Since I'm seeing the "Lucrecia didn't even like Hojo and he forced her into everything" sentiment rolling around the fandom again, I'd like to remind everyone that Hojo and Lucrecia are canonically married. They are together. They are in a relationship. Canonically.
Behold, the Dirge of Cerberus relationship chart from the 10th Anniversary Ultimania! And a zoom in on the connection between Hojo and Lucrecia. What's that word connecting them? Oh, that's 夫婦! I wonder what that means?
This isn't exclusive to the Compilation, either, because the only direct interaction between them that we see in the OG is this:
Dirge actually made their relationship worse than was implied in the OG by giving Lucrecia some internal conflict. She still literally fell into his arms, and when Vincent even implied that she should second guess her decision with the project by asking if she was sure, Lucrecia blew up at him.
Hojo is extremely fucked up, I'm not saying otherwise, but Lucrecia was an explicitly willing participant here. They're married. Stockholm Syndrome isn't real. Do I think she felt pressured? Absolutely! Who wouldn't, in her position? However, I don't think the pressure came expressly from Hojo. I think the majority of it came from academia.
We're talking about a woman whose mentor died in a lab accident directly related to her thesis—a thesis for which she was ridiculed, which included research conclusions that remained unproven, unclear, and even fantastical until decades later when Omega was awoken early. Lucrecia needed to be part of something that would cast off the shadow hanging over her after Grimoire's death. I can't imagine anyone in her position not jumping at the chance to work with Shinra's top researcher on something as big as the Jenova Project. Add in the fact that success on Project S would prove her work was better than that of two other scientists who were no doubt much more respected than her—the team on Project G, whose efforts had already resulted in failure—and there was literally no way she could pass up the chance.
If we really want to shift the blame for Lucrecia's decisions to someone else, it was actually Gast that headed up the project. He's the one that took Sephiroth as a baby, we know this because Sephiroth was born in 1977 and Hojo and Lucrecia both went on to work on Project 0 in the same year, so they must have been moved immediately after he was born.
Gast was the lead on the project, with Hojo and Lucrecia working below him as assistants, but I never see anyone implying that he may have pressured her into agreeing to serve as the incubator for Project S, even though that kind of thing literally happens all the time. (Check out the Hwang affair for a real-world incident from 2004 in which a top biotech scientist pressured female researchers on his team into using their reproductive potential in his scientific research.)
The issue with insisting that Hojo and Lucrecia weren't actually together is that it creates a cascading effect on interpretations of Lucrecia's character that simply don't do her justice. If Hojo—the other junior researcher on the project, not even her supervisor—forced her into everything, then she has literally no agency. She had no aspirations, because Hojo is the one that forced her to participate in the project. She had no expertise, because she wasn't brought onto the project to actually work on the research aspect. In fact, she had no part in the project at all aside from her term as an incubator. She's done nothing and is capable of nothing. Hojo forced her into everything, he must have, because she didn't want anything to do with him but still wound up doing whatever he told her to do. I've seen people going so far as to claim that she was sexually assaulted to produce Sephiroth, which is both offensive and ludicrous when you actually look at the source material.
In actuality, these two were married. They met through the project, they had similar goals, and strove to reach them together. And even years later, Hojo does have respect for her work! Against all odds, he respects her work as a scientist.
He didn't agree with her thesis, but he didn't strike it from the record when he got control of the department. Most importantly, he accepted her theories immediately when he realized what had actually happened to Vincent. No rejection, no denial, only shock—but he accepted that Lucrecia was right. According to Dirge, he trusted her work so much once it was proven that he decided to try a variation of her process on himself.
Before this, Hojo still had a photo of Lucrecia. Even after what happened in Nibelheim, even after she disappeared, he kept this lovely photo of his lovely wife, the only person who ever matched his intellect—even if he was correct in that she was overly emotional, often to her detriment—and he gave that photo to Sephiroth so that he'd have a photo of his real mother.
This is not at all how anyone, particularly someone as self-important as Hojo, would treat the memory of someone they manipulated and coerced and forced into helping them.
Lucrecia is complex. She's brilliant, she's got the same moral compass as all her coworkers, but she seems to be really self-aware of that fact: consider her line "you can't call me his mother" when talking about Sephiroth in the OG, the way she blew up at Vincent for questioning her decisions, the lengths she was willing to go to make up for her mistakes. She is utterly fascinating.
And she married Hojo for her own reasons, which I've discussed at length in the past. This was an intentional decision on her part. He didn't force her into anything. They were actually, 100 percent, together.
But, as usual, god forbid women do anything.
(WARNING: I will not abide by misogynistic commentary on this post. Words like "bitch," "slut," "whore," etc. will result in a block. If you use infantilizing language, you will be blocked. If you argue about the existence of Stockholm Syndrome, you will be blocked. Lucrecia Crescent and I would never be friends, but I love her character to the ends of the earth and will not let her be fucking slandered because y'all can't handle a female character being less than a pillar of moral "purity" in any concept aside from sexual liberation.)
