#aerith posting

Aerith posting again

Aerith is Sephiroth's foil, the opponent who the planet has deemed as its champion, because who better to outsmart you than someone who shares so many of your experiences and yet is your opposite in every way.

I don't think Aerith was given all this knowledge of the future because she's the last Cetra, but because she's Aerith. She is the strongest threat to Sephiroth's power not because of her blood but because of her brain and her heart. She holds a love inside her not just for the planet, but for everyone and everything that lives on it, too. She has a wit like no one else's, nothing slips past her notice, and she is willing to give up the one thing she wants most—a future for herself—to ensure the future of everyone else.

Tifa, on the other hand, while lacking Aerith's knowledge if the future and connection to the Planet, has a passion inside her that surpasses the ambition of Sephiroth. She is his victim more than anyone else, the one to get caught in the crossfire of the cycle of abuse started by Shinra, and she will be the one to put an end to that same cycle in every single universe.

Tifa again and again acts in ways that Sephiroth doesn't know how to counter because all of her anger and passion and drive is fueled by love and he could never understand that.

Sephiroth sees Cloud as a pawn he can control, but Aerith and Tifa are the ones blocking his path time and time again.

Sephiroth is alone in his fight, but Tifa and Aerith are not. They hear what the other doesn't speak out loud. They help eachother live in the moment. They always pull eachother back up. Their roles in combat even compliment eachother.

(Please excuse my fandom wiki screenshots)

This bit of dialogue is super interesting in the context of the re!trilogy because it seems that they drew from it a lot when writing their relationship this time around.

Tifa Lockhart is the only person who really saw who Aerith was in the original. Not even Cloud really payed enough attention to Aerith to know that she planned on coming back. That she wanted to. But Tifa did. Tifa was the only one who seemed to really know Aerith, and this is even more true in Remake/Rebirth.

Tifa is the only one who sees beyond the mask Aerith puts up.

Tifa clocks Aerith knowing more than she should multiple times. She picks up on Aerith knowing the sector 7 plate is going to fall. She asks her where Cloud had been before she found him, says it seems like something Aerith would know despite Aerith not even meeting Cloud until afterwards.

She rushes to comfort her in the Train Graveyard, the first and only time she ever sees Aerith truly break, and knows exactly what to say to get her back on her feet. She finds the meaning behind Aerith's vague words enough to see that she needs help and gives it to her no questions asked. Says they'll "do it together", even.

Aerith even starts dropping the mask around her, something she does with basically no one else. She's comfortable enough with Tifa to talk more about what has been taken from her by the whispers. To discuss Zack. Aerith does not let many people see her at her worst, when she's sad or stressed or feeling hopeless, but she lets Tifa see it more than most others.

Once again, Tifa is the only one who picks up on the little things about Aerith, the things she successfully hides from everyone else. This makes it even more devastating that she didn't notice anything off with Aerith leading up to the Capital.

There were signs Aerith knew what was coming, most notably in the lyrics of No Promises to Keep, a song Tifa watched her perform (even encouraged her and cheered her on before the performance depending on who you got during the play).

Tifa was the only one who was ever going to pick up on what those lyrics actually meant, because she was the only one who picked up on the other hidden meanings behind Aerith's words. But she didn't. This time, instead of being the only one who knew how Aerith truly felt, she failed to pick up on it the one time it really mattered. Last time, she knew Aerith planned on coming back. This time, she didn't know that Aerith knew she wasn't going to.

Tifa going to have this line of dialogue in part 3 because its no longer true on multiple levels.