FF7 rebirth ending failed in everything (spoilers)

Ok lets discuss this ending.

I’ve finished the game, fortunately without spoilers, and we have to accept it: Aeris has to die. Honestly, I got a bit emotional watching the scene where Cloud tells Aeris: “Aerith, open your eyes,” and then she does.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that the Aeris who pushed Cloud to return manipulated his memories to help him deal with the guilt of not being able to save her. She told him: “No matter what happens, it’s not your fault.”

A lot of theories I’ve seen on Reddit say she’s alive, but they all boil down to the same thing: “Believe me bro, it’s not cope, it’s hope.”

At the end of the game, we’re shown a multiverse where Aeris is alive, Sephiroth succeeds in destroying the earth with Meteor, and people accept their fate and inevitable death along with the world—because without Aeris in the Lifestream, no one can control it to save the earth from the meteor.

That’s why, at the end of the game, Aeris’s spirit gets excited when she hears Cloud’s words, promising him that he will succeed in stopping Sephiroth (which doesn’t happen in the original; you defeat him too late, and Aeris has to intervene).

The black Whispers of fate, being Sephiroth’s work, solved the complete mess that the REMAKE game was, since it’s him who’s manipulating the events to play out the same way as in the original.

Aeris’s death is super brutal, but I would have preferred that over the mental puzzle we got instead. Not only did it let down the fans who followed the franchise from the beginning, but it also failed Aeris herself and what her character represented.

In the Rebirth timeline, Aeris died—this is a fact. But just like Square Enix preferred to censor her death with a lousy multiversal puzzle, Aerith did the same with Cloud’s mind. She censored her brutal death from his mind, so he could save the earth in time, and Aeris could live in a timeline with Cloud, while Tifa has to live with the fact that she’s the childhood friend who never gets a happy ending—just like in any story written by the Japanese.

I’d like to hear your opinions.

The game is wonderful, but the ending is a complete disaster. Okay, she dies—let me cry. Don’t throw in a 2-hour boss fight and then bait me into thinking she’s alive… when you already showed me that if she lives, the earth is destroyed.