Love interests
People online be doing too much. The shipping wars are still going strong.
Hopefully I'm not about to write some things that will get my inbox flamed to hell and back. Personally, I don't have any problems with any ships, but I think we can all agree the shipping wars on twt have gotten out of hand and make the fandom look very bad.
Zack Fair
"I think it was 5 years ago. He went out on a job, and never came back. He loved women, a real lady's man. He probably found someone else..."
To me, this is an OG pairing. He’s dead, she’s dead - they're portrayed as being reunited in the lifestream in Advent Children. Zack is Aerith's first love and she literally wrote him 89 letters during the events of Crisis Core. That does not denote a casual fling, no matter that Aerith implies it wasn't serious. On 'Aerith's Theme' Nobuo Uematsu states, "Every single day, she waited and waited.” So I made the song to match that scene which means, it wasn’t made for the scene in Forgotten City. The scene where Aerith waits for Zack at the station was first. It’s a song about “a poor girl who waits for someone who doesn’t come.”
- Game Symphony Japan FFVII 2014 concert program
“He was like a cloud drifting through the skies. As we peered skyward through the rafters of a heavenless Midgar, we made a promise. And that was the last time we spoke.”
- Crisis Core 1st Official Trailer
Cloud Strife
I myself like TifaxCloud, but I think Clotis are delulu when they try to deny that Cloud harbors any type of feelings for Aerith. He is clearly flustered by her forwardness, but Tifa has the upper hand when it comes to Cloud by default of not being DEAD. But it’s obvious throughout the story that Cloud comes to respect Aerith and genuinely care about her as a person.
Sephiroth
At different points during the development of the original game, Sephiroth and Aerith were portrayed as siblings or lovers. You can see this close relationship in early Amano artwork. Hojo openly discusses breeding Aerith with "G-Type" and "S-Type" soldiers. Hojo also states "walking the halls of this very building, who would’ve thought? Were I to arrange a face-to-face, how I would love to meet their offspring" - clearly speaking of Sephiroth whom Palmer tells everyone he had just seen. There's also the fact that Zack Fair was added to the game late in development - were some of Aerith's lines about Zack originally meant to be about Sephiroth?
“Did you have any SOLDIER friends? Any war buddies? So Cloud, you were SOLDIER 1st Class, right? Weird. Just that you were in the same rank with the first guy I ever loved.”
Ultimately the general consenus is that Sephiroth is beyond traditional romance and his sexuality is never addressed in the video games. It would have been really interesting to see how these dynamics played out due to their respective backgrounds with Shinra.
Tseng
During a pervy conversation between Reno and Rude on the subject of which ff girl is best girl, it's revealed that Tseng is partial to Aerith.
The Crisis Core Complete Guide also states the following: The two characters deeply involved with Aerith were Zack, who would become her lover (koibito), and Tseng, her guardian.
