Me:
Man. Sephiroth and I really are the same person.
The major difference is that I genuinely knew my mother (and even my low life of a father) and had siblings and best friends to keep me grounded to the reality called living. He lost that, either through losing every friend and loved one he ever had (sans Zack who he did not have enough time to truly bond with as a companion I feel) or learning the truth in Nibelheim (i.e. that the mother in his head, who he held most dear, was not the mother he thought she was; the real person was complicit in his conception and "abandoned" him as far as he knew...or really died; and the mother, Jenova, wasn't human and had been used in Hojo's experiments for years to create monsters, him included).
He really had nothing to fall back on to maintain a bond with society.
The people of the world saw him as one thing, a "hero" of great power who could protect them and had protected them, so their love for him extended only to what he could do for them based on what he allegedly already had. Nevermind that from Sephiroth's perspective, he was no hero because he was just killing people for Shinra before they could kill him. Surving within and without the company was all he had ever known, all he was doing. His enemies saw the same and, thus, saw not a hero but an insurmountable wall...a monster so to speak. In either case, no one ever just saw "a person" dealing the hand that life gave him.
As for Shinra, he was there "thing" to do with as they pleased. Not a person, not even a soldier, but a "thing" to use however they needed. Fabrication of the SOLDIER program by painting him as the beloved hero? Done. Beauty and status symbol to help paint Shinra as good? Done. A bodyguard to protect the assests of the company? Done. A weapon to throw at their enemies whenever they wanted something or when a problem needed to go away (whether that problem used to be allies or not)? Done. For Shinra, Sephiroth was not a person or individual but a tool. To the troops and fellow SOLDIERs, he might have been more, but none of them truly got close to him the way Glenn's team did or even Angeal and Genesis, and considering his own traumas, alot of that probably stemmed from Sephiroth keeping others at arm's length either from not trusting them or just not expecting them to see him.
Neither society nor Shinra really knew or cared about him as a person, and I really feel that the Nibelheim flashback, both in the old and new game, kind of emphasize this. In the case of most immediate people around him, like the villagers and Tifa and so on, it wasn't out of malice. People just lived in a completely different realities both mentally and emotionally, and that's the tragedy of Sephiroth's story.
He's a person like everyone else, but he was brought into the world unlike any of them and raised in an environment where treating people like property, objects, and disposable was the norm. Sure, he learned to be better adjusted enough to properly interact with people, but at his fundamental core, he was an "other" compared to everyone around him. Where people lived their lives chasing regular hopes and dreams that involved family, friends, and making the best of the mundane, Sephiroth had to struggle and fight as a weapon with no family, no hometown to return to, and (by the time of Nibelheim) no friends he was close to. He was so far removed from people and society by circumstance, and had he actually managed to leave Shinra and make his own life and adventures outside of that harsh reality, then perhaps his tale would have been different.
But that did not happen.
Nibelheim happened. Jenova happened, and Sephiroth had no reason to keep being human because he wasn't. Not just because of genetics but because of his upbringing and how non-human that upbringing was. He WAS a person, but no one else ever saw it. The ones who did also broke or was just dead. Would that he could have left Shinra and reconnected to Matt and Lucia...but alas.
Me:
Yes. That's the fundamental difference between we two isolated persons. Whereas I live in my own bubble, protecting myself from a world that always labels me wrong, I am still of that world and its people. I still had a life in my society the way anybody else would have (even if some don't see it that way).
Sephiroth did not have that. He longed for it, but the truth became clear that he was a "monster" from birth to adulthood in his rearing. And that broke him from his human connections permanently.
And that's why, I can't help but cry and wish that things could have been different. If only he had someone alive who saw him. If only it mattered by Nibelheim.
