Valenwind - backround
Journal Entry: Wed Jul 16, 2008, 4:01 PM
Spoilers: The whole game.
Pairing: Cid/vincent
Space Aliens of Death – Final Fantasy VII
Final Fantasy VII is a video game with a convoluted storyline that hails from a long, proud legacy of video games with convoluted story lines. It mostly revolves around the main character Cloud and his multiple psychological issues, plus amoral corporations and the resident Silver Haired Evil Guy, whose main goal in life is to fulfill his Oedipal Complex wet dream and take over the planet for alien mommy…by smashing a giant rock into the planet.
Nobody ever claimed that this made much sense.
In the midst of all this chaos, there are two party members – one who is so worshiped among the fans that his personality has often been twisted beyond recognition, and the other, widely ignored in the grand scheme of fandom. Vincent Valentine is an ex-Turk, a gunman, a man with a past so heavy it’s a wonder he hasn’t collapsed. Cid Highwind is a man of rough edges, rough praise, and a rough mouth, and he had more dreams shattered in a week than most people do in a lifetime.
Also, they’re totally doing it.
God Damned Tea! – Captain Cid Highwind
A lot of Cid’s past is unclear – we know he worked for Shinra, and what fanon there is for him holds that he was in the air force at one point, most likely during the Wutai War. What we do know is that Cid was the main drive behind the Shinra Space Program, and put his heart and soul into reaching the stars, because his first and true love is the sky. Unfortunately, Cid himself had to stop the launch and ‘sabotage’ his rocket, partially because of a malfunction, and partially because of a fellow scientist named Shera. More than a little bitter and angry, he waited for the space program to be restarted, but it never happened. Having had his dreams thoroughly stomped on by Shinra, Cid decided to go stomp on them a little.
He does eventually get to the stars, but that comes later.
Never let it be said that Cid Highwind does anything half assed. Here is a man who loves, hates, dreams, and verbally abuses people with all of his heart. Cid’s first appearance in the game involves him waxing absolutely poetic about his beloved rocket with the enthusiasm most people grant to something made of solid gold. He then proceeds to swear up, down and sideways at Shera, showing just how well he interacts with other people.
Cid isn’t a bad person. In fact, he’s quite nice. He just has absolutely no idea how to handle people, and more often than not deals with any feelings that don’t fall under the category of ‘oooh, shiny plane’ or ‘happy’ by transmuting them into anger. He’s got a lot on his mind the most of the time, and can sometimes come off as gruffly depressed – he’s certainly rather cynical at times. However, he’s by no means downtrodden or angsty, Cid’s just seen a lot of the world, and it hasn’t been very keen on showering him with good fortune. But still, he manages to cling to hope, no matter what happens, and that makes him a very strong character.
Once the bunch of people thrown together by hatred and circumstance begins to coalesce into a real team, it’s easier to see Cid’s true colors. He takes his responsibility to people seriously, and has an instinct to protect. He’s very gruff and short with words, but he’ll be the first one to try and help. He goes so far as to take over leadership of the group for a time, even though they dump it in his lap while he’s sleeping, and keeps them going even though Cloud is having a bit of an episode. Cid prefers to rely on his own powers, and the powers of mankind, showing very science-dependent views that border on atheistic, which is no bad thing.
Cid has a strong association with dragons in the game, and it shows in his personality. He’s prickly and breathes fire, but he’s noble and his bark is worse than his bite, you just have to know how to deal with him.
He chain smokes, he likes Loveless (fan of the theater, Cid?), he wants to be an astronaut.
He also has a pink plane named “Tiny Bronco” and a rainbow colored spear called Venus Gospel, but uh…we’re not going to analyze that.
Sleeping in a Coffin is Bad for Your Back – Vincent Valentine
Was there ever a tale of more woe, than that of Vincent Valentine and his stalker issues? Thirty years before the start of the game, Vincent was a Turk – an assassin and a kidnapper, the doer of Shinra’s dirty jobs. He was also in love; unfortunately, his dearly beloved loved another, and was destined to become the mother of Sephiroth. Lucrecia married Hojo, one creepy, obsessive slime ball of a scientist, and became pregnant. The two used the fetus as a testing ground for Jenova cells before it was even born, and Vincent disagreed vehemently. So Hojo shot him, experimented on him, and locked him in suspended animation in the basement of a creepy old mansion.
Enter Cloud Strife et al to free him from his coffin, and Vincent decides to join the crusade against Sephiroth, feeling that the man’s actions are partially his responsibility.
Vincent seeks two things: survival and repentance. He feels responsibility heavily, and wants to make past wrongs right, but he also wants to carry on doing the right thing. He’s not the type to give up and stop fighting, and stubbornly adapts to a world thirty years into his own future, where the only person he really knows is the man he desperately wants to kill.
Vincent is not all angst and gloom. He shows flares of dark humor, and is asocial by nature rather than circumstance. People, even those he’s fighting beside, exasperate him, and it seems he’s often amazed at the limits - or lack thereof - of human ignorance and stupidity. He prefers silence and quiet, but this doesn’t mean he’s constantly brooding. Vincent is intelligent, stubborn, a master of perseverance and sarcasm, and seeking some closure. What he isn’t is obsessive (well, perhaps a little), suicidal, or stuck irrevocably in his own past.
Vincent is not Cloud, as much as we do love Cloud.
Vincent does eventually gain his closure, comforting Lucrecia’s spirit (by lying to her, but that’s a little beside the point), and seeing Hojo killed. This leaves him free to rebuild his life and gain back the time he’s lost.
A note on Chaos, etcetera – When Vincent gets pissed, he turns into violent monsters and loses conscious control of his actions. How this effects him is never discussed frankly in-game, and is thus usually up to the individual to decide. Personally, I see it as something that makes Vincent more honest about his own flaws, something that would simultaneously drive him to become a better person, and force him to face that fact that he’s often not a good person. It also freaks the hell out of other people.
Sharing a Room – The Hard Evidence
We don’t go into this pairing with a lot of concrete facts and evidence; we’ve resigned ourselves to that. Beyond the fact that the two seem friendly with each other in what interactions we do see in game, there are two points in the script that back us up, one which is swiftly becoming infamous.
Point one: The Golden Saucer scene. When the group has to stay overnight at the hotel in the Golden Saucer, if you’ve acquired Vincent by this point he wakes up a napping Cid and tells him its time to go to their room. Now, whether or not this is a sign of something intimate at this point, it does mean something in their relationship. Vincent cares enough about Cid even at that relatively early point to make sure he doesn’t sleep in a chair, and they’re both willing to share a hotel room. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever attempted sharing a hotel room with someone you don’t get along with, but in short it just does not work. The two are comfortable with each other.
Point Two: The Train Ride (of Death!). During a high stress, high danger situation, Vincent out and randomly calls Cid ‘Chief’, a nickname we haven’t heard from any of the other characters. Vincent is not usually the type to give out nicknames, or to use them to tease, but anyone giving Cid Highwind an unwanted nickname is quite certainly doing it to tease him. Cid, for his part, gets kind of snappy, but he’s overworked. Anyone else, he probably would have smacked, but Vincent just gets Cid’s special brand of ‘I like you but you’re annoying me, so now I have to yell’. This, again, displays a familiarity between the two that they rarely have with the other characters.
So no, we’re not going on much. But we manage!
Of Demons and Dragons – Why?
It’s hard for me to pinpoint exactly when I started shipping Cid and Vincent. I know that as long as I’ve been in fandom I’ve been a Sephiroth/Cloud shipper, but Cid/Vin somehow slipped in under my radar. Despite the lack of fics, the lack of art, the lack of support, I looked at it and thought ‘you know, that could work, and it could work really damn well’.
One of the draws of the pairing is that it can, in fact, work out. There’s no living significant others to deal with, no overt hints of attraction to other characters, neither of them dies and neither of them is evil. While the two would have their issues to work out, it wouldn’t be a pairing dominated by angst and psychological issues, if you didn’t want it to be. Unlike ships like Sephiroth/Cloud, Cid/Vincent leaves some genre wiggle room
Looking at it from a purely character perspective, the two are the only ones in their age group in the game party. Most of the others are in their early twenties, Nanaki and Yuffie are teenagers (albeit, one’s only a teenager in mystical cat years), and Barret is older than them, though none too mature himself. They’d be drawn to each other as the default adults of the organization, the voices of experience, knowledge, and (frighteningly enough) reason. They’d find in each other inadvertent friendship and camaraderie, and a break from the anarchy of the other party members. Eventually, that relationship would develop, through a combination of mutual attraction, close quarters and a need for some sort of stress relief, into something more intimate.
Both Cid and Vincent are asocial in their own ways, pushing people away with either gruffness or silence, and exasperated with the hopeful youth or ignorance of the others. Cid would know when to give Vincent his silences, and Vincent would let Cid go off on a tangent without interrupting his tirade, though they would both know when to tell their partner to get over it, or shut the hell up. The Cid/Vincent relationship is all about equilibrium, a partnership and a balanced, healthy codependency. Acceptance.
It’s also all about the potential for mutual snark, or angst, or fluff, or adult issues that you sometimes don’t get to address with younger pairings. Cid/Vincent is a pairing of raw potential.
Veering, for a moment, away from logic and into pure fangirl aesthetics, the two do look amazingly good together. There’s an attractive contrast between tall, slim, dark Vincent and shorter, muscular, blond-and-blue-eyed Cid. And the first person to say that Cid’s not attractive loses.
And just a note to address – though I’ve continually written the pairing name as Cid/Vincent throughout this manifesto, I don’t want to insinuate anything about the ‘traditional’ seme/uke rolls assigned in pairing names sometimes. This is a pairing of equals, and to designate them as anything but is unfair and untrue. Vincent/Cid is just as true as Cid/Vincent.
Hey, Wait a Second! – A Short Note on Lucrecia and Shera
I made a point previously about no living significant others and it holds true. Lucrecia is dead, her spirit is at rest, and a chance to move on in life is owed to Vincent. In fact, if Lucrecia is a good enough person for him to fall in love with, she’d probably want it of him.
As for Shera, I quoth the Cid: ‘Thinkin’ about marrying her gives me the chills’. Cid may or may not hold some affection for Shera as a friend, but she represents too much of what was taken from him for him to be comfortable with her. That, and she never fights back against him; occasionally, Cid’s going to need a firm smack upside the head, and Shera’s not the type who can deliver that. Whether or not you write Cid as completely homosexual (as I see him in my mind) or not, Shera is less of a factor than most would lead you to believe, though she’s definitely going to be a presence in any fic set in Rocket Town. She’d probably be quite supportive, and happy that Cid’s moved on from his tunnel vision obsession.
- Mood:
Anguish - Listening to: Like Toy SOLDIERs
- Reading: Nine Lives
- Watching: Shinra - Like Toy SOLDIERS
- Playing: Um i beat FF7CC XD
- Eating: pudding
- Drinking: skyy blue Vodka
(urgh D
Gloomy
