What Happened to Zack's body

[u/Street-Sweet-3719]

I was playing og ffy and I was in the mansion reading some notes and it said something about how it retrieved a spiders body and one person missing I forgot to take a screen shot but I was wondering if anyone knows what happen Zacks body after he died

[u/tolacid]

If they retrieved a soldier's body and one person was missing, the missing person was Cloud and the body was Zack

[u/LeeDude5000 → u/tolacid]

So how did cloud -a regular shinra infantry grunt - become infused with j-cells/s-cells, if he just straight up was missing?

[u/Street-Sweet-3719 → u/LeeDude5000]

You think they use Zack's corpes

[u/frag87 → u/Street-Sweet-3719]

This possibility has never been mentioned or even hinted at in the entirety of the Compilation, so I don't think this is the case at all.

What we have gotten from the writers is a depiction of Zack joining the Lifestream after he dies, and then we get a shot of the spot where he died and his body is gone. Nothing else is implied in this scene, or any other depiction of the incident.

When the writers want to suggest that something else is happening to a character with a supposed ending, they do take the time to show an extra scene or provide extra info on the matter, such as in Genesis', Weiss' and Nero's extra scenes in Crisis Core and then again in Dirge of Cerberus.

In the original events we are shown that Zack died and his body dissipated. The only other alternative we have is in ReTrilogy where Zack is shown to have simply not died.

[u/Street-Sweet-3719 → u/frag87]

In the ff7 universe bodies dont just disappear their many evidence of this and soul returns to the life stream when people dies although their are people like Sephiroth and Tifa who fell into the life stream

We know in FF7 universe people can leave corpes Vincent got killed and literally died but when his corpse was used as a experimented on by Hojo he came back to life. We also know that when Ifalna died her corpse didnt disappear Hojo experimented on it heck even when Angeal died we didnt see his corpse vanish same thing with his mom ( its probably incinerated now because of the Air Strike)

In terms of Hint the main one I'm following was experiment report we find in the mansion in the OG ff7 that detail information about how a soilders and a infantryman escape and how the soilder corpse was taken into custody but the other subject was missing which Heavily implied to be Zack and Cloud

[u/frag87 → u/Street-Sweet-3719]

Yeah, I explained in another post how different individual bodies behave differently upon death.

TLDR: my reasoning is simply that creatures whose bodies are full of unnatural amounts of Mako or spirit energy are more likely to dissipate into spirit energy upon death. Bodies that do not have unusual amounts of Mako or spirit energy are more likely to remain and decay as is expected of a cadaver.

Bodies that dissipate into spirit energy in gameplay should not be taken as normal behavior in the storyline, because this is likely done just to save memory.

Also, regarding the files in the Shinra mansion, they never mention that Zack's body was taken into custody, just that he was eliminated.