LogFAQs > #979806955

MartinFF7 posted...

Also agreed, though where I'm a little stumped is whether it's just your consciousness that can move between worlds or your whole physical body

It seems pretty clear that it's consciousness only. We've never seen more than 1 body in one place at the same time, and Cloud & Aerith needed their comatose bodies to jump into. Also in the original Japanese, Aerith refers to the lifestream as containing the Cetra's consciousnesses. So it's more that consciousness is physical and the lifestream is a physical place that consciousnesses can go. They can only enter the world through an existing body though.

One thing that is weirdly unanswered is Aerith in R1. There were a lot of hints that her consciousness was from the future. This ending confirms the mechanics of that. But how did she get back to that timeline's body?

MartinFF7 posted...

Also means there are two different Aeriths right now, technically? "our" Aerith who died and is in the lifestream, and "other" Aerith who's in the world where she survived, popped over to help Cloud in his final battle, and goes back to her "second home" in the other world at the game's end?

To me it seems like there's only "our" Aerith who is the main one and who is in the lifestream and who fought with Cloud. The one who survived is from an alternate timeline, and you can imagine infinite of those. But the alternate timeline isn't real/canon. They just showed it to confuse the players, and then switched back to showing the main timeline. Same as Zack choosing to save Cloud vs Biggs. They flipped between both confusingly, but none of those are really canon. The only canon Zack is the one who died and is now in the lifestream and who fought with Cloud.

Another interpretation is that there is only 1 lifestream version of a character. All the dead versions of the character merge into that lifestream version. So the lifestream Aerith is all the infinite Aeriths who were killed by Seph, including the one in the main timeline. Then that combined lifestream version can hop into living bodies and retain their infinite memories. So the Aerith who fought with Cloud is the merged lifestream version, and same with final boss Seph, and the Seph who jumps into his clones. It also explains why he wants to destroy all the worlds, so he can merge with all of them in the lifestream and become complete.

It's the same with Zack too, but a bit trickier because Seph apparently was able to cut part of Zack's lifestream consciousness away? It seemed like Zack ended up in the real world after that and couldn't go back.