Hey guys, sorry I'm super late to the party here, but as someone who has been studying and writing essays about this stuff for years I thought I should pitch in some input on a few points here. For posterity or whatnot.
Unfortunately when I found and read this very lengthy thread last week it was while I was sick, so forgive me if the thoughts I jotted down are less coherent than they should be. The thread is too long for me to reread the whole thing now, and even if I did, I still wouldn't have time to read and respond in one sitting, which I'm sure is an unsatisfactory excuse but it is what it is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But, you know, I'm
easily reachable on Tumblr where I'm very willing to engage in these sorts of discussions and share what I know, cited from canon, etc.
When they remake this game, I hope they go with the original game's portrayal of Lucrecia instead of her Dirge of Cerberus one. I really thought her being trapped in crystal while being dressed in a pimped out dress was too overdramatic for my taste. And I hope they cut out the Grimoire subplot, because I feel it just made her too unlikable due to the fact that even before meeting Vincent she indirectly ruined his life.
I just want her in the remake to be what she was said to be in the Ultimanias, where she chose Hojo due to feeling sympathy for him and that she became deformed to the experiments.
Well, let start by addressing the OP here, even though I'm sure it's been covered:
The original game's "portrayal" of Lucrecia was basically no portrayal at all. She was a blank slate upon which you could write any story you preferred to be told. Anyone who thinks her OG portrayal was "better" than her DoC portrayal is basically seeing butterflies in a Rorschach that they're insisting is prettier than the real thing.
Put more plainly: You're seeing whatever it is that you want to see, which is probably why you like it better. But you're trying to compare apples with an orange that you imagined. Actually, it's more like you're trying to compare the subjective idea of an apple with an orange that you imagined but we'll get to that.
I actually do think Lucrecia's extended characterization hurt her. I think it's the combination of DoC's bad writing and the whole "less is more" thing. And honestly, her whole character clinging to Vincent's forgiveness felt so contrary to the OG in my opinion, part of the tragedy in my eyes is that Vincent was so singularly focused on this one woman and helping her and was in love with her...
But it was never mutual. She might have liked him or even cared for him, but she was always focused on her research and in OG, the existence of her son. I don't think likeability or sympathy shouldn't come into it, she was simply a woman who prioritized science over everything else, and everyone suffered because of it.
Lucrecia was someone who made the wrong choice, but at the same time was also a victim- even if it was of her own doing. That was kind of interesting. Then they made her completely apologetic and even more melodramatic, to a story that was already melodramatic.
At the risk of being redundant, this is a fanon interpretation—one of many prior to DoC—and you seem to fall into the camp of fans who had their preferred fanon jossed by new canon and therefore maintain that the new canon is thereby Bad™.
Which it isn't, necessarily. It's just not the one you preferred.
And that's the last post I'll reply to just to say this same message, but there were lots of other posts in this 6 page thread that I could basically repeat the same thing to, so don't take my lack of explicitly replying as much to any of the rest of them to be my implicit acceptance of their points.
Much as I love Dirge (and I love it more than it deserves to be), I'm not sure I can think of any scenes that I thought benefitted Lucrecia's character. The "If this only concerns me, then yes, I am sure" scene just made me hate her more because I have always interpreted Vincent's lines on the Sister Ray to indicate that he thought Sephiroth may have been his kid until Hojo confirmed things -- so her saying that to Vincent there just made me think, "Wow, what a complete and utter cock socket bitch."
Besides, knowing she's just acting the way she is toward him because she blames herself for his daddy dying just makes her look like she has the emotional maturity of a particularly immature flea. Not exactly the kind of person who should be making decisions like this in the first place.
If it comforts you at all, that line was not at all what she said in Japanese and was completely made the fuck up for the English script because what she says in Japanese doesn’t really carry over into English at all. And, of course, they needed to make up something that had the appropriate length of dialogue to go with the appropriate mouth-flapping.
In Japanese, after she prompts him to say what he came to say, when the English script has Vincent say, “Are you sure…this is what you really what?!” he actually says, “Kimi…kimi ha…” And when she comes back with “Am I sure? Am I sure?! If this only concerns me, then yes, I am sure!” what really happens in Japanese is she cuts him off and basically says, “Hold on, are you speaking to me? Because if you’re speaking to me then you don’t call me ‘kimi.’” (I am paraphrasing liberally here, mostly because I don’t remember what she says off the top of my head except that it starts with “Watashi?”)
The significance, of course, being that “kimi” is how you address a significant other or someone else close to you, and Vincent slipped up and used the wrong second-person pronoun after their falling out. So what’s happening in this scene is that Lucrecia is making it very clear that they’re not in that place anymore, and then Vincent kind of sadly accepts that.
(I TRIED to provide a link to the YouTube video of the Japanese cutscene, but UGH the user took it offline. I will go rage about this in a separate post; in the meanwhile, I guess you'll have to obtain a copy of the Japanese game yourself if you want to verify my claims here, and then the scene in question is the flashback that occurs after Rosso takes the Protomateria from Vincent and before he wakes up in the truck with Yuffie.)
However, on the flip side, Vincent’s line on the Sister Ray didn’t mean that at all. Primarily because it makes zero sense for him to have thought Sephiroth was his son but have his whole worldview rocked just because Hojo claimed otherwise, considering that even if Vincent
had thought that Sephiroth was his son, then it would have been with Hojo believing otherwise all along. This isn’t even an OG/DoC inconsistency, but something you need to look no further than OG to find the contradiction in: In
the flashback, when Vincent says, “I’m against it!! Why experiment on humans??” Hojo says, “She and I are both scientists!!” thereby placing himself as the father of the child much in the same way as he does
in the DoC scene mentioned above (“Ha! I don’t know what you’re
implying, but both of
us are scientists. We know what we are doing. You are the last person to have any word in this. Now, leave us at once,
boy!” [emphasis mine based on what I hear emphasized])
Rather, I posit that what Vincent is expressing outrage about is the casual way in which Hojo refers to Lucrecia—which, if you recall, isn’t even by name. (Edit 12/3:
I found the canon source supporting this.) He calls her “the woman carrying my child.” Hojo, in fact, never refers to Lucrecia by first name in canon, usually preferring epithets like “that woman” if he must speak of her at all. (
At the end of DoC, he refers to her to Vincent as “our Dr. Crescent,” which is literally the only time he ever refers to her by any individual name, and I don’t even think it happens in the Japanese script, WHICH I CAN'T CURRENTLY ACCESS TO VERIFY. >:C)
Remember that Vincent stepped aside with the logic that “If she is happy, then…I don’t mind.” Vincent clung to this idea that he was doing what was best for Lucrecia and that even if it hurt to do so, it was a sacrifice that he was making so that she could be truly happy with someone else. When Hojo reveals Sephiroth’s paternity to Cloud and the others, this is how the script goes with Vincent in your party:
http://www.yinza.com/Fandom/Script/43.html#hojo said:
Hojo
Quit asking me why, you moron.
Hmm... actually, you might be cut out to be a scientist.
He turns back to the controls.
Energy level is at...... 83%. It's taking too long.
My son is in need of power and help. ...That's the only reason.
Cloud
...your son?
Hojo
Ha, ha, ha... Although he doesn't know.
Ha, ha, ha... HA, HA, HA...!!
What will Sephiroth think when he finds out I'm his father?
Always looking down on me like that.
HA, HA, HA...!!
Cloud
Sephiroth is your son!?
Vincent
......!
Hojo
Ha, ha, ha...
I offered the woman with my child to Professor Gast's Jenova Project.
When Sephiroth was still in the womb, we took the cells of Jenova...
HA, HA, HA!!
Vincent
You......!
Cloud
I can't believe you're the one who did this...
The illusionary crime against Sephiroth...* [a well-known mistranslated line, I believe; you can dig up the proper translation somewhere on this forum, but I don't have it on hand]
Hojo turns around.
Hojo
Heee, hee, hee, hee! No you're wrong!
It's my desire as a scientist! Heee, hee, hee, hee!
Vincent
......
I was...wrong. The one that should have slept was...
...You, Hojo!
Now, it's true that Vincent expresses surprise at the same point at which Cloud expresses surprise about Sephiroth being Hojo's son, which happens before Hojo starts referring to Lucrecia casually and revealing that he never gave very many fucks about his role as a father, and you're guess as to what that's all about is probably as good as mine. But for what it's worth, my two best guesses are:
1. They didn't want you to know yet that Vincent knew all along that Hojo was presumably the father, because this scene happens before you're likely to reach Lucrecia's Cave for the other flashback. i.e., bad storytelling, using the wrong character to guide the audience toward the surprise they want them to feel.
2. He was expressing surprise at Cloud's surprise about Hojo's statement, not the statement itself.
If you think about it, Vincent's been out of the picture since Sephiroth was born, and they never discussed Sephiroth's father before, only his mother. Also,
when Vincent and Cloud first met, Vincent asks Cloud if he will encounter Hojo if he goes with them, as a natural conclusion to the idea of going after Sephiroth, and just after discussing Sephiroth's parentage with Cloud. Not-very-inclined-to-in-depth-conversations-or-chattiness Vincent may have thought all along that
everyone was in the know that Hojo was Sephiroth's father, because when Vincent last left the goings-on of the Hojo-Crescent family drama, baby Sephiroth was born to Hojo and Lucrecia and then (as far as he thought) Lucrecia died. Seems like it might be a natural conclusion that the kid would be raised by his father, and that it wouldn't be a huge secret. In fact, this optional dialogue takes place
before they encounter Hojo on the Sister Ray:
Vincent
Hojo... what a queer fellow.
Such utter lack of scientific talent... compared with the genius of Dr. Gast......
Lucrecia chose him trying to protect him...
Now I understand... I understand... but...
He talks openly about Lucrecia being with Hojo, and then finds out Cloud never knew Hojo was the father? Hell, I'd be surprised too. And then, if I were Vincent who stepped aside so that the woman he loved could be with someone "better" for her, I'd wonder what the hell Hojo was doing all those years he was supposed to have been a father to her child, and then I'd be pretty damn angry to learn that he never gave a shit about the kid or Lu. Which seems to be pretty much exactly what Vincent actually does, but hey, your mileage may vary when the dialogue being examined is "...!". But consider how noble Vincent thought his "sacrifice" for Lucrecia had been, and then he learns that this is what it had gotten her.
Any way you slice it, though, it doesn't make any sense for Vincent to believe himself to be the father under any circumstances in which Hojo's belief to the contrary is what changes his mind. I'm not saying Vincent can't be the father and I'm not saying it's impossible for him to have known about it if he was, but it only makes sense if he always believed Hojo thought otherwise anyway.
Getting angry because Vincent wasn't concerned enough about the baby, while she herself was the one trying to harm the baby makes her look massively unlikable. At least Hojo owns up to what he is and laughs off Vincent's concerns altogether.
Having her be involved in the experimentation on Vincent, after he got shot by Hojo, while her son was being tested on in another room of the Shinra Mansion also makes her look really bad, even if she did have intermittent fits of coming to her senses.
The getting Grimoire killed stuff isn't too bad, but it doesn't help anything at all, so I'd rather it was left forgotten.
Well, then, maybe this explains one of the many reason why everyone liberally hates on her while understanding jack shit about Dirge of Cerberus themselves. See above.
We also have no idea that Sephiroth is in another room of the Shinra Mansion, and a pretty good reason to believe he isn’t. I've written about this before—admittedly after this thread happened, it seems, and I'm realizing that maybe I was asked about it
because of this thread, but you can find my reasoning about it here:
http://ravynnenevyrmore.tumblr.com/post/147924545855/you-are-my-go-to-expert-on-vincent-and-lucretia
The crucial part:
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If Sephiroth was in the manor, Lucrecia wouldn’t need to be shaking Hojo’s shoulders and pleading with him when that physical energy would be better spent breaking down a door. This is not the depiction of a woman who is too polite to see her son in the next room without first obtaining Hojo’s permission; Lucrecia is physically unable to reach Sephiroth, wherever he may be, and Hojo is a party to her access being barred.
(Yeah, that's grammatically awkward and I'm sorry.) You can find the rest of my reasoning about things related to that argument in the blog post.
Also, where are these intermittent fits of coming to her senses? She was trying desperately to save Vincent’s life while her body and mental state were deteriorating due to Jenova cells. I honestly don’t understand how anyone could miss that part of her story so badly.
And re: experimenting on Vincent vs. using highly experimental tactics in trying to bring him back to life, here's another essay I wrote recently on
that topic:
http://lucreciacrescentappreciation.tumblr.com/post/152879593653/experiment-vs-experimental
I don't see my take on Lucrecia in that scene as adding another layer of conniving. I call her duplicitous because one minute she's surprising Vincent with a picnic or getting him to dance with her (see that shitty Lost Episode game), the next she's saying she could never be with him and frothing at the mouth about how none of this is his business.
I'm not saying she's as bad a character as Machina in Type-0. I'm just saying if they were locked in a room together, the room needs to be set on fire.
Also, another hint that the soap opera filter is well deserved: Hojo saying "So you've come to your senses and chosen me" in that one flashback.
It wasn’t “one moment” this and “the next moment” that. There were
literally months lapsing between the little snippets we see—out of chronological order, by the way—which is evidenced by the fact that an entire pregnancy happens between some of them.
I believe in Japanese the time lapse might be clearer because the way they speak to one another shifts to reflect their present familiarity with one another in each scene, but honestly, if you just look at things like “we’re making introductions for the first time so we’re being polite and referring to each other by last name and title” and “we’re slow dancing in the middle of a workday and also are on a first name basis” and “so now you’re pregnant with someone else’s baby and we’re not on speaking terms” it should be pretty damn obvious in any language that a significant amount of time has lapsed here.
Honestly, I fear significantly for people's reading/viewing comprehension sometimes.
No I didn't mean Gast was free and clear. But of the three scientists in the wrong, he comes out the best. The idea of the Jenova Project wasn't inherently evil. They thought Jenova was an Ancient and they were hoping to revive the race/species/whatever. With the hopes that such a reborn Cetra could lead humanity to the Promised Land. Yes, Shinra wanted to just slap a new Midgar on it, but from a purely scientific standpoint, the goal was not a corrupt one.
This is what I think allowed Lucrecia to justify it in her mind. Hojo had no need to justify it because he's a psychopath. Gast does indeed run from the problem, but at least he realized that it WAS a problem. (Whether he saw the ethical issues, or simply when he learned that Jenova was a interplanetary parasitic alien and not a peaceful, Promised-Land-finding-Cetra is up for debate
)
So explain to me how you figure Gast is the best of the three when you allow that he and Lucrecia likely had the same motives. Is it that Lucrecia experiments on her own child while Gast only experiments on other people’s children? Orrr is that she’s a woman and therefore we’re gonna judge her more harshly about how she treats babies?
@Tres: Yeah, and that's the stuff I like considerably less about what Dirge showed. It makes her, at best, an incorrigible tease. Whereas VII's flashback merely outlined to me that they hit it off in conversation and then Vincent fell for her without her necessarily going out of her way to lead him on. At worst, it makes her what you've surmised, that not only is she a bit of a tease, she even slept with him before pulling the rug out from under him.
"At worst," you might as well make up that she kicked some puppies while she was at it, because none of the rest of your interpretation is substantiated by canon either.
And even if it was the likes of Reno or Tseng making the objections, a baby is a baby, and it was experiment cause they weren't sure what it would do yet. The aim was trying to implant the knowledge of how to get to the Promised Land into baby Sephiroth. That's what they wanted Ancients for. Sephiroth was ultimately unharmed but also a failure, his increased physical abilities was just an unforeseen bonus. Baby Sephiroth dodged Genesis' bullet through blind luck.
But Vincent didn't make that objection, did he? All he said was 'are you sure'. He's never really shown to care about Sephiroth, only Lucrecia.
Another strong hint that if Sephiroth
is his son (and believe me I’m not discounting the possibility of it), then Vincent actually doesn’t think/know that. Because otherwise he’d be angsting all over it alongside his Lucrecia woes. But the most he ever says in the way of angst regarding killing Sephiroth is, “Kill Sephiroth... Kill the son of that beloved woman... Am I on the verge of committing another sin......? Or am I atoning as best I can for only standing by…?”
No, Hojo's experiments made Vincent immortal, which made him a candidate for Lucretia's experiments in the first place. The Protomateria helps stabilise him, but Hojo is the one that saved his actual life. Also the Shinra Mansion is quite small and in the Compilation they were there for several years after Sephiroth was born.
Wasn't that a deliberate red herring? We get that impression early in Dirge, and then later on we get the same scene with more context, where Lucrecia responds with the emphatic if childish "YOU'RE WRONG YOU'RE WRONG YOU'RE WRONG, and we find out that she's frantically sciencing because if she can't correct things "the tissue will continue to decay".
Wasn't that, almost the point of the game? "You were the reason I survived."
If Lucrecia had access to Sephiroth, the "Let me see him! Just once!" scene makes no sense.
Yes, exactly, the first version of that scene was a red herring. But here’s what I think her screaming “YOU’RE WRONG YOU’RE WRONG” was about:
http://ravynnenevyrmore.tumblr.com/post/150240483800/quartercirclejab-were-treated-to-a-flashback
I've got a question, and this might be deviating too far from topic but it made me think in these last few posts: Why does Shinra Manor exist? And in Nibelheim? Does it have to do with the Reactor? There are others, albeit, not in towns, but...
Perhaps the Shinra family came from Nibelheim. Cloud mentions during his story in Kalm that "Long ago, people from Shinra used to live in that mansion..." -- but whether he's referring to the Jenova Project scientists or the Shinra family is unclear.
If the family came from Nibelheim, it may explain why the company chose to put the first mako reactor just outside that town.
I’m also going to chip in the presence of the nearby materia fountain where Chaos was discovered, as well as the other materia fountain that Sephiroth teaches Cloud and Tifa about in the Nibel Mountains. Personally, I have a theory that this means that the Lifestream is close to the surface in this area like it is in Mideel. But also, it could just be an old piece of property that the Shinra family owned and a matter of convenience to use it.
Re: Starling
I'm pretty sure I already addressed this. In the event that Vincent did regularly kidnap people for experiments, no matter how hypocritical you might find it, it has no bearing on the validity of the point he's making. Like you said though, the lack of certainty means you can't be certain if your interpretation of Vincent as a hypocrite actually applies to canon, as it's only one of multiple possibilities.
Everyone in this thread is making the same kind of assumptions, though, putting their own interpretations on scenes that may or may not mean something different based on context we don't have.
Hojo may have been an abusive partner, or he may not have, we don't have complete information on their relationship so we can't state it as a fact. Vincent may have been overly obsessive for all we know, there's evidence to support that too.
He's certainly not the most hinged person later on, was he more restrained early on? We do not know. You counter my assumptions that the old Turks had similarities with the modern incarnation with assumptions that they were not. I brought that up to counter the idea that that scene necessarily makes Lucrecia significantly less sympathetic. We do not know the context. Maybe she had a real genuine connection with Hojo until the fate of the project got between them. Maybe Hojo had a start of darkness somewhere we didn't see.
With so little information available, what it comes down to largely is preference.
Hojo as an abuser is a presumption you are bringing in because it allows you to arrive at the characterisation you want. Other people are making different presumptions to fit their preferred interpretation.
Actually, while I agree with your logic and the overall point you're trying to make here (particularly "Everyone in this thread is making the same kind of assumptions [...] putting their own interpretations on scenes that may or may not mean something different based on context we don't have," which I want to bold and highlight and underline a thousand times), we
do have sufficient evidence to say that Hojo was an abusive spouse. I outline it here:
http://ravynnenevyrmore.tumblr.com/post/124637735920/7-reasons-why-lucrecia-crescent-is-an-important
This discussion is clarifying a lot of meta stuff for me regarding talking about characters. It seems that when we talk about fictional characters -i.e. the creation of a human imagination - whether from this game or anywhere, there are many different things we could potentially be talking about:
a) The character the author intended to convey.
b) Whether we think the author did a good job of conveying the character they intended to convey – is the character a “good character” in this sense
c) Possible interpretations of that character, both those which can be accommodated within what we canonically know of them, and those which break canon
d) Is the character a “good” character in the sense of contributing effectively to the story, or are they ineffective, counter-productive or surplus to requirements?
e) Is the character a “good” character in the sense of being someone we’d like to know IRL
It can sometimes be impossible to separate a) from c), possibly due to a failure of b), but also due to confirmation bias and the other things Starling mentions.
As Starling pointed out, we all tend to interpret a character in a way that makes sense in the context of our own life experiences.
Aw damn, I went off to look up deconstructionism and forgot the rest of what I was going to say.
Of course people will want confirmation of their biases in the remake, but I hope SE doesn't give it to them/us, is all.
This times fifty million thousand.
I'm not trying to deny that Lucrecia was abused. Just like I wouldn't try to deny that someone had been mauled after they walked into a tiger's cage, and I would also call 911/999. That doesn't alter the fact that Lucrecia must have known what Hojo's nature was like before entering into a relationship with him.
There is no reason to suppose he didn't show his true colours to her. Yes, everything we see of him and his actions comes after their wedding, but Starling, your claim that he must have presented as a different kind of person before their is based on your view of Lucrecia as an abused person. Taking as true the premise that Lucrecia was an abused person, and also taking as true the premise that no blame can accrue to her for this, you reason backwards and conclude that it must follow that Hojo lured her into the relationship under false pretenses. But SE provides us with no canon evidence for this. This argument is a logical fallacy.
There is one thing Lucrecia must have known before getting into a relationship with Hojo, and that is that he was willing - nay, keen - to perform genetic experiments on unborn fetuses. She must have also have known that Jenova's cells were not human cells. She must have looked at them down a microscope. So she would additionally have known that Hojo was willing, nay eager, to create a chimera. Any man willing to abuse an unborn fetus in that way is, one would assume, a man lacking a moral compass. Unfortunately, Lucrecia was equally eager to create a human chimera. She knew there was a tiger in the cage and she got in anyway, because she was a tiger too. Maybe she assumed that, however willing he was to harm others in pursuit of his own ends, he wouldn't harm her, because he loved her or because they were two of a kind. Maybe she overestimated her power over him.
What she didn't anticipate was how motherhood would change her.
While canon doesn’t provide us with the setup for this, IRL about how abusive relationships generally work
does, and I’m gonna quote that post I linked above here:
Moreover, we have no reason to think that Hojo displayed that sort of behavior in the beginning, and judging by the surprise that Lucrecia often shows to his cruel behavior, we have every reason to believe he wasn’t. Because no one enters a relationship with an abusive person fully aware of their abusive behavior. They always seem normal and even loving in the beginning.
It’s accompanied by the image of Hojo holding out his arms and saying, “So, you’ve come to your senses and chosen me?” He appears quite welcoming and even friendly in this gif.
(Yes, I'm quoting myself and that's bad, but ask me to go out into the internet and find something more objective to cite about how people who enter relationships with abusive people do so unwittingly and I'll get back to you with some.)
And while we don’t canonically see Hojo
not being batshit crazy before shooting Vincent, we also don’t see him
being batshit crazy before shooting Vincent, so it’s also a logical fallacy to expect it to be proven that he didn’t act in a way we don’t see him acting or not acting, rather than expecting the unusual behavior itself (instead of the absence of it) to be proven.
What we
do see is Lucrecia reacting to the first chronological instance of Hojo being batshit crazy with complete shock and horror, which rather indicates that she didn’t see it coming. Other indications that she didn’t see it coming include
her marrying him. And indications that Vincent—a Turk—didn’t see it coming include him getting his ass shot because he—still a Turk here—was unprepared for such a thing to happen (disregarding DoC’s poor cinematic choice of having Hojo hold the gun in his hand while Vincent runs up to him, which did not seem to happen in OG).
And yes, you could commit character manslaughter and try to reason that Lucrecia entering a relationship with Hojo doesn't indicate that she didn't have reason to know he was an abusive asshole but rather that she's stupid, and you could try to reason that Vincent getting shot doesn't indicate that he had no reason to consider Hojo dangerous at that moment but rather that
he's stupid, and then you could use several instances such as these to proudly conclude, "Boy, all these characters sure are stupid!" But if your interpretation of the material depends circumstantially on the premise of a lot of characters (scientists and Turks!) being
really fucking stupid, it just might be your interpretation and your presumed circumstances that are wrong.
At the very least, headcanoning a character as dumb just to prove why you think they're dumb achieves nothing but reinforcing your own bias.
Starling said:
I think Gillian gets sympathy because people don't really pay attention to her role or because she successfully takes her own life, making it moot.
Gillian said:
Speaking of Gillian, she's a very interesting character to compare/contrast to Lucrecia as both of them played nearly the exact same part in their respective experiments (they had a kid with the lead scientist on their project and experimented on themselves/their kids). The main differences between them is that the experiment Gillian was a part of messed with her genes before she got pregnant while Lucrecia was pregnant with her son while both of them were being experimented on. The other main difference is that Gillian's kid was thought to be a failure while Lucrecia's was a success, which lead to Gillian getting to raise her kid, while Lucrecia's was taken from her. Regardless of their differences, both of them commit suicide when they find out how much their experiments messed up their kid (Gillian) or themselves (Lucrecia). Which kinda makes me wonder if would have even mattered if Lucrecia had gotten to keep Sephiroth; for all we know, the thing she was disappointed with was not experimenting on Sephiroth with Hojo (okay, the game implies that's not why she regrets not having Sephrioth, but still, I don't think that would be to out of character for her).
The most interesting difference I see between the two of them though, is that Lucrecia actually tries to fix something she did wrong, while Gillian never does. I can't help but think that it would have been way easier on Lucrecia for her to just go to the mako cave after Sephrioth is taken from her and forget about Vincent. Instead she tries to fix the mess Hojo made of him and takes all the data about what she did to fix him with her. Which I find odd unless she was expecting Vincent to find her in the middle of nowhere. (Which leads to some interesting AU fic ideas...) Given that we really don't see any of the other scientist try to fix their mistakes (as opposed to being annoyed that those mistakes exist or running away from them), I do have to give Lucreica some credit/benefit of the doubt here. To not do otherwise would be to say that characters can't learn lessons even if they've done horrible stuff in the past.
Genesis was the subject of Project G, not Angeal, Gillian just got pregnant during the experiment. There's little reason to think she had any ambition to experiment on her own child other then the assumption she is like Lucretia, who could not conceive of a problem with that. And Genesis was considered a normal child, both he and Angeal were allowed to raise normally. Which Gillian did. And she left Hollander and married someone that clearly had a good moral compass. And Gillian nevertheless takes her own life over what they did to Angeal and Genesis, Lucretia just kinda succumbed to her own physical problems. Yeah, Gillian generally gets the benefit of the doubt more then Lucretia, that makes sense to me.
Where did you get the idea that Gillian didn't mean to get pregnant while being experimented on, and that she only accidentally involved Angeal in Project G? I don't remember that being in the game or meta-canon materials
anywhere, and frankly the Crisis Core Ultimania Q&A (
http://thelifestream.net/lifestream-projects/translations/340/crisis-core-ultimania-scenario-qa/) seem to indicate it false with things like “Angeal and Genesis were created at roughly the same time, and were deemed as failed projects when they were babies,” “They didn’t get the data they had expected from Angeal and Genesis, and they were considered failures (although Hollander states in the game that Angeal was a success, at the time Project G was seen to be a complete failure),” and “Gillian kept the truth about Angeal’s birth and the related research a secret from her husband.” Sounds to me like Angeal was a purposeful part of the project all along, but hell, the CC stuff isn't really my forte so if you have evidence to support your claim that I missed, please present it.
Also worth noting is that Gillian attempted to flee with Angeal but they were caught by ShinRa and brought back to Banora, where they were kept under surveillance. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this happened and Lucrecia wasn’t allowed to see her son (who was considered a success, no less) at all.
Some Post In Here Somewhere said:
I think part of the problem is that people don't like Dirge as a game, so they refuse to give it the same benefit of the doubt that they give the OG.
I found this quote in there somewhere and just wanted to say QFT.
I already addressed that point. They thought it was an Ancient but they didn't know that Ancient = human. These people were scientists and, as I said before, they must have looked down a microscope at Jenova's cells. They must have been able to see that her cells were not like human cells.
Apart from anything else, something must have eventually tipped both Hojo and Gast off to the fact that this creature was neither human nor an Ancient.
And it did, but not until after the three Jenova Project babies were already born. Our hint about that is that Sephiroth walks away from reading literally all the documentation about the Jenova Project that is housed in the Shinra Manor basement with the outdated understanding that Jenova is an Ancient. So, whenever they realized she wasn’t, it was at some point between the science crew moving all their research to Midgar, and Crisis Core, when Hojo mentions he’d already figured it out.
I still think they were fucking morons. I mean, they find a vaguely humanoid freakish thing in the North pole (not saying knowlespole because that is stupid) and then they're like 'Oh this must be an ancient!'
Based on what? I mean there is all sorts of freaky creatures in the FFVII universe. What if they'd found the remains of a Snow or something? Would they have thought the same?
I mean obviously this is something that the writers didn't elaborate on, but I've always thought it was flimsy.
Also, has anyone ever considered the possibility that the mind-altering influence of the dormant Jenova was maybe planting the suggestion in their minds that it was an Ancient? For self-preservation and stuff? You know, Jedi mind-trick business.
"This creature is an Ancient. You want to breed it into human babies." "This creature is an Ancient. I want to breed it into human babies."
Obviously I'm not saying
that's canon, but it's as plausible an explanation as any other you're going to try to hang a character judgment upon.
a post that I lost the link to in which someone said:
No, Hojo's experiments made Vincent immortal, which made him a candidate for Lucretia's experiments in the first place. The Protomateria helps stabilise him, but Hojo is the one that saved his actual life.
Hojo’s experiments strengthened his body, but left him “in a death-like state” by the accounts of some canon materials; “dead” by others. Either way, Lucrecia says that Vincent’s tissue is decaying in her lab and that’s what she’s trying to stop, which sounds like death to me. And to top it all off, Vincent acknowledged at the end of the game that it was because of Lucrecia that he survived. Lucrecia is who brought Vincent back to life (or saved him from certain death, depending on your interpretation, but either way, if he was dead at any point, it was Lucrecia who brought him back).
another post I lost the link to in which someone said:
That interpretation only places more of the blame for Vincent's experiments on Lucretia if Hojo was barely around for them while Vincent was lying on a slab in a mansion only Lucretia had access to.
Hojo shot Vincent, then experimented on his body, endowing him with his first three monster transformations, fortifying his body, and leaving him “in a death-like state.” This is canon. I don’t know how else it can be explained to you.
Lucrecia took Vincent’s body after Hojo had discarded it (as evidenced by Hojo coming into her lab and saying, “And just what are you doing with my failed experiment?”), and tried more stuff to try to bring him back to life.
a third post that I lost the link to bc sick Ravy is trash in which someone said:
Also the Shinra Mansion is quite small and in the Compilation they were there for several years after Sephiroth was born. She had access to the main lab, where Vincent was kept I don't see how it is physically possible for her to never see her son even once. Let alone against her will.
They were there for some time after Sephiroth’s birth, yes. We have no idea where Sephiroth was at the time, except that it likely wasn’t anywhere Lucrecia had access to him.
Occam’s razor, guys. If Lucrecia wanted to see her son and was begging someone else to let her see her son, which scenario makes more sense while utilizing fewer acrobatic feats of logic?
1. Lucrecia physically could not reach her son because he was not nearby.
2. Lucrecia was totally able to reach her son but just didn’t because she’s a stupid bitch or smth idk SMH LUCRECIA WHAT A DUMB HO BAG WHO CAN’T EVEN OPEN A FUCKING DOOR, GOD.
Lastly,
Starling:
I feel like you probably made a lot of good points that I would probably agree with, but I can’t read any of them because that font color makes my eyes bleed, which unfortunately is a large part of the reason why I had to stop visiting this forum in the first place. I’d probably really like to talk to you sometime if you could write in a different color—or, even better, on Tumblr.
I can’t read light-on-dark text for more than a little while without getting headaches, but the brighter the text, the worse that problem is. I’ve tried to bring up this problem multiple times before—even offered designing a new skin myself—but the forum/site administration seems wholly uninterested in considering my opinion because apparently I’m not a professional graphic designer who has offered my normally expensive and well-qualified services for free or something. BUT ANYWAY.