#ff7fs

I think Jenova has a habit of integrating memory without understanding the individual relationships that cause code shifting in conversations or even the major differences between characters. Lucrecia as she portrays her is Mother, she's not Lucrecia as a person, she's a designation and part of the grouping of this being what a mother sounds like is based on Jenova's limited experience with the subject, especially with modern humans. The memory has the same feeling as Cloud's 'memory' of Nibelheim at the beginning of Rebirth, right down to a photograph and that's because those are Zack's memories but twisted and edited just enough to pass for Cloud's.

Angeal's relationship with the townsfolk when he was supposedly quite the thieving toerag of a kid screams of fantasy of being accepted and beloved. Heroism for him is producing crops, it's making sure his parents are taking care of and feeling accepted as part of a community where he grew up in poverty. It's rose tinted because it's literally rose tinted glasses.

I would bet that was not remotely his mother's reaction to him joining SOLDIER. We're saying Gillian Hewley, the woman who wouldn't talk about her experience to the point of death, who ran off with Angeal as a baby to try and get away from all of that, who preferred to live in poverty rather than take a single gil of Shinra's money, would have a) cared about Angeal's SOLDIER uniform looking sharp, b) ordered the 'finest materials straight from Midgar' and c) when Angeal expresses worry over dirtying it, would giggle and say it was fine when should just make him another? Does that sound like the same woman or does it seem like a fantasy of what he wished would have happened?

I'm going to go further here and say that in fact, it's much more likely to be in line with Genesis's mothers reaction and I'm wondering if either a) Jenova got them mixed up because of the close quarters or b) Jenova just characterised it as Mum Behaviour and went with it, assuming it all sounded roughly the same when the difference between Angeal's mother and Genesis's (and Lucrecia for that matter) is vast in terms of personality and relationships. Either way, I think this is again one of those little edits where she's using one memory to patch another.

Having now looked at some of the better quality pictures of a younger Gillian below, I am now more convinced than ever that the other Nibelheim scientist we see with Hollander in the opening film of First Soldier is Gillian. For me, this pretty much confirms Jenova had close proximity to the mamas (and Genesis's biological mother who SE need to stop gatekeeping because saying it's a secret is making me feral) and could have patterned their behaviours between that and the pre-existing J-cells.

I still think I'm right about the battle royale being a Synaptic Net Dive (particularly since the event in Ever Crisis where we literally faced down the system that was used to train that first round of would-be SOLDIERs in the battle royale), but the iteration of First SOLDIER in Ever Crisis isn't. Not exactly, anyway. It seems like it's whatever the energetic equivalent of the SND would be for Sephiroth, whatever you would call the way that he (and Lucrecia) can pull memories out of people's heads and put them on display, run through them and relive the experience tangibly, beat for beat—only in Ever Crisis, it's Sephiroth doing it to himself.

Sephiroth gave up his memories in Meteorfall, using his only surviving Clone as an anchor to keep his consciousness from being burned away forever—this is why the Remnants don't actually know him, because they're made from what the Lifestream remembered of him, not from his own concept of himself. He doesn't have a concept of himself anymore, he needs someone or something else to pull him back together.

Jenova "remembers," such as she can, because they were temporarily fused into one being prior to Meteorfall. This is why Kadaj's assimilation of the last piece of Jenova at the climax of Advent Children opened the way for Sephiroth to come back up out of the Lifestream, albeit in an obviously incomplete state.

Cloud also remembers, and he's special: as the only surviving Sephiroth Clone, as the man who struck him down both in Nibelheim and in the Northern Crater, as someone who actually met him prior to everything falling apart, Cloud's memories contain both the most accessible and the most complete version of Sephiroth that can currently be found.

But it's still someone else's memory, because Sephiroth doesn't remember himself.

The Sephiroth at the Edge of Creation at the end of Remake comes from some point well beyond the end of the series, postcanon by some incomprehensible degree. And he's...different. That Sephiroth uses his old personal pronoun, that Sephiroth is almost soft with Cloud—and that's the same Sephiroth as we see at the end of the opening arc of First SOLDIER, because the corresponding cutscene appears to take place just before Cloud arrives at the end of Remake.

That Sephiroth is out there at the Edge of Creation thinking about his childhood, thinking about Rhadore, thinking about Wutai, thinking about who he is and what he's done.

And he remembers. Somehow, in spite of everything, that Sephiroth remembers. He knows what happened to him, what he went through, what he did. He knows himself. And Sephiroth is not some horrifying amalgam of a extraterrestrial pathogen and the incandescent rage of a man created only to be used, he's not an incomplete echo of a memory of a hero long dead; and the Sephiroth at the Edge of Creation knows where he came from, how he got here, and everything that happened along the way.

And he's playing it back to himself.

What's he looking for? What's he hoping to see? Why did he start there, on his first field mission, where he learned the only thing he really had to prove was that he's capable of compassion? Where he learned that it's not black and white, and that death can also be mercy?

Why did he move forward to the night that he ran himself ragged saving lives in an attempt to never have to show that kind of mercy again?

That Sephiroth remembers, and he's choosing to remember this.

Final Fantasy VII - Ever Crisis - The First Soldier

First Soldier