Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth set the fandom back twenty years
I once learned about British politics at school. I don’t remember the details, but our teacher showed us one video of a rancorous debate in the House of Commons. The shouts of MPs echoed through the chambers, and people jeered disapprovingly at anyone speaking into a microphone. People sat next to each other like a loose mosh pit and waved papers at each other. It’s unruly, it’s chaotic – and it’s also exactly how I imagine the shippers of Cloti and Clerith would feel if you got them all together and threw them into one room to debate the best love interests for Final fantasy 7 main character Cloud Strife.
Fans of Final fantasy 7 and its associated compilation media have been debating the right fit for the brooding mercenary since 1997. On the one hand, we have Cloti – a combination between Cloud and Tifa Lockhart, Cloud’s childhood best friend. On the other side is Clerith, who argues that Cloud should be with Aerith Gainsborough, a cheerful and carefree sorceress who Cloud meets on his travels.
Every time I think the fandom’s interest in one of the greatest ship wars in video game history has finally died down, the dormant beast is reawakened. Square Enix came out last winter Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth, and its arrival has unleashed new havoc on the fandom. The events depicted in the recent remake – and the conversations surrounding them – set the fandom back twenty years.
(Ed. remark: This post contains spoilers for the intimate date scene shared between Cloud and Tifa and other events Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.)
User-created fan sites from the early 2000s captured the feelings of both sides of the great ship war. Even then, people who supported either pairing spewed profanity and hatred towards the other character they didn’t deliver with Cloud. You could read rants on anti-Aerith sites about how she was a “pure bitch” for taking Cloud away from Tifa, or go to Clerith forums to read about a supporter dragging Tifa because she had “big airbag breasts” . Anything that could be used as ammunition on either side would be – no matter how insignificant or downright irrelevant the details might be. Some fans even analyzed details like the supposed secret meaning behind the color of Tifa’s skirt. (You can read Polygon’s deep dive into this era of fandom here.)
Image: Square Enix via Polygon
In the years since, Square Enix has continued to release new remakes FF7-related media, and that has only given fans more fodder to support both sides. Final Fantasy 7 Remake shows a loving, budding friendship between Tifa and Aerith, with Cloud’s overall storyline not leaning too heavily on either person in terms of romance, but then Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth everything went one step further. That’s because Cloud and Tifa kiss! In that scene and several others, Rebirth seems to be going all in on Cloud and Tifa. The dates and cutscenes vary depending on the dialogue choices you make and the quests you choose, but even if you don’t get to see Cloud on an intimate date with Tifa, the two will almost kiss regardless of your date choices on another point in the movie. the story. And no matter what you do, Cloud doesn’t share a kiss on the lips with any other character.
Yes, we are talking about who kisses whom on the lips. (Even when we’re talking about the facts, the conversations around this feel super elementary.) But now those moments in the game, and many more, seem almost ready to arm supporters of both characters with a military-grade arsenal to their silk. On the day of the game’s release, users shared clips of various date scenes with Cloud on Rebirth lit the fire of the fans’ passion and has not been extinguished since.
The anger between the two groups began to ping-pong back and forth at an alarming rate. In a post on A screenshot of that post ended up on the Cloti subreddit, prompting passionate responses like this one from one user called Riskedbiscuit, who wrote: “Classic Clerith deranged behavior. They clearly don’t play the games and just think Tifa is ‘bullying’ Cloud when she wasn’t. She tried to invite him to things but he wouldn’t go because of her friends and he wanted Tifa for himself… not for her fault. They just blame her for everything, probably some of them think Tifa killed Aerith. Bunch of media-illiterate clowns trying so hard to twist the story for their ship. I can’t imagine being so miserable and stupid.”
Image: Square Enix via Polygon
In Rebirth, Cloud struggles with his mysterious connection to Sephiroth and often lashes out at those around him, including both Aerith and Tifa. In one message, X user CloudxAerith wrote, “cIotis has been anticipating and rejoicing since 2015 using cloud collapse where it hits aerith and this is what they got,” and the tweet includes a clip of Cloud pushing Tifa to the ground. In answer, X user Mudiscorp said, “now that we can use the same weapon as them, they say ‘but he was controlled by sephiroth’. Ohhh the karma.”
Just one scroll through the deluge of footage defending both sides takes me back to the early 2000s fans expressing anger at each other’s favorite characters. Members of the fandom continue to muddle with both fictional characters, and even the methods of analysis have remained the same. (People still shout about supposedly “unbiased” translations of the Final Fantasy Ultimania archiving books.)
The difference now? In a world where these disparate fan communities have been brought together on sites like Reddit, X and TikTok, the anger has shifted even more to personal attacks on the posters themselves. If you’re a Tifa supporter, it’s not enough to hate Aerith anymore, you also have to hate everyone who ships Aerith. A Tifa supporter can easily search and find an Aerith fan profile and respond to their posts. Fan accounts can quote and tweet claims, which in turn serve as a place to build upon a particular claim or argument.
Image: Square Enix via Polygon
Even if a fan doesn’t go out of their way to find accounts and recordings they disagree with, they can still encounter content from the other side. In my own experience, the TikTok algorithm has shown me both Cloti and Clerith content, likely because I’ve expressed interest in watching videos about Final fantasy 7. It seems to me that the TikTok algorithm could easily send Cloti content to a Clerith fan, or vice versa, and cause more conflict.
It’s important to remember that these extreme examples are not representative of the entire fandom, or of every Clerith and Tifa shipper. This week I saw another one nice post on Reddit from an Aerith fan who just wanted to highlight her favorite moments from the combination. There’s plenty to love about all three characters. Final Fantasy Remake showed us that Cloud, Aerith and Tifa would do that provide great company, Actually. Better yet, it showed us that the date we were meant to see all along might be the one between Tifa and Aerith, as the two make plans to go on a date yourself.
I have no problem with shipping. Talking about romantic pairings helps create online communities around games, and for me, it increases my enjoyment of a series. The shippers of Cloti and Clerith have given us a gift sultry fanfic, flashy video editsAnd cute art. It’s just that sometimes these sides can get a little aggressive and spoil the fun for people who are just there for the good times. Part of that is because of the way social media works these days, but the fighting also continues because we just can’t say for sure who would be the better match. Clerith versus Cloti is a war that cannot be won – and perhaps that is why this war has lasted so long.