he went apeshit, but Shiva bless leather pants.

However, there was one man who, cheek for cheek, beat us all. His rear end can only have been the result of a collaborative effort by the gods to create the most perfect ass existence has ever known. My theory is that the pantheon then began to fight over who could keep it, and in the tussle it was dropped to Gaia, where it came to a human.

Oh, Veld, you magnificent bastard. If you’re out there, somewhere, reading this, please give that glorious tush a goose for me, for old times’ sake. Also, you owe me 150 gil.

And if you die, (can you die?) I’m having you stuffed and mounted in my living room, bent over to pick up a pen.

…That bastard started keeping my pens.