HOW AERIS GOT HERSELF COUCHED
Or:
All FFVII Characters Are Damaged Goods: Flower Girl Edition
That title there is one of my very favorite things about FFVII. The characters are put through some horrible shit and you know what? It scars them. No matter what happens or how Good an End camp gives them, Cloud will never really be able to smile like he did in Crisis Core. Even if Wutai is totally restored, Yuffie is always going to have that angry bitterness at the world. Barret's gonna be Barret, Cid's gonna be Cid, Tifa's gonna be Tifa. FFVII isn 't about facing down your demons and trusting in your friends to become a healthy, happy person. It's about life being crappy, confusing and sometimes painfully unfair, and it's about how sometimes a shitty unfair life is going to make you a screwball, but you know what? You gotta hold your shit together long enough to save the world anyway, because no one else is going to do it for you. The characters have deep flaws and damages that never really get resolved. And Aeris, irregardless of the pedestal that the characters and fans placed her on, is absolutely no exception to this. While her independence is a traight about her to be admired, sometimes she takes it way to far. In some ways, she's probably incapable of not taking it to far. Basically, she is borderline incapable of actually being able to put her faith in other people to help or protect her- even people she loves, even people she would do anything for, even people who she would tell to their faces that she does trust. And, even if she hypothetically got to live a reasonably happy,normalish life from this point on, those issues ain't goin away on their own.
For Aeris's whole life, she's in a weird state of never being by herself, but still being alone. There have been people around, the dead the living, even one guy who's job it is to stalk her and make sure she's OK. She also hasElmyra, who is as good a mom as she possibly can. But irregardless of that, Aeris 's whole life has been one long lesson in independence. The people who are capable of keeping her safe are unwilling to do so, and the people who want to keep her safe are incapable. The one person who could have been both leaves her without even a real goodbye. It all sort of leaves an impression.
But backing up! Her formative years are spent in the custody of Hojo. Now, I don't believe that she's cut up, or mindfucked or infected with eldritch horror-viruses. (Well no, she was probably cut up a little, but always under anesthesia, or the mother would get all uppity. Honestly this is what happens when you start treating the specimens like human beings. How troublesome.) However, I do think it would be pretty unreasonable to assume that this is a not a shitty, shitty way to grow up. It's worthIfalna's life to get them out. It's worth years of neurotic denial of her own nature for Aeris to stay out. It's seven years of Hojo. Even if there wasn't sanity-crushing unethical experimentation happening to Aeris, it was sure as shit happening to Ifalna. There's helplessness. Theres's hopelessness. There's repeatedly being told by Hojo that the only reason she isn't being fucked up regularly was due to how inferior she is to her mother. No matter how much Ifalna does to protect Aeris from it, kids internalize that kind of stuff. And in escaping, Ifalna, the only person Aeris trusts, gets shot to death.
Lil'Aeris is definitely a tough kid though, and bounces back pretty well. She is clearly distraught when Ifalna is killed, but she seems pretty undisturbed afterwards. (The fact that she is probably still HEARING Ifalna's voice periodically certainly doesn't hurt, here.) It's not hard for her to bond with Elmyra and come to think of her as "mom." All in all, tiny flower girl is actually doing pretty well until Tseng shows up. However, it's at this point when Tseng tells her that she will need to go back to Shinra because she is special that Aeris's Big Issues start to manifest. She denies what she is. Being special means danger. She stops talking about Cetra things, even to her own mother. Anything that makes her different or weird is to be kept strictly to herself. That's a pretty big burden for a kid to decide to carry.
ANYWAY THERE SHOULD BE A WHOLE BUNCH OF WORDS HERE ABOUT CRISIS CORE AND WHAT BOTH LOVING AND LOSING ZACK DID TO HER EMOTIONAL WELL BEING (hint: it was really really awesome and then sucked super hard) BUT I WANT TO GO PLAYFFXIII and this essay has been sitting half-written in google docs for like a week and a half now so we're just going to skip all of that and move on to OG canon. Baby I owe you one essay because Zack has a VERY important place in all this but if I don't finish this thing up and post it now I probably never will. :(b
Moving on!
Depending on how you count, there are at least two and possibly up to four characters who exist basically for the single purpose of telling you shit thatAeris could have, but didn't. Elmyra's only there to give you Aeris's backstory. Bugenhagen tells you a little bit on Planet Theory that you wouldn't otherise know, but he then spends all of disk three as the Aeris Whisperer, trying to figure out what the fuck she was thinking when she done ran off to get shanked. (The world is almost screwed because know one knows what her plan was. \o/) Ghast and Ifalna do their exposition bit on things that Aeris knew since the middle of disk one, and POSSIBLY THE WHOLE GAME. By the time of her date, she has a pretty good idea about what's going on in Cloud's head, but she still can't bring herself to breathe a word about Zack. Now I will grant you some of this being for the sake of story-telling; you can't be aFFVII character without withholding important plot details for no god damn reason, after all. But Tifa's worried about either Cloud having a mental breakdown, or she herself being the crazy one. Cloud's crazy. Cait Sith's a spy. Aeris hides waaaaay more, and more important information than anyone else. What's her excuse?
As far as actions go, yes, she does hire Cloud as a body guard, but she then never leans on him. In the church that day, she wants him for his sword- she hires him as a meat shield. Very next scene she goes on to emasculate him awesomely, and then spend the rest of the game rebuking and/or mocking any of his attempts to keep her out of danger. Thosearen 't the actions of someone who truly believes her body to be guarded. In Cosmo Canyon when she's bummed about that whole Last of Her Kind thing, Cloud tries to give her a "you're not alone" pep talk, but she completely rejects it:
Aerith
"I learned a lot. The elders taught me many things."
"About the Cetra... And the Promised Land..."
(She looks down)
Aerith
"I'm...... alone..... I'm all alone now..."
Cloud
"But I'm..... we're here for you, right?"
(She shakes her head)
Aerith
"I know. I know, but... I am the only.... Cetra."
The issue isn't brought up again. When she eventually leaves Cloud behind, she says it's because she's the only one who can save the world. She has to do it alone. It wasn 't some kind of self-sacrificing deal with leaving them because she thought that they would hold her back or try to stop her from some big sacrifice. The game makes it pretty clear that Aeris intended to come home and life Happily Ever After. No, she went off to save the world alone, because given her life up to that point being alone was the only option that made sense to her.
This is why I do see her as a tragic sort of figure, in the classical sense. If you let Aeris be responsible for her own life- not just a symbol of Cloud's failure or a passive object that was acted upon by Sephiroth, then she brought her death upon herself by being unable to believe in anyone but herself. I think a lot of her characterization is tied into that Japanese ideal of not burdening others with your problems. But one of the things I forever love about Final Fantasy VII is the way it shines a light on some of the nastier implications of popular tropes. Aeris's desire to be independent seems at times to go beyond selflessness and courtesy and into unhealthy neuroticism.
So how is all of this relevant to camp where she is snuggling regularly with her two hot, twinked out boyfriends who could basically punch the cock of anything that tries to mess with her? Well, she still is incapable of really trusting and relying on them. \o/ Not completely at least. \o/ The idea that her safety can be trusted to anyone but herself just dddddoesn't work for her. There have been too many burns and years of paranoia for all that crap to just go away. She's in a little bit of denial about this, which at times has made her either a liar pants or totally full of shit. She talks a big game to Zidane about trusting your friends and relying on one another, but also didn't mention for six months that Para-Medic has been terrorizing her. She just doesn't want anyone to know that she feels this way and will do just about anything to hide it from other people. She partially hides these feelings from herself, or at least how deep they go because lying to herself makes it a lot easier to lie to everyone else. And of course no one wants to hear that she doesn't trust them. They'll be happier thinking that she does rely on them, so it's best if she keeps them thinking that way. IT IS AN AWESOME CYCLE, AND SHE IS A WINNER. But she does genuinely worry about having her intimacy issues hurt the people she loves. It's also what makes Zack's horrible reverse couching so terrible for her. 8( She failed and hurt Zack, but at the same time knows she would probably hide things from him again if the situation arose.
I don't really know what could get her to admit these issues, let alone move past them. For the most part, she's OK and they don't come up. She absolutely meant it when she told Zack she wanted to fight beside him some time. In vague, broad terms and concepts, she can clearly see that she has people around her who love her and want to take care of her. However, when the issue hits closer to home (her own track record with science, SAVING THE WORLD et cetera ) she's going to have a really, really hard time not seeing it as something that she has to take care of alone, and that anyone else- for all their strength, love, or good intentions- can not be relied on to keep her safe.