☀ APPLICATION / INFO
NAME: Aerith Gainsborough
AGE: 22 (at death)
DOB: February 7
[character history / background]: HISTORY @ Final Fantasy Wikia.
That is, for the most part, satisfactory. However! I am unsure as to whether I will include anything from Before Crisis. The fact that it is a game for Japanese mobile phones and may never, ever get here isn't a good reason, because there are translated scripts available. But, uh... frankly, even more than anything else the prequels/sequels have presented, some of the BC events don't mesh well with original game canon for her character. Poorly translated as it is, I like to stick with it. According to that history, the Turks protect Aerith at numerous times, while she also has run-ins with AVALANCHE.
Yes, Aerith is a character who, when it comes to her business and especially Cetra-related concerns, keeps things close. However, her animosity toward / complete disinterest in the Turks is hard to reconcile with a history that might have involved rescuing at their hands. Furthermore, she's obviously never heard of AVALANCHE. Given that the one she is involved with in BC sparks up Ancient/old voice debate, it's impossible. So, uh, until they remake the game and adjust her character accordingly, I... am ignoring it as canon... lsdfkm god I sound like such a snob, I APOLOGIZE BUT IT DOESN'T FIT. BC may obviously be meant as a retcon, but we have not seen Aerith's character in game-time and how her attitude toward the Turks / AVALANCHE might differ, considering the changes imposed by BC. Everything else, Crisis Core, can stay. Compromise! … Because, seriously, you don't want me to get into the discrepancies in mother effin' Crisis Core.
[character abilities]: EQUIPMENT, STATS, & DOWN TO LIMIT BREAKS.
For the sake of city translation: Aerith possesses some ability with a staff, but is mostly a weakling physically. She's ace with materia magic, but also has her own healing magic. This is generally expressed through her “Limit Breaks”, but I also suspect that the health of her flowers in the slums wasn't only due to proximity to Life Stream.
If Cloud (aka you) doesn't happen to have the impossible foresight to know that right after the Temple events, Aerith is going to leave your party and die with whatever is equipped on her; then you lose those items forever. THEREFORE logically, I will assume that as I am taking her post death (but before AC/C), she can arrive with those with which she was “buried”. AKA, defensive bangles, Princess Guard, and some materia.
[character personality]: At first glance, Aerith is very much a character who wears her heart on her sleeve. Cheerful, outgoing, and kind, she is easily written off as the typical bubbly do-gooder type. She seems to make no secret of her feelings. If, instead of remembering her as a flower girl, you call her the “slum drunk”, she angrily decries you as rude. When a shop manager in Wall Market asks her to step aside and not listen to his “male request”, she huffily puts her hands on her hips, and grumbles in protest. She giggles often, and looks continually on the bright side, cheering up even Tifa.
In fact, her optimism seems to border on naivete, and that strikes often as ignorance. Self-described as a girl who, having grown up in the slums, can take care of herself, Aerith neverless remains physically dependent. She is the one most rescued in the game, and that while having only one disc of playtime - though, in all fairness, she asks for help only once. When taken by ShinRa, she tells Tifa that Marlene is safe and once slapped, urges the group to escape. When she goes alone to the North, she expressly tells Cloud NOT to follow. She makes for an odd mix of practicality and head-in-the-clouds - dreaming ahead, wanting to ride in airships and see the world, but asking not for a knight in shining armor, but for a bodyguard, and that in exchange for payment. Though, it's a less practical form of payment - a date.
There's no problem speaking her mind, or even a sign of healthy fear - to Vincent, the dude sleeping in a coffin for repentance “...that's weird.” To Sephiroth, the insane, and insanely strong, villain hellbent on crashing a meteor into the planet and so forth, “I won't let you!” And she trots off alone to do just that.
Aerith does prove capable of handling herself, worthy of her “Oh no! Whatever will I do!? … Isn't that what you want me to say?” Left alone outside of the whorehouse while Cloud, uh, visits, Aerith charges certain men a few hundred gil for a flower, tells another she wouldn't sell him one for a million or date him for more, but gives the mixed up kid leaving his home a flower and a gil, free. As one of the sleazebags puts it, she proves a good business woman when inclined to be.
She also evinces an unusual sense of humor. Aside from teasing Cloud (and Barret), and flirting with him to the occasional pain of Tifa, she finds dressing Cloud up as a woman extremely entertaining. And after being beaten by Cloud and setting off alone, in their dream, she teases him for his guilt and concern (“Then why don't you REALLY worry about it? And let me handle Sephiroth.”)
Beneath this alternatively bold and gentle exterior are issues, ones easy to miss given her limited time and her propensity to putting on a bright face. Whenever something strikes home, strikes personally, Aerith lies, lies, and lies some more. When Cloud first asks about her once-upon-a-time SOLDIER boyfriend (Zack Fair), she tells him they weren't serious, but that she liked him for awhile. That is disproved first by Elmyra kicking Cloud out early for being a SOLDIER (as Aerith had been so hurt by one), and much later by Aerith finally admitting that he'd been her first love. More significantly than that, her beginning interest in Cloud was due to his physical resemblance (mannerisms, speech, eyes, uniform, etc) to Zack. That is, half of her reason for coming along on the journey was the Zack-Cloud puzzle.
Despite knowing the Turks well after years of pursuit, (very well, when it comes to Tseng, with whom she shares a strange hostile-familiar relationship), she plays dumb with Cloud as to who they are and why they would be after her. It isn't so unusual to keep big things from a relative stranger - and who would believe “Cetra!” anyway? - but it becomes striking when one considers how open she otherwise is with him, and how persistently she denied her heritage as a child.
If Aerith had her way, at least in the beginning, she would never speak of being a Cetra, she would not be one. To be normal is to be happy; to be a Cetra is pain, loneliness, and isolation. It is the first seven years of her life in a laboratory, her real mother dying on the train steps, knowing when Elmyra's husband had passed and bringing her tears, hearing voices too noisy to decipher, or the voice of her dead mother, it is the pursuit of ShinRa, being told “you are special!”, of being merely “the Ancient” and not Aerith, a girl with a name and flowers and simple dreams.
She forces herself to confront her heritage when caught up in the journey with Cloud and AVALANCHE, but it does not come easily, and it is not always what she wants to hear. After a run-in with Hojo, she asks “What part of me is like a Cetra? What is a Cetra supposed to be like?” but can receive no answer, not from herself or from Cloud. When it comes to this, to her blood, her increasingly perceived “destiny”, she is increasingly inconsolable. Learning at Cosmo Canyon how fully she is the last, and the responsibility of it, Cloud attempts to tell her that he and AVALANCHE are there for her, but much as she understands what he means, it's meaningless - because for Aerith, Cetra has been and is and forever will be her own isolation. It set her aside as a child, and set her aside as an adult.
Accepting this, and her responsibility to stop Sephiroth and the black materia as the last Ancient with the white materia, she leaves the group and prays alone in the Forgotten City. Cloud blames himself for her death, but as she says in Advent Children, “You came for me” - this is vital. Cloud's presence there, his following with everyone else, it is of incomparable importance because in that moment, as a Cetra, she didn't have to be alone, and she wasn't.
Aerith is no martyr-- she went alone, but did not expect to die. As Tifa says, “she looked forward to the future more than any of us”. She also has a selfish streak a mile wide, flirting with Cloud despite Tifa's obvious feelings, and insisting on having fun at the Gold Saucer despite Barret's angst. That moment, however, is also indicative of her way of handling things when shit hits the fan. Her denial of personal grief does not stop with herself. She hand waves in most things, that optimistic naivete at work. Cloud was possessed by Sephiroth and acting like a freak? No big deal, everything's okay! Cloud gave the Black Materia to Sephiroth? No need to worry! Barret blames himself and is blamed by his village for its destruction, and everyone hates him? Well, okay... but this amusement part is awesome and we're gonna go have fun.
Part of it may be recognizing the limitations of the moment - these things happened, esp. in regard to Cloud, they cannot be changed, and they cannot be addressed or solved, so just put it aside for later, let's move move move. Aerith, obviously, is a person inclined to act, and to solve problems as she goes. Though inclined to action, she is markedly curious - curious about Cloud, curious about the Cetra and herself, even if there is pain involved.
Aerith wears her heart on her sleeve; simultaneously, it is locked and unreachable, the key lost to Zack, or perhaps Ifalna, her real mother and all that made her different. Zack, her first love, who bought her the pink bow, fell through her roof and proposed a date as perfectly normal for repayment, suggested she sell flowers, and in all likelihood was responsible for much of her current outgoing and flirtatious personality. She wrote him 89 letters - yet, though she loved him, loves him, loved him, Aerith looks ahead. After that many unanswered letters, Aerith isn't the type of person to root herself in her past. And though Cloud crashed through her roof and proceeded to disorient her time and place, by disc-end, it isn't Zack anymore - “but things are different, you're different”. She will always have feelings for Zack, but she isn't incapable of moving on, even with a guy half-pretending to be the first one. And then she died 8).
[third person / log sample]: The first time Aerith saw the sky, the first time she looked up and saw blue through the smog that went on and on, and on, she had been seven and caught it only in frenzied glimpses, looking back and up and back, more aware of her mother's labored breathing and the red between her fingers, sticky and stinking. Like that, and after, the sky could have swallowed her whole. The second time, worth remembering, that stood out as definite and sky, a silly boy with silly hair looked into her eyes and she looked into his and couldn't look away; his funny mako eyes could have swallowed her whole.
She had not expected to see eyes like that again, so blue and so unnatural. In that moment, with this new man crashing into her life and crushing her flowers, that they were the same was more important than that they weren't at all.
It became a study, involuntary and irresistible. Two columns spread through her mind, unshakable fixtures, Cloud and Zack, similarities, differences. Zack and Cloud; walking the same, a confident stride and width of the feet; gesturing, swinging a hand forward just so. Zack smiled more, all the time, teeth and bright, bright eyes. When Cloud smiled, it was almost as if he hadn't meant to, the expression seeking its place but never fitting exactly right. It made her want to straighten it, just so, like a crooked painting, or take a napkin and lick the corner and wipe away the little imperfection.
But did she want to for Cloud, or in the hopes that if she did, if that little thing could be altered, Cloud would be that much more Zack?
She thought, sometimes, that Cloud didn't know how mixed and torn and two but one but two he was (he brushed his hair back and is Zack, but Zack never shrugged like that and so it must be Cloud); she thought, other times, that Tifa might know, because Tifa didn't always look at Cloud like he's carrying half her world, but like he's going one way and no matter how much she tried, she's six steps behind and lagging.
Where are you? she thought other times, while forcing everyone to stop, giddy as she jogged across a flower field and plucked an armful. A wreath for Cloud, but he wouldn't wear it even as she wheedled and insisted, so it sat on her own head when she offered a small bouquet of three to Tifa, winking, “until he gets a clue!” Where are you? she wondered, one last flower in her hand, twisted between her fingers as she pulled one petal and then another, Zack, Cloud, Zack, Cloud...
Before she could reach the end, she dropped the bloom underfoot; her fingers curled into her palms, unable to shake when braced there. The sky stretched over head, speckled with cloud and bright with sun, and when she inhaled it was wild grass and flowers.
Columns, thick with compare and contrast, erased and struck out and written again and again - but more importantly, more than the buzzing now and again in her head, than the weight of the world on Cloud's shoulders held like Zack's, the day was bright and warm, and there were hundreds more like it, just waiting for their turns.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: Post-Death, before end of game, well before events in Advent Children.
Possibly under construction?