The Fifth Act, Chapter 12

[sinnatious]

Title: The Fifth Act

Rating: T for violence.

Summary: FFVII Time-travel. Gen. Cloud has an accident with a Time Materia.

Author's Note: Neighbours thought it would be awesome to start partying at 4:30 in the morning and still haven't stopped. So this chapter may contain more mistakes than normal. Please point out any that you see

Comments

[anonymous]

I think it's less a manner of intelligence, and more a combination of lack of social graces (due to a difficult, semi-isolated and ostracized childhood resulting in shyness and distrust + 4 years of his adolescence as an experiment + 1 in a coma-like state + all the insanity of FFVII) and the fact that he was only starting to more or less get over all his traumas when he was thrown right back to stare them all in the face one more time. It's a difficult situation to be in.

He hasn't had a nervous breakdown, but all that holding it together through channeling all his efforts into destroying Sephiroth, Jenova and Hojo are eating away at all his attention, so anything that requires planning beyond kill kill fight fight fight isn't working out very well for a lack of proper planning.

If Cloud stopped to think and plan for pretty much anything that wasn't Sephiroth, Jenova and Hojo, I think he would make smarter decisions, but he simply isn't the right mental state to relax on those areas.

I mean, I get what you mean, it is frustrating from the point of view of a reader, and I remember all that helplessness and missed chances annoying me the first time I read the story, but upon other re-reads I realized how well it all fit together. Cloud is resilient and competent to an extent, but boy, does he have his many, many faults.

[sinnatious]

Ah, your comment made me realise I never replied to the original comment. It's kind of nice when other readers will wade into the dicussion for me, though!

It's a valid enough suggestion, but I am always wary of making Cloud (or Vincent, for that matter) into a Gary Stu. He's already armed with foreknowledge and strength enough to defeat Sephiroth - if he were emotionally rock-solid and had a genius-level flare for planning as well... I don't think I could write that in a way that made him still feel in character and keep the stakes as high. Maybe some authors could, but it's not how I chose to write this one.

anon you replied to

[anonymous]

C:

To pull of something like that in any believable form would require a different approach than normal "what ifs" and time travel fics, and the result would be very, very different from something like The Fifth Act, for example.

In fact, someone did a somewhat short, interesting story along those lines, with Vincent, of all people:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8281862/1/The-Turks-Way

I give the author kudos for at least doing things I would never have even expected and both solving problems I didn't think of while not managing to solve everything.