*Spoilers follow for Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake and possibly, maybe future instalments of the Final Fantasy VII Remake. I don’t know, I’m not a psychic.*
Aerith dies. Told you there’d be spoilers.
Still, Aerith dies. It is perhaps gaming’s most infamous spoiler. You will still find people today talking about what a formative experience this was: how it proved the potential of games to tell emotive stories, how it transformed Sephiroth into one of the greatest villains of all time and how you can definitely bring her back, bro, trust me bro, you just have to play her theme on the piano and talk to her ghost in the church and level everyone up past 99, bro it’s true an employee at Squaresoft told me, this method actually works for sure.
The death that once shocked the gaming world simply no longer reverberates for the vast majority of newcomers to Final Fantasy VII. Everyone who has attempted to play the game since 1997 has heard that spoiler by now, and, boy, does it loom heavy over the experience. Experiencing this classic for the first time, Aerith's death comes as more of a relief than anything else: “Finally, now I can get on with the rest of the game!"
In my first playthrough (of many), I had no emotional investment in Aerith. She seemed to fit too easily into that idyllic maiden stereotype which seems to haunt Final Fantasy’s White Mages at their every step: Rosa from IV, Garnet from IX, Yuna from X, Luna from XV and Aerith all seem cut from the same cloth. They’re sacred, morally pure, exalted from birth. Chaste, virginal, bland, uninteresting, bleh.
So, already, you have to question why anyone would put any effort into seeing more of that character. As soon as I was able she was relegated to the back-benches. Practically speaking, this was in favour of transforming Barret into my personal heal slave as quickly as possible. (And, if we're being honest, how much of the emotional weight of her death has more to do with the fact you just lost your best healer?)
But, substantially, this was in order to prioritise the game’s other love interest, Aerith’s rival: Tifa. Now, she rarely left my party. She was treated to my best Materia, she got to go on the Gold Saucer date and you best believe I was getting her that scene under the Highwind. Tifa was the childhood friend. The merciless monk. Sabin suplexed a train, sure, but Tifa suplexed Godzilla. Most importantly, she is cemented in the game’s central character story, that of Cloud’s identity crisis, far more than Aerith is, who represents the more fantastical side of things; the Ancients and the Lifestream and Jenova and all the stuff that went over your head that first time around.
In Cloud’s story, Aerith’s primary function is simply to die. Her secondary function is then a link to Zack, where Aerith likes Cloud because she liked Zack. Cloud likes Aerith because Zack liked Aerith. And then she serves a tertiary function of, maybe, saving the world in a final eco-warrior Hail Mary. Tifa, on the other hand, is the connection between Cloud’s faux Ex-Soldier persona, and his true identity. Far and away, she seemed the more endearing character. And for years I held my head high, wearing my Team Tifa shirt proudly, knowing that I had made the enlightened decision.
That was half a decade ago, and Final Fantasy VII looks decisively shinier now. For one, they’ve added a few more polygons. And Tifa has never looked better. A fantastic design with a real weighty, “punch”y (heh) playstyle. But Aerith’s character is revised too: Flower power Madonna is out, grunge-y manic pixie slum girl is in.
With all due respect to Mena Suvari, herself an institution in the pantheon of teen moviedom, Aerith’s new voice actress Brianna White is a massive factor in bringing about this new, more compelling version of the character. She works within the structure of the original content, where Aerith’s most damsel-y moments are kept intact, but lends them all an ironic flair. Throughout, you do get this feeling that Aerith doesn’t really need Cloud as her bodyguard and, for all the humour, incessant joy and strange anime grunting, there is a bittersweet undercurrent to it all. A sadness that lies just beneath the surface.
Perhaps, this version of the character was there in the original, but such nuance is hard to convey through poorly translated textboxes and minimal emoting. It’s even harder to remember. Remake Aerith has an aura of clarity, certainty and purpose. You’re going to struggle not to remember her personality, and you’re going to struggle not to fall in love with her.
I can’t lie, it helps that she plays like a god. There’s not a video game character more endearing than the one who’s actually fun to play and there are few things more satisfying than finishing off some bandit creep with the aptly divine-named Ray of Judgment; Aerith is responsible for many of the combat’s *Chef’s Kiss* moments.
But it is that iconic death, conspicuously absent from this first instalment, which has changed Aerith the most. For a long time, her death has been a bit of a ‘Women in Refrigerators' moment, motivating Cloud and the player forwards at the expense of her own character. Not any longer. This new imagining lends her far more agency than she was ever granted before, as certain scenes seem to hint that she knows at least the broad strokes of destiny (IE the original game’s plot) and, as such, is aware of her ultimate fate; alternatively going towards it willingly or attempting to avoid it entirely, depending on how the ‘Unknown Journey’ pans out.
So, there’s a case to be made that Remake Aerith has taken over from Tifa, claiming her rightful place as new ‘best girl’. But that doesn’t really hold up either. Because one of the truly great reinterpretations of the Remake is how it drains away the jealousy and competition between these two characters in order to break away from the confines of their love triangle. Much to the contention of warring shipper factions, this reimagining casts the characters as close friends from the get go, foregoing any pretence of rivalry or jealousy, and they often have more chemistry together than either of them do with Cloud. According to Tifa’s voice actress, Britt Baron, this interpretation of their friendship specifically shows that “women don't have to tear other women down”, but, more than that, it reads as a denial of the love triangle’s foundational status in the legacy of Final Fantasy VII: these characters are bigger than Cloud now. They have lives that do not completely hinge around his existence.
The Tifa/Aerith rivalry is then rendered a relic from a bygone era of internet fandom, sat perhaps alongside anonymity and CreepyPasta, and whilst I have some sympathy for those brave soldiers trapped in the unending shipping wars for upwards of twenty years, the Remake has breathed new life into these women.
Rather than needlessly relitigating old arguments over which female character is better (which curiously all inevitably descend into gratuitous comments on cup size), we can perhaps look forward to some more fruitful discussions about what makes both of these characters so enduring, twenty years after their debut.
Oh, but Jessie is definitely ‘best girl’. Just saying.
