LOL, that sentence made sense when it was first written and there were only two things, and when I added the third I went, "fuck it, rewriting is HARD" and left it because I had too much staring me in the face and tapping its foot at me expectantly. ^^;;
And heh, I am also looking forward to Gong-gil actually getting to do something. He was pretty down for the count for the first half...and will be for part of the third section but that's OK because he's actually going to be doing things in the last part and maybe the third if I have to revise as much as I think but heeeeey.
I think, had Angeal been mentoring Cloud instead of Zack, he definitely would have had a similar reaction--not as strong, because Cloud wasn't as broken as Gong-gil is here, and I think would have pushed a lot to try to get Cloud to come out of his shell some...but would have been waaaay too overprotective in some ways. I could see Cloud being better off in the "Maybe I'm NOT useless and doomed to fail"-mentality way, but not nearly so well off in the "I can kick your ass from here to next Sunday" kind of way. Being babied in any way never does Cloud any good, but the guy for serious needs someone to give him the good kind of attention.
...and any troopers or SOLDIERs that gave Cloud a hard time would have to pray they never ended up under Angeal's command, because oh, would Angeal ever make them hate their lives. XD