[OG+REMAKE SPOILERS] About a certain Soldier
I was watching some lore vids about the remake and one of them was talking about the butterfly effect and how because of Sephiroth and Aeriths meddling the party arrives too soon or too late at certain events. Like Sephiroth appearing after the bombing mission which would lead to Cloud missing Aerith at that street corner so the Whispers had to step in, or Aerith who seemed to already know what awaits her and Cloud on their way to Sector 7 which leads to them arriving a bit too early so Tifa in the chocobo carriage takes much longer till she appears. Little things that change the timeline as a whole.
But then I got thinking and realized that the timeline is *already* *waaaay* off. The remake changed the the moment when Tifa finds Cloud at the train station, in the OG she found him a month before the start of FF7, in the remake they met ***one day*** before the bombing mission (for some reason the english localisation didn't pick this up) which is such a weird change since it means Cloud was able to function for over a month just fine even though we know that he was barely conscious in the OG and that his fake persona formed the first time when he met Tifa again.
**OG timeline:**
**\[ ν \] – εуλ 0007/09**
*· FFVII/BC/CC/LO – The WastelandJust outside of Midgar, Zack was killed by the pursuing ShinRa army. Cloud was left at the scene.*
*· FFVII – MidgarWhile being tended to by a station worker in the Sector 7 Slum train station, he was reunited with Tifa, and using the abilities of Jenova’s cells formed a new personality. With Tifa’s invitation, he decided to assist AVALANCHE.*
It's such a unnecessary change since it makes everything...less believable. Like Tifa meets Cloud and immediately tells him that she is a member of a terror cell and gets Cloud on board and for some reason Barret was totally fine with that instead of him at least taking some time to think things through. Seems a strange move by the devs and they better have a good reason for such a complicated change.
**So what could this mean?**
What if the ending we saw with Zack dragging Cloud towards Midgar was the the begin of FF7 remake? What if we saw what happened retroactively because the team defeated the Whispers?
Zack watched for a month Cloud in Midgar then something happened to him which lead to Cloud being left behind. After Zack was gone a mako poisoned Cloud met Tifa and FF7 is back on track.
**But wait, how would Zack be alive when the Whisper thing happens at the end of the game and he dies way before...?**
Well that's the usual time travel paradox that always happens, there is no point zero anymore which always causes a time loop
Causal loop
From Wikipedia
*A* ***causal loop*** *is a theoretical proposition in which, by means of either* *retrocausality* *or* *time travel*\*, a sequence of events (actions, information, objects, people) is among the causes of another event, which is in turn among the causes of the first-mentioned event. Such causally looped events then exist in\* *spacetime*\*, but their origin cannot be determined. A hypothetical example of a causality loop is given of a\* *billiard ball* *striking its past self: the billiard ball moves in a path towards a time machine, and the future self of the billiard ball emerges from the time machine before its past self enters it, giving its past self a glancing blow, altering the past ball's path and causing it to enter the time machine at an angle that would cause its future self to strike its past self the very glancing blow that altered its path. In this sequence of events, the change in the ball's path is its own cause, which might appear paradoxical.*
So Zack being alive at the start of the game because of the Whispers defeat at the *end* of the game would work because of the casual time loop paradox.
**So why didn't Zack go and see Aerith?**
Maybe Clouds condition was so bad that Zack wasn't able to leave his side or maybe since Zack knew Aerith is under surveillance he couldn't take the risk and get captured since Cloud depended on him. I mean there is no way to tell what happened there
**So why does Cloud have Zacks Buster Sword?**
Again there is literally no way to tell at this point at least, maybe Zack was running around disguised as a civilian and then something happened to him there or maybe he at some point tried to get to Aerith but was spotted and captured?
**Conclusion**
Maybe the ending of FF7r shows us what actually happened at the begin of the remake. Zack brought Cloud to Midgar looked after him for a month and then something happened to him which lead to a Mako poisoned Cloud to wander around with Zacks buster sword where he later had a run in with Tifa in Sector 7, this would explain how he was able to survive in Midgar for over a month in the state he was in.
thoughts?