#bulletprccf

I meant gross like his personality is gross lmfao

Ah, okay. Well... We see so little of him as a young man that we have no idea what he was like, except for the indication that she didn’t know him to be insane until she stumbled upon him murdering Vincent.

We see him in...literally two scenes prior to that. One in which the only thing he says is “So, you’ve come to your senses and chosen me.”/“Well then, are you going to come to be beside me?” (En/Jp) and the other of which is the scene where he tells Vincent to butt out of the Jenova Project and does some subtle chest thumping about how he’s the father of the baby and Lucrecia is his.

So, was he a pleasant and charismatic young man? I doubt it. But there’s strong evidence against him being so openly nasty and insane (to recap past discussions: she reacts with shock and horror when she sees that he has murdered Vincent and does a complete 180 in how she regards him from that point forward), so I don’t think we can take his 30-year-later appearance or personality to be an accurate picture of what he was like when Lucrecia married him.

Especially when you have matters of insanity and age and unchecked mental deterioration... Okay, I’m gonna get anecdotal for a sec, but my father’s a little off his rocker and I know gets worse and worse as the years go by. Not to the point where he would kill someone ofc, but he says things that shock me and I’m like, “Did my mother see this 40 years ago when she married him?” And the answer is no, which is a combination of the fact that that isn’t who he was 40 years ago, and also because it was her very presence that was probably keeping him in check for so long.

But looking back, I can see the signs that these things were lurking... You brush it off, like “Oh, he didn’t really mean it like that,” and “Oh, that’s just the way he is, but he’s a good guy, really.” Making excuses and trying to see the best in people. And when someone like that is 20, 30, 40, I think they have better control of their mental faculties and are more adept at hiding it and adhering to society’s rules. But 50, 60, beyond... idk if they just don’t care about society’s rules anymore, or if it’s losing important people and things in their life that makes them feel it’s no longer worth it to adhere, or if their aging minds just deteriorate and lose some of the actual ability to perform like that, but there seems to be much less reservation there and not for the better. (My father and OG Hojo are probably around the same age.)

When my mother died a few years ago, my father became “unchecked” and that seems to have been the turning point at which I could see the ideas that he expresses shift greatly. With Hojo, I think it was probably when he became department head, and/or when he killed Gast, and/or when he got Hollander out of the way, and/or as President Shinra became older and lazier and stopped paying so much attention to what Hojo was doing. Or it’s probably a combination of all those factors, each one nudging him a little closer toward open and unreserved insanity.

bless you. also I wondered, what are your thoughts for how she became pregnant? I’m all for artificial insemination b/c uh…Hooj is…gross…but Squeenix is kinda strange anyway. |:

Well, funny you should mention that, because the supposed grossness of Hojo is definitely the primary reason why I say Square can’t be trusted to use accurate character models. Because those scenes took place 20–30 years before OG, and even in OG he had shorter hair in the flashback, indicating that he looked different back then.

I’m guessing that the reason why they didn’t give Hojo a younger model for the DoC flashbacks and an older model for the end/opening flashback was to avoid confusing people who hadn’t played FF7 (and specifically that one hidden flashback scene) about older Hojo and younger Hojo being the same person. Not that I don’t think that’s a stupid reason, but it seems in line with their alleged reasoning about developing a storyline for Cloud in AC that made him angsty so that casual players would recognize him as the same character, and what I assume is their reasoning for giving Grimoire the exact same clothes as older Vincent so that we’ll recognize them as being related even though that makes absolutely zero logical sense whatsoever. They seem to base a lot (read: most) of their reasoning for doing things on aesthetics and visual readability rather than what actually makes sense. (See also: every buckle and zipper Nomura has ever drawn, everyone’s hair, etc.)

So with that reasoning (which by the way is shitty reasoning because who’s going to play DoC with little to no experience of OG first and not be confused already??), if they had used a younger model for Hojo in the flashback scenes, which is literally ALL of the scenes he appears in until he’s revealed as the villain, less savvy players might have been all like “who dat” when it’s revealed at the end that gasp Weiss is internet!Hojo.

They could have solved this, of course, by having Vincent see internet!Hojo as his younger incarnation, which would have arguably made more sense considering that’s how Vincent mostly knew him, assuming that the apparition of Hojo on screen is Vincent’s interpretation of what he’s seeing and not necessarily what “is” in “reality.” (You know, fictional reality. >.> ) But then that wouldn’t necessarily tie this character to the opening sequence of a man with a black ponytail and white labcoat slumped over a computer terminal (for the really dumb gamers), nor would newcomers to the compilation necessarily connect this shorthaired man to the Hojo in Crisis Core the following year.

So... I’m guessing they made the decision based on what worked best for their bottom line financially and wouldn’t risk alienating new fans/customers, and not necessarily based on what was the “right” thing to do. :/ (Which I hope is not predictive of what we can expect from the remake, since they’ll have the opportunity to invite new players in from the beginning...)

This is all to say that I don’t think Hojo was old and ugly when Lucrecia was married to him just because DoC portrayed him as such. It’s pretty impossible for him to have not aged at all in those years, which is what DoC portrays, sooo choose your retcon: Did Hojo actually age, or is Hojo actually a vampire? I prefer to choose that he aged.

Which also brings us to something else: They were married. Canonically. It’s not in the game but it’s referenced in the ultimania materials in several places. (Maybe this is another thing that was “lost in translation,” either literally or via cultural cues, and the Japanese audience was never as confused about as the Western/English-speaking one was?) It stands to reason that, as a married couple, they were having sex.

I still think a case could be made for Sephiroth having been conceived via IVF because it was easier to manipulate the embryo that way or something (a headcanon I don’t favor btw), but it doesn’t make sense as a means of avoiding the idea that Lucrecia ever had sex with Hojo.

You could certainly headcanon that the conception was IVF. You could headcanon they never had sex—hell, you could headcanon them both asexual. You could headcanon them never married if you want, and you could headcanon them all to be part chocobo.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

IF YOU HEAR SHRILL SCREAMING

IT IS ME

Reserved for you!

oh friend you shouldn’t talk about me like that [ (obnoxious kawaii blushu) ]

LMAO

glad you liked it, sorry about your tea

:T