#because Im doing mental gymnastics to get him to talk to other muses

[manintheblackcape]

Can we talk about how weird it is Sephiroth's shadow is felt throughout the entire game and yet he has no real relationship with any of the characters, other than Cloud? He has established connections with many party members, but he's either unaware of those connections, or just doesn't care. The rest of the party don't matter to Sephiroth because it's all about Cloud (and that's not me trying to make this gay. Sephiroth is just obsessed with this one dude that can beat him in a fight).

Sephiroth doesn't know Vincent had a history with his mother and father, and Hojo never told him he was his father (but it's hinted that Sephiroth might have always known?), so this entire subplot with Vincent and Hojo goes unnoticed by him and he never learns it ever happened.

Tifa went through so much shit in Nibelheim and was just as emotionally devasted by everything that went down that day as Cloud, but Sephiroth doesn't care about Tifa beyond using her as a tool to exploit Cloud's insecurities. Tifa's own personal vendetta towards Sephiroth gets overshadowed by Cloud's personal vendetta. Tifa's trauma kinda gets overlooked by the narrative because her tragedy over losing her father gets lumped together with Cloud's tragedy over losing his mother. Both of them have personal beef with Sephiroth and he only cares about one of these rivalries.

And that's interesting because it didn't have to be Cloud. The entire point of the flashback reveal is the revelation Cloud is not special. It could have been ANYONE. Sephiroth is not obsessed with Cloud because he respects him as his true equal or had this complex history that Cloud deluded himself into believing, no, Sephiroth is just obsessed with Cloud because a faceless trooper killed him by pure luck and shear stubbornness. Had Tifa not gone running in screaming bloody murder so Sephiroth had all the time in the world to counter her attack, and instead did what Cloud did and shanked him from behind while he wasn't looking, she might have been the one Sephiroth chose as his fated rival that night. This nobody tour guide from a backwater village who took out the Shinra's greatest SOLDIER, and he took that personally.

You'd think at the very least the writers would play into the established dynamic of Aerith and Sephiroth's roles as thematic foils in the story. Cloud might be his character foil, but Aerith is the only one who can defeat Sephiroth in a way that matters. He will always come back to life as long as Cloud remembers him, but Aerith is the only one who can stop him in his tracks. They are so similar, yet different, and not just in character design. They both had pretty fucked up childhoods at the hands of Hojo, and made to feel special in the worst ways possible. He believes himself to be a cetra, while she is the last of the cetras. He has the black materia, while she has the white materia. He is fire and sky, while she is water and earth.

And the story doesn't seem to care enough about this narrative parallel in the same way it does about Cloud idolizing Sephiroth and wanting to be just like him. It's even confirmed in one of the books these two hang out in the lifestream and yet they never talk! They just keep their distance out of fear one will consume the other. You could have had this fun dynamic with them playing chess games with Cloud as Aerith's knight, but it never goes there. There's so much wasted potential here.

Not including Crisis Core, where they actually have to give him human connections for the story to work (and even then Genesis and Angeal are conveniently not around that much before defecting Shinra early on in the game), even his relationship with Zack is kinda left to the player's interpretation as time is played very loosely in CC (this game feels like it takes place over the course of several weeks and yet Zack has been on vacation no less than 6 times. Even Zack's friendship with Cloud isn't nearly as developed as it should be considering how little screen time they have together before Nibelheim). The game shows cut scenes of Sephiroth and Zack growing close as friends, but Zack spends most of the time being annoyed at Sephiroth for dumping all his assignments on him or they only ever talk about Angeal and Genesis. Their hinted friendship in FF7 OG is way more interesting than what we actually got.