Yeah, about hero!Sephiroth….
Crisis Core and The First Soldier are not tone deaf when it comes to Sephiroth’s writing. At all.
I know they have weak execution in areas, but they have a point they want to make about characters like Zack and Sephiroth and Cloud that you are supposed to understand for a reason.
It’s clear to me that some FF7 fans refuse, for whatever reason, to acknowledge that the entire point of hero! Sephiroth’s character these days is to show that his fall from grace was literally a fall from grace by standards entirely separate from Shinra. If you go by Shinra’s “morals” or illusions of righteousness, he was never actually a hero at all. He fell from nothing “good” whatsoever.
He was a war machine painted like a great figure by the company’s own propaganda, sent to finish an extermination of the people of Rhadore for his first mission and later sent over to Wutai to fight in the war that Shinra unjustly perpetuated and began when he was a child.
Yes, Shinra called him a hero before he was ever even in the Wutai war. Before he was ever even deployed. He was around 8-9 when it began and Shinra needed plenty of recruits to build an army before they deployed him specifically. He was showing great promise as a boy in training, so what better way to lure in other children than to rely on the image of a young prodigy to inspire them?
That was why FS revealed this almost immediately. Shinra crafted a war hero image for Sephiroth to use as propaganda long before he did anything special on the battlefield, and this was the very image he loathed, resented, and expressed his desire to be free from. He didn’t want to be a “hero” because all he knew was Shinra’s illusion of one. And Shinra’s illusion is what we’re meant to see through when we look at the meaning of a hero as well.
We’re supposed to understand this distinction by now because it was already shown through Zack and Cloud. Both of them became heroes beyond Shinra despite initially falling for the company’s propaganda and being massively screwed over. They came to understand that Shinra’s definition of a hero was warped, and Sephiroth was already aware of this long before them.
But now we have The First Soldier, which is cold canon. And we know a little more about Sephiroth’s true hero status.
It’s Nojima’s explanation for why we could have once called Sephiroth a real hero, because while he was certainly still in the process of attaining the title in truth and sincerity (by way of using his strength to save others instead of kill them), he was taking his first steps towards following his own heart (which was naturally inclined towards kindness and care for others when healthy and tended to).
Yes, the call of Sephiroth’s heart was once pure and he was embracing it in his early 20s, when Shinra’s struggle with Wutai was coming to a halt. Yes, Nibelheim broke that resolve into pieces. But Sephiroth was once trying to be the good person he naturally was inclined to be even beneath Shinra’s endless suppression. He was once trying to be a hero that dodged the hateful battlefield and instead rushed to save others in need.
And this is a miracle, because despite what I have seen others try to say, this was a child born and raised inside Shinra, sent to face the cruelest form of “war” at 14 with the mindset of “kill or die, even when they’re children your age….because like you, they may be trained to murder….”
And before then? Sephiroth was training under Hojo since early childhood. He may not have been on the actual frontlines from before he was ten years like the CC Ultimania/Complete Guide claimed, but he was being readied for it.
Do you really think he gained those skills in battle overnight? That conditioned mindset? Do you think he had memories of limit-breaking pain and dreams of his mother saving him from Hojo’s live tests with monsters for no reason?
Do you really think this child didn’t understand the concept of having fun or that he wasn’t familiar with enjoying the outside world, eating good food with a normal family, learning to socialize with people that didn’t see him as an object, or feeling free to think outside his mission because he was raised well and cared for? By anyone other than Hojo?
He was ruthlessly taught to kill or be killed from early on, and repeatedly lied to about his identity by his own “caretakers” because he was their machine. He was not recruited. The only children that compared to him inside Shinra were those in Deepground, and their fully human psyches/bodies fractured under the endurance of training and trials that Sephiroth was just inhuman enough to survive and grow stronger from.
There is no “sad childhood” to be spoken of in this because there is no childhood to be spoken of at all. Sephiroth’s story goes beyond that.
Sephiroth was a weapon produced inside Hojo’s laboratory. Hojo. The Hojo. Not just some dark and gloomy room with hazard lights. The mad scientist’s lair where Hojo unethically groomed a desired monster that longed to embrace his Shinra-stifled humanity and was finally able to do so the moment he met his first team. Glenn said it himself. He knew Sephiroth had compassion in him and the boy melted on the spot thanks to the smallest bit of affection and kindness. All his previous fear-based violence wilted in the face of the cycle being broken.
After that, Sephiroth helped to properly bury the Rhadorans, he came to understand what they had fought for alongside his team, and then he risked his life to try and save the sole survivor of their race.
Yes, it ended in tragedy and disaster, but that experience shaped Sephiroth for the rest of his sane life. He began to try and spare his enemies, he fought to save his comrades, he became kind at heart, and he was a step away from leaving Shinra.
You want to know why some Turks questioned Shinra for a longer period of time perhaps?
Cissnei, for instance? She was around the same age as Sephiroth when on the field, and like him…trained before then. She was compassionate, empathetic, dreamed of freedom, and eventually left the company. She was just like Sephiroth if he hadn’t lost everything. It’s stated that Cissnei learned to open up and trust others because of her friends in the Turks division. She found her family and began to heal from the cold isolation and detachment that a childhood in Shinra produced. She followed through with that healing inside her heart and ended up free, finding a good life away from Shinra.
Sephiroth was no different when he met Team Glenn. He defied Shinra for them, he bent rules fpr their sake, and he allowed a sweet, soft part of his true childlike personality to blossom when in their presence. For a moment, Sephiroth discovered a glimpse of childhood….something he never knew.
But then he lost those people just as he began to heal and regain innocence.
Yes, he came back to life and once again began to improve after he met Angeal and Genesis. But as FS2 is revealing, this was not easy, because the layers of psychological and familial trauma that were woven into his mind already at the age of 14-15 after an inhumane background and losing his first found family were so brutally devastating, that he was almost lost to madness and delusion long before Nibelheim.
Sephiroth was mentally ill for years and there was a fucking space alien and imperialist megacorp working together to make it ten times worse with lies surrounding his identity on top of his preexisting issues. This development was a different beast from the Turks and…yeah, even Deepground.
Do you wonder why the Deepground soldiers rebelled against Shinra with “villainous rage” some have claimed Sephiroth himself did not “earn?”
It’s because their existences were not swathed in layers of lies and half-truths about their origins that kept them desperate for answers and largely unaware of what they were or where they could potentially belong. It’s because they did not get a chance to see (and be subsequently ripped away from) the other side of life where the grass was greener and hopes for safety, childhood, and innocence could be grasped at like Sephiroth did.
The Deepground soldiers knew their situations were fucked up because they were humans being treated like dogs from day one and they could see that. Their cages were not painted in gold and dressed up to look like glorious arenas. Their cages were not sometimes left open for them to experience hope before being dragged back inside.
The Deepground warriors came to understand that they were prisoners and were literally being restricted as the strongest humans alive. Of course there was conditioning and learned helplessness involved, but they were also a league, often allied, of humans with unique powers that banded together in order to tear down Shinra’s obvious oppression. They became a community of violent rebels working to break free.
But Sephiroth was always a solitary case, always a little too inhuman, a little too special, and different from everyone, even his fellow SOLDIERS and certainly average humans.
He could not connect with others in his environment and was tied down to his hidden origin. Shinra was his prison just as much as it was for the others I mentioned, but he knew it as his only home because of the sinister way in which they crafted his reality.
He saw the inhumanity of his environment and admitted to feelings of dehumanization after apparently growing up in a cell beneath Hojo’s lab, and he dreamt of his mother taking him away from it, he longed for home and family, but where would he find such things in a world that he didn’t fit into because of his unique existence? Why would the inhumanity of his environment not be suited to a modified human weapon like himself? The abuse and isolation would only be unjust if he were not somewhat of a monster. That’s how he reasoned even if his heart ached for normalcy and humanity.
His missing and seemingly human mother was his only hope. His friends and comrades were his only reprieve from being othered. And even then, where others escaped, questioned, healed, and rebelled, Sephiroth lost everything just as he was considering abandoning Shinra. A desire he expressed before Zack or Cloud. A desire that had been growing inside him for a long time. He was so close, and he was truly becoming a hero with his heart in the right place for the first time. He was trying, healing, inching his way towards that sweet escape.
And then Shinra’s legacy dragged him back with more lies to lead him towards their favorite specimen in Jenova and have him finally, truly fall for the complete lie that he was never human at all. Just a monster that couldn’t save or help anyone with its strength. Just a lab creation that had been used for its power for years. Just an othered being striving and longing for things it could never have because they only were granted to real humans. Not him or his equally solitary mother. All hope became despair.
That’s when Sephiroth’s humanity died just as it was coming to life in completion for the first time.
And why the hell do I care so much about this you ask? Why go through all this trouble to yap and defend pre-Nibelheim Sephiroth? Because I think it matters that we treat his writing with the respect we treat Cloud’s, even if it’s not as clearly spelled out or if you gotta read the fine print. YOU HAVE TO READ THE FINE PRINT.
Sephiroth is not the born evil villain you want him to be. He fell from a place of growth and healing that many other characters are shown obtaining after terrible life experiences and identity crises. Sephiroth is the one that loses the battle and it’s the REASON he is the cruel, cold-hearted villain he is. His “cool factor” and his war crimes as a villain are only strengthened in intensity because of who he once was, what he once experienced.
There is no harm in admitting that this villain is a tragic creation and always has been.
