fuyu | (no subject)

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ranty

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(I posted this at

canonrants originally, but I think it's a pretty good essay so I'm posting it here too.)

I have FINALLY put my finger on what bothers me so much about Cloud in Kingdom Hearts II, and to a lesser extent Advent Children. I think what it is, is that Nomura has forgotten what about Cloud made him such a good character at the start.

Cloud is a subversion of the "great, strong hero" trope - he's not a very strong person at all, actually. In fact, a good chunk of bad things happen to and around him because of his weakness - he can't get into SOLDIER, and because he's too ashamed of his failure to face Tifa at Nibelheim, she spends half the game unsure of who he really is when he desperately needs her support and belief. And when everything is going to hell later on, he breaks down where Tifa's faith would have bolstered him, and things go a lot worse because of his breakdown. His weakness ends in him spending most of the game as a puppet, screwing things up even as he's trying to fix them, and finally ending up out of his mind and wheelchair-ridden for a significant portion of disc 2. There is a desperate, horrible pathos there. His struggle is meaningful.

In KH2, the part of "pathos" is played by "standing around moping". We never see any hint of just what the hell Cloud is even angsting about. Was it the destruction of Hollow Bastion? Well then he's a great big whinypants, isn't he? They have their world back and they're putting it back together. Even Leon's happy. So, surely it can't be that. Something Sephiroth did, then? Well, while I'm all for filling in the blanks with fanfic, we've been left an awfully big hole here - whatever Sephiroth did, it can't have been what he did in FF7. Considering, you know, the fact that Nibelheim never existed to be burned down, and Aerith is somewhat on the living side. Original canon backstory =/= KH backstory, almost by definition. We never have any sense of why he and Sephiroth are at odds. All we have is "Sephiroth is Cloud's darkness!" and, to be perfectly honest, by this time the word "darkness" has practically lost all meaning. Apparently they're fighting just because they're Cloud and Sephiroth.

I'm generally willing to cut Cloud some slack in Advent Children, at least - while he does spend more time moping than inspiring pathos, he also has pretty much every reason in the world to have given up. An incurable, terminal epidemic has suddenly appeared and affected a huge part of the world's population, and this epidemic can probably be traced to stuff that was HIS FAULT - and oops, he's got it too! Well, that buggers up his promise to live his life out for Zax's sake, doesn't it? Whoops, that must mean Zax's tragic death was all in vain, then, huh? And he's going to have to answer to both of them in the Lifestream... Yeah, his angst is pretty damn justified. I'm just annoyed that he has to have this elemental confrontation with Sephiroth AGAIN.

Fighting Sephiroth is not the only thing Cloud does. He's a subversion of the strong hero, yes, by being weak - but there's additional subversion, here, of just what being "weak" means. Yeah, he fails at getting into SOLDIER - he also then takes down Sephiroth after Zax failed to, through sheer bull-headed determination. Sure, he's not man enough to face Tifa after he washed out of SOLDIER - but he's man enough to infiltrate the Don's house in a dress for her sake. Of course, Mako poisoning completely shatters his mind - but with a little help from Tifa, he pulls himself back together into a relatively healthy, functioning human. Twice. The important thing about him isn't that he's weak. It's that he is a stubborn son of a bitch and fights through his weakness and overcomes it. We see him at his worst, and then we get him back at his best.

That's what makes Cloud such a great character. And that's what's absent in Kingdom Hearts 2, and could have stood to be brought out a little more in Advent Children. Cloud isn't, and shouldn't be, defined by his conflict with Sephiroth - that conflict is the backdrop and the means by which he fights the weaknesses and failures that do define him, and emerges a better person for it.

Nomura seems to have forgotten all that. Which is why we get a shallow, two-dimensional, and fucking irritating Cloud in KH2 who pretty much only exists to be angsty and have a cool battle sequence with Sephiroth, instead of a three-dimensional character with a life and personality who we can relate to and love.

And that is why KH Cloud pisses me off.

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And with KH there's the added factor that half the lead characters are children who are in the process of having their lives continuously shattered appart and yet still manage to remain strong and hopeful in the face of this. Hell, Riku's pretty much the antithesis type of Cloud's character type, the one who broke everything because he was too strong and is now in the process of trying to fix it.

(That said, Cloud is still my woobie and I appreciate him running around the KHverse being all pretty, even if I do wish he'd keep his mouth shut unless to snark. And getting pierced with phallic swords in AC. I am very shallow and they will always remain the pairing that made me 'get' the point of yaoi.)

YES, that too. Though Riku's problem never struck me so much as being that he's "too strong", so much as that he has no middle ground whatsoever - he can be incredibly strong or he can be incredibly weak. Steel and glass, is how I think of it.

... actually I find him very similar to Cloud in that respect. Something hit him in his glass spots and he broke, and broke a lot of other shit on his way down, and now he's putting it back together again.

Anyway.

(Oh, yes. I would actually have been perfectly content if all he'd had was that brief bit of snark with Leon, because that was exactly right and wonderful. And yes, he does contribute quite a bit to the scenery. Man, I miss his KH1 incarnation.

... XD)

. . . you do realise I immediately thought "So Riku is a non-Newtonian fluid?"

...

Yes. That's

exactly

what Riku is. XD

Now I feel like doing a character essay or...something xD

Du eet. XD

But I don't know for who or what xD

Very true, Cloud's one of those characters who doesn't get enough credit. Anyone who says he has no personality wasn't paying enough attention.

I prefer KH fic that uses FF backstories, just because I can't feel like I know these characters without their defining backgrounds attached. In particular, KH's Cid Highwind refuses to mesh with my knowledge of who Cid is and how he reacts to people (and the idea of Cid raising Yuffie is a whole lot funnier with their original feisty selves).

He has tons of personality! Poor Cloud. :<

... haha, funnily enough I'm almost the exact opposite. XD Most of the time, unless a really good author is doing it and making it interesting, FF backgrounds in KH fics just annoy me. XD To me it's like, why do the extra work to force the square peg of FF canon into the round hole of KH canon, when there's a whole fun new world you can play with?

WORDY MCWORDWORD, YO.

Cloud always managed to piss me off in KH and KH2.

In the first KH, I raised my brow. What the hell, he's decked out in Vincent's clothes and angsting just like Vincent would. Quiet, broody, aloof, but not entirely heartless. Honestly, I don't think he was acting like Cloud at all. Can Cloud angst? Oh yeah sure he can! But more like out loud arrrgh all this is my fault HOW CAN I FIX IT?

KH2!Cloud just pissed me off more. Argh. XD If Leon is happy and Cloud is not, I see something very wrong here.

♥

I dunno, in KH1 he hit the right notes with me. Sure he was Vincenty, but he was also going out and getting shit done and talking back to Hades and at the end going "yeah, I fucked that one up" without, it seemed to me, so much dwelling as just having a mope before moving on. I mean, when Sora encourages him, he encourages back. And even jokes with him!

And, importantly, he felt like he fit with the KH universe. In KH2, he just feels awkwardly transplanted. That scene with Leon is fantastic (and still amuses me at how it was almost a 1:1 translation from Japanese, little to no modification necessary - testosterone is the same in all languages!), but the rest... bleah.

(Passing thought: KH1 Cloud never fought Sephiroth. At least not until Final Mix. That may be part of why I like him so much! He's not defined by the Sephiroth conflict like he is in EVERY OTHER APPEARANCE HE'S EVER HAD.)

Your characterization rants are so spot-on. *gnaws on them* Honestly, I was willing to give AC!Cloud less slack than you were.

KH!Cloud needs moar spite and spine, altogether. :[

I wasn't always this forgiving of him - mostly it hit me when I was watching the dub and he was at the grave - something about hearing his woe at that point in English made me go "ohhhhhhh."

He does. :< I still like him in KH1, but in KH2 he just fails.

To my surprise, some people are pissed that Leon in KH actually smiled and was happy. XD but I don't know if that was a reactionary 'damn it, that should be Cloud' thing on their part or not. Regardless, I think you've pretty much got it here.

I suppose what annoys me about KH in general is that I can never quite tell if they actually come from Hollow Bastion, or there's some deeper thing going on with this memory rewriting that means they actually have been screwed around with by time and space, and originally DID come from their games.

...but I suppose I'm giving Nomura way too much credit. I mean, dude.

Zack 'Fair'. Riiiiiiight. (man, I need to make an icon making fun of that name. XD)

:3

KH could be a leetle more consistent with the canon, that's for sure.

XD I still need to make that "My Fair SOLDIER" icon.

WORD.

I've also written my own character analysis of Cloud, and strangely enough I came up with the "Chivalrious Knight" type XD;; Want a link?

I've never played FFVII and I still know he's horribly out of character.

A few notes on Kingdom Hearts and Advent Children Cloud.
One thing that's weird is the implication that Cloud and Sephiroth (and possibly Tifa) aren't from Hollow Bastion/Radiant Garden, if we're to assume that the "Did they go back to their own world?" comment wasn't a gaffe on someone's part, so it's entirely possible that Cloud's homeworld is still gone in KH2, giving him room to angst. On the other hand, the fact that Cloud is still obsessing over Sephiroth is a bit strange, given that he isn't even really a villain in the game. In fact, he doesn't do anything really, except show up to taunt Cloud. Sure, he plays around with Sora for a bit, but when Sora proves too tough to squash but too weak to be a real threat, he says "I'm bored now, go do something useful and find Cloud for me."
One way of looking at it is that Sephiroth lost his own independent existence and is relying on Cloud's darkness to sustain himself, which is why he goes out of his way to piss him off, and why he nearly panics when it looks like Tifa is getting through to him. If this is true, it's possible that Cloud is moping because Sephiroth is, when we're not looking, running around making his life miserable to keep him in the darkness.
Advent Children wise, it was mostly compressed because of time limits, I think. He had to have a character arc or the movie would have been total fanservice instead of just mostly fanservice, but it had to be one that was easy enough to overcome in the time allotted. Plot-wise it may have worked better if Aeris's Great Gospel had, instead of just curing the Geostigma, actually washed away the JENOVA cells, meaning that Cloud would have to learn to be strong again after losing all his SOLDIER-First Class Plus abilities, but there was really no way to do that in the time they had.
On a side note, given that the Great Gospel didn't wash away the JENOVA cells, Denzel and the others would now seem to be essentially SOLDIERs. Wonder what the implications of that are.

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