Sephiroth: A Fan
Girl’s Perspective
By Lady Sanzennine
Disclaimer: FFVII and all of it’s characters are the property of Squaresoft Inc.
A/N: Please note that this “essay” is my point of view. I am not speaking for everyone out there. Everything written here is based on my perspective, speculations and observations of the fanfiction community.
There are a million and one females out there who love Sephiroth. Mention this obsession to any other fan girl and she’ll likely get excited and want nothing more than to tell you all about how she sees him and why she’s in love with him. Mention it to a guy and you’ll probably get one of these reactions: “…He’s a psychopath. Cool like nothing else, but a psychopath.” Or “Dear, he’s not real.”
To the latter, I say, so what? It’s called an imagination. The former, however, I feel needs to be explained with the tightly controlled neurotic zest of a girl that can rationalize anything that her favorite silver-haired bishounen does. And so I present to you this: An explanation for why we all love Sephiroth – the man who wanted to be a God.
Let’s start off with the blatantly obvious and painfully shallow reasons.
Alright enough of the surface reasons. It’s the deeper things that are the most interesting.
Sephiroth is what’s known as the “tragic villain.” If we examine his past, we find that his biological mother, Lucrecia, died right after childbirth. In addition to never having known the love of his mother, he was brought into the world as an experiment, purely for scientific reasons. Knowing this, it doesn’t take a lot to imagine that Sephiroth probably led an awful, unhappy childhood. Hojo, the man that was (supposedly) Sephiroth’s father clearly had no love for his child, and likely spent all of Seph’s early years experimenting on him and testing him.
So, we can conclude that Sephiroth was an abused, neglected child. Doesn’t that tear at your heartstrings?
We also know that later in his life he became a SOLDIER and proceeded to accelerate through the ranks with incredible speed until at last he became a General. The youngest Sephiroth that we actually get to see is during Cloud’s flashback to the day when he lost everything. If you recall, Sephiroth was rather cold, as Tifa commented (during the scene in which Cloud has lost his mind and Tifa’s there trying to help him remember). It’s generally accepted that when Sephiroth is not mad, he’s a cold, detached type of character. For some reason, fan girls find this incredibly appealing.
This is one of the characteristics of Sephiroth that I’m not sure how explain. Why is his stoic-ness so attractive? In real life, I doubt that most Seph fan girls would actually fall for the (at least on the surface) unfeeling, “I think soft emotions are beneath me,” type of guy. The best explanation I can come up with is that most of us believe that NO MATTER WHAT, Sephiroth is not an immoveable boulder of a man. Refer to the abused child theory. If the trend in “Sephiroth in love” fanfiction is any indication, it would seem that we have a fixation with “drawing Sephiroth out of his protective shell.”
There’s something really attractive about that prospect. Perhaps it’s the whole wanting to change a man for the better, which no matter how people try to deny it, women always try to do. But while some fics do paint the picture of the girl (or guy. Forgive me, I have no experience with yaoi fics) changing Sephiroth, others are more focused on cracking through the walls of ice that he’s built around himself to reveal a character that’s deeper and not two dimensional.
Sephiroth is not a cut and dry character. He is not pure, unredeemable evil with no soul to speak of who feels no remorse in anything he does. The best example I can come up with from the game to show that Sephiroth does feel something is this scene:
(When Sephiroth, Cloud, Zack and co. arrive in Nibelheim)
Sephiroth: It's your first time back to your hometown in a long time, right? So how does it feel? I wouldn't know because I don't have a hometown...
Cloud: Umm.... how 'bout your parents?
Sephiroth: My mother is Jenova. She died right after she gave birth to me. My father... (He laughs.) What does it matter...? All right, let's go.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but when he says “…I don’t have a hometown…” I get the distinct impression of underlying loneliness. And when he says, “What does it matter…?” There’s bitterness there. There’s no real evidence in the game to show that Sephiroth knew that Hojo was his father, but if he did, well he’s got to feel pretty crappy. How would you feel if your own father cared nothing at all for you and only kept you alive for experimentation? There would be a lot of negative feelings there, and quite possibly self-loathing. Sometimes when people can’t get the love they crave, they start to wonder if something is wrong with them.
I’m portraying Sephiroth as a really big wuss, aren’t I?
That’s one of the biggest problems that fanfiction authors are faced with. Most of us have no clue as to how to show who we believe Sephiroth to be underneath the bulky armor without turning him into the biggest priss in the world.
Allow me to clarify. Sephiroth is not a wuss. He is, however, a man who has suffered through a lot in his life. This is the basis for my sympathy for him. Everything else builds on this foundation.
The real question, though, remains: How can you love a crazy maniac who burned down an entire village, killed countless more people, and planned to destroy the world so that he could become a god?
I’m not going to say that none of that matters, because that would be a lie. The fact of the matter is, Sephiroth committed a heinous, unbelievable crime but that does not make him irredeemable. It’s important to realize that if he was a real person in real life, most of us probably would not hesitate to condemn him instant death. It would be far too dangerous to allow him to live.
But it’s not real life. So, the overactive imaginations of authors can come up with a thousand different scenarios where our one-winged angel is not the epitome of evil and everything ends happily ever after.
Recall in the game, during Cloud’s flashback where we
see Cloud and Sephiroth venture into the Nibelheim reactor. Sephiroth tells
Cloud to look inside the pods beside the containment chamber labeled JENOVA.
Cloud sees a monster inside and Sephiroth explains that they were once human
beings exposed to too much mako, which caused them to mutate. Normal members of
SOLDIER are showered with mako, which makes them enhanced human beings. When
Cloud asks Sephiroth, “
After this incident, Sephiroth locked himself up in the basement library of the Shinra mansion in relentless pursuit of answers to the questions that plagued him. Later on when Cloud confronts him, we find out that Sephiroth believes that Jenova was an Ancient (which is not true), and since he thinks she’s his mother (true, but not true at the same time), he is therefore an Ancient and the rightful heir to the planet.
We all know that this wasn’t true. Jenova was the crisis from the sky and, if Aeris is any indication, the Cetra were a peace loving people who were in tune with the planet. But Sephiroth believed it. And he continued to believe it all the way up until Cloud killed him.
This is what really bothers me. Sephiroth was lied to his entire life! He never even knew about Lucrecia and he was never told the truth about who and what he was. I can’t help but feel angry at Cloud and the rest of AVALANCHE for never even trying to tell Sephiroth the truth (make no mistake though, I love AVALANCHE dearly). Granted, he probably wouldn’t have listened, but still! At least then they would have given him a chance – one chance, however slim.
Okay, so Sephiroth thought he was a Cetra and tried to pursue Godhood. He went stark raving mad when he “realized” that the pathetic humans of the world had betrayed his race and experimented on him and his mother. He swore that he’d take revenge for all the injustices that Jenova and he had suffered at the hands of humans, cut off his mother’s head so he could carry it around, burned down a village, and nearly killed several main characters of FFVII.
When it comes to explaining all this, Sephiroth sympathizers usually take either of two different stances.
1. It was all Jenova’s fault. That evil little bitch took over Seph’s mind so that she could use him to take over the world.
Or
2. Sephiroth, at the time, fully believed in what he was doing. He truly felt that humans were to blame for everything, that Jenova was his loving mother, and that he was destined to be a god.
Personally, I prefer the latter because the former is just too easy. It should be noted that even in the second explanation Jenova is usually considered to be a heavily influential factor for Seph’s state of madness. She might not be controlling him, but she was definitely talking to him in his mind and persuading him to do what she wanted.
Let’s think about it logically. Before the Nibelheim incident, on the surface, Sephiroth had it all. He might not have been a God, but he was damn powerful. He was basically worshipped. Then he went to the reactor and everything fell apart.
During the confrontation with Cloud in the reactor, Sephiroth says, “I have orders to take this planet back from you stupid people for the Cetra.” Orders eh? From who? Could it be anyone other than Jenova?
More proof that Sephiroth could have been manipulated by Jenova in whatever way lies in Cloud. Remember how Seph was able to control Cloud – how he almost made him kill Aeris? If Sephiroth had so much power over a man simply because he contained Jenova cells, who’s to say that Jenova herself didn’t have just as much power over Sephiroth?
Of course, some people argue that Cloud was able to overcome the mind control, so Sephiroth should have been able to as well. Alright, but consider that Cloud actually had a family, a solid foundation of love and acceptance behind him. Sephiroth had none of that. All his life he’d felt different. It’s not hard to imagine that Cloud was far more stable than Sephiroth. Seph believe that Jenova was his mother. Okay, on a side note, Jenova was the most god awfully ugly thing I’ve ever seen. How the hell could he believe that she gave birth to him?! *shudder* Anyways, the point is that for the first time in his life, Sephiroth might have thought that he was feeling the love of a mother. That’s heady stuff.
So, the fan girl conclusion is that Sephiroth either did all of those terrible things because he was being controlled by a malicious alien pretending to be his mother, or that he was totally confused and misled and made to believe that he was the avenging angel of the Cetra race. Either way, it’s all too easy to “fall in love” with this characterization of Sephiroth. Both explanations have the amazing ability to capitalize on the compassion of our feminine souls.
Once again, let me reiterate that if Sephiroth were a real man I’d be scared to death of him. There’s no way I’d want to risk the lives of hundreds of innocents, or perhaps the entire world, just so he could have a chance to change his ways.
On a final note, before Sephiroth and Cloud duke it out in the Nibelheim reactor Cloud says, “Sephiroth.... I trusted you... No, you're not the Sephiroth I used to know!" And thus, we can conclude that after Sephiroth lost his mind, he was essentially a completely different person from the man of his past.
Sephiroth was a character of amazing complexity and with a little imagination you can paint an incredibly detailed picture of his life in your head. He is the tragic villain – the bad guy that could very well change sides if given the opportunity and convinced of the truth. He suffered through so much and was then made to believe that all of human kind had stolen his birth right away and reduced him and his only living family to experiment specimens. So he snapped and went crazy.
But in the wonderful world of fanfiction, everyone can change for the better. Everyone can realize and regret the mistakes of the past. And everyone can redeem themselves if given the chance.
That is why we love him.
Recap:
1. Sephiroth was probably an abused child. As an author, I want nothing more than to right the wrongs of his past.
2. Sephiroth is the embodiment of the stoic soldier archetype, but underneath lies a wounded soul.
3. Sephiroth never knew the truth and was likely manipulated by Jenova. This is a big injustice that many fanfiction authors are trying to correct.
Author’s Note: The full game script of FFVII can be found at http://www.phoenixgenesis.com/ff7/ff7script/ff7contents.htm
I’m planning another chapter for the near future to this “essay.” The next installment will analyze the different romantic pairings in which Sephiroth is involved in fanfiction.
Please leave a review, just to let me know that you read this. I’ll love you forever.
~LS~