Tanabata 七夕 Is A Popular Traditional Japanese Festival Of Chinese Origins. This Celebration Commemorates

Truth

THE PROMISE

Since forever and I hope I'll never change

Do you ever feel so detached from the world because you’re constantly living in the fictional/fantasy worlds in your head given that reality is just too boring, too limiting, and too uneventful????

‘Course she did.

Angeal always bothers me and idk how to word it!! Not sure your take on why or what you see with his character in general but I'd love to know bc this has been bothering me forever

so this got. a little more heated than i thought it would. sorry anon lmao

angeal stans this is your warning!! nice things are not said under the cut

so angeal exists in the narrative to be the dead mentor figure so we feel bad for zack and to infodump a little about his and genesis's pasts in the beginning so genesis gets a modicum of development as well. he also does some obligatory passing on of his legacy of soldier honor and morals to zack so zack has a clear model to follow and we as the audience can see his growth from somewhat careless and cocky to a little more serious and driven after angeal's death. on a deeper level, angeal also exists as a counterpoint to genesis's and sephiroth's respective models of heroism, where (simply put) angeal's is staying true to a code of honor to protect the people, genesis's is being recognized by the public for heroic deeds, and sephiroth's is manufactured success and perfection in performance

and like, crisis core shows that each of these models doesn't work. in the case of angeal, his rigid adherence to a code of honor to remain morally pure leads to his downfall. especially with the circumstances of his death-- like, death before dishonor is an incredibly strong concept in japanese culture, but it's pretty clear in cc that what angeal does in forcing zack's hand is somewhat backwards in logic. like, where was this revelation that he was hurting people back in the middle of the war with wutai where he was literally destroying people’s villages and livelihoods vs. now when the war is literally over and he isn’t actively hurting people?? but. whatever. sure, let's assume this was the turning point that finally made him realize what he’s done in the past

but even then he doesn't solve anything, he doesn't try to help anyone despite that being basically his motto, he just gives up because he himself doesn't fit into his strict worldview-- if he isn't the hero he thought he was, then he must be a monster, and he can't be tolerated to exist. angeal quite literally shatters under the weight of his morals

there's also the issue of the story from his childhood, which is supposed to show his character as honorable à la "honor can exist in unconventional ways" but. it fails to establish him as such imo. it's like, you're too proud to accept help so you're gonna steal from people instead? and not even the rich people because one of them is your friend?? like there's a difference between being honorable and being too proud, especially if part of your motto is to protect others. it feels like a weird blend of capitalist work ethic + robin hood-esque imagery while missing the part where robin hood didn't actually steal solely because he was poor, he stole because fuck rich people and so he could help other poor people. you know. by giving them the handouts angeal is apparently too proud to accept

he's just a huge hypocrite, which makes his lectures on honor and pride feel all the more sanctimonious. he tries so hard to keep the moral high ground that the moment he comes up against something that actually tests his self-perception, he just shrugs and goes "guess i'll die". i feel like that was the entire point of how crisis core wrote him, especially given the role the buster sword plays in symbolizing his honor (aka use it or lose it), but the overall fandom tends to treat him as objectively the best of the firsts, like this bitch didn't just nosedive into drama queen territory just as quickly as the other two. i think @ladylokiofmidgard put it best when she said he has the moral backbone of a chocolate éclair

like angeal is as bland as white bread but somehow manages to singlehandedly piss me off more than any other character in the compilation. i could go on more but this post is already too long as it is

anyways. angeal was wrong. the buster sword is a metaphor for his failure to uphold his own philosophies relative to the people who inherited it. fight me

Ever Crisis Academy

And they made relationship chart. Thanks, Square. Now when's the next chapter for the first SOLDIER?

Icon next to Hollow’s arrangement in the ultimania: 

Opening to FF7R: 

Very end of Crisis Core: 

End of FF7R as Hollow begins to play: 

Ending of Crisis Core: 

Cloud alone on a barren wasteland of cracked earth, alone in the rain, a destined death he couldn’t stop, screaming at the top of his lungs (howling) outside himself looking in (remembering Zack, creating his false persona with Zack as a base) the storm clears, a new journey on the horizon. Remake opens up with Zack’s death place as the bird flies towards Midgar, the bird is pictured with Hollow, Hollow begins to play at the end as Zack comes into view and it begins to rain. Game opens with where Zack died and ends where Zack died. 

I have written and rewritten the Gast Post wayyy too many times and put more time thinking about it then it's worth so now here it is, just so it will begone from my drafts, here's my beef with Gast Faremis and the two big narrative issues that make thinking about him fill me with rage

Also I'm gonna put a TW for grooming here actually because Gast's lack of a canon age makes it seem like he might have met Ifalna when she was very young and they have a weird power imbalance thing going that I kind of talk about

The Jenova Project

It is basically impossible to make a sound judgement on Gast's ethics because we have no idea when he left the Jenova project or really why beyond that he knew he misidentified Jenova. I know one of the ultimanias said he felt guilt/remorse. But to be quite frank, until they show this remorse in-game it means nothing to me. It's one thing to reveal details like ages in the ultimanias, but Gast is a far too critical player in the plot for his characterization to be getting done secondhand in supplemental materials. Do not get me started on how he never shows up in Dirge. They just... ignore him a lot of the time, which is really weird since his discovery of Jenova is the plot catalyst for the entire series.

Also, I've noticed people tend to passively talk about him like he's *the good one* on the team or that he would have saved Sephiroth from Hojo. I'm not really sure where this comes from? Sephiroth speaks highly of him, but i don't trust Seph to be an accurate judge of character when it comes to Gast. Sephiroth would have been, at the very vert latest, probably around 4 when Gast left the company. If he even remembers Gast at all, his memories are not gonna be a full picture of what the man was like. Besides that, I think it's incredibly likely Sephiroth has a mystical, idealized version of Gast in his head, because Gast is someone who could, in theory, give him the answers about his origins Hojo refuses to. Hojo also probably shit talks Gast if be ever comes up, which would only make him more appealing to Sephiroth. Gast is not Hojo. He has cleared the bar past literally the worst person Sephiroth has ever met. It is akin to praising a candle for being able to burn compared to a crumpled, broken, wet match. Gast being less abhorrent then Hojo doesn't mean he was a good person.

I think people also tend to automatically assume Gast was a good person bc he's Aerith's dad, but being a good person isn't genetic. He didn't have the opportunity to be a father to her for more then about 3 weeks. That's not his fault, obviously, but it means he had no hand in raising her, so him being her father really isn't indicative of anything outside of him being involved with Ifalna, which we will get to in a second.

Honestly, it seems to me like Gast was ambivalent to Sephiroth at best. Remember that a perfect weapon was not what they were designing Sephiroth to be; they wanted him to be an Ancient. Of course, Jenova is not one, meaning that in terms of achieving its original goal, Gast's goal, Project S was a failure from the outset. I can't help but wonder if Gast saw Sephiroth that way, or else as a horrible mistake, especially considering that after leaving the company and abandoning Sephiroth (and maybe Lucrecia depending on who left first) to Hojo, Gast on his own time achieves his original goal of making an Ancient, by fathering Aerith. Speaking of...

Ifalna

We know from the guides that Ifalna was 29 when she died. Aerith was 7, meaning Ifalna had her at around 22. If Gast was around Hojo' age, he would've been in his early 30s when Sephiroth was born. Sephiroth is 5-6 years older then Aerith, which would put him at around his mid thirties when he had a child with Ifalna. If Gast left the project shortly after Sephiroth was born or during Lucrecia's pregnancy, he might have met Ifalna as early as her being 18. I sincerely do not believe the devs want to imply their relationship was predatory. I honestly don't think all that much thought has been put into it at all, and while it's reasonable to sideline it since it's not the most urgent bit of lore, this sidelining makes trying to figure out what their dynamic was a nightmare.

Apparently the ultimanias are contradictory about whether the two of them met at Shinra or outside of it. The only time we've ever seen the two of them together was the Icicle Inn tapes, wherein their interactions seem mostly professional until the last tape. In this last tape, the dev's clumsy way of showing that these two are in a relationship was to have Ifalna start to address him as Professor, then correct herself and call him 'honey' instead, which is a hell of a Freudian slip for her to make, given that this tape takes place almost a month after the birth of their daughter.

Again, I think this was just a very awkward blinking neon sign hung up in order to quickly convey THESE TWO WERE IN LOVE, but if you take it at face value, it is strange at best and downright chilling at worst. Gast was the leader of the Make An Ancient Baby project, and when he realized he didn't actually make an Ancient, he left the project and went and had a baby *old school style* with the last Ancient while she was undergrad age. It is fully possible he and Ifalna did have real feelings for each other, but that context with the age gap just makes it... eugh. And it's not like they had a professional friendship and he just served as a sperm donor for Ifalna because she wanted to start repopulating her species or smth. She calls him by a pet name, they are in some kind of romantic entanglement.

At this point I don't think the devs have put nearly as much thought towards this as I have, we're probably just supposed to assume they were happy together because it makes Gast dying more tragic. But them neglecting this relationship leaves it uncomfortably unclear. For example, because they don't think about this relationship a lot, Aerith never mentions her mom telling her about her dad, which is very easily read as Ifalna not wanting to tell her daughter about Gast. That would just be because it hurts Ifalna to talk about his death, but... she also told Aerith stories about the Ancients, which must have also been painful since they were the last two, stuck in a lab away from nature. We know Ifalna gets emotional when talking about the Cetra, she gets worked up seemingly to the point of crying while talking about Jenova in the interviews. The only explanation I can see for why she wouldn't want to talk about Gast if they were happy toghether was that Hojo might punish her if she did. (Worth noting i have traces of two pasts but haven't gotten to reading it yet, she might mention him in there but again supplemental materials, Aerith has never knce mentioned a dad in the actual games)

If the goal is that we are supposed to see Gast as a bad or even morally compromised person who went straight after leaving the company, that's perfectly fine, but everything about him is so muddy that I genuinely can't tell what to make of him. Hojo and Hollander we're clearly supposed to hate, and Lucrecia has settled herself pretty comfortably in the "did fucked up things but has since paid for it" niche, but Gast is just... here. Floating around in the back of the narrative, not even really haunting it because his main contribution as the guy who discovered Jenova gets usurped by Hojo being the one to spread its cells. His other main contribution is being Aerith's bio dad, and she has never once seemed to give it any thought. The only person in the modern era who seems to give a rat's ass about his role in everything is Sephiroth, for like 2 seconds during his meltdown at Nibelheim before he's back to huffing the mommy issue fumes. He is just... such a bizarre, frustrating nothingburger, and I desperately hope they rectify it in remake 3.

I’m not good with Japanese, but these lines sound VERY similar!  

It would be interesting to know if there are others, did you spot any?

FFVII Remake vs Crisis Core comparison