#not aliens not jenova definitely not trauma

[jolioiseau]

begging on my astral knees for ppl to understand that the wing is a manifestation of sephiroths hatred, not weird alien genetics

[risingoflights]

So glide away on soapy heels

And promise not to promise anymore

And if you come around again

then I will take

then I will take

The chain from off the door

Based on @the--calamity ‘s beautiful, dark, haunting fic The Nightmare Begins, detailing the start of the Jenova Project, which you should definitely read. Just mind the warnings, and leave your preconceptions of all the characters at the door of Calamity’s house - you won’t need them in there.

This is a story about The Jenova Project - science and ShinRa and reactors and Sephiroth - but it is also a story about trauma and the chain. About humanity and being denied it. It is a story about agency and preservation. Impact and intent. What we pass on, how far it ripples. The fingerprints we leave in each other. The echos.  

Where is the line between personal and universal? What harm are we capable of causing as we spread our own survival? How far could it go?  Could it end us? The whole world?

Jenova duplicates, infects, spreads. Sometimes Jenova looks like an alien, horrible creature in all of its wrongness and sometimes it takes the shape of something intimate, loved. Kept, even. Maybe that's why we keep it.

Jenova is not evil. It is surviving.

So are we.

The monsters put into us are not our fault.

They are always our responsibility.

-Calamity

[withgreatpowercomesmyfuckingdick]

this come out of nowhere really, I just can't get myself to sleep without sharing this but why in all time travel fanfic. sephiroth seems to be extra aware of his status of " experiment " ??? it just, I don't know. I don't say that sephiroth or even genesis and angeal are stupid but it's strange to me that they seem extremely aware about it in those fanfic. when in crisis core, that piece of Informations seems to be new to them. i mean, do I just see the wrong issue? the way they learn that they are experiment choked them to the core. none of them reacted well? sephiroth just thought that he was special he said it himself.

maybe he lied to himself or the company and hojo did not treat him like we thought they did , at least outside of those experiment. so I find it weird when I read fanfiction that the big 3 already knows and acknowledged it, when that information was one of the big reveal and issues of crisis core.

also sephiroth not technically being 100 % aware of his experiment status means that most of us write hojo extremely wrong when he interacted with sephiroth. I mean, I don't know he seems to snob every one but sephiroth. in ff7, he was just weird, extremely fixed on sephiroth.

or maybe I interpreted it the wrong way ? maybe I am just stupid I don't know. I don't want to say something stupid.

I don’t think this is stupid at all and you are definitely not stupid, lovely! No one is stupid for expressing their opinions, even and especially when those opinions go against the crowd. And nothing’s wrong with a little critique lol, keeps me humble

(long text as always, but main points highlighted red lovelies)

Truth is, most fanfic around Sane!Sephiroth is heavy headcanon, and I am no better. We know (somewhat) that Sephiroth was raised in Nibelheim for some time but obviously didn’t see the townspeople as he has no memory of them, so it’s easier to conclude he was raised in a lab or some other isolated Shinra area. Sephiroth doesn’t actually know much about his origins, neither in canon nor in my fic. He doesn’t even believe he has parents, which he doesn’t cause they’re both ass or dead, but that’s beside the point lol. Sephiroth’s backstory just gives a lot of room for headcanons and the fandom sort of mutually agreed “Yup he’s traumatized as shit” and rolled with it

Now what I definitely took creative liberties with is his confiding in Genesis and Angeal about this childhood trauma. This is a much bigger stretch and more than likely not directly canon, but since I have them in a romantic relationship, there definitely had to be some opening up about what the fuck Hojo was calling Sephiroth into a lab for once a week (back when things were *bad* bad). I think in canon, Genesis and Angeal undoubtedly spotted some things that helped them see that Seph wasn’t completely normal, but they took it in stride because they’re good friends like that.

I would like to clarify one thing: the Firsts are aware that *Sephiroth* was treated badly during his childhood, but only as a SOLDIER child. They don’t have a clue about Jenova and the extent of what Hojo/Hollander/Gast did. Sephiroth doesn’t even know the full extent of what was done to him because as far as he’s aware, he’s a mako SOLDIER with a few gimmicks wired in. Traumatizing? Yes. Inherently monstrous? In his own eyes occasionally, but he’s got other people similar enough to him he can be talked away from it

The introduction of Jenova was nerve wracking and brand new and horrible and gut wrenching. They didn’t ask to be implanted with literal alien cells before their births, doomed to unstable and insane deaths before they’d taken their first steps. Sephiroth grew up a child SOLDIER, but monsters? Artificially made ones perhaps. A little gene splicing, even breeding, like how humanity helped the Liger happen (lion-tiger breed). But monsters that used to be *people*? That was new, and that terrified him. And that’s what sent him into the spiral. So I mean, you’re right. Jenova’s existence does shock them to their core, but Sephiroth’s entire childhood did not revolve around Jenova. Even if his purpose was to be a ‘mock Ancient,’ his developmental years revolved around being a weapon for war.

While I’m on that nofe, I’ve seen some comments on Sephiroth’s “alien cells” comment when he speaks to Zack on things for the first time and I want to clarify: when Sephiroth says alien cells, he meant foreign to the human body, not the fucking earth. None of them have a right clue what Jenova is, just like in canon

Also Everybody Hates Hojo so honestly I don’t think people are concerned? This is a man who was definitely not above experimenting on children, manipulated, nearly killed, and then experimented on a former friend, took advantage of a life/scientific partner for the advancement of an experiment and admitted to having seen her as nothing more than a tool, referred to Aerith as her species rather than a person and planned to literally breed her with another species (facilitated rape, basically), and in the OG game, helps fuel a major mental breakdown of Cloud’s for basically…no fucking reason? Not to mention DoG where he just…decides the planet’s fucking moving lmao. Literally goes “Ah yes, let me follow in my son’s footsteps and genocide the whole population so we can sail the stars :D”

the man is fucking mental regardless. just a personal opinion, but any rendition of Hojo is somewhat accurate if his cruelty is kept. I will admit that my Hojo is more reminiscent of an abusive parent because…that’s sort of what he is, and there’s some projection of my own personal experiences happening

And that’s an aspect of all fiction ofc, and especially fanfiction. Renditions change with authors because authors have different experiences. I can’t begin to tell you all the things I’ve accidentally or purposefully projected into this story.

Honestly I could write more but my eyes keep crossing and I should go to bed myself lol. Your ask really made me think so thanks for submitting! Hope I actually answered you amidst all my nonsense babble, and I hope you get some sleep!!!

[imaginative-spirit]

hii! i found your twitter acc when i was searching for sefikura meta/analysis, and i found your tweet! i wanted to ask if you know some blog posts (or any posts) of their relationship analysis, as i am quite new to the whole ffvii series and i am intrigued by their relationship. i wanted to ask through cc but i noticed you dont have curiouscat so i’m asking through tumblr, sorry ;;

I didn’t mean to put all of this under a readmore but tumblr is being an ass so that’s what we’re doing now, I guess...

Hello!! Unfortunately I can’t really come up with anything on the spot, because despite seeing posts like that around before, I’m very unorganized and bad at keeping track of posts... so I decided to write you one on the spot instead, lmao!! I’ve been planning to write a more coherent, longer analysis for a while but still haven’t gotten around to it, but I’ll share some of my condensed thoughts here. The sefikura relationship is what intrigues me most about FFVII after all, and I usually yell quite a lot about them on twitter!

You say you’re new to FFVII, which means that I should definitely give a spoiler warning here. I’m going to address spoilery stuff from the OG, Remake and also some of the compilation material, because it’s hard to talk about their relationship without doing so. (I’ll also assume you’re familiar enough with the world of FFVII to know what I mean when I talk about stuff like SOLDIER, Shinra, Jenova, the Lifestream and such... this would get too long if I explained all of that here, lol)

Okay, so. Cloud and Sephiroth are narrative foils, which means their stories and arcs parallel each other in many ways. The most central themes surrounding them are their loneliness, sadness and how they cope with trauma.

Sephiroth was most likely raised by Hojo in a Shinra lab, and if you know Hojo, you know that there’s no way Sephiroth was treated as anything but an experiment. He never knew his mother, and the only person he had any respect for - Professor Gast - vanished when he was young and this seems to have given him abandonment issues. Cloud, on the other hand, had a mother but not much else. He felt alienated by the other children growing up in Nibelheim and seems to have been generally disliked by the adults as well, due to them blaming him for the time Tifa got hurt. In other words, they were both very lonely as children.

Shinra sent Sephiroth to war when he was very young (people disagree quite a lot on how old Sephiroth actually is but it’s assumed that he was around 12), and as the years went by, Sephiroth became the poster child of SOLDIER. We know that Cloud grew to idolize Sephiroth for how strong and brave the media made him out to be (A.K.A. had a celebrity crush on him), and that was what inspired Cloud to leave town and try to join SOLDIER.

As we see in the prequel game Crisis Core, Sephiroth at this point is well-respected by his peers after his efforts in conquering Wutai. His two only friends are Genesis and Angeal, who are also SOLDIER 1st Class, but they end up leaving SOLDIER, which means Sephiroth gets left behind. Considering that he already had abandonment issues to begin with, being abandoned by his only friends must’ve hit hard. I’d say this sets the foundation for Sephiroth’s downward spiral. However, at this point, I would argue that Sephiroth is still a good person at heart, despite all the trauma he has endured. He persists, refusing to hunt down his deserter friends, and even begins a hesitant friendship with Zack, who was Angeal’s apprentice.

Cloud befriends Zack as well, but doesn’t make it into SOLDIER and instead remains in the ordinary Shinra infantry, which is a crushing loss for him because he can’t achieve his dream. It’s at this point I like to imagine that if Zack had introduced Sephiroth and Cloud to one another, things could’ve gone better. Sephiroth is older than Cloud and outranks him, but with how isolated Sephiroth has been for his entire life I think there’s potential for a meaningful friendship here. They’re both very lonely and neither of them is really a people-person, so I think they’d get along well once Cloud gets over his hero-worship and Sephiroth manages to open up a bit. I would say that sefikura, if Nibelheim didn’t happen, has the potential to be a healthy relationship.

But of course, that’s not how canon goes. The Nibelheim mission happens, Sephiroth finds out that he’s not human and finally snaps after years of mistreatment, burning the town to the ground. Cloud manages to kill Sephiroth, ends up spending several years as an experiment, gets injected with Jenova cells, goes into a coma, wakes up just in time to watch Zack die, and ends up so traumatized that he creates a false identity for himself as a former SOLDIER 1st Class.

We’ve now reached OG FFVII. At this point, Sephiroth, while technically dead and chilling in the Lifestream, uses Jenova as a vessel to move around and takes advantage of Cloud, using him as a puppet for his own gains. He constantly dehumanizes Cloud and generally doesn’t give a damn about him as a person, while Cloud resents Sephiroth but can’t resist his manipulations. In a lot of ways, I think Sephiroth projects his own trauma onto Cloud here, because if Sephiroth had to suffer as Shinra’s puppet for his entire life, then Cloud should suffer as Sephiroth’s puppet as well. As a victim of horrific abuse, Sephiroth has a lot of justified anger, but he takes it out on the wrong person entirely. It’s definitely a very unhealthy situation.

But of course, unlike Sephiroth, Cloud doesn’t let his trauma define him. He reaches his breaking point and falls apart completely, but he gets back up, because unlike Sephiroth, he has a support system of friends who stand by his side and work together with him to defeat Sephiroth at the end of the game. For most of his life, Cloud has been chasing Sephiroth. This is where he finally catches up and surpasses him.

And here, the tables turn. Cloud kills Sephiroth but that’s never stopped Sephiroth before. This is where Sephiroth first develops his Cloud-obsession. He fixates on Cloud so hard that his hatred keeps him from completely fading away into the Lifestream. Cloud is literally his lifeline. (Isn’t it romantic? lol) He returns in the sequel movie Advent Children, where he fights Cloud one-on-one and basically just taunts him for 10 minutes before Cloud kills him again.  It’s implied that Sephiroth can keep coming back as long as Cloud exists as well.

Canon beyond this has, for a long time, been unknown territory. There’s a sequel game called Dirge of Cerberus that the fandom at large pretends doesn’t exist because it’s... kinda weird to say the least, lol. And it doesn’t really have anything to do with sefikura anyway. People have written post-canon sefikura as something that continues to be toxic, but there’s also fic that offers redemption and forgiveness for Sephiroth, acknowledging that he was a victim too. It’s left very open-ended.

All of this basically explains how I see sefikura. They’re two people who were alike in many ways, who could have been friends before everything fell apart around them, if things had been different. But they never did meet, before it was too late. Instead, they keep chasing each other, full of hate even though they’re probably the only people in the world who could truly understand each other’s trauma. The only real difference is that Cloud had friends to back him up while Sephiroth was abandoned, and I really, truly wish they could get an opportunity to reach some sort of understanding. And that would basically be it...

...but then the Remake happened. Diving into speculation territory here. I firmly believe that the Sephiroth we see in the Remake is a time traveller, or is at least aware of the future to some degree, and that the remake is actually a sequel where Sephiroth is quite literally remaking OG ffvii. He’s completely obsessed with Cloud to a degree that he never was in the OG, and considering how loyal the developers stayed to the characterization of basically every other OG character this immediately stuck out to me like a sore thumb even though it took me until the end of the game to piece it together.

I’m not kidding here. Sephiroth is desperate for Cloud’s attention in the Remake. He's constantly trying to touch Cloud, everything he says to Cloud makes him sound like a pining ex-husband, and he generally doesn’t do anything to harm Cloud except scaring him shitless simply by showing up. He actually has quite a few moments when he’s very gentle with Cloud. At the end of the game he basically even proposes to Cloud by asking Cloud to join him and genuinely seems upset when Cloud rejects him. And even then, he claims he doesn’t want Cloud (nor himself) to die.

For the life of me, I can’t wrap my head around what Sephiroth’s goal is in the Remake and I have no idea what they’re planning to do with his character in future parts, but I’m very excited to find out. The sefikura content in the Remake was very delicious and at this point the only thing they could do to surpass it in the future would be to have them actually make out on screen, lmao.

I hope this is coherent enough to read, I basically just tried to condense everything I could into a neat little essay and there’s definitely things I didn’t mention here, lol. I’ll write a proper, more well-thought out analysis another time!

Also, if you want to ask me anything else or talk to me about sefikura in general, my DMs are always open, both here and on twitter ;D

[thegingeryone]

Thinks about Jenova and cackle laughs a lot here are headcanons bc im enthusiastic and i love the horrible alien momther

Stands at a solid 7′7, if she reforms herself properly. 

It takes a lot of fucking up her body to actually make her be dead, and by that I mean you’d have to take all the bits and bobs and like, throw them into a black hole. She’s a juggernaut who can only be delayed. 

She really does think of the remnants and seph as her kin. not necessarily her kids bc she doesn’t have the same understanding of parenthood but she sees them as worth protecting/assisting (sephiroth is definitely the favourite)

She’s a very...biological threat. Like, some other square ladies will fuck up memory via heart magic, Jenova will actively mess around with the brain’s connections. She’s an infectious, parasitic cancer that can think.

Doesn’t actually like to think though. Bc she’s virtually invulnerable, she’s pretty cocky and lazy...but her tactics are already so unorthadox that most people don’t see them coming. When she does have to think, she’ll get a grudge against whatever caused it. 

Can regenerate herself, but requires sufficent energy to do so.

Eats crystals aka the lifeblood of a planet. In addition to literally anything else. 

Seriously hc Jenova will eat A N Y T H I N G. doesn’t matter if its rotten or poison or what, she will put it in her mouth. 

She’s not controlling sephiroth. she will certainly influence him, or egg him on, but she’s not controlling him. 

Has a surprisingly carefree personality. And shitty eyesight. She’s BAD at regenerating her eyes, compared to everything else- but the carefree personality leads to some pretty slapdash jobs. Another thing where she could put her mind to it and learn, but won’t, because she’s a lazy sod. 

Probably has more wayward kin out there, because she’s a hedonistic asshole who mostly cares about eating and scaring people. 

Her fighting style is very focused on making opponents and herself bleed so she can infect them. If that isn’t worth it, then she aims for one-hit kills. 

She doesn’t like ShinRa. At all. Like, given two bullets and a room with Aerith, Cloud and Rufus, she’d shoot Rufus twice and then eat him. She takes the ShinRa thing...personally....frighteningly personally. Working for the company is enough to make her rage, and her rage is not pretty. The events there probably gave her some sort of trauma- she’s used to things like the Cetra happening, not so much people using her like a slab of meat. She doesn’t see the irony. Or maybe she does and is just too arrogant to care. 

Good singer. Sings at Alto, mostly, though by messing with her vocal folds she can produce all sorts of sounds.