On the face of it, yes, but the only time Seph is known to have gotten near the awakened Jenova, he lost his mind.
Not quite. He has an episode in the reactor, but holds it together even with Genesis prodding and goes back to Nibelheim to investigate. His investigations and seven days of sleep deprivation finally push him over the edge. The whole thing could have went down very differently if he had been aware of Lucrecia's existence.
...
It's more that he would have never been in the position to go off the rails to begin with if she hadn't used him as she did.
Maybe so, but if she had been let raise him as she wanted, then it wouldn't have arisen. It's not even 'a mother's love' that's in question, just the knowledge that she existed would have muddied his 'take back the planet for mom' policy.
I've never been claiming that Lucrecia is blameless here, but compared to others involved in the project like Gast and Gillian she seems to take a lot of the fault, despite being more remorseful than any of them. Gast just walked out, and the only difference between her and Gillian is that she wasn't allowed to raise her kid and Gillian was.
I'm responding to these parts first because I feel like it's the most important bit.
At least from a literary perspective, if not an in-universe vantage, I feel like Angeal serves to answer the question "What if Lucrecia had raised Sephiroth?" Angeal seems to have had a stable, ideal,
normal childhood with loving parents, and at least one really close friend. He still goes off the rails when he finds out about his origin, and ultimately invites it to destroy him.
His story really is a mirror of Sephiroth's. His mother is even able to actually commit suicide where Lucrecia wasn't.
Obviously in a real-world scenario, there would still be room to emphasize that Sephiroth and Angeal aren't the same person, but the contrast between them strikes me as too deliberate from a literary perspective.
All of this is a long-winded way of me saying that I think Lucrecia's actions doomed Sephiroth no matter what.
Clem said:
What I've said is that she didn't make every effort, caved too easily, and comes off looking pathetic. I don't see how any of that's even debatable, frankly, but to each their own.
Well, we were talking about how that scene is meant to indicative of other stuff that's happening. I don't see how you're interpreting that scene is literally the only effort she makes at all. It seems highly unlikely she just went into a screaming rage once for thirty seconds and then just gave up.
I didn't say "that scene is literally the only effort she makes at all," though.
I said "The thing about montages or time jumps like that ... is that, as a storytelling tool, what's shown is going to be seen as representative of the whole.
Since they should, as storytellers, be aware of how what's shown will be unpacked and digested, there's really no reason to think what was shown
isn't representative."
"Representative," not "only."
Put another way, what is shown to us can reasonably be taken as most exemplary of what
isn't shown as well. Obviously this wasn't Lucrecia's only effort to persuade Hojo to not be a jerk. But she never went beyond this either.
Clem said:
Either way, though, the key idea there is that she left him in that lab at Hojo's mercy, and we know for a fact that Hojo moved him out of the tube. Lucrecia left him in the tube, but he didn't wake up there; he woke up on a table. Hojo's notes in the Shinra Manor from the OG also say that he was the one to lock Vincent up.
Vince may have willingly got in the coffin, but Hojo turned the key to the room.
My impression was that whatever her sickness was got to be too much, and she had to leave before he woke up. We know she left a copy of her records for him explaining what had happened, (which he doesn't find until Dirge, likely through Hojo intervention), maybe she tried to hide him, who knows?
...
See above. She definitely gave up on both him and herself.
She left him a note, so by the time she left, she knew he was going to wake up.
We see Lucrecia when she leaves. I will grant you that the fact she left a record for Vincent would reasonably indicate that she expected him to survive and awaken -- but we also saw her leave with Vincent still in the tube. Yet he doesn't wake up right there -- not even in that room, neither in the original game nor in Dirge.
Clem said:
Right, but we're also talking about a fatalistic last resort. Which, for someone willing to give up on everything anyway, shouldn't have been out of the question.
She never wanted Sephiroth or Vincent dead, though, just herself.
While true, there's a reason I said "last resort." She had several other options I spoke of.
And who would have killed Vincent in that scenario? Shin-Ra wouldn't have had anything that could stop him except the protomateria -- which Lucrecia would have.
For that matter, she didn't even give the trying-to-die thing her all. =P She could have let Chaos kill her, and give the protomateria to someone else to put him back to sleep.
Clem said:
He also doesn't believe it even exists until he sees Vincent transform during the events of the original game. Lucrecia had proof that it does exist.
But once he sees that proof, he instantly knows what it is and what it does. President Shinra is going to ask him if it comes up, whereupon he can say 'nope, that's nothing to do with the promised land'
And why would Hojo do that? He would obviously want to study this creature, so why try convincing the President that it isn't significant?
For that matter, why wouldn't the President be interested in Chaos even if it didn't offer a lead to the Promised Land? Sephiroth ultimately didn't fulfill that purpose, but Shin-Ra most certainly still found a use for him.
Clem said:
Minato said:
There's a reason not even Vincent, nor anyone else, realised that Hojo was Sephiroth's father. He did not raise him.
Vincent didn't know that? Is that canon? I wasn't under that impression.
Can't say I was of that understanding either.