I'll admit - shhhh - in the game I always found Aerith vaguely annoying. She's so clingy and 'Cloud-centric' that it got old fast for me. Sure, it was a surprisingly mild 'Tifa's standing right there' reaction but more to the point - I HATE clingy people hanging on to me! I kept wanting to shake her and shout 'why do you care what kind of skin tone I like?! Just go do what you think would be fun!' By the time we hit the Temple of the Ancients I was bringing Tifa along just in the hopes she'd keep Aerith off of me. (My nephew ALSO brought Tifa along as the last party member to the Temple and given he'd been using Vincent and Red up to that point, I thought it was interesting).
It also didn't help that there's a small but very vocal set of fandom that get obnoxious over her, misrepresent her terribly to fit their Disney princess mold and bash Tifa. For a long time I was entirely turned off to Aerith as a character and tended to just ignore her when possible.
But you know how it is - you need to write a character into a story somewhere and you start to want to figure out the 'why' of them and the next thing you know, they're actually kind of okay if not downright interesting and/or sympathetic. I kind of started to enjoy Aerith. Especially when I could write her without the clinging. I had a lot of fun with her in TWT and in Almost Had Him I had a blast! She's so conflicting in the way she presents herself often times and so deliciously complex (I love FFVII's complex characters and often suspect the writers had no idea what they were doing when they started that whole ball rolling). It's fun to write her as human - and I agree with you, I do think she found peace at the end. The AC script before the rewrite in which they took her out of the end credits entirely ends with the lines: "Vestiges of Aerith (nothing with any presence in reality) silently watch Cloud as he rides away. Aerith looks a little lonely, but then she smiles."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-03-18 05:47 am (UTC)It also didn't help that there's a small but very vocal set of fandom that get obnoxious over her, misrepresent her terribly to fit their Disney princess mold and bash Tifa. For a long time I was entirely turned off to Aerith as a character and tended to just ignore her when possible.
But you know how it is - you need to write a character into a story somewhere and you start to want to figure out the 'why' of them and the next thing you know, they're actually kind of okay if not downright interesting and/or sympathetic. I kind of started to enjoy Aerith. Especially when I could write her without the clinging. I had a lot of fun with her in TWT and in Almost Had Him I had a blast! She's so conflicting in the way she presents herself often times and so deliciously complex (I love FFVII's complex characters and often suspect the writers had no idea what they were doing when they started that whole ball rolling). It's fun to write her as human - and I agree with you, I do think she found peace at the end. The AC script before the rewrite in which they took her out of the end credits entirely ends with the lines: "Vestiges of Aerith (nothing with any presence in reality) silently watch Cloud as he rides away. Aerith looks a little lonely, but then she smiles."