#confidently incorrect

I don't even know where to begin. Every word spoken in this video essay is wrong, including "and" and "the".

"Zack is just objectively a better person."

Zack Fair is literally a war criminal. But because he did said war crimes with a goofy grin on his face, and because Square tried to frame the whole affair as some happy-go-lucky boy scout adventure, it doesn't count, right?

Also, does anyone else think it's weird that Zack decided to take the time, in the midst of the Wutai invasion, to play pattycake with a little girl whose country he was currently invading? You should, because it's fucking weird.

"Zack is a better hero."

Remind us again which of the two has killed Sephiroth repeatedly and saved the entire planet twice over? I'll give you a hint: His name doesn't start with "Z".

"Cloud doesn't actually care about the planet…"

Pictured above: Character development, a concept with which the FFVII fandom is entirely unfamiliar

Because his life experiences have turned him into a cynic. He improves over time thanks to his friends showing him that caring about the world and other people does matter. Acting like he's the same kind of cynic at the beginning and end of the story rejects his character growth, and, by extension, much of the meaning of the narrative itself.

Then, within the very same sentence, we dip into a complete non sequitur:

"… he hands Sephiroth the Black Materia twice. What kind of a 'hero' would do something like that?"

Because he's being mentally manipulated into doing so by the villain. If elementary storytelling like this still eludes you, you need to go back to reading Chicken Little.

Even CinemaSins couldn't come up with a take this dumb.

"He can just be moody for no reason."

He and his mother were both rendered social pariahs by the people of Nibelheim when he tried to help Tifa. Then, he failed to make it into SOLDIER, and after that he was let down in the most horrifying way possible by his childhood hero, and had his sole remaining parent killed and his home destroyed. After that, he and his closest friend were both experimented on by a madman for five whole years. So yeah, what possible reason could he have for being grumpy?

"His 'emo-ness'."

"Emo-ness" is not a word, and describing Cloud as being "emo" is for people who can't talk, write, or think. "Morose", "world-weary", "PTSD-ridden"… try an actual, meaningful description next time.

Not to mention that he is carrying a great deal of anger within him, not just sorrow. Anger towards Shinra and how they abused the planet and its population. Wrath towards his dead nemesis. Unbridled fury at the state they left the world in. The sheer injustice of it all. And god help anyone foolish enough to underestimate the sheer force of that anger.

"Cloud was too weak, too physically inept, to get into SOLDIER."

This is something that everyone gets wrong. It wasn't a lack of physical ability. He was rejected from SOLDIER because his psych evaluation indicated that Jenova would likely mess up his mind. That was the real reason.

But let's say people were right about this. Cloud was simply too weak to make it into SOLDIER, end of story. So he gets SOLDIER upgrades from Hojo and all of a sudden he's able to stand up to actual first-class SOLDIERS, the Turks, Rufus, and even take down Sepiroth himself on more than one occasion? Without even undergoing SOLDIER's training regimen?

If all Shinra needed to do was to drag some average joes off the street and pump them full of Jenova and Mako cells, they'd have an entire army of first-class SOLDIERS. It doesn't add up, and it denies Cloud the very real inner strength and tenacity that drove him to stop Sephiroth dead in his tracks when he burned down Nibelheim.

The story demonstrates the difference between true strength (Cloud's perseverance in the face of impossible odds) versus fake strength (being pumped up with Mako and Jenova cells by a corporation bent on exploiting you for its own gain).

...

*nervous sweat*

even the biggest pain slut wouldn't fuck with a toothache, right?

...

“People have been using q***r to self-identify since the word existed”? Now that’s quite an ahistorical lie!

Even before the Q-slur was a slur, its connotation was always negative. In the 19th century, the word carried lots of bad meanings, a range covering “excessive”, “fake”, and “bad”, as documented by a 1796 slang dictionary (Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue). Q***r bub was bad liquor, q***r chant was a false name or address, and to shove the q***r was to pass counterfeit money. Even before the phrase q***r people ever referred to sexual minorities, that was an insult.

The first time that the word q***r was applied to sexual minorities (that we know of because we have it in writing) was, famously, as an insult. John Sholto Douglas, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry in Scotland, had one son Alfred, and another son Francis, who was gay with Lord Roseberry, and died at a young age. In the 1840s, John wrote a homophobic tirade to the other son Alfred that Francis never should’ve been involved with “snob q***rs like Roseberry”, not knowing that Alfred and Oscar Wilde had sending each other love letters for years.

It was only a century later that people ever started “using q***r to self-identify”. The word q***r crossed to the US soon after around 1900, and was used in its original meaning for almost a century, until Q***r Nation published the leaflet Q***rs Read This in June 1990. Its content explicitly acknowledges that the idea of identifying as q***r was off-putting and unthinkable for many of us.

According to Etymonline, the adjective q***r was first recorded around the year 1500, a cognate of Germen quer (“oblique, perverse, odd”). So your statement is off by about... 500 years. Half a millennium.

People haven’t been using q***r to self-identify for half a millennium since the word existed, actually.