#i like thinking of them beyond 'irredeemable monsters who abandoned their son'

[shigayokagayama]

post the teru parent headcanons pretty please 🧎

ok my basic thoughts on these people are that theyre not like. uniquely shitty people. theyre just rich people who had a kid more out of obligation than actually wanting a kid. like it was just a milestone in their life the same way as graduating school or buying a car would be. they just figured they could offload most of the responsibility of actually raising him onto paid help because like. thats what people with money do. they dont really think about how badly having a rotating cast of people caring for you and only getting attention from the people who are supposed to care for you when you accomplish something will fuck you up because a lot of parents just. dont think about that. like youre more worried about them doing good in school and not getting in trouble than you are the long term consequences of your parenting style, and that especially goes for rich folks who want to be able to brag about their kids to their peers.

more specific baseless headcanons: i see them both as tech startup ceos who got really lucky and made something that got bought out by a big company when teru was relatively young and went from being "yearly vacation to the bahamas" rich to "private jet" rich in a very short period of time. i think both his parents have really bad relationships with their own families. i see his dad as being born into money and having a similarly distant relationship from his own parents as he has with teru meanwhile i think his mom was more like. upper middle class who didnt really get money until she married her husband and started a business with him and i think that her turning into her "too busy to maintain familial relationships" self caused a huge falling out between her and most of her family and she stopped talking to them when teru was little (specifically i think she kept dumping her son at her sisters house to babysit then just leaving for days at a time when their company was in the process of getting bought out and her sister got sick of it)

[altocat]

The patrick chains meme but it's an opinion you have for ff7

Lucrecia does some despicable things, but I don't think she deserved having her newborn child taken and subsequently kept from her.

While she indeed ran away and essentially abandoned Seph, we don't see how and why she came to the conclusion that there was nothing she could do to see or get to him. Hojo could have threatened her son. He could have triggered her into a state of complete futility. Or maybe she tried multiple times to no avail. We don't KNOW. We never get to see it beyond a single scene of her pleading with Hojo, only for him to blow her off. For all her immortality, Lucrecia doesn't have super powers, and was in an extremely weakened emotional and physical state thanks the the Jenova cells. So perhaps getting to Sephiroth would have always been physically impossible. Dirge doesn't really show us the full extent of her regret because it's limited to her relationship with Vincent over the larger narrative.

I don't think Lucrecia is evil. Or a monster. I think she made some very real, very human mistakes and has no idea how to fix them. She shut down because the hole just kept getting bigger and bigger and she kept making stupid decisions in order to try to fix it. And I think that's a surprisingly realistic reaction. She didn't hate Sephiroth or regret being his mother. I think she truly thought there was nothing she could do. And I think she believed the Jenova Project was some misguided way to make up for what happened to Grimoire--a great achievement after a great loss. She likely didn't think Sephiroth would be taken away.

Lucrecia is a complex character. I think too many people demonize her in the fandom. She's done some downright disgusting, awful, irredeemable things. But I don't think she's an evil person. She can't crawl out of the hole she's in and her learned helplessness has effectively ruined her capacity to make good choices. That's a human dilemma. A real one. And one worthy of healing. She's responsible for what happened to Sephiroth. But her presence, had they allowed it, might have also helped avert what he became. Them keeping him from her was NOT her fault. And realistically, one severely depressed and physically weakened woman against a fascist mega corporation with literal armies at their disposal probably couldn't amount to much.

I don't think she's a good parent. But I also believe she loved her son. I think people are complicated.

People who say she's just as bad as Hojo....no. No, I'm sorry. But no.