Cloud "couldn't finish him," as is the way of Disc One sub-villains — Tifa tactfully does NOT say, "because you took him on solo instead of letting us help, you ninny"
The sudden compulsion of "I KNOW WHAT TO DO" made him get a few wires crossed on what was actually smart to do. (...come to think of it, that could probably describe a few other things.)
I assumed Aerith playing the martyr card was more her offering to be a distraction while they got out--Shinra wants her alive, she can rush at them and make a struggle while AVALANCHE slips out the other way. ...So still martyr-y and like Barret ever would have gone with that anyway, but less...distressed damselish. May be wishful thinking on my part. Hooray for Barret shooting it down anyway.
And the descriptions of Barret and Cloud in this just amuse me. Although:
Okay, gather round boys and girls, Uncle Cloud will play the part of Maechen tonight.
Maechen would be appalled at the way Uncle Cloud ended that flashback. Shaaaaame.
[Side note: Nibelheim is Nilfheim, "Mist home," the home of the dwarves (miners) in Norse mythology. So there's the mist-motif in yet another Final Fantasy.]
A lot of people like connecting it to Cloud's name too (Clouds and mist being both made up of water--so Nibelheim could be considered "Cloud's home", in a way).
...One other fun tidbit of names, though I only know this through the FF wiki--apparently in the coding, one of the grunts is "Zax", the other "Zako". "Zax" is, well, the source of our unreliable narration, "Zako" is a kind of degrading term that pretty much means "cannon fodder". The blueshirt. Makes me wish I could look at the coding because there's moments before blueshirt's death when I can't tell which one should be the future protagonist. I mean, was Cloud more likely to be the one trying to imitate Zack (seems right), then saying he didn't really want to be SOLDIER (huh? ...okay, this could make some sense if he was sour graping), or is he the one whispering that Zack shouldn't be goofing off (makes sense for him wanting this visit to be clean and cut, in-town, out-of-town, no-one-finds-out-he's-really-a-nobody?) Pretty much trivial in the long run but it still makes me curious.
I'm pretty sure Tifa's supposed to read as brittle, given Barret's sheepish reaction to her objection.
Oh dear. Didn't Elmyra say the same thing, slightly more tactfully?
Makes me wonder if Cloud's superimposing what she said onto Mr. Lockhart now--since after all's said and done, it's unlikely he actually had this conversation with Tifa's father.
Sephiroth declares that he's an Ancient created from Jenova by Professor Gast's research. So why did he think he was a monster created via high exposures to Mako? Is that how the Ancients incubated their babies?
I think the "Jenova" inscription being near all the monsters created via high exposures to mako is what led to that logical leap in the first place.
Cloud adds (how does he know?) that Shinra shipped Jenova's body back to Midgar.
I think this is just awkward translation/writing getting in the way again--it's not really THAT puzzling how Jenova might have gotten from one Shinra-controlled facility to another Shinra-controlled facility in the first place. His line would read a little better if he said something like "Shinra must have shipped it" rather than just "Shinra shipped it", but the logic isn't that weird or anything. (Actually I think Aerith's questioning is just badly set up here--the real oddness is that Jenova, headless spook, disappeared from Shinra HQ, and that's her next question and it's still weirdly phrased.)
translation totally mangled the pathos of his statement
FF7: the eternal question of if translation is at fault, or if Cloud's own emotional/mental quirks are. At least, I'm never quite sure...
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2013-09-29 02:55 am (UTC)The sudden compulsion of "I KNOW WHAT TO DO" made him get a few wires crossed on what was actually smart to do. (...come to think of it, that could probably describe a few other things.)
I assumed Aerith playing the martyr card was more her offering to be a distraction while they got out--Shinra wants her alive, she can rush at them and make a struggle while AVALANCHE slips out the other way. ...So still martyr-y and like Barret ever would have gone with that anyway, but less...distressed damselish. May be wishful thinking on my part. Hooray for Barret shooting it down anyway.
And the descriptions of Barret and Cloud in this just amuse me. Although:
Okay, gather round boys and girls, Uncle Cloud will play the part of Maechen tonight.
Maechen would be appalled at the way Uncle Cloud ended that flashback. Shaaaaame.
[Side note: Nibelheim is Nilfheim, "Mist home," the home of the dwarves (miners) in Norse mythology. So there's the mist-motif in yet another Final Fantasy.]
A lot of people like connecting it to Cloud's name too (Clouds and mist being both made up of water--so Nibelheim could be considered "Cloud's home", in a way).
...One other fun tidbit of names, though I only know this through the FF wiki--apparently in the coding, one of the grunts is "Zax", the other "Zako". "Zax" is, well, the source of our unreliable narration, "Zako" is a kind of degrading term that pretty much means "cannon fodder". The blueshirt. Makes me wish I could look at the coding because there's moments before blueshirt's death when I can't tell which one should be the future protagonist. I mean, was Cloud more likely to be the one trying to imitate Zack (seems right), then saying he didn't really want to be SOLDIER (huh? ...okay, this could make some sense if he was sour graping), or is he the one whispering that Zack shouldn't be goofing off (makes sense for him wanting this visit to be clean and cut, in-town, out-of-town, no-one-finds-out-he's-really-a-nobody?) Pretty much trivial in the long run but it still makes me curious.
I'm pretty sure Tifa's supposed to read as brittle, given Barret's sheepish reaction to her objection.
Oh dear. Didn't Elmyra say the same thing, slightly more tactfully?
Makes me wonder if Cloud's superimposing what she said onto Mr. Lockhart now--since after all's said and done, it's unlikely he actually had this conversation with Tifa's father.
Sephiroth declares that he's an Ancient created from Jenova by Professor Gast's research. So why did he think he was a monster created via high exposures to Mako? Is that how the Ancients incubated their babies?
I think the "Jenova" inscription being near all the monsters created via high exposures to mako is what led to that logical leap in the first place.
Cloud adds (how does he know?) that Shinra shipped Jenova's body back to Midgar.
I think this is just awkward translation/writing getting in the way again--it's not really THAT puzzling how Jenova might have gotten from one Shinra-controlled facility to another Shinra-controlled facility in the first place. His line would read a little better if he said something like "Shinra must have shipped it" rather than just "Shinra shipped it", but the logic isn't that weird or anything. (Actually I think Aerith's questioning is just badly set up here--the real oddness is that Jenova, headless spook, disappeared from Shinra HQ, and that's her next question and it's still weirdly phrased.)
translation totally mangled the pathos of his statement
FF7: the eternal question of if translation is at fault, or if Cloud's own emotional/mental quirks are. At least, I'm never quite sure...