•+Hey again! Void here. [he/him] I’m that guy, the deranged sefikura. This is where I ramble incoherently, reblog stuff, and chat. @voiddrawss is my art blog.+•
I've seen/recently received a few asks about Sephiroth and Cloud's dynamic as a pairing with the knowledge that Sephiroth met Cloud when he was sixteen. Clearing it up for potential newcomers in the fandom that Sephiroth canonically really had nothing to do with teen trooper Cloud at all. He only addresses him a handful of times as his boss, but is completely detached from Cloud and doesn't take any particular interest to him beyond showing basic kindness towards his subordinates. Sephiroth being somewhat attentive to Cloud's relation to Nibelheim serves as 1.) A means of faking the player out by positioning Cloud as Zack and making us believe he and Sephiroth actually knew each other before and 2.) Because Seph is a cool guy and he's generally been shown to be pretty decent with his men. It's more of a framing to show that Sephiroth had some humanity back in the day. And it also serves as a means to introduce Nibelheim as an important setting for dramatic purposes.
He speaks to trooper Cloud:
Once to ask about Cloud's hometown
Once to tell him to go visit family
Once to compliment him on saving Tifa
Once to tell him to keep Tifa safe while they investigate the reactor
And that's it, apart from him and Cloud trying to kill each other at the reactor. In terms of Sephiroth's potential feelings for Cloud, they don't actually manifest until years later and arguably don't truly become obsessive until Advent Children. I'm categorizing the R Trilogy as taking place in an AU after AC, of course.
Point being, yes Sefikura is toxic. And for many reasons. But Sephiroth never was interested in Trooper Cloud at all and barely even knew he existed. He was too busy chumming it up with Zack and worrying about Genesis. Angeal and Genesis were likely the most important people in his life back when he was still sane and alive. Cloud was barely a footnote to him. He did not acknowledge him. Not until much later. That's probably why Sephiroth became so fixated on him--Cloud was just this nothing kid who showed up and randomly clowned his ass at the very height of his power. It's the stewing and dwelling on that indignation for literal years that finally ignites Sefikura as a concept.
Sephiroth's importance starts before he even properly appears. In the original Final Fantasy VII, the game builds him first through absence, aftermath, and other people's fear. His name arrives before his full presence does, and by the time thep layer starts meeting the evidence of what he's done - the Nibelheim incident, the Shinra building, the trail of bodies, the way Cloud talks about him - Sephiroth already feels larger than the ordinary scale of the cast. He enters the story as legend, war hero, and impossible standard, then gradually becomes the central catastrophe the whole game has to orbit around.
That structure is a huge part of why he works; he's not just the final villain in a mechanical sense, but a figure of collapse. The story keeps using him to turn revelation into disaster: the revelation of his origins, Shinra's lies, what happened in Nibelheim, how fragile Cloud's own identity really is. He's tied to nearly every major destabilisation in the game. Once he starts moving, other people's lives stop belonging cleanly to them; Cloud's sense of self, Tifa's memories, Aerith's future, the Planet's safety, all of it gets pulled into his gravity.
Across the Compilation and the Remake project, that role becomes even more personal. The original game already ties Sephiroth and Cloud together very tightly, but later material pushes that bond further until Sephiroth functions almost like a permanent psychic wound inside Cloud's life. He's a villain, certainly, but he's also a fixation, an invasive presence, a figure who keeps refusing to stay in the past. That gives him an unusual kind of narrative longevity; he doesn't feel confined to one crisis, he feels like something the story can never quite finish surviving.
In terms of archetype, he carries traces of the fallen hero, the corrupted chosen one, the false god, and the beautiful destroyer. He begins as the ideal soldier and ends as somebody trying to stand above humanity altogether, with the shift between those states powered by identity collapse, narcissistic injury, and the discovery that his entire life was built on lies.
Psychology
Sephiroth's psychology is built around identity, exceptionalism, and catastrophic disillusionment. Before the Nibelheim incident, he's already set apart from ordinary people; he's stronger, more admired, more mythologised, and more emotionally remote. Even without the later breakdown, he never comes across like somebody who's had a normal relationship with intimacy or personhood. He's been raised as a weapon, treated as an elite assert, and surrounded by enough reverence that ordinary human attachment feels almost absent from his life.
Once he discovers the truth - or what he believes to be the truth - about Jenova and the Shinra experiments, the structure holding him together gives way very quickly. The library scenes in Nibelheim are crucial here; Sephiroth doesn't just learn disturbing information, he loses the framework that made his life coherent. The identity he'd been living inside becomes intolerable. He can no longer understand himself as human in the same way, and instead of rebuilding from that rupture in any grounded direction, he reorients around superiority, chosenness, and cosmic entitlement. The combination of personal injury and grandiosity becomes central from that point on.
The most persuasive clinical lens for him is probably Narcissistic Personality Disorder/NPD, or at least severe narcissistic pathology, especially if you focus on grandiosity, emotional detachment, lack of empathy, fixation on special status, and an extreme reaction to identity injury. Sephiroth's breakdown after Nibelheim has very recognisable narcissistic shape to it; he learns that the self he's been inhabiting is false, experiences that revelation as a profound humiliation and violation, and then rebuilds around the conviction that he's not merely special but fundamentally above everyone else. Once he lands there, other human beings stop existing to him as moral equals and become obstacles, witnesses, or material.
There's also a strong dissociative quality to him after the Nibelheim incident, though it presents less as confusion and more as a split between the human life he's discarded and the godlike role he's trying to assume. He feels severed from ordinary human feeling, and the game repeatedly frames him as somebody acting from a distance - cold, elevated, untouchable, almost more concept than man by the time the main body of FFVII is underway. Jenova's influence complicates all of this, of course, because Sephiroth isn't operating in pure isolation; still, the story works best if his choices retain psychological meaning of their own rather than being reduced to simple possession.
Strengths and Flaws
Sephiroth's strengths are overwhelming enough that the story almost has to mythologise them. He's brilliant, composed, tactically gifted, physically unmatched by almost everyone around him, and able to command attention with almost no effort. Even before the fall, he has the kind of presence that makes other people organise themselves around him. The game doesn't need to insist that he was famous and extraordinary - every scene built around his reputation already tells you that.
There's also a terrifying steadiness to him once he's chosen his path. Sephiroth doesn't thrash around emotionally or lose focus after Nibelheim. His destruction is deliberate. He can wait, manipulate, reappear at exactly the right moment, and turn other people's uncertainty into one more weapon. That self-possession is part of what makes him unsettling; he doesn't read as chaotic, but as somebody whose internal permissions have been permanently severed from ordinary morality.
His flaws sit very close to those strengths; the exceptionalism curdles into absolute entitlement, the confidence hardens into contempt, the emotional reserve empties out into detachment so severe that nothing human seems to have claim on him anymore. Once Sephiroth starts viewing himself as singular and chosen on a cosmic scale, there's no room left in him for humility, reciprocity, or grief that doesn't convert immediately into rage and domination.
Another flaw is how brittle his identity turns out to be. He appears self-contained, but the whole collapse at Nibelheim proves that a great deal of his stability depended on an externally constructed myth about who he was. Once that myth breaks, he can't absorb the fracture and remain recognisably human. He has no ordinary self underneath it sturdy enough to survive the revelation, only superiority and ruin.
Relationships
CLOUD STRIFE
Cloud is the central relationship in Sephiroth's story, especially once the original game moves past Nibelheim and ino the long struggle over memory, identity, and control. Sephiroth isn't simply the villain Cloud has to defeat, but the figure around whom Cloud's own fractured self keeps organising and disorganising. Their connection runs through trauma, envy, admiration, violation, and the fact that Cloud's mind is unusually vulnerable to Sephiroth's influence because of Nibelheim, Jenova cells, and the way his identity was already destabilised before the main plot begins.
That gives their dynamic a very intimate cruelty - Sephiroth doesn't only threaten Cloud physically, he takes aim at his sense of self, repeatedly forcing him to question what he remembers, what he is, and whether he has any real agency at all. By the later parts of the original game, Cloud's struggle with Sephiroth has become inseparable from his struggle to become a coherent person. Sephiroth keeps trying to reduce him to a puppet, an extension, a broken vessel that can be moved by the right pressure.
Later material intensidies this further; in Advent Children and especially in Remake-era storytelling, Sephiroth feels almost permanently lodged in Cloud's psychic life. turning their relationship into something closer to fixation than straight-forward enmity. The original game already supports the deeper reading, though; Cloud isn't just the hero who happens to oppose Sephiroth, but the person Sephiroth keeps returning to because Cloud carries the proof that Sephiroth can still be resisted, and because Cloud's very existence became tangled up in Sephiroth at the moment of his own psychological breaking.
JENOVA
Jenova sits at the centre of his identity collapse. The tragedy is that the relationship begins in false knowledge; Sephiroth initially interprets Jenova as his mother and himself as the rightful heir of the Cetra, and that misunderstanding gives shape to the whole Nibelheim breakdown. His reverence, rage, and sense of cosmic destiny all grow out of information that's incomplete and distorted.
What's so effective about this relationship is that it never feels nurturing in any human sense; Jenova is origin, contamination, and symbolic parent all at once. Sephiroth clings to her as explanation, justification, the answer to why he's always been different, and once he does that there's no grounding counterforce left in him. Jenova becomes the centre of the world-view he builds after the collapse, the source from which he derives chosenness and from which he rationalises the destruction of everyone else.
The bond is also parasitic in a psychological sense. Whether you read Sephiroth as controlling Jenova, being influenced by Jenova, or existing inside some more mutual contamination, the relationship strips away ordinary human identity and replaces it with a role: heir, vessel, superior being, cosmic instrument. There's nothing in it that allows Sephiroth to remain a person among other people.
ZACK FAIR
Zack matters because he gives one of the clearest views of Sephiroth before the full collapse. In Crisis Core especially, Zack's admiration and relative warmth toward Sephiroth make the later break feel sharper. Sephiroth around Zack still reads as distant and emotionally reserved, but he also reads as somebody who can exist within human structures - SOLDIER, mission hierarchy, professional respect, even a limited kind of cameraderie.
That history does a lot for the character because it stops Sephiroth from feeling like he was always already the final form of monstrosity we meet in the later stages of FFVII. Zack's presence helps preserve the sense that there was once a man there, however emotionally stunted or set apart, before identity injury and Jenova knowledge rearranged everything. Zack also serves as a contrast point for Cloud, because both men are tied to Sephiroth through admiration and trauma, but Zack knew him in the period where his humanity was still visible.
AERITH GAINSBOROUGH
Aerith's relationship with Sephiroth is less personally elaborate than Cloud's, but no less important to the story. She represents everything Sephiroth's world-view has turned against: actual Cetra lineage, connection to the Planet, and a form of spiritual meaning that's relational rather than dominating. He seeks to use the Planet by force, while Aerith listens to it; he wants transcendence through wound and control, while Aerith's power comes through care, sacrifice, and communion.
That makes them natural oppositional figures even before the capital sequence. Her murder becomes the clearest expression of Sephiroth's hatred for anything that stands outside his control and still retains moral power. He doesn't simply remove a threat, he strikes at one of the few presences in the story that represents a different relationship to the sacred than his own.
HOJO
Hojo is crucial to Sephiroth's construction, even if Sephiroth doesn't spend much time emotionally oriented toward him in the way he is toward Jenova or Cloud. Hojo is the architect of the experiment that created Sephiroth's life as a project rather than as an ordinary human existence. He's the scientist who hepled ensure Sephiroth would enter the world already objectified, already exceptionalised, already denied the conditions that might have let him build a stable and ordinary self.
That means Hojo functions less like an emotional relationship and more like an origin wound embodied in another person. Sephiroth's life is what happens when someone is raised inside another man's monstrous curiosity.
ANGEAL HEWLEY
Angeal is one of the closest things Sephiroth ever has to a peer relationship that feels stable before the collapse. In Crisis Core, Angeal, Genesis, and Sephiroth are the First Class trio, but Angeal occupies a very different emotional position from Genesis; he's steadier, more restrained, and much less volatile, which gives Sephiroth one of the only relationships in the era that feels grounded rather than competitive.
Like Zack, that dynamic helps show what Sephiroth was like before Nibelheim in a way the original game alone can't. Around Angeal, he still comes across as distant and set apart, but not yet fully unreachable; there's a professional respect there, and a kind of quiet ease that suggests Sephiroth did know how to exist inside a bond that wasn't purely instrumental. Angeal also gives you a moral contrast; he has his own crisis around Project G, degradation, and identity, but his response to that crisis is radically different from Sephiroth's later reaction to Project S and Jenova. Angeal keeps returning to honour, restraint, and responsibility, even when he's falling apart; Sephiroth, once he breaks, goes in the opposite direction.
So Angeal is important partly because he humanises Sephiroth's past and partly because he highlights how catastrophic Sephiroth's later turn really is. There were other ways to respond to monstrous origins - Angeal proves that.
GENESIS RHAPSODOS
Genesis is much more volatile and much more direct as a reflection of Sephiroth's ego, pride, and fragility. Their relationship is competitive from the start, or at least charged in a way Sephiroth's bond with Angeal isn't. Genesis is obsessed with status, comparison, recognition, and what it means that Sephiroth is always treated as the superior one. That puts a specific kind of pressure on their dynamic; Sephiroth may seem cooler and more self-contained, but Genesis is constantly pulling that hierarchy into view.
Genesis is tied to the earliest cracks in Sephiroth's world. Through Crisis Core, the collapse of the Angeal/Genesis/Sephiroth triad and the revelations around the Jenova Project start eroding the stable identity Sephiroth had been living inside. Genesis doesn't "cause" Sephiroth's fall, but he belongs to the chain of events that starts destabilising the myth around him. He also serves as as kind of distorted parallel: another elite SOLDIER created through inhuman experimentation, another man whose identity becomes inseparable from degradation, exceptionalism, and the need to understand what was done to him.
The difference is that Genesis externalises constantly - he performs, provokes, dramatises - while Sephiroth internalises until the internal break becomes absolute. Putting them together makes Sephiroth look even more tightly held before Nibelheim, and it makes the later collapse feel less like something that came from nowhere.
Just for Fun / Typology
MBTI - INTJ
The Ni is the strongest part of the read. He's intensely singular in focus, highly abstract once he's settled on a world-view, and oriented toward long-range control rather than immediate improvisation. Sephiroth doesn't spread himself out across possibilities, he narrows - once he commits to a conclusion about himself and the world, everything else gets reorganised underneath it.
Te fits well, too. He's strategic, efficient, controlling, and extremely comfortable subordinating people and circumstances to a larger objective. Even his emotional life, once it hardens after Nibeheim, becomes organised around mission rather than expression. He's not somebody who processes out loud or in a visibly relational way. He decides, acts, and imposes structure.
I could maybe see INFJ because of the mythic language around destiny, the charisma, and the almost prophetic scale of his self-concept, but INTJ still feels much more accurate because his inner world is so coldly systemised and his engagement with others is so instrumental.
MORAL ALIGNMENT - Lawful Evil
He's not Chaotic in his methods or in his emotional presentation. Sephiroth's destruction is disciplined, controlled, and attached to a coherent hierarchy of belief, even if that belief is monstrous. He has a plan, a cosmology, and a stable conviction that his will should organise reality. He doesn't lash out randomly, he moves with intention.
The Evil side hardly needs much defense. He's willing to sacrifice anyone, annihilate whole populations, violate minds, and wound the Planet itself in pursuit of his own ascension. What keeps Lawful Evil is the strongest fit is the order within that destruction - he wants domination, not simply ruin for its own sake.
Conclusion
Sephiroth remains powerful because the story builds him out of both myth and damage. He's beautiful, remote, overwhelming, and terrifying on a grand scale, but underneath that scale sits something psychologically sharp: a man raised as an experiment, built into an ideal, then shattered by the discovery that the ideal was never human to begin with. From there, he rebuilds around superiority, control, and the conviction that the world exists to be used for his transformation.
Cloud gives him his most intimate conflict, Jenova gives him his catastrophic origin, and the rest of the story keeps showing the fallout of a person whose identity injury was large enough to become apocalyptic.
Idk why but the EC reveal of Jenova is actually??? The best one??? Which is something I NEVER thought I'd say since it's, you know, EVER CRISIS. But for some reason, this reveal is the most cinematic.
The slow pacing. The rising steam. The unsettling lack of music. The fact that the broken statue loses one of its wings in an ominous reference to Safer Sephiroth. That single glowing red eye being the first image we see of her right as it slowly pans into the tank to display her full body. It's all SUPER spooky and effective. And especially eerie after the events of First Soldier 2.
So yeah. It's crazy to say, but this is both my fave design of Jenova and also, strangely enough, just the overall best introduction to the character. And it's in a mobile gacha game.
I think what I love about the EC version is that Jenova looks undeniably, frighteningly, exactly like Lucrecia.
We know Jenova can make herself look like anyone, so it leaves us with a pretty heavy question - is this one hell of a coincidence? Is Jenova manipulating Sephiroth's perception of her physical features?
Or into the really wild stuff, like: is this resemblance somehow connected to, or even literally the one reason the experiment worked perfectly with Lucrecia and not any of the others?
The devs were seriously cooking that day. They've managed to make Jenova genuinely scary, which was always THERE, but not nearly as overt. And it definitely plays into the idea that Sephiroth is literally seeing Lucrecia when he looks at Jenova, which is further hinted at due to the grooming Jenova subjected him to in Robio.
I’ve played a couple of hours now and I gotta say, while it’s corny, I’m having a blast. Just have to…wait until Seph is playable. I had my suspicions the villains wouldn’t be.
ALSO LIGHTNING POSTING TO INSTAGRAM IN THE INTRO?! Hello?! I was dying laughing.
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