In Honor Of Me Finally Recovering From This Flare Up (GRARGH.) I Am Inflicting My Ache On Vincent.

reeve being anxious about one thing or another but vincent and cid (and yuffie and shelke, sometimes) are always there to help him

always catching when he's overthinking something

dragging him away from wro hq to go out with them for dinner

being with him after some sort of scare, so he knows they're all okay

helping him get through panic attacks, if and when he has them

yuffie sends him updates when she's away in wutai, or on a mission

shelke updates reeve on cid and vincent, since neither of them are technology experts, and she's with them all the time anyway.

cid likes to have reeve "help" him bake (reeve just sits there, and they talk, mostly.)

vincent takes naps on reeve when he's home, since reeve always seems to worry the most about vincent.

okay this is just me being mad about something irrelevant so feel free to skip this one but! i was scrolling away on youtube, as a bored final fantasy fan who was away from home does. then, i find this video:

i see this and go 'oh my gosh, my favorite. an uninformed idiot made a whole video. can't wait to hate watch!" little did i know i would barely make it two minutes in. i save the video, and when i get home, i start dinner and turn this on.

according to this guy, the first thing the game "doesn't tell you"... is what punisher mode is. you know, the like, major function of cloud's kit. that they explain. and i was so mad i closed the video, went downstairs to my faithful ps5, and slotted the data disc into it to redownload the whole game to prove this guy wrong.

a half hour later (i went and finished my dinner while it was downloading dw) i start a new game, and lo and behold, literally like, four battles in, is the explanation for punisher mode:

JESUS CHRIST. WHAT THE FUCK??? anyway. i was so mad and i'm literally right and i don't care i just needed this out of my noggin.

i love leslie kyle. he's:

1) helping literal terrorists go do more terrorism bc at least they're not his sex trafficking mob boss

2) just looking for his fiancee/girlfriend (he says girlfriend in TKAA:ATSS but says fiancee in remake continuity so...)

3) going to eventually becomes friends/coworkers with kyrie canaan. the future angel of the slums kyrie canaan.

4) voiced by mark whitten. i just like him, really.

5) still wearing that UGLY LEOPARD PRINT JACKET. STILL.

on my rebirth replay i had the stellar idea to write down the loveless prelude and compare it to the "original" loveless poem. also it's color-coded.

later i'm gonna think harder about my big "explore differences" note. maybe on the airplane. i mean, what do you do on an airplane anyway? analyze fictional religious poetry.

thinking about final fantasy vii dads today...

cloud and tifa have a weird thing going with their parents, where cloud lost his dad very young/didn't grow up with his dad, only living with claudia, and tifa has the exact opposite, where her mom died when she was young (leading to the og nibelheim incident /hj) and she grew up mostly with brian, until both claudia and brian died in the (second) nibelheim incident.

brian lockhart was obviously very protective of tifa, not wanting her to go up mount nibel in the first place with sephiroth, zack, and cloud to check on the reactor. then he died in front of her up in the reactor a week later...

while barret doesn't talk about his parents, he is a dad, and he sure has complicated feelings about that!! what with dyne being his best friend, and myrna not being able to be there with him, caring for marlene through all that loss must be crazy.

aerith's dad literally helped create sephiroth. professor gast was a craaazy dude lowkey. and he's so irrelevant in her life it kills me a little. i hope we see gast in pt. 3. and tell him his daughter is fuckin' dead.

nanaki has a weird thing with seto, too, where he believed him to be a coward, just to learn that in all actuallity, seto sacrificed the life he could have had with his wife and nanaki to protect cosmo canyon, so nanaki wouldn't feel the need to make a similiar, self-sacrificing choice.

yuffie and godo... her anger at him in the remake trilogy has me hooked. sonon seemed to think he was a great guy, and yuffie adamantly argued the opposite. i cannot WAIT to see him in pt. 3. i cannot wait to find out what is going on. she hates him so much right now, for the sake of her country.

does cid have a dad thing? ...i don't think so. neither does reeve/cait sith... well. i didn't forget them. they're mentioned.

vincent and grimoire... another thing i hope they explore in pt. 3... or in a DoC remake (PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE REMAKE IT.) the literal 4 minutes of grimoire screentime that explains absolutely nothing about their relationship, or grimoire's research, or... ANYTHING. i'm so. curious. he came in, flirted with lucrecia, and died. ARGH TELL ME MORE!!!

also, not a party member, but the whole "president shinra having multiple illegitimate sons" thing always makes me hate that guy a little more. lazard and evan i love you guys. rufus i love you too but your daddy issues are a different flavor.

day dreaming about commissioning someone to draw rufus and tseng from my own fic. i know what i want it to look like but i can't draw for the LIFE OF ME.

imagine. it's sunset in junon. rufus and tseng stand side by side, rufus leaning over the railing on the airstrip. rufus is looking over the ocean, tseng is not-so-subtly looking lovingly at rufus. rufus is in a baby blue sweater vest, a white dress shirt underneath, khakis and dress shoes. a jacket tied over his shoulders, a platinum wristwatch on his wrist. his hair is gelled back. tseng is out of uniform too- a deep red silky dress shirt, not quite buttoned all the way up. he's wearing black slacks and his holster, his hair down and cascading over his shoulders.

is the vision there?? do we see it?? do we hate it??

LOOK WHO CAME IN THE MAIL!!!!! HE'S SO SMALL. AND SO CUTE. RENOOOOOOOO :D

i finished the game and I'M RIGHT! WHERE IS MY DoC FOUND FAMILY CONTENT??? i gotta do it myself (i was doing it already but was i nervous shelke was gonna die so i left her out just in case but she DOESN'T!)

started dirge of cerberus, here's my main takeaway so far:

reeve, cid, and vincent have two daughters, yuffie and shelke.

three dads, two daughters.

am i close 🤨

HA HA HA HA HA HA. HA HA HA HA HA HA!

rewatched advent children (complete) recently and it really just makes me so sad for kadaj. i mean, loz and yazoo don't even feel like people in the way that kadaj does- they don't have the sass and snark of sephiroth, they don't command a room the way that sephiroth does. but all kadaj wanted was to be loved. he wanted to be wanted, and his creation led him to believe he could only be loved by jenova (who is incapable of love) by becoming sephiroth, by becoming someone else entirely. kadaj is not sephiroth, he is a remnant of who jenova made sephiroth into. he isn't even a remnant of who sephiroth truly was- of the man that angeal and genesis and zack and lazard and glenn and matt and lucia got to know. kadaj likely doesn't know who any of these people are- because jenova didn't care about who sephiroth was, only his power as her puppet, her pawn. kadaj was never going to get what he wanted, and that fucking sucks.