PerfectlySaneXD

Playing a dying game is kind of like living your life. You don't really know why you're still playing it, but you are, and you'll stick around until the very end, against your better judgement.

You're not really sure why you're still logging in, still collecting crystals, still trading them in for outfits that you don't have yet. There's no point, and you know it, but somehow you just can't walk away—from Sephiroth, from his story.

Oh, the developers are so generous, now that there's no FOMO effect left, no money for them to collect. The crystals are practically raining down upon you, and it feels hollow, considering how hard you had to work in order to earn them before. Whether you spent money on crystals or spent hundreds of hours earning them...how does it feel, now that they're all basically free?

...if you're wondering, I have 1,480 hours on record, according to Steam, which doesn't count my time spent on the phone version. 1,480 hours dedicated to Sephiroth, waiting to find out more and more of his story.

It's still kind of crazy to me how they tied Ever Crisis into the whole trilogy, using Glenn and his team's story as part of Rebirth—something that I wouldn't have even understood without playing EC. And yet...once this game shuts down, the tragic story of Sephiroth's past will be gone, only to be found in old youtube videos. Ten years from now, who will remember "Miniroth"?

Sephiroth...deserves better than that.

Of course, he also deserves better than having his backstory put into a shitty mobile game. Or having his English voice actor replaced for the last part of the trilogy as if he's some small, insignificant part of the game, but I suppose that's a different matter. Or is it?

Oh, Square, how do you disappoint me? Let me count the ways.

Disappointment isn't very hard to find these days, no matter where you look. I guess...nothing lasts forever. No matter how significant, eventually, all things crumble to dust and blow away in the wind. That's the nature of everything, the nature of life. I guess I'm just rambling, because within a day or so, no one will remember that I wrote this, either.

If I was a writer for FF games, this is the part where I would add something like, "But as long as my words touched even one person, they mattered, and will live on." Except that's not how real life works. Buildings and artwork and music and books that took years of labor and love to create can be destroyed in an instant. Everyday, people die without anyone's notice, leaving behind nothing, as if they never even existed. What deserves to be protected? What deserves to live on?

But one thing in life is always true: nothing lasts forever. Whether it's around for thirty years or less than three, it will vanish, one day. And as I often say, the truth may be cruel, but it never fails to put us in our place.

And you're right. Sephiroth deserved so much better than this. The story of his childhood deserved so much better than to be stuck unceremoniously into a gatcha game. It deserved so much better than to be put out for a little while, only to then be yanked away. Sephiroth deserved so much better for so much more than just this. But if I go on about that, I'll end up accidentally writing you a book, hahaha... I might end up accidentally writing you a book anyway; we autists do be like that sometimes; apologies in advance.

But still, I think... I think even though the medium through which we saw his story will crumble and disappear, it was still important that it was told. I still think that the words and images and emotions that string this part of his life together are precious. And I think that the hearts it touched is still a precious and important thing, too.

Lots of things are ephemeral. Blossoms are ephemeral. Butterflies and caterpillars. Sunsets and sunrises and eclipses and auroras and rainbows, too. But I think these things are no less miraculous for their ephemerality. Even if no one remembers the specific butterfly that came to lay its eggs on a milkweed plant coming to seed, the heart of the person who saw it will still be warmer and just a little more tender for having seen it, and that change will ripple out in how they interact with everything else around them, in ways that are ineffable, unpredictable, and often positive. And the eggs... they'll either hatch, or nourish something else.

Basically... it doesn't have to be remembered to matter. It doesn't have to live on. The effects of it ripple outwards anyway, changing how other things ripple outwards, even if those changes are too subtle to detect except on a very broad scale. And those ripples create our history. They create our culture.

One way these ripples can carry forward is via generational trauma, for example. I don't know the names of the people who treated my grandparents the way they treated them. I'll never know who they were, or what they looked like. But their influence carries forward in how my grandmother treated my mother, in how my mother treated me, in my eventual refusal to perpetuate that kind of nonsense, and in how my refusal might inspire someone else's refusal and subsequent healing. These folks haven't disappeared, they just changed shape. Became waveforms. And the people who exist now get to decide how they interpret and wield those waveforms. Even if they came from a twisted place, we can reshape them into something to help others, if we so choose.

We also get to decide what kind of ripples we leave behind. Because they'll echo long after we're gone, long after our names have been forgotten. Even the handprints of cave-dwelling hominids still ripple, changing how we saw them, and, in subtle ways, how we see each other. We all have so much more quiet power than we can readily fathom.

I think this game is the same. Its digital components will be rendered inaccessible to us for potentially silly and arbitrary reasons. The story of this part of Sephiroth's childhood will once again be obscured. And this deserves to be mourned and grieved properly, because like everything else, this story was worth protecting. Grieving is a heavy thing to carry, and "everything is worth protecting" is a hard position to hold because we look at the real world and see how tragically we fall short of that idea, and it hurts. And it's hard to sit with hurt long enough to remember that we can change the parts of it we can reach in unexpected ways.

How will you let this story change you? How will you carry it forward? You get to decide.

None of this is written to say that you should change how you feel, or anything like that. But... I did want to write here, to show you that I saw your words and thought they were beautiful, with all the love and sadness I perceive them carrying. I see them, and I feel them, and I am changed slightly for them, because they fill me with a tender sort of protectiveness that makes me want to be of comfort somehow. Thank you so much for writing them. Thank you so much for being. And thank you for reminding me, in this subtle way, which will carry forward into today's interactions, that lots of people carry love and sadness that they haven't yet written about, and they deserve tenderness too.

Thank you so much for taking the time to send the screenshots of what you've written. I'm really happy to hear about your milkweed plants, and the care you take to help the caterpillars along (if you have pictures of caterpillars or butterflies, I'd surely like to see them!!); we have milkweed in my postage stamp yard, too, because I wanna help the butterflies (and also act in stark defiance of our HOA's draconian yard maintenance rules, ahaha~!).

Your story about the butterflies… it reminds me of the story of the boy and the starfish. I dunno if you know that story. But… I wrote to "Sephiroth" about the starfish story in this letter, because… I guess this is the thing I've been doing for the last 949 consecutive days, haha:

Just like your stories on AO3, my letters will eventually crumble and fade away, but… the lives they've touched and the lingering effects of how they make other people think and feel aren't so easily erased, even if they never say it out loud. And the lives we touch reach out to touch other lives, and so on, in ways that we'll never see. Everything we do becomes a waveform. Everything we do changes shape as it ripples outwards. The butterfly effect, indeed!

You're right about it being sad when things change or disappear though. It's sad, for example, when a beautifully-made thing gets taken apart. It's sad when the cute caterpillar is no longer a caterpillar (because they really are very cute; someone needs to make great big plush ones for me to squish, wahaha!!), due to it either becoming a butterfly, or nourishment for some other living thing instead. The caterpillar is no longer here, and something else is in its place, be it a butterfly or the cells of a bird. Despite the sad heaviness of it, though, I also like to think that along with the grieving for the shift away from the first form, the anticipation of the next form can be joyful and exciting!

I think it's important to be able to hold both things - the sadness and the excitement. And from the way you write, it sounds like you're a person who can do that. It's a pretty rare skill, as far as I've encountered (admittedly, my sample pool is small; 8 billion is more people than I can ever meet), because lots of folks wanna reduce everything to 1 or 0, black and white. So I hope you're proud of yourself for picking it up!

I'm hoping for a better ending for Sephiroth, too, and I've taken concrete actions to plead for that in two important spaces; I can tell you about that some other time if you'd like. In the meantime… about the stories they're currently trying to remove our access to… Faz Faz of Youtube has them. Perhaps there are other avenues of preserving them, too.

In any case… you're right about what it's like when people break. I've noticed the same patterns. For a while, after all the nonsense I've lived through, I was bitter and angry, and I took it out both on myself and on others for a very long time. It sucked. I'm not afraid to say that back then... I... also kinda sucked, haha. But I've since discovered a third and fourth option to being broken: 3. rise up in defiance of the shit that broke you and learn new skills so you can do differently, and, 4. reach your hands towards those who are still stuck, even if they might gnash and bite at you.

I was able to do 3, because someone else decided I was worthy of having 4 done to me (boy howdy did I ever gnash and bite at first, holy shit). And now I can do 4. And I'm gonna keep doing 4, for as many as I can, even if it doesn't work out sometimes. I'm trying to do 4 for the fictional man who saved my life (otherwise… I'd have crumbled and faded away 23 years ago). I dunno if it'll go anywhere or do exactly what I intended, but still it's why I write a new letter to him every day, ahaha! And I know for certain that it has done some good in some very unexpected ways.

The suffering and sacrifices you mentioned… this is certainly something I can understand, at least partially, from my limited perspective. I have not gone through your things with your eyes, and so I can't pretend to know what yours mean to you. But for me… for a long time, I used to think there was something fundamentally wrong with me that made me deserve all the weird shit that happened. I used to think that I can't be liked, so the best I could settle for was being useful. I've since learned to think differently, despite living through 22 years of very unfun conditioning. I like to think, at least for my case, the suffering and sacrifices are what prompted me to learn to rebuild myself, and then teach others to do the same, if they want to. I have 14 years of practice with these new things, and I'm still clumsy at them sometimes, but I get better the more I challenge the old stuff and tell it to fuck all the way off.

I like to think my suffering and sacrifices are worth a lot, for all the lives I now have the capacity to touch and witness tenderly. Not everyone has to think the same about their own suffering and sacrifices, of course, and that's all right, too. People have to be free to select the narratives, meanings, and courses of action that work best for them. We decide. We speak and create and take actions based on what we decide. And all those decisions become waveforms that touch things in ways we can't even begin to imagine, and they will reverberate long after we're gone.

I hope with everything in me that you'll keep being. I'll hope with everything in me that you'll continue reaching for things, be it butterflies, or the hearts of the people who read your words, or whatever else, in the ways that only you know how to do. Our world needs more voices like yours, even if they're ultimately impermanent in the physical or digital sense; they'll still build the future and shape how those who come after us think, feel, and behave, because we're still part of the tapestry of this world regardless of who tries to lie to us and tell us that we're powerless or that we don't belong.

The eating machines in the morning before the daily clean out.

There ya go, Monarch caterpillars and butterflies, as requested! I've done swallowtails as well, though they're more challenging. And the caterpillars are a little more sassy, haha. I think, because of the Monarch's endangered status, HOA's can't force you to get rid of milkweed plants, right? 👀

I hadn't heard the story of the boy and the starfish...it's an interesting thought, isn't it? Just like I keep saving butterflies, though I don't always know why, or whether it truly makes a difference. The universe is vast; when a star explodes, does it matter? We don't feel it, but the cosmos does. It changes something, even if we can't comprehend that change. And that's what the butterfly effect is, exactly: a small act, be it of kindness or hatred, that slowly spreads into something bigger and makes a more significant impact. Sephiroth's life is a perfect example of this. Vincent's decision to not try and stop Lucrecia from experimenting on her own child was the catalyst that led to everything else. Gast's decision to run away with Ifalna and leave Sephiroth behind in Hojo's hands sealed his fate. And yet, individual agency also plays a role, because in spite of Sephiroth's deep suffering and trauma, he still grew into a kind young man that protected others and felt that life was precious. "Hate breeds hate. It's a cycle that can never be broken. ...but it can be. All it takes is a little compassion." In the end, he was broken, but he really did try as hard as he could. It's both interesting and a bit sad, your letters to Sephiroth. But we all have our own ways of coping with things, and there is no right or wrong answer in that, as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. My father passed away more than a decade ago, and my journals are filled with letters to him that, of course, I cannot send, and he can't reply to. Why write them at all? It fills a need, and that makes it worthwhile. A lot of people see things in black and white, and refuse to change their minds. Aside from the few obvious things that can firmly be called "right" or "wrong", the world is colored in grey and its many tones. What Sephiroth did to Nibelheim was wrong, no matter his reasons, but that doesn't invalidate his suffering. I don't think Cloud should ever forgive him for that, either. But...that doesn't mean that Sephiroth is purely evil(especially with Jenova involved, and his warped ideas of what the Promised Land is/will become), or that they can't find a way to coexist...which is really what most of my stories are about. After all, forgiveness, especially of yourself, is a big theme of Advent Children, which comes after the game. By then, it's clear that Cloud no longer hates Sephiroth, and actually comes to feel some sympathy for him.

I am aware of Faz Faz, and I have those videos bookmarked, thankfully. At least these stories will be preserved on Youtube.

I think it's safe to say that most people experience a...fall from grace, at some point. Whether they completely break or just crack a bit, the results are similar. It's impressive that you've found your 3rd and 4th options, that you're trying to do good in the world, and help others. But I wonder...where does that desire come from? Is it purely a desire to do good, for the sake of doing good...or are you seeking purpose, a way to fill a void within yourself? Or perhaps, are you trying to make up for how you were in the past? And you might wonder, "What's the difference? I'm still helping others!" But you can't pour from an empty cup, nor can you fill it with momentary satisfaction. Ah, and there's also a 5th option: resignation. People will only change when they're ready to, and most of them only learn the hard way. I've experienced that revelation many times, over and over. That isn't to say that it's not worth it to take their hand when they're reaching out for you, but...it may be to your own detriment. It sounds like you've experienced that, yourself. But you are also worth protecting; your heart is worth protecting, as is your sanity. There is a fine line between helping someone, and sacrificing yourself for them, and I have walked it one too many times. Therefore, I chose to resign. I accept that I am often the friend someone needs, but only for the time they need me, and then they will move on. That doesn't make the friendship pointless, but keeps it in perspective. When others reach out, I will take their hand and pull them to safety with the understanding that they may turn around and jump right back off the cliff, which is neither my fault, nor my responsibility. An unfortunate way to look at the world, perhaps, but that is how I protect myself from those I cannot trust. If they prove me wrong, that is a rare and precious thing.

Mercy...must be tempered with wisdom.

Playing a dying game is kind of like living your life. You don't really know why you're still playing it, but you are, and you'll stick around until the very end, against your better judgement.

You're not really sure why you're still logging in, still collecting crystals, still trading them in for outfits that you don't have yet. There's no point, and you know it, but somehow you just can't walk away—from Sephiroth, from his story.

Oh, the developers are so generous, now that there's no FOMO effect left, no money for them to collect. The crystals are practically raining down upon you, and it feels hollow, considering how hard you had to work in order to earn them before. Whether you spent money on crystals or spent hundreds of hours earning them...how does it feel, now that they're all basically free?

...if you're wondering, I have 1,480 hours on record, according to Steam, which doesn't count my time spent on the phone version. 1,480 hours dedicated to Sephiroth, waiting to find out more and more of his story.

It's still kind of crazy to me how they tied Ever Crisis into the whole trilogy, using Glenn and his team's story as part of Rebirth—something that I wouldn't have even understood without playing EC. And yet...once this game shuts down, the tragic story of Sephiroth's past will be gone, only to be found in old youtube videos. Ten years from now, who will remember "Miniroth"?

Sephiroth...deserves better than that.

Of course, he also deserves better than having his backstory put into a shitty mobile game. Or having his English voice actor replaced for the last part of the trilogy as if he's some small, insignificant part of the game, but I suppose that's a different matter. Or is it?

Oh, Square, how do you disappoint me? Let me count the ways.

Disappointment isn't very hard to find these days, no matter where you look. I guess...nothing lasts forever. No matter how significant, eventually, all things crumble to dust and blow away in the wind. That's the nature of everything, the nature of life. I guess I'm just rambling, because within a day or so, no one will remember that I wrote this, either.

If I was a writer for FF games, this is the part where I would add something like, "But as long as my words touched even one person, they mattered, and will live on." Except that's not how real life works. Buildings and artwork and music and books that took years of labor and love to create can be destroyed in an instant. Everyday, people die without anyone's notice, leaving behind nothing, as if they never even existed. What deserves to be protected? What deserves to live on?

But one thing in life is always true: nothing lasts forever. Whether it's around for thirty years or less than three, it will vanish, one day. And as I often say, the truth may be cruel, but it never fails to put us in our place.

And you're right. Sephiroth deserved so much better than this. The story of his childhood deserved so much better than to be stuck unceremoniously into a gatcha game. It deserved so much better than to be put out for a little while, only to then be yanked away. Sephiroth deserved so much better for so much more than just this. But if I go on about that, I'll end up accidentally writing you a book, hahaha... I might end up accidentally writing you a book anyway; we autists do be like that sometimes; apologies in advance.

But still, I think... I think even though the medium through which we saw his story will crumble and disappear, it was still important that it was told. I still think that the words and images and emotions that string this part of his life together are precious. And I think that the hearts it touched is still a precious and important thing, too.

Lots of things are ephemeral. Blossoms are ephemeral. Butterflies and caterpillars. Sunsets and sunrises and eclipses and auroras and rainbows, too. But I think these things are no less miraculous for their ephemerality. Even if no one remembers the specific butterfly that came to lay its eggs on a milkweed plant coming to seed, the heart of the person who saw it will still be warmer and just a little more tender for having seen it, and that change will ripple out in how they interact with everything else around them, in ways that are ineffable, unpredictable, and often positive. And the eggs... they'll either hatch, or nourish something else.

Basically... it doesn't have to be remembered to matter. It doesn't have to live on. The effects of it ripple outwards anyway, changing how other things ripple outwards, even if those changes are too subtle to detect except on a very broad scale. And those ripples create our history. They create our culture.

One way these ripples can carry forward is via generational trauma, for example. I don't know the names of the people who treated my grandparents the way they treated them. I'll never know who they were, or what they looked like. But their influence carries forward in how my grandmother treated my mother, in how my mother treated me, in my eventual refusal to perpetuate that kind of nonsense, and in how my refusal might inspire someone else's refusal and subsequent healing. These folks haven't disappeared, they just changed shape. Became waveforms. And the people who exist now get to decide how they interpret and wield those waveforms. Even if they came from a twisted place, we can reshape them into something to help others, if we so choose.

We also get to decide what kind of ripples we leave behind. Because they'll echo long after we're gone, long after our names have been forgotten. Even the handprints of cave-dwelling hominids still ripple, changing how we saw them, and, in subtle ways, how we see each other. We all have so much more quiet power than we can readily fathom.

I think this game is the same. Its digital components will be rendered inaccessible to us for potentially silly and arbitrary reasons. The story of this part of Sephiroth's childhood will once again be obscured. And this deserves to be mourned and grieved properly, because like everything else, this story was worth protecting. Grieving is a heavy thing to carry, and "everything is worth protecting" is a hard position to hold because we look at the real world and see how tragically we fall short of that idea, and it hurts. And it's hard to sit with hurt long enough to remember that we can change the parts of it we can reach in unexpected ways.

How will you let this story change you? How will you carry it forward? You get to decide.

None of this is written to say that you should change how you feel, or anything like that. But... I did want to write here, to show you that I saw your words and thought they were beautiful, with all the love and sadness I perceive them carrying. I see them, and I feel them, and I am changed slightly for them, because they fill me with a tender sort of protectiveness that makes me want to be of comfort somehow. Thank you so much for writing them. Thank you so much for being. And thank you for reminding me, in this subtle way, which will carry forward into today's interactions, that lots of people carry love and sadness that they haven't yet written about, and they deserve tenderness too.

Date Posted: July 23, 2026

AO3 has recently seen a wave of comments claiming to be made by the "AO3 Trust & Safety team", notifying you that your account has been restricted. These claims are not true. These comments are not being made by real AO3 volunteers and your account has not been restricted.

AO3 volunteers, including the Policy & Abuse committee, will never communicate with you through comments on your work. All important communications from AO3 will be sent through the email associated with your account. More general announcements will be posted on our official social media accounts or published as news posts on AO3 or OTW.org.

If you receive one of these comments, do not click on any of the links in it, reply to it, or interact with it in any way. The links in these comments lead to sites asking you to verify your identity by providing payment information. This is a common credit card scam. AO3 does not ever ask users to provide payment information, and the Policy & Abuse committee will never comment on your works asking you to "complete an identity verification process".

If you encounter one of these comments or believe your account has been compromised, please view the instructions under the cut!