cryoftheplanet:Among the cast, Aeris is exceptional. This isn’t a matter of her heritage or her abil

cryoftheplanet:Among the cast, Aeris is exceptional. This isn’t a matter of her heritage or her ability, however exceptional those might also be, but a matter of her outlook. By motif, Aeris is a “flower blooming in the slums,” something hopeful and tenacious and a little bit miraculous. She has grown up in bleak surroundings with an abundance of personal pain, and it certainly has an effect on her, but unlike much of the cast, she refuses to let it corrode her.The thing to understand about Aeris is that she is not primarily kind. She’s certainly not unkind, but it’s not kindness that is her defining trait, the unique thing about her that insulates her from the darkness around her. Rather, it’s her ability to look forward with faith and inward with honesty. While the rest of AVALANCHE leaves Midgar with vengeance in mind, Aeris’ pain drives her to self-discovery. She feels her emotions without indulging in their negativity, and gets impatient with other characters (Cloud with his constant fretting or Barret when he’s lashing out) when they don’t do the same. She wants to understand herself and her history and how to carry on, questions that the rest of the cast eventually arrive at long after she’s gone, and questions that prove to be fundamentally self-healing to explore.She does, however, insist on going through this process alone. It’s in her proclivity for self-isolation and secret-keeping that we see the way growing up “different” in a way that took her in and out of Shinra’s labs had a profound impact on her. Though she’s very friendly and usually very forthcoming with her opinions, her deepest and darkest are things she always tries to carry by herself. She’s the one character who never lays things out for us - her backstory is recounted to us by Elmyra, and she doesn’t share with us what she’s learned about the White Materia, or the details of her parentage. Her thoughts on her heritage become more sparse the more she learns about it.Part of why she hides so many personal details must be habit born of prudence - it wouldn’t help her evade Shinra to go around telling everybody, after all - but I think that as much as she wants to understand herself and her legacy, she wants as well to be seen as normal and not exceptional. Exceptional killed her mother and saw her trapped in a lab for the formative years of her life, yes, but it’s also something vast that always risks drowning out the rest of who she is as a person. She may be an Ancient, but she is also herself, and she seems to want to be so authentically.Characters like this, who hide the weight of their great cosmic destiny but seem cheerful on the outside, are often revealed to be hiding their struggle behind a smile. I think this is never the case with Aeris. Fierce independence and occasionally foolhardy confidence are character traits that go hand in hand with a desire to explore and experience the world around her as well as the world within. She seizes on whatever adventure is put in front of her, whether that’s flirting with the mysterious stranger that just fell through her roof or insisting on having a good time at the amusement park when they’re supposed to be hunting Sephiroth. The vibrance she shows through all of it is deeply genuine, and Tifa is right in more ways than one when she says that Aeris very much wanted to live. -- source link

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