Randomly Built - Old As Time

Hojo did horrific things to Aerith, Cloud, and Zack. There is no argument there. Vincent, Nanaki, Lucrecia, Gast, and Ifalna were also his victims, and every single one of them is justified in hating him.

But they were not his child. Sephiroth was. And that distinction matters.

Sephiroth was in Hojo’s custody from before birth and remained under his control longer than any other victim. He was experimented on in utero, then subjected for years to extreme physical and psychological torture to test the limits of SOLDIER endurance: pain inflicted deliberately and repeatedly, not as collateral damage, but as the point. Because Sephiroth was biologically different, those experiments were harsher and more invasive, driven by Hojo’s sadistic curiosity.

That’s not even touching the lifelong emotional abuse: lying to him about his mother, denying him any real family, leaking his private information to the media, and ensuring he could never leave Shinra or exist as anything other than a weapon. Sephiroth’s entire identity was engineered and controlled. People who make those comparisons about Aerith, Cloud, etc, often failed to take in account what Sephiroth REALLY went through and only look at his surface traits.

Yes. Hojo harmed many people. Sephiroth was the endgame and the answer to the Reunion Theory, even there Sephiroth was used. Sephiroth is the final product of Hojo’s ambition. The one who never escaped and ultimately never got a chance at a life outside exploitation.

You can acknowledge all of Hojo’s victims without flattening the reality that Sephiroth was his greatest one. Hojo may have loved his son in a twisted, self-serving way, and may even have protected him at times, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he was also Sephiroth’s primary abuser, and the architect of who Sephiroth ultimately became.

Recognizing that doesn’t excuse Sephiroth’s actions. It explains them once you look beyond the 'cool villain' trope.

2021 birthday: I caught crystalflies for you. I visualised them in your hair

2022: I listened to starconches on the beach wondering if I'd hear your voice

2023: I visited a friend and they threw a party, please come if you have the time

This birthday, 2024: I dream of you. Do I deserve to dream so sweetly?

In conclusion:

People get baffled by the Nibelheim Incident and say, “I guess finding out you were an experiment would be upsetting, but why would that fill him with so much rage that he started killing humans and wanting to destroy the entire planet?”

But it’s more like….no, imagine you were born inherently different from everyone else. Forget the extra tragic background stuff that some of us know for a moment. Just take that basic idea about being “born special.”

You are distinctly isolate. It’s in your literal DNA. You are physically and biologically “other” your entire life. Not with a disorder or deformity, but with some completely unique and separate make-up as a living being.

And you don’t like it. You don’t like being special and different. It’s a type of different that can be utilized because it manifests in unnatural, destructive power. Your physical strength and endurance are beyond human and are most suited to war and bloodshed. This strips you of the ability to assimilate into the world. It makes you fit best as a weapon.

You don’t get a family, home, or sense of secure, ordinary life. You don’t get to connect with the planet. You live in a completely different world from everyone else and look out at them through glass and steel.

Sure, they idolize you. Cool. They worship the physical otherness that you were born with. They admire your godly strength, they fawn over your looks, they obsess over your presence, blah blah. But it’s all distant noise to you. There’s no fulfillment in it. You don’t want praise and worship from behind glass and steel, you want something or someone to connect to.

You want your mother — because SHE would give you love, safety, acceptance, and humanity. You could feel human if you could run into the arms of the human that birthed you. The existence of your mother is proof that you are human for the time being. You need her so much.

But none of this is given to you and even though you look for answers, they somehow evade you for your entire life.

MEANWHILE, the only ones to steer and guide you are the company that brought you up and at least gave you a place to reside, a place to find purpose. In your mind, since you were born special, maybe this company is a type of salvation, even if you don’t like everything they do or…..anything about them at all, actually.

But hey! They still guide your power and strength. They still give you something to hang onto. They don’t attack you for being special, they just steer you to employ your abilities and that’s SOMETHING to hold onto. It’s a place where you can assimilate and be accepted in some way. Even if it hurts you. You OWE them.

Now cut to Nibelheim. You uncover it all. Every. Single. Lie. And lies on top of lies. What you discover isn’t even the full truth, but you THINK it is. You think you’ve just finally found out all the answers!

And it starts with your birth. Turns out you were created. You’re not human at all. You were created from the remains of an ancient being that was dug up from the earth and labeled as a separate species by humanity. It’s even dubbed a monster by some, and boy…does it sure look like one.

All of those differences you grew up with, all of those feelings of otherness, all of those fucking isolate traits that FORCED you to live in a cold, different world and that conveniently suited the needs of the greedy, corporate businessmen that raised you were produced and crafted by them.

Your “special existence” that took away every chance at normal, human life was not something you were born with and had no control over. It was literally the result of horrible, unethical experimentation. All of your years of trying to accept it and just do your job are now pointless. It’s like a robot discovering it never had any autonomy or soul because it was always a product made with false ideas about itself.

And to make things worse? Your mother is the other victim of the company that created you. They had her all along, trapped inside an experimental hellscape and hooked up to tubes and wires. Treated like a revered object the same way you were. She’s not human either. That means she’s the only one that can be one with you and understand you. Or so you believe.

All those years you spent separated from her, trying to make peace with what you thought was a natural difference in your DNA…all of it was meaningless because you were being lied to, controlled, used, and treated like the creation you were from the start. You were being kept from your mother and even told she was dead.

Of course you would break.

This is just the core of Sephiroth’s story and I’m not even mentioning all of the additional horror that goes into his life, but this alone would make anyone enraged beyond reason. It would send anyone into deep despair.

Sephiroth only climbed out of that pitch black despair by using hatred, rage, and the drive to return to his mother. He reshapes his entire person to embrace the monster Shinra created. He embraced what he believed they made him to be without his consent, and turned his back on the “others” besides himself and his mother.