Short answer? Yes, at first. In Nibelheim and FF7, definitely. He seems to think she is without blame and everything that happened to her was his fault for not saving her. Vincent is kind of a naive, romantic idealist.
Throughout DoC when he learns more of the truth, I think he comes to see that she wasn’t as blameless as he originally thought. Still, it’s clear that he forgives her.
(Also this is a large part of my doujinshi
Redemption.)
Now… *reads thread*
All right, so here’s my take on Lucrecia and some of the awful decisions she has made, as someone who has spent an inordinate portion of the past 17 years contemplating Lucrecia:
Lucrecia is ambitious. She was canonically the top of her university (according to Grimoire in the Omega Reports) and apparently hired by ShinRa straight out of school. It takes a lot of work to get into a position like that. Girl has put a lot of effort into her career. It’s very important to her.
Lucrecia is also very stubborn. This is also canonical, as Vincent says it to Shelke in DoC (in the Japanese translation, at least). We can see this part of her when she continues to fight for her thesis even after it’s mocked. She mentions to Grimoire that part of the reason why she’s so excited about Chaos and wants to experiment on it right away is because she wants to prove all of her haters wrong. Even after Grimoire dies, even though that tears her apart inside, she doesn’t give up.
Lucrecia is also varying degrees of crazy depending on which part of her timeline we’re looking at. The other thing Vincent describes her as to Shelke is “emotional.” (Or it may have been “overly emotional,” or at least meant to be “overly emotional,” since merely
possessing emotions is generally thought to be a positive thing.) Girl doesn’t have a good grip on her emotions. She’s high in the IQ, low in the EQ. And considering she must have spent an extraordinary amount of time honing her intelligence and focusing on her career, she probably just hasn’t spent very much time honing her emotional intelligence or cultivating personal relationships. Personally, I think she just sees feelings as kind of frivolous. They’re secondary indulgences next to the real priorities, which are career, science, etc.
As a result of this(/these) character trait(s) (but the emotional deficiency in particular), Lucrecia kind of becomes this crazy burrito over time:
First, of course, the Grimoire thing happens and that takes a big toll on her emotionally. So every scene we see her in after Grimoire’s death (i.e., most of them) includes this as a factor.
Then she meets Vincent, and that’s an added stressor. Because he’s Grimoire’s son, which reminds her about Grimoire, and it’s also very awkward having his son around and not wanting to tell him.
Then she starts to
like Vincent, which is an even bigger problem. To be honest, it’s kind of her own fault for spending so much time with him, but I see this as being interestingly guilt-motivated while at the same time her desire to not want to have feelings for him is motivated by that same guilt. She is in this push-pull with herself where she wants to reach out to Vincent but also hold him at arm’s length. And, as Vincent says, she always “only believed what she wanted to,” so she manages to somewhat successfully convince herself that she was not developing feelings for Vincent or at least pushes it aside successfully enough for long enough that they don’t quite develop a relationship in the traditional sense.
Then Vincent finds out about her involvement with Grimoire, and Lucrecia gains the additional guilt of not telling Vincent about this sooner. As well as him now knowing she caused his father’s death, which takes another toll on her.
So we’re up to like 5 crazy points for Lucrecia now. That’s approximately 3 more crazy points than what it takes for
me to start making dumb ass life decisions.
So now that Lucrecia has an even more pressing need to push Vincent away, she has to start resorting to drastic measures to achieve this. Really drive the point home. Like starting an affair with Hojo. (Can’t say I’ve never done anything similar, tbh.) From here on out she actively strives to push Vincent away from her. Actually, Lucrecia trying to push Vincent away is also canonically established, as she notes toward the end of Dirge of Cerberus: "I didn't want to face the truth. I pushed you away, but...Now I realize...I never wanted to lose you."
I personally think that the agreement to volunteer in the project was also part of her “push Vincent away” strategy, but I’m open to several ideas about her exact motivations for this. When I wrote about this in the fanfic referenced later, I struggled for some time over whether I should write her as having always wanted a child, or just figuring she might as well, or being lonely and wanting someone to love, or what. I could see any of these reasons as being feasible, and probably many others. But I think it does any character a disservice to only assume the worst of them.
+2 more crazy points, by the way: Now she’s got pregnancy hormones AND Jenova cells to contend with. So she’s got 7 crazy points all tacked on there that are affecting all of her actions and decisions from this point forward. She’s basically a burrito with all the works now—black beans, pinto beans, sour cream,
cilantro—you name it.
She acts bitchy and cold to Vincent. (I've also personally done this.) Partially because it’s easier to be mean than to deal with unpleasant complicated feelings, and partially because it’s easier to deal with him if she can make him not want to be anywhere near her.
Jenova starts taking its toll on her. She has visions. Horrible visions of her future son doing things like looking crazy and setting towns on fire. Probably killing people, too. (I like to imagine a fair number of atrocities committed during the Wutai War also featuring in her visions but SE just opted for animation economy in reusing the Nibelheim stuff.) I don’t think she would know how literal/accurate these scenes are or are not, but I’m sure she knows they mean bad shit.
But it’s too late for her to get out. She’s married to Hojo now, she’s probably signed other legal contracts stating she can’t leave and ShinRa owns her baby, and also it’s kind of impossible to escape and outrun them. Gast tries. He dies. ShinRa is a global superpower. It’s like trying to outrun the government and the mafia all rolled into one.
Also, don’t forget she is
stubborn. She doesn’t want to give up; she wants to see this whole fucked up thing through to the end, probably sure that if she sticks with it long enough, sticks through all the bad awful stuff, it’s bound to pay out in the end. She’ll have a son, the world will have an Ancient to take them to the Promised Land, she’ll have the recognition, etc. Why pull out before the sacrifices actually pay off? (Another thing I've brought up in fanfiction: “Dr. Valentine died because of [her] ambitions. The least [she] can do is see them through so that his death won’t have been in vain.” Stubborn.)
Unfortunately things don’t end up working out that way. Vincent gets killed; Hojo takes her baby away. Hojo gets
mean; meaner than he was before. Instead of being indifferent or even feigning kindness to her in hopes of seducing her, he’s already gotten all that he needed from her and just discards her and mocks her now. So this is like 3-4 more crazy points now, by the way. We’re up to a crazy burrito score of 11 (because I’m giving two to “had baby and promptly had him taken away, never allowed to hold him,” which in addition to being an awful thing to have happen to you could also result in more hormonal craziness).
Her attempts to revive Vincent aren’t working. She lost her son. Her body is failing her; her sanity is failing her. She gives up and tries to kill herself. Unable to actually succeed in this, she isolates herself in the grotto
and knows nothing about what’s going on in the world outside henceforth.
So, to recap:
Personality traits working against her: ambitious, stubborn, (over-)emotional
Valid reasons to be crazy:
1. caused mentor’s death, resulting in guilt
2. forced to work alongside son of deceased mentor, whose presence reminds her of Grim’s death every day
3. starts to like Vincent, resulting in guilt
4. Vincent finds out she caused his father’s death
5. Lucrecia is now faced with not having told him about this sooner, resulting in guilt
6. becomes pregnant, setting hormones off balance
7. receives side effects of Jenova cells in her womb, taking a toll on her sanity
8. Vincent is killed. grief, heartbreak, guilt, etc.
9. Has baby. Moar hormones.
10. Has baby taken away from her. fucking awful thing to happen + more hormones
11. only remaining human contact (Hojo) becomes an ass who seems to enjoy tormenting her for no reason, and is also the person who killed Vincent and is keeping her son from her.
That’s eleven reasons to be off kilter.
Eleven. Frankly I only need PMS to be twice the crazy bitch Lucrecia is, so. I mean. Cut her
some slack.
An interesting thing about the fandom’s relationship with Lucrecia is that we have characters in this compilation who kill people (including children and other innocents), who torture people, who manipulate people into fighting and possibly dying for them, who leave allies to die, etc. etc. And most of the characters guilty of those things are forgiven by the fandom. Fanned over, even. Draco in Leather Pants style. For killing people's fathers for no reason and dropping reactor plates on sleeping children.
Yet you take a mother who agrees to experiment on her kid—a decision made at a time when she did not HAVE a kid but DID have a career that was very important to her—and that apparently crosses the moral event horizon.
The cynic in me is wont to believe this has something to do with society’s expectation for women to be nurturers above all else, and that failing so spectacularly in this is worse than any other crime, including outright murder and genocide. Although I believe there’s a fair amount of “Dying For Our Ship” going on here, too, because Vincent is quite popular. And nothing is quite so loathsome as being a female character who has the affections of a desired male character.
No, his own low self-esteem, and his subconscious desire to sabotage any chances he might have had for happiness in order to punish himself for, as he saw it, failing to life up to his father's expectations - these things are what led him to fall in love with a woman whom he subliminally knew would not only never return his love, but was constitutionally incapable of feeling love. Far from being blind to her failings, they were what attracted him. Maybe.
What? What fanfiction did you pull this from?
Because that certainly was never in canon.
Also the more I think about it the Grimoire thing wasn't really needed.All they could have done is actually shown Lucrecia as Gast's assistant as she was said to be in the OG.I mean it would have in my opinion been a better story if they did it instead because Grimoire just seems like a bad plot device for drama instead of a real character.
This I agree with. I felt Grimoire was a weak character. His role felt forced and his outfit is ridiculous for several reasons.
Also they could have kept the original reason that Lucrecia chose Hojo over Vincent.Mainly because if I remember she felt pity over him because of his envy of Gast as a scientist.I mean now that I think about it might have been even more apporiate that Gast should have appeared in Dirge Of Cerebrus instead of Grimoire.
That was only Vincent’s speculation. As we have seen, Vincent tended to be wrong. We have no idea why Lucrecia chose Hojo over Vincent in OGC.
Also one thing that I note is the fact in the OG she was obsessing about Sephiroth and didn't seem to care that Vincent was alive plus even told him to stay away from her but in Dirge Of Cerebrus all she seems to do is focus on him and proclaim how sorry she is that she screwed up his life.
That may depend on your game. Most of the time when you enter Lucrecia’s Cave, her first bit of dialogue is “Vincent…”—before she even notices that people are approaching her, meaning that she is sitting around pining over Vincent already. But every now and then—maybe 1/10 times?—her first dialogue will be “Sephiroth…” indicating that she’s sitting around moping over Sephiroth, and only says Vincent’s name when she sees him. This may give the appearance of her caring less about Vincent, much in the same way a low CloTi affection rating can give the impression of Cloud and Tifa just being friends via the Highwind scene.
Yes, Lucrecia says, “Stay back!!” but she also says she feels too guilty to be around other humans and tried to kill herself. It’s not at all outside of Lucrecia’s MO to care about Vincent and at the same time insist that he stay away from her.
In a way, the problem with her character comes from the fact that she's not expressed as being crazy enough, so she comes off as cold and manipulative, instead of self loathing and self punishing.
I absolutely agree with this. Although she seems to get no shortage of criticism for being crazy, I wonder if maybe it’s not enough. Also I feel as though people don’t take into enough account how pregnancy hormones may have been affecting her, particularly in the scene where she snaps at Vincent for being concerned about her wellbeing.
Also when Lucrecia was having visions about Sephiroth's deeds to come should have actually made her question more and more about her child being apart of the project.
Who’s to say she didn’t? She was kind of deep into it at that point; an exit strategy may not have been viable. In fact, the very fact that she was having premonitions indicates that Seph was already growing inside her infused with Jenova, so it would have been too late to do anything about that. And frankly if the US can't pull out of the Middle East I'm willing to give Rosemary's baby-mama a pass on being unable to pull out of ShinRa.
how much better would it have been if:
2. That Lucrecia was experimented on against her will (because Hojo has a thing for that), or that she initially agreed but was being threatened/apprehended by Shinra when she wanted out?
If I remember correctly in the Ultimanias there were some early notes about the fact that originally Lucrecia was actually going to be forced to be experimented and was originally against it plus sided with Vincent against experimenting on her own child.
Yes I've read that before. If they hadn't changed that the story could've been less sucky.
Why is “less sucky story” synonymous with “removing the difficult moral dilemma that one of the key characters finds herself in”? While we’re at it let’s just go back through all Greek drama and remove anything morally gray or difficult. Nothing like a little whitewashing to make a story better and more interesting.
I still hesitate to say she has much of a conscience. Her biggest regret is not the horror her experiments unleashed, but that she wasn't able to ever hold her son. That's still a human regret and can be empathized with. But it's still selfish, considering.
Not true. She also regrets what she did to Vincent and what she did to Grimoire. She’s been in isolation and likely has no idea what horror the experiments unleashed. For all she knows, the visions are more of a manifestation of her fears or carry a hefty amount of poetic license rather than direct portrayals of actual wars being fought and towns being burned. And considering she asks Vincent about Sephiroth and he lies to her about it, how would she know what’s going on in the world outside her cave? Let’s not give her the responsibility of player omniscience on top of everything else.
She doesn't even seem to realise her son is a prick and she doesn't need to feel sorry for him any more.
Likewise, how would she even know this? She never met the guy. And she doesn’t seem to be out and about reading the news or else she wouldn’t have to ask Vincent if he was alive or dead because she had a suspicion based on some dreams.
Then again she works for Shinra which expects its scientists to cross moral lines.I think the only time they grow a concious is when it personally affects them or like Reeve slowly realize through seeing Shinra's actions that they are working for an evil organization.
I think there is some merit to this as well. Consider the world they live in, and Lucrecia’s position. She probably had to work very hard to get there. She probably had to stand out among a lot of other people to get there. The Omega Reports mention she was the top of her class at her university. The girl doesn’t play around. And in the world of FF7, the two options in life seem to be either “be good enough to work for ShinRa and live a very good life” or “live a terrible life of crippling poverty.” Additionally, when Lucrecia lived and worked, the extent of ShinRa’s evil was probably not known.
You brought up Reeve, who had a change of conscience. But let’s not overlook the fact that he had the privilege of being able to have a change of conscience because he lived long enough to experience one. Lucrecia is alive, yes, but she’s effectively “out of the game” and not really in a position to run off and found the WRO. (Speaking of which, I wonder if Reeve would have had quite the same display of conscience if ShinRa were still a viable employer?)
I really, REALLY doubt Lucrecia has not noticed by now that she was working for an evil organization. I’d say she had a front row seat to that shit show. Funny thing about pregnancy, though, or shooting yourself up with Jenova: you can’t really say, “Oh, you know what? I’ve changed my mind; let’s not do this after all.”
That brings up another point because in DOC Hojo in the flashbacks seemed so obviously unpleasant that even if Lucrecia was trying to push Vincent away she could have found someone less repulsive.
Unleeessss that was the point. (Explicit fanfiction warning.)
I took that line more as her a) trying to mask that she was partly upset because she really cared about Vincent and b) deliberately trying to be a bitch and hurt his feelings by saying that what she did was none of his concern.
This.
I can't remember if Lucretia Lucrecia ever said, in DoC, that she loved Vincent and meant it. Did she?
She never said she loved Vincent and didn’t mean it. She never outright says she loves him at all. But where we see it is in the unraveling of her data fragments toward the end of the game, in one of the parts where a bunch of overlapped, disjointed white words are flying across the screen. Among a bunch of stuff like “Chaos” and “so sorry” etc. are “Vincent” and then “I loved…” She clearly loves him, and knows this on some level, eventually, but she denies it to herself for so long because she doesn’t want to love him that it takes her a long time to finally realize it. She says as much in the scene where she appears to him and he is frozen, and she brings him to “their spot” and says, “The warm breeze on our skin... I know that it no longer exists. Things fade with time, as do many things in this world, but there are some things we cannot let disappear. I finally…I finally realized my true feelings.”
But he never comes right out and says it to her, either. He says it to Cloud & Co. Hojo even mocks them by calling Lucrecia Vincent’s “beloved” while he’s chilling there dead in a stasis tube. Even when Shelke tells Vincent to “go tell Lucrecia what is truly in your heart” he doesn’t even say he loves her; he says she is the reason he survived.
It’s one of those situations where they love each other, they both know they love the other, everyone else knows it, but they never say it to each other. Amps up the UST.
Didn't she figure this out in TOG though... and in DoC this is why she keeps apologizing to Vincent...
She does not ever find out what her actions have wrought upon the world because Vincent lied to her about it to spare her. It is my understanding that what she is apologizing for is all the stuff she did in the past, and the reason why it happens after OG and not before is because neither of them knew the other was still alive until that point. But after FF7, Vincent visits her from time to time.
A mutual love getting torn apart by circumstance -- or some wacky ass reason like guilt over getting the other person's parent killed -- is more the realm of fiction.
Okay maybe this is where I differ from other humans then
because I kill people’s parents.
I was probably just set in what I gathered of their relationship in VII,
I think that’s the case with a lot of people, because a lot was hinted at FF7 and nothing much was really confirmed. I boggle over people who say things like “I liked Lucrecia better in FF7” or “I liked their story better in FF7” because it’s like, “You liked
what better in FF7?” All we got in FF7 regarding Lucrecia or their story was an empty shell that we were each able to fill our own blanks with however we saw fit, and I think the thing that everyone feels they liked so much better was their own personal interpretation.
That's how people (using that term lightly in regards to them) like this think, imo. They're actually confused (or amused) that people object to their behaviour. As far as they're concerned, people are just there as tools. Something to use then throw away. Once you decide in your head that people are simply that any of their actions seem quite normal to them.
Something that Sephiroth also does with his “You are just a puppet” bit, by the way.
I've never read a fic that told the story of FFVII from Hojo's POV. It would be interesting, especially with such an unreliable narrator.
It would be difficult, given that no one really knows what the fuck was ever going on in Hojo’s mind. I think he’s one of the most difficult characters to relate to, and a lot of the people who feel they can relate to him or consider themselves Hojo fans are fans of a character they’ve made up themselves that only barely resembles Hojo.
But here is a brief vignette I did on Hojo, anyway:
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10789619/1/Hojo
Please excuse the CC retcons.
Thats my biggiest gripe is the fact that Vincent actually cared more about her and her unborn child's saftey more than Hojo did but she brushed him off.When the father of your child doesn't care about the potential danger about experimenting on yourself and your unborn son plus you go along with it then you have crossed a moral line.
And what privilege we have, able to criticize others from the sidelines while not being in their awful situations ourselves. Right and wrong and correct solutions are all so much easier to figure out when you’re the peanut gallery.
