Dome System

"Is that your blood?"

"Of course not."

-

SharenaWeek Day 3: Swap / Alternate Universe

He always sleep well anywhere.

wide,flat and warm…

ideal for bed.

The goddess does not forbid slaying in heels.

Finally finished Genesis wearing Aerith's red dress hehe :3c

Put your lovin where your mouth is,

Your sugar talking isn’t working tonight.

Ya your paragraphs mean shit to me,

it’s verbatim what you said last week.

Sephiroth was human.

Leave Angeal for me

That one's mine.

-Somebody says some blatantly vile and misogynistic thing about her along the lines of “She’s fucking scum as evil as Hojo” (no nuance, entirely untrue), “I want to beat that bitch to a pulp” (a comment that sent FF7 Twitter into hysterics for good reason), “I hate that bitch for what she did to poor Vincent” (she saved Vincent’s life and the worst thing she did to him was reject him), “She deserved to lose her child for being a terrible mother and running away from her responsibility” (she never got to BE a mother, her baby was STOLEN by SHINRA), “She deserves no sympathy for what she did to her child,” (these people go onto sympathize with the mass murderer Sephiroth and write thirstposts for the Turks even though Lucrecia shows more regret than either), etc..

You know, the list goes on.

Half the time these people have not even played Dirge and only watched cutscenes of Vincent. They have no real nuanced outlook on Lucrecia whatsoever, and frankly, the other half of the time, their comments reek of “I don’t want to see her with nuance.”

They just talk and hate out of their ass and bash Lucrecia’s fans. (You should hate with knowledge to back it up if you don’t want it to be debated, man. But hey, this tracks since Aerith and Tifa are treated the exact same way by this fandom.)

-So, then, almost every time, a small group of Lucrecia fans who DID play Dirge of Cerberus and realized that she was written to be both flawed and sympathetic, full of sincere regret that influenced all of her later actions and ultimately led to her metaphorical suicide, suddenly come out and say: “Hey, you guys are really erasing half her story and hating on a character and her fans with some pretty strong red flag rhetoric. Here is her actual story and reasoning. You guys can sympathize with Mr. Turk Vincent and Sephiroth, right? Maybe consider that Lucrecia is worthy of the same understanding.”

-You’d think that once this shit is said, there would be more support for the fight against the obvious unfairness and imbalance of the hate, that IS very often tainted with glaring and typical fandom misogyny, but nope. Instead we got the response I’ve seen on Twitter where people make jokes about how they’d rather stan Corneo than Lucrecia, or people doubling down on calling her sexist shit.

And on TOP of that, we got the smug other half where people who only read a fucking fraction of the debate simply decide that Lucrecia’s defenders are all somehow ignoring and excusing what she did to justify everything, and thus are not real Flawed Woman Appreciaters.

Because yeah, that’s definitely what we’re doing. You definitely should throw in the “You can defend her all day but she still did [X]” comments like that gets some point across.

Do I think she's off the hook because she's sorry? That's subjective. And up to Vincent and Sephiroth. Vincent never blamed her to begin with, so we already know his answer. As for Sephiroth...I think that's a complicated situation. But you can't tell me that Sephiroth's life is BETTER without her in it as his mother. Because it's not. And her being forcefully separated from her child and subsequently driven away to meet her metaphorical suicide is precisely WHY Sephiroth develops such a complex about her. Because she wasn't THERE.

I think Lucrecia is sympathetic because she recognizes what she did and doesn't make excuses. And keeps trying to correct her mistakes and grows increasingly despondent when she inadvertently makes it worse. But even with all that said, there are plenty of things she NEVER deserved. She didn't deserve to be in an abusive relationship. She didn't deserve to have her child taken from her. She didn't deserve to have Hojo patronize her and laugh in her face. And she certainly doesn't deserve half the shit she gets in the fandom because she's a complicated female character with many layers.

I do wonder how they will portray her in Part 3. Because I don't trust this fandom to fully come to terms with a sympathetic Lucrecia who was likely coerced and manipulated by Hojo under dubious circumstances. Remember, the original plan for Lucrecia was that Hojo drugged her before knocking her up. And given the fact that Ever Crisis has only been intensifying the implications of Sephiroth and Lucrecia's connection, I think they will definitely paint a picture of an entirely different character than the one the fandom has conjured up in its head.

It is always wild how much discourse surrounding Lucrecia erases canon that's established. Somewhere along the line, a vocal corner of the fandom (mostly twitter?) decided to strip away her narrative agency, her canonical guilt, and the horrific circumstances she endured, flattening her into a one-dimensional villain.

I always bring back Shinra in this discussion. What was she really going to do against Shinra? Look what they did to Zack, Cloud, Genesis, and Angeal. Some detractors like to judge her choices as if she is operating with total freedom in a vacuum. She wasn't. She was a brilliant scientist working under the suffocating, predatory umbrella of Shinra, directly alongside Hojo—a literal psychological monster.

Every single choice Lucrecia made was to fix a previous mistake, only to be outmaneuvered. She carried immense guilt over Grimoire Valentine’s death. When she realized the horror of the Jenova Project, she tried to use her own maternal presence to protect her unborn child, only for Hojo to completely strip away her rights, treat her like a lab rat, and forcefully rip her newborn baby away from her the moment he was born.

To me, what makes Lucrecia so compelling is that she never excuses herself. It anything, she is her own harshest judge. Her entire existence in that cave is self-imposed, agonizing purgatory born both from sheer, overwhelming guilt and accountability.

I was talking to someone the other day that suggested she 'ran away'. She didn't run away from Sephiroth; she was physically separated from him by Shinra, driven mad by the Jenova cells in her body, and chose a metaphorical suicide because she believed her very existence was a curse. To say she showed no remorse is to completely ignore the entire plot of Dirge of Cerberus, where her lingering consciousness and data fragments are literally powered by her desire to save Vincent and her eternal, weeping apologies to the son she never got to hold.

For me, the bottom line is you (using you in general here) don't have to think Lucrecia is a perfect, flawless hero. She isn't written to be one. She is a classic, tragic Final Fantasy figure defined by grief, manipulation, and isolated despair, and for that side of fandom to ignore that is to ignore her character arc and makes me question how they really are going to react to Part 3, depending on what SE does what the character.

But she didn't deserve to be abused by Hojo. She didn't deserve to have her baby stolen and that baby didn't deserve to be submitted to 'trials of pain' by Hojo. And she certainly doesn't deserve the sheer vitriol thrown at her by the side of fandom.