Final Fantasy 7’s Tifa vs. Aeris love triangle spoke to bigger anxieties

There are many people who love to play. Final Fantasy 7Obsession with a game you don’t really own can lead to a distorted view of reality.

[Ed. note: This story contains full spoilers for Final Fantasy 7.]

Cloud is an arrogant, talented and talented mercenary. He travels through fantasy to stop Sephiroth. Along the way, Cloud encounters two heroines: his childhood friend, Tifa, who unravels the truth behind Cloud’s identity and mysterious episodes, and the flower-seller Aeris, who actually stops Sephiroth from winning in the end. Even if you haven’t played Final Fantasy 7 You might not be aware that Aeris is killed before this happens.

All pop culture is subject to the same question: “Who would win?” This is why we are dedicating an entire week of debates to those who have shaped TV, films, games and comics for good and bad. Polygon’s Week of Who Would Win? is upon us.

You might also know that Aeris was supposed to be called “Aerith,” the ambiguous last katakana of her Japanese name EARISU, and just another fumble of Final Fantasy 7’s blurred, decontextualized translation. Or maybe you know that Aerith is Cloud’s true love? Maybe you are certain that she’s your true love. It is not, because that’s TifaIt is possible to prove this. And this isn’t your personal preference — it’s about Canon. CanonThis is the weapon you need to grab and fire. It’s fan-translated passages from tie-in novels (the official translations were done by biased liars), scanned screenshots from Ultimania guidebooks of these characters’ Kingdom Hearts Square Enix official accounts promote their new product range with cameos and tweets Final Fantasy 7 –themed café food. What appears least is actually the best. CanonAll is well with the text Final Fantasy 7 Self.

These narratives have been competing for over 20 years; Aerith vs. Tifa, “Cloti vs Clerith.” Both sides paint the other side as uniquely toxic and deluded. Because the Aerith owner saw the Twin Towers fall on September 11, 2001, I still have vivid memories of seeing the hateful Aerith site. It was covered with GIFs featuring American flags. Since that time, words like “l33t”, “llamas” and “Lemons” have become memes, GIFs, SCEAMs, or stanning queens. Final Fantasy 7 Remake has added new tomes of Aerith and Tifa scenes to argue over — but it’s the same battle, running since 1997.

Square Enix

Batman’s at it, too. Robert Pattinson is the great mind, and the better chef, of the millennial generations. He was forced to live his entire adult life caring for the Edward-versus–Jacob controversy. Final Fantasy 7’s love triangle.

“It’s the two options of girls,” he said, as his Batman costar Zoë Kravitz rolled her eyes. “Aerith … she’s like the really kind girl, she has superpowers to heal everyone … and then Tifa’s this sexy little thing, like a thief, in this short skirt. Aeris gets shot right when she is at her best. This is how every guy figures out what love is.”

“Either the one that’s gonna heal everything,” Kravitz wondered, “or the one in the short skirt?”

Batman might be getting involved. I’m forced to wear lipstick in an attempt to make the love triangle go away. That is because I don’t believe it. Final Fantasy 7There is a love triangle. Cloud’s relationship with each woman is romantic in tone and important to the plot — but, outside of one or two incidental scenes, there’s no conflict between the girls over Cloud, and no suggestion that Cloud needs to “pick” one. The story doesn’t follow the simplistic template of the YA love triangle or the pervy burlesque of the ’90s harem anime; even the game’s dating sim element (an overemphasized aspect that would later form the backbone of the dialogue-choice romances BioWare became so celebrated for) feels more like a developer in-joke than a serious plot point.

To find out the origin of the love triangle, I started the Wayback Machine. Final Fantasy 7 Fandom from the past. By the mid-2000s, transformative fandom — fanfic writers and fan artists, and Cloti and Clerith shippers — had fled to proto-social networking sites like LiveJournal, while fandom’s archivists and armchair critics squabbled on wikis and bulletin boards. But at the turn of the millennium, before the internet was six apps and a billion shops, there was no boundary between these two styles of fandom, with both cohabiting on eccentric personal sites (called “shrines”) stuffed with enthusiasm, essays, fanwork and fact. Kids coming online for instructions for breeding a Gold Chocobo at, say, Icy Brian’s RPG Page, would find most of the site dedicated to fanfic; others, wanting to brush up on lore for their CloudxAerith epic, might find it alongside stats for both characters’ weapons. Doujinshi, a fan-made manga that is often sexually explicit, was next to official material. Many readers didn’t have the cultural literacy necessary to understand that this fanwork wasn’t officially approved.

Square Enix

Compared to today, the early-’00s internet was a world free of guardedness. People expressed their feelings freely without using irony. The only thing a user could do was to leave a flame on your Guestbook, which were controlled by pseudonymous people. These unguarded words today are the Rosetta Stone of the ship-war.

“Let’s put it this way: only if she was real, she is a pure bitch,” screams Aeris In Hell, an anti-shrine maintained on obscure internet host internettrash.com (which is somehow still working, after a fashion, frozen in amber the day that Dee Dee Ramone died). The site’s author goes on to insult Aerith for trying to take Cloud away from Tifa. “Another damsel-in-distress smoked the carpet. It’s so embarrassing that they have to look this girly. She’s mental. […] A skanky, retarded, butt-ugly ho.”

AngelTifa84, webmaster of Anti-Gainsborough Establishment, resents Aerith’s fans complaining about “what [Tifa] wears, not taking a look at their ‘goddess’ and how she dresses (with that slit),” before calling her “trashy.” All that remains of Tifa Haters Anonymous is a reference to Tifa’s “big airbag boobs,” while the Comic Sans weeb manifesto Japanese Culture and the Love Triangle of Final Fantasy VII launders its judgements via Orientalism, insisting the Japanese see Aerith’s ribbon as a symbol of true love, while Tifa’s black skirt represents misfortune.

Tifa and Aerith are arguing about what the right way is to be a female. It’s a debate over the short skirt versus the long skirt; the submissive girl versus the flirt; the nurturer versus the fighter, with these traits assigned to each girl based on their body and clothes, not their actions. Zoë Kravitz was right to call out Robert Pattinson’s dichotomy as sexist — but she had no idea that he’d got the girls’ personalities wrong. Tifa is an active fighter wearing a small skirt. Aerith on the other hand is more a foolhardy and mischievous magician in a longer skirt.

Square Enix

I’m not calling Official Cloud x Tifa Petition webmaster Tifa Strife or Batman a misogynist . But from birth, we have all been basted in a million stories where the “good girl” gets rewarded with the man while the “bad girl” ends up alone or dead. Final Fantasy 7Because ship warriors love to see which girl is chosen as the hero, they believe that she will be the best woman. Aerith isn’t just herself — she’s also Lenna and Rosa and Yuna and Terra and Elly, part of a lineage of pure healing princess girls with staves. Tifa is, however, a symbol of forcefulness and sexuality like Kid and Celes or Layla and Ayla. The same anime industry which responded to the success in Neon Genesis EvangelionJapanese media fans love identifying the aforementioned million Reis-like and Asuka-like clones with their sexual subjectivity and fury removed. TypeYou can use it as a camera, but also as a container to store stories.

Also Final Fantasy 7There is no better place to express your anxieties than this canvas. A game made in a year — six months to carve the tools, six months to build the whole thing — it glitters with shonky spontaneity. It’s stuffed full of kitchen-sink maximalism and demented grandeur, but it’s also abstract, never coalescing into the Botoxed literalism of later Final Fantasy titles. The interface invites you play by making the characters appear like toys. It also has a slideshow of silicon movie and manga images that makes it look as if they are playing with each other. When the underresourced and overworked translator forgets the subject, the text-only dialogue turns into gibberish.

Final Fantasy 7The shadow of great adventure cast on a medium that is too small. The role-playing in the game takes place outside of the screen, when the player falls into the lull of the patchwork visual and textual language and begins to tell themselves stories about what is “really” happening. And once you start telling yourself stories, you exaggerate whatever is in yourself already — you make it cartoon-obvious, like that algorithm that turns photographs into a psychedelic whirl of weird dogs.

Which girl is it? Is Cloud’s true love? Both.

Square Enix

Tifa shaped him, a formative childhood friend who then gave him his fake identity via a magical sci-fi contrivance that functions as a metaphor for Cloud’s off-base beliefs about what she wants him to be. He is helped by her and they end up having sex together under the Highwind after spending the whole game obsessing with each other as kids.

But, before this, Aerith lances Cloud’s protective blister of machismo, laughing with him at his mean jokes and fitting him into a wig and dress. She asks to meet the “real” him, and Cloud returns the favor by remembering the real her, after her death. Disgusted by the idea that she’ll only be remembered as an empty, smiling void, he recalls the independent and flawed person who planned to stop Sephiroth, puts her plan into practice, and is rewarded by an encounter with her spectral presence.

And then Aerith’s hand becomes Tifa’s material hand; as they cling to each other, Tifa and Cloud both agree that, after death, they’ll see Aerith again. Cloud is forced to choose. Cloud’s love for Tifa reminds him why he loved Aerith. His feelings of affection towards Aerith helped him forget the things that kept him from falling in love with Tifa. The girls never compete over him — they love each other, too. Thinking he’s “with” one girl more than the other is missing the point.

Like Cloud Strife who reimagined his self as a false hero after each bad idea that was pumped into it, so we wrote the new game from scratch based on what we believed to be our biases. We also rewrote it based upon how much we didn’t trust pop culture to teach us anything. We had to scramble for Canon’s authoritarian comfort, convincing ourselves the developers were sending coded messages about the official true love via tie-in branded packets of Batchelor’s Pasta ‘n’ Sauce. And at the bottom of it is a remarkable game we never even respected enough to read for what it was — a story just a little different from the conventional shape.