The game sets up these problems for his characterization and then solves them. We see him deal with Aerith’s death and mourn for her, we see him lose Zack, we see him come to terms with his loved ones dying over and over again, and then we see him move on and form connections with the new people in his life. So while Cloud suffers, his character arc is about learning to deal with the trauma, despite his mental health trying to drag him down. This doesn’t solve his problems by any means, but it is a way to help him recover and accept that he has problems so he can continue working through them. At one point, the game even puts the plot on hold so Cloud can figure out who he is as a person-which he only manages to do with the help and support of his friend Tifa. We need more stories with heroes suffering from such a widely misunderstood illness.Ĭloud’s mental health issues work in Final Fantasy VII because the game takes the opportunity to address why he has those issues and gives his character time to work through them. That’s what Cloud’s character also feels like during Advent Children, and although that probably makes him completely unrelatable to many viewers, it’s a characterization that I would wholeheartedly embrace in any other story. It’s like being a corpse pretending to still be alive and simply going through the movements. Sometimes, on bad days, I describe my depression to people as feeling like a ghoul in a person suit. In Advent Children, Cloud is a mere shell of a person. Cloud definitely suffered from depression during Final Fantasy VII, but in the movie, it’s so much more pronounced, and in many ways a bit jarring. So by the time Advent Children rolls around two years later, when Cloud is at the ripe old age of twenty-three, it’s not hard to see why he might suffer from depression. But we are not supposed to assume that Cloud is a mentally healthy individual. We see that he cares about people, even though he has trouble showing it. We get to see him bond with other characters, occasionally make some jokes, and go out of his way to take Aerith on a nice date, even though he clearly doesn’t want to at the time. But despite all that, Cloud still pulls through with the help of his friends. Cloud was a much more relatable person during the game-it’s clear he can’t have as much fun or find enjoyment the way everyone else can, and he’s apathetic to things that cause huge emotional reactions in other characters. Neither the game nor the movie tells us one way or the other whether he has depression, and while we can argue that failing to mention it at all is a bad form of representation, the game at least specifically calls attention to Cloud’s mental state more than once. All these events happen before the first game starts, and what happens to him in the game isn’t much easier.Ĭloud is mind-raped by Sephiroth, gaslit by a scientist named Hojo, and fails to save Aerith’s life. Then, he witnesses his hometown burned to the ground, becomes a victim of human experimentation, and watches his friend Zack be murdered in front of him. Later on, Cloud joins an army, but he doesn’t make the rank he hopes for. At one point, he’s blamed for nearly getting his childhood friend Tifa killed, when in fact he was trying and succeeded to save her life after she wandered off into some monster-filled mountains. As a small child being raised by a single mother, both he and his mother are shunned by the other people in their town for unexplained reasons. Cloud has a bit of a rough life even before the movie begins.
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