Jetrauben posted:

My money is on "there is weird time/space fuckery going on and Cloud saved Aerith in one timeline but it's overlapping with a version where she died, leading to dimensional fuckery." I do not think we're seeing a third game without a playable Aerith, though; she's clearly still an active presence and not just a hallucination, even if she's also a lifestream ghost or liminal being. Red reacts to her, even if he doesn't seem to realize it's her.

I saw the observation that both Cloud and Tifa, people who have touched the Lifestream, seem to see both Aerith dead and Aerith alive in that moment when Sephiroth stabs her, and notably Tifa lingers longest by the pool where we can assume they laid her body to rest and looks the most uncomfortable and disturbed by what's going on. Trying to reconcile conflicting memories? Doubting her own sanity? Unclear.

That said, I think we didn't see the burial because not only was Cloud possibly not present for it per se in this version of events, but also because it'll be the big reveal that starts the breakdown in the third game, when the rest of the party challenges him on not realizing/acknowledging that Aerith is extremely dead and buried.

EDIT: Also, I think the implications of the doomed timeline is that Zack (and Aerith and Cloud when you have your date) is experiencing every one of his deaths. There's not multiple Zacks, there's one Zack who keeps getting cycled through different possibilities that keep ending in his death. But like Aerith for example is wearing all three colors of jewelry bangles from Cloud's "date" with her, indicating she's done this multiple times, I think?