Holy Crap!!!
It's not that people are in love with the character, it's the fact you just spent what, like 45 hours building this awsome character, and keeping her in your group to level her up, then all of a sudden she is killed in a damn FMV that you had no control over!
So they you say, No freaken way, now i have to replace her with somebody decent. Only to realize you have been using the same three characters of Aeris, Tifa, and cloud the entire freaken time. This means everyone else is like 1/4 their level, and totally useless.
You also loose the designated healer/spellcaster in your group. although you could spread around the spellcastin and use restore or something better than that, you still ahve a deficiency as far as limits go.
because what limit breaks kick...er...heal more arse than hers!?
THAT is why people care IMO, i mean really...there is also the part where by carefully choosing your responses you think you are going to get with aeris by totally blowing off tifa. (I have not beaten the game yet, and i think that the dialogue may be KOTORish in that you can fall in love...right?)
It's not love for pretty in pink (aeris), it's hate for having to bring another damn character up to a decent level. This is just like playing (Place your favorite RPG here) for 2 years only to have a corporate server crash or something and your charater gets deleted.
yeah....it's like that....i've been there.
DAMN YOU ANARCY ONLINE!!!!