I'm sleepy and going to bed in like 2 minutes here we go:>Sephiroth in OG FF7 is largely a plot device. The apparitions we see throughout the game are just JENOVA/JENOVA-made. We only ever meet the real Sephiroth in the Northern Crater, and the argument whether he or JENOVA were in control of the other is non-conclusive.>While he was an antagonistic force, he had no real personal, two-way connection to anyone in the OG game.>But oh! "Cloud killed Sephiroth in Nibelheim! And Sephiroth killed his mother!"- events whose significance to Seph were only played up as the Compendium of FF7 went along.>Cloud having to overcome Seph wasn't about defeating the man personally, it was about overcoming his trauma and growing past it.>Cue post-FF7 OG. Sephiroth is nigh the most popular JRPG character ever conceived, probably more than Cloud himself if we're being real.>This meant that SE had to milk him hard, and what was once a plot device of a character is now this whole big beluga, whose connection to the main character, which was only thematic and personally tenuous, is now down right nonsensical and hamfisted, because it had no real solid base to begin with.>This comes to a head in Advent Children and FF7R where they're really forcing this idea that Seph has a deep, existential connection to Cloud, that he can't *be* without him, both through a burning grudge and some flowery BS about persisting through memory (a once thematic angle made literal, making it stupid.)The more they "fleshed him out" as a response to his popularity, the more they took away everything that made him great. Now we're at this very weird point where he seems to be the stealth main character of the sequel Remake trilogy, vagueposting for 200 hours straight about fate and destiny, doing absolutely fuck all in the process. But hey, hope you're looking forward to his "redemption" in Part 3!>TL;DR Go back to school.
>>738092095I'm sorry the writers don't care about you're fucking headcanon.
I'm not reading any of that
>>738092095>Sephiroth became popularAnd that was the biggest problem. There is nothing, in game, that suggests Sephiroth is even alive and there is all the evidence to suggest that Jenova is the antagonist and always has been.
>>738093508You autists are never going to let this go no matter how many times you get BTFO are you?
>>738092095You are a fool. The Jenova Sephiroth walking around IS Sephiroth. It's Sephiroth sitting on his couch playing Brinter of Chaos 7 and Jenovaroth is his player avatar. It's the same thing as Ultimecia and Zeromus, this is the character you are constantly fighting they're just using spare bodies
>>738092095>The more they "fleshed him out" as a response to his popularity, the more they took away everything that made him greatEh, i prefer my villains to be more emotionally invested in the plot and with the characters. Thats why FF tactics, Vagrant story and FFXII have such shit villains. Formav is a nothing burger, Guilderstern was meh and Vayne...who? Matsuno writing is garbage. As for Sephiroth, the key aspect that people remember is that he was cool. You remember the famous CGI cutscene in the flashback, the midgar zolom killing and the supernova, but not really his character or his motivations. To me the whole "Who was in control???" discussion is just people forcing themselves to make Sephiroth deeper as a villain than it actually is. The game explicitly says that sephiroth used jenova as a vehicle to move around the world but HE was in control, and it was never stated otherwise or even explored. As for >Cloud having to overcome Seph wasn't about defeating the man personally, it was about overcoming his trauma and growing past it.No, it is more simple, it is a way for Cloud to get over Sephiroth influence over him. He travels inside his mind and get rid of Sephiroth as a parasite inside of him or his "lifestream memories" attached to him from sephiroth.
>>738093775>FF tacticsDycedarg was the real villain of FFT
I'm fairly confident that a lot of the ambiguity of the original game was also in part thanks to the really shitty translation quality of the time.
>>738093867Well thanks Matsuno for treating him as a random liutenant then, and not the final boss
>>738093598>>738093775As much as people like to whine and cry basically this sums it up: They made the legend far too cool for them to be able to write themselves out of it. There are multiple instances in the original game that TELL YOU FLAT OUT that Jenova is simply using Sephiroth's likeness and the only thing that suggests it is Sephiroth who is "in control" is one line from Hojo whose entire career was designed on ensuring Sephiroth was the ultimate creation of science. Reliable narrator Hojo is not.
>>738096215>There are multiple instances in the original game that TELL YOU FLAT OUT that Jenova is simply using Sephiroth's likenessThis never happened
>>738092095Please explain why Jenova would need to take the appearance of Sephiroth isn't of making a new version of her original body otherwise go write your headcanon on a fanfiction site
>>738096215The timeline of events dictate Sephiroth is in control. Jenova starts moving, when the party is captured in Shinra HQ. This is three decades after Jenova is rediscovered and five years after Sephiroth falls into the Lifestream. If Jenova is in control and therefore not dead, it was alive during the 2000 years in stasis and then waited thirty years extra after thawing before starting its new plan. The timeline is too convenient to happen when it does. If Sephiroth is in control, then five years is pretty natural sounding time for him to swim through the Lifestream to learn its secrets and knowledge and then obtain control of the Jenova Cells. Then he puts his plan into motion, when the Clones are in place. Secondly the plan of dropping the Meteor on the Planet to become a god is a complicated, and most importantly human, plan rather than a straightforward instinctual infection spreading to dominate and munch on the planet, that Jenova used before.
Guys like sephiroth because he’s a badass powerful nihilist like me. Girls like him because he’s hot. It’s really not that complicated, anon, his story and even what he says doesn’t really matter. He’s a magazine model who appeals to both sides.
>>738096457It's explained several times how Jenova would utilize the Cetra against themselves through mimicry and deception, something that is a theme all throughout the game. Even stating that they sealed the creature because it had been injured and trying to regenerate into another humanoid form of the one that sealed it/injured it greatly. Why add that in for zero reason?>>738099143While Jenova is considered a parasite, remember that it does have sentience and intelligence as evidenced by the one crack in the veil when Jenova directly addresses Cloud in the OG. The mask slipped. Also considering that Jenova was sealed by the Cetra by powerful magic, then basically put on life support and in a coma in Nibelheim for the SOLDIER program, it can stand to reason that because Jenova had no cells out there in the world, Jenova could not influence anything due to that. Can call it weakness or whatever, but keep in mind that Sephiroth had NO contact with Jenova and was a perfectly sane individual up until that point in Nibelheim.Lore also dictates that exposure to the lifestream purges jenova cells from one's body and also absorbs dead individuals back into it. This means that Sephiroth woudl be purged of all Jenova cells surely after five years of being IN the lifestream. Keep in mind he fell in there with Jenova's head and by the time we "see" him again he only has the upper half of his body reconstructed. The lower half is never seen.All this is evidence that Jenova has simply been using his body and likeness...as a puppet.
>>738101182>Lore also dictates that exposure to the lifestream purges jenova cells from one's bodymy memory of the games are a bit murky but isn't the soldier program about putting the cells in the military to become super soldiers? Shouldn't that mean Cloud (when he's in the wheelchair) and Sephiroth should no longer be super soldiers?
>>738101582In a sense you would be correct but I believe that it was more akin to being able to pump more mako (lifestream) into a subject as the jenova cells would counter act it and thus allow a human to be pushed far past their limits. Just some individuals have more of resistance towards Jenova's calling that Hojo is extremely invested in.Sephiroth couldn't escape it at all and went crazy the moment he got within Jenova's range of influence and while it took a week, Cloud shows to have much more mental resilience towards it but still drawn towards Jenova. The last "fight" in the OG was him purging himself of the last of Jenova's influence by "killing Sephiroth for good".
>>738102540And remind me, for better or for worse the original doesn't have a background for the black materia existing?
>>738102913The background is that white and black materia both existed before Jenova came to the planet and before the ancients. It's suggested that they were safeguards against the planet being destroyed by its own inhabitants in some way. If the world needed to purge itself from danger, it would use the black materia and the white was there for protection of its populace
>>738103165Isn't the black materia's only use to blow the planet up with meteor, or is that Sephiroth/Jenova turning it up to 11?
