Why YV is better than VT.


I love Tifa. Don't get me wrong. But Tifa is too motherly and loving. She has all the patience required for a longterm relationship with Vincent, but she doesn't have the steel. Yes, she's got spine. Yes, she's strong. But she's entirely too much silk. It's like cotton candy. It's sweet and awesome and fluffy and wispy and easy to make and comes in bright cool colours, but it will rot your teeth.

Tifa is what Vincent wants (note that I say WHAT he wants, not WHO, because WHO he wants is Lucrecia). She is willing to indulge his angstmuffin tendencies. This is very much the last thing he needs. Tifa would be able to sympathize with him, even empathize, and these ARE good things, but Vincent doesn't really NEED it. Tifa would let Vincent throw little pity parties until it pissed her off so much she exploded. She would effectively END their relationship before it moved past 'empathy' and into 'recovery'. Nobody's going to fix Cloud, but Tifa will go a long way to helping him heal.

There is substantially more wrong with Vincent than there is with Cloud. One could argue that due to his career as a Turk, Vincent entered the coffin as one type of psycho and left as another kind. Even if Vincent were to return to his pre-coffin level of sanity, he would still not be very sane. He just wouldn't be angsting all the time.

And here is where Yuffie comes into play. Yuffie would stop the first pity party Vincent ever tried to throw. She would put a stop to the 'drowning in his sorrow' thing RIGHT. FUCKING. QUICK. She would nip the entire pity party, "I am such a monster" sessions in the bud. Hell, she would stomp the SEED into nonexistence.

Unlike Tifa, Yuffie doesn't sympathize. She understands almost every part of Vincent's predicament EXCEPT for Lucrecia. Yuffie was a thief and a liar, and an almost-traitor to boot. She KNOWS what it means to have a past where you did awful things, she KNOWS what it means to want to be forgiven.

Unlike Vincent, though, Yuffie didn't find herself lacking. She didn't automatically assume "I'm a horrible person and nobody will ever forgive me."

She understands his need to protect himself from his fear of never being forgiven (it is this need which leads him to NOT TRY for forgiveness, which he mentions in AC [you great big LOSER, I can't believe I thought so highly of you!]). She understands him.

But just because she understands him doesn't mean that she's willing to let him pass by his life. She's not going to let him rot in that coffin, she's not going to let him moulder in his grave.

Unlike Tifa, Yuffie isn't polite. Rather than knocking on the coffin's lid, she would wrench it open, screaming, "VINNIE IF YOU'RE IN THIS CREEPY THING I SWEAR TO LEVIATHAN I AM GOING TO USE ALL CREATION ON YOUR BIG GOTH BUTT!"

But she'd do it because she KNOWS he isn't a monster. She KNOWS, with all her heart, that somewhere in that quivering ball of angst is a DAMNED GOOD MAN. He might be a little psychotic, he might have evil demons living in his body, but he's a GOOD MAN, and she knows it. And she's willing and able to take salt and steel wool to that ball of angst and expose the good man.

And that is precisely what Vincent needs.

He needs somebody to believe in him. He needs somebody who can watch him crucify himself and cut him down from that cross. He needs somebody who he can't push away, who he can't ignore, who he can't taint.

He's not going to 'taint' Yuffie. She's stolen, she's lied, she's manipulated, she's betrayed. She's been hung from hundreds of feet in the air. She's faced down Sephiroth. She's beat the bugfuck out of her own kin and laughed about it.

Yuffie needs people. She needs all sorts of people. From the age of twelve, she's raised herself. She needs somebody who is willing to put up with her, who will listen to her, who will help her stay calm. Somebody who will never lie to her, who will never ask her to be anything but what she CAN be.

Funny, how it's Yuffie that most fans hate. Yuffie is selfish. Yuffie is a child. Yuffie is the one that most of AVALANCHE would probably avoid. That hyperactive, obsessively cheerful kleptomaniac NEEDS people around her if she's ever going to learn to socialize, but people avoid her.

And here is where they're such a perfect dichotomy. Vincent needs people to learn how to love (or at least tolerate) himself. Yuffie needs people to learn how to relate to others, she needs people to teach her to become tolerable. Vincent has thousand of screaming fangirls. Yuffie has something like eight(THE FOURSOME OF AWESOMNESS and a few others).

But they're still very much alike. They need people, they need someone to help them heal. Their every action should show others just what they need, but nobody ever gives it to them. People ignore them, cast them aside, fear them, ridicule them.

They have pasts that taint them, pasts wherein they walked on the Wrong side of the moral line. They loved one thing with a love that only death could stop. And, in one case, death did not stop.

But most importantly... at the end of the day, it is the ability to love with a rich and selfless love, a crushing, fierce love, a desperate love, that they share. They feel things deeply. Yuffie loves Wutai with a desperate and beautiful love. She loves it so much that she LOVES IT IN HER BONES.

Can you imagine that kind of love aimed at Vincent? Can you imagine the wonders someone who could love him that much would do for him?

Tifa stayed at Cloud's side, willing to sacrifice the world. But was she willing to sacrifice her love of herself, her soul, her morality? Did she camp out in the woods and steal for him?

It is Yuffie's desperate, stubborn, mule-headed love that Vincent needs. Because even though Yuffie was willing to die for Wutai, she wasn't going to let it just amble on being a disgusting tourist trap. She wants to CHANGE Wutai, she wants to improve it. Yuffie is even now prodding Wutai in the ass, saying "COME ON COME ON COME ON GET OVER IT REBUILD AND MOVE ON COME ON LET'S GET BACK TO THE GLORY".

Can you imagine Tifa kicking Vincent in the back of the head and telling him that if Lucrecia was worth a QUARTER of the suffering Vincent puts himself through in her name, then Lucrecia would want him to live his life?

I certainly can't.