fuyu | (no subject)

(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.