Face it, every fandom has a dark side; Cleris is no exception. Now, maybe I draw the line at explicit necro fics, but I always find a spooky beauty in the dark erside of our fave pairing. Y'know that feeling you get when someone's about to tell you a ghost story? You know you're going to get spooked out, maybe disturbed, but you get good, tingly shivers all the same.

Some examples(all found on FF.net)
-Cloud swimming to the bottom of the lake and staying there...forever(White Waters by Chiikara)
-Cloud travelling back in time to murder baby!Sephiroth so Sephiroth will never kill Aeris...but things go terribly wrong(Revenio, by Ketari Fang)
-Resurrecting Aeris, only to find her wasted and horrifying(The Beloved by 012607, and a million more resurrection fics out there)
-Cloud slowly being driven insane, hurting everyone close to him...all for her sake(Faults by nesza)

I love well-written dark Clerises...in any fandom actually. And the gentle flower girl in her sunken grave, the soldier who pines away for her...once death entered the equation, they were prime material for dark, angst-ridden opuses!

That's one of the reasons why I adore this pairing; I can go from one extreme to another. There's ultimate happiness, their promised land, fluff bunnies that jump around in your stomach...but there's also the depths of despair to explore.

Your opinions on the 'darker' side of Cleris? :)

I honestly don't like the "lighter" side of cleris all that much. I prefer darker themed pairings. :lol:

I'm not the kind of person that goes nuts for the whole HAPPY FLOWERS OF LIGHT type of thing when it comes to them. It might just be the emo in me talking but I like the thought of struggling to attain something nearly unattainable, even if the end result isn't a perfect world. I don't see them being happy enough to skip through flower fields, but I prefer to think of them being a couple with realistic problems. Even if that is a bit hard with the way they are now. :lol:

I kinda like the thought of them not being able to be physically together, probably because I like to see fictional characters not having a perfect ending. It's kinda boring to me. :fish:

Well...my fics focus on attaining the impossible. Instead of having him pine forever for a 'love that can never be', I instead focus on the spirituality of things and make what should never be possible. To make the impossible possible is my personal hobby, and one I indulge in.

What I especially don't want to see are fics where Cloud 'moves on'. Last thing I wanna see, really.

I definitely am a fan of the darker side, and honestly, if I see fluff without some darkness to make it worth it, it doesn't have as much impact. I haven't read as many good fanfics as I'd like, so I might have to check out a few of those.

I think that to truly love Cleris, you have to enjoy tragic love anyway. If you like happy endings, then I'd think Cloti seems more obvious surprisingly. I mean, everyone just moves on, the childhood friends ended up with something more, and everyone settles down for a normal family life. (*ignores for the moment the reasons they wouldn't necessarily be perfect together and such*) However Cleris doesn't have such a simple happy ending. Aerith died, and Cloud is left with guilt and pain from it. He doesn't simply move on and forget her, he has to make choices. In Advent Children he chooses to keep living while realizing even if she can't physically be there in this perfect family, she's there in his heart waiting for him. That's probably one of the happiest of the Cleris options, other than her resurrection.

Resurrection isn't my favorite option because it takes away from the tragedy a bit, however I do think that since at least there was tragedy to make the happiness deeper, I could still enjoy it. Then we have many other options explored through fan fiction as well, and some we might have explored in our own minds.

For me, the hardest path to happiness is often the most meaningful. Settling for the easy path and getting only partial happiness will never be as great as taking a difficult path towards something greater. Since I believe Cloud has something much greater than he could ever have with Tifa, I feel it's worth it.

Very nicely said Tacofoolio!

Okay I am not as elloquent(spell?) as that but I figure I would chime in. (Nice topic Kusari Yarou!)

I like both sides of the Cleris picture. Honestly if the writer is good I am willing to read normally hard to read subject matter, in most cases. One of my favorite writers always has hard and painful subject matter and sometimes it is hard to read but he does such a good job I end up enjoying the fact that it was different and difficult.

With Cleris I think many times it is natural to think of trying to give them a happy ending since in some ways it was robbed in FFVII etc (even though that can be debated). So to go the opposite direction, and explore the uncomfortable aspects of what grief can do and if you try to defy death, that is bold but also compelling and I applaud those who take that side on.

So overall I think both types can be good and should be written about but in te end it comes down to the writer on whether the story is worth the read or not. But if they are really good they can get you out of your comfort zone and then you can be in for some real gems of stories on both sides.

On a quick side note, Angelalex242: You writes stories! I would love to see your work. I think you could be one of those writers I was just talking about since you always have good though out posts but are also funny many times. Okay I sound like a fan girl, sorry, I just think you would have good stories. :blush:

I don't know if this constitutes a "darker" side of Cleris, but what drew me into this pairing in the first place is the inherent tragedy of it. I always go for the couples that can't be together (or the couples that the writers refuse to put together week after week just because they want to torture all the JAM fans :sad: ) because the tragedy adds a third dimension to the romance that creates a truly wonderful drama.

So for me, I almost never go for the resurrection fics or fics where Cloud can see Aerith any time he wants in the flowerfield. My favorite part of their relationship (again, I don't know if it's really "dark" but it's not fluffy and pink either) is how bittersweet it is. It's sweet because of all the moments they had together throughout disc 1, and bitter because of FMVs like the death of Aerith and the hand reach scene.

As strange as it sounds and as much as I was saddened by it, Aerith's death is one of my favorite parts of the game. That entire scene was nothing but raw emotion in which, I might add, the ultimate bittersweet melody of the game repeats over and over. Cloud didn't even get the chance to be truly happy with her, and it was heartbreaking. The cruelty of fate to have Cloud crash through a roof into Aerith's church, to have them be so perfect for one another, and to have Cloud lose her so suddenly is what draws me into this couple.

Hmm, interesting topic!
I tend to enjoy the lighter side of Cleris, but I also do get a lot of pleasure out of the tragic side as well. I love the fact that Cleris has such a balance of both ^_^

I LOVE bittersweet relationships, and CloudxAerith should be known as bittersweet rather than sappy, in my opinion. It's tragic.

Ahaha, you guys should read Materia Thief's fanfic! If I could only find the link...

I'm going to agree with most of the people here. I love bittersweet relationships! Sometimes I find the happily ever after to be a little cheesy. That is why I like relationships like Cloud/Aeris, Locke/Rachel or Locke/Celes, Tidus/Yuna, and Laguna/Raine.

If Aeris hadn't died, I probably wouldn't have liked them that much.

Yeah, I'm a bit of a sucker for tragic pairings. I think a tragic love story has much more impact to me, it's why I like pairings where even though the two people involved love one another, something's stopping them from being together, and it's not something like that can be overcome without a lot of effort, if at all. I do like to read fanfics where Aerith and Cloud are happy together, but darker fics where they don't get their happily ever after are more likely to get me reading.

I kinda like the middle ground, because to me, that's kind of what C/A is--it's not completely tragic; let's face it, for a dead person, Aerith surely has quite an effect on the living still (besides the obvious effects on Cloud, she can still perform her limit breaks. Limit breaks from the OTHER SIDE XD), and at the same time, it is rather tragic that they can't be physically together.

However, I'd love to see a fic that writes them as content, but wistful, you know? Like them being able to talk like normal and having a nice time, but you get that underlying feeling that you know they want to be able to touch each other physically, but they can't quite manage it unless Aerith is using her magic or something. If someone could write a fic like that without letting it fall too far to the angsty side, and not too far to the mushy fluffy side--I'd love to read it.

I hope I'm making some amount of sense. XD

I like the lighter side, but I think I prefer darker ones. These stories actually give more emotion and emphasis, what I like most are angsty ones, they give more realism. What I love most on CloudxAerith is that their story gives the realism of life of what can be or can never be.

I don't always equate 'dark' with 'tragic ending'. :P A fic can be dark, but Aerith and Cloud still get a wrenching 'happily ever after'...those kinds of stories that end with Cloud dying, for instance. They're both dead which is heartwrenching...but they are now together in the Lifestream which is 'happy' for them, even if not for those they leave behind.

It's exactly that(the bolded part) that produces the darkest fics I've seen. What Cloud defies, even what he resorts to, just to be with her again

I noticed that it was easier for Clerises to delve into the 'dark side' when there was still no AC. 'I think I can meet her there'...so many unanswered questions, when, where, how...? Then came AC, which confirmed Cloud mired in depression, but also brought things full circle,by having him come to terms with his guilt...and showing us that mysterious flowerfield, the closest thing to a Cleris 'happily ever after' we get in the FF7-verse. Somehow, I find it harder to picture Cloud on another downward spiral after AC.

Bitter sweet....rather then dark? I love disturbing ficlets that really burrow into your mind and stay there for a long, long time. Though I find it quite hard to discover "dark," Clerith fictions, I've myself perfer Ficcies with a more hidden malicous undertone then full out twilight zone.


Still, I do love to swarm into my dark side on the odd occasion, so I guess the only dark side of Clerith I can think of at the moment....maybe, beyond all the sweetness and light of Clerith, one can drown in too much light? Maybe pure bliss can develop into pure toture?Or am I babbling again?

I wrote a whole essay on dark romance using a cleris fan fiction as an example.

Essay

Nice essay, if a bit short :)

That was "Faults" by nesza right? Hee, I remember her Author's Note. Something like "Don't read if you don't want your innocent view of the FF7 LTD to be warped!"

Might this be "White Waters" by Chiikara? :lol:

"Revenio" by Ketari Fang? Or "The Beloved" by Icor?
...well maybe not "The Beloved": the girl he loves, collapsed in her own blood, clinging on desperately to the thing that should be their baby.
*shivers*
Or maybe not "Revenio" either, since that involves Cloud time-travelling, and that sure doesn't sound like the plot you outlined. So what WAS it? (Yes, I have been doing constant dark-fic-hopping lately :D )

Oh no, I get what you mean. When you love, you're putting yourself at extremes: tthere's the possibility of sheer happiness with your love,but also sheer hurt when that love is taken away. Even more heartwrenching, when that same love enchants you with her presence, but you just can't *reach* her no matter how you try, which is an idea extrapolated in lotsa dark fics. It's as agonizing as the punishment of Tantalus, from the Greek Myths, where in Hades:
his punishment, now proverbial for temptation without satisfaction, was to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches. Whenever he reached for the fruit, the branches raised his intended meal from his grasp. Whenever he bent down to get a drink, the water receded before he could get any

"So close and yet so far"...that's the tragedy of it.

I applaud you except the third one is Shamisen by yours truly. ^^ Thanks for reading. I work hard on those silly little things.

Dark side of Clorith? That would be interesting. I can't say whether or not I would personally like it, but I might. I've always preferred the "lighter" side of things. Perhaps, Aerith dieing was "dark" enough for me, but that's just me. I think it would be interesting to see how Cloud would go insane and hurt the people around him.

I really prefer the lighter side don't know why but I'm not a dark Cleris fan and well I'm the type of girl who likes more happy stories and specially with a happy ending

I admit there is an appeal to the darker side of the Clerith romance. I can't explain it really, but it just seems so. . . so real, while happy fluff sometimes seems so fake. Not to say that I don't like the light side. I love both! But the darker side of love, that kind of love that can become obsession. . . *shivers* its just awesome! So, yay for both dark and light Clerith!