Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds - Ada Limón

[ID:

“When the plane went down in San Francisco, I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes.

He memorizes the wrecked metal details, the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke.

Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes: The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa.

How people go on, and how people don’t.

It was almost a year before I learned that his brother was a pilot.

I can’t help it, I love the way men love.”

The final line is highlighted in yellow. /End ID]

a couple of misfits

dedicated to a fic that SHOOK me up like a cocktail mixer. please give Stag and Wolf, Wyvern and Rabbit a read, and send deadlifts some love! 

claude and felix don’t have a support conversation, but during my first playthru, i recruited this spunky lil swordsman to the golden deer house. i like him! not as much as i like claude, but. y'know, that’s a hard one to beat. lmao

He liked it when she would scratch behind his ears

I’m gonna do a bit more with them later on, but since tumblr is better at showing gifs than twitter here’s a WIP of sorts

Meh, changed my mind, I don’t think the idea I had originally actually looks better than just the 3 gifs side-by-side 

Among the cast, Aeris is exceptional. This isn’t a matter of her heritage or her ability, however exceptional those might also be, but a matter of her outlook. By motif, Aeris is a “flower blooming in the slums,” something hopeful and tenacious and a little bit miraculous. She has grown up in bleak surroundings with an abundance of personal pain, and it certainly has an effect on her, but unlike much of the cast, she refuses to let it corrode her.

The thing to understand about Aeris is that she is not primarily kind. She’s certainly not unkind, but it’s not kindness that is her defining trait, the unique thing about her that insulates her from the darkness around her. Rather, it’s her ability to look forward with faith and inward with honesty. While the rest of AVALANCHE leaves Midgar with vengeance in mind, Aeris’ pain drives her to self-discovery. She feels her emotions without indulging in their negativity, and gets impatient with other characters (Cloud with his constant fretting or Barret when he’s lashing out) when they don’t do the same. She wants to understand herself and her history and how to carry on, questions that the rest of the cast eventually arrive at long after she’s gone, and questions that prove to be fundamentally self-healing to explore.

She does, however, insist on going through this process alone. It’s in her proclivity for self-isolation and secret-keeping that we see the way growing up “different” in a way that took her in and out of Shinra’s labs had a profound impact on her. Though she’s very friendly and usually very forthcoming with her opinions, her deepest and darkest are things she always tries to carry by herself. She’s the one character who never lays things out for us - her backstory is recounted to us by Elmyra, and she doesn’t share with us what she’s learned about the White Materia, or the details of her parentage. Her thoughts on her heritage become more sparse the more she learns about it.

Part of why she hides so many personal details must be habit born of prudence - it wouldn’t help her evade Shinra to go around telling everybody, after all - but I think that as much as she wants to understand herself and her legacy, she wants as well to be seen as normal and not exceptional. Exceptional killed her mother and saw her trapped in a lab for the formative years of her life, yes, but it’s also something vast that always risks drowning out the rest of who she is as a person. She may be an Ancient, but she is also herself, and she seems to want to be so authentically.

Characters like this, who hide the weight of their great cosmic destiny but seem cheerful on the outside, are often revealed to be hiding their struggle behind a smile. I think this is never the case with Aeris. Fierce independence and occasionally foolhardy confidence are character traits that go hand in hand with a desire to explore and experience the world around her as well as the world within. She seizes on whatever adventure is put in front of her, whether that’s flirting with the mysterious stranger that just fell through her roof or insisting on having a good time at the amusement park when they’re supposed to be hunting Sephiroth. The vibrance she shows through all of it is deeply genuine, and Tifa is right in more ways than one when she says that Aeris very much wanted to live.

We been knew

janaya moments in season 3:

Character Design, Revising for Emotional Impact, and Aeris’  new choker

There’s a post going around pointing out that Aeris’ new choker design features a forget-me-not, which when coupled with a Brave Exvius item description, appears to be in memory of Zack. This seems like an innocuous change - if it were just to add a flower, I’d say that it mostly was. But if we proceed under the assumption that it is intended as a memento of Zack (probable), it’s a change with some far-reaching consequences.

In the original game, here’s what Aeris tells us about Zack’s disappearance:

Now, Aeris is not the most forthcoming of characters, but even if you read these lines allowing that she might be covering up her own feelings on the subject, she tells us point-blank that:

Her explanation is interesting for two reasons. The first is that we know it’s incredibly wrong, so it lends a note of tragic irony to the situation. The second is that it’s not a sentimental explanation, but a pretty brutally realistic one - it would suck for her to admit it, but she does so readily enough to suggest she’s had the time and distance to come to a crappy but mundane conclusion about what happened. It’s sad, but she’s practical about it, and that communicates something about her perspective and the type of person she is.

Giving Aeris a memento of Zack negates both of the two points we can extract from her dialogue above. After all, a forget-me-not necklace is not an appropriate keepsake for your teen boyfriend who walked out on you and didn’t have the decency to tell you face-to-face. This means Aeris’ knowledge of the situation and her whole perspective on her relationship with Zack has to be rewritten to accommodate the presence of such a memento. We’ll see what it winds up actually being when the game is releaesd, but the conclusions we can draw already are:

These two facts paint a different portrait of who Aeris is by radically altering the conclusions she draws from the same initial situation. That’s reason enough to have a bone to pick with this particular change… but there’s more.

Character design is a tool to communicate tone, identity and role about a character. Like prose, it’s deliberately crafted to impart certain impressions and convey intangible or emotional information. From a design perspective, the change in Aeris’ necklace also subtly alters her place in the story. It connects her more closely to Zack and makes both him and their past relationship more prominent.

That comes with a subtle cost; a previously unmarked aspect of Aeris’ character design has now been converted into a signifier for Zack. Its purpose is no longer to communicate something or represent Aeris’ specifically, but rather to represent the story between her and Zack (and the story between Zack and the audience by reminding players of Zack’s death, an emotionally resonant moment for many).

This isn’t the only instance of a change meant to increase Zack’s presence in the narrative. Crisis Core was full of them; with Zack as it’s main character and his fate a foregone conclusion, CC set out to make a variety of revisions to the meaning of certain story elements in order to maximize his emotional impact. The Buster Sword is the most glaringly revised, the changes surrounding it altering Cloud’s decision to emulate Zack from mostly internal and self-motivated to mostly external and circumstantial (another essay), but Aeris has also been changed significantly through incidental alterations to her design and circumstances.

According to Crisis Core, Aeris wears her iconic ribbon because Zack bought it for her, her iconic colour because Zack suggested it, and took up her profession (how she is introduced, how she literally introduces herself to others, an integral part of her character concept) after he proposed it. Again, these changes were made to bring Zack’s role in the story to greater prominence by increasing the degree to which he was important in the lives of other characters. However, the net result is that Aeris’ identity and role in the story has shifted. Symbols and elements that were strongly associated with Aeris are instead being used to communicate her past relationship, and her character and perspective on that relationship has changed in turn.

If it weren’t for all of this, maybe I could write off the necklace change. With the context we have, it’s another undeniable shift in her writing. An Aeris who wears a memento of her ex boyfriend and who dresses in a colour signifying her reunion with him cannot be reconciled with an Aeris who assumed her ex abandoned and replaced her. They’re two completely different emotional and behavioural profiles.

There’s a host of of other creeping changes in her character that have been caused by prioritizing Zack as well. Making it so that she never thought of selling flowers on her own feels contradictory with the slightly dishonest but entrepreneurial savvy Aeris demonstrates when she sells flowers at wildly different price points to men who are interested in her in Wall Market; making it so that we have several indicators that Aeris actively memorializes Zack makes the loss of her mother (previously a huge component in her backstory) feel like Ifalna is comparatively less important to her.

To conclude, I want to say it is entirely possible to be fine with all of these changes, but one shouldn’t deny that they are happening, and they are the product of actively-made directorial and design decisions. My hope at this point is that they have fewer implications on who Aeris is than I fear they might.

aerith and tifa lived happily ever after and i will not take criticisms