Aerith. What can I say about Aerith? I’m in love with Aerith, but everyone is a little bit in love with Aerith. That’s my girl, my sister, my daughter, my everything. She’s wonderful, she’s perfect, she’d never hurt me, she breaks my heart. I think about how much I want her to have a long, happy life, and I literally cry because she never will.
I’ll always love the end of Rebirth because finally, over a quarter of a century after losing her the first time, I got to say goodbye. I didn’t have to wonder if she knew that she would be missed. I know that she knew she was loved.
Aerith, my girl, I’m so sorry.
💞 All the people I ship romantically with this character
My favorite ship for Aerith is an OT3 with Zack and Cissnei, although I ship her with both individually as well. Zack is canonically indicated to be in a relationship with both of them at the same time in CC (adding his parents recognizing Aerith from letters alone in Rebirth really drives this home, since they also met with Cissnei several months prior and seemingly encouraged her to marry Zack), and the way Cissnei talks about Aerith is so…I dunno, there’s a sort of reverence there that you don’t hear from her regarding anyone else. They’re all good for each other, and they’re best for each other all together.
I don’t actually personally ship her with Tifa (to everyone’s surprise, I assume, given what a raging lesbian I am), but I really appreciate the concept and am in full support regardless of whether I personally feel like they have romantic chemistry.
🤝 My non-romantic OTP for this character
Tifa is a big one—I wish they’d gotten their shopping date with Cloud playing pack chocobo—but my favorite platonic relationship for Aerith is Tseng. Jailer and savior, protector and manipulator, everything she’d ever need and never want all at once, the relationship between Tseng and Aerith is complicated to say the least. There’s no doubt that they love each other, but the ways they express love are very different, the roles into which they were both forcibly cast are very different, so it’s hard to say if either of them ever really knew how the other felt before it was too late.
I hope they did, though.
🚫 My unpopular opinion about this character
I feel like any Aerith opinion is gonna be massively unpopular somewhere in the fandom, but I guess my most unpopular opinion is that she can’t be saved any more than Sephiroth can. If Aerith survives, she isn’t in the Lifestream to petition Gaia for aid, Holy never activates, Meteor flattens the planet. Rocks fall and everyone dies. Literally. She and Sephiroth are the scales of power during the Crisis, and they balance one another perfectly without Cloud to tip the situation one way or the other. They cancel one another out, and that means neither of them can be saved—not without the other, anyway.
If Aerith were to survive in the City of the Ancients, Sephiroth would win. Just like if Sephiroth were to have survived in Nibelheim, Aerith would have won—or, more accurately, she never would have had to join the fray in the first place. If one of them makes it through their destined death, they both do. If one of them dies, they both have to die. I could go into the parallels in detail (Cloud having an opportunity and the impetus to strike Aerith down even though he loved her, but not taking it, Genesis having an opportunity and the impetus to strike Sephiroth down even though he loved him, but not taking it; Sephiroth dying on one side of the Masamune in the place where his progenitor was imprisoned, Aerith dying on the other side of the Masamune in the place where her progenitors once thrived) but this is long enough already.
Aerith had to die, and she understood that. The hard part is that nobody else does.
🌟 One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon
I want to see little Aerith and Babyroth interacting in Shinra’s labs. I don’t know if this ever happened, but there was plenty of overlap during which it could have, so I like to think it did. I don’t think we’ll ever see it, but it would be so good…
Aerith: I mean, you were a weird dog at the time, so I’m not surprised. Angeal: I was what? Aerith: A weird dog. You were also possessing your old supervisor, but I missed that part. Angeal: What. Aerith: You were also, like, a lot of gryphons. And sahagins. And a manticore! Angeal: I was…when? In what order? Aerith: No, no, all at the same time. Before your supervisor, though. Made you kinda bonkers, but the whole thing was kinda bonkers so I get it. Angeal: I think I need to sit down. Aerith: You electrocuted my first boyfriend with your ass. Angeal: Maybe you need to sit down.
Tseng is…kind of adopted? His parents had emigrated to Midgar before he was born, but were killed when he was about seven or eight; because of the circumstances around their deaths, he wound up as a ward of Shinra.
This is also what happened with Cissnei, but where she was placed in a company facility that gave her a basic education and significantly more than basic military training, Tseng was placed in what amounts to a Shinra-funded foster home with a half-dozen other kids of varying ages. He was also given an education, put through the Academy with his foster siblings and trained up until he caught Veld’s eye and was inducted into the Turks. Although he doesn’t talk about them to basically anyone, Tseng is actually still in intermittent contact with his foster siblings.
12. Crack headcanon?
Tseng lost his virginity to Genesis. They were teenagers, Tseng was on assignment, vodka was involved. Genesis would have no problem talking about it, but he swore to Tseng that he wouldn’t say a single word to anyone, at least within Shinra.
…By the time Genesis returns to the world in late 2010, Shinra no longer exists, so Tseng gets to live in fear that he’s going to reveal this absolutely ridiculous secret to some tabloid. Or to Kunsel. He’s not sure which would be worse.
15. Worst thing they’ve ever done?
If you ask him, this is tied between going along with the order to drop the Sector 7 plate, and allowing Aerith to leave with Avalanche. The plate killed hundreds of thousands of people just on top, never mind the innumerable people underneath, people that Shinra doesn’t really register as people and therefore don’t count among the casualties of the event.
The idea that one person’s death could possibly be equivocal to this makes Tseng sound selfish at the very least, if not outright monstrous—but when Aerith died, her entire species was lost. She was the last daughter of the Planet’s chosen children, the very last of her kind. Regardless of how much or how little she understood of her birthright, how much or how little she knew of the culture to which she was heir, her death wasn’t just the loss of one person.
Aerith’s death was the loss of an entire world, and Tseng allowed it to happen by letting her leave in the first place.
50. A memory they’ve blocked out?
Tseng doesn’t do this. He just doesn’t. He’d probably be better off with regard to emotional regulation if he did do this, but he doesn’t.
Sephiroth looks like Aerith’s little brother who dressed up really nice for her wedding and will end the evening by throwing a wine glass full of strawberry ramune at the groom’s racist uncle.
