#gehudshniea

[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