@Makoeyes987 ... that entire thing is classic victim blaming. It's essentially "Person A decided to get into a relationship with Person B because they thought it was okay and then Person B started abusing them, so it's Person A's fault because they should have known better than to get into a relationship with Person B in the first place." There's not a lot of other ways to take what you just wrote.
You're conveniently leaving out the part where Person A and B decided to
utilize their own child as a lab experiment with an unknown alien creature. Do Shinra scientists suddenly lose their moral and humanistic reasoning? How did Gast suddenly realize the inhumanity of what they did and regret it? Lucrecia is a victim of sacrificing her child, Sephiroth, to Shinra for her ambition to be taken seriously as a scientist. Yes, she's a victim of Hojo's experimentation but she too was part of the very same Jenova Project. She wasn't some hapless victim. She wasn't kidnapped like Ifalna and forced into this against her will.
Even in the OG, Lucrecia herself never gets to talk in the flashback. Hojo is talking *for* her: "She and I are both scientists". What she says in her cave... she's morning something she never got to do... when she clearly wanted to do it. Even in the OG... something's off. Like... Lucrecia has no trouble talking in the Cave. So why does she never talk in the Flashback that is all *about* her? DoC just takes that and runs with it.
FFVII said:
Lucrecia: You can't call me his mother... That... is my sin...
Those are Lucrecia's own words of guilt. And Dirge of Cerberus expands on this and shows that yes, she made that choice. She feels guilt for a reason. She says quite explicitly to Vincent in the past,
"Am I sure? If this only concerns me, then yes I am sure."
She made her choice and worked with Hojo. That's not even a controversial statement, it's a fact.
It's never *wrong* to be emotionally effected by stuff that happens to you. You get that right? Especially when it's something like someone close to you dying. Blaming someone because they are feeling strong emotions that are effecting their judgment is a... really slippery slope to go down. Trying to say that everyone should be emotionless logical automatons and that would have solved the problem doesn't really help anything... and it's not even true to life. People are emotional beings.
This isn't about her feelings about Grimoire pushing her to reject Vincent, yes that's not "wrong." This is about
what she chose to do
while doing that. And yeah, she made a fucked up immoral choice. Nevermind the unethical decision of splicing your own child's DNA with an unknown alien lifeform with unforeseen consequences. The child was going to be a corporate tool for mako extraction. They were making a superhuman for the use of Shinra Inc.
That's not a slippery slope?
Now, could Lucrecia have done better or realized what was going on sooner? Sure. It is also possible (likely even) that she was really emotionally messed up from her mentor's death (that was as result of *her* experiment), meeting his son and realizing she liked him and feeling guilty about how she'd hurt his dad... all while Hojo is there who we know from both DoC and the OG is really good at getting under people's skin emotionally. Remake practicly makes him get off on doing it.
We're not shown any evidence there was coercion. Lucrecia being emotionally messed up is possibly a factor but where does that end her agency as a functioning adult? How does that absolve her of what she chose to do as the mother of her child and as a responsible scientist? If you're going to somehow attribute this
all on Hojo, then you'd sorta need to prove that. Hojo didn't put a gun to Lucrecia's head or blackmail her into getting with him. He literally says,
"So you've come to your senses and chose me." Hojo apparently
waited for Lucrecia's choice. She obviously had rebuffed him before, hence him claiming she "came to her senses."
Then Lucrecia eagerly nods and smiles as she says "Yes" as they embrace. So who chose whom?
If the stuff from Early Material Files *doesn't* get brought back up in the Compilation, that's one thing. It's another when an aspect of it *is* brought back though. Especially given how the OG was made. So knowing Lucrecia and Hojo were in an abusive relationship in the Early Material Files... kinda shows that the idea of that is an old one that has been around for a very long time. It wasn't that Hojo and Lucrecia never will thought to be in an abusive relationship until DoC or something. That was just... always how NKN seem to have seen their relationship.
Where do we hear Hojo raped Lucrecia, then? Vincent didn't fall into "a trap." He was shot dead in a heated confrontation over Hojo's treatment of his partner and unborn child. And Vincent didn't lose his memories of it either. This is not canon towards the story. You're extrapolating intention based on
unused material that did not get included in the game. Essentially going around the actually used material of the story in search of implication not in said story. These are unused materials that were in development but scrapped. You can't just apply this in a discussion of what actually was used in the text. One can easily argue that the very fact this
wasn't used discounts its interpretation right there.
They
chose to give greater agency and responsibility to Lucrecia because they wished to portray a more morally ambiguous and regrettable situation. Not one that simply paints Lucrecia as a hapless damsel in distress at the mercy of a mad scientist. She was
also a mad scientist.
What's the first thing we see for Hojo in Remake through his introduction during the Board Room Meeting? Outright recommending selecting members of SOLDIER to rape Aerith followed by wondering how best to psychologically break her.... just like what the Early Materials said was the case with Lucrecia.
As distinctly morbid these two situations are, they're entirely different circumstances in two different games and scenarios. Hojo's recommendation in the Remake on how to break and breed Aerith is not the same circumstance or even time frame of how Hojo chose to be with Lucrecia in an unused scenario that didn't make it into the OG. They both exhibit a morbid and sadistic side to Hojo, but one's unused, and the other was used to demonstrate cruelty and sadism towards Aerith. Not Lucrecia, his partner.
Hojo's a monster but attribute what he did to the proper order and scenario. He simply didn't do that in the text.
