I know we've derailed the convo quite a bit and I appreciate everyone tackling this topic regardless.
People asking us about this stuff is what causes us to go look up our sources again and go, "We really sythesised everything we can on this topic given everything we know from canon right?" And it's nice to have something a little different than the Remake itself to research.
My understanding is that Hojo, ultimately, had oversight of Deepground. Maybe this is a flawed understanding and someone like Estes-D (?) actually was in charge. If the Genesis-Gene infusion was happening at birth (which explains Rosso's experimentation), why use Genesis Genes rather than Sephiroth genes? What am I missing?
Hojo seems to have had control over Deepground in name only... like he has control over the entire Science Department. And yet we se a lot of scientists with their own science projects that he doesn't care anything about.
Hojo is obsessed with Jenova (and Seprhioth). Anything that doesn't have have to do with her is... not really something he's interested in. And Deepground has nothing to do with Jenova. The scientists in Deepground are mainly experimenting with the effect mako has on people... and not much else.
Genesis was considered largely a failure, no? He and Angeal were somewhat shunted off to Banora, unlike Sephiroth who was raised, presumably, in Midgar/with the lab stuff. Why did they choose a failure's genes? What's special enough about Genesis?
Was there something more malleable about his genes?
We have missing information between when Genesis was considered a failure and when Deepground was started up as Deepground. However, we do know it was not long after Genesis was born that Deepground started experimenting with loads of mako and Genesis' Gene Sequence and (most importantly) no real oversight from just about anyone in Shinra. It was a mad scientists' playground. Unlike Hojo's Science Department where they at least had to keep some things looking right for everyone else in Shinra and the board of directors and the public.
There is a very short list of people outside of Deepground that knows it exists and... that's pretty much... President Shinra, Scarlett, Heiddegar and Hojo. Everyone else who knows about Deepground is in Deepground itself and seemingly doesn't go top-side much.
My current *guess* for why Genesis's Gene Sequence was used in Deepground is that he is the only surviving member of Project G to make use of Gene Sequencing/Mapping to create. All the others died and Angeal was the result of Gillian getting pregnant. There would also have been a slight delay between Genesis being born and Genesis being declared a failure and someone working in Deepground could have easily grabbed his Gene Sequence for whatever reason.
Deepground is nowhere near as picky as Hojo is when it comes to experimenting with what "works". The point of experiments is figuring out what works *after* experimenting on stuff and Deepground takes that mentality to the extreme conclusion of "test everything to death". Them experimenting with what everyone else sees as a failure isn't out of character for Deepground at all. Who knows, maybe they'll find something useful all the big wigs up in the Science Department missed...
Was the experiment used in Deepground to make folks like Rosso the basis of Hojo's "Sephiroth Copy" project and the tech that would eventually make Genesis Copies? If so, we could be seeing the same tech/science being developed:
No it was not. "Copies" are very different from what the Tsivets are when it comes to... just about everything about them. So the effects are widely different. Not even all copies are made the same way.
Initial Stage: Jenova Project -> Jenova derived entities
Second Stage: Replication of Jenova Project Beings
5: Sephiroth Copies/Nibelheim: Hojo perfects Hollander tech to make Seph Copies that Seph later controls
These are the only three that really go together. And the first two stages are really one and the same. Gast was originally the one overseeing all of this before he left Shinra. Hojo was over Project S that made Sephiroth. Hollander and Gillian were over Project G (which stands for Gillian, not Genesis). Project S was thought to be a success and was folded into the normal SOLDIER creation process. Project G was a failure (to Hojo at least) and Genesis and Angeal (and Gillian) all got to grow up as normal people as a result!
The Sephiroth Copies are made by Hojo. Sephrioth himself can't make them, since he doesn't have the right Jenova abilities to do so. But he can control them. Hojo also didn't just make the Sephrioth Copies just for kicks. They were specificly made to test out Jenova's Reunion Theory, that is, how all of Jenova's Cells will want to come together. It is unknown if Hojo got this idea having seen the Genesis Copies. Remake makes it sound like he's been making them over a very long period of time though. Maybe even as far back as the original Project J.
2.5 Stage: Rosso and other DG with Genesis Genes
This would have happened after Project G and S were ended. Deepground has no real oversight, so no one cares what they do. It should be noted Genesis' Gene Sequence is not the same thing as Genesis' Cells. One is just the data of what genes show up in someone's DNA. The other is actual biological material. And Deepground seems to have only had the former, not the later. Which means none of the Tsivets actually have Genesis' Cells in them (or Jenova's Cells for that matter). And that is what all the degradation issues are linked back too. Hojo is also not involved with experimenting with this personally and this is not how Copies are made. The Tsivets are not Genesis Copies. They're just people who have had their DNA shuffled around a bit to be like someone else's in certain ways and that is not what is going on with the Copies elsewhere.
3: After perfecting process, SOLDIER with Jenova Genes similar to what happened with Lucrecia and/or Gillian?
Gillian and Angeal and Genesis all got to go live in Banora as... normal people. Genesis was adobpted by the mayor and his wife and it's canonical he came across LOVELESS in their study (and got obessed with it as a kid). His parents let him grow up as a normal kid and didn't send him to anything related to Shinra's military school... until Genesis himself wanted to go out to become a SOLDIER as a teenager due to Shinra's propaganda. Which was when he left home.
Gillian remarried to someone who seems to have been a really good dad to Angeal and Angeal had a happy childhood. Gillian did not want Angeal to have anything to do with Shinra, but Genesis was Angeal's best friend and when Genesis went out for SOLDIDER, Angeal went with him. This was when his dad gave him the Buster Sword. Gillian would commit suicide in Crisis Core when she realized what kind of problems her experiments were causing Genesis and Angeal... who are... basically her kids geneticly.
Banora itself is a town for... essentially Shinra retirees... to make sure they don't talk about stuff they shouldn't. So if anything *really* weird would have happened with Genesis and Angeal, Shinra would have found out about it most likley... but nothing did happen. Which was just more proof to Shinra that Project G hadn't worked. It is... very likely that Genesis and Angeal would have been left alone indefinitely if they didn't go out for SOLDIER, but just stayed in Banora.
After Lucrecia put Chaos in Vincent to hopefully fix him, she left Shinra behind. She tried killing herself, but the Jenova Cells she got while pregnant with Sephrioth didn't let her die. So she went to the cave where she found Chaos' mako pool and... kinda put herself into a mako crystal... She's not dead, but she is in stasis. And seeing visions of Sephrioth destroying the world. Given how well she knows Hojo, I kinda can't blame her for wanting to make sure he never found out she can't really die due to Jenova...
4: Genesis Copies Stage: Further using 2.5 but full on Genesis copies (seem to be mentally linked? None rebel/act independently)
There is no link back to how the Tsivets are made for the Genesis Copies. Copies in general need to have the actual cells of whoever they are a copy of in them and the Tsivets don't have that. And Copies need to have Jenova Cells in them. The Genesis Copies all used to be SOLDIERs... and Hojo puts Jenova Cells in the Sephrioth Copies while making them. And the Tsivets don't have Jenova Cells in them at all.
The Genesis Copies are... rather freaky... in how Genesis' Cells interact with them. It's not some surgical procedure per say... as much as it Jenova's abilities. That Genesis's Cells have. Where those cells will copy parts of themselves onto that other person's cells. Copies in general are... essentially when other cells try to make the body they are in into a copy of the body they are from. Whether that be Jenova's body, Sephrioth's body, Genesis' body, Angeal's body, Gillian's body... that's what makes a Copy a Copy. And that... also includes includes how people think. Saying that Genesis can control his Copies is both right and wrong... it's more like the Copies start thinking like him... because Genesis' Cells are making them into Genesis. Or at least trying to. The same thing is happening with the Sephrioth copies. In... addition to whatever mental orders they are getting from Sephrioth. So yeah, Jenvoa is freaky because her cells can turn other beings into something like what she is.... and some of those beings can do the same thing to other people...
I know those links are spelled out necessarily in any of the maeterials, but I'm trying to understand the processes here of what we're dealing with. I'm also stuck as to why Genesis Genes were at all superior to Sephiroth Genes for Deepground. The only solution I could think of for this is that the Gene collection happened after Sephiroth and Angeal were lost, so that Genesis was the only option. While DG had experiments, the Genesis Genes would have been used on DG specimens *after* the Nibelheim incident. I do understand this isn't the correct timeline now, but that just brings me to why Genesis....
Good luck trying to get Hojo to stop obsessing over Sephrioth. We know he's been censoring stuff about the S Project for ages and I wouldn't be surprised if that included what Sephrioth's Genetic Sequence was. As it is, Sepiroth never needed his genes sequenced as part of his creation process. He was the kid Lucrecia got pregnant with via Hojo and was then injected with a bunch of Jenova Cells that started changing what Sephrioth's own cells were like while Sephrioth was still in the womb. Angeal is *almost* the same thing. But he didn't get Jenova Cells injected in him... instead his mother, Gillian had them herself from an earlier experiment.
The thing to know about Deepground at the end of the day is that it really doesn't care if it's experiments work or not. It just like experimenting for the sake of experimenting. And you can't know if something is really a failure until you do a lot of experimentation on it....
The shocking thing to me about Project Jenova in general is how fast the thing went. We still have no idea *what Cetra traits exactly* Gast and Co. were looking for when they declared Genesis and Angeal failures and Sehprioth a success. We do know it happened when they were all babies. That's... not a lot of time to go do a bunch of testing to figure out if the Cetra traits you were trying to... cultivate.... copied over or not. Or if they'll show up later in life.
Hojo is... ironically really bad at science in general. He has conclusions he wants to be right about certain things and then goes and designs experiments that he thinks will get him the conclusions that he wants. That is... really bad science all the way around. Deepground's approach of "experiment on anything and everything even if you think it doesn't work" is a way better mentality to have (and yes, I know they go horribly overboard). But from the looks of it... Deepground doesn't have a conclusion about anything they are doing before they do it. Instead it's just "what if x happens if we do this?" No wonder Deepground figured out Genesis' Gene Sequence actually had something in it long before Hojo's Science Department did; they have a way better head for that kind of thing.
FFVII is... honestly about how very bad scientific method doomed the world. Hojo is a horrible scientist for a lot of reasons and not all of those reasons are just his lack of a moral compass. When it comes to doing good scientifically sound research... most of the named scientists aren't. Often times because Shinra really wants them to find out certain things as fast as possible instead of in a scientifically robust way... and that's when corner cutting when it comes to research often starts.
