Yes, there's no one way memories work, but we see how Yuffie's memory works.
She simply doesn't know about Deepground. That matches what we see in Intermission; no one gives her a rundown of Deepground's existence nor does she visit it firsthand. Given the reality of memory and it's unreliable nature especially in the wake of traumatic experiences, this is not so wildly inconsistent, at least in terms of breaking the progression and scenario of the Dirge's story. Yuffie doesn't say anything about Nero but she also isn't really in a position to do random expository banter over her past with Vincent while they go separate ways within Mako Reactor 0.
I'll say this, though. I'm more surprised Nero doesn't say anything in recognition of Yuffie. I suppose that could be chalked up to him being far more focused on Weiss and his revival, but that is what strikes me as more inconsistent with Intermission. But, that's the joy of retcons.
If you stay out of a thread long enough, you're bound to miss some good stuff. Whoops. Sorry if some of this is too far back, but there's some interesting points I wanted to chime in on.
But first, I wanted to talk about Lucrecia's, Hojo's, Gast's, et al's mindsets when working on the Jenova project. We have a few key things I think we can assume.
1. Lucrecia and Gast, I believe, are both Planetologists. This means their scientific work is based on Cetra lore and carries a certain reverence for the Planet.
2. This team believed, at first, that Jenova was an Ancient/Cetra. They believed they were recreated the Cetra.
3. They named Sephiroth well... Sephiroth. To be incredibly reductive here, this is the "path" to god, and in an eastern understanding, god can be synonymous with nature/cosmic divinity, not just a singular entity.
Soooo... To look at this in another context. Folks find Jesus Christ's crypt. Part of his body is intact, they have his DNA. They decide to inject this in and recreate the Messiah, effectively artifically/scientifically creating the Second Coming... after all, if God works through human action, then this was their destiny, right? So some devout Christian woman agrees, gets her egg fertilized, and Baby Jesus is on the way. She even names him "Messiah" when he's born. Only, in the youth of the baby's life, they find that the DNA in the Crypt they found actually belongs to Satan.
So they made the Anti-Christ. The fake Messiah that very well could destroy the world. You believed, with your whole being, that you were about to save humanity and let everyone who ever lived into the Kingdom of Heaven, and instead... you started the Apocalypse. But, in the case of Mary II/Lucrecia, you're the mother of the Anti-Christ, it's still your kid. You still feel that tug/pull of a mother loving a child.
Remember, snippets from OG script when Vincent meets Lucrecia in the Cave:
Vincent: This body is... the punishment that's been given to me. I was unable...... to stop Professor Gast and Hojo... And Lucrecia... I was unable to stop them. All that I was able to do was watch... That is my punishment...
Vincent's problem was experimenting on people, and he knows he should have stopped them, including Lucrecia. We may say he doesn't care about Sephirtoh, which I understand we don't have evidence for, but he was against the experimenting all together. He's not Snape over here (although....)
Lucrecia (edited a bit) said:
Lately, I dream a lot of Sephiroth... My dear, dear child. Ever since he was born I never got to hold him, even once... Not even once. You can't call me his mother... That... is my sin... ....[cut some stuff] Vincent... Won't you please tell me?
Vincent: ......What?
Lucrecia: If Sephiroth is still alive? I heard that he died five years ago. But I see him in my dreams so often... And I know that physically, like myself, he can't die so easily. Please, Vincent tell me...... Cloud starts forward, but Vincent holds out an arm to silence him.
In the above, Lucrecia states she never got to hold Sephiroth, never got to be a mother. This is her sin. That's the thing that bothered her originally. (But also, how did she *hear* he died 5 years ago?! WTF? What water cooler is she bopping around with?)
What I'm getting at is, here, at least, Lucrecia's sin, in her opinion, was not experimentation. It wasn't that she made Sephiroth in any manner, it's that she couldn't be a mother. This is an important point in understanding her character, I think.
Who the heck cares what it looks like? It's been dead for over 2,000 years under (in?) a glacier. IRL glacier mummies don't look particularly human either.
So, this is a sticking point for me, Obsidian. Jenova shouldn't decay, it's not dead. We understand mummies decay, albeit weirdly. Jenova shouldn't look undead in any manner, unless that's some weird property of it. I've said before elsewhere I'm not sure if Jenova is even a living entity, but something beyond life/more undead than we currently think, which is why it never dies.... anyway.
According to that one doctor in TKAA, the arm that came off that thing was a human woman's arm in addition to being Jenova's arm. No one alive except Cetra knew what a Cetra was supposed to look like, so this humanoid thing with some fantastical attributes that could make it pass for a magical ancestor of humanity -- and it has human DNA? I can see how the mistake was made.
Plus 1 to there being only human races on Planet (minus Red's folks that don't seem to be widely known). Why would these humans consider Cetra would be non-humans? If we look at ancient races on Earth, no one expects any lost missing link to be a Dino Dude or anything other than human/humanesque on the evolutionary scale. Wings are really outside of that, so either they thought these folks were super, super divine... OR, and I think more likely, the Planet once had other/more races that were non-humans.
Lucrecia doesn't get any special allowances made for her because she's the woman, because she's the mother and not the father. The duty she owes to her baby isn't more or less than the duty owed by Hojo, its father: they are equally to blame. Both did it out of curiosity and to advance their careers, not to save its life or for some other child-centred reason. Lucrecia may have told herself she was doing it to help humanity, but she's shown to be a character who is a) extremely ambitious, and b) doesn't know their own mind.
You make a fair point here and I think absolving Lucrecia of responsibility shouldn't be the end goal. You know what's really at stake? When did Hojo know that Jenova wasn't a Cetra and was an alien? This is the only thing, imo, that can truly answer this thread's question. If he knew, then, that Jenova was alien and lied/manipulated/let Lucrecia believe it was a Cetra... then he manipulated her. If he found out after, I think we're here with shared, equal responsibility. Yes, they share equal responsibility regardless for experimenting on an unborn child, but I do think Lucrecia believed she was giving birth to a Christ like figure and creating a hero/empowered entity that would save people.
That's interesting, isn't it? What he [Gast] was distressed about appears to not be that human experimentation is wrong, but that Jenova wasn't an Ancient.
Lucrecia gave up on her life's work, The Planet's Pulse, because the research killed someone. This research was the single most important thing in her life, and she gave it up purely for ethical reasons.
...
She also fights hard to save Vincent's life through illness after he's turned into a catatonic wreck by Hojo, again purely for ethical reasons. 'I hurt you so so much, but I'm so happy you survived.'
I love when the Turks criticise the Science Depts lack of ethics. 'If only they didn't do such horrible things to the people we kidnap for them for that specific purpose.'
Yeah, we shouldn't depict Lucrecia as having no morals, she held a belief that gave her a different set of morals. I'm still not sure she thinks making Sephiroth was immoral. Not holding him was, yeah?
In Japanese, he says 都市計画責任者だった私はディープグラウンド、触れるべからずとして、その存在のみ、聞かされていました -- "As the person in charge of city planning, I was told only that Deepground existed, and to leave it alone."
So Reeve knows, albeit not much, that DG exists. I think this makes sense and supports a general way I see the Science Department. Few folks know what actually happens in there or the extent of it, just mostly rumors. Frightening rumors.
I am very attached to my mental version of Reeve: fundamentally a decent guy, only ever really wanted to build things, got sucked into the world of materialism and ambition that is Shinra, Inc., lost sight of his values, tried to make the system work for him, got promoted for being good at saying "Yes Mr Shinra", tried to undermine Avalanche from within but surprisingly finds his own inner good person reawakened by hanging out with them - steps out of the Meteor crisis into a world that needs a leader and claims the role, is good at his own PR ("Did I tel you I'm a hero of the Jenova War?" but fundamentally just isn't very good at seeing the big picture or managing people, veers between meek and shouty. Would rather be a Gepetto in a little workshop somewhere, really.
I pictured him a bit different. I don't know if I ever felt he was "lost," more I see him how Progressives view Liberals in the US. Reeve thinks Capitalism/Shinra/Mako Energy can be used for good if directed/fixed/upheld correctly. Progressives/Avalanche view someone like this as an idiot, that's just perpetuating those evils and making excuses. They just have different standpoints.
I imagine Reeve adopted a lot of Shinra stuff, and someone like Barret would be pissed off to find out he was working with Rufus in any capacity. He just holds a different (though heroic) ideology.
However, it was only when Gast discovered that Jenova was an alien that he realised he'd crossed his own moral line and fled from the consequences of his actions. A brave man would have stayed, to clean up his own mess - and not leave his daughter to do it.
I just wanted to add that I believe this must have been some time into Sephiroth's childhood at least. Sephiroth spoke of as knowing (and apparently looking up to/trusting Gast. So they must have known each other for some time. I wonder, still, if Gast was Sephiroth's father figure. (A nice play on Gast being Aerith's bio dad and A and S being siblings at one point in the FF7 draft).
I believe the game specifically wants us to draw two conclusions
- Gast's behaviour in the Jenova project from beginning to end is deserving of our censure
- despite this, Gast himself is still a fundamentally good person with many redeeming features
Ergo, good people can do bad things, and doing bad things doesn't automatically make someone a bad person. A simple enough concept, but one which our own society increasingly struggles to grasp.
Scientists have left Shinra before. Buganhagen did, and is permitted to live his eccentric life in Cosmo Canyon unmolested despite it being a known centre of anti-Shinra activity. Nobody aside from Gast and Hojo know that Jenova is a space alien, so they wouldn't know why he'd left the company.
So we know from TWM here that Bugenhagen didn't leave Shinra Science Department. But you are right, we see many scientists in the novel materials that reveal they used to work for Shinra, though they seem to be a bit more in hiding to me? If the retirement package for a typical Shinra Doc is the Rayleigh Resort, then GTFOing and slumming it up is a far better option.
Hate to contribute to the death of more olden lore understanding, but Cait Sith's line on the Highwind wasn't that Bugenhagen used to be a Shin-Ra worker. =( Instead, he said Bugen used to be a frequent customer: ブーゲンさんは昔っから神羅のお得意さんやったんです
Yes, they share equal responsibility regardless for experimenting on an unborn child, but I do think Lucrecia believed she was giving birth to a Christ like figure and creating a hero/empowered entity that would save people.
She even names him "Messiah" when he's born. Only, in the youth of the baby's life, they find that the DNA in the Crypt they found actually belongs to Satan.
So they made the Anti-Christ. The fake Messiah that very well could destroy the world. You believed, with your whole being, that you were about to save humanity and let everyone who ever lived into the Kingdom of Heaven, and instead... you started the Apocalypse. But, in the case of Mary II/Lucrecia, you're the mother of the Anti-Christ, it's still your kid. You still feel that tug/pull of a mother loving a child.
As far as I know, Lucrecia never found out Jenova *wasn't* a Cetra. No one did until several years after Sephiroth was born and he was already taken away from Lucrecia. Now, she was getting Jenova visions while pregnant with Sephioth. And she seemingly continues to get them even while in her cave. What she doesn't seem to know is *where* they are coming from and what they actually are. She just seems to know she's getting weaker and collapsing and seeing weird random stuff like the White Materia falling into water and Meteor coming down. And Sephiroth burning Nibelheim. Just with no context what-so-ever. My gut feeling is that this is how she seems to know Sephiroth is dead. The Jenova Cells she got from being pregnant with Sephiroth are letting her know what happened and she still has no knowledge of "Jenova was actually an alien and not a Cetra" because she left the Jenova Project years before anyone figured out what Jenova actually was.
Our (current) understanding of the timeline is that Sephiroth was born *somewhere* in the late 1970s. This is when he's taken away from Lucrecia. Gast at this point doesn't know Jenova *isn't* a Cetra. No one does. They think they've just made the first viable Cetra in several thousand years. Hojo also takes Sephiroth away from Lucrecia at this point before she ever gets to interact with him. And Lucreica works on Vincent to get him not as messed up.
It wouldn't be until... 1985 (when Aerith is born), potentially an entire decade after Sephiroth is born, that Hojo finds out Jenova *isn't* a Cetra. Which is... not exactly a big deal to him. He just keeps on experimenting as usual.
So I guess it's kinda like thinking you cloned Jesus, Krishna or Amaterasu, raising that kid under that assumption (after you took him away from his mom ASAP) and then finding out that you'd *actually* cloned Satan, Kansa or Izanami instead. Woops.
And not really caring that that was what you cloned, you can still salvage the situation *somehow*.
I always thought that flashback was just for the players. It would be really weird if her flashbacks happened to be the same camera angles as AC. Why would the vision be of the outside of the JENOVA tank.
Not holding Sephiroth can't be immoral because Lu was never given a choice in that.
Lucrecia was always pretty confused about morality anyway.
(And can I just say that mothers tend to blame themselves quite fiercely for things that were entirely outside of their control).
The hardest person on Lucrecia is Lucrecia. She has a self-blaming streak a mile wide, often about things she regrets about but had no way of preventing other than... not being there in the first place. Which is probably why she leaves and shuts herself up in a cave. She sees herself as making everything worse for people she cares about.
She isn't the one who kills Grimoire, it's a genuine accident. But it is her research topic and her research subject and if she hadn't been researching Chaos, Grimoire wouldn't have been around Chaos' mako in that way.
Hojo is the one who shoots Vincent who *chose* to go confront Hojo. Lucrecia isn't the one who shoots him. But she feels really guilty about it and tries fixing it. The only "crime" she really commited was being someone Vincent cared enough about to confront Hojo about.
It's not Lucrecia's fault or decision that Sephiroht is taken away from her... but she is the one who got pregnant with him and the one who got injected with everything that makes Sephiroth Sephiroth.
And instead of saying it's just and accident or oh... Hojo's fault (which is really the person to blame), she keeps piling more and more guilt onto herself. That's just... a huge part of her character: her self-blame for causing events she can't hope to fix or make better.
That's very true, Obsidian. And it's one of the characteristics that make her, for me, a dislikable character, although I am sure others will like or empathise with her for it. Excessive self-blame is a form of egoism, and unjustified guilt is a kind of self-indulgence.
I wouldn't go that far, she's a scientist involved in the project, not a bystander that unwittingly did these things. But, sincere regret and attempts to make up for it should count for something.
I'm a big fan of the "hot mess express" interpretation of Lucrecia, and she is a character I have been analyzing a lot lately in my fic writing (albeit much of it yet unpublished because my drafts, like her, are an unmitigated disaster).
I find her portrayal in Dirge very interesting, and I disagree with the view that she is portrayed as a victim of anybody except herself. I have written up some thoughts in the past about the contrast between how she is portrayed visually/symbolically versus narratively. On the one hand, we are given this image of her encased in crystal and dressed in white. She looks like Sleeping Beauty, like a Madonna, like a virgin sacrifice. On the other hand, the reason she is in the crystal to begin with is that her body is so corrupted that the planet itself doesn't want to touch that with a ten-foot pole and opted instead to essentially phagocytize her.
I think the whole "maiden in a crystal" image is a perfect metaphor for Vincent's idealized version of her. He needs to believe that she was worth everything he gave up. He needs to believe that she was innocent so that his intervention was warranted. He can't accept that she is, quite literally, toxic.
What I like about Lucrecia's flaws is that they are very mundane. She isn't obviously evil. Day-to-day, she's probably perfectly nice and pleasant to be around. But she is also selfish, cowardly, self-loathing, and self-destructive. She has a conscience, but she's not very good at listening to it. These are traits that are more relatable to the average person than overtly villainous traits like extreme greed or megalomania. For most of us, when we hurt those around us, it's not out of malice or sadism; it's because we are scared or overwhelmed or want something for ourselves badly enough to ignore the little voice warning us against it. Many people with mental illness can relate to our own self-loathing and self-destructive behavior radiating out to hurt those around us, even when that was not our intention.
This idea of radiating self-destructiveness is the core of how I interpret Lucrecia. I fluctuate wildly between feeling genuinely bad for her and wanting to slap her. In my headcanon, her negligence that led to Grimoire's death was directly related to the fact that she had been abusing stimulant medication and had not slept for days. She repeatedly acknowledges that she should not do certain things and then goes ahead and does them anyway. She's a master of rationalizing to herself whatever she needs to believe at any given moment. She's self-absorbed, whiny, cynical, elitist, hypocritical, and has terrible impulse control. On the other hand, there are also many external factors that have led her to be this way. There always are, and that (I hope) keeps her at least remotely sympathetic, maybe even dangerously relatable in that way that flawed characters can be. A cautionary tale if there ever was one.
Anyway, I apologize if this is thread necromancy. I had thoughts.
I actually have part of it posted. I threw up part of the rough draft but then my inner perfectionist was like "ohno ohno ohno I need to go back and edit so much this is so disorganized and badly planned why did I ever think it was a good idea to post a draft" so I stopped posting it. I think I got some good stuff insofar as finding her voice and exploring her thoughts and backstory, but the structure is weak, and the other characters are underdeveloped and the whole thing needs to be overhauled and polished. If you want to see what I posted so far, it's here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30526041/chapters/75285135
This is a very short oneshot I wrote recently as well (480 words) that is just meant to give a brief glimpse of her inner turmoil: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33096652
Personally, I find it more interesting to conceptualise Hojo and Lucrecia's relationship as a meeting of true minds. No woman knows what it's like to be pregnant until they are pregnant. Lucrecia could easily have believed that she could conceive and bear a child without ever regarding it as anything other than an experiment. As the pregancy progressed, however, and perhaps especially once she felt the baby moving, her feelings changed (to her intense surprise and initial annoyance), becoming less "science-y" and more that despised thing, motherly. Seeing the change in her, Hojo might then have said, or thought, "Hey, that wasn't the deal," and confiscated the experiment before she could compromise it with her sloppy uncontrolled female emotions. And the part of her brain that was still running on science agreed with him.
I 100% agree with this interpretation. I reject the interpretation sometimes put forth that Hojo and Lucrecia were "the same." I think they had some big differences, the most obvious one being the capacity for remorse (while Lucrecia's remorse may not be especially *helpful* it does imply a significantly different internal configuration from Hojo's overtly sociopathic behavior), but they still regarded each other as intellectual peers and knew one another better than anybody. I really like the idea that Hojo knew Lucrecia better than Vincent ever did.
However, because they were both deeply broken, narcissistic people, this intimate mutual understanding was weaponized rather than serving as the foundation for a healthy, loving relationship. Canon gives us almost nothing about the nature of their relationship, so this is purely speculative, but I imagine it starting out as a dopamine-fueled geek spiral and quickly evolving into an all-out war. Hojo taking Sephiroth was the final play in an ever-mounting power struggle, cementing his victory and Lucrecia's defeat.
I *do* think Hojo was predatory toward Lucrecia when she was in a vulnerable position, but I don't think she was hapless prey. I like to think she inflicted some lasting damage on him, too. She had his number as much as he had hers. Imagine Sid and Nancy, but genius scientists. While he treated her horribly, not all of her choices can be causally attributed to his abuse. It's a valid interpretation to say they were, but there's no specific evidence for or against it in canon, so it really comes down to how you personally fill in the gaps. My stance on the Dirge flashbacks is that we are very limited by the lens of Vincent's memory, and Hojo was not as obviously cacklingly evil in reality as he is in those memories.
Fandom tends to write Lucrecia as either helpless victim or irredeemable monster, neither of which does her credit. She made horrible mistakes but worked hard, took risks, and made sacrifices to try to fix, mitigate or learn from them.
Closest parallel is maybe Beatrix, who takes the stance of 'I cant possibly make up for this, but I'm going to try anyway,not for me but for the people I hurt.' Which for me is legitimately admirable, it takes strength of character to do that when it would be so easy to keep going. That's why she start crying when Vincent, in full knowledge of what she has done, acknowledges her efforts 'you are why I'm alive, you did more than create monsters.'
What world are you watching Beatrix in? Cause it sure ain't Gaia.
Lucrecia literally went to sleep after earning her PhD in poor decision making. Yeah, she at least saved Vincent but then went into crystal stasis for the rest of her life.
And I'm pretty positive Beatrix faced her past, future, and attempted to rebuild the mess Alexandria did after trying to conquer the Mist Continent. Through living.
Fandom tends to write Lucrecia as either helpless victim or irredeemable monster, neither of which does her credit. She made horrible mistakes but worked hard, took risks, and made sacrifices to try to fix, mitigate or learn from them.
I notice this trend, too. People tend to shoe-horn her into that damned victim/vamp dichotomy. I like to throw her into the "troubled, but an asshole" role, which is usually the territory of male anti-heroes. It is a level of complexity that is not often extended to female characters, who are expected to either be "likeable" or outright villainous bitches (note: I think there is a difference between being a bitch and being an asshole, but that's a discussion for another time). She gets in over her head, realizes that she's gone down the wrong path, and tries to change course, but I don't think she can be said to have really cleaned up the mess she made. She's redeemable, but not redeemed. And the first step for her to achieve redemption would be to overcome the belief that she is irredeemable.
If I had to compare her with another character, it would be Bojack Horseman. From Wikipedia:
BoJack has been shown to be caring and insightful, but his insecurities, loneliness, desperate need for approval, and guilt over his own actions often result in self-destructive and selfish actions that devastate those around him.
At what point does someone clean up the mess they've made, though? That's a failing of capability, not intent. She tries to address all her issues, and either is prevented or simply cannot because she has no means to. If Cloud had been defeated by Sephiroth,winning or losing doesn't make him more or less redeemed, what's important is that he sincerely tried.
I guess it comes down to 1) we don't actually know what she did during the 30 year time skip, and 2) we don't know what she was capable of doing during that time.
On the one hand, to expect her to attempt to reclaim her child from ShinRa would be a tall order. Literally, how would one do that? How would one even go about attempting to do that? One person against a corporate behemoth. On the other hand, she had a lot of inside knowledge about ShinRa and perhaps could have done some good by aligning herself with parties that were trying to oppose them. She was in possession of a lot of sensitive information that could have been made public. While it might be a struggle finding people willing to believe her, she is carrying actual physical evidence in her body.
She also saved Vincent but then left him alone to figure out how to navigate the world with a demon inside his body. Which, at least initially, was so shitty for him that he spent 30 years wishing he was dead. At the very least, could she not have stayed at his side through his awakening and helped him make some sense of what she had done to him? She was the literal demon expert. It seems like she condemned him to a terrible, lonely existence when she could have made it a little less lonely with her presence. From what we know about Vincent, I think her presence would have made all the difference for him. I understand why her guilt would make her unable to face him, but her guilt certainly didn't do anything to improve his situation. It was not a helpful, productive guilt; a productive guilt would have obligated her to face him.
So did she actually consider any of these things? Did she try any of them and fail? Did she try any of them and succeed? Was she just too mentally shattered, or perhaps too physically damaged to face such tasks?
This question of "Did she do everything she could do?" is one that I don't think can be answered with certainty because, as with almost everything around Lucrecia, there is a critical lack of information furnished by the canon. To me, it seems that there is lots more she could have done. But there are also possible sympathetic explanations for her not having done them. These are questions that I love seeing addressed in fanfic and hope will continue to be explored in all their wonderful variations by more fic authors.
How I see it from my rather little knowledge of DoC: it does feel that Lucrecia and Vincent are similar in that they think they can't atone their sins. There is hope though that Vincent will face this, whatever that means for him, while I think Lucrecia is probably 'lost' in that sense that she won't ever try.
But she did try. She tried to save both Vincent and Sephiroth, and gave up on the single most important thing in her life (proving her thesis)because it was too dangerous to pursue, even though it would vindicate her in the eyes of all the scientists who laughed at her.
The implication we have is that something JENOVA related happened to her that made disappearing necessary. We know she did leave a copy of her records on Omega and chaos in nibelheim for Vincent, but he never found them until Dirge.
iIt's true that there are a lot of gaps, and I don't want to be all 'you must follow my headcanons or else, but the extent of the Lu hatred puzzles me, given that other chharacters can be redeemed from things like actual murder.
iIt's true that there are a lot of gaps, and I don't want to be all 'you must follow my headcanons or else, but the extent of the Lu hatred puzzles me, given that other chharacters can be redeemed from things like actual murder.
If it's any consolation, I don't hate her! I love her very dearly as a character and have put a lot of thought into my headcanons around her. I just happen to like my characters deeply flawed. So I know I won't necessarily see eye-to-eye with people who want to take a more innocent interpretation of her (which is a completely valid interpretation!). I know not everyone who likes her will appreciate my version of her, and that's okay. There are just so many possible ways to imagine her because we are given so little in canon. I personally enjoy the great variety of characterizations she is given, even if they don't match mine. That's part of the fun of fandom.
I don't like the hate she gets either, and I think a lot of it is fundamentally misogynistic because there is a demand for female characters to be likeable that is not extended to male characters. Also everyone despises a "bad mother." I don't need her to be likeable, but I do want to see her presented as a full person instead of a plot vehicle. People who hate on her ask things like, "What kind of woman would experiment on her own child?" and "Why would she possibly choose Hojo over Vincent?" But they don't seem to have any interest in actually ANSWERING those questions! I actually do want to know: what could motivate a person to make the choices she makes? There are a million possible answers, and all of them are way more interesting than just writing her off as a stupid bitch.
I swear how much a character is loved or hated has less to do with what their actions are than how their actions are portrayed. Destroying entire cities has the cool, badass factor to it and creates villains that people love. Experimenting on your child... I can't think of how to make that look cool.
I've never played DoC myself, just watched it on YouTube and read various stuff on fandom wikis, so a lot of this is based on second hand info. While I don't think she's some helpless victim, I can sympathize a little.
She made some real shit choices, probably rationalized it away in the name of science and career advancement. I do sometimes wonder though, how many people would have made the same choices in her shoes, keeping in mind that she's a young, aspiring scientist surrounded by other ambitious, if not mad scientists, many who didn't even believe her research.
Unlike other villains who redeemed themselves more gracefully (or even our main characters in Avalanche), Lucrecia suffered from excessive self-blame. I think a part of it is a fatal flaw in her character, and a part of it is that her losses are far more personal and a direct outcome of her increasingly self-reinforcing shitty choices. These losses first involved her mentor, and then some dude she likes, and then her partner both in life and work, and then her child. Her faith and abilities (in science and career and what not) which once guided her actions is what ultimately led to her demise. I don't know what more she has left, if the one thing she's good at and believed in is the thing causing all the regret.
It feels tragic, maybe even unfair, that what had started out as aspiration and potential has to turn into this. So, yeah, while I think she's the one at fault, I still feel kinda bad for her.
Very much so. DoC failed in making me invested in Lucrecia's guilt over Grimoire's death. As a consequence, the scenes between Lucrecia and Vincent that are meant to connect back to Grimoire feel void to me. This in turn diminishes how much emotional currency I put on Lucrecia's character.
With other storytelling techniques however, and with FF7R's level of quality dialogue, I believe the very same scenarios that caused apathy or backlash could be transformed into something that works for general audiences.
