#JENOVA

[rosy-crow]

”I wish this moment could last forever…..”

[ora-oblivionis]

mother

[pen-and-umbra]

The parallels between Masamune & Robio and Sephiroth & Nibelheim cases are so on the nose, it's not even funny.

FS ep. 2 chapter 2 makes a point of using similar expressions when describing Masamune's and Sephiroth's descent into madness and subsequent murder spree.

(Sephiroth): And that was it. He stayed holed up in the basement...reading and reading... like a man POSSESSED. (Masamune): Robio's tools and weapons were the responsibility of a single smith. One day, he took up his hammer as if POSSESSED, and poured all of his energy into crafting a remarkable blade.]

As a result, both men's behaviour is described as obsessive to the point of appearing possessed.

This possessed-like behavior eventually leads to a very specific type of carnage: the settlement is burned down, and the townspeople are slaughtered one by one. The opening sequence for the FS, episode 2, emphasizes the parallel by depicting a young Sephiroth standing amidst burning Robio in the same iconic pose as during the Nibelheim massacre. Furthermore, one of the first FS teasers cleverly superimposed Nibelheim footage over that of FS to create the glitching dejavu effect, almost as if history repeats itself.

In the case of Sephiroth, we can be fairly certain that his proximity to Jenova, combined with prolonged mental and physical degradation due to stress, lack of sleep, food, and so on, caused his mind to "slip" — or be hijacked.

What about Masamune? According to Alissa's account, as far as it can be trusted, the massacre was motivated by villagers coveting the masterwork weapon for themselves, which resulted in hostilities and infighting. Thus, it can be concluded that the problem began with the forging of a weapon, both the process and the end result.

(The villagers started fighting amongst themselves to claim the sword as their own. Some even attempted to sneak into the smith's home and steal it for themselves.)

Incidentally, to the point of being conspicuous, Alissa plants the idea that Sephiroth is deserving of a weapon as special as himself.

Eventually, Sephiroth makes a rather odd statement, that he feels the sword calling out to him. It's not the first time Sephiroth demonstrates some kind of extrasensory perception, despite vehemently denying it out loud.

Shortly before those purple orbs first appear on-screen in Chapter 1, Sephiroth mentions that he feels they're being watched. Later he makes an even creepier remark that he senses the presence of a strong will of some sorts.

The statement is linked to the fact that Masamune the swordsmith is thought to have been alive for the past 500 years, and that some power — allegedly the strong will that Sephiroth senses — is seemingly responsible for keeping him alive. 

Excluding ShinRA's R&D vicious experiments with biological samples and various types of Mako, there's only one known case of keeping one's body in an undying state — and that is the case of Lucrecia, according to whom Jenova cells keep her from dying. Jenova itself is mentioned by the Cetra as not capable of dying during the Temple of Ancients exploration. 

Moreover, why would Sephiroth sense a presence? Unless, of course, he shares a strong link to the source, perhaps on a cellular level.

I've already discussed the possible link between Masamune and Jenova here [read here].

(In ancient times, before the discovery of smelting, people forged weapons and tools from **meteoric iron**. Interestingly, there is a phenomenon known as telluric iron, derived from the Latin word for earth, "tellus," as seen in terms like "Telluric Fury" or "Telluric Scriptures.")

In short, in the distant past, people forged cold arms from using matter from meteors. Oddly enough, the most recent chapter mentions meteors, as Bachman relays a "hogwash" rumour that ShinRA creates their new breed of SOLDIER by scraping something (cells) off a meteor.

A strange introduction to the meteor subject, given that the general lore held that ShinRA unearthed an alien body and used it as a source of tissue. In the previously linked post I theorized that the meteor Jenova had arrived on splintered upon entering the atmosphere, and a piece landed in Wutai vicinity, centuries later to be discovered by Masamune and used in the forging of the sword. This splinter may have contained some of Jenova's organic matter. It fits well with the newly introduced concept of "special cells" being scraped off a meteor. On the other hand, the rumour clearly contradicts known lore; it could have been purposefully planted by ShinRA to obscure the true source of SOLDIER procedure in the hopes that it would be perceived as too absurd to be taken seriously.

Another similarity connects Robio's story to that of a "calamity from the skies". If Alissa's story is to be believed, a great battle took place in that area — a fight between Ancients and a vicious beast, similar to the story told by the Cetra hologram in the Temple of Ancients.

(But then, without warning, a fearsome beast invaded the region. Its attacks on the village claimed the lives of its people and their animals. The fiend existed only to slaughter.)

Specifically, the game depicts Cetra battling Jenova as a tentacled monster, a BEAST, that transforms into a human Goddess-like figure upon defeat.

Powerful fire magic was mentioned as being at work in Robio (fire being exceptionally good at eroding organic matter as well as preventing deadly bacteria/diseases from infecting new hosts), but more importantly, the village area is repeatedly mentioned in conjunction with the concept of "sealing". Angeal, Sephiroth and others initially conclude that the zone is abandoned, "forbidden," and "sealed" to prevent the truth about the heinous massacre from being revealed, but later hypothesize that the village was sealed together with whatever evil emerged there.

One detail that comes to mind is that since the Cetra's "celestial adversary" could not truly die, so it could not be defeated in a true sense, which is why the Ancients sealed/imprisoned it in geological strata (where it fell into slumber, per Temple of Ancients narrator).

So, here's the idea. The Temple of Ancients refers to "celestial adversary" as having been scattered in some way since the Age of Ancients [more on this here].

(“Heed well to our warning of that which is to come…<...> The reunion. When our adversary's scattered malignancy shall converge to plague the Planet once more.”)

Indeed, what if, upon arrival, Jenova was fragmented, either by meteor splintering or by design (Ancients cleaved it into pieces to weaken it, defeat it bit by bit, and eventually prevent the parts from converging into a single organism). Whatever the case, the Robio area may contain some of Jenova's organic remnants, such as a meteor (or its metallic core within Masamune's sword) or a body part sealed in the Petra-inspired temple. Masamune the swordsmith discovered it over 500 years ago and became exposed to its mind-altering properties, which resulted in corruption (perhaps unsealing and a letting the contaminant outside?), subsequent crazed behavior, and an eventual massacre. In its turn, the villagers' sporadic coveting of the blade and hostile behavior evokes some strange parallels with a "celestial adversary" sowing discord among men.

Interestingly, the settlers of Robio—I'd call them proto-Wutaians—are said to be Ancients or their descendants. The interesting part is that the descendants of those who defeated "the beast" appear to die in the same way the beast was slain: they are burned down, as if in vengeance.

And to point out the obvious: it oddly mirrors Sephiroth's deranged decision to burn down the town of Nibelheim, all while sticking to a paranoid delusion that humankind attempted to take something of his [The Planet]. Like the sword, like the world.

----

@pen-and-umbra

[altocat]

hi again alto!!!!! 😎

if you think that the whole masamune-thing happening in ec is related to jenova and/or the sword itself is directly tied to her, do you think that might explain why Sephiroth can seeming summon it at will? I know that that's really just a bit of an unexplained plothole, but I think it'd be really neat lol (sobbing and crying over him)

I figured the sword was always supernatural if Sephiroth can just manifest it out of nowhere. If the sword comes from Jenova, it's possible that only Sephiroth can tame its power and utilize it to its full supernatural potential.

I was joking with the whole "cursed sword" stuff earlier. Some people are genuinely thinking that the SWORD is what caused Nibelheim. And while I think the sword definitely is cursed in the sense that it is imbued with an evil power, Sephiroth is totally fine with it for at least a solid decade before Nibelheim. And what he does to the village is more or less an echo of the sword's past, not BECAUSE of it. If anything, I'd say that Sephiroth burning the village is a callback to JENOVA'S influence, not the will of the blade itself. We'll see how things unfold over time....

[holly-fixation]

Has anyone else noticed that only Sephiroth and Angeal are having purple dreams in Ever Crisis?

Alien mom shows love for all her children!

[sapphirothcrescent]

"I just want Sephiroth to be happy with his mom"

You mean his human mom right? Because he seems pretty happy with space mom!

[sephirthoughts]

square enix doesn't do queerbaiting they do dadbaiting

Why the hell is the monster in Sephiroth's head quoting Vincent through a misnamed facsimile of Lucrecia? Hello?

[caprart1]

I think he should have one motherly snuggle just as a little treat

[geekysteven]

[pencilequipped]

Phew, took the evening, but did a set of Sephiroth sketches. I wanted to showcase his various forms from the original game, and had a blast doing so. Hope yall like it!

[achurchinthesector5slums]

a gaggle of soldiers doodled in my geology class right after rebirth came out

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Could you talk more about sephiroth and clouds dynamic/relationship? Especially about sephiroths feelings towards cloud since I personally haven’t seen many people talk about that aspect.

Well, it sort of depends which version of the Final Fantasy VII story you're talking about, because certainly in the original game, Sephiroth actually doesn't care very much about Cloud at all.

During the events in Nibelheim, Sephiroth has a relationship with Zack as a friendly coworker (arguably an actual friend), but Cloud is just some Shinra goon nobody whose name and face Sephiroth doesn't even know. It's not until Cloud confronts him in the Mako reactor and successfully kills him that Sephiroth even sees his face for the first time. Sephiroth doesn't even know Cloud's name in the last few moments of his life, he just sees this enraged kid suddenly find the strength to overpower him and throw him into the reactor core out of nowhere.

After Cloud kills him, well... I would make the argument that Sephiroth never actually comes back. He dies in the throes of a psychotic break where the Jenova cells inside of him are using his emotional anguish to manipulate him towards her own ends, promising him all the love and family and fulfilment and sense of identity that Shinra violently abused out of him. And when he dies, whatever parts of Sephiroth's mind that were left are fully replaced with Jenova's single-minded superobjective to consume the planet and move on to parasitize again.

And so the version of Sephiroth that haunts Cloud for most of the narrative isn't actually Sephiroth the man. Almost every part of that person is long gone. Just like how Jenova used the psychological hook of Sephiroth's mother to control him, "Sephiroth" is mostly the Jenova cells using the hook of Sephiroth's influence over Cloud to try and control him.

And that's why Sephiroth seems so fixated on Cloud - not because Sephiroth the Person actually cares about him, but because the Jenova cells that are spread out across a thousand organisms are calling for Reunion, and they will use whatever psychological hook or crook that can manipulate their hosts to make it happen. The other Jenova victims presumably saw visions just as vivid and personal, urging them on towards the Northern Crater.

Sephiroth seems obsessed with Cloud because Cloud is obsessed with Sephiroth. Sephiroth is this avatar of his trauma, his self-hate, and his deep internal identity crisis, the representation of his every doubt and insecurity. Hence Sephiroth's gleeful constant accusation that Cloud is merely a puppet, Cloud has no personality, Cloud isn't real - these are Cloud's own fears being verbalized against him by the Jenova cells. And it's deeply ironic because the only puppet here is Sephiroth, being piloted by Jenova like an ant by cordyceps.

Hence the very final battle with Sephiroth which takes place not in the depths of the Northern Crater with the party confronting Safer Sephiroth, but in a black and undifferentiated void-space at the end of a psychedelic mind-trip, that Cloud undertakes alone to confront the ghost of Sephiroth in his mind and banish his influence forever. Like, that final moment really is the most This Is Only Happening In Cloud's Mind-ass final boss confrontation imaginable.

But that's the original Final Fantasy VII. The extended FF7 universe pivots hard off of the popularity of Sephiroth as an Iconic Villain and goes about building out him as the central antagonist of the entire universe, and centering him almost obsessively in the extended narrative of Final Fantasy VII.

Advent Children basically retcons the end of Final Fantasy VII, where it turns out oops Cloud didn't actually fully reject Sephiroth's influence over him, here's some Geostigma to represent the haunting malice of this singular villain and here's a 1-to-1 recreation of the final scene from FF7 where Cloud destroys Sephiroth with Omnislash extended out to a gratuitous anime fight scene that ends with an even more awesome ultra-final ultimate Super Omnislash... but then even THAT isn't enough as Sephiroth promises ominously to "never become a mere memory" and he's going to haunt Cloud forever and ooooh maybe he'll be coming back for another seven sequels or something, because the franchise is never ever ever going to let Cloud move on, heal or get better, not so long as Sephiroth is this popular.

Same deal with Kingdom Hearts, which represents Cloud's character as basically revolving entirely around Sephiroth, and Sephiroth as almost romantically obsessed with Cloud, while games like Crisis Core get into the Star Wars Extended Universe business of attaching portentous mythological weight to originally inconsequential objects like the Buster Sword, and building out a grand conspiracy of gene manipulated One Winged Angel People all chasing the coat-tails of Sephiroth's popularity.

All of this comes together in the Final Fantasy VII Remake games, which try to reconcile the extended post-FF7 narrative with the original Final Fantasy VII story, adopting the idea of Sephiroth as the singular operatic puppet master villain of the story, rather than Shinra or Jenova who were the original game's thematic central villains as representations of parasitic and extractive capitalism.

So in these games, Sephiroth is obsessed with Cloud, and seems to see Cloud as his own best chance of salvation from his fate, and there's deep homoerotic tension between the two as Cloud struggles between wanting to kill Sephiroth, and wanting to be with or become him.

Oh, and to be clear, I do love the extended FF7 universe and all the post-original fluff that gets attached to it, I do love Sephiroth and Cloud as this pair of Doomed By The Narrative romantic lover-enemies fated to Toxic Yaoi each other to death forever, and I'm very fond of my good boy Zack, who deserves all the love the games have shown him. I cackled like an absolute hyena when I realized just how far the Final Fantasy VII Remake was going to go in rewriting the story.

It's just also hard not to see Square's treatment of Final Fantasy VII after it became The Iconic JRPG™ as anything other that corporate self-mythologizing and Star Wars style brand management, obsessively building more a marketable facade around the original game focused on its most popular surface-level features, at the cost of obscuring a lot of the subtler themes and ideas of the original game.

Sephiroth is not the main villain of Final Fantasy VII. Extractive capitalism is, and it is embodied by Shinra in the first half, and Jenova in the second half, and both of those antagonistic forces use Sephiroth as a puppet to do their bidding, and a veil to hide the primitive brutality of their consumption. But nobody would ever think that seeing how Sephiroth has been elevated as King Bad Guy of Villain Mountain in the aftermath.

I'm sorry I think this went kind of off the rails from the question you actually asked lol

[crylin]

ZackWeek2024 | day 6: sci-fi au 👽☄️ ⭐️Zack & Marlene vs Alien!Jenova⭐️

[ittybittypixel]

Sephiroth “And they call her… Jenova.”

[vaatil]

Im cooking something 👽

[pink-nubes]

I painted Sephiroth for a class 🧚‍♀️