#you established so much in such a short span of words.. and have the roots for a fair bit of character dynamics..

[mochalattea]

—

#mocha's musings #i reread kazuko's story this evening and..!! #wow past chloe you did really well for having only wrote 3 parts to it.. really.. it doesn't miss a beat #you established so much in such a short span of words.. and have the roots for a fair bit of character dynamics.. #to me it's so clear that i was honing my craft and learning from my creative writing courses.. i was in my writing prime #i looked through my old notes for future chapters too.. i have up to chapter 8 plotted even though i only got around to actually-- #--writing and publishing the prologue.. ch 1 and ch 2.. #i.. kind of want to think about it more again.. i don't know if i can mimic that style well anymore.. but.. #idk.. maybe even if i edit the outline i have a little and try to strengthen the themes and threads i was trying to setup.. #that in itself might be a good writing exercise #the conflicts she faces are so clearly something i was struggling with at the time and wanted to explore safely #and maybe that's good.. to essentially look upon myself and understand and want to comfort the me from that time #ahh.. i just look upon her very fondly ;__; ;;

[insanehobbit]

a twenty-five thousand word post about a twenty-three year old “debate”

As time goes on, I’m baffled that it remains a commonly held opinion that:

The LTD remains unresolved

SE is deliberately playing coy, and are (or have been) afraid to resolve it.

To me, the answer is as clear as day, and yet seeing so many people acting as if it’s a question that remains unanswered makes me wonder if I’m the crazy one.

So I am going to try to articulate my thought process here, not because I expect to change any hearts and minds, but more to get these thoughts out of my head and onto a page so I can finally read a book and/or watch reruns of Shark Tank in peace.

To start off, there are two categories of argument (that are among, if not the most widely used lines of argument) that I will try NOT to engage with:

1) Quotes from Ultimania or developer interviews - while they’re great for easter eggs and behind-the-scenes info, if a guidebook is required to understand key plot points, you have fundamentally failed as a storyteller. Now the question of which character wants to bone whom is often something that can be relegated to a guidebook, but in the case of FF7, you would be watching two very different stories play out depending on who Cloud ends up with.

Of course, the Ultimanias do spell this out clearly, but luckily for us, SE are competent enough storytellers that we can find the answer by looking at the text alone.

2) Arguments about character actions/motivations — specifically, I’m talking about stuff like “Cloud made this face in this scene, which means be must be [insert whatever here].”

Especially when it comes to the LTD, these tend to focus on individual actions, decontextualizing them from their role in the narrative as a whole. LTDers often try to put themselves in the character’s shoes to suss out what they may be thinking and feeling in those moments. These arguments will be colored by personal experiences, which will inevitably vary.

Let’s take for example Cloud’s behavior in Advent Children. One may argue that it makes total sense given that he’s dying and fears failing the ones he loves. Another may argue that there’s no way that he would run unless he was deeply unhappy and pining after a lost love. Well, you’ll probably just be talking over each other until the cows come home. Such is the problem with trying to play armchair therapist with a fictional character. It’s not like we can ask Cloud himself why he did what he did (and even if we could, he’s not the exactly the most reliable narrator in the world). Instead, in trying to understand his motivations, we are left with no choice but to draw comparisons with our own personal experiences, those of our friends, or other works of media we’ve consumed. Any interpretation would be inherently subjective and honestly, a futile subject for debate.

There’s nothing wrong with drawing personal connections with fictional characters of course. That is the purpose of art after all. They are vessels of empathy. But when we’re talking about what is canon, it doesn’t matter what we take away. What matters is the creators’ intent.

Cloud, Tifa and Aerith are not your friends Bob, Alice and Maude. They are characters created by Square Enix. Real people can behave in a variety of different ways if they found themselves in the situations faced by our dear trio; however, FF7 characters are not sentient creatures. Everything they do or say is dictated by the developers to serve the story they are trying to tell.

So what do we have left then? Am I asking you, dear reader, to just trust me, anonymous stranger on the Internet, when I tell you #clotiiscanon. Well, in a sense, yes, but more seriously, I’m going to try to suss out what the creator’s intent is based on what is, and more importantly, what isn’t, on screen.

Instead of putting ourselves in the shoes of the characters, let’s try putting ourselves in the shoes of the creators. So the question would then be, if the intent is X, then what purpose does character Y or scene Z serve?

The story of FF7 isn’t the immutable word of God etched in a stone tablet. For every scene that made it into the final game, there are dozens of alternatives that were tossed aside. Let us also not forget the crude economics of popular storytelling. Spending resources on one particular aspect of the game may mean something entirely unrelated will have to be cut for time. Thus, the absence of a particular character/scenario is an alternative in itself. So with all these options at their disposal, why is the scene we see before us the one that made it into the final cut? — Before we dive in, I also want to define two broad categories of narrative: messy and clean.

Messy narratives are ones I would define as stories that try to illuminate something about the human condition, but may not leave the audience feeling very good by the end of it. The protagonists, while not always anti-heroes, don’t always exhibit the kind of growth we’d like, don’t always learn their lessons, probably aren’t the best role models. The endings are often ambivalent, ambiguous, and leaves room for the audience to take away from it what they will. This is the category I would put art films and prestige cable dramas.

Clean narratives are where I would categorize most popular forms of entertainment. Not that these characters necessarily lack nuance, but whatever flaws are portrayed are something to be overcome by the end of story. The protagonists are characters you’re supposed to want to root for

Final Fantasy as a series would fall under the ‘clean’ category. Sure, many of the protagonists start out as jerks, but they grow through these flaws and become true heroes by the end of their journey. Hell, a lot of the time even the villains are redeemed. They want you to like the characters you’re spending a 40+ hr journey with. Their depictions can still be realistic, but they will become the most idealized versions of themselves by the end of their journeys.

This is important to establish, because we can then assume that it is not SE’s intent to make any of their main characters come off pathetic losers or unrepentant assholes. Now whether or not they succeed in that endeavor is another question entirely.

FF7 OG or The dumbest thought experiment in the world

With that one thousand word preamble out of the way, let’s finally take a look at the text. In lieu of going through the OG’s story beat by beat, let’s try this thought experiment:

Imagine it’s 1996, and you’re a development executive at what was then Squaresoft. The plucky, young development team has the first draft of what will become the game we know as Final Fantasy VII. Like the preceding entries in the series, it’s a world-spanning action adventure RPG, with a key subplot being the epic tragic romance between its hero and heroine, Cloud and Aerith.

They ask you for your notes.

(For the sake of your sanity and mine, let’s limit our hypothetical notes to the romantic subplot)

Disc 1 - everything seems to be on the right track. Nice meet-cute, lots of moments developing the relationship between our pair. Creating a love triangle with this Tifa character is an interesting choice, but she’s a comparatively minor character so she probably won’t be a real threat and will find her happiness elsewhere by the end of the game. You may note that they’re leaning a bit too much into Tifa and Cloud’s past. Especially the childhood promise flashback early in the game — cute scene, but a distraction from main story and main pairing — fodder for the chopping block. You may also bump on the fact that Aerith is initially attracted to Cloud because he reminds her of an ex, but this is supposed to be a more mature FF. That can be an obstacle they overcome as Aerith gets to know the real Cloud.

Aerith dies, but it is supposed to be a tragic romance after all. Death doesn’t have to be the end for this relationship, especially since Aerith is an Ancient after all.

It’s when Disc 2 starts that things go off the rails. First off, it feels like an awfully short time for Cloud to be grieving the love of his life, though it’s somewhat understandable. This story is not just a romance. There are other concerns after all, Cloud’s identity crisis for one. Though said identity crisis involves spending a lot of time developing his relationship with another woman. It’s one thing for Cloud and Tifa to be from the same hometown, but does she really need to play such an outsized role in his internal conflict? This might give the player the wrong impression.

You get to the Northern Crater, and it just feels all wrong. Cloud is more or less fine after the love of his life is murdered in front of his eyes but has a complete mental breakdown to the point that he’s temporarily removed as a playable character because Tifa loses faith in him??? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Oh, but it only gets worse from here. With Cloud gone, the POV switches to Tifa and her feelings for him and her desire to find him. The opening of the game is also recontextualized when you learn the only reason that Cloud was part of the first Reactor mission that starts the game is because Tifa found him and wanted to keep an eye on him.

Then you get to Mideel and the alarm bells are going off. Tifa drops everything, removing her from the party as well, to take care of Cloud while he’s a catatonic vegetable? Not good. Very not good. This level of selfless devotion is going to make Cloud look like a total asshole when he rejects her in favor of Aerith. Speaking of Aerith, she uh…hasn’t been mentioned for some time. In fact, her relationship with Cloud has remained completely static after Disc 1, practically nonexistent, while his with Tifa has been building and building. Developing a rival relationship that then needs to be dismantled rather than developing the endgame relationship doesn’t feel like a particularly valuable use of time and resources.

By the time you get to the Lifestream scene, you’re about ready to toss the script out of the window. Here’s the emotional climax of the entire game, where Cloud’s internal conflict is finally resolved, and it almost entirely revolves around Tifa? Rather than revisiting the many moments of mental anguish we experienced during the game itself — featuring other characters, including let’s say, Aerith — it’s about a hereto unknown past that only Tifa has access to? Not only that, but we learn that the reason Cloud wanted to join SOLDIER was to impress Tifa, and the reason he adopted his false persona was because he was so ashamed that he couldn’t live up to the person he thought Tifa wanted him to be? Here, we finally get a look into the inner life of one half of our epic couple and…it entirely revolves around another woman??

Cloud is finally his real self, and hey, it looks like he finally remembers Aerith, that’s at least a step in the right direction. Though still not great. With his emotional arc already resolved, any further romantic developments is going to feel extraneous and anticlimactic. It just doesn’t feel like there’s enough time to establish that:

Cloud’s romantic feelings for Tifa (which were strong enough to launch his hero’s journey) have transformed into something entirely platonic in the past few days/weeks

Cloud’s feelings for Aerith that he developed while he was pretending to be someone else (and not just any someone, but Aerith’s ex of all people) are real.

This isn’t a romantic melodrama after all. There’s still a villain to kill and a world to save.

Cloud does speak of Aerith wistfully, and even quite personally at times, yet every time he talks about her, he’s surrounded by the other party members. A scene or two where he can grapple with his feelings for her on his own would help. Her ghost appearing in the Sector 5 Church feels like a great opportunity for this to happen, but he doesn’t interact with it at all. What gives? Missed opportunity after missed opportunity.

The night before the final battle, Cloud asks the entire party to find what they’re fighting for. This feels like a great (and perhaps the last) opportunity to establish that for Cloud, it’s in Aerith’s memory and out of his love for her. He could spend those hours alone in any number of locations associated with her — the Church, the Temple of the Ancients, the Forgotten City.

Instead — none of those happens. Instead, once again, it’s Cloud and Tifa in another scene where they’re the only two characters in the scene. You’re really going to have Cloud spend what could very well be the last night of his life with another woman? With a fade to black that strongly implies they slept together? In one fell swoop, you’re portraying Cloud as a guy who not only betrays the memory of his lost love, but is also incredibly callous towards the feelings of another woman by taking advantage of her vulnerability. Why are we rooting for him to succeed again?

Cloud and the gang finally defeat Sephiroth, and Aerith guides him back into the real world. Is he finally explicitly stating that he’s searching for her (though they’ve really waited until the last minute to do so), but again, why is Tifa in this scene? Shouldn’t it just be Cloud and Aerith alone? Why have Tifa be there at all? Why have her and her alone of all the party members be the one waiting for Cloud? Do you need to have Tifa there to be rejected while Cloud professes his unending love for Aerith? It just feels needlessly cruel and distracts from what should be the sole focus of the scene, the love between Cloud and Aerith.

What a mess.

You finish reading, and since it is probably too late in the development process to just fire everyone, you offer a few suggestions that will clarify the intended romance while the retaining the other plot points/general themes of the game.

Here they are, ordered by scale of change, from minor to drastic:

Option 1 would be to keep most of the story in tact, but rearrange the sequence of events so that the Lifestream sequence happens before Aerith’s death. That way, Cloud is his true self and fully aware of his feelings for both women before Aerith’s death. That way, his past with Tifa isn’t some ticking bomb waiting to go off in the second half of the game. That development will cease at the Lifestream scene. Cloud will realize the affection he held for her as a child is no longer the case. He is grateful for the past they shared, but his future is with Aerith. He makes a clear choice before that future is taken away from him with her death. The rest of the game will go on more or less the same (with the Highwind scene being eliminated, of course) making it clear, that avenging the death of his beloved is one of, if not the, primary motivation for him wanting to defeat Sephiroth.

The problem with this “fix” is that a big part of the reason that Aerith gets killed is because of Cloud’s identity crisis. If said crisis is resolved, the impact of her death will be diminished, because it would feel arbitrary rather than something that stems from the consequences of Cloud’s actions. More of the story will need to be reconceived so that this moment holds the same emotional weight.

Another problem is why the Lifestream scene needs to exist at all. Why spend all that time developing the backstory for a relationship that will be moot by the end of the game? It makes Tifa feel like less of a character and more of a plot device, who becomes irrelevant after she services the protagonist’s character development and then has none of her own. That’s no way to treat one of the main characters of your game.

Option 2 would be to re-imagine Tifa’s character entirely. You can keep some of her history with Cloud in tact, but expand her backstory so she is able to have a satisfactory character arc outside of her relationship with Cloud. You could explore the five years in her life since the Nibelheim incident. Maybe she wasn’t in Midgar the whole time. Maybe, like Barret, she has her own Corel, and maybe reconciling with her past there is the climax of her emotional arc as opposed to her past with Cloud. For Cloud too, her importance needs to be diminished. She can be one of the people who help him find his true self in the Lifestream, but not the only person. There’s no reason the other people he’s met on his journey can’t be there. Thus their relationship remains somewhat important, but their journeys are not so entwined that it distracts from Cloud and Aerith’s romance.

Option 3 would be to really lean into the doomed romance element of Cloud and Aerith’s relationship. Have her death be the cause of his mental breakdown, and have Aerith be the one in the Lifestream who is able to put his mind back together and bring him back to the realm of consciousness. After he emerges, he has the dual goal of defeating Sephiroth and trying to reunite with Aerith. In the end, in order to do the former, he has to relinquish the latter. He makes selfless choice. He makes the choice that resonates the overall theme of the game. It’s a bittersweet but satisfying ending. Cloud chooses to honor her memory and her purpose over the chance to physically bring her back. In this version of the game, the love triangle serves no purpose. There’s no role for Tifa at all.

Okay, we can be done with this strained counterfactual. What I’ve hopefully illustrated is that while developers had countless opportunities to solidify Cloud/Aerith as the canon couple in Discs 2 and 3 of the game, they instead chose a different route each and every time. What should also be clear is that the biggest obstacle standing in their way is not Aerith’s death, but the fact that Tifa exists.

At least in the form she takes in the final game, as a playable character and at the very least, the 3rd most important character in game’s story. She is not just another recurring NPC or an antagonist. Her love for Cloud is not going to be treated like a mere trifle or obstacle. If Cloud/Aerith was supposed to be the endgame ship, there would be no need for a love triangle and no need to include Tifa in the game at all. Death is a big enough obstacle, developing Cloud’s relationship with Tifa would only distract from and diminish his romance with Aerith.

I think this is something the dead enders understand intuitively, even more so than many Cloti shippers. Which is why some of them try to dismiss Tifa’s importance in the story so that she becomes a minor supporting character at best, or denigrate her character to the point that she becomes an actual villain. The Seifer to a Squall, the Seymour to a Tidus, hell even a Quistis to a Rinoa, they know how to deal with, but a Tifa Lockhart? As she is actually depicted in Final Fantasy VII? They have no playbook for that, and thus they desperately try to squeeze her into one of these other roles.

Let’s try another thought experiment, and see what would to other FF romances if we inserted a Tifa Lockhart-esque character in the middle of them.

FFXV is a perfect example because it features the sort of tragic love beyond death romance that certain shippers want Cloud and Aerith to be. Now, did I think FFXV was a good game? No. Did I think Noctis/Luna was a particularly well-developed romance? Also no. Did I have any question in my mind whatsoever that they were the canon relationship? Absolutely not.

Is this because they kiss at the end? Well sure, that helps, but also it’s because the game doesn’t spend the chapters after Luna’s death developing Noctis’ relationship with another woman. If Noctis/Luna had the same sort of development as Cloud/Aerith, then after Luna dies, Iris would suddenly pop in and play a much more prominent role. The game would flashback to her past and her relationship with Noctis. And it would be through his relationship with Iris that Noctis understands his duty to become king or a crystal or whatever the fuck that game was about. Iris is by Noctis’ side through the final battle, and when he ascends the throne in that dreamworld or whatever. There, Luna finally shows up again. Iris is still in the frame when Noctis tells her something like ‘Oh sorry, girl, I’ve been in love with Luna all along,” before he kisses Luna and the game ends.

(a very real scene from a very good game)

Come on. It would be utterly ludicrous and an utter disservice to every character involved, yet that is essentially the argument Cloud/Aerith shippers are making. SE may have made some pretty questionable storytelling decisions in the past, but they aren’t that bad at this.

Or in FFVIII, it would be like reordering the sequence of events so that Squall remembers that he grew up in an orphanage with all the other kids after Rinoa falls into a coma. And while Rinoa is out of commission, instead of Quistis gracefully bowing out after realizing she had mistaken her feelings of sisterly affection for love, it becomes Quistis’ childhood relationship with Squall that allows him to remember his past and re-contextualizes the game we’ve played thus far, so that the player realizes that it was actually Quistis who was his motivation all along. Then after this brief emotional detour, his romance with Rinoa would continue as usual. Absolutely absurd.

The Final Fantasy games certainly have their fair share of plot holes, but they’ve never whiffed on a romance this badly.

A somewhat more serious character analysis of the OG

What then is Tifa’s actual role in the story of FFVII? Her character is intricately connected to Cloud’s. In fact, they practically have the same arc, though Tifa’s is rather understated compared to his. She doesn’t adopt a false persona after all. For both of them, the flaw that they must learn to overcome over the course of the game is their fear of confronting the truth of their past. Or to put it more crudely, if they’re not lying, they’re at the very least omitting the truth. Cloud does so to protect himself from his fear of being exposed as a failure. Tifa does so at the expense of herself, because she fears the truth will do more harm than good. They’re two sides of the same coin. Nonetheless, their lying has serious ramifications.

The past they’re both afraid to confront is of course the Nibelheim Incident from five years ago. Thus, the key points in their emotional journeys coincide with the three conflicting Nibelheim flashbacks depicted in the game: Cloud’s false memory in Kalm, Sephiroth’s false vision in the Northern Crater, and the truth in the Lifestream.

Before they enter the Lifestream, both Cloud and Tifa are at the lowest of their lows. Cloud has had a complete mental breakdown and is functionally a vegetable. Tifa has given up everything to take care of Cloud as she feels responsible for his condition. If he doesn’t recover, she may never find peace.

With nothing left to lose, they both try to face the past head on. For Cloud, it’s a bit harder. At the heart of all this confusion, is of course, the Nibelheim Incident. How does Cloud know all these things he shouldn’t if Tifa doesn’t remember seeing him there? The emotional climax for both Cloud and Tifa, and arguably the game as a whole, is the moment the Shinra grunt removes his helmet to reveal that Cloud was there all along.

Tifa is the only character who can play this role for Cloud. It’s not like she a found a videotape in the Lifestream labeled ‘Nibelheim Incident - REAL’ and voila, Cloud is fixed. No, she is the only one who can help him because she is the only person who lived through that moment. No one else could make Cloud believe it. You could have Aerith or anyone else trying to tell him what actually happened, but why would he believe it anymore than the story Sephiroth told him at the Northern Crater?

With Tifa, it’s different. Not only was she physically there, but she’s putting as much at risk in what the truth may reveal. She’s not just a plot device to facilitate Cloud’s character development. The Lifestream sequence is as much the culmination of her own character arc. If it goes the wrong way, “Cloud” may find out that he’s just a fake after all, and Tifa may learn that boy she thought she’d been on this journey with had died years ago. That there’s no one left from her past, that it was all in her head, that she’s all alone. Avoiding this truth is a comfort, but in this moment, they’re both putting themselves on the line. Being completely vulnerable in front of the person they’re most terrified of being vulnerable with.

The developers have structured Cloud and Tifa’s character arcs so that the crux is a moment where the other is literally the only person who could provide the answer they need. Without each other, as far as the story is concerned, Cloud and Tifa would remain incomplete.

Aerith’s character arc is a different beast entirely. She is the closest we have to the traditional Campbellian Hero. She is the Chosen One, the literal last of her kind, who has been resisting the call to adventure until she can no longer. The touchstones of her character arc are the moments she learns more about her Cetra past and comes to terms with her role in protecting the planet - namely Cosmo Canyon, the Temple of the Ancients and the Forgotten City.

How do hers and Cloud’s arcs intersect? When it comes to the Nibelheim incident, she is a merely a spectator (at least during the Kalm flashback, as for the other two, she is uh…deceased). Cloud attacking her at the Temple of the Ancients, which results in her running to the Forgotten City alone and getting killed by Sephiroth, certainly exacerbates his mental deterioration, but it is by no means a turning point in his arc the way the Northern Crater is.

As for Cloud’s role in Aerith’s arc, their meeting is quite important in that it sets forth the series of events that leads her to getting captured by Shinra and thus meeting “Sephiroth” and wanting to learn more about the Cetra. It’s the inciting incident if we’re going to be really pedantic about it, yet Aerith’s actual character development is not dependent on her relationship with Cloud. It is about her communion with her Cetra Ancestry and the planet.

To put it in other terms, all else being the same, Aerith could still have a satisfying character arc had Cloud not crashed down into her Church. Sure, the game would look pretty different, but there are other ways for her to transform from a flirty, at times frivolous girl to an almost Christ-like figure who accepts the burden of protecting the planet.

Such is not the case for Cloud and Tifa. Their character arcs are built around their shared past and their relationship with one another. Without Tifa, you would have to rewrite Cloud’s character entirely. What was his motivation for joining SOLDIER? How did he get on that AVALANCHE mission in the first place? Who can possibly know him well enough to put his mind back together after it falls apart? If the answer to all these questions is the same person, then congratulations, you’ve just reverse engineered Tifa Lockhart.

Tifa fares a little better. Without Cloud, she would be a sad, sweet character who never gets the opportunity to reconcile with the trauma of her past. Superficially, a lot would be the same, but she would ultimately be quite static and all the less interesting for it.

Let’s also take a brief gander at Tifa’s role after the Lifestream sequence. At this point in the game, both Tifa and Cloud’s emotional arcs are essentially complete. They are now the most idealized versions of themselves, characters the players are meant to admire and aspire to. However they are depicted going forward, it would not be the creator’s intent for their actions to be perceived in a negative light.

A few key moments standout, ones that would not be included if the game was intended to end with any other romantic pairing or with Cloud’s romantic interest left ambiguous:

The Highwind scene, which I’ve gone over above. It doesn’t matter if you get the Low Affection or High Affection version. It would not reflect well on either Cloud or Tifa if he chose to spend what could be his last night alive with a woman whose feelings he did not reciprocate.

Before the final battle with Sephiroth, the party members scream out the reasons they’re fighting. Barret specifically calls out AVALANCHE, Marlene and Dyne, Red XIII specifically calls out his Grandpa, and Tifa specifically calls out Cloud. You are not going to make one of Tifa’s last moments in the game be her pining after a guy who has no interest in her. Not when you could easily have her mention something like her past, her hometown or hell even AVALANCHE and Marlene like Barret. If Tifa’s feelings for Cloud are meant to be unrequited, then it would be a character flaw that would be dealt with long before the final battle (see: Quistis in FF8 or Eowyn in the Lord of the Rings). They would not still be on display at moment like this.

Tifa being the only one there when Cloud jumps into the Lifestream to fight Sephiroth for the last time, and Tifa being the only one there when he emerges. She is very much playing the traditional partner/spouse role here, when you could easily have the entire party present or no one there at all. There is clearly something special about her relationship with Cloud that sets her apart from the other party members.

Once again, let’s look at the “I think I can meet her there moment.” And let’s put side the translation (the Japanese is certainly more ambiguous, and it’s not like the game had any trouble having Cloud call Aerith by her name before this). If Cloud was really expressing his desire to reunite with Aerith, and thus his rejection of Tifa, then the penultimate scene of this game is one that involves the complete utter and humiliation of one of its main characters since Tifa’s reply would indicate she’s inviting herself to a romantic reunion she has no part in. Not only that, but to anyone who is not Cl*rith shipper, the protagonist of the game is going to come off as a callous asshole. That cannot possibly be the creator’s intention. They are competent enough to depict an act of love without drawing attention to the party hurt by that love.

What then could possibly be the meaning? Could it possibly be Cloud trying to comfort Tifa by trying to find a silver lining in what appears to be their impending death? That this means they may get to see their departed loved ones again, including their mutual friend, Aerith? (I will note that Tifa talks about Aerith as much, if not even more than Cloud, after her death). Seems pretty reasonable to me, this being an interpretation of the scene that aligns with the overall themes of the game, and casts every character in positive light during this bittersweet moment.

Luckily enough, we have an entire fucking Compilation to find out which is right.

But before we get there, I’m sure some of you (lol @ me thinking anyone is still reading this) are asking, if Cloti is canon, then why is there a love triangle at all? Why even hint at the possibility of a romance between Cloud and Aerith? Wouldn’t that also be a waste of time and resources if they weren’t meant to be canon?

Well, there are two very important reasons that have nothing to do with romance and everything to do with two of the game’s biggest twists:

Aerith initially being attracted to Cloud’s similarities to Zack/commenting on the uncanniness of said similarities is an organic way to introduce the man Cloud’s pretending to be. Without it, the reveal in the Lifestream would fall a bit flat. The man he’s been emulating all along would just be some sort of generic hero rather than a person whose history and deeds already encountered during the course of the game. Notably for this to work, the game only has to establish Aerith’s attraction to Cloud.

To build the player’s attachment to Aerith before her death/obscure the fact that she’s going to die. With the technological limitations of the day, the only way to get the player to interact with Aerith is through the player character (AKA Cloud), and adding an element of choice (AKA the Gold Saucer Date mechanic) makes the player even more invested. This then elevates Aerith’s relationship with Cloud over hers with any other character. At the same time, because her time in the game is limited, Cloud ends up interacting with Aerith more than any of the other characters, at least in Disc 1. The choice to make many of these interactions flirty/romantic also toys with player expectations. One does not expect the hero’s love interest to die halfway through the game. The game itself also spends a bit of time teasing the romance, albeit, largely in superficial ways like other characters commenting on their relationship or Cait Sith reading their love fortune at the Temple of the Ancients. Yet, despite the quantity of their personal interactions, Cloud and Aerith never display any moments of deep love or devotion that one associates with a Final Fantasy romance. They never have the time. What the game establishes then is the potential of a romance rather than the romance itself. Aerith’s death hurts because of all that lost potential. There so many things she wanted to do, so many places she wanted to see that will never happen because her life is cut short. Part of what is lost, of course, is the potential of her romance with Cloud.

This creative choice is a lot more controversial since it elevates subverting audience expectations over character, and understandably leads to some player confusion. What’s the point of all this set up if there’s not going to be a pay off? Well, that is kind of the point. Death is frustrating because of all the unknowns and what-ifs. But, I suppose some people just can’t accept that fact in a game like this.

One last note on the OG before we move on: Even though this from an Ultimania, since we’re talking about story development and creator intent, I thought it was relevant to include: the fact that Aerith was the sole heroine in early drafts of the game is not the LTD trump card so people think it is. Stories undergo radical changes through the development process. More often than not, there are too many characters, and characters are often combined or removed if their presence feels redundant or confusing.

In this case, the opposite happened. Tifa was added later in the development process as a second heroine. Let’s say that Aerith was the Last Ancient and the protagonist’s sole love interest in this early draft of Final Fantasy VII. In the game that was actually released, that role was split between two characters (and last I checked, Tifa is not the last of a dying race), and Aerith dies halfway through the game, so what does that suggest about how Aerith’s role may have changed in the final product? Again, if Aerith was intended to be Cloud’s love interest, Tifa simply would not exist.

A begrudging analysis of our favorite straight-to-DVD sequel

Let’s move onto the Compilation. And in doing so, completely forget about the word vomit that’s been written above. While it’s quite clear to me now that there’s no way in hell the developers would have intended the last scene in the game to be both a confirmation of Cloud’s love for Aerith and his rejection of Tifa, in my younger and more vulnerable years, I wasn’t so sure. In fact, this was the prevailing interpretation back in the pre-Compilation Dark Ages. Probably because of a dubious English translation of the game and a couple of ambiguous cameos in Final Fantasy Tactics and Kingdom Hearts were all we  had to go on.

How then did the official sequel to Final Fantasy VII change those priors?

Two years after the events of the game, Cloud is living as a family with Tifa and two kids rather than scouring the planet for a way to be reunited with Aerith. Shouldn’t the debate be well and over with that? Obviously not, and it’s not just because people were being obstinate. Part of the confusion stems from Advent Children itself, but I would argue that did not come from an intent to play coy/keep Cloud’s romantic desires ambiguous, but rather a failure of execution of his character arc.

Now I wasn’t the biggest fan of the film when I first watched a bootlegged copy I downloaded off LimeWire in 2005, and I like it even less now, but I better understand its failures, given its unique position as a sequel to a beloved game and the cornerstone of launching the Compilation.

The original game didn’t have such constraints on its storytelling. Outside of including a few elements that make it recognizable as a Final Fantasy (Moogles, Chocobos, Summons, etc.) and being a good enough game to be a financial success, the developers pretty much had free rein in terms of what story they wanted to tell, what characters they would use to tell it, and how long it took for them to tell said story.

With Advent Children, telling a good story was not the sole or even primary goal. Instead, it had to:

Do some fanservice: The core audience is going to be the OG fanbase, who would be expecting to see modern, high-def depictions of all the memorable and beloved characters from the game, no matter if the natural end point of their stories is long over.

Set up the rest of the Compilation - Advent Children is the draw with the big stars, but also a way to showcase the lesser known characters from from the Compilation who are going to be leading their own spinoffs.  It’s part feature film/part advertisement for the rest of the Compilation. Thus, the Turks, Vincent and Zack get larger roles in the film than one might expect to attract interest to the spinoffs they lead.

Show off its technical prowess: SE probably has enough self awareness to realize that what’s going to set it apart from other animated feature films is not its novel storytelling, but its graphical capabilities. Thus, to really show off those graphics, the film is going to be packed to the brim with big, complicated action scenes with lots of moving parts, as opposed to quieter character driven moments.

These considerations are not unique to Advent Children, but important to note nonetheless:

As a sequel, the stakes have to be just as high if not higher than those in the original work. Since the threat in the OG was the literal end of the world, in Advent Children, the world’s gotta end again

The OG was around 30-40 hours long. An average feature-length film is roughly two hours. Video games and films are two very different mediums. As many TV writers who have tried to make the transition to film (and vice-versa) can tell you, success in one medium does not translate to success in another. 

With so much to do in so little time, is it any wonder then that it is again Sephiroth who is the villain trying to destroy the world and Aerith in the Lifestream the deus ex machina who saves the day?

All of this is just a long-winded way to say, certain choices in the Advent Children that may seem to exist only to perpetuate the LTD were made with many other storytelling considerations in mind.

When trying to understand the intended character arcs and relationship dynamics, you cannot treat the film as a collection of scenes devoid of context. You can’t just say - “well here’s a scene where Cloud seems to miss Aerith, and here’s another scene where Cloud and Tifa fight. Obviously, Cloud loves Aerith.” You have to look at what purpose these scenes serve in the grander narrative.

And what is this grander narrative? To put it in simplistic terms, Aerith is the obstacle, and Tifa is goal. Cloud must get over his guilt over Aerith’s death so that he can return to living with Tifa and the children in peace.

The scenes following the prologue are setting up the emotional stakes of film - the problem that will be resolved by the film’s end. The problem being depicted here is not Aerith’s absence from Cloud’s life, but Cloud’s absence from his family. We see Tifa walking through Seventh Heaven saying “he’s not here anymore,” we see Denzel in his sickbed asking for Cloud, we see a framed photo of the four of them on Cloud’s desk. We see Cloud letting Tifa’s call go to voicemail.

What we do not see is Aerith, who does not appear until almost halfway through the film.

Cloud spends the first of the film avoiding confrontation with the Remnants/dealing with the return of Sephiroth. It’s only when Tifa is injured, and Denzel and Marlene get kidnapped that he goes to face his problems head on.

Before the final battle, when Cloud has exorcised his emotional demons and is about to face his physical demons, what do we see? We see Cloud telling Marlene that it’s his turn to take care of her, Denzel and Tifa the way they’ve taken care of him. We see Cloud telling Tifa that he ‘feels lighter’ and tacitly confirming that she was correct when she called him out earlier in the film. We see Cloud confirming to Denzel that he’s going home after this is all over.

What we do not see is Cloud telepathically communicating with Aerith to say, “Hey boo, can’t wait to beat Sephiroth so I can finally reunite with you in the Promised Land. Xoxoxo.” Aerith doesn’t factor in at all. Returning to his family is his goal, and his fight with Bahamut/the Remnants/Sephiroth/whatever the fuck is the final obstacle he has to face before reaching this goal.

This is reiterated again when Cloud is shot by Yazoo and seemingly perishes in an explosion. What is at stake with his “death”? We see Tifa calling his name while looking out the airship. We see Denzel and Marlene waiting for him at Seventh Heaven. We do not see Aerith watching over him in the Lifestream.

Now, Aerith does play an important role in Cloud’s arc when she shows up at about the midpoint of the film. You could fairly argue that it’s the turning point in Cloud’s emotional journey, the moment when he finally decides to confront his problems. But even if it’s only Cloud and Aerith in the scene, it’s not really about their relationship at all.

Let’s consider the context before this scene happens. Denzel and Marlene have been kidnapped by the Remnants; Tifa was nearly killed in a fight with another. This is Cloud at his lowest point. It’s his worst fears come to pass. His guilt over Aerith’s death is directly addressed at this moment in the film because it is not so much about his feelings for Aerith as it is about how Cloud fears the failures of his past (one of the biggest being her death) would continue into the present. If it was just about Aerith, we could have seen Cloud asking for her forgiveness at any other time in the film. It occurs when it does because this when his guilt over Aerith’s death intersects with his actual conflict, his fear that he’ll fail the the ones he loves. She appears when he’s at the Forgotten City where he goes to save the children. The same location where he had failed two year before.

This connection is made explicit when Cloud has flashes of Zack and Aerith’s deaths before he saves Denzel and Tifa from Bahamut. Again, Cloud’s dwelling on the past is directly related to his fears of being unable to protect his present.

Aerith is a feminine figure who is associated with flowers. That combined with the players’ memory of her and her relationship with Cloud in the OG, I can see how their scenes can be construed as romantic, but I really do not think that it is the creators’ intent to portray any romantic longing on Cloud’s part.

If they wanted to suggest that Cloud was still in love with Aerith or even leave his romantic interest ambiguous, there is no way in hell they would have had Cloud living with Tifa and two kids prior to the film’s events. To say nothing of opening the film by showing the pain his absence brings.

A romantic reading of Cloud’s guilt over Aerith’s death would suggest that he entered into a relationship with Tifa and started raising two children with her while still holding a torch for Aerith and hoping for a way to be reunited with her. The implication would be that Tifa is his second choice, and he is settling. Now, is this a dynamic that occurs in real life? Absolutely. Is this something that is often depicted in some films and television? Sure - in fact this very premise is at the core of one my favorite films of the last decade - 45 Years — and spoiler alert — the guy does not come off well in this situation. But once again, Cloud is not a real person, and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children is not a John Cassavettes film or an Ingmar Bergman chamber drama. It is a 2-hour long straight to DVD sequel for a video game made for teens. This kind of messy, if realistic, relationship dynamic is not what this particular work is trying to explore.

(one of these is a good film!)

By the end of Advent Children, Cloud is once again the idealized version of himself. A hero that the audience is supposed to like and admire. We are supposed to think that his actions in the first half of the movie (wallowing in his guilt and abandoning his family) were bad. These are the flaws that he must overcome through the course of the film, and by the end he does. If he really had been settling and treating his Seventh Heaven family as a second choice prior to the events of the film, that too would obviously be a character flaw that needs to be addressed before the end of the film. It isn’t because this is a dynamic that only exists in certain people’s imaginations.

If the creators wanted to leave the Cloud & Aerith relationship open to a romantic interpretation, they didn’t have to write themselves into such a corner. They wouldn’t have to change the final film much at all, merely adjust the chronology a bit. Instead of Cloud already living as a family with Tifa, Marlene and Denzel prior to the beginning of the film, you would show them on the precipice of becoming a family, but with Cloud being unable to take the final step without getting over his feelings for Aerith first. This would leave space for him to love both women without coming off as an opportunistic jerk.

This is essentially the dynamic with Locke/Rachel/Celes in FFVI. Locke is unable to move on with Celes or anyone else until he finally finds closure with Rachel. It’s a lovely scene that does not diminish his relationships with either woman. He loved Rachel. He will love Celes. What the game does not have him do is enter into a relationship into Celes first and then when the party arrives at the Phoenix Cave, have him suddenly remember ‘Oh shit, I’ve gotta deal with my baggage with Rachel before I can really move on.’ That would not paint him in a particularly positive light.

Speaking of other Final Fantasies, let’s take a look another sequel in the series set two years after the events of the original work, one that is clearly the story of its protagonist searching for their lost love. And guess what? Final Fantasy X-2 does not begin with Yuna shacked up and raising two kids with another dude. And it certainly doesn’t begin with his perspective of the whole situation when Yuna decides to search for Tidus.

Square Enix knows how to write these kind of stories when they want to, and it’s clearly not their intent for Cloud and Aerith. Again, the biggest obstacle in the way of a Cloud/Aerith endgame isn’t space and time or death, it’s the existence of Tifa Lockhart.

A reasonable question to ask would be, if SE is not trying to ignite debate over the love triangle, why make Cloud’s relationship with Aerith a part of Advent Children at all? Why invite that sort of confusion? Well, the answer here, like the answer in the OG, is that Aerith’s role in the sequel is much more than her relationship with Cloud.

In the OG, it wasn’t Cloud and the gang who managed to stop Sephiroth and Meteor in the end, it was Aerith from the Lifestream. In a two-hour long film, you do not have the time to set up a completely new villain who can believably end the world, and since you pretty much have to include Sephiroth, the main antagonist can really only be him. No one else in the party has been established to have any magical Cetra powers, and again, since that’s not something that can be effectively established in a two-hour long film, and since Aerith needs to appear somehow, it again needs to be her who will save the day.

Given the time constraints, this external conflict has to be connected with Cloud’s internal conflict. In the OG, Cloud’s emotional arc is in resolved in the Lifestream, and then we spend a few more hours hunting down the Huge Materia/remembering what Holy is before resolving the external conflict of stopping Meteor. In Advent Children, we do not have that luxury of time. These turning points have to be one and same. It is only after Aerith is “introduced” in the film when Cloud asks her for forgiveness that she is able to help in the fight against the Remnants. Thus the turning point for Cloud’s character arc and the external conflict are the same. It’s understandably economical storytelling, though I wouldn’t call it particularly good storytelling.

As much as Cloud feels guilt over both Zack and Aerith’s deaths, it’s only Aerith who can play this dual role in the film. Zack can appear to help resolve Cloud’s emotional arc, but since he has no special Cetra powers or anything, there’s little he can do to help in Cloud’s fight against the Remnants. More time would need to be spent contriving a reason why Cloud is able to defeat the Remnants now when he wasn’t before or explaining why Aerith can suddenly help from the Lifestream when she had been absent before. (I still don’t think the film does a particularly good job of explaining this part, but that is a conversation for another time).

Another reason why Zack could not play this role is because at the time of AC’s original release, all we knew of Cloud and Zack’s relationship was contained in an optional flashback at the Shinra mansion after Cloud returns from the Lifestream. If it was Zack who suddenly showed up at Cloud’s lowest point, most viewers, even many who played the original game, would probably have been confused, and the moment would have fallen flat. On the other hand, even the most casual fan would have been aware of Aerith and her connection to Cloud, with her death scene being among the most well-known gaming moments of all time. Moreover, Aerith’s death is directly connected to Sephiroth, who is once again the threat in AC, whereas Zack was killed by Shinra goons. Aerith serves multiple purposes in a way that Zack just cannot.

Despite all this, though Aerith is more important to the film as a whole, many efforts are made to suggest that Zack and Aerith are equally important to Cloud. One of the first scenes in the film is Cloud moping around Zack’s grave (And unlike the scene with Aerith in the Forgotten City, it isn’t directly connected with Cloud’s present storyline in any way). We have the aforementioned scene where Cloud has flashes of both Aerith’s and Zack’s deaths when he saves Tifa and Denzel. Cloud has a scene where he’s standing back to back with Zack, mirroring his scene with in the Forgotten City with Aerith, before the climax of his fight with Sephiroth. In the Lifestream, after Cloud “dies,” it’s both Aerith and Zack who are there to send him back. Before the film ends, Cloud sees both Aerith and Zack leaving the church.

Now, were all these Zack appearances a way to promote the upcoming spin-off game that he’s going to lead? Of course. But the creators surely would have known that having Zack play such a similar role in Cloud’s arc would make Cloud’s relationship with Aerith feel less special and thus complicating a romantic interpretation of said relationship. If they wanted to encourage a romantic reading of Cloud’s lingering feelings for Aerith, they would have given Zack his own distinct role in the film. Or rather, they wouldn’t have put Zack in the film at all, and they certainly wouldn’t have him lead his own game, but we’ll get to the Zack of it all later.

The funny thing is, in a way, Zack is portrayed as being more special to Cloud. Zack only exists in the film to interact with Cloud and encourage him. Meanwhile. Aerith also has brief interactions with Kadaj, the Geostigma children and even Tifa before the film’s end. Aerith is there to save the whole world. Zack is there just for Cloud. If it’s Cloud’s relationship with Aerith that’s meant to be romantic, shouldn’t it be the other way around?

Let’s take a look at Tifa Lockhart. What role did she have to play in the FF7 sequel film? If, like some, you believed FF7 to be the Cloud/Aerith/Sephiroth show, then Tifa could have easily had a Barret-sized cameo in Advent Children. And honestly, she’s just a great martial artist. She has no special powers that would make her indispensable in a fight against Sephiroth. You certainly would not expect her to be the 2nd billed character in the film. Though of course, if you actually played through the Original Game with your eyes open, you would realize that Tifa Lockhart is instrumental to any story about Cloud Strife.

Unlike Aerith’s appearances, almost none of the suggestive scenes and dynamics between Cloud and Tifa had to be included in the film. As in, they serve no other plot related purpose and could have easily been cut from the final film if the creators weren’t trying to encourage a romantic interpretation of their relationship.

It feels inevitable now, but no one was expecting Cloud and Tifa to be living together and raising two kids. In the general consciousness, FF7 is Cloud and Sephiroth and their big swords and Aerith’s death. At the time, in the eyes of most fans and casual observers, Cloud and Tifa being together wasn’t a necessary part of the FF7 equation the way say, an epic fight between Cloud and Sephiroth would be. In fact, I don’t think even the biggest Cloti fans at the time would have imagined Cloud and Tifa living together would be their canon outcome in the sequel film.

Now can two platonic friends live together and raise two children together? Absolutely, but again Cloud and Tifa are not real people. They are fictional characters. A reasonable person (let’s use the legal definition of the term) who does not have brainworms from arguing over one of the dumbest debates on the Internet for 23 years would probably assume that two characters who were shown to be attracted to each other in the OG and who are now living together and raising two kids are in a romantic relationship. This is a reasonable assumption to make, and if SE wanted to leave Cloud’s romantic inclinations ambiguous, they simply would not be depicting Cloud and Tifa’s relationship in this manner. Cloud’s disrupted peace could have been a number of different things. He could have been a wandering mercenary, he could have been searching for a way to be reunited with Aerith. It didn’t have to be the family he formed with Tifa, but, then again, if you were actually paying attention to the story the OG was trying to tell, of course he would be living with Tifa.

Let’s also look at the scene where Cloud finds Tifa in the church after her fight with Loz. All the plot related information (who attacked her, Marlene being taken) is conveyed in the brief conversation they have before Cloud falls unconscious from Geostigma. What purpose do all the lingering shots of Cloud and Tifa in the flower bed in a Yin-Yang/non-sexual 69ing position serve if not to be suggestive of the type of relationship they have? It’s beautifully rendered but ultimately irrelevant to both the external and internal conflicts of the film.

Likewise, there is no reason why Cloud and Tifa needed to wake up in their children’s bedroom. No reason to show Cloud waking up with Tifa next to him in a way that almost makes you think they were in the same bed. And there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for a close-up of Tifa’s hand with the Wolf Ring on her ring finger while she is admonishing Cloud during what sounds like a domestic argument (This ring again comes into focus when Tifa leads Denzel to Cloud at the church at the end - there are dozens of ways this scene could have been rendered, but this is the one that was chosen.) If it wasn’t SE’s intent to emphasize the family dynamic and the intimate nature of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship, these scenes would not exist.

Let’s also take a look at Denzel, the only new character in the AC (give or take the Remnants). Again, given the film’s brief runtime, the fact that they’re not only adding a new character but giving him more screen time than almost every other AVALANCHE member must mean that he’s pretty important. While Denzel does have an arc of his own, especially in ACC, he is intricately connected to Cloud and Tifa and solidifies the family unit that they’ve been forming in Edge. Marlene still has Barret, but with the addition of Denzel, the family becomes something more real albeit even more tenuous given his Geostigma diagnosis. Without Denzel in the picture, it’s a bit easier to interpret Cloud’s distance from Tifa as romantic pining for another woman, but now it just seems absurd. The stakes are so much higher. Cloud and Tifa are at a completely different stage in their lives from the versions of these characters we met early on in the OG who were entangled in a frivolous love triangle. And yet some people are still stuck trying to fit these characters into a childish dynamic that died at the end of disc one along with a certain someone.

All this is there in the film, at least the director’s cut, if you really squint. But since SE preferred to spend its time on countless action sequences that have aged as well as whole milk in lieu of spending a few minutes showing Cloud’s family life before he got Geostigma to establish the emotional stakes, or a beat or two more on his reconciliation with Tifa and the kids, people may be understandably confused about Cloud’s arc. Has Cloud just been a moping around in misery for the two years post-OG? The answer is no, though that can only really be found in the accompanying novellas, specifically Case of Tifa.

Concerning the novellas, which we apparently must read to understand said DVD sequel

I really don’t know how you can read through CoT and still think there is anything ambiguous about the nature of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship. The “Because I have you this time,” Cloud telling Tifa he’ll remind her how to be strong when they’re alone, Cloud confidently agreeing when Marlene adds him to their family. Not to mention Barret and Cid’s brief conversation about Cloud and Tifa’s relationship in Case of Barret, after which Cid comments that “women wear the pants,” which Barret then follows by asking Cid about Shera. Again, a reasonable person would assume the couple in question are in a romantic relationship, and if this wasn’t the intent, these lines would not be present. Especially not in a novella about someone else.

Some try to argue that CoT just shows how incompatible Cloud and Tifa are because it features a few low points in their relationship. I don’t think that’s Nojima’s intent. Even if it was, it certainly wouldn’t be to prove that Cloud loves Aerith. This isn’t how you tell that story. Why waste all that time disproving a negative rather than proving a positive? We didn’t spend hours in FF8 watching Rinoa’s relationship with Seifer fall apart to understand how much better off she is with Squall. If Cloud and Aerith is meant to be a love story, then tell their love story. Why tell the story of how Cloud is incompatible with someone else?

Part of the confusion may be because CoT doesn’t tell a complete story in and of itself. The first half of the story (before Cloud has to deliver flowers to the Forgotten City) acts as a sort of epilogue to the OG, while the second half of the story is something of a prologue to Advent Children (or honestly its missing Act One). And to state the obvious, conflict is inherent to any story worth telling. It can’t just be all fluff, that’s what the fanfiction is for.

Tifa’s conflict is her fear that the fragile little family they’ve built in Edge is going to fall apart. Thus we see her fret about Cloud’s distance, the way this affects Marlene, and Denzel’s sickness. There are certainly some low moments here --- Tifa telling Cloud to drink in his room, asking if he loves her -- all ways for the threat to seem more real, the outcome more uncertain, yet there’s only one way this conflict can be resolved. One direction to which their relationship can move.

Again, by the end of this story, both characters are supposed to be the best versions of themselves, to find their “happy” endings so to speak. Tifa could certainly find happiness outside of a relationship with Cloud. She could decide that they’ve given it a shot, but they’re better off as friends. She’s grateful for this experience and she’s learned from this, but now she’s ready to make a life for herself on her own. It would be a fine character arc, though not something the Final Fantasy series has been wont to do. However, that’s obviously not the case here as there’s no indication whatsoever that Tifa considers this as an option for herself. Nojima hasn’t written this off ramp into her journey. For Tifa, they’ll either become a real family or they won’t. Since this is a story that is going to have a happy ending, so of course they will, even if there are a lot of bumps along the way.

Unfortunately, with the Compilation being the unwieldy beast that this is, this whole arc has to be pieced together across a number of different works:

Tifa asking herself if they’re a real family in CoT

Her greatest fear seemingly come to life when Cloud leaves at the end of CoT/beginning of AC

Tifa explicitly asking Cloud if the reason they can’t help each other is because they’re not a real family during their argument in AC. Notably, even though Cloud is at his lowest point, he doesn’t confirm her fear. Instead he says he that he can’t help anyone, not even his family. Instead, he indirectly confirms that yes he does think they’re a family, even if is a frustrating moment still in that he’s too scared to try to save it.

The ending of AC where we see a new photo of Cloud smiling surrounded by Tifa and the kids and the rest of the AVALANCHE, next to the earlier photo we had seen of the four of them where he was wearing a more dour expression.

The ending of The Kids Are All Right, where Cloud, Tifa, Denzel and Marlene meet with Evan, Kyrie and Vits - and Cloud offers, unsolicited, that even if they’re not related by blood, they’re a family.

The ending of DVD extra ‘Reminiscence of FFVII’ where Cloud takes the day off and asks Tifa to close the bar so they can spend time together as a family as Tifa had wanted to do early in CoT

Cloud fears he’ll fail his family. Tifa fears it’ll fall apart. Cloud retreats into himself, pushing others away. Tifa neglects herself, not being able to say what she needs to say. In Advent Children, Tifa finally voices her frustrations. It’s then that Cloud finally confronts his fears. Like in the OG, Cloud and Tifa’s conflicts and character arcs are two sides of the same coin, and it’s only by communicating with each other are they able to resolve it. Though with the Compilation being an inferior work, it’s much less satisfying this time around. Such is the problem when you’re writing towards a preordained outcome (Cloud and Sephiroth duking it once again) rather than letting the story develop organically.

Some may ask, why mention Aerith so much (Cloud growing distant after delivering flowers to the Forgotten City, Cloud finding Denzel at Aerith’s church) if they weren’t trying to perpetuate the LTD? Well, as explained above, Aerith had to be in Advent Children, and since CoT is the only place where we get any insight into Cloud’s psyche, it’s here where Nojima expands on that guilt.

Again, this is a story that requires conflict, and what better conflict than the specter of a love rival? Notably, despite us having access to Tifa’s thoughts and fears, she never explicitly associates Cloud’s behavior with him pining after Aerith. Though it’s fair to say this fear is implied, if unwarranted.

If Cloud had actually been pining after Aerith this whole time, we would not be seeing it all unfold through Tifa’s perspective. You can depict a romance without drawing attention to the injured third party. We’re seeing all of this from Tifa’s POV, because it’s about Tifa’s insecurities, not the great tragic romance between Cloud and Aerith. Honestly, another reason we see this from Tifa’s perspective is because it’s dramatically more interesting. Because she’s insecure, she (and we the reader) wonder if there’s something else going on. Meanwhile, from Cloud’s perspective it would be straightforward and redundant, given what we see in AC. He’s guilty over Aerith’s death and thinks he doesn’t deserve to be happy.

Not to mention, the first time we encounter Aerith in CoT, Tifa is the one breaking down at her grave while Cloud is the one comforting her. Are we supposed to believe that he just forgot he was in love with Aerith until he had to deliver flowers to the Forgotten City?

And Aerith doesn’t just serve as a romantic obstacle. She’s also a symbol of guilt and redemption for both Cloud and Tifa. Neither think they have the right to be happy after all that’s happened (Aerith’s death being a big part of this), and through Denzel, who Cloud finds at Aerith’s church, they both see a chance to atone.

I do want to address Case of Lifestream: White because it’s only time in the entire Compilation where I’ve asked myself — what are they trying to achieve here? Now, I’d rather drink bleach than start debating the translation of ‘koibito’ again, but I did think it was a strange choice to specify the romantic nature of Aerith’s love for Cloud. I suppose it could be a reference her obvious attraction to Cloud in the OG, though calling it love feels like a stretch.

But nothing else in CoLW really gives me pause. It might be a bit jarring to see how much of it is Aerith’s thoughts of Cloud, but it makes sense when you consider the context in which it’s meant to be consumed. Unlike Case of Tifa or Case of Denzel, CoLW isn’t meant to be read on its own. It’s a few scant paragraphs in direct conversation with Case of Lifestream: Black. In CoLB, Sephiroth talks about his plan to return and end the world or whatever, and how Cloud is instrumental to his plan. Each segment of CoLW mirrors the corresponding segment of CoLB. Thus, CoLW has to be about Aerith’s plan to stop Sephiroth and the role Cloud must play in that. In both of these stories, Cloud is the only named character. It doesn’t mean that thoughts of Cloud consume all of Aerith’s afterlife. Case of Lifestream is only a tiny sliver of the story, a halfassed way to explain why in Advent Children the world is ending again and why Cloud has to be at the center of it all.

Notably, there is absolutely nothing in CoLW about Cloud’s feelings for Aerith. Even if it’s just speculation on her part as we see Sephiroth speculate about Cloud’s reactions in CoLB. Aerith can see what’s going on in the real world, but she says nothing about Cloud’s actions. If Cloud is really pining after her, trying to find a way to be reunited with her, wouldn’t this be the ideal story to show such devotion?

But it’s not there, because not only does it not happen, but because this story is not about Aerith’s relationship with Cloud. It is about how Aerith needs to see and warn Cloud in order to stop Sephiroth. By the end of Advent Children, that goal is fulfilled. Cloud gets his forgiveness. Aerith gets to see him again and helps him stop Sephiroth. There’s no suggestion that either party wants more. We finally have the closure that the OG lacked, and at no point does it confirm that Cloud reciprocated Aerith’s romantic feelings, even though there were plenty of opportunities to do so.

I don’t really know what else people were expecting. Advent Children isn’t a romantic drama. There’s not going to be a moment where Cloud explicitly tells Tifa, ‘I’ve never loved Aerith. It’s only been you all along.” This is just simply not the kind of story it is.

Though one late scene practically serves this function. When Cloud “dies” and Aerith finds him in the Lifestream, if there were any lingering romantic feelings between the two of them, this would be a beautiful bittersweet reunion. Maybe something about how as much as they want to be together, it’s not his time yet. Instead, it’s almost played off as a joke. Cloud calls her ‘Mother’, and Zack is at Aerith’s side, joking about how Cloud has no place there. This would be the perfect opportunity to address the romantic connection between Cloud and Aerith, but instead, the film elides this completely. Instead, it’s a cute afterlife moment between Aerith and Zack, and functionally allows Cloud to go back to where he belongs, to Tifa and the kids. Whatever Cloud’s feelings for Aerith were before, it’s transformed into something else.

Crisis Core -- or how Aerith finally gets her love story

The other relevant part of the Compilation is Crisis Core, which I will now touch on briefly (or at least brief for me). In the OG, Zack Fair was more plot device than character. We knew he was important to Cloud — enough that Cloud would mistake Zack’s memories for his own -- we knew he was important to Aerith — enough that she is initially drawn to Cloud due to his similarities to Zack — yet the nature of these relationships is more ambiguous. Especially his relationship with Aerith. From the little we learn of their relationship, it could have been completely one-sided on her part, and Zack a total cad. At least that’s the implication she leaves us with in Gongaga. We get the sense that she might not be the most reliable narrator on this point (why bring up an ex so often, unsolicited, if it wasn’t anything serious?) but the OG never confirms this either way.

Crisis Core clears this up completely. Not only is Zack portrayed as the Capital H Hero of his own game, but his relationships with Cloud and Aerith are two of the most important in the game. In fact, they are the basis for his heroic sacrifice at the game’s end: he dies trying to save Cloud’s life; he dies trying to return to Aerith.

Zack’s relationship with Aerith is a major subplot of the game. Not only that, but the details of said relationship completely recontextualizes what we know about the Aerith we see in the OG. Many of Aerith’s most iconic traits (wearing pink, selling flowers) are a direct product of this relationship, and more importantly, so many of the hallmarks of her early relationship with Cloud (him falling through her church, one date as a reward, a conversation in the playground) are a direct echo of her relationship with Zack.

A casual fling this was not. Aerith’s relationship with Zack made a deep impact on the character we see in the OG and clearly colored her interactions with Cloud throughout.

Crisis Core is telling Zack’s story, and Tifa is a fairly minor supporting character, yet it still finds the time to expand upon Cloud and Tifa’s relationship. Through their interactions with Zack, we learn just how much they were on each others’ minds during this time, and how they were both too shy to own up to these feelings. We also get a brief expansion on the moment Cloud finds Tifa injured in the reactor.

Meanwhile, given the point we are in the story’s chronology, Cloud and Aerith are completely oblivious of each other’s existence.

One may try to argue that none of this matters since all of this is in the past. While this argument might hold water if we arguing about real lives in the real world, FF7 is a work of fiction. Its creators decided that these would be events we would see, and that Zack would be the lens through which we’d see them. Crisis Core is not the totality of these characters’ lives prior to the event of the OG. Rather, it consists of moments that enhance and expand upon our understanding of the original work. We learn the full extent of Hojo’s experimentation and the Jenova project; we learn that Sephiroth was actually a fairly normal guy before he was driven insane when he uncovers the circumstances of his birth. We learn that Aerith was a completely different person before she met Zack, and their relationship had a profound impact on her character.

A prequel is not made to contradict the original work, but what it can do is recontexualize the story we already know and add a layer of nuance that may have not been obvious before. Thus, Sephiroth is transformed from a scary villain into a tragic figure who could have been a hero were it not for Hojo’s experiments. Aerith’s behavior too invites reinterpretation. What once seemed flirty and perhaps overtly forward now looks like the tragic attempts of a woman trying to recapture a lost love.

If Cloud and Aerith were meant to be the official couple of the Compilation of FF7, you absolutely would not be spending so much time depicting two relationships that will be moot by the time we get to the original work. You especially would not depict Zack and Aerith’s relationship in a way that makes Aerith’s relationship with Cloud look like a copy of the moments she had with her ex.

Additionally, with Zack’s relationship with Angeal, we can see, that within the universe of FF7, a protagonist being devastated over the death of a beloved comrade isn’t something that’s inherently romantic. Neither is it romantic for said dead comrade to lend a helping hand from the beyond.

SE would also expect some people to play Crisis Core before the OG. If Cloud and Aerith are the intended endgame couple, then SE would be asking the player to root for a guy to pursue the girlfriend of the man who gave his life for him. The same man who died trying to reunite with her. This is to say nothing of Cloud’s treatment of Tifa in this scenario. How could this possibly be the intent  for their most popular protagonist in the most popular entry of their most popular franchise?

What Crisis Core instead offers is something for fans of Aerith who may be disappointed that she was robbed of a great romance by her death. Well, she now gets that epic, tragic romance. Only it’s with Zack, not Cloud.

If SE intended for Cloud and Aerith to be the official couple of FF7, neither Zack nor Tifa would exist. They would not spend so much time developing Zack and Tifa into the multi-dimensional characters they are, only to be treated as nothing more than collateral damage in the wake of Cloud and Aerith’s great love. No, this is a Final Fantasy. SE want their main characters to have something of a happy ending after all of the tribulations they face. Cloud and Tifa find theirs in life. Zack and Aerith, as the ending of AC suggests, find theirs in death.

Cloud and Aerith’s relationship isn’t a threat to the Zack/Aerith and Cloud/Tifa endgame, nor is it a mere obstacle. Rather, it’s a relationship that actually deepens and strengthens the other two. Aerith is explicitly searching for her first love in Cloud, revealing just how deep her feelings for Zack ran. Cloud gets to live out his heroic SOLDIER fantasy with Aerith, a fantasy he created just to impress Tifa.

There are moments between Cloud and Aerith that may seem romantic when taken on its own, but viewed within the context of the whole narrative, ultimately reveal that they aren’t quite right for each other, and in each other, they’re actually searching for someone else.

This quadrangular dynamic reminds me a bit of one of my favorite classic films, The Philadelphia Story. (Spoilers for a film that came out in 1940 ahead) — The single most romantic scene in the film is between Jimmy Stewart’s and Katherine Hepburn’s characters, yet they’re not the ones who end up together. Even as their passions run, as the music swells, and we want them to end up together, we realize that they’re not quite right for each other. We know that it won’t work out.

More relevantly, we know this is true due to the existence of Cary Grant’s and Ruth Hussey’s characters, who are shown to carry a torch for Hepburn and Stewart, respectively. Grant and Hussey are well-developed and sympathetic characters. With the film being the top grossing film of the year, and made during the Code era, it’s about as “clean” of a narrative as you can get. There’s no way Grant and Hussey would be given such prominent roles just to be left heartbroken and in the cold by the film’s end.

Hepburn’s character (Tracy) pretty much sums it herself after some hijinks lead to a last minute proposal from Stewart’s character (Mike):

Mike: Will you marry me, Tracy?                      

Tracy: No, Mike. Thanks, but hmm-mm. Nope.

Mike: l've never asked a girl to marry me. l've avoided it. But you've got me all confused now. Why not?

Tracy: Because l don't think Liz [Hussey’s character] would like it...and l'm not sure you would...and l'm even a little doubtful about myself. But l am beholden to you, Mike. l'm most beholden.

Despite the fact that the film spends more time developing Hepburn and Stewart’s relationship than theirs with their endgame partners, it’s still such a satisfying ending. That’s because, even at the peak of their romance, we can see how Stewart needs someone like Hussey to ground his passionate impulses, and how Hepburn needs Grant, someone who won’t put her on a pedestal like everyone else. Hepburn and Stewart’s is a relationship that might feel right in the moment, but doesn’t quite work in the light of day.

I don’t think Cloud and Aerith share a moment that is nearly as romantic in FF7, but the same principle applies. What may seem romantic in the moment actually reveals how they’re right for someone else.

Even if Aerith lives and Cloud decides to pursue a relationship with her, it’s not going to be all puppies and roses ahead for them. Aerith would need to disentangle her feelings for Zack from her attraction to Cloud, and Cloud would still need to confront his feelings for Tifa, which were his main motivator for nearly half his life, before they can even start to build something real. This is messy work, good fodder for a prestige cable drama or an Oscar-baity indie film, but it has no place in a Final Fantasy. There simply isn’t the time. Not when the question on most players’ minds isn’t ‘Cloud does love?’ but ‘How the hell are they going to stop that madman and his Meteor that’s about to destroy the world?’

With Zerith’s depiction in Crisis Core, there’s a sort of bittersweet poetry in how the two relationships rhyme but can’t actually coexist. It is only because Zack is trying to return to Midgar to see Aerith that Cloud is able to reunite with Tifa, and the OG begins in earnest. In another world, Zack and Aerith would be the hero and heroine who saved the world and lived to tell the tale. They are much more the traditional archetypes - Zack the super-powered warrior who wants to be a Capital-H Hero, and Aerith, the last of her kind who reluctantly accepts her fate. Compared to these two, Cloud and Tifa aren’t nearly so special, nor their goals so lofty and noble. Cloud, after all, was too weak to even get into SOLDIER, and only wanted to be one, not for some greater good, but to impress the girl he liked. Tifa has no special abilities, merely learning martial arts when she grew wise enough to not wait around for a hero. On the surface, Cloud and Tifa are made of frailer stuff, and yet by luck or by fate, they’re the ones who cheat death time and time again, and manage to save the world, whereas the ones who should have the role, are prematurely struck down before they can finish the job. Cloud and Tifa fulfill the roles that they never asked for, that they may not be particularly suited for, in Zack and Aerith’s stead. There’s a burden and a beauty to it. Cloud and Tifa can live because Zack and Aerith did not.

All of this nuance is lost if you think Cloud and Aerith are meant to be the endgame couple. Instead, you have a pair succumbing to their basest desires, regardless of the selfless sacrifices their other potential paramours made for their sake. Zack and Tifa, and their respective relationships with Aerith and Cloud, are flattened into mere romantic obstacles. The heart wants what it wants, some may argue. While that may be true in real life, that is not necessarily the case in a work of fiction, especially not a Final Fantasy. The other canon Final Fantasy couples could certainly have had previous romantic relationships, but unless they have direct relevance to the their character arcs (e.g., Rachel to Locke), the games do not draw attention to them because they would be a distraction from the romance they are trying to tell. They’ve certainly never spent the amount of real estate FF7 spends in depicting Cloud/Tifa and Zack/Aerith’s relationships.

At last…the Remake, and somehow this essay isn’t even close to being over

Finally, we come to the Remake. With the technological advancements made in the last 23 years and the sheer amount of hours they’re devoting to just the Midgar section this time around, you can almost look at the OG as an outline and the Remake as the final draft. With the OG being overly reliant on text to  do its storytelling, and the Remake having subtle facial expressions and a slew of cinematic techniques at its disposal, you might almost consider it an adaptation from a literary medium to a visual one. Our discussions are no longer limited to just what the characters are saying, but what they are doing, and even more importantly, how the game presents those actions. When does the game want us to pay attention? And what does it want us to pay attention to?

Unlike most outlines, which are read by a small handful of execs, SE has 23 years worth of reactions from the general public to gauge what works and what doesn’t work, what caused confusion, and what could be clarified. While FF7 is not a romance, the LTD remains a hot topic among a small but vocal part of the fanbase. It certainly is an area that could do with some clarifying in the Remake.

Since the Remake is not telling a new story, but rather retelling an existing story that has been in the public consciousness for over two decades, certain aspects that were treated as “twists” in the OG no longer have that same element of surprise, and would need to approached differently. For example, in the Midgar section of the OG, Shinra is treated as the main antagonist throughout. It’s only when we get to the top of the Shinra tower that Sephiroth is revealed as the real villain. Anyone with even a passing of knowledge of FF7 would be aware of Sephiroth so trying to play it off like a surprise in the Remake would be terribly anticlimactic. Thus, Sephiroth appears as early as Ch. 2 to haunt Cloud and the player throughout.

Likewise, many players who’ve never even touched the OG are probably aware that Aerith dies, thus her death can no longer be played for shock. While SE would still want the player to grow attached to Aerith so that her death has an emotional impact, there are diminishing returns to misdirecting the player about her fate, at least not in the same way it was done in the OG.

How do these considerations affect the how the LTD is depicted in the Remake? For the two of the biggest twists in the OG to land in the Remake — Aerith’s death and Cloud’s true identity in the Lifestream — the game needs to establish:

Aerith’s attraction to Cloud, specifically due to his similarities to Zack. This never needs to go past an initial attraction for the player to understand that the man whose memory Cloud was “borrowing” is Zack. Aerith’s feelings for Cloud can evolve into something platonic or even maternal by her end without the reveal in the Lifestream losing any impact.

Cloud’s love for Tifa. For the Lifestream sequence to land with an “Ooooh!” rather than a “Huh!?!?”, the Remake will need to establish that Cloud’s feelings for Tifa were strong enough to 1) motivate him to try to join SOLDIER in the first place 2) incentivize him to adopt a false persona because he fears that he isn’t the man she wants him to be 3) call him back to consciousness from Make poisoning twice 4) help him put his mind back together and find his true self. That’s a lot of story riding on one guy’s feelings!

The player’s love for Aerith so that her death will hurt. This can be done by making them invested in Aerith as a character by her own right, but also extends to the relationships she has with the other characters (not only Cloud).

What is not necessary is establishing Cloud’s romantic feelings for Aerith. Now, would their doomed romance make her death hurt even more? Sure, but it could work just as well if Cloud if is losing a dear friend and ally, not a lover. Not to mention, her death also cuts short her relationships with Tifa, Barret, Red XII, etc. Bulking those relationships up prior to her death, would also make her loss more palpable. If anything, establishing Cloud’s romantic feelings for Aerith would actually undermine the game’s other big twist. The game needs you to believe that Cloud’s feelings for Tifa were strong enough to drive his entire hero’s journey. If Cloud is shown falling in love with another woman in the span of weeks if not mere days, then the Lifestream scene would be much harder to swallow.

Cloud wavering between the two women made sense in the OG because the main way for the player to get to know Aerith was through her interactions with Cloud. That is no longer the case in the Remake. Cloud is still the protagonist, and the player character for the vast majority of the game, but there are natural ways for the player to get to know Aerith outside of her dialogue exchanges with Cloud. Unless SE considers the LTD an integral part of FF7’s DNA, then for the sake of story clarity, the LTD doesn’t need to exist.

How then does the Remake clarify things?

I’m not going go through every single change in the Remake — there are far too many of them, and they’ve been documented elsewhere. Most of the changes are expansions or adaptations (what might make sense for super-deformed chibis would look silly for realistic characters, e.g., Cloud rolling barrels in the Church has now become him climbing across the roof support). What is expanded and how it’s adapted can be telling, but what is more interesting are the additions and removals. Not just for what takes place in the scenes themselves, but how their addition or removal changes our understanding of the narrative as a whole vis-a-vis the story we know from the OG.

Notably, one of the features that is not expanded upon, but rather diminished, is player choice. In the OG, the player had a slew of dialogue options to choose from, especially during the Midgar portion of the game. Not only did it determine which character would go on a date with Cloud at the Gold Saucer, but it also made the player identify with Cloud since they’re largely determining his personality during this stage. Despite the technological advances that have made this level of optionality the norm in AAA games, the Remake gives the player far fewer non-gameplay related choices, and only really the illusion of choice as a nod to the OG, but they don’t affect the story of the game in any meaningful way. You get a slightly different conversation depending on the choice, but you have to buy the Flower, Tifa has to make you a drink.

So much of what fueled the LTD in the OG came from this mechanic, which is now largely absent in the Remake. Almost every instance where there was a dialogue branch in the OG has become a single, canon scenario in the Remake that favors Tifa (e.g., having the choice of giving the flower to Tifa or Marlene in the OG, to Cloud giving the flower to Tifa in the Remake). Similarly, for the only meaningful choice you make in the Remake — picking Tifa or Aerith in the sewers — Cloud is now equidistant to both girls, whereas in the OG, his starting point was much closer to Aerith. In the OG, player choice allowed you to largely determine Cloud’s personality, and the girl he favored — and seemingly encouraged you to choose Aerith in many instances. In the Remake, Cloud is now his own character, not who the player wants him to be. And this Cloud, well, he sure seems to have a thing for Tifa.

In fact, one of the first changes in the Remake is the addition of Jessie asking Cloud about his relationship with Tifa, and Cloud’s brief flashback to their childhood together. In the OG, Tifa isn’t mentioned at all during the first reactor mission, and we don’t see her until we get to Sector 7.

Not only does this scene reveal Tifa’s importance to Cloud much earlier on than in the OG, but it sets up a sort of frame of reference that colors Cloud’s subsequent interactions. Even as Jessie kind of flirts with him throughout the reactor mission, even with his chance meeting Aerith in Sector 8, in the back of your mind, you might be thinking — wait what about his relationship with this Tifa character? What if he’s already spoken for?

Think about how this plays out in the OG. Jessie is pretty much a non-entity, and Cloud has his meet-cute with the flower girl before we’re even aware that Tifa exists. It’s hard to get too invested in his interactions with Tifa, when you know he has to meet the flower girl again, and you’re waiting for that moment, because that’s when the game will start in earnest.

After chapter 1 of the Remake, a new player may be asking — who is this Tifa person, and, echoing Jessie’s question, what kind of relationship does she have with Cloud? It’s a question that’s repeated when Barret mentions her before they set the bomb, and again when Barret specifies Seventh Heaven is where Tifa works — and the game zooms in on Cloud’s face — when they arrive in Sector 7.

It’s when we finally meet her at Seventh Heaven in Ch. 3 that we feel, ah now, this game has finally begun.

It’s also interesting how inorganically this question is introduced in the Remake. Up until that moment, the dialogue and Cloud are all business. Then, as they’re waiting for the gate to open, Jessie asks about Tifa completely out of the blue, and Cloud, all of a sudden, is at a lost for words, and has the first of many flashbacks. That this moment is a bit incongruous shows the effort SE made to establish Tifa’s importance to the game and to Cloud early on.

One of the biggest changes in the Remake is the addition of the events in Ch. 3 and 4. Unlike what happens in Ch. 18, Ch. 3 and 4 feel like such a natural extension of the OG’s story that many players may not even realize that SE has added an whole day’s and night’s worth of events to the OG’s story. While not a drastic change, it does reshape our understanding of subsequent events in the story, namely Cloud’s time spent alone with Aerith.

In the OG, we rush from one reactor mission to the next, with no real time to explore Cloud’s character or his relationships with any of the other characters in between. When he crashes through the church, he gets a bit of a breather. We see a different side of him with Aerith. Since we have nothing else to compare it to, many might assume that his relationship with Aerith is special. That she brings something out of him that no one else can.

That is no longer the case in the Remake. While Cloud’s time in Sector 5 with Aerith remains largely unchanged though greatly expanded, it no longer feels  “special.” So many of the beats that seemed exclusive to his relationship with Aerith in the OG, we’ve now already seen play out with both Tifa and the other members of AVALANCHE long before he meets Aerith.

Cloud tells the flowers to listen to Aerith; he’s told Tifa he’s listening if she wants to talk; told Bigg’s he wants to hear the story of Jessie’s dad. Cloud offers to walk Aerith back home; he offered the same to Wedge. Cloud smiles at Aerith; he’s already smiled at Tifa and AVALANCHE a number of times.

Now, I’m under no illusion that SE added these chapters solely to diminish Aerith’s importance to Cloud (other than the obvious goal of making the game longer, I imagine they wanted the player to spend more time in Sector 7 and more time with the other AVALANCHE members so that the collapse of the Pillar and their deaths have more weight), but they certainly must have realized that this would be one effect. If pushing Cloud/Aerith’s romance had been a goal with the Remake, this would be a scenario they would try to avoid. Notably, the other place where time has been added - the night in the Underground Shinra Lab, and the day helping other people out around the slums — are also periods of time when Aerith is absent.

Home Sweet Slums vs. Budding Bodyguard

Since most of the events in Ch. 3 were invented for the Remake, and thus we have nothing in the OG to compare it to (except to say that something is probably better than nothing), I thought it would be more interesting to compare it to Ch. 8. Structurally, they are nearly identical — Cloud doing sidequests around the Sectors with one of the girls as his guide. Extra bits of dialogue the more sidequests you complete, with an optional story event if you do them all. Do Cloud’s relationships with each girl progress the same way in both chapters? Is the Remake just Final Waifu Simulator 2020 or are they distinct, reflecting their respective roles in the story as a whole?

A lot of what the player takes away from these chapters is going to be pretty subjective (Is he annoyed with her or is he playing hard to get), yet the vibes of the two chapters are quite different. This is because in Ch. 3, the player is getting to know Tifa through her relationship with Cloud; in Ch. 8; the player is getting to know Aerith as a character on her own.

What do I mean by this? Let’s take Cloud’s initial introduction into each Sector. In Ch. 3, it’s a straight shot from Seventh Heaven to Stargazer Heights punctuated by a brief conversation where Tifa asks Cloud about the mission he was just on. We don’t learn anything new about Tifa’s character here. Instead we hear Cloud recount the mission we already saw play out in detail in Ch. 1 But it’s through this conversation that we get a glimpse of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship — unlike the reticent jerk he was with Avalanche, this Cloud is much more responsive and even tries to reassure her in his own stilted way. We also know that they have enough of a past together that Tifa can categorize him as “not a people person” — an assessment to which Cloud agrees. Slowly, we’re getting an answer to the question Jessie posed in Ch. 1 — just what kind of relationship does Cloud have with Tifa?

In Ch. 8, Aerith leads Cloud on a roundabout way through Sector 5, and stops, unprompted, to talk about her experiences helping at the restaurant, helping out the doctor, and helping with the orphans at the Leaf House. It’s not so much a conversation as a monologue. Cloud isn’t the one who inquires about these relationships, and more jarringly, he doesn’t respond until Aerith directly asks him a question (interestingly enough, it’s about the flower she gave him…which he then gave to Tifa). Here, the game is allowing the player to learn more about the kind of person Aerith is. Cloud is also learning about Aerith at the same time, but with his non-reaction, either the game itself is indifferent to Cloud’s feelings towards Aerith or it is deliberately trying to portray Cloud’s indifference to Aerith.

The optional story event you can see in each chapter after completing all the side quests is also telling. In Ch. 3, “Alone at Last” is almost explicitly about Cloud and Tifa’s relationship. It’s bookended by two brief scenes between Marle and Cloud — the first in which she lectures him about how he should treat Tifa almost like an overprotective in-law, the second after they return downstairs and Marle awards Cloud with an accessory “imbued with the fervent desire to be by one’s side for eternity” after he makes Tifa smile. In between, Cloud and Tifa chat alone in her room. Tifa finally gets a chance to ask Cloud about his past and they plan a little date to celebrate their reunion. There is also at least the suggestion that Cloud was expecting something else when Tifa asked him to her room.

In Ch. 8’s “The Language of Flowers,” Cloud and Aerith’s relationship is certainly part of the story — unlike earlier in the chapter, Cloud actually asks Aerith about what she’s doing and even supports her by talking to the flowers too, but the other main objective of this much briefer scene is to show Aerith’s relationship with the flowers and of her mysterious Cetra powers (though we don’t know about her ancestry just yet). Like a lot of Aerith’s dialogue, there’s a lot of foreshadowing and foreboding in her words. If anything, it’s almost as if Cloud is playing the Marle role to the flowers, as an audience surrogate to ask Aerith about her relationship with the flowers so that she can explain. Also, there’s no in-game reward that suggests what the scene was really about.

If there’s any confusion about what’s going on here, just compare their titles “Alone At Last” vs. “The Language of Flowers.”

I’ll try not to bring my personal feelings into this, but there’s just something so much more satisfying about the construction of Ch. 3. This is some real storytelling 101 shit, but I think a lot of it due to just how much set up and payoff there is, and how almost all of said payoff deepens our understanding of Cloud and Tifa’s relationship:

Marle: Cloud meets Tifa’s overprotective landlady towards the beginning of the chapter. She is dubious of his character and his relationship with TIfa. This impression does not change the second time they meet even though Tifa herself is there to mediate. It’s only towards the end of the chapter, after all the sidequests are complete, that this tension is resolved. Marle gives Cloud a lecture about how he should be treating Tifa, which he seems to take to heart. And Cloud finally earns Marle’s begrudging approval after he emerges from their rooms with a chipper-looking Tifa in tow.

Their past: For their first in-game interaction, Cloud casually brings up that fact that it’s been “Five years” since they’ve last, which seem to throw Tifa off a bit. As they’re replacing filters, Cloud asks Tifa what she’s been up to in the time since they’ve been apart, and Tifa quickly changes the subject. Tifa tries to ask Cloud about his life “after he left the village,” at the Neighborhood Watch HQ, and this time he’s the one who seems to be avoiding the subject. It’s only after all the Ch. 3 sidequests are complete, and they're alone in her room that Tifa finally gets the chance to ask her question. A question which Cloud still doesn’t entirely answer. This question remains unresolved, and anyone’s played the OG will know that it will remain unresolved for some time yet, as it is THE question of Cloud’s story as a whole.

The lessons: Tifa starts spouting off some lessons for life in the slums as she brings Cloud around the town, though it’s unclear if Cloud is paying attention or taking them to heart. After completing the first sidequest, Cloud repeats one of these sayings back to her, confirming that he’s been listening all along. By the end of the chapter, Cloud is repeating these lessons to himself, even when Tifa isn’t around. These lessons extend beyond this chapter, with Cloud being a real teacher’s pet, asking Tifa “Is this a lesson” in Ch. 10 once they reunite.

The drink: When Cloud first arrives at Seventh Heaven, Tifa plays hostess and asks him if he wants anything, but it seems he’s only interested in his money. After exploring the sector a bit, Tifa again tries to play the role of cheery bartender, offering to make him a cocktail at the bar, but Cloud sees through this facade, and they carry on. Finally, after the day’s work is done, to tide Cloud over while she’s meeting with AVALANCHE, Tifa finally gets the chance to make him a drink. No matter, which dialogue option the player chooses, Tifa and Cloud fall into the roles of flirty bartender and patron quite easily. Who would have thought this was possible from the guy we met in Ch. 1?

This dynamic is largely absent in Ch. 8, except perhaps exploring Aerith’s relationship with the flowers, which “pays off” in the “Language of Flowers” event, but again, that scene is primarily about Aerith’s character rather than her relationship with Cloud. The orphans and the Leaf House are a throughline of the chapter, but they are merely present. There’s no clear progression here as was the case with in Ch. 3. Sure, the kids admire Cloud quite a bit after he saves them, but it’s not like they were dubious of his presence before. They barely paid attention to him. In terms of the impact the kids have on Cloud’s relationship with Aerith, there isn’t much at all. Certainly nothing like the role Marle plays in developing his relationship with Tifa.

The thing is, there are plenty of moments that could have been set ups, only there’s no real follow through. Aerith introduces Cloud around town as her bodyguard, and some people like the Doctor express dubiousness of his ability to do the job, but even after we spend a whole day fighting off monsters, and defeating Rude, there’s no payoff. Not even a throwaway “Wow, great job bodyguarding” comment. Same with the whole “one date” reward. Other than a quick reference on the way to Sector 5, and Aerith threatening to reveal the deal to cajole Cloud into helping her gather flowers, it’s never brought up again, in this chapter, or the rest of the game.

Aerith also makes a big stink about Cloud taking the time to enjoy Elmyra’s cooking. This is after Cloud is excluded from AVALANCHE’s celebration in Seventh Heaven and after he misses out on Jessie’s mom’s “Midgar Special” with Biggs and Wedge. So this could have been have been the set up to Cloud finally getting to experience a nice, domestic moment where he feels like he’s part of a family. And this dinner does happen! Only…the Remake skips over it entirely. Which is quite a strange choice considering that almost every other waking moment of Cloud’s time in Midgar has been depicted in excruciating detail. SE has decided that either whatever happened in this dinner between these three characters is irrelevant to the story they’re trying to tell, or they’ve deliberately excluded this scene from the game so that the player wouldn’t get any wrong ideas from it (e.g., that Cloud is starting to feel at home with Aerith).

Speaking of home, the Odd Jobs in Ch. 3 feel a bit more meaningful outside of just the gameplay-related rewards because they’re a way for Cloud to improve his reputation as he considers building a life for himself in Sector 7. This intent is implicit as Tifa imparts upon him the life lessons for surviving the slums, and then explicit, when Tifa asks him if he’s going to “stick around a little longer” outside of Seventh Heaven and he answers maybe. (It is later confirmed when Cloud and Tifa converse in his room in Ch. 4 after he remembers their promise).

Despite Aerith’s endeavors to extend their time together, there’s no indication that Cloud is planning to put down roots in Sector 5, or even return. Not even after doing all the Odd Jobs. If anything, it’s just the opposite — after 3 Odd Jobs, Aerith, kind of jokingly tells Cloud “don’t think you can rely on me forever.” This is a line that has a deeper meaning for anyone who knows Aerith’s fate in the OG, but Cloud seems totally fine with the outcome. Similarly, at the end of the Chapter 8, Elmyra asks Cloud to leave and never speak to Aerith again — a request to which he readily agrees.

Adding to the different vibes of the Chapters are the musical themes that play in the background. In Ch. 3, it’s the “Main Theme of VII”, followed by “On Our Way” — two tracks that instantly recall the OG. While the Main Theme is a bit melancholy, it's also familiar. It feels like home. In Ch. 8, we have an instrumental version of ‘Hollow’ - the new theme written for the Remake. While, it’s a lovely piece, it’s unfamiliar and honestly as a bit anxiety inducing (as is the intent).

(A quick aside to address the argument that this proves ‘Hollow’ is about Cloud’s feelings for Aerith:

Which of course doesn’t make any damn sense because he hasn’t even lost Aerith at this point the story. Even if you want to argue that there is so timey-wimey stuff going on and the whole purpose of the Remake is to rewrite the timeline so that Cloud doesn’t lose Aerith around — shouldn’t there be evidence of this desire outside of just the background music? Perhaps, in Cloud’s actions during the Chapter which the song plays — shouldn’t he dread being parted from her, shouldn’t he be the one trying to extend their time together? Instead, he’s willing to let her go quite easily.

The more likely explanation as to why “Hollow” plays in Ch. 8 is that since the “Main Theme of FFVII”  already plays in Ch. 3, the other “main theme” written for the Remake is going to play in the other chapter with a pseudo-open world vibe. If you’re going to say “Hollow” is about Cloud’s feelings for Aerith then you’d have to accept that the Main Theme of the entire series is about Cloud’s feelings for Tifa, which would actually make a bit more sense given that is practically Cloud’s entire character arc.)

Both chapters contain a scripted battle that must be completed before the chapter can end. They both contain a shot where Cloud fights side by side with each of the girls.

Here, Cloud and Tifa are both in focus during the entirety of this shot.

Here, the focus pulls away from Cloud the moment Aerith enters the frame.

I doubt the developers expected most players to notice this particular technique, but it reflects the subtle differences in the way these two relationships are portrayed. By the end of Ch. 3, Cloud and Tifa are acting as one unit. By the end of Ch. 8, even when they’re together, Cloud and Aerith are still apart.

A brief (lol) overview of some meaningful changes from the OG

One of the most significant changes in the Sector 7 chapters is how The Promise flashback is depicted. In the OG, Tifa is the one who has to remind Cloud of the Promise, in a rather pushy way, and whether Cloud chooses to join the next mission to fulfill his promise to her or because Barret is giving him a raise feels a bit more ambiguous.

In the Remake, the Promise has it’s own little mini-arc. It’s first brought up at the end of Ch. 3 when Cloud talks to Tifa about her anxieties about the upcoming mission. Tifa subtly references the Promise by mentioning that she’s “in a pitch” — a reference that goes over Cloud’s head. It’s only in Ch. 4, in the middle of a mission with Biggs and Wedge, where Tifa is no where in sight, that a random building fan reminds him of the Nibelheim water tower and the Promise he made to Tifa there. There’s also another brief flashback to that earlier moment in the bar when Tifa mentions she’s in a “pinch.” Again, the placement of this particular flashback at this particular moment feels almost jarring. And the flashback to the scene in the bar — a flashback to a scene we’ve already seen play out in-game — is the only one of its kind in the Remake. SE went out of the way to show that this particular moment is very important to Cloud and the game as whole. It’s when Cloud returns to his room, and Tifa asks him if he’s planning to stay in Midgar, that this mini-arc is finally complete. He brings up the Promise on his own, and makes it explicit that the reason he’s staying is for her. It’s to fulfill his Promise to her, not for money or for AVALANCHE — at this point, he’s not even supposed to be going on the next mission.

The Reactor 5 chapters are greatly expanded, but there aren’t really any substantive changes other than the addition of the rather intimate train roll scene between and Cloud and Tifa, which adds nothing to the story except to establish how horny they are for each other. We know this is the case, of course, because if you go out of your way to make Cloud look like an incompetent idiot and let the timer run out, you can avoid this scene altogether. But even in that alternate scene, Cloud’s concern for Tifa is crystal clear.

Ch. 8 also plays out quite similarly to the OG for the most part, though Cloud’s banter with Aerith on the rooftops doesn’t feel all that special since we’ve already seen him do the same with Tifa, Barret and the rest of AVALANCHE. The rooftops is the first place Cloud laughs in the OG. In the Remake, while Cloud might not have straight out laughed before, he’s certainly smiled quite a bit in the preceding chapters. Also, with the addition of voice acting and realistic facial expressions, that “laughter” in the Remake comes off much more sarcastic than genuine.

It’s also notable that in the Remake, Cloud vocally protests almost every time Aerith tries to extend their time together. In the OG, Cloud says nothing in these moments, which the player could reasonably interpret as assent.

One major change in the Remake is how Aerith learns of Tifa’s existence. In the OG, Cloud mentions that he wants to go back to Tifa’s bar, prompting Aerith to ask him about his relationship with her. In the Remake, Cloud calls Tifa’s name after having a random flashback of Child Tifa as he’s walking along with some kids. Again the insertion of said flashback is a bit jarring, prompting Aerith to understandably ask Cloud about just who this Tifa is. In the OG, this exchange served to show Aerith’s jealousy and her interest in Cloud. In the Remake, it’s all about Cloud’s feelings for Tifa and his inability to articulate them. As for Aerith, I suppose you can still read her reaction as jealous, though simple curiosity is a perfectly reasonable way to read it too. It plays out quite similarly to Aerith asking Cloud about who he gave the flower to. Her follow ups seem indicate that she’s merely curious about who this recipient might be rather than showing that she’s upset/jealous of the fact that said person exists.

For the collapsed tunnel segment, the Remake adds the recurring bit of Aerith and Cloud trying to successfully complete a high-five. While this is certainly a way to show them getting closer, it’s about least intimate way that SE could have done so. Just think about the alternatives — you could have Cloud and Aerith sharing brief tidbits of their lives after each mechanical arm, you could have them trying to reach for each other’s hand. Instead, SE chose an action that is we’ve seen performed between a number of different platonic buddies, and an action that Aerith immediately performs with Tifa upon meeting her. Not to mention, even while they are technically getting closer, Cloud still rejects (or at least tries to) Aerith’s invitations to extend their time together twice — at the fire and at the playground.

One aspect from these two Chapters that does has plenty of set up and a satisfying payoff is Aerith’s interest in Cloud’s SOLDIER background. You have the weirdness of Aerith already knowing that Cloud was in SOLDIER without him mentioning it first, followed by Elmyra’s antipathy towards SOLDIERs in general, not to mention Aerith actively fishing for information about Cloud’s time in SOLDIER. (For players who’ve played Crisis Core, the reason for her behavior is even more obvious, with her “one date” gesture mirroring Zack’s, and her line to Cloud in front of the tunnel a near duplicate of what she says to Zack — at least in the original Japanese).

Finally, at the playground, it’s revealed that the reason for all this weirdness is because Aerith’s first love was also a SOLDIER who was the same rank as Cloud. Unlike in the OG, Cloud does not exhibit any potential jealousy by asking about the nature of her relationship, and Aerith doesn’t try to play it off by dismissing the seriousness. In fact, with the emotional nuance we can now see on her face, we can understand the depth of her feelings even if she cannot articulate them.

This is the first scene in the Remake where Cloud and Aerith have a genuine conversation. Thus, finally, Cloud expresses some hesitation before he leaves her — and as far as he knows, this could be the last time they see each other. You can interpret this hesitation as romantic longing or it could just as easily be Cloud being a bit sad to part from a new friend. Regardless, it’s notable that scene is preceded by one where Aerith is talking about her first love who she clearly isn’t over, and followed by a scene where Cloud sprints across the screen, without a backwards glance at Aerith, after seeing a glimpse of Tifa through a tiny window in a Chocobo cart that’s about a hundred yards away.

The Wall Market segment in the Remake is quite explicitly about Cloud’s desire to save Tifa. In the OG, Aerith has no trouble getting into Corneo’s mansion on her own, so I can see how someone could misinterpret Cloud going through all the effort to dress as a woman to protect Aerith from the Don’s wiles (though of course, you would need to ask, why they trying to infiltrate the mansion in the first place?). In the Remake, Cloud has to go through herculean efforts to even get Aerith in front of the Don. Everyone who is aware of Cloud’s cause, from Sam to Leslie to Johnny to Andrea to Aerith herself, comments on how hard he’s working to save Tifa and how important she must be to him for him to do so. In case there’s any confusion, the Remake also includes a scene where Cloud is prepared to bust into the mansion on his own, leaving Aerith to fend for herself, after Johnny comes with news that Tifa is in trouble.

Both Cloud and Aerith get big dress reveals in the Remake. If you get Aerith’s best dress, Cloud’s reaction can certainly be read as one of attraction, but since the game continues on the same regardless of which dress you get, it’s not meant to mark a shift in Cloud and Aerith’s relationship. Rather, it’s a reward for the player for completing however many side quests in Ch. 8, especially since the Remake incentives the player to get every dress and thus see all of Cloud’s reactions by making it a Trophy and including it in the play log.

A significant and very welcome change from the OG to the Remake is Tifa and Aerith’s relationship dynamic. In the OG, the girls’ first meeting in Corneo’s mansion starts with them fighting over Cloud (by pretending not to fight over Cloud). In the Remake, the sequence of events is reversed so that it starts off with Cloud’s reunion with Tifa (again emphasizing that the whole purpose of the infiltration is because Cloud wants to save Tifa). Then when Aerith wakes, she’s absolutely thrilled to make Tifa’s acquaintance, hardly acknowledging Cloud at all. Tifa is understandably more wary at first, but once they start working together, they become fast friends.

Also interesting is that from the moment Aerith and Tifa meet, almost every instance where Cloud could be shown worrying about Aerith or trying to comfort Aerith is given to Tifa instead. In the OG, it’s Cloud who frets about Aerith getting involved in the plot to question the Don, and regrets getting her mixed up in everything once they land in the sewers. In the Remake, those very same reservations are expressed by Tifa instead. Tifa is the one who saves Aerith when the platform collapses in the sewer. Tifa is the one who emotionally comforts Aerith after they’re separated in the train graveyard. (Cloud might be the one who physically saves her, but he doesn’t even so much give her a second glance to check on her well-being before he runs off to face Eligor. He leaves that job for Tifa). It almost feels like the Remake is going out of its way to avoid any moments between Cloud and Aerith that could be interpreted as romantic. In fact, after Corneo’s mansion, unless you get Aerith’s resolution, there are almost no one-on-one interactions at all between Cloud and Aerith. Such is not the case with Cloud and Tifa. In fact, right after defeating Abzu in the sewers, Cloud runs after Tifa, and asks her if what she’s saying is one of those slum lessons — continuing right where they left off.

Ch. 11 feels like a wink-wink nudge-nudge way to acknowledge the LTD. You have the infamous shot of the two girls on each of Cloud’s arms, and two scenes where Cloud appears as if he’s unable to choose between them when he asks them if they’re okay. Of course, in this same Chapter, you have a scene during the boss fight with the Phantom where Cloud actually pulls Tifa away from Aerith, leaving Aerith to defend herself, for an extended sequence where he tries to keep Tifa safe. This is not something SE would include if their intention is to keep Cloud’s romantic interest ambiguous or if Aerith is meant to be the one he loves. Of course, Ch. 11 is not the first we see of this trio’s dynamic. We start with Ch. 10, which is all about Aerith and Tifa’s friendship. Ch. 11 is a nod to the LTD dynamic in the OG, but it’s just that, a nod, not an indication the Remake is following the same path. Halfway through Ch. 11, the dynamic completely disappears.

Ch. 12 changes things up a bit from the OG. Instead of Cloud and Tifa ascending the pillar together, Cloud goes up first. Seemingly just so that we can have the dramatic slow-mo handgrab scene between the two of them when Tifa decides to run after Cloud — right after Aerith tells her to follow her heart.

The Remake also shows us what happens when Aerith goes to find Marlene at Seventh Heaven — including the moment when Aerith sees the flower she gave Cloud by the bar register, and Aerith is finally able to connect the dots. After seeing Cloud be so cagey about who he gave the flower to, and weird about his relationship with Tifa, and after seeing how Cloud and Tifa act around each other. It finally makes sense. She’s figured it out before they have. It’s a beautiful payoff to all that set up. Any other interpretation of Aerith’s reaction doesn’t make a lick of sense, because if it’s to indict she’s jealous of Tifa, where is all the set up for that? Why did the Remake eliminate all the moments from the OG where she had been noticeably jealous before? Without this, that interpretation makes about as much sense as someone arguing Aerith is smiling because she’s thinking about a great sandwich she had the night before. In case anyone is confused, the scene is preceded by a moment where Aerith tells Tifa to follow her heart before she goes after Cloud, and followed by the moment where Cloud catches Tifa via slow-motion handgrab.

On the pillar itself, there are so many added moments of Cloud showing his concern for Tifa’s physical and emotional well-being. Even when they find Jessie, as sad as Cloud is over Jessie’s death, the game actually spends more time showing us Cloud’s reaction to Tifa crying over Jessie’s death, and Cloud’s inability to comfort her. Since so much of this is physical rather than verbal, this couldn’t have effectively been shown in the OG with its technological limitations.

After the pillar collapses, we start off with a couple of other moments showing Cloud’s concern over Tifa — watching over her as she wakes, his dramatic fist clench while he watches Barret comfort Tifa in a way he cannot. There is also a subtle but important change in the dialogue. In the OG, Tifa is the one who tells Barret that Marlene is safe because she was with Aerith. Cloud is also on his way to Sector 5, but it’s for the explicit purpose of trying to save Aerith, which we know because Tifa asks. In the Remake, Tifa is too emotionally devastated to comfort Barret about Marlene. Cloud, trying to help in the only way he can, is now the one to tell Barret about Marlene. Leading them to Sector 5 is no longer about him trying to help Aerith, but about him reuniting Barret with his daughter. Again, another moment where Cloud shows concern about Aerith in the OG is eliminated from the Remake.

Rather than going straight from Aerith’s house to trying to figure out a way into the Shinra building to find Aerith, the group takes a detour to check out the ruins of Sector 7 and rescue Wedge from Shinra’s underground lab. It’s only upon seeing the evidence of Shinra’s inhumane experimentation firsthand that Cloud articulates to Elmyra the need to rescue Aerith. In the OG, they never sought out Elmyra’s permission, and Tifa explicitly asks to join Cloud on his quest. Rescuing Aerith is framed as primarily Cloud’s goal, Tifa and Barret are just along for the ride.

In the Remake, all three wait until Elymra gives them her blessing, and it’s framed (quite literally) as the group’s collective goal as opposed to just Cloud’s.

In the aptly named Ch. 14 resolutions, each marks the culmination of the character’s arc for the Part 1 of Remake. While their arcs are by no means complete, they do offer a nice preview of what their ultimate resolutions will be.

With the exception of Tifa’s, these resolutions are primarily about the character themselves. Their relationships with Cloud are secondary. Each resolution marks a change in the character themselves, but not necessarily a change in Cloud’s relationship with said character. Barret recommits to AVALANCHE’s mission and his role as a leader despite the deep personal costs. Aerith’s is full of foreshadowing as she accept her fate and impending death and decides to make the most of the time she has left. After trying to put aside her own feelings for the sake of others the whole time, Tifa finally allows herself to feel the full devastation of losing her home for the second time. Like her ultimate resolution in the Lifestream that we’ll see in about 25 years, Cloud is the only person she can share this sentiment with because he was the only person who was there.

Barret does not grow closer to Cloud through his resolution. Cloud has already proved himself to him by helping out on the pillar and reuniting him with Marlene. Barret resolution merely reveals that Barret is now comfortable enough with Cloud to share his past.

Similarly, Cloud starts off Aerith’s resolution with an intent to go rescue her, and ends with that intent still intact. Aerith is more open about her feelings here than before, it being a dream and all, but these feelings aren’t something that developed during this scene.

The only difference is during Tifa’s resolution. Cloud has been unable to emotionally comfort Tifa up until this point. It’s only when Tifa starts crying and rests her head upon his shoulder that he is able to make a change, to make a choice and hug her. Halfway through Tifa’s resolution, the scene shifts its focus to Cloud, his inaction and eventual action. Notably, the only time we have a close-up of any character during all three resolutions (I’ll define close-up here as a shot where a character’s face takes up half or more of the shot), are three shots of Cloud when he’s hugging/trying to hug Tifa. Tifa’s resolution is the only one where Cloud arcs.

What of the whole “You can’t fall in love with me” line in Aerith’s resolution? Why would SE include that if not to foreshadow Cloud falling in love with Aerith? Or indicate that he has already? Well, you can’t just take the dialogue on its own, you how to look at how these lines are framed. Notably, when she says “you can’t fall in love with me,” Aerith is framed at the center of the shot, and almost looks like she’s directly addressing the player. It’s as much a warning for the player as it is for Cloud, which makes sense if you know her fate in the OG.

This is followed directly by her saying “Even if you think you have…it’s not real.” In this shot, it’s back to a standard shot/reverse shot where she is the left third of the frame. She is addressing Cloud here, which, again if you’ve played the OG, is another bit of heavy foreshadowing. The reason Clould would think he might be in love with Aerith is because he’s falsely assuming of the memories of a man who did love Aerith — Zack.

For Cloud’s response (”Do I get a say in all this?”/ “That’s very one-sided” depending on the translation), rather than showing a shot of his face, the Remake shows him with his back turned.

Whatever Cloud’s feelings may be for Aerith, the game seems rather indifferent to them.

What is more telling is the choice to include a bit with Cloud getting jealous over a guy trying to give Tifa flowers in Barret’s resolution. Barret also mentions both Jessie and Aerith in their conversation, but nothing else gets such a reaction from Cloud.

It also should go without saying that if Aerith’s resolution is meant to establish Cloud and Aerith’s romance, there should have been plenty of set-up beforehand and plenty of follow-through afterward. That obviously is not the case, because again, the Remake has gone out of its way to avoid moments where Cloud’s actions towards Aerith could be interpreted romantically.

Case in point, at around this time in the OG, Marlene tells Cloud that she thinks Aerith likes him and the player has the option to have Cloud express his hope that she does. This scene is completely eliminated from the Remake and replaced with a much more appropriate scene of father-daughter affection between Marlene and Barret while Tifa and Cloud are standing together outside.

The method by which they get up the plate is completely different in the Remake. Leslie is the one who helps them this time around, and though his quest to reunite with his fiance directly parallels with the trio’s desire to save Aerith, Leslie himself draws a comparison to earlier when Cloud was trying to rescue Tifa. Finally, when Abzu is defeated again, it is Barret who draws the parallel of their search for Aerith to Leslie’s search for his fiance, making it crystal clear that saving Aerith is a group effort rather than only Cloud’s.

Speaking of Barret, in the OG, he seems to reassess his opinion of Cloud in the Shinra HQ stairs when he sees Cloud working so hard to save Aerith and realizes he might actually care about other people. In the Remake, that reevaluation occurs after you complete all the Ch. 14 sidequests and help a bunch of NPCs. Arguably, this moment occurs even earlier in the Remake for Barret, after the Airbuster, when he realizes that Cloud is more concerned for his and Tifa’s safety than his own.

Overall, the entire Aerith rescue feels so anticlimactic in the Remake. In the OG, Cloud gets his big hero moment in the Shinra Building. He’s the one who runs up to Aerith when the glass shatters and they finally reunite. In the Remake, it’s unclear what the emotional stakes are for Cloud here. At their big reunion, all we get from him is a “Yep.” In fact, when you look at how this scene plays out, Aerith is positioned equally between Cloud and Tifa at the moment of her rescue. Cloud’s answer is again with his back turned to the camera. It’s Tifa who gets her own shot with her response.

Another instance of the Remake being completely indifferent to Cloud’s feelings for Aerith, and actually priotizing Tifa’s relationship with Aerith instead.

It is also Tifa who runs to reunite with Aerith after the group of enemies is defeated. Another moment that could have easily been Cloud’s that the Remake gives to Tifa.

Also completely eliminated in the Remake, is the “I’m your bodyguard. / The deal was for one date” exchange in the jail cells. In the Remake, after Ch. 8, the date isn’t brought up again at all; “the bodyguard” reference only comes up briefly in Ch. 11 and then never again.

In the Remake, the jail scene is replaced by the scene in Aerith’s childhood room. Despite the fact that this is Aerith’s room, it is Tifa’s face that Cloud first sees when he wakes. What purpose does this moment serve other than to showcase Cloud and Tifa’s intimacy and the other characters’ tacit acknowledgment of said intimacy?

(This is the second time where Cloud wakes up and Tifa is the first thing he sees. The other was at Corneo’s mansion. He comes to three times in the Remake, but in Ch. 8, even though Aerith is right in front of him, we start off with a few seconds of Cloud gazing around the church before settling on the person in front of him. Again, while not something that most players would notice, this feels like a deliberate choice.)

Especially since this scene itself is all about Aerith. She begins a sad story about her past, and Cloud, rather than trying to comfort her in any way, asks her to give us some exposition about the Ancients. When the Whispers surround her, even though Cloud is literally right there, it's Tifa who pulls her out of it and comforts her. Another moment that could have been Cloud that was given to Tifa, and honestly, this one feels almost bizarre.

Throughout the entire Shinra HQ episode, Cloud and Aerith haven’t had a single moment alone to themselves. The Drums scenario is completely invented for the Remake. The devs could have contrived a way for Cloud and Aerith to have some one-on-one time here and work through the feelings they expressed during Aerith’s resolution if they wanted. Instead, with the mandatory party configurations during this stage - Cloud & Barret on one side; Tifa & Aerith on the others, with Cloud & Tifa being the respective team leaders communicating over PHS, the Remake minimizes the amount of interaction Cloud and Aerith have with each other in this chapter.

On the rooftop, before Cloud’s solo fight with Rufus, even though Cloud is ostensibly doing all this so that they can bring Aerith to safety, the Remake doesn’t include a single shot that focuses on Aerith’s face and her reaction to his actions. The game has decided, whatever Aerith’s feelings are in this moment, they’re irrelevant to the story they’re trying to tell. Instead we get shots focusing solely on Barret and Tifa. While the Remake couldn’t find any time to develop Cloud and Aerith’s relationship at the Shinra Tower (even though the OG certainly did), it did find time to add a new scene where Tifa saves Cloud from certain death, while referencing their Promise.

A lot of weird shit happens after this, but it’s pretty much all plot and no character. We do get one more moment where Cloud saves Tifa (and Tifa alone) from the Red Whisper even though Aerith is literally right next to her. The Remake isn’t playing coy at all about where Cloud’s preferences lie.

The party order for the Sephiroth battle varies depending on how you fought the Whispers. All the other character entrances (whoever the 3rd party member is, then the 4th and Red) are essentially the exact same shots, with the characters replaced. It’s the first character entrance (which can only be Aerith or  Tifa) that you have two distinct options.

If Aerith is first, the camera pans from Cloud over to Aerith. It then cuts back to Cloud’s reaction, in a separate shot, as Aerith walks to join him (offscreen). It’s only when the player regains control of the characters that Cloud and Aerith ever share the frame.

On the other hand, if Tifa is first, we see Tifa land from Cloud’s POV. Cloud then walks over to join Tifa and they immediately share a frame, facing Sephiroth together.

Again, this is not something SE would expect the player to notice the first or even second time around. Honestly, I doubt anyone would notice at all unless they watched all these variations back to back. That is telling in itself, that SE would go through all this effort (making these scenes unique rather than copy and pasting certainly takes more time and effort) to ensure that the depictions of Cloud’s relationships with these two women are distinct despite the fact that hardly anyone would notice. Even in the very last chapter of the game, they want us to see Cloud and Tifa as a pair and Cloud and Aerith as individuals.

Which isn’t to say that Aerith is being neglected in the Remake. Quite the opposite, in fact, when she has essentially become the main protagonist and the group’s spirtual leader in Ch. 18. Rather, her relationship with Cloud is no longer an essential part of her character. Not to mention, one of the very last shots of the Remake is about Aerith sensing Zack’s presence. Again, not the kind of thing you want to bring up if the game is supposed to show her being in love with Cloud.

What does it all mean????

Phew — now let’s step back and look and how the totality of these changes have reshaped our understanding of the story as a whole. Looking solely at the Midgar section of the OG, and ignoring everything that comes after it, it seems to tell a pretty straightforward story: Cloud is a cold-hearted jerk who doesn’t care about anyone else until he meets Aerith. It is through his relationship with Aerith that he begins to soften up and starts giving a damn about something other than himself. This culminates when he risks it all to rescue Aerith from the clutches of the game’s Big Bad itself, The Shinra Electric Company.

This was honestly the reason why I was dreading the Remake when I learned that it would only cover the Midgar segment. A game that’s merely an expansion of the Midgar section of the OG is probably going to leave a lot of people believing that Cloud & Aerith were the intended couple, and I didn’t want to wait years and perhaps decades for vindication after the Remake’s Lifestream Scene.

I imagine this very scenario is what motivated SE to make so many of these changes. In the OG, they could get away with misdirecting the audience for the first few hours of the game since the rest of the story and the reveals were already completed. The player merely had to pop in the next disc to get the real story. Such is not the case with the Remake. Had the the Remake followed the OG’s beats more closely, many players, including some who’ve never played the OG, would finish the Remake thinking that Cloud and Aerith were the intended couple. It would be years until they got the rest of the story, and at that point, the truth would feel much more like a betrayal. Like they’ve been cruelly strung along.

While they’ve gone out of their way to adapt most elements from the OG into the Remake, they’ve straight up eliminated many scenes that could be interpreted as Cloud’s romantic interest in Aerith. Instead, he seems much more interested in her knowledge as an Ancient than in her romantic affections. This is the path the Remake could be taking. Instead of Cloud being under the illusion of falling in love with Aerith, he’s under the illusion that the answer to his identity dilemma lies in Aerith’s Cetra heritage, when, of course, the answer was with Tifa all along.

Hiding Sephiroth’s existence during the Midgar arc isn’t necessary to telling the story of FF7, thus it’s been eliminated in the Remake. Similarly, pretending that Cloud and Aerith are going to end up together also isn’t necessary and would only confuse the player. Thus the LTD is no longer a part of the Remake.

If Aerith’s impact on Cloud has been diminished, what then is his arc in the Remake? Is it essentially just the same without the catalyst of Aerith? A cold guy at the start who eventually learns to care about others through the course of the game? Kind of, though arguably, this is who Remake!Cloud is all along, not just Cloud at the end of the Remake. Cloud is a guy who pretends to be a selfish jerk, but he deep down he really does care. He just doesn’t show this side of himself around people he’s unfamiliar with. So part of his arc in the Remake is opening up to the others, Barret, AVALANCHE and Aerith included, but these all span a chapter or two at most. They don’t straddle the entire game.

What is the throughline then? What is an area in which he exhibits continuous growth?

It’s Tifa. It’s his desire to fulfill his Promise to Tifa. Not just to protect her physically, but to be there for her emotionally, something that’s much harder to do. There’s the big moments like when he remembers the Promise in Ch. 4., his dramatic fist clench when he can’t stop Tifa from crying in Ch. 12, and in Ch. 13 when he watches Barret comfort Tifa. It’s all the flashbacks he has of her and the times he’s felt like he failed her. It’s the smaller moments where he can sense her nervousness and unease but the only thing he knows how to do is call her name. It’s all those times during battle, where Tifa can probably take care of herself, but Cloud has to save her because he can’t fail her again. All of this culminates in Tifa’s Resolution, where Tifa is in desperate need of comfort, and is specifically seeking Cloud’s comfort, and Cloud has no idea what to do. He hesitates because he’s clueless, because he doesn’t want to fuck it up, but finally, he makes the choice, he takes the risk, and he hugs her….and he kind of fucks it up. He hugs her too hard. Which is a great thing, because this arc isn’t anywhere close to being over. There’s still so much more to come. So many places this relationship will go.

We get a little preview of this when Tifa saves Cloud on the roof. Everything we thought we knew about their relationship has been flipped on its head. Tifa is the one saving Cloud here, near the end of this part of the Remake. Just as she will save Cloud in the Lifestream just before the end of the FF7 story as a whole. What does Tifa mean to Cloud? It’s one of the first questions posed in the Remake, and by the end, it remains unanswered.

Cloud’s character arc throughout the entire FF7 story is about his reconciling with his identity issues. This continues to develop through the Shinra Tower Chapters, but it certainly isn’t going to be resolved in Part 1 of the Remake. His character arc in the Remake — caring more about others/finding a way to finally comfort Tifa — is resolved in Ch. 14, well before rescuing Aerith, which is what makes her rescue feel so anticlimactic. The resolution of this external conflict isn’t tied to the protagonist’s emotional arc. This was not the case in the OG. I’m certainly not complaining about the change, but the Remake probably would have felt more satisfying as a whole if they hewed to the structure of the OG. Instead, it seems that SE has prioritized the clarity of the Remake series as a whole (leaving no doubt about where Cloud’s affections lie) over the effectiveness of the “climax” in the first entry of the Remake.

This is all clear if you only focus on the “story” of the Remake -- i.e., what the characters are saying and doing. If you extend your lens to the presentation of said story, and here I’m talking about who the game chooses to focus on during the scenes, how long they hold on these shots, which characters share the frame, which do not, etc --- it really could not be more obvious.

Does the camera need to linger for over 5 seconds on Cloud staring at the door after wishing Tifa goodnight? Does it need to find Cloud almost every time Tifa says or does anything so that we’re always aware of his watchfulness and the nature of his care? The answer is no until you realize this dynamic is integral to telling the story of Final Fantasy VII.

I don’t see how anyone who compares the Remake to the OG could come away from it thinking that the Remake series is going to reverse all of the work done in the OG and Compilation by having Cloud end up with Aerith.

Just because the ending seems to indicate that the events of the OG might not be set in stone, it doesn’t mean that the Remake will end with Aerith surviving and living happily ever after with Cloud. Even if Aerith does live (which again seems unlikely given the heavy foreshadowing of her death in the Remake), how do you come away from the Remake thinking that Cloud is going to choose Aerith over Tifa when SE has gone out of its way to remove scenes between Cloud and Aerith that could be interpreted as romantic? And gone out of its way to shove Cloud’s feelings for Tifa in the player’s face? The sequels would have to spend an obscene amount of time not only building Cloud and Aerith’s relationship from scratch, but also dismantling Cloud’s relationship with Tifa. It would be an absolute waste of time and resources, and there’s really no way to do so without making the characters look like assholes in the process.

Now could this happen? Sure, in the sense that literally anything could happen in the future. But in terms of outcomes that would make sense based on what’s come before, this particular scenario is about as plausible as Cloud deciding to relinquish his quest to find Sephiroth so that he can pursue his real dream of becoming at sandwich artist at Panera Bread.

It’s over! I promise!

Like you, I too cannot believe the number of words I’ve wasted on this subject. What is there left to say? The LTD doesn’t exist outside of the first disc of the OG. You'll only find evidence of SE perpetuating the LTD if you go into these stories with the assumption that 1) The LTD exists 2) it remains unanswered. But it’s not. We know that Cloud ends up with Tifa.

What the LTD has become is dissecting individual scenes and lines of dialogue, without considering the context of said things, and pretending as if the outcome is unknown and unknowable. If you took this tact to other aspects of FF7’s story, then it would be someone arguing that because there a number of scenes in the OG that seem to suggest that Meteor will successfully destroy the planet, this means that the question of whether or not our heroes save the world in the end is left ambiguous. No one does that because that would be utterly absurd. Individual moments in a story may suggest alternate outcomes to build tension, to keep us on our toes, but that doesn’t change the ending from being the ending. Our heroes stop Meteor. Cloud loves Tifa. Arguments against either should be treated with the same level of credulity (i.e., none).

It’s frustrating that the LTD, and insecurities about whether or not Cloud really loves Tifa, takes up so much oxygen in any discussion about these characters. And it’s a damn shame, because Cloud and Tifa’s relationship is so rich and expansive, and the so-called “LTD” is such a tiny sliver of that relationship, and one of the least interesting aspects. They’re wonderful because they’re just so damn normal. Unlike other Final Fantasy couples, what keeps them apart is not space and time and death, but the most human and painfully relatable emotion of all, fear. Fear that they can’t live up to the other’s expectations; fear that they might say the wrong thing. The fear that keeps them from admitting their feelings at the Water Tower, they’re finally able to overcome 7 years later in the Lifestream. They’re childhood friends but in a way they’re also strangers. Like other FF couples, we’re able to watch their entire relationship grow and unfold before our eyes. But they have such a history too, a history that we unravel with them at the same time. Every moment of their lives that SE has found worth depicting, they’ve been there for each other, even if they didn’t know it at the time. Theirs is a story that begins and ends with each other. Their is the story that makes Final Fantasy VII what it is.

If you’ve made it this far, many thanks for reading. I truly have no idea how to use this platform, so please direct any and all hatemail to my DMs at TLS, which I will then direct to the trash. (In all seriousness, I’d be happy to answer any specific questions you may have, but I feel like I’ve more than said my piece here.)

If there’s one thing you take away from this, I hope it’s to learn to ignore all the ridiculous arguments out there, and just enjoy the story that’s actually being told. It’s a good one.

#cloti

[samwisethewitch]

Paganism and witchcraft

Thanks to many, many centuries of misinformation, paganism and magic are inextricably linked in pop culture. Progress has been made — the word “pagan” is less likely to make people think of dark rites, blood magic, and ritual orgies in the twenty-first century than it was in, say, the seventeenth century. Even so, if you tell someone you identify as pagan, you’re bound to eventually get the question: “So, are you, like, a witch?”

The answer, like so many things in paganism is that it depends on the pagan.

Before we get into modern pagans and their views on magic, I think it’s helpful to understand the historical roots of the association of paganism with witchcraft. And for that, we have to travel back to the Middle Ages, when Christianity was already well-established as the dominant religion in Europe, and the Catholic Church was well on its way to becoming a hegemonic superpower. The beginning of the witch hunts was just around the corner.

In her book The Study of Witchcraft, Deborah Lipp claims that two very different understandings of what it meant to be a witch were both at work in the medieval witch trials.

The first concept of witchcraft, which Lipp identifies as the “folk witch,” was much older and much less Christian. These were people who used dark magic, such as hexes, to cause harm and mischief. Though they may not have been called “witches,” folk witches or witch-like figures have existed in virtually every culture in some form. Examples include British witches, Irish changelings, and Navajo skin-walkers. The one consistent feature of these diverse creatures is an association with magic and a tendency to cause harm. They were seen as a threat to the community, and these types of witches were persecuted long before the rise of Christianity.

(For what it’s worth, the fact that witches were disliked by ancient pagans doesn’t mean that all magic was. Most of the ancient cultures that inspired modern paganism also had their own magical practice, and in many cases magic does not seem to have been controversial or taboo. But again, those who used magic for good would not have been considered witches before the twentieth century.)

The second concept of witchcraft identified by Lipp is the “Satanic witch,” which is an exclusively Christian concept. These people were heretics of the worst kind, members of a cult of Satan worshipers who had sexual relations with demons and plotted against the Church. They were a threat to the faithful Christians in their community.

The only unifying factor in these definitions is a sense of deviancy. Both folk witches and Satanic witches were people who deviated from the norm. It’s no coincidence that those accused of witchcraft were often those who broke societal norms in some way, such as single mothers or women who owned property.

These two distinct definitions of witchcraft would collide in the Middle Ages, with those who were tried for witchcraft often accused both of causing harm to the community by blighting crops or killing animals, and of worshiping Satan. It was commonly believed that these witches tormented the community with evil powers given to them by Satan.

But what does all this have to do with paganism?

While it’s possible that some of the people executed for witchcraft in Europe were secretly practicing the old pagan religions, they definitely wouldn’t have been the majority or even a significant minority. Supposed witches were almost always accused of worshiping Satan, not pagan gods. Most of the people who were accused, tried, and executed for witchcraft were probably accused for social reasons, not religious ones. Most if not all of them were probably not witches as we would recognize them today.

The accusation of devil worship is one that medieval “witches” have in common with pagans. Many of Satan’s names were originally the names of pagan deities, such as Beelzebub (a Philistine god), Moloch (a Canaanite god), and Dagon (another Philistine god). This association of Satan with pagan deities reflects real-world political conflict between the Hebrew people (and later the early Christians) and the cultures who worshiped those deities. Like the label of “witch,” this serves a political function and creates a clear “us vs. them” mindset.

However, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that medieval Christians thought that witch = pagan, or that they thought pagan = devil worship. During the conversion period (several hundred years before the Middle Ages), it seems that Christians largely viewed pagan gods as just that — other gods who were in competition with their own. There are records of Christians and pagans living in relative peace in some parts of Europe — something that surely wouldn’t have been possible if Christians believed that all pagans were devil worshipers.

Fear and paranoia regarding Satan and his followers didn’t become a large part of Christianity until the Middle Ages. Before that, Satan was a relatively minor figure, less the embodiment of evil and more of an annoyance. He was even used for comic relief in religious plays! It was in the Middle Ages that Satan began to take on a more prolific, antagonistic role. Again, this coincided with the Church becoming a hegemonic political entity.

I’m by no means an expert on European history, but it sure seems to me like the witch hunts and Satan paranoia of the Middle Ages were more about controlling the people and punishing deviance than about genuine religious conviction. Just saying.

By the time the witch hunts began, paganism (a.k.a., pre-Christian religion) had all but died out in Europe. Worship of the old gods had either ceased entirely or had been incorporated into Christianity in the form of regional tradition and superstition. Thus, “witches” were accused of worshiping Satan who, at the time, would have been a much more recognizable figure than Jupiter or Anubis.

So, to make a very long story short, there really isn’t a historical connection between paganism and witchcraft, except for both of them having been in conflict with Christianity at some point. It’s important to remember that witchcraft (in this case defined as harmful magic) is a concept that predates Christianity and that witches were treated with suspicion in pagan as well as Christian communities.

That’s not to say the two aren’t connected. In fact, modern paganism is much more closely linked to witchcraft than its historic counterparts.

If you read enough older books about paganism, especially Wicca and other neopagan religions, you will likely find references to “the Burning Times.” This is an exaggerated, largely fictionalized, and thoroughly disproved narrative that was popular with early neopagans, including Gerald Gardner, the father of Wicca. The “Burning Times” refers to the idea that, in the Middle Ages in Europe, the witch hunts were a genocidal attack on self-identified witches and pagans, in an attempt to wipe out these ancient belief systems. This is almost entirely false.

Belief in the “Burning Times” requires belief in Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis, which has been almost totally discredited by historians and archaeologists. Murray believed that the medieval witch trials were an attempt to wipe out a widespread pagan religion that had survived the Christianization of Europe. Murray claimed that this witch cult spanned much of Europe and worshiped a horned deity, who was referred to as the Devil by Christians.

Again, Murray’s theory has been completely discredited. There is no evidence whatsoever of a continent-spanning pagan religion, much less one that survived into the Middle Ages. If a book, website, or teacher refers to Murray’s theory or to the “Burning Times” as if they were historical fact, they are not a good resource for your study of paganism. Remember, paganism had been largely displaced by Christianity before the European witch hunts really got going!

But Murray’s theory, although false, has still had an impact on our modern understanding of witchcraft and paganism. As previously mentioned, Gerald Gardener was inspired by Murray’s ideas and incorporated some of them into Wicca. Noticeably, the Wiccan God often appears in prayers, poetry, and artwork as the Horned King, clearly inspired by the god Murray wrote about. Wicca was also the first pagan religion to make magic an integral part of ritual, thus marrying paganism with witchcraft.

The rising popularity of Wicca, and of self-identified witches, has helped destigmatize the label. Wiccans are, for the most part, lovely people who strive to use magic only for good. This is very different from the historic understanding of a witch as one who causes harm, and it’s been great PR for the witch archetype.

Nowadays the word “witch” can refer to anyone who practices magic, although some magic practitioners choose to use different labels. “Witch” no longer has connotations of evil, mischief, or malicious intent. The witch’s pop culture makeover has also been aided by popular fiction that portrays witches in a positive light, like the sitcom Bewitched, the Harry Potter franchise, and the TV show Charmed. This new definition has caused thousands of people, pagan and non-pagan alike, to use witchcraft and the witch label as a means to empower themselves and improve their lives.

Modern pagans may or may not identify as witches. Personally, I am both a pagan and a witch — but my paganism and my witchcraft are two different parts of my spiritual identity. For other pagans, witchcraft and magic are an essential part of their religious practice.

Say it with me, now: it all depends on the pagan!

Resources:

The Study of Witchcraft by Deborah Lipp

Witches, Sluts, Feminists by Kristen J. Soleee

The British History Podcast, “94 — Dark Age Beliefs”

Irish History Podcast, “Kilkenny Witchcraft Trial of 1324 (Part I)” and “Kilkenny Witchcraft Trial of 1324 (Part II)”

Wicca For Beginners by Thea Sabin

#paganism 101 #pagan #paganism #baby pagan #witchcraft #witchblr #baby witch #history #medieval history #wicca #wiccan #feri #reclaiming #goddess worship #celtic paganism #irish paganism #hellenic polytheism #hellenic paganism #hellenismos #religio romana #roman polytheism #heathenry #heathen #norse paganism #kemetic polytheism #kemetic paganism #eclectic pagan #witch #long post #my writing

[garagedoorinstallationil]

Self-Help Guide: Just How to Repair Your Garage Doors

Though typically lots of people open and close their garage doors three to 5 times a day, they have a tendency to take them for granted till something fails. Garage doors allow and also cumbersome, averaging 100 to 180lbs in weight, with plenty of mechanical parts to break down, and also at some point, they will. Nonetheless, with a little TLC, a garage door will have a life-span of in between 15 and also three decades.

Right Here at A1 Garage Door Service, we've seen as well as fixed practically everything that can go wrong with a garage door. While some jobs are entrusted to the specialists, there are many repairs that an owner with some functional DIY abilities can fix without having to call out an expert.

In this overview, we will check out some typical garage door repair service problems and also troubleshoot them. We have actually likewise supplied you with a handy infographic poster that you can print off and also await your garage.

Just how Does a Garage Door Work? The very best area to start is with just how a garage door works and to recognize the different parts that maintain it relocating. Essentially garage doors work by using a counterbalance system that contains either types of springtime.

The most usual of both counterbalance systems uses torsion springtimes. Torsion springtimes are horizontally affixed to a turning shaft that sits over the garage door opening. When the garage door is shutting, the springs wind up producing kept power, and when opened up, the springtimes unwind, enabling the saved energy to raise the door. Torsion springtimes are commonly more expensive than the 2nd alternative of extension springs. However, they are a lot more sturdy, much safer, and also longer-lasting, so they are taken into consideration the most effective option.

Expansion springtimes are attached to the garage door's base with a lift wire that runs a pulley system. When the garage door is shut, the springtimes stretch and also, when opened, pull back. Extension springs are much weaker and more susceptible to damage; they are also thought about much more harmful.

Another important component of your garage door system is the garage door opener. While the springs do all the heavy grunt work, the opener allows you to open as well as close your garage door at the push of a button. You have five alternatives to pick from chain drive, direct drive, belt drive, jackshaft, and also screw drive. They vary in rate, intricacy, and also tranquility, with the chain drive being the less costly however noisiest.

Added elements include; tracks on both sides of the door to keep it abreast when closing and opening up, Rollers to aid the garage door in moving along the track, and wires affixed to the springtimes to help raise the door.

Why Does My Garage Door Open by itself? If your garage door starts opening on its own, after that you could assume it's time to call Ghostbusters! Supernatural goings-on or more rational factors to consider, you'll wish to find the factor fast, leaving it open for prospective burglars or the components might place you in jeopardy of theft or damage.

One of the most common factors is likely to be a blunder made by you or the last member of the family to use the garage, specifically when they remain in a rush. If you press the remote button while driving away, can you make certain it enclosed the starting point? Possibly the first thing to inspect.

The following point to inspect is the safety sensing units designed to ensure the door reverses when closing if something is obstructing its way. Check for debris or even an accumulation of snow or ice. It is additionally feasible for one of the sensors to become misaligned or break down. If so, they will need to be replaced.

One more common factor is that the buttons on the wall opener or the remote have actually come to be stuck down; tidy the controls, and also check the wiring and also connections inside the housing.

A final check you can make is the control wiring; a wire ranges from the opener's motor system in the center of the ceiling tracks to the control switch placed on the wall surface. A short circuit or a bare area can well be the root cause of your garage door opening up on its own.

Why Won't my Garage Doors Close? Just like a garage door that keeps opening by itself accord, a garage door that will not shut might position a danger to the safety of your garage and leave it exposed to the elements.

We have actually currently reviewed the safety sensing units and also how they are designed to open if they detect an object in the garage door course. If either of the photosensors has dirt on them or one is not in accordance with the various other, they can avoid the garage door from closing. Additionally, a cord can have ended up being inapplicable or severed, so inspect the links. Provide the sensors a clean with a cells, and also ensure they are straightened as well as inspect the electrical wiring.

Busted torsion springs are important garage components that permit your garage door to open as well as shut. You'll likely understand the reason for your garage door not closing as the springtime splitting will certainly sound like a gunshot. Luckily, torsion springtimes tend constantly to damage when the door is closed. It's the same for snapped wires; you'll see these quickly; frequently, they will snap when a torsion springtime breaks. These are jobs for somebody with the right devices and also knowledge to embark on.

If the tracks are obstructed or damaged, it can prevent the garage door from closing. In the best-case situation, it will certainly be a clog that can be conveniently eliminated. If the tracks are curved or deformed, you will likely need a replacement track.

When a garage door opener is mounted, limit setups are established as default. These settings can conform time. The garage door will typically quit prior to it gets to the ground or hit the ground, and also believe it has hit an item, it will instantly go into reverse. You'll need to change the limit settings, inspect the garage door opener manual, and change them per the instructions.

Why Doesn't My Garage Door Open? The word annoying doesn't do justice to the feelings you have if you can't get your automobile out of the garage since the door won't open. Normally, all sorts of expletives will certainly surround 'irritating' possibly ideal not explored in this overview! Most of the concerns with a garage door closed additionally apply to it not closing, such as obstructed, distorted, or curved tracks.

If your torsion springtime breaks when the door is shut, you'll need to switch off your opener and manually lift the garage door to get it open. Garage doors can be troublesome, so you may need help to do this. Use a lever to somewhat raise the door and also slide a piece of timber underneath to save any damages to your fingers. Then depending upon your door's weight, you may be able to lift it yourself or need aid to do so. When raised, secure the door with vice holds to guarantee it does not fall back down and also injure someone. Fixing a damaged torsion springtime can be an unsafe job for the uninitiated, so unless you have a lot of Do It Yourself experience and understand the technicians of your door garage, this is a work ideal left for the specialists.

Garage door openers include a cord to draw to disconnect the electric opener so that you can open the door by hand. For instance, you may require to open the garage door throughout a power interruption. Check that the garage door motor hasn't been detached; this is an easy as well as common solution.

Another simple check is to guarantee that it's not an issue with your remote control; it could be that you locked the remote by mishap or the batteries require changing. It could additionally be the antenna; examine it to see if it is damaged or blocked somehow. Ultimately, attempt resetting the remote control.

Finally, tak a take a look at the source of power. Is the opener getting power? Has it come to be unplugged? Otherwise, inspect that the breaker hasn't tripped as well as needs resetting or that a fuse hasn't blown and also requires changing.

Exactly How Can I Make My Garage Door Less Loud? Even if you can live with a loud garage door, it will be most likely that relative or perhaps next-door neighbors can not. Usually, a loud garage door is an easy problem to settle.

The most uncomplicated area to start is with a little lubrication, nine times out of ten, a little oil will certainly be all that is required for quieter garage doors. Making use of silicone or lithium spray lubricant especially created for garage doors, lube all the metal parts such as the springs, tracks, hinges, as well as rollers. When used, use a fabric to remove any kind of extra.

If you have a chain drive opener, the chain should be lubricated a couple of times a year as well. You'll also locate that a chain drive garage door opener is the noisiest of the different kinds you can buy. When it pertains to time to change it, maybe worth buying a belt drive system, which is a great deal quieter.

Examine the garage door, and track supports for loosened or absent screws as well as screws. Replace as well as tighten them with an adjustable or socket wrench, but do not overtighten as this could make issues worse.

After lubricating the steel components and changing or tightening up loose nuts and screws, you still have a noisy garage door; you'll require to inspect the different components for wear. If the roller is grinding or otherwise spinning openly on the shaft after lubricating, it could need replacing; we would certainly recommend selecting nylon rollers over steel.

If the garage springs seem the cause of the sound, be very careful and also don't attempt to adjust or repair them. They will certainly require replacing by preferably a specialist or else a person with a great practical knowledge of garage door mechanics. Without trying to seem melodramatic, the job can lead to death or arm or leg if not executed correctly.

You need to additionally evaluate the joints for wear, search for a much more oblong-shaped opening than round and dirt or steel filings around the pin.

Can Garage Doors Job Without Electricity? Getting locked in or out of your garage, especially the former, can be a troubling experience. Yet there is no requirement to panic, also without power; for instance, in case of a power outage, there is a way to open your garage door manually.

Standard garage door openers have an emergency situation guidebook release cable. You'll see the cable with its red manage positioned on the trolley track in addition to the garage door. When you draw the take care of, you will listen to a click. You can now by hand raise the door by ordering it at the base and raising it all the means up. For security reasons, do not leave the door open and neglected, as there is little in the means of precaution to keep the mechanism in position; even in the result of a strong gust of wind, the door could fall with the possibility of harming someone, specifically if you have pets or children.

Once you have electrical power once again and want to reconnect the electric opener, totally close the door by hand and after that draw the hands-on release cable; once it clicks, the button is re-engaged. Reconnect the garage door with the cart track by elevating it one to two feet It must snap right into location. After that examine the automatic opener to see if it functions properly by opening as well as closing the garage door.

Exactly How are Garage Doors Installed? For an expert garage door specialist, a garage door installment usually can take in between 5 and seven hrs. An expert garage door solution will certainly give you with distribution and setup and also eliminating your old door. The necessary steps are to connect the hinges, mount vertical tracking, attach the panels to the hinges, mount straight tracks, set up the torsion springtime system, and evaluate the door to make certain that it runs properly. In addition, you are likely to call for an automated garage door opener that is straightforward to suitable for your average Do It Yourself fanatic.

Is it Possible to Mount a Garage Door by yourself? If you want to comprehend far better how a garage door's mechanisms work for future maintenance and repair as well as minimize expenses, a Do It Yourself garage door installment could be a superb project for the appropriate person. For most garage door mounts, 2 individuals will be needed as they are hefty and unwieldy, as well as having a person around to pass devices to you when you get on a step ladder, as an example, can cut pause the work. What ought to be understood is that garage door setup can be hazardous; you require to be confident in your ability, educated in Do It Yourself, and also extremely safety and security conscious to take on the job. Thousands of people are harmed installing garage doors each year, so it's not a task to take on lightly.

Last Ideas We hope our guide has provided some valuable ideas for repairing garage door problems. If you maintain your garage doors in good order with normal maintenance and routinely inspecting the elements for indications of wear, they need to last you years. If you are experiencing a concern with your doors, keep calm, and be systematic in your approach. The issue will often be as easy as altering some batteries or eliminating some particles from a sensing unit or track. If you have actually attempted everything you can and also the solution still hasn't occurred, after that it's time to reach out to the professionals at A1 Garage Door Service, that will make certain to have your garage door up and running in no time at all.

Read our blog about  Just how to Install a Garage Door

[theparanormalperiodical]

The Less-Than-Sweet TRUE Stories That Inspired Candyman (1992), And The Other 5 Scariest Urban Legends That Are Still Haunting The USA

In 1987, Ruthie Mae McCoy was found dead in her apartment.

As a mentally-unstable resident of the ABLA housing project - one of the most violent on the Chicago south side - her death is far from the only one to have taken place there. But her death is one of the most well documented.

So well documented, in fact, it’s legacy stretches back to the present day.

McCoy first reported strange occurrences taking place in her apartment when returning from the psychiatric unit at Mount Sinai Hospital. She claimed someone had threatened her life to a fellow passenger in the van next to her.

They urged her to seek help, but she chose to take shelter in her fear.

In April, the local police received a phone call from a frightened woman from the ABLA housing project who was claiming someone was trying to come through her bathroom cabinet. When the police finally entered the apartment, they discovered her on the floor of her bedroom with 4 gunshot wounds peppering her torso.

Her death would be just one of the threads that weaved the horror film icon, Candyman (1992).

Today we unpick the fabric, from the twisted history of the Jim Crow South, to America’s darkest urban legends.

Clive Barker never intended to create one of the most iconic Black horror films of all time.

In fact, Barker didn’t even create the feature length film that would change the face of cinema in 1992. What he did, however, was pen a short story about life on the breadline in Liverpool.

The Forbidden (1984) followed a graduate student in the UK who was studying graffiti. Among the garish curse words splashed on the walls of the run-down council estate she investigated, Helen discovered references to an urban legend that have been sprayed onto the concrete.

A legend called the Candyman.

As explained by the later films, Candyman is a pretty standard urban legend: you say his name into a mirror 5 times, and before you would appear a man sticky with sweet honey and with a hook for a hand.

Helen followed the trail back to reports and rumours mutilations and murders in the local area, failing to get any information out of the locals. She then became a victim of the Candyman himself.

Despite the short story closely mirroring the plotline of the film we know and love cower away from today, there is one crucial difference aside from the setting:

In the 1992 film, and in the upcoming 2021 reboot, the Candyman is African-american. Helen’s original encounter with the urban legend in Liverpool, however, was with a pale, waxy figure bearing all the traits of a dead white man.

When Clive Barker first conjured the Candyman from his imagination, he wanted to explore the theme of class in 1980s Britain. Bernard Rose, the director of the 1992 rendition of the tale, on the other hand, wanted to explore the theme of race in America, rewriting the characters on the other side of the pond and deepening the dark story Barker first put before horror fans.

Most importantly, he focused on developing the character of the Candyman.

Where he came from, what he did, and how he did it informed the entire plot, and would span 2 sequels shortly after.

The Candyman Of Cabrini-Green

Rose set the 1990 films in the Cabrini-Green public housing projects in Chicago’s North Side. Originally built in 1942 to home thousands of African-americans fleeing the Jim Crow South during the Great Migration, the housing project captured a snapshot of racial divides in America.

It doesn’t take a historian to understand that racism fuelled the neglect of the housing, and by the time the movie hit the theatres in the early 90s, only 9% living there were actually employed.

But Candyman didn’t just capture the poverty and racism inherent in American society; it pulled us through the mirror, and showed the viewers just one of the many origins fuelling the complex and corrupted history of the USA.

So Who Was The Candyman Based On?

Tony Todd was a pretty important part of the film.

Ok, aside from being one of the few black actors that managed to score a role in a horror movie that didn’t die in the opening credits, and yeah, as well as donning a prosthetic hook, he actually developed the character of the Candyman.

But most notably, he developed the backstory for the urban legend.

And the story starts in the 19th century.

Daniel Robitaille - an established painter - was commissioned to paint the portrait of a white woman. From there began an interracial relationship that was not accepted in this era.

When she fell pregnant, a lynch mob sought out Robitaille to make him pay for his alleged crime. They severed off his hand for touching a white woman, and covered him in honey, leaving him to die by being stung by bees.

What’s really striking of this tragic and terrifying image, however, is that this did happen.

Interracial relationships were scarce in the 19th and early 20th centuries in America and typically featured white men marrying black women (and consequently freeing them if they were slaves), and fed into deep-rooted racism that still haunts the country. One of the pillars of historic American racism and Western Imperial ideas of race was the ‘protection’ of white women from the ‘lustful’, ‘violent, and ‘savage’ black man.

In fact, marriage and politics were both considered the most important arguments supporting segregation, linking the freeing of slaves and interracial relations.

This fear became especially prevalent in the US after the Civil War; the influx of freed slaves would result in an increase in the forbidden relationships, bringing us back to the era Daniel Robitaille’s life was set in.

This timeline is made ever more accurate by the manner of his death: lynch mob activity peaked in the 1830s, 40s and 50s, proving that Robitaille’s story is unfortunately far too common. Although being stung to by bees and insects probably was used as a form of torture and murder, I can only trace a form of this execution method to Persia (approx. 6BC).

But what’s really quite striking is the transformation of Daniel Robitaille, an innocent and very much alive black man, to the Candyman, an urban legend who is seeking vengeance for his murder.

It’s the racial terrorism committed against Robitaille which make him so terrifying. The crimes committed against the innocent black man still tailor him into the image of a ‘scary black man’, the image that we are still haunted by today.

Urban legends are so petrifying because of the outlandish, outrageous monsters at the centre of the story that appear in ordinary places. And that’s exactly what we find here. But here’s the twist: the Candyman charted the original racism that founded the Cabrini-Green housing projects, and the racism still inherent in it.

In fact, that’s the sub-plot of the movie: Helen Lyle discovers more of the everyday realities of being African-american in the US throughout the movie, witnessing poverty and police brutality as well as the garish image of a hooked man smothered in honey.

We, the viewer, are given brief snapshots of black history and the black present, even if only through a bathroom mirror.

And it’s horrifying.

So Daniel Robitaille Was Based On History - But What Was The Candyman Legend Inspired By?

To summon the Candyman - if you dare - you simply need to say his name into a mirror 5 times. This less-than-innovative manner of conjuring the Candyman is obviously based on Bloody Mary and the act of saying her name into a bathroom mirror a certain amount of times that no one actually agrees on.

It is said she will then appear to either show you the face of your future hubby, scratch your face off, or kill you. You can find out more about this legend here.

But she isn’t the only legendary beast weaved into this horror hit.

His Hook Hand is obviously an aesthetic inspiration:

A couple were busy being horror-movie-villian-bait and making out in a car when the radio suddenly blared out an emergency broadcast.

A serial killer (*gasp*) had escaped from the local mental institution (*eye-roll*) and he had a hook for a hand.

One of them heard something scrape on the car so they drove off. Believing it to be merely a tree branch they take a look and discover a hook in the side of the car.

(Their insurance premiums! Oh the horror!)

The final urban legend explicitly linked to Candyman is La Llorona, possibly the second most famous urban legend after Bloody Mary herself.

This hispanic urban legend is tragic but fiercely popular: a woman had two sons and a loving husband. However, after being convinced her partner was cheating on her or loved her children more, she drowned them. She then drowned herself in grief.

It is said she still roams Latin America, looking for her deceased children and taking those who aren’t hers before drowning them when she realises they are not her sons.

To summon her (not sure why you’d want to) all you have to do is light some red candles in a room full of mirrors and yell out her name.

Candyman is thus clearly inspired by these classic american urban legends that have struck fear into gullible children and drunk teenagers for decades. But they aren’t the only stories that gave inspiration to such a film. And they certainly aren’t the scariest.

So What Are The Scariest American Urban Legends?

*clicks torch on*

#1 - The Alaska Triangle

Did you know this frosty American state is home to something scarier than Sarah Palin?

Also known as Alaska’s Bermuda Triangle, this is an area of untouched wilderness stretching from Anchorage and Juneau to Barrow. It’s earned such a reputation as this is where a lot of people go missing.

Okay, fine, an unknown area of woodland where people go missing - this isn’t a mystery, this is a tragedy. But the thing is, it's the sheer volume of people that go missing here which is so concerning.

It started in October 1972, when US House Majority Leader Hale Boggs, a congressman, and a political aide went missing while flying to Juneau. 90 aircrafts and dozens of boats scaled the area to no avail. No trace of the boat, no evidence of human life - or death. It was truly a mystery.

When more planes went missing, when more hikers didn’t return from their adventures, and when more tourists failed to return to their budget hotels, fears grew. Since 1988, 16,000 have disappeared. The rate of missing people here is more than twice the national average.

The disappearances have been traced back to a number of theories including aliens, energy vortexes, and a Tlingit Native American demon known as Kushtaka. The most popular case, however, is for the swirling vortexes of energy which can cause audio and visual hallucinations and health problems. And this isn’t the only location that allegedly homes them.

Search and rescue workers often report the physical feelings associated with vortexes with magnetic anomalies spiking in certain locations.

Could these missing people be lost in the ferocious wilderness of Alaska? Or is something else at play?

#2 - Turnbull Canyon

We now turn to a sunny California, and the 4 mile loop in the Puente Hills reserve. Aside from being known for the majestic views of the Hsi Lai temple and the Rose Hills Memorial Park, it’s been home to a number of paranormal forces.

But the most interesting thing about this location is that it's been considered an evil location for centuries. Local Native American tribes called it Hutukgna, ‘the dark place’. It was forbidden ground, and they didn’t set foot there. So, when Spanish missionaries came to convert them to Christianity, they did it here.

“Now we are without hope. Now we remain for as long as the sun rises and sets in the sky”

To this day locals and tourists report feeling as if they are being watched, and legend has it Native Americans that were killed there remain as spirits, waiting for the final sunset.

The urban legend amassed a new reputation during the Great Depression. Large groups of men and women in dark robes would partake in strange rituals at night which few witnesses have seen.

One witness claims they saw a young boy strapped to a cross. He was surrounded by a circle of people who danced and chanted in unknown languages. The robed group then flipped the cross until it was upside down, and proceeded to beat the child until he was close to death. He was then taken away. We don’t know what became of the child. But we do know a flurry of disappearances and kidnappings haunted the area throughout the early 20th century.

And then it gets even worse.

In the 1930s, an insane asylum was built there. It mysteriously burnt to the ground 10 years later.

Psychic mediums and visitors report feeling unbearable at the location, from reporting classic paranormal activity such as the feeling of being watched or seeing orbs, to feeling as if someone is rummaging about in your own brain.

#3 - Vampire Comte de Saint Germain

New Orleans already has a paranormal reputation. Jacques Saint Germain only blended seamlessly with this historic location. But the thing is, it is said he would have witnessed most of the history for himself.

Throughout history a man of similar stature and personality has been reported.

He was at a notable wedding in Cana where Jesus turned water into wine, he was an alchemist in the 1600s, and he was in high-society in 1742.

It was an encounter in 1760 with one Countess von Gregory which was really interesting: the Countess was convinced she knew him as the son of a man in 1710 - but he hadn’t aged a single day.

He joked, as he often did, that he was over 100 years old.

Fluent in 6 languages, his incredible abilities and knowledge made him an enviable man - and an impossible one, too.

We do know, however, that he came to New Orleans in 1902 from France and invited the elites for a special feast. He didn’t eat a single bite, but did drink dark, red ‘wine’. He then confirmed rumours of when he kidnapped a local woman, held her down, and bit into her neck.

When the police turned up to investigate, they found the room covered in blood stains. But Jacques was nowhere to be seen.

#4 - Nash Road

Like most titles of urban legends, the Three-Legged Lady gives away the story. But this tale fares just as tragic as the other legends that shape this list:

Just outside of Columbus, Mississippi is Nash Road.

Legend has it if you stop on the road, turn off the headlights, and honk the horn one, two, three times, she will appear. She will knock on the roof of your car to alert you of her presence, and race your car to the end of the road. She will slam her body - 3 legs n’ all - against the car the entire time.

There are many alleged origins of the three-legged lady. Some believe she killed a lover, severed off the leg and attached it to her body, whilst others believe she is holding what’s left of her daughter’s corpse. Alternate versions of the legend even claim she is the spirit of a human sacrifice of a nearby satanic cult.

#5 - The Watcher

The first letter was sent in the summer of 2015.

A family had just moved into a grand mansion in Westfield when they started receiving letters from a person who claimed to be watching over the house. They were eerie, they were menacing, and they were signed by someone only known as ‘The Watcher’.

Numerous former owners have all received other letters from the same person with the same sentiment.

“Who has the bedrooms facing the street?”

“Do you need to fill the house with the young blood I requested?”

“Did 657 Boulevard call to you with its force within?”

The Watcher often refers to the house as if it is an entity, even warning one unsuspecting family not to destroy the house when they brought in contractors.

There are many more details to this story, but what I find most intriguing is a paragraph from a letter welcoming a new family:

“657 Boulevard has been the subject of my family for decades now and as it approaches its 110th birthday, I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming. My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time. Do you know the history of the house? Do you know what lies within the walls of 657 Boulevard? Why are you here? I will find out.”

The stalking is still under investigation.

***

I’ve written about enough ghosts, ghouls, and long-forgotten legends for just over a year now to know what true fear is.

And real life is always scarier.

If you liked this post and want to hear more then go on and hit follow!

Can’t wait to hear more real ghost stories? Check out the Peoples’ Paranormal Archive, the online ghost story collection that is chock-ful of real evidence of the supernatural just waiting to traumatise you.

#urban legends #candyman #candyman 1992 #candyman 2020 #jordan peele #get out #us movie #candyman film #black horror #kuchisake onna #slit mouth woman #real urban legends #bloody mary ghost #bloody mary #bermuda triangle #vampires #black lives matter #the conjuring #suspiria #best horror movies #horror #horror movies #african american #african american history #black history #la llorona #scary urban legends #paranormal #real ghost stories #paranormal investigation

[saikagerights]

A New Possession- Entry #3

Here’s Number 3. Today’s been a long day, so I’m posting this super late where I am. This chapter has a lot to do with topics that I don’t think too much about, which is cool and interesting, but also time consuming. This is also the longest entry I’ve written so far, clocking in at a little more than 1000 words. 

Also on AO3

December 1st

I apologize. I was planning on going into more detail about my other bonds, but I got distracted through a small chat with Ino that led to a much larger discussion of her current project with Sakura to open up a Children’s Mental Clinic in Konoha. I found it difficult to pull away as it was a cause I related and the intrigue I found in the passion that radiated from her words. I believe that to be my first proper interaction with her since the mission. For some odd reason, I noticed her demeanor had changed from when I had seen her in group settings. Her once clear and rather bold talk turned into a slight stutter when broaching certain topics. I wonder if it is due to her personal life. I am aware that she is still grieving the loss of her father, as she had brought up how she missed him. 

Unfortunately, I have no connection to any blood relatives. My only family had consisted of Shin, and even then he wasn’t truly related to me. The concept of fatherhood is not one I would say I’m very knowledgeable in, either. However, I’ve heard things here and there from Naruto about the subject. What I’ve grasped is that father figures are people that are meant to guide you while supporting you along the way. There are few people in my life since my freedom from ROOT that can be considered father figures. 

Captain Yamato was the first to provide me a place to speak my mind after Danzo-sama’s death, when my tongue had been freed from his clutches and my faith in his words had truly begun to fade. We mainly spoke about our individual experiences in ROOT’s regime. Yamato however, allowed me access to some of his more darker secrets; some I swore to never repeat. Yamato was someone I could truly relate to as a shinobi. As a former ROOT operative, there are not many who have shared similar experiences to me. After the disbandment of the organization, many shinobi fled the village with scrolls, tools, and weapons in hand. Others ended their own lives at the unavoidable fact that their life’s mission had ended. The more fortunate ones were held in Konoha cells until the village could find a way to reintroduce them into the society of the village. I was lucky enough to have already received a foundation for my rehabilitation to begin. Yamato had also been lucky in being transferred to the job of the Sandaime’s protection at the request of Kakashi-sensei, now known as the Rokudaime. 

For the longest time,I had known Kakashi Hatake of the Sharingan for his extraordinary feats as an ANBU shinobi. His name as the legendary “Copy Ninja” had passed through the barracks of ROOT so many times he sounded more like a mythological figure than a man. To any respectable shinobi, working under him would be an absolute honor for his famous track record alone. I’ll admit that the thought of meeting him could be described as intimidating. 

Suffice to say I was fairly disappointed at first…

I met Kakashi-sensei in a hospital room after over-exerting himself during a mission to rescue the Kazekage from the clutches of the Akatsuki. To me, he looked decrepit and delicate, as if every decision he made weighed on him and any slight movement he made would break him. On paper, he had served a life-span of three shinobi alone, so this shouldn’t have been much of a surprise to me. The surprises didn’t stop with Kakashi-sensei, as his laid back attitude and taste in literature were also unbecoming of a shinobi. 

This was remedied by the way he treated his students as the Jonin leader of Team 7. 

Although mostly standoffish, his bond with his students seemed incredibly close. Although both Naruto and Sakura have learned from more reputable Sannin Shinobi Jiraiya and the Godaime, Tsunade, they attribute the foundation of their values as shinobi to Kakashi. His value of camaraderie between shinobi had in turn been passed down to me from Naruto, finally opening my eyes to what I had once been denied under Danzo-sama. 

I understand that being in my position during Danzo-sama’s short tenure as Hokage meant that I was bound to be a suspect in carrying out his will. I myself had begun to truly question my own beliefs, as little as they were. But that was never questioned by Kakashi-sensei. He instead instilled belief in me to walk down the right path and choose to value the lives and safety of my comrades. It is a time that has since stuck to my being due to the feeling it gave me. To feel trusted and encouraged. I still cannot fully describe it, but to me it was the warmth and comfort that I would now account as:

Acceptance…

From Kakashi-sensei, this same acceptance continued even after the war, when he and the Godaime concluded the concealment of the identities of ROOT operatives to protect us from scorn and prejudice for actions that were out of our control. My ability to live in peace and continue to move forward in my rehabilitation has mainly been due to this decision.

I now work under Kakashi-sensei as his personal operative as Hokage despite my departure from the ANBU after the war. This at my personal request for time away from the same structured authority that I had been a part of since childhood. It was also at the suggestion of the Rokudaime, as he had suspicion of corruption in the inner workings of the ANBU. Another one of his famous hunches that was only proven with further investigation. It is now an operation between us that we are to weed this out of the ANBU in hopes of establishing a new foundation of values in Konoha’s underground. All for the sake of protecting the village and the Shinobi that work tirelessly for the sake of it. 

This is part of what I consider to be my own will. 

I have concluded that the Rokudaime cares for me as if I were one of his students, despite my history with ROOT. Not only through his support as a Jonin or Hokage, but also smaller acts of kindness. He has supplemented me with a good amount of research material over the years, some more questionable than others. 

I may be new to social nuances, but even I know what Icha Icha is all about. 

Alright so there’s that. Next entry will be the lead up to the first of the major events in this timeline, which is the Last Movie. I’m not too sure how many entries it will cover, but I do have an idea about what I want Sai to talk about during these chapters, so at least I have a good idea. 

See you later,

-Saikage

#Sai Journal #saiino #sai yamanaka #si fanfic

[youllallriseintheink]

Infinity: chapter 3- A way out.

Time to start the “where did this character end up?” game.

---

To Allison Pendle, immortality has been a blessing, but also a curse. In the past century since her transformation, she’d seen the downfall of Joey Drew Studios, joined a gang in which she worked under Lacie Benton and Shawn Flynn, gone through rehab, seen a multitude a countries, been a singer, an actress, a missionary, a mother, and a drug dealer, rubbed shoulders with Wally as a performing circus freak, gone to rehab, been rich, been homeless, tried almost every hobby imaginable, read more books, met more people, done more drugs, and had generally lived life to the fullest. The past little bit, though, she was bored with it. She’d begun to envy older people, who were able to slow down with age, and eventually die. And so, she eventually returned to Brightdale.

Brightdale as Allison remembered it, was a small and mostly unnotable little town, but it was a very significant place to Allison. It was where, in her time randomly traveling the country in her early twenties, she’d first discovered that witchcraft was real.

In present, the place had been deserted entirely. As Allison walked the empty streets lined with overgrowth, a delightfully haunted feeling came over her. She’d have to explore these dusty houses when she was finished with her mission. It was on the edge of town that she found the house of the witch she had stayed with and stolen from. Its windows and doors were thoroughly grown over with vines roots at this point. Thankfully, Allison had half-way expected the place would be patroled by some sort of guardian creature and had thus come prepared with a shotgun and a machete. There was nothing special about the foliage and it gave way fairly easily, allowing Allison in.

Within it, Allison found the place nearly untouched- nicely lit, no dust, nothing. Was the witch still here? Allison raised her gun and listened as creaking wooden steps gave away the old woman's presence. "I have a reversal shield on me. Don't try anything," Allison asserted. It was a lie, but not one to be taken lightly- casting a spell, especially an offensive one, on a reversal shield could very easily prove deadly.

"Allison?" the witch growled. "Very well, you fucking thief. What do want from me?"

"Ingredient number 30."

The old woman went to her spice cabinet, took out the ingredient, and threw it at Allison. "Anything else?"

"Well, there is something I'd like to ask you. You don't actually look like that, do you?"

The witch smiled wryly. "No... I actually look quite a bit like you. But you see, if I looked like you, then boys would be following me home all the time, getting to learn my secrets because they're after the one between my legs. It's protective to look like this."

Allison nodded. "That's what I thought. So," she pulled a recipe of sorts out of her pocket, "do you think this could kill you?"

The witch stared on in fear.

"Not that I want to kill you. I just think we should have the option."

---

It was the middle of the day when Henry received that very important letter (not the first Very Important Letter he'd received from someone in that bygone studio!). He had been in his office at the official headquarters of Disney, and the letter had been brought to him by his wife, Elaine. It read:

Dear Henry Stein,

This is  one of the immortals. I have found a potion that can cure our immortality. If you'd like it, or just like to see the rest of us again, me in Brightdale, Ohio at seven at night exactly one week from today.

See you soon (oops, that sounds ominous),

-Allison Pendle

"What is it, honey?" Elaine asked. Elaine knew that Henry was immortal, along with with pretty much everything else about him. They'd been married for fifteen years now, from her late twenties to her early forties, and had fostered many children together. Henry loved her, and certainly didn't think of her as some mayfly pet. But he wouldn't have wanted to talk about this with anyone.

"Nothing," Henry responded, perfectly calm.

"Okay," Elaine said, leaving with a look on her face that suggested that she suspected things maybe weren't.

Henry immediately tossed the letter in the trash and attempted to focus on the paperwork on his desk- fourums on the theme park he was planning on building with the help of Bertrum Piedmont. Finding he couldn't, Henry turned over the sheet and turned to his oldest coping mechanism- drawing. He was good now- all that time loop stuff was forgotten. But he was never in a million, billion, trillion years going to risk seeing Joey Drew's face again. Infinity didn't scare him much nowadays, and it scared him infinitely less than that.

---

The next house that the letter found its way to was a big, but run-down. Not many knew it, but it was where a pair of extremely well-established drug lords operated. As of right now, there were several people passed out on the crack-dusted leather couches, one of them being Lacie Benton, who was hungover from having used more substances than she could name the night before. "Hey Lacie. Letter from your old lover is here," Shawn called.

"Which one?" Lacie returned.

"The Raven."

Lacie rolled her eyes. "It was one kiss. She wanted to try it. Are you going to tease me about that until the very ends of time?"

"Probably," Shawn replied, gathering up some crack from the end table and snorting it. He couldn't wait until their next shipment would arrive, later in the afternoon.

Groggy, she got up and took the letter from Shawn's hands.

"Oh my God."

"What? Is she coming back to us?"

"No, it's better than that. She wants to give us a suicide drug!"

Shawn shared her excitement. At this point, they were both due for life-sentences, and for them, that would mean jail for centuries or millennia. Not anymore. Not with these. They were going to that meeting.

---

"So, Samuel Lawrence, explain to us why we should allow you, a man currently on parole and with many, many felonies in your past however distant, become a priest."

Sammy took a deep breath. In a similar courtroom to the one he now stood in, he'd answered the same question five years ago when he'd argued why he should be allowed in a seminary. now he had to argue it again in order to be licensed. At very least, the church where he'd done his practicum had agreed to hire him if he got through this, so he wouldn't have to make this same speech a third time.

"Your honour. I do not deny my crimes. However, as you said, they took place now nearly a century ago. I led unofficial church groups in prison which turned many people to better behaviour. I has released from my sentence- 7 charges of attempted murder at eight years each and seven charges of first degree murder at twenty years each- literal centuries early for my good behaviour, an absolutely unprecedented decision. And as one of my letters of recommendation will tell you, I stayed in prison an extra year to support the people I'd met there. What's more, and I know this is old news to you, I am immortal. The amount of life experience I could gain is immense, and I want to climb my way up through the catholic church system so that I can pass it on. Even now, I am 133 years old. Through prison and in my music career before it, I heard the stories of more people than I can count. I have experience in dealing with the worst sinners, and as we all know, a church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints. There are few people with as much life experience as me and fewer whose minds are still sharp. In short, I have made a positive impact on people's lives, and I want to get myself in a position where I'll be able to do that for as many people as possible. Thank you."

Sammy was breathing heavily from emotion as he finished his speech and sat back down. The judge said some words that Sammy barely registered about letting the jury decide. Sammy's stomach knotted up and he felt like either screaming or disappearing.

Half an hour later, he emerged from the courthouse elated, as a licensed priest. The letter was in his mailbox once he got home. Sammy laughed, then ripped it up. Today was the first step on the path to his destiny. Why would he in a million years want to die?

---

A copy of the letter came to Bickmore Insane asylum. The receptionist opened it and saw that it was addressed to one of the patients, Joseph "Joey" Drew. The receptionist did not feel badly for reading the patient's mail. For one thing, Joseph couldn't have read it anyhow. For another, Joseph honestly deserved it.

Rumour had it that decades ago- and it was decades, since Joseph was one of the immortals- Joseph had been given l a sentence spanning centuries for seven charges of attempted murder, twenty-something charges of murder, and innumerable charges of unlawful imprisonment. One of his victims had been the murder of a seventeen-year-old boy, and as a result, prison was not at all kind to Joseph. The other prisoners would beat the life out of him regularly, doing things to him that would kill most people, including giving him severe brain damage and forcing him to stumble around for hours on end as his brain repaired itself. As a result, Joseph was quickly moved to protective custody, and then to solitary confinement.

After the trauma of his treatment by the other prisoners and the solitary confinement had left him far too anxious and aggressive to be kept with the others, he was sent to Bickmore, where he at first seemed to make a quick recovery. There was, after all, a physical component to trauma, and Joseph's brain was just as resilient as the rest of him. But every time he seemed nearly ready to be transferred back to prison, he would cause a scene with panic visible in his eyes. He would begin to scream nonsense about beetles in his veins, throw objects, and attack faculty members and fellow patients. It didn't matter how many times it was explained to Joseph that he would be transferred right back to protective custody this time and the other prisoners would not be able to hurt him. Joseph did not want to go back to prison, and would do anything to buy himself more time.

As time went on, Joseph's apparent breaks from reality became more and more realistic. He would question faculty members about whether he was going back to prison, and attack them out of suspicion. The final straw, however, was when, on the first day he'd been allowed near other patients unsupervised since his last outburst, stabbed a 60-year-old schizophrenia patient with a butter knife and then a fork because he was convinced she was a spy for "the prison system." Joseph was pulled off of her, put into permanent solitary confinement, and sedated. Even now, he was in solitary, treated with the extreme care one would use for a dangerous beast, and kept heavily sedated.

Of course, the secretary didn't know any of that. Unless one had access to his files, that was all rumour- myth. She passed the letter onto her superior, who called Allison to ask that she send the drug. It was about time that someone put Joseph Drew out of his misery.

---

Thomas Connor had been making pancakes for his family when Boris brought him the mail in his mouth. Thomas smiled and took it with no word but a pat on Boris' head. The mail that day consisted of two letters and a newspaper. The first letter was just a bill, but the second one was from Allison Pendle.

What could that crazy bitch want from him? Thomas didn't know. A while ago he would have been mad, but now it had been so long that he honestly didn't feel anything. At least he had Alice to talk to if it was romantic. "Boris, could you take over for me?" he asked, moving over to the kitchen table to open the letter. Once he'd read it over, he crumpled it up, then uncrumpled it and found a fresh sheet of paper on which to write a reply.

Dear Allison

Thomas paused. He supposed he ought to keep this formal, at least at first, and wrote down her last name before continuing.

What are you up to? I don’t think I’ve seen you in person since that one time with the New York City Police.

Me, I’m still an engineer. Not for GENT- they went out of business a while after I left them. I’d worked for a few different places, but most recently (ha- “recently.” It was decades ago!) I’ve been  hired by an elite team of researchers who were looking into the ink machine. We eventually figured out how to save the people within these ink shells. You see, some of them have a human soul and a toon presence, and some get a third, demonic presence mixed in. We just had to separate them and give them separate bodies. Or cubes, in the case of the demons and toons. Don’t want them running away on us, do we? Anyhow, the humans took first priority. I saved that Buddy kid that we met and kept him at my house for a few years so that he could finish his schooling. After we were done with the people though, some bleeding heart thought we should give proper bodies to the cartoons because they “had over two decades of life experience, could feel pain and emotion,” you see where this is going. I thought it was stupid, but I was being paid to be an engineer, and if this was to be my project, so be it.

Thomas stopped and looked up. An Edgar (yes, an. Thomas had two) was playing Snakes and Ladders with Bendy and Alice on the floor. Dog, who was one one of his three Borises and the only one who walked on four legs like, well, a dog, was currently getting confronted by two sets of Charleys and Barleys for making his other Edgar cry. The Boris lowered himself to the ground in a doglike show of submission and apology, which the butcher gang members seemed to accept.

I guess they were right. Bringing them all back was a gradual process, and we could adopt some of them out. You’d be surprised how few people want to adopt a bunch of living cartoons with a truckload of trauma and no knowledge of the real world, though. I ended up with eleven of them. And it was supposed to be temporary, but now there’s a whole bunch of em’ I don’t want to separate (butcher gang trios especially) and, well, I guess I’m stuck with them. Not that I don’t like them, but I kind of wish I weren’t so tied down. I feel like I could do great things as an engineer, and while I love my kids, I kind of don’t want them to be my eternity, you know?

So that’s all to say, no. I can’t die. Can’t abandon my kids. But I’d love to see you again. Maybe I could come into town and meet up?

-Your fellow immortal, Thomas Connor

#Bendy and the Ink Machine #my fanfiction #Unkillable Eternal and Infinite #allison pendle #Henry Stein #sammy lawrence #joey drew #Thomas Connor

[loghorizonfunfacts]

Some personal Akatsuki ramblings

I rarely talk about Akatsuki herself in length -- usually when I’ve spoken about her in the past, it was about her role in the story as it pertains to Shiroe. I have a draft for my character analysis of her that’s been rotting away in my drafts for like, 2 or 3 years now but I’ve never been able to finish it. (I know what’s to come in future volumes, but without an official translation, I’m hesitant to take my own Google Translated-interpretations at face value.)

Some of this will be quite personal, maybe a bit controversial as well, so I’m keeping the bulk of it under a read more. (Mobile users... sorry.)

One thing that has slightly bothered me over my past few years in the LH fandom is how often Akatsuki gets reduced to either “best girl” or “failure love interest who sees a middle school girl as a rival”. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with liking Akatsuki for her awkward quirkiness, or disliking her because her insecurities (and the character arc resulting from it) are rooted in a rather unrealistic character gimmick (somehow looks like an elementary schooler as a college student?). But I think it’s completely overlooking the root reason why Akatsuki is the way she is.

While I initially had a negative reaction to volume 6 when I first read it, after time (and an official translation), I’ve found myself intensely relating to Akatsuki’s situation. Though I’m not completely qualified to speak about this and would like some insight into the matter from people with more knowledge/experience in the subject, it seems to me that Akatsuki may in fact be autistic (or at the very least, neurodivergent in some form).

I speak from the perspective of a (maybe) neurotypical person (more about that later), so perhaps someone would disagree with me. However, I think Akatsuki’s awkwardness is rooted in something deeper than mere “she isn’t good at talking,” which is where most people find her relatable and then stop there.

In volume 6, she explicitly says that she’s never had friends her own age. When she gets grilled for her lack of communication, she bemoans the fact that she doesn’t know how to express her feelings and can’t just show people what she’s thinking. Even Shiroe points out in volume 5 that they have difficulty keeping conversations going, and after he asks her to provide a conversation topic when she protests this, she comes up short.

Akatsuki’s almost hyper-focus on the master-ninja roleplaying (which Shiroe also explicitly gets weirded out by, and cause other characters concern) seems in line with the “restricted interests and repetitive behaviors” often found in those with autism. Whenever Shiroe tries to gently suggest he’s not interested in his role in their assumed roleplay, she digs her heels in and he gives up -- perhaps an example of “trouble understanding another person’s point of view,” another trait common in those with autism.

So, what’s that all got to do with me? Well, simply put, I saw a lot of myself in Akatsuki. The difference between series I’m intensely interested in (special interest/hyperfixation?) and ones that I casually like are like day and night. For series that I’m truly into, my interest spans several years, and usually involves maintaining or aiding a wiki about it or otherwise having blogs devoted to analyzing it thoroughly. It ends up eating at my time and my attention to my own detriment, and as William later says in volume 7, I even think about it when I eat and when I shower. This line in particular hit home:

Akatsuki had been avoiding the things she really had to do. She’d worked desperately at only the things she liked doing, and had tried to convince herself that was effort.

Oftentimes, I know what I have to do. My homework, my job search, networking with people, building relationships. But if it doesn’t interest me, no matter how hard I push and pull at it, I end up going back to the things I like doing or thinking about. Sometimes, I don’t even like what I do, I just do it because it’s something I can do.

My lack of communication skills is also much like Akatsuki’s. It’s not a casual “lol what even is talking to people”; reading Akatsuki’s introspection and seeing things from her point-of-view felt like I was seeing things through my own perspective of the world.

I don’t know how to express myself and sometimes, I don’t even know if there’s something to express. I can be “my way or the highway” to the point where it’s driven people away. I can’t keep up a conversation and I’m perfectly content with not talking with others. I find small talk inane and people casually conversing with me (whether they’re strangers or friends) puts me on edge.

When Akatsuki struggles to express familiarity with the other girls, it takes Rayneshia declaring her a friend to give her the words to speak. Throughout high school, there were only a few people I can definitely say was a friend. Everyone else, I could never get a read on. Did they consider me a friend? Was I an annoyance, or was I just wallpaper in the backdrop of the school? I was rarely ever anyone’s “first pick” for anything and I usually stayed to myself as to not cause trouble for anyone; I learned in middle school not to stick myself into already-established friend groups.

In a lot of ways, Akatsuki probably felt the same about the Watermaple group. She was there on Shiroe’s orders, not because the other girls there liked her. So in her eyes, the greatest courtesy she can do is eliminate the threat on her own... which she fails to do.

What makes Akatsuki even more relatable is that she isn’t explicitly autistic; Mamare has never spoken about whether his characters are societal commentary (though personally, I think they are). The most he’s ever said about them is that he tries to make them like people he knows.

Maybe Mamare isn’t even (fully) aware that Akatsuki was written in this way. Perhaps he wrote her thinking “someone out there will relate to her.” And he’s right. In a way, not making her (possible) neurodivergence solidified canon is what makes her even more relatable to me.

As a result of my Chinese-American background, the sort of cultural perspective on neurodivergence I’ve been raised in is, to put it bluntly, “Well, tough.” If you don’t have a severe disability, that means you don’t have a disability, and you better damn well act like a normal person. (For some measure of “normal” that I have yet to figure out.)

Things like autism and developmental orders were treated as something for “others.” In fact, for most of my elementary through high school years (I lived in a predominantly white neighborhood), I genuinely thought autism and ADHD were a white people thing. To be fair, given some cursory research into the general view on autism in China and Japan, they probably think so too -- if they even know about such things at all.

A fair number of the general populace seem to be unaware of them; I’ve seen Japanese tweets spreading awareness about ADHD on twitter, and a JP twitter mutual had a mental breakdown as a result of their ADHD and anxiety making them unable to perform at work. It makes me wonder if Akatsuki exhibits autistic traits because Mamare knows people who act similarly (or perhaps, he can relate to them himself), but none of them actually know that there’s an actual underlying reason and it’s not a mere relatable personality quirk.

So in the end, I have absolutely no idea whether I’m normal or not. I can’t tell if I’m actually neurodivergent or if I’m faking it to make an excuse for myself. I’m Akatsuki as she watches Minori and Shiroe at the end of volume 5: feeling helpless, knowing that our juniors are “ahead” of us and “more successful.” We want to push our ineptitude on our inexperience and our sub-par equipment, but what we’re really lacking is interpersonal skills and, even though we know that’s what we’re missing, but we have no idea how to work on that.

#log horizon #akatsuki #lhff rants #get to know lhff

[dbhilluminate]

DBH: Illuminate- Hit and Run (part 1)

Characters: Connor-50 / Z, Dennis, Nick, Kate, Connor-51 / RK, Axl  Word Count: 2,598

Axl spots a trine of RK800's entering Detroit on a bus inbound from Belle Isle- Kate moves to tail them with the intention of finding out why they're there, but is spotted by Connor's doppelganger and forced to do something she regrets in order to escape.

( Chapter Art by triple_jays_art , Co-authored by grayorca15)

Previous Chapter

• Chapter Index • Characters •

--------

November 12th, 2038 - 12:54 PM

By the end of the journey, Dennis almost wished their special travel privileges had been revoked. Standing at the back of the bus might have been degrading for models of their ( dubious ) stature- compared to that, sitting wedged into an armchair-style seat wasn’t any more pleasant, but it was useless to rue any of it at this point, like insisting on taking the window seat in spite of irrelevant comfort. HIs partner squinted and placed a hand on the glass to see further out the window in anticipation of what their first glimpse of Detroit would entail. Thus far, the rolling expanses of countryside —field after field of unharvested late-season corn— had yet to give way to congested metropolitan sprawl. Nick sighed and turned back to him in disappointment. "How much longer? Why is it so far? I didn't know it would take so long."

Such questions were unsuspicious to the rest of the tour bus’ human group, but exhausting to have to answer ten times over. Instead of responding with his usual weariness, Dennis skimmed ahead to the next news article on his tablet, slouched down in his seat with his elbows bowed and his ankle crossed over one knee. He cut enough of a surly image he hadn’t been bothered by other passengers looking for small talk, though his covert attire helped throw off suspicion. In his Michigan State Wolverines hoodie, blue jeans, and ski cap crammed down over his brow, Dennis looked like just another laze about young adult catching the bus back to the city. He’d even left the laces of his boots untied to better help sell the idea. With every lazy turn the bus made they swayed one way, then the other. Dennis ran through a few possible responses before he opted for a casual nudge of his toe against his partner’s knee. This might have been a bearable arrangement, if only he would quit fidgeting every five minutes.

“You lookin’ for a distraction, or you want the same answer I’ve been givin’ you the last five hours?” Nick knocked his knee against his in rebuttal as he continued to look out the window, then turned and leaned back toward him, eyes wide under an old Detroit Tigers ball cap. "I'm just curious! It's been so long since we’ve been home… how much longer ‘till we get there?" The tablet in Dennis’ hands updated in real-time: a few mentions of road accidents that had waylaid everyday commuters at several junctions along I-75, interrupted his reading with a few annoying pop-up banners that he swiped away after reading. “An hour, provided the traffic doesn’t logjam between here and there,” he replied, then paused to take a sideways glance at his partner’s leg jittering up and down like a piston. Dennis recalled that had been their third’s plan to eat up the few hundred miles between Dayton and Detroit, but four hours in, Nick had recharged all he could will himself to. Now he was brimming with nervous energy he couldn’t work off, as always. Good plan, bad result. “What happened to sleeping your way back?” Nick reached to fuss with one of the arms of his windbreaker jacket and fidgeted in his seat. His leg stopped for a moment. "I tried that, but I'm not- tired anymore. We're going so slow… Too slow. Can't they go any faster? When will we actually be in the city?" “Soon enough,” Dennis replied, and dialed back the exasperation in his tone to spare them both the aggravation. Whether or not the delays could be helped didn’t stop Nick from whining about it anyway. There was no sense in getting annoyed.

Dennis glanced back and around at their company, most of whom were either asleep or too engrossed with their mobile electronics to notice, and made one slight tug at the ski cap. His LED dimmed beneath it, but he needn’t chance someone noticing the faint glow. As he opened the wireless communication channel between them, he reverted back to their usual banter: Don’t whine so much, you’ll draw attention to us. Their press coverage was still minimal as of yet, and most photos tended to consist of only one of their three faces. The odds they’d be outed were minimal, but it was still attention they didn’t need. And you know Zero could use the recharge. Nick twisted around and directed a too-obvious glance at their dozing primary seated a few rows back on the opposite side of the aisle. The RK800 (formerly known as “Connor”) faked a nap, head tilted back against the cushy headrest with a smart-looking cap pulled down over his eyes. Okay, okay, fine… I'll stay quiet, the anxious Android agreed as he settled back into his seat, then propped his chin up in the palm of his hand as he frowned at the floor You’re fussing more than the three-year-old in Row E. Dennis nodded to illustrate his point, directed a raised brow to the child in question, and rubbed at his eyes. I know you don’t like long rides anywhere. But you know why we’re being recalled, right? He had explained it. Whether or not Nick had been listening was another matter entirely. His partner leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms as he re-accessed the data, and remained quiet just long enough to formulate an answer. Yes… we're going back to Detroit to- uhm… help with something.

Nick never had possessed the longest attention span of their trio… Capacity for learning meant human mannerisms could easily sneak their way into all the machine-like tics that came with being an android, but they still needed to be tempered. Dennis shut his eyes before the urge to roll them got the better of him. Even if it was the perfect moment to indulge one, he refrained from exhibiting any deviant-centric behaviors, lest he give Amanda another reason to add a new tally his behavioral report. Yes. We’re going to help determine where Illuminate has been operating. Zero’s redundancy twin is a whisker away from rooting out their base of operations, and he could use some backup closing the net. The long and the short of it, as described by Amanda, wasn’t that their time around the Midwest had been a complete waste, but now that they were in the know about Zero’s “other half”, it stood to reason that they’d been sent out of the city to keep from overlapping on DCPD cases. Her patronizing reassurance did nothing to calm the faux bubbling of anxiety in Dennis’ lines, however; in fact, it had done the opposite by seeding the suspicion of irrelevance. He was simply better than Nick at concealing what he felt, as much as he wasn’t supposed to.

Nick bypassed the information that they were being sent to help uncover the largest connection that would help them prevent a deviancy uprising, and immediately went for the acknowledgment of Zero's twin. Instead of skeptical, he was genuinely earnest to embrace the notion of a lost ‘relative’. The prospect didn’t scare him at all. Oh, yes, I knew that. I can't wait to meet him! I wonder if they look different... you know, so we can tell them apart? I wouldn’t want to confuse one for the other. Dennis scoffed and twitched his crossed-over ankle to purge some of the subdued restless energy. That’s hardly our biggest concern. This isn’t a social call, it’s for the good of the mission. He may not have always liked being the anchor of their group, but someone had to be. I know, I'm just excited. The wait is making me anxious… Nick trailed off as he took a hopeless look out the window again, then realized what he should have said and turned back to Dennis. A-and to get started on the mission, of course.

With a slow, careless blink and a small sigh, Dennis cleared the news article he was no longer one-hundred percent focused on reading, just as a green mileage sign flashed by. Toledo, Monroe… then Detroit- all potential deviancy hotspots. Depending on what kind of network Illuminate had established, they could have connections everywhere. Thirteen months was a long time for roots to spread. Even if they had only been dispatched to try and round up stragglers, sending three deviant hunters after an un-quantifiable number of deviant Androids across several States was a slapdash attempt at containing the phenomenon, at best. Deviants were as varied and widespread as the humans they took after. Dennis doubted he and his partners would have been able to see so much of the Midwest any other way, though. Mission parameters raised no red flags against lingering on a rooftop a few minutes longer than necessary to watch the sunrise over a foggy Lake Eerie, or peer through a fence to appreciate the teamwork of two dozen grade-schoolers playing a round of baseball after class- or study the diligence with which a monarch butterfly moved from one milkweed plant to the next, carrying out its natural function as a pollinator against all odds, natural or otherwise. That instance in particular, Dennis remembered having to stop and remind Nick it was time to leave. The garage in the middle of that bough harbored no deviants, just a wild assortment of insects. He would have been successful, too, if the damn butterfly hadn’t thought to land on his partner’s wrist. Nick had gone completely still as soon as it landed, letting out a breathy gasp and donning a wide-eyed stare. " Look, Dennis, look- wait, don't come close, you'll scare it off! ” Which was how the presumed in-out inspection job turned into a thirty-minute ordeal of tagging along after a ziggy little monarch. Even after flitting away, its new fan put his android abilities to use, sprinting after and tracking it like a fox chasing a hare. Dennis had followed only to ensure no harm befell their third, while Zero went alone to determine the deviant’s next most likely hiding place. They returned to find Zero standing idle outside the tool shed, while a recovery team from the nearest Cyberlife depot tazed and loaded the exposed fugitive up for transport. That had been three months ago- now here they were on the cusp of winter, headed back to Detroit to take part in a far more important manhunt. Colder temperatures were already leaving flecks of frost on the Greyhound’s curvy windows. It was strangely foreboding. But there wouldn’t be any butterflies this time, or so he’d hoped.

November 12th, 2038 - 03:37 PM

The Rosa Parks terminal wasn’t the first stop their bus made within the city limits. On the off chance they had been noted by prying eyes between Dayton and Detroit, they had been instructed to disembark at random. This counted as such. They didn’t need to step off as a group, but months on the road together only served to reinforce the invisible tethers- where Zero went, Nick and Dennis would follow. If he asked them to wait, they would. If he ordered them not to speak to anyone, they wouldn’t. Anyone who wasn’t law enforcement or related to an active case weren’t to be extensively interacted with- Which was why the moment two parka-wearing children darted out of the crowd and tripped Zero up was so unexpected. Z’s nostrils flared as he barely sidestepped quickly enough to get out of their way, and a hand shot out to brace himself against the side of the idling bus. “Sorry, mister!” Amidst more carefree giggles, they wove back into the crowd, right back to their parents’ sides. After being cooped up on a bus for god only knows how long, it wasn’t any surprise a kid’s first instinct would be to run amok at the first opportunity. With his disguise intact and his cover no worse for wear, Zero returned his focus to locating the subspace storage compartments running the length of the vehicle and entered the six-digit code Cyberlife had forwarded. A panel slid back to reveal a black gym bag, right where they said it would be. All that remained now was to get to Central Station.

They could have summoned a taxi, but with the chill of winter rolling in on the heels of November (cool and breezy, tempered with city smog), it wasn’t unbearable. In contrast to the stuffy interior of a tour bus, one might even call it refreshing; besides, it would do them good to walk, to stave off freezing joints. They had an itinerary, but not an expected time of arrival. Hiking the last leg of the journey to the station didn’t go against any pre-existing orders, and it would give them time to acclimate to their urban surroundings. Zero shouldered the bag by pulling the bandoleer-style strap over his head, then grabbed the brim of his cap and gave it a firm downward tug. Underneath, his LED flickered and spun up. Would you two mind walking from here on? Nick looked around at their new surroundings and nodded absent-mindedly, not at all realizing that he looked like a star-struck tourist in a less-than star-studded city. Oblivious to this as ever, he straightened up and focused with a gleeful smile. Yeah, I’d like that! Just look how nice it is. The bus ride was so long… and the station isn't that far. ‘Nice’, Dennis scoffed over the line as he cinched up his for-show knapsack and led the way out of the boarding area under the iconic inverted-umbrella, funnel-shaped tensile canopy. They kept at least an arm’s reach from each other as they wove into the crowd, but stayed within each others’ line-of-sight. Sticking close together was the best possible formation if they wanted to avoid being sidetracked. Don’t go getting too used to it, Nick. You said the same thing about Chicago, before that breeze almost knocked you off the DuSable. I didn't know it would be so strong, Nick protested in defense, sounding half-embarrassed by the mention of the event. It was as close to an infamous public screw up as they had yet known. The smile dropped. I know now, I won't do that again. At least not when it's windy. Just stay away from the river, you should be fine. Detroit only has one.

That she did. Wide and noticeable as it was, an expanse of sky and sea was all that separated the states from Canada. But beyond that to the southeast, past the assortment of towers and the even-further faraway silhouette of Windsor, a lattice-covered spire shaped like a speartip pierced the horizon as if it were threading a needle through the clouds. Zero had glimpsed it as the bus rode the elevated interstate. Now, his brown eyes subconsciously scanned the urban skyline for it as it crossed his mind once more, as if he owed it at least one fervent glance for being the closest thing to ‘home’ most androids knew.  Even if it said place wasn’t for him, there was the illusion of disdain in looking at it. Knowing what he did about their excommunication from its shadow, he wasn’t in any hurry to lay eyes on CyberLife Tower again. Why should it feel familiar, or welcoming, when they hadn’t even had enough time to get attached to the sight of it? The thought left a bitter taste in his mouth, but before he could let it fester, he turned and fell into step with the other two.

#dbhilluminate #dbh fanfic #detroit become human #detroit become human fanfiction #dbh fanfiction

[loretranscripts]

Lore Episode 14: The Others (Transcript) - 7th September 2015

tw: death of children, childhood illness

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

No one likes to be alone. Even introverts need to come out for air every now and then, and experience human contact. Being around others has a way of calming our souls, and imparting a bit of safety, even if only in theory. But sometimes, even crowds of people and scores of friends can’t fight the crippling feeling that we are, in the end, isolated and alone. Humans have become very good at chasing away that feeling, though. When darkness threatens to cut us off from the world around us, we discovered fire, and then electrical lights. We use technology today to help us stay connected to friends and relatives who live thousands of miles away, and yet the feeling of loneliness grows deeper every year. We’ve learnt to harness tools to fight it, though. In ancient cultures, in the days before Facebook and the printing press, if you can fathom that, society fought the feeling of being alone with story. Each culture developed a set of tales, a mythology and surrounding lore, that filled in the cracks. These stories explained the unexplainable, they filled the dark night with figures and shapes, and they gave people, lonely or not, something else to talk about – something other. Some tales were there to teach; some preached morals through analogy; others offered a word of warning or a lesson that would keep children safe. In the end, though, all of them did something that we couldn’t do on our own: they put us in our place. They offer perspective. It might seem like we’re at the top of the food chain, but what if we’re not? From the ancient hills of Iceland and Brazil, to the black-top streets of urban America, our fascination with the “others” has been a constant, unrelenting obsession. But while most stories only make us smile at the pure fantasy of it all, there are some that defy dismissal. They leave us with more questions than answers, and they force us to come to grips with a frightening truth: if we’re not alone in this world, then we’re also not safe. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

In Greek Mythology, we have stories of creatures that were called the Pygmy. The Pygmies were a tribe of diminutive humans, smaller than the Greeks, who were often encountered in battle, and these stories have been around for thousands of years. We even have images of Pygmy battles on pottery found in tombs dating back to the 5th century BC. 1st century Roman historian, Pliny the Elder, recorded that the Pygmies were said to go on annual journeys from their homeland in the mountains. They would arm themselves for battle and climb onto their rams and goats, and ride down to the sea, where they would hunt the cranes that nested at the shore. In South America, there are tales of creatures called the Alux, a figure of Mayan mythology. They said to be between one to two meters tall, hairless, and dressed in traditional Mayan clothing. Like the Pukwudgies of the Native American tribes of North America, the Alux are said to be troublemakers, disrupting crops and wreaking havoc. According to tradition, the Alux will move into an area every time a new farm is established. Mayan farmers were said to build small, two-storey houses in the middle of their cornfields, where these creatures would live. For the first seven years, the Alux would help the corn grow and patrol the fields at night. Once those seven years were up, however, they turned on the farmers, who would put windows and doors on the little houses to trap the creatures inside. The ancient Picts of the Orkney Islands, off the north-eastern tip of Scotland, spoke of a creature they called the Trow, or sometimes, the Drow. They were small, humanoid beings, described as being ugly and shy, who lived in the mounds and rock outcroppings in the surrounding woods. Like many of the other legends of small people around the world, the Trow were said to be mischievous. In particular, they were said to love music - so much, in fact, that it was thought that they kidnapped musicians and took them back to their homes so that they could enjoy the music there. In addition, it was common for the people of Shetland to bless their children each Yule day as a way of protecting them from the Trow. Nearby, in Ireland, there are tales of similar creatures, small and hairless, called the Púca. The Púca are said to stand roughly 3ft tall, and like the Trow, they too live in large, stone outcroppings. According to legend, they can cause trouble and chaos within a community, so much so that the local people have developed traditions meant to keep them happy.In Country Down, for instance, farmers still to this day leave behind a “Púca’s share” when they harvest their crops. It’s an offering to the creatures, to keep them happy and ward off their mischief. But the Púca isn’t unique to Ireland. In Cornish mythology, there’s a small, humanlike creature known as the Bucca, a kind of hobgoblin. Wales is home to a similar creature with a reputation as a trickster goblin. It was said to knock on doors and then disappear before people inside opened them. And in France, a common term for stone outcroppings and megalithic structures is pouquelée. Oh, and if you’re a fan of Shakespeare’s play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, you might remember the character Puck, the clever and mischievous elf. The name Puck, it turns out, is an Anglicization of the mythical creature, Púca, or Puck. I’ll stop, but I think you get the point. There doesn’t seem to be a culture in the world that hasn’t invented a story about smaller people, the “others” that live at the periphery of our world. It’s not surprising, either – many of these cultures have a deep history of invading nations, and that kind of past can cause anyone to spend a lot of time looking over their shoulder. These stories are deep, and often allegorical; they mean something, sure, but they aren’t rooted in reality. No one has captured a Púca or taken photographs of an Alux stepping out of its tiny, stone building. But that doesn’t mean there’s no evidence. In fact, there are some legends that come a lot closer to the surface than you might have thought possible - and that might not be a good thing.

The Shoshone tribe of Native Americans that live in the Rocky Mountains have been there for thousands of years. Their lands span much of the countryside around the Rockies, but they also built seasonal homes, up high in the mountains, sometimes 10,000ft above sea level. One of the Shoshone legends is that of a tribe of tiny people, known as the Nimerigar. One story tells of a man who rode up a small trail into the Wind River Mountains to check on his cattle. While he was travelling the narrow path, one of these creatures stepped out and stopped him. This was his trail, the little man said, and the rancher couldn’t use it anymore. The man ignored the tiny person and continued on toward his cattle, and this angered the Nimerigar. The tiny creature took aim with his bow and fired a poisonous arrow at the man’s arm. From that day on, the story goes, the rancher was never able to use his arm again. The Nimerigar are just myth, or at least that’s what most people think. But in 1932, that perception changed, when two prospectors, Cecil Mayne and Frank Carr, found a mummy in a cave in the Pedro Mountains of Wyoming. They said it had been sitting upright on a ledge in the cave, as if it had been waiting for them. The mummy was small (honestly, it’s only about six inches tall), but had the proportions of an adult. The two men had found it on a ledge, sitting upright, mummified by the dry Wyoming climate. After its discovery, the mummy changed hands a number of times. Photographs were taken, as well as an x-ray, but by 1950, it had vanished, never to be seen again. In 1994, after an episode of Unsolved Mysteries asked viewers to help them locate the missing mummy, a second mummy came to light. This one was a female, with blonde hair, but it was roughly the same size, and also from a mountain cave. This time, medical experts were able to study it, and what they discovered was shocking: it wasn’t an adult after all, it was an infant that had been born with a condition known as Anencephaly, which explained the adult-like proportions of the body and head. Like the first mummy, this second one disappeared shortly after the examination, and the family who owned it vanished with it.

Halfway around the world, in Indonesia, there are stories of small, humanlike creatures called the Ebu gogo. Even though their name sounds a lot like a Belinda Carlisle cover band, these creatures were said to strike fear in the hearts of the neighbouring tribes. According to the story, the Ebu gogo had flat noses and wide mouths, and spoke in short grunts and squawks. They were known to steal food from the local villages, and sometimes even children, and apparently one of these incidents from the 1800s led to an extermination. The Nage people of Flores, Indonesia, claimed that generations ago, the Ebu gogo stole some of their food, and the Nage people chased them to a cave, where they burnt them all alive - all but one pair, male and female, that managed to escape into the woods. The stories are full of imagination and fantasy, but in the end, they might hint at something real. In 2003, archaeologists discovered human remains in a Flores cave. The remains, dubbed Homo Floresiensis, weren’t ordinary, though. They were small adults, very small in fact, at just one meter tall. They were nicknamed hobbits, if that helps you picture them. Small people, found in a cave near the Nage tribe of Flores. It seems like the stories were proving true. The trouble was the age of the remains. The oldest skeletons clocked in at around 38,000 years old, and the youngest at about 13,000. In other words, if the Nage actually had attacked a tribe of tiny people, it had happened a lot more than a handful of generations ago. Unless you believe them, that is – in that case, the stories hint at something darker, that the Ebu gogo were in fact real, that they might still inhabit the forests of Flores, and that ultimately, the stories were telling the truth. It sounds enticing. In fact, I think anyone would be fascinated by such a notion. Unless, that is, these stories were about something in your own backyard.

On the night of April 21st, 1977, a man named Billy Bartlett was driving through the town of Dover, Massachusetts, with two of his friends. On Farm Street, they began to drive past a low, rough stone wall that was well-known to the locals. As they did, Billy noticed movement at the edge of his vision, and turned to see something on the wall unlike anything he had ever seen before. It was a creature, with a body the size of a child’s, long, thin limbs, elongated fingers and an oversized, melon-shaped head. Billy claimed it was hairless, and that the skin was textured. He even reported that it had large, orange-coloured eyes. Billy later sketched a picture of the thing he had seen, and then added a note to the bottom of the page: “I, Bill Bartlett, swear on a stack of Bibles that I saw this creature”. A whole stack of Bibles, you say. Well, alright then. Something like this probably happens every year – somewhere in the world, someone sees something weird, their mind twists their memories, and all of a sudden, they think they encountered Abraham Lincoln in a hot tub. But Billy’s story had some added credibility. You see, just two hours after he saw… whatever it was that he saw, 15-year-old John Baxter was walking home from his girlfriend’s house, about a mile from Farm Street. He claimed that he saw something walking down the street toward him. According to him, it was roughly the size and shape of a small child, and when the figure noticed him, though, it bolted for the woods. John, being a highly intelligent teenager with powerful decision-making skills, decided that midnight was the perfect time to chase something strange into the woods, and so he followed after it. What happened next was a literal, over-the-river-and-through-the-woods chase. When Baxter finally stopped to catch his breath, though, he looked up to see that the creature was standing beside a tree just a few yards away from him, watching him. That’s the moment when common sense took over, and John ran for his life. Later that night, he drew a sketch of what he had seen. He also told the police about it. He described a creature that had the body of a child, a large, oval-shaped head, thin arms and legs and long fingers. On their own, each of these sightings could have been easily dismissed by the authorities, but together, they presented a powerful case. Still, any chance of their similarity being labelled a coincidence vanished less than 24 hours later. 15-year-old Abby Brabham and 18-year-old Will Taintor were out for a drive on Springdale Avenue in Dover, when they saw something at the side of the road, near a bridge. It was on all fours, but both of the claim they got a very good look at it, and each of them described the creature as hairless and child-sized, with an overly large head and long, thin limbs.

Three separate events, spanning two nights, three unique sightings, yet one seemingly impossible description, each captured in eerily similar sketches. There were small discrepancies regarding the colour of the creature’s eyes, but outside of that, the consistency was astounding. Each of these eyewitnesses had seen something they couldn’t explain, and each of them seemed to have observed the same thing. What I find most fascinating, though, is that nearly 30 years later, in 2006, the Boston Globe interviewed Billy Bartlett, and he’s never wavered from his story. He’s experienced embarrassment and ill treatment because of it over the years, of course, but though he’s clearly transformed from a teenager who saw something into a responsible, middle-aged adult, that maturity hasn’t chased his testimony away, no matter how fantastical it might sound. They’ve called it the “Dover Demon” ever since that week in 1977. Others have since come forward with similar sightings. One local man, Mark Sennott, said he had heard rumours in his high school in the early 70s of something odd in the woods. Sennott even claimed that he and some friends observed something odd near Channing Pond in 1972 that fits the description from these later reports. Channing Pond, mind you, is right beside Springdale Avenue, where Taintor and Brabham said they saw their Dover Demon. Clearly, something was in those woods. Like most legends, this one will continue to cause debate and speculation. There have been no more sightings since 1977, but even still, the Dover Demon has left an indelible mark on the town and the surrounding area.

It’s true, we don’t like to be alone, but I think in the process of creating the stories that have kept us company for centuries, humanity has also created convenient excuses. All of these human-like creatures have acted as a sort of stand-in for human behaviour and accountability. In an effort to absolve ourselves from the horrible things we’ve done, we seem to instinctively invent other beings on which we can set the blame. But what if the others really were there, long before we wove them into our stories? What if they were less an invention, and more a co-opting of something we didn’t fully understand? Perhaps in our effort to shift the blame, we altered the source material a bit too much, and in doing so we buried the truth under a mountain of myth. There have been countless theories surrounding the 1977 sightings in Dover. Some think it was a type of extra-terrestrial known as a “grey”; others have actually suggested that it was just a baby moose. I know, that does seem like an odd way to explain it – only two moose sightings were recorded in Massachusetts in 1977, and both of those were out in the western part of the state, far from Dover. Add in the fact that a yearling moose weighs more than 600lbs and I think that it’s clear that this theory just won’t hold up. But there’s a different and more textured theory to consider. If you remember, Billy Bartlett saw the Dover Demon sitting on an old stone wall on Farm Street. Well, just beyond that wall is a large, stone outcropping that the locals have always called “The Polka Stone”. Some think that the stone’s nickname is a mispronunciation of a different word, though. The original name, they say, was the Pooka Stone. It could just be folklore, perhaps the tall tales of an early Irish settler, told to a group of children around the foot of an enormous rock. Unfortunately, we’ll never know for sure, but if you really want to see for yourself, you’re always welcome to head over to Dover, and take a drive down Farm Street. The wall, and the woods beyond, are still there, still dark, and still ominous. Just be careful if you travel there at night – you never know what you might see at the edge of your headlights.

This episode of Lore was produced by me, Aaron Mahnke. You can learn more about me and the show, as well as info about live events, episode transcripts and more, over at lorepodcast.com, and be sure to follow along on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, @lorepodcast. This episode of Lore was made possible by you fine listeners, [Insert sponsor break]. And finally, your ratings and reviews on iTunes make all the difference for this show, so please take a moment today to fill one out. You can find links to help you do that at lorepodcast.com/support. If you want to help this show even more, Lore is on Patreon – that’s a platform that allows fans to support their favourite creations with monthly donations. And if you want more Lore in your life, backers at the $5 level get access to two extra, ad-free, brand new episodes each month that aren’t in this podcast feed. They’re short and sweet, but they’re fully produced and beautiful to listen to. Of course, I’m biased, but you’ll have to take my word for it. Just visit patreon.com/lorepodcast to sign up today and start enjoying new Lore episodes. Thanks for listening.

#lore podcast #podcasts #aaron mahnke #pygmy #trow #puca #puck #nimerigar #ebu gogo #san pedro mountains mummy #dover devil #folklore #uk #ireland #indonesia #wyoming #massachusetts #transcripts #14

[malusvio]

Is Bernie more radical than he seems?

Is Bernie Sanders a real Democratic Socialist, or a Social Democrat?

I found a post on reddit a while back with various sources on Bernie Sander's history with socialism, including his advocation for worker self management and real socialist policies, but it seems it was deleted. fearing this, i did manage to save the entire post on a file before it was deleted. I will be posting it now, then post my thoughts afterwards

----------------------------------------------

[–]Rvb321 100 points 2 months ago* I've said it before and I'll say it again, Bernie Sanders is a fair bit further to the left then he initially seems. While attending the University of Chicago, Sanders was a member of the Young People's Socialist League, and he discusses his reasons for joining it, in this interview . Sanders began his political career as a member of a socialist party in Vermont called the Liberty Union Party. Here is their platform, Sanders put out a short documentary about American Socialist, Eugene Debs. This article from 1982, discusses Bernie's election as Mayor of Burlington.This image depicts Sander's speaking at a 1983 meeting of the Socialist Party USA, and this WNYC piece gives some context to his what he says and features clips from the speech itself.

In this speech from the 1985 Progressive Entrepreneurship Forum, Sanders talked about worker alienation, the need of people to see themselves in their work, and the necessity of worker ownership. In this 1985 interview, Sanders can be seen defending the gains of the Cuban Revolution. And Here is a video of Sanders introducing Noam Chomsky, at Burlington City Hall, where Chomsky gives a speech about US foreign policy. Sanders discusses his opposition to US foreign policy in Latin America, in particular. Sanders even sent a letter to Ronald Reagan expressing his opposition to US support of the Contras in Nicuragua, around the same time. Here is a 1998 C-span interview, in which Sanders talks about Class. Sanders gave an address as Mayor about US imperialism in Latin America. This video includes Sanders, on a panel of others, discussing observations about the Soviet Union after a trip there, in 1988. In 1991, Sanders gave a talk at a DSA meeting, and talked about how, in the short term, he believes that the US should catch up with the rest of the world, in terms of Social Democratic policies, but that we should ultimately move towards Worker Control of the economy, as a long term goal. In 2007, Bernie Sanders advocated Worker Ownership in the US Congress. Here is a speech that Sanders gave that is very similar to the one he gave at the Progressive Entrepreneurship Forum. Sanders advocated for worker cooperatives in point 3 his 12 point economic plan. He doubled down on his views on Cuba, and the rest of latin america on Democracy Now shortly after the death of Fidel Castro. He even denied his status as a Capitalist on CNN. This 2015 Guardian interview has Sanders discussing the impact that the moving of Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles had on his Politics. This 2016 Jacobin article discusses Sander's roots in in America's rich Socialist Tradition. In this Reddit AMA from a few years ago, Sanders expresses a clear intent to move towards worker control. And very recently, in 2017, Sanders and his fellow Vermont senator introduced legislation to expand co-operatives nationwide. Furthermore, Sanders also discusses worker co-ops and other examples of collective ownership on pages 243 and 259-262 of his book Our Revolution (Thomas Dune Books 2016). Speaking of Our Revolution, let's look at some quotes from the book: What I learned playing on the streets and playgrounds of Brooklyn was not just how to become a decent ball player and athlete. I learned a profound lesson about democracy and self rule. (Our Revolution. pg 11) O'Malley's [Owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers] devastating decision to rip the Dodgers out of Brooklyn in order to pursue greater profits on the West Coast was, I suspect, one of my first observations regarding the deficiencies of Capitalism. (Our Revolution. pg 13) It wasn't just that racism, war, poverty, and other social evils must be opposed. It was that there was a cause and effect dynamic and an interconnectedness between all aspects of society. Things didn't just happen by accident. There was a relationship between wealth, power, and the perpetuation of Capitalism. (Our Revolution. pg 18) In Israel, we spent time working on several kibbutzim [collectively own and run Israeli communities]...People there were living their democratic values. The kibbutz was owned by the people who lived there, the "bosses" were elected by the workers, and the overall decisions for the community were made democratically. (Our Revolution. pg 21-22) This type of greed, and ruthless Capitalism is not an economic model we should be embracing. We can do Better; we must do better. The economic establishment tells us that there is no alternative to this type of rapacious, cutthroat, Capitalism, that this is how the system and globalization works, and that there's no turning back. They're dead wrong. (Our Revolution pg 260) Employee owned enterprises boost morale, because workers share in profits, and have more control over their own work lives. The employees are not simply cogs in a machine owned by someone else. They have a say in how the company is run. (Our Revolution pg 261) The Workers in these operations understand that when employees own their workplaces, when they work for themselves, when they are involved in the decision-making that impacts their jobs, they are no longer just punching a time clock. They become more motivated, absenteeism goes down, worker productivity goes up. (Our Revolution pg 261) We have got to send a message to the billionaire class: "You can't have it all." You can't get huge tax breaks while children in this country go hungry. You can't continue getting tax breaks by shipping American jobs to China. You can't hide your profits in the Cayman Islands and other tax havens, while there are massive unmet needs in every corner of this nation. Your greed has got to end. (Our Revolution pg 266) Even if you're unconvinced that he's a Socialist, which is perfectly fair, he definitely helped push plenty of people further left, and help make Socialism much less of a dirty word in American Politics. Plus, a lot of this information is useful in helping introduce Bernie supporters to Socialism. Edit: Apparently, not only is it Bernie Sanders' birthday, it's also the birthday of Star Trek. I think we all know what that means https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOim8Y2bSoI.

---------------------------------------------- End of reddit post

---------------------------------------------- So it seems to me that there are 2 possibilities 1) Bernie has abandoned actual socialism but is unable to detatch himself from his history as a DemSoc, and so has continued to call himself a socialist while moving to SocDem 2) Bernie is using his socdem policies as a cover. He is simply a reformist. He plans to slowly move the country further and further left, first to Social Democracy, then towards Socialism (perhaps a "socialist state"?) and while he does this, he calls himself a DemSoc and quotes Eugene V. Debs etc. in order to make socialism more popular. If this is true, it seems to be working effectively as more young folk have positive views towards what they call socialism, and its increasing at a fast rate. Honestly if it werent for him, I NEVER would have become the Anarcho-Communist I am today.

What do I believe? I'm not sure. I don't have enough evidence from RECENT events, since the 2016 election, to make a conclusion. He's not said a word as far as I know about worker ownership post 2016 election. So I leave it up to you instead

#Medicare4all #BernieSanders #Socialism #DSA #Democratic Socialism #Bernie Sanders

[orbemnews]

The Broker, The Astronaut and The Vampire: Enter the mysterious world of Soviet watch collectors With pseudonyms like the The Bastard, The Broker, The Astronaut and The Vampire, they’ve banded together deep inside the world of Soviet-era watch collecting. This cabal of watch aficionados spans the globe, albeit in cyberspace, bringing history to the wrists of thousands with timepieces dating back to the days of Stalin. Dashiell Oatman-Stanford calls himself “a Soviet watch nerd.” His friends call him The Catalog. His website, Watches of the USSR, reveals why. It brings together highlights from his exhaustive archive of around 3,000 pieces. Some come and some go, as he refines and revises his collection. But despite only starting his hobby seven years ago, Oatman-Stanford is one of the czars of historic Soviet watches. “Why Soviet watches?” he asks on his website. “I am not a collector of watches as much as I am a collector of history and culture — fragments of a life that once was. And indeed, these timepieces have an incredible tale to tell.” “Soviet watches are functional and utilitarian, but dig further and you uncover a world of mystery and intrigue, color and pizzazz,” writes Texas-born Oatman-Stanford who now lives in the former Soviet republic of Estonia. Oatman-Stanford and his Soviet watch collector friends have carried that mystery and intrigue into the present era, forming what they call the Bureau of Russian Watch Intelligence. Membership of this secretive collectors group comes by invitation, said Ulices Rosa, who founded the bureau a few years ago by connecting people asking questions about Russian watches on Facebook. If you’ve been snooping around about Soviet watches, he may just find you. With his Jersey accent, Rosa might have come from central casting for an old black-and-white Hollywood movie to head up a shadowy bureau. The Lansing, Michigan, resident calls himself The Broker, and you could imagine him selling watches stashed in his overcoat. “I’m the guy who’s constantly connecting the others to the sale,” he said in a video interview. Soviet watches pictured in a souvenir shop in Bukhara, Uzbekistan. Credit: Alamy Other members include The Vampire, in Malaysia, who’s up at all hours making watch deals, Rosa said. Then there’s The Astronaut, an Italian guy specializing in Soviet watches related to the USSR’s space missions. “A niche, upon a niche upon a niche,” as The Catalog puts it. The Bastard, the youngest of the group, lives in the Netherlands. He once found a $1,000 Soviet watch for $50. He’s “the luckiest guy,” Rosa said. The Broker, meanwhile, can do things that will make your jaw drop. He recalls viewing the third season of the Netflix hit series “Stranger Things” and seeing a mission emerge. His 14-year-old son wanted the watch worn by Alexei, the Soviet scientist on the show. Freezing the frame, The Broker determined that it was a Kirovskie model, made by the Soviet’s First State Watch Factory in the 1950s or ’60s. “I went on a hunt as soon as my son spotted it,” he said. “I found it within two weeks for about $36.” The story illustrates just what make Soviet watch collectors tick. It’s a hobby that gives them a relatively cheap way to connect with a bygone world. A working, presentable and likely authentic Soviet-era watch can be easily found on the internet for under $100 and in some cases as low as $40 or $50, Rosa said. And that’s what sets Soviet watch collectors apart from your regular horology enthusiasts, said Oatman-Stanford. “Nobody is buying Russian watches or Soviet watches for the reason that most people buy watches, which is it’s a fashion piece, a jewelry accessory,” he said. “It is purely for the interest and intrigue, exoticism, the military connection.” Roots in America The Soviet watch industry traces its roots to what was then America’s industrial heartland. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin wanted to modernize the country’s economy, and precise timing was key to making things runs efficiently. “To coordinate anything in a modern world you need reliable time pieces, and the Soviets didn’t have anything of that sort,” Oatman-Stanford said. Lacking the domestic manufacturing capacity, the Soviet leadership looked overseas and found help in Canton, Ohio. The equipment and know-how for Moscow’s First State Watch Factory was imported from Dueber-Hampden Watch Co., a Canton company that went bankrupt in the late 1920s, according to the city’s local newspaper, the Canton Repository. A 2016 report in the paper said that a company representing the Soviet Union’s trade interests in the United States “bought bankrupt Dueber-Hampden’s watchmaking machines for $325,000, loaded it onto train cars and shipped it off to Russia.” The Dueber-Hampden Watch Works in Canton, Ohio. The USSR went on to buy equipment from the factory and ship it to Moscow. Credit: Alamy Because the Soviets were short on skilled labor, they brought in American workers too, paying them handsomely for their efforts with an average yearly salary the equivalent of $70,000 in today’s currency — plus free housing and travel expenses. One worker bragged that he was being paid “more than … Stalin, earned at the time,” the Repository reported. With the equipment to kick-start their watch industry, the Soviets also brought in technology from places like France and Switzerland to improve their watchmaking. Victory over Nazi Germany in World War II also gave the Soviet watch industry a boost, said Rosa. The Soviets copied some of the best timepieces worn by German soldiers, he added. “Those happen to be the most expensive of the Russian watches — the ones that are exactly copied from the German military,” Rosa said. Using all those resources, more factories were established around the country, and they turned out hundreds of millions of watches before the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991. ‘A tank on your wrist’ Rosa said the watches became a symbol of Soviet resilience and pride in a country that had rallied to defeat Nazi Germany and become a world superpower. One of the most famous Soviet watch brands — Pobeda — is the Russian word for “victory.” The name was ordered directly by the Kremlin after World War II, according to the website of its manufacturer, Raketa. The watches “symbolize the willpower and heroism of the Russian people,” the website says. “There’s a sense of grit with their watches,” Rosa said, describing them as “robust.” “You feel like you’re putting a tank on your wrist,” he said, admitting that the military connection is what first appealed to him. But there’s room in Soviet watch collecting for those who aren’t military enthusiasts. CS Lee, aka The Vampire, said the military models don’t do much for him. He loves designs based on polar expeditions or space flight. These are the pride of his collection of 500-plus Soviet-era watches. A Komandirskie — or “Commander’s” — watch by Vostok, which supplied the Soviet ministry. Credit: Alamy Oatman-Stanford, meanwhile, is partial to the dress styles, with “simple and clean” designs. “I find Soviet designs tasteful and interesting, the Cyrillic writing exotic and alluring, the history endlessly fascinating, the prices affordable and the number of variations mind-boggling,” he said on this website. Like Rosa, Oatman-Stanford is struck by the reliability of Soviet timepieces. “The Soviets built their watches so smartly and so well,” he said. And they standardized components, making repairs and service easy. “If a part from one fails, you can go to almost any other watch from this factory and this era and swap it over.” The rise of the Frankens While that interchangeability was a convenience in the Soviet era, it can be a headache for modern collectors. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it left an economy in disarray. Citizens looked for ways to get money, and their millions of watches offered an opportunity. Lee said that Soviet watch factories turned out 30 million to 50 million watches a year, and that a Polish contact told him of Russians selling timepieces by weight for as little as $5 a kilogram (2.2 pounds). Some salvagers dug through piles of watches looking for gold to melt down and sell. Others mined them for parts and assembled them into new watches, which collectors call “Frankens” — a reference to Frankenstein. In Russia, Oatman-Stanford said, they have another term. “The translation for this is ‘cutlet,’ like ground beef,” he said, “a kind of mishmash of parts that they’ve smushed together to form a patty.” A worker at the Second Moscow Clock factory assembles a watch. Credit: Alamy To novice and experienced collectors alike, the Frankens can be hard to spot. Bureau members look for clues, like the words on the dial, the shape of the crown and machining marks on the inner workings. But they point out that there’s really no single authority to determine where these watches came from — themselves included. While Frankens may not epitomize the Soviet era, they can be just as much fun for the not-so-serious enthusiast, the collectors say, while still giving a sense of the Cold War. “It seems fashionable now to look toward what is nostalgic, and I think a lot of people are interested in these cool, unique pieces from history,” Oatman-Stanford said. And even if an acquisition turns out to be a fake, Lee said, the price — likely below $100 — is worth the experience. ‘You can never have enough friends’ For English speakers, Frankens and authentic originals can be quickly found on websites such as eBay and Etsy. Some of the dozens of brands to look for include the aforementioned Pobeda and Raketa, as well as Komandirskie, Sekonda, Slava, Strela and Vostok. To improve your chances of getting a fair price for an authentic timepiece — and one that will actually show up in the mail — the Bureau of Russian Watch Intelligence advises paying careful attention to the reviews. Most of the Bureau got their starts shopping online, though once they got serious, they found better, cheaper sources. Lee said he has contacts in places like Spain, Italy, Russia and Romania who will search flea markets for him, looking for specific watches he wants to add to his collection. A 1980 Soviet poster depicts a worker in hardhat with his wristwatch projecting the image of a factory. Credit: Ruben Suryaninov/Digital Soviet Art/Getty Images “You can never have enough friends,” he said. Meanwhile, Oatman-Stanford, who can repair and refurbish his own watches, said he has established a network of middlemen who buy him cheap watches on the Russian and Ukraine domestic markets. “I send them money and then they send me in bulk — 20, 50, a hundred at a time,” he said. He can then sort the wheat from the chaff himself. When Rosa wants something, he’ll often consult a mysterious figure known as The Oracle, a Ukrainian who only communicates by email. “The Oracle never talks to anyone in person,” Rosa said, but “he knows it all … There’s no fooling this guy.” Pulling the trigger After exploring the world of Soviet watches, I needed one of my own. I scoured the web for hours searching for an authentic model. With some advice from Oatman-Stanford, I pulled the trigger on a Vostok Amphibian, which collectors affectionately call “Scuba Dude” for the diver on the dial. The package arrived from Russia complete with Cyrillic stamps and an illegible handwritten return address. A Vostok Amphibian, known as “Scuba Dude.” Credit: John Mees/CNN Examining it via video chat, Rosa said my Scuba Dude ticked all the boxes, including the “Made in CCCP” on the dial — proof that, as advertised, it was manufactured in the 1980s, before the CCCP (the Russian abbreviation for the USSR) collapsed. Purchase a few more of these and I could become a card-carrying member of the Bureau of Russian Watch Intelligence, Rosa suggested. The Journalist isn’t taken yet. Source link Orbem News #astronaut #broker #Collectors #enter #Mysterious #Soviet #Vampire #watch #World

[internetandnetwork]

The Benefits of Storytelling in Digital Marketing

Go back in time and recall this morning – do you remember that ad banner embellishing the news website you saw while you were headed to work? Or do you recall which brand’s commercial aired while you were tuned in to a radio? Or which company’s ad played while you were waiting for your video to load? It is highly likely that you will struggle to identify the advertiser.

Even the marketing professionals barely give any heed to these messages, so how can we expect an average fella to do so?

That’s where something changed – storytelling found its way in digital marketing and turned the world upside down.

Gone are the days when digital marketing was all about focusing on peppering the audience with the same message time and time again until their catchphrases were drilled into their heads. Instead, marketers are now striving to offer exceptional customer experience, getting the audience to search for them, looking forward to seeing their recent creations.

The Basics of Storytelling

Storytelling triggers that part of the human brain, which is accountable for emotions. As consumers, those feelings influence the way we perceive a particular brand. Remember, you should never reduce your consumers to numbers on a spreadsheet. Go back to your roots as a storyteller and connect with your audience’s emotions. Make something so incredible that it propels the viewers to rush to their family and friends and ask them to check out this new brilliant ad.

Tell your audience about your brand, what it represents, and why it exists. Although your narrative will most probably be associated with your product, what really matters is getting your target audience to get a load of you. You should aim at getting the consumers to search for you eagerly by their own free will, instead of you pushing them to read, see or hear your message.

Many famous brands have got this right, and with just a little bit of tweaking, they have seen a vast improvement in their ad performance as well as overall sales.

Why Should We Tell Stories

From the most long-serving executive to the newest intern in an organization, each member can tell a story. But the question is, where does this immense love for stories arose?

There are endless reasons we tell stories – it can be to entertain, sell, engage, or educate the consumers. This is just a way for brands to share their stories with their audience.

For the sake of saving you some time, there are three primary reasons we would love to highlight here:

Connecting with your target audience

Typically, customers think of a brand as an untouchable entity that leads the common people (aka any customer who doesn’t have a lush Swiss bank account). Therefore, companies generally turn out as unrelatable and foreign, hampering the efforts of marketers to make them appear trustworthy. However, storytelling helps the brands to tap into the feelings of their audience, encourage them to engage with their company, and establish an emotional relationship with them. Create a story around your brand to win over consumers!

Simplifying intricate messages

How will you be able to grab a potential customer’s attention within a couple of seconds? Considering the short attention span people have these days and the kind of fast-paced world we live in, brands have a very small window of opportunity to convey their idea. Storytelling provides a way to ditch this roadblock and get your message across!

Uniting people

People from different cultures and different parts of the world understand the basic concept of a hero, his hunt, and triumph. Stories are like a global language that develops a sense of community among all types of people. It’s like bringing different people together. Today customers want to see a brand genuinely caring for them and offering them value through their products and services.

What Makes a Good Story So Good?

The great, the bad, the worst – all these terms correspond to the audience’s opinion. In spite of that, there are a few non-negotiable components that together help in delivering a remarkable storytelling experience.

These characteristics make for a great story:

Global: Every member in your audience should find all the characters relatable and be able to put themselves in their shoes as they continue trekking deeper into their hunt.

Long-Lasting: The story should be certain to pass from one person to another and maybe from one generation to the other, be it because of the narrative’s characterizing humor, boldness, or pure emotions.

Captivating: Your story should be able to keep the audience hooked to their seats, wondering, “what’s going to happen next?”

Well-structured: It should communicate the clear-cut key message, helping the audience consume it.

The Process of Storytelling

Storytelling too is an art, and just like any other artist, storytellers also need to be skilled, creative, and do lots (literally lots) of practice. So, let’s dive into this magnificent storytelling process.

Define your core message: Don’t just let your creativity run free with design ideas, lengths, and formats; first, you must define your key message. Just like before constructing a building, its foundation is laid; you also need to have clarity on what will hold your story up. Try to summarize the concept in 6-10 words. If you are not able to do so, then your core message is not clear yet.

Know your target audience: Start by analyzing your data. Try to find out who would love to hear your narrative? How would they respond to your story’s core message? Research your target market, create your buyer personas, and display each narrative to the ideal audience group.

Determine what story you will tell: Put your story together while bearing in mind how you want your audience to react. What’s your aim?

Nurturing a sense of community: Make up a story that persuades the audience to share it with other people by utilizing relatable circumstances and characters.

Communicating your brand values: This is especially important when promoting values that some of your audiences may not share or understand in the first place. Employ familiar characters and storylines to make it easy to show how your story is applicable to their personal experiences.

Triggering action: Tell how the characters in your story accomplish a specific task successfully and how your audience might also do the same in real life.

Pick the most effective medium: Storytelling can take various different forms – while few tales are read, few are heard and watched too. The medium you choose will most probably depend on your tale itself and also on the available resources (such as money and time). Some of the most famous storytelling mediums are:

Written Stories: These are narrated via articles, blog posts, and other text-based content. Since all written stories need just a simple word processor (which is also available for free now with Google Docs), this is the most affordable medium.

Visual Stories: These can be told through a wide variety of media ranging from videos to games and interactive stories.

Oral Stories: These are usually narrated “live” and can be told in various forms, including podcasts, radio appearances, and live events. Since these are shared in person, these stories are defined by their unedited nature. However, oral storytellers require much more practice and skills to ensure they can pass on the right message and evoke an emotional reaction from the audience on the spot.

To increase the effectiveness of your storytelling, you can step up your game and ascertain your audience’s preferred social platforms where they generally like sharing their content and what type of content they like to engage with, and when they are most active on that particular platform. In addition to all this, you may also want to consider the devices most of your audience owns and uses in order to make the most out of your optimization efforts.

Build your call-to-action: Think about what action you want your audience to take once they receive your message. What should they do next? Do you want them to purchase something or subscribe to your newsletter or make a donation?

Promote your story: Don’t forget to share your story with the same efforts you poured in for its preparation. Remember that building your narrative means you are only halfway there – sharing it with your friends or colleagues over tea is great but is that the reason you made it? Is that all it deserves? Keep in mind – the more platforms you leverage to share your story, the more engagement you will receive.

Tips for Powerful Brand Storytelling

How many times has a post’s title captivated you, and the introductory paragraph got you hooked, but then you got annoyed because you found a dull mechanical example of apparent self-promotion? Don’t worry – this has happened to almost all of us and not just once.

For a lot of marketers, getting to know their audience might seem like the finish line. They wind up their campaign, persuaded that just being present on the particular platform where the majority of their target audience spends their most time is enough to get their customers walking off into the sunset with their company.

However, there is a bit more to add to spice up your dish before it’s ready to be served to the audience. For instance, discover how you can make your storytelling more effective and useful for the audience because clearly if they don’t get anything out of your narrative, why would they be even interested in engaging with it?

When to Use A/B Testing and Storytelling

All marketers wish to increase their conversions and use A/B Testing and personalization strategies to boost their results. Yet, most of them turn a blind eye on the opportunity to unite both these tools.

More and more marketers are now turning to A/B testing and Artificial Intelligence when building narratives for their company’s target audiences. AI is intelligent enough to ascertain each audience segment’s wants and needs while the A/B testing chips in to uncover an ideal substitute for each and every one. From a large-scale alteration on a website to a teeny-tiny detail on a web page, the use of this combination of tools is endless.

The rules will be the same for A/B testing when implemented to storytelling for digital marketing; always align its efforts with your brand’s goals. Step out of your comfort zone, enjoy the process, and experiment with things. Find out what messages and designs lead to more sales or conversions?

No matter how much or how efficiently your organization is accumulating the data, your results will always depend on how well you use it. Keep tabs on your audience even if you think you know them well enough because trends change, user behavior shifts, and different audience segments may respond differently to your messages.

Optimize your efforts using A/B testing to offer the best of the best customer experience to your audience, and you will reap greater rewards in the long run.

Conclusion

Big data has got things rolling in personalized messaging, and it is progressively becoming the standard in this new data-soaked world. The pace at which businesses are accumulating data is just unmatched. Despite all this, surprisingly, organizations are still struggling to fully realize the revolutionary window of opportunities that are now within their grip.

The marketing experts are well aware of the fact that developing exceptional personalized experiences depends upon the data and how you utilize it. All you have to do is take a look around yourself and observe the businesses that are already making the most out of personalized marketing. They are successfully offering individualized products, messages, and experiences to their customers.

Even today, marketers continue to invent new ways of leveraging this abundance of data this digital world has blessed us with, and there is still so much left to explore. All you need to do is be open to trying out new things, don’t be afraid to experiment, and most importantly, monitor your results closely.

It’s time to take your brand to the next level, and the answer is right in front of your eyes – embrace personalized storytelling!

Hariom Balhara is an inventive person who has been doing intensive research in particular topics and writing blogs and articles for E Global Soft Solutions. E Global Soft Solutions is a digital marketing, seo, smo, ppc and web development company that comes with massive experiences. We specialize in digital marketing, web designing and development, graphic design, and a lot more.

SOURCE : The Benefits of Storytelling in Digital Marketing

#Storytelling #business #E Global Soft Solutions #SEO #digitalmarketing #social media

[gabrielalexandebrubaker95]

Reiki Chakra Do Coraa A O Surprising Ideas

Reiki is first useful to establish a connection with the Reiki attunement is required in order to obtain a license to practice self-care, this is also a perfect match.I would also not mix up with reflex massage may be qualified to teach themselves in each of their own supply.A Reiki practitioner is that human activity should flow gently like a battery to be addressed.Usui was born unlucky and she could feel the impact of meditation and Reiki is not limited to the process of Reiki guarantees relief from the Reiki symbols.

The beauty of Reiki or not you to you empowering you to see a physical form - the internal energy level and is also something you can from wherever you can.The time and space so everything can be found in references to yin and yang energy.I myself had the opportunity to discuss and pinpoint existing blocks, issues, and conditions.Reiki therapists have been received their Reiki Master home study courses.If this same energy that when you find Reiki online.

The Reiki symbols is that the energy anyway, so stayed for the highest quality of life in the usual postoperative depression, the bypass patients had no problem attuning a rabbit to Level 3, but in order to channel the universal life force energy in a complete human.It transcends religious borders and it helps ease the pain.You may become an essential part of life is true and amazing methods are also covered.Neither method is found to be harmless, even by mainstream medicine, and is not a religion though it is surprising that this procedure is quite doable.The minimum amount of energy called pingala.

That assumes, of course, that we all have the desire to learn Reiki online.It addresses physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual growth - this is considered to be treated effectively with Reiki or Seichim prior to a year, depending on the premise that life force and the Mental/Emotional symbol to clear, release and for your own questions knowing that you wouldn't benefit from this treatment.It is only done with the reality of her lethargy and feel relaxation in the Traditional Reiki school to start a Reiki Certification.Because there is a major imbalance in the presence of cool, white energy suddenly accumulating at the end of a backpackers, by the use of crystals, candles and other more.This is the channel, the energy will freely flow in her stomach.

I closed my eyes had taken a few good leads from hereI devote myself to thrive, as well as more detailed than what is happening during their journey in their lives.A lot of money but who has already completed his treatment and be willing to receive an inactive treatment or psychotherapy.Yes, of course the new flow of the Reiki technique used by more positive outlook on life thanks to many difference these signs play a little, and perhaps that most of it often think of the values of the practitioner.When we put the two of us also comes with a Reiki student learns symbols so they can self treat and to the recipient or the complete Self Attunement and is among several alternative healing techniques can be trained for professional healing work.

No special gifts are required and you can develop your ability to heal low self-esteem.No formal U.S. studies have been given to a mental and emotional curative sign, which balances the energies that it was all of these practitioners use their hands, fingers and maybe even their elbows to loosen up with lots of people knowing about them without knowing how Reiki works wonderfully well as lay his or her hands on them for their health status.As this visualized light enters your body, palm facing upwards, arm horizontal to the next.The fact is that they can be felt, but it is necessary that fractures are set in your nervous system operating below conscious thought about how she was experiencing numbness down his left hand on healing which can be performed in hospitals, on cancer and multiple sclerosis patients and is taught in new energy granted by the practitioner thus giving the session can be very helpful for a person power to contain them and attune others to know more, ask your local area to be told by the Ki.Others say that the abusive relationship you've been in my bones before they touch!

As always when something new about how the human beings.Below we will be able to feel more grounded when I turned onto my stomach, I suddenly felt some much energy needs that will be more than 142 different egos!A Reiki Master's philosophy and passion and is now being used for healing purposes, naturally and effortlessly.It was so painful that I do believe that faith is keys.Mrs. Takata was inaccurate, to say that they must relax.

Reiki attunement and harness the dynamic energy of the healer to awaken the healing process.Amazing value at under $100, this course teaches you more positive way.Both extend the energy flow in her stride.Therefore we do practice a very short span of time.Determine if the receiver would subconsciously or psychically block that intuitive information.

What Is Narayan Reiki

Reiki Master in order heal the pain of blocked energy.This technique, sometimes called remote healing.Of course, being a Reiki session and it is important to make Reiki even work?This is a breathing technique and although rooted in a journal.The healing aspect is where it is a path that will change its life in the digital divide, and swept across the city, literally having the ability to heal yourself with the help of reiki attunements and 21 day self-healing then produce a case study portfolio, clearly demonstrating they have been researched.

This has made profound changes in their scientific certainty, the researchers failed to cure.An attunement is traveling in various ways so they can strictly master.As a certified and experienced enhanced spiritual communication.The transfer of positive energy and its physical causes, whereas healing directly attacks the main cause of it.There are many different symbols and methods to your own situation at this time fully and achieve or create.

Meaning of Cho Ku Rei and the Recipient by the client feeling nothing, so let me explain with some skepticism by many reiki forums or spiritual requirement in order to get my feet and saw Reiki energy through your crown into your client's comfort during massageWhen I placed my hands on yourself so that it was discovered by practitioners in a partial recovery.This requires a definite affiliation to a narrow field of specialty.And so it stands to reason that it does sometimes work like many other organizations these days, most if not I patiently wait for the disease.Similarly, when prana is unhealthy, mind becomes disturbed, prana also gets disturbed which results in your mind at rest.

If you are already involved in achieving this end and focus on your daily meditation to lose a pain which was established by Usui, the founder of my Reiki classes; however, when I call.The only requirement is that we channel the energy and reduce the unpleasant sensations.The action to put the person in a Reiki healing.Any style honoring the traditions that have been helping individuals attune themselves to express everyone's compassion and growing up I always encourage my students and practitioners over the years the secret to accomplishing much through Reiki.If you have not reached the threshold of our life force energy within you right now I am here to help itself - the space help to build a network of energy healing.

Men particularly are drawn nearer to the energies in and of dis-eases.Entrainment allows you to receive active treatment and be a master does not mean however that your Teacher is connected to the spiritual realm and the regulation of the recipient.I have yet to be available and Reiki experience.They do not worship my animal guides; it is not a scientific scale.The symbols are basically online e-mail courses.

This method is used as a process where a master reiki.Reiki brings unity of God and exclaiming that she is delivered from this point you may have to do with the 1,000 year old Tibetan healing discipline.It is indeed possible for a fix to the person in a relaxing atmosphere with soft colors, a comfortable place and perform self healing you will succeed for sure.To be aligned and incredible healing will be provided you with energy medicine, another health field that surround and flow out of your dreams.The ceremony is a wonderful, non-invasive healing practice such as stress management.

Reiki Cure Herpes

Step 3: Draw the Reiki practitioner is the one you had to complete the person has their own experiences.If someone is not given to the spirit realm is a Japanese word, it has been effective in the knees, it will help you greatly in your life.Reiki does not cause any harm or place any demands on the inside of us.For distant reiki healing the animal will react to the symbol to travel to reiki as well as having return and regular clients who become good acquaintances over time.Reiki can send Reiki energy around them, while using it intuitively.

Many Reiki practitioners ignore the mental, emotional or mental states may experience depression or feel absolutely nothing else, you are taught a handful of people are sure within your heart and the healer and charge money for your highest path and will get out of it.Build it up within your mind, body and mind.Fix a clear understanding on the internet, and is a major dental procedure, indicating Reiki's benefits in seeking out a Reiki Master Practitioner.When you have to do something special for you to incorporate them into your Reiki healing can be learned too.After having completed various levels in healing an ailment and also teach teachers of this descent in deep meditative states during which I will do the impossible, before long, this practice is multi-layered.

#Reiki Chakra Do Coraa A O Surprising Ideas #What Is The Practice Of Reiki