Remaking Cetrans

[waw]

Have we gone into any osrt of indepth discussion why Ifalna Cells aren't used in a second wave of the original Jenova Project?

Gast, Hojo, Hollander, Gillian, etc all seem to work on the OG Jenova project. The original design is re-create an Ancient by splicing Jenova's dna into Humans. This is because Jenova is mistaken for an Ancient.

Gast bails. Hojo pursues, finds him with Ifalna and a little girl, takes them back to the Shinra HQ (after giving Gast his... severence bonus.)
Hojo at some point (possibly here) has learned the truth about Jenova. (Okay, quick side note, I sort of imagine that Jenova and Hojo communicate in some screwy way much like Audrey 2... "Clone me Seymour...." but I digress).

Why isn't there a push to inject Ifalna Cells into SOLDIER candidates, new experimentation lines, or even Deepground experiments?

I can think through a couple of solutions but I'm not sure if anything is supported anywhere:
1. Further Cetran experiments are not needed. SOLDIER has developed into an excellent warrior program and with Aerith's dreams, cloning and replicating is pointless.
2. Ifalna's cells won't mix with Jenova entities. (I find this not so likely because Jenova did infect the Ancients).
3. Hojo did this experiment, but nothing happened. (Cetrans are possibly more culture than biology possibly, so DNA isn't that special).
4. Hojo did this experiment and it was a great success. This will be used to explain X. (Not sure if any character could fit as everyone's too old or has their experimentations explained, but this is a possibility. How eerie would it be see a "Next Gen Sephiroth" lying around in a tube.)

Now, I bring this up in the Remake Forum due to how the Aerith x Red XIII adult movie is being addressed. Hojo brings up ideas of crossing her with Project S or Project G SOLDIER-types, meaning, there's an interest on Hojo's part to 1. keep Cetrans around (so he's not like... eager to eradicate them a la Jenova-desires or something weird) 2. eager to see a crossing between SOLDIER/Jenovoids and Aerith/Cetrans.

Therefore, I think in some ways we can rule out most of my hypothetical answers. 1 is obviously not the case here. 2 is either unknown or impossible due to Hojo's desires. 3 could have happened with failed results and desire for further experimentations. Or 4, there were some crosses but something happened.

What's really interesting, however, is that Hojo isn't looking, in Remake, to replicate the Project S experiment with Jenova cells. He wants to um. ohgodwhy... volunteer... Aerith directly.

But that leaves me with in all that time, why Aerith and Ifalna cells weren't used in experimentation in SOLDIERs even if they were providing a need in the Shinra programming.

Any thoughts, solutions, and what did I miss in the game?

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

That's a very good question. I look forward to seeing people's suggestions.

 

[abigail]

I'm wondering if Hojo's erm, plan, with Aerith and iflana's cells are just a screen. something Hojo could present the board for a new reason for the board to inject money into the science dept.

Meanwhile Hojo is kicking his reunion project into high gear. but he is a man of many plans, so if the "hypothesis" had not proven correct that night (during the drum in Remake). then he has another project to work on.

This doesnt explain the years between first picking up Ifalna's body, and the events of Remake. But I'm still of the opinion that Hojo sees more value in Jenova than any Cetra.

And having Aerith during Remake, is, uhhhh, "easier to work with" than Iflana's dead cells.

 

[waw]

Thanks abigail.

The only issue here is that Shinra did have... possession... of Ifalna for what, the first 6 years or so of Aerith's life? The weirdness we see in some of the short stories is that Aerith was very much in Shinra's possession, and we know that Ifalna was and escaped with Aerith before dying in the slums. Shortly thereafter, Aerith was discovered by the Turks and monitored, but not forcibly taken into custody. So how do we explain this?

In some ways, I think Aerith wasn't needed: Ifalna could have been experimented upon and/or have blood drawn and tissue samples taken to preserve her dna for further experimentation.

Ifalna, also, may have been experimented upon with Mako and Jenova cells, though it seems Aeirth would say something like "my mom had those eyes before she died" or something to support this.

It also makes me wonder if Shinra/Tseng knew about Zack and Aerith and wanted it to play out to create a natural hybrid...

I agree that Hojo valued Jenova over Cetra and had greater emphasis on the Reunion project that anything else. The only issue here is that President Shinra wanted to find the Promised Land and he needed a Cetran to do it. So, that should still be in the works.

 

[Sephiroth Crescent]

Those two resources are of high value to President Shinra... what if it was stipulated by him not to do direct experimentation with them?

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Here's what I think. There's nothing genetically special about Cetras. That's a long-standing factual error committed by the science department under the leadership of Gast which has subsequently become enshrined as textbook fact; Hojo has realised it's an error, but hasn't bothered to share this knowledge with anyone, because, you know, it's just another one of the frivolous things with which this world is cluttered. Cetra are ordinary human beings who cultivated their ability to commune with the Planet. It's their culture that makes them Cetra, not their genome. Aerith's mother taught her to speak with the Planet, but in fact, anybody can learn to do it if they dedicate their life to mastering the art. Yes, Aerith is a healer, but many non-Cetran humans have special abilities of all kinds. Special abilities are a human thing in their world, not a specifically Cetran thing. "Humans" came into existence when some Cetrans, fed up with the wandering lifestyle devoted to cultivating the chi of the Planet, settled down in one place and stopped listening to the planet or doing what it wanted.

So if you took DNA from Aerith or Ifalna and injected it into a human embryo, all you'd end up with is an ordinary baby. Hojo figured this out during the time he had Ifalna and her daughter in custody. They're just humans. In-world, most of what the man in the street thinks he knows about the Ancients is bullshit mythology invented by Shinra's educational outreach department.

 

[waw]

I would totally buy that as a solid explanation, but there's still the problem of the President. He very much wants Cetrans around for his use. He has Ifalna, Aerith, and has signed off on experimentation before. Why is he forcing results from Hojo? (Even if the results are "experimentation won't work.")

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Because Hojo hasn't bothered to tell him?
Hojo has his own agenda, which is to test his Reunion theory. AFAIK, he hasn't shared the Reunion theory with anyone else in Shinra, and certainly not with President Shinra. I'd say he's stringing the President along, buying time while he waits for the Reunion to commence. As soon as it starts, he buggers off (pausing only to hang out with some beach bunnies in Costa del Sol), and has to be taken into custody by Shinra.
Hojo cultivates a dotty, scary old professor persona, partly so that all his sins of omissions can blamed on his egg-headed absentmindedness - but underneath that mask is a calculating mind interested only in testing his scientific theories, and especially his greatest experiment: his son.

PS If people in the science department want to keep their jobs, they produce the results the Professor wants. His won't be the first lab to operate in this way.

 

[waw]

It's a good theory but I can't wrap my brain around Pres. Shinra not demanding more results or pushing for more and getting totally chumped by Hojo for well over a decade on "Oh, we uh... the Cetran dna just didn't take root in the specimen. The other specimen uh... died... from.... COVID. Yup." And maybe that's *that* central to Hojo's character, he totally chumped Shinra on any project related to Ifalna and Aerith. But that's a lot of chumping!

I'm honestly surprised none of the Tsviets have Ifalna DNA. This would have made so much sense for Weiss.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

Did President Shinra know that Jenova was not a Cetra?

 

[waw]

Those two resources are of high value to President Shinra... what if it was stipulated by him not to do direct experimentation with them?

I missed this comment. That could be a good reason too, but we do go years without Cetran power. If we know that the Cetrans' power isn't biological, this makes a lot more sense and tracks with "Aeirth must cooperate willingly" thoughts.

Did President Shinra know that Jenova was not a Cetra?

I don't know. I'm not sure we ever see the President speaking much about Jenova one way or the other. I think what we do have, though, is the products of Jenova (Jenovoids as I like to call them) or SOLDIER didn't have the abilities they were looking for.

The Remake shortstory gives us data on Aerith as a little girl when she was having dreams of seemingly mako rich areas that the President then had special teams probing to see if they were (or led to) the Promised Land because she was an Ancient. We have no evidence of anyone in SOLDIER doing this (or Planet-Speaking, though I'm figuring these powers are related).

This leaves us with at least being able to conclude that the President understood the powers of SOLDIER were different from the powers of the Cetrans.

Furthermore, Tseng speaks of scriptures that Shinra took literally. Reminds me of the cut Book of God/Book of the Devil material from the FF7 early stages. If the ability to Planet-Speak and the (presumably other) powers of the Cetrans isn't genetic, we start to understand far more about the Ifalna and Aerith's life. But that also opens up the possibilit of someone learning to Planet-Speak and gain the abilities of a Cetran....

Is this supported by Sephiroth? Or is just the powers of Jenova also seem similar to the powers of Aerith?

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I wonder if those scriptures are real, or a Shinra invention, or some kind of pre-Shinra forgery or spoof that the President took seriously. Even if it's an authentic piece of Cetran scripture, Shinra (i.e., the President) has misunderstood it. Aerith makes it clear that the Promised Land doesn't have a physical location. It might even refer to the Afterlife.

My headcanon is that the Jenova project went pear-shaped something like this:

A few years after Sephiroth, Genesis and Angeal were born, Gast realised they weren't showing the expected qualities of a Cetra and that the Jenova project had been a failure. Since the Jenova Project had been his brainchild, he was likely to pay for this failure with his life, so he fled. At some point he met Ifalna, who explained to him what Jenova really was.

Hojo figured out some things on his own
- Jenova wasn't a Cetra (but he kept this information to himself)
- Shinra's interpretation of the "scriptures" was bollocks (he kept this information to himself, too)
- Jenova DNA created supersoldiers.
Supersoldiers were an acceptable alternative to offer to the President, and so he was promoted to Head of Science

Ifalna may have told Hojo the truth about Jenova, before she realised what kind of man she was dealing with.

When Ifalna and Aerith were captured, it was President Shinra's idea to sent the SOLDIERs out to look for the locations in her dreams. Hojo privately scoffed at such an unscientific approach, but it wasn't his project so it wasn't his business. His job was to map the genome of the Cetra and figure out how they were different from humans. He found out that they weren't different. He also kept this information to himself.

He may even have colluded in their escape since they were a liability to him. The longer he had these assets in his labs, the harder it was to explain why he couldn't recreate one. Once they were gone, he could produce some or other eldritch monster from time to time and claim it was the latest product of Cetran gene splicing. Or say the Ifalna material had deteriorated. Or something.

After he lost the Cetra, President Shinra decided to focus on the space program and the hope of finding the Promised Land on another planet.

President Shinra is a rather eccentric wishful thinker who throws billions of gil at cockamamie projects trying to prove that his fantasies are real. Hojo takes advantage of this.

Of course, we may find out in Remake Part II that Cetrans are, in fact, genetically distinct from humans and that their powers reside in their genome, in which case all my headcanon will have to be binned. The information available in the OG, however, supports my current theory.

 

[Erotic Materia]

You know Lic, I think you might be on to something. This little piece from Hojo when they're in the Northern Crater seems to support that theory too, I think:

 

[Odysseus]

He may even have colluded in their escape since they were a liability to him. The longer he had these assets in his labs, the harder it was to explain why he couldn't recreate one. Once they were gone, he could produce some or other eldritch monster from time to time and claim it was the latest product of Cetran gene splicing. Or say the Ifalna material had deteriorated. Or something.

My only issue with this is how excited he was to have Aerith back in captivity and to breed her, that doesn't mesh with him wanting her gone out of convenience. I've always been a little fuzzy on if the Ancients were actually genetically different or if it was more about spiritual practices and beliefs. I do agree that he knew Jenova wasn't a Cetra long before anyone else did though.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

He's excited because he can watch.

 

[Erotic Materia]

 

[waw]

My only issue with this is how excited he was to have Aerith back in captivity and to breed her, that doesn't mesh with him wanting her gone out of convenience. I've always been a little fuzzy on if the Ancients were actually genetically different or if it was more about spiritual practices and beliefs. I do agree that he knew Jenova wasn't a Cetra long before anyone else did though.

Well done folks. I forgot Hojo had said that about the Promised Land.

When it comes to Ifalna's escape, I am quite curious as it wouldn't surprise me if she had help. Would it have been Hojo? Perhaps, and if he discarded and didn't care about Cetran stuff, that would follow. Yet, in that same game we do have his weird exuberance about breeding Aerith with Nanaki....

I'm going to just step over Lic's assertion about Hojo (though probably not wrong...)

I do feel the creators had that scene with Red and Aerith due to bringing the characters in and highlighting Aerith's nature, but I don't think a crossbreeding between would even be genetically possible. What we see in Remake makes far more sense. Was it limitations and speed so they just retconned that part right out to a more logical experience? Quite possibly - and if so I feel that this retcon dumps the idea of Hojo's sick fascination with watching Aerith breed with a wolf/dog/moomba/buga/lion/thing (seriously, why can we not have a species name for him?!)

But it seems in both canons we have an assertion from Hojo that he would like to preserve the Cetran bloodline for study. I think we can conclude that he did not come to the conclusion that there was no genetic difference from humans then. Cetran powers may be cultural with genetic proclivities for it, or something. Or a sort of inherited power....

This now makes me wonder how powerful a child between Zack and Aerith could have been. (Can SOLDIERs procreate? Presumably if they could they'd pass on Jenova material).

 

[Clement Rage]

Have we gone into any osrt of indepth discussion why Ifalna Cells aren't used in a second wave of the original Jenova Project?

Who says they weren't? They were still doing some kind of experiments on Ifalna when she escaped. Most likely it just didn't work, or didn't work as well.

 

[waw]

It's a good question. We don't know. I have some logic rationale to explain some of it away.

1. You don't want to risk your only Cetran sample.
2. Okay so you had Aerith as a backup. Ifalna may have been tested on.
3. What would those experiments have looked like? They need Cetran abilities, not necessarily Cetran super soldiers, so empowering Ifalna who, from what we know, at least wasn't loyal to Shinra, even if she cooperated begrudgingly. The goal is to empower others with Cetran abilities that are loyal.
4. We have no indication of Ifalna Project experiments though something like the Restrictors might pop up as having I-Cells or something, I doubt we'll ever get that explanation. No character in canon has indicated having her cells.
5. After Ifalna escapes Shinra, we have no evidence of characters tested on to replace Ifalna. So even if Ifalna was experimented on, after she escapes and dies, presumably Shinra would want another test subject. This doesn't happen.
6. Remake emphasizes needing Aerith to comply. Possibly that compliance factors in as the work with Ifalna could have been around a Restrictor Control chip or something like that, but even during mind control her powers wouldn't work for Shinra. Whatever the case, we have the Iflana Dies to Aerith Recaptured gap that the President's seemingly favorite project is just on hold.

So my question about not seeing the Ifalna Cells in a project isn't that they necessarily weren't. It's that we don't have data on if they were or what that looked like. It's honestly a very weird "plothole" that doesn't make sense.

Super bad Shinra wants Cetrans to find Promised Land. He's obsessed and luny and believes in this myth and is willing to go to great horrible lengths for his scientific goals. His prized possessions escape Shinra HQ, Mommy Cetran dies in the slums. Daughter Cetran disappears. Finds little girl living in the slums with a powerless adoptive mother.

Doesn't take little girl back. Why? Because they need her to comply? But they literally built the entire SOLDIER program off of screwing around with at-the-time-believed Cetran DNA but from what we can see, just decide not to with Ifalna and Aerith. (I mean, on one of Tseng's visits it could just be a blood sample to get fresh DNA to use on more experimentations. why not?)

So it's really about asking these lore enthusiasts and experts if there's anything in canon indicating, hinting, or missed that could explain any of this.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

There's really no reason for us to believe the attempt (to use Ifalna's cells in a similar fashion to how they used Jenova's) wasn't made. I dare say it would be foolish to think they didn't try it considering the many variables tested on the unborn in a variety of experiments -- e.g. Gillian's cells being used on Genesis as a fetus, the (unrelated to Jenova) experiments done on Weiss and Nero before they were born, etc.

Clearly if it was attempted, it didn't have the desired results. Put simply, there's no good reason for us to think Ifalna's (or any other Cetran's) cells were going to interlace and replicate in the same manner as those of a cancerous psychic alien who eats the souls of planets. XD

One is essentially just a human while the other is basically John Carpenter's "The Thing."

Like I said, I do think it pretty much goes without saying that it was attempted yet just didn't work.

Of course, we may find out in Remake Part II that Cetrans are, in fact, genetically distinct from humans and that their powers reside in their genome, in which case all my headcanon will have to be binned. The information available in the OG, however, supports my current theory.

Canon seems to push that it's both. It's canon that Cetra do have genetic distinctions, the same way any race of humans would (i.e. in real life), but I think we can safely wager that without cultivating that (ha, puns) with cultural understanding, it won't reach its potential.

Meanwhile, baseline humans are obviously still not so genetically removed from the Cetra as to make them biologically incompatible, and we also observe in the original game how qualities of Cetra culture can be adopted by baseline humans and even some of their abilities reacquired.

For Aerith, hearing the planet was no feat at all, but it was something the others in Avalanche had to learn. For the more educated-in-the-subject Bugenhagen, discerning the planet's cries wasn't even a particularly big feat, and he had delved enough into the culture and mindset that he could make out actual instructions regarding the White Materia when the others couldn't. There's a definite spiritual component that goes beyond the hereditary biology.

 

[Obsidian Fire]

Things get even weirder when you have Sephiroth doing things that it seems likely the Cetra had to be able to do for certain things to even be an issue. No one can cast Meteor without the Planet's help... and Sephiroth manages to do just that by force. Same thing goes for using materia at all and a bunch of other stuff.

What I do think the Cetra rely on is have a completely different set of priorities than anyone else does that the Planet itself validates. The Cetra have a very... unusual... relationship with the Lifestream where they can stick around in it "spiritually" for much, much longer than other beings (even other humans) can. And it's said that this is because doing so is a "reward" for how they served the Lifestream while they were alive.

Which... begs the question that... if the "biologial" Cetra didn't serve the Lifestream in life... would that have made them Cetra or not "spiritually"?

This... makes me wonder if Aerith is going to decide not to serve the Planet this time around... and then finds her Cetra powers failing... or something along those lines.

If you want to go really far into science, the idea behind the "Cetra gene" might be something like epigenetics. Where everyone has the capacity to be a Cetra, they just don't have the "right environment" to turn their Cetra gene on. Where the "right environment" is whatever spiritual mindset that is specific to the Cetra is. Having a mindset close to the Cetra turns the gene "on", having the wrong mindset turns the gene "off". And Aerith was born with the gene already "on" thanks to having a mom with it already "on".

However, part of me doesn't like the "mindset" idea of being a Cetra either because... it frankly sucks when it comes to the implications behind it. It would basicly boil down to... "do whatever the Planet tells you to do and you get cool super-powers and a longer afterlife that doesn't involve dissolving into nothingness automatically". Oh, and your kids might end up being born in the same situation you are.

That just... doesn't sound like something that would work well long-term. Especially if you have other people around who don't want to obey the Planet all the time and are jealous of the Cetra's cool super-powers. Or Cetra with super-powers who are sick and tired of doing what the Planet says and decide to use said super-powers for something else... at least until they stop having them due to not doing what the Planet wants them to do. It just seems like something that could go very wrong very quickly or be easily abused. (Don't do x thing or the Cetra will come after you because the Planet doesn't like you doing that).

Huh... that last situation is a lot like Gridania in FFXIV with the Elementals and the Padajli (and the Hearers)... and boy is that situation like something out of Lovecraft in terms of being fucked up (Shadows Over Insmouth in particular... just with trees, not fish)!

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

I could be wrong, but I don't think you can tell a person's race by looking at their genes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_... populations are,to determine a person's race.
https://www.popsci.com/story/science/dna-tests-myth-ancestry-race/

If you could, race wouldn't be a social construct but a biological fact.

All kinds of ordinary humans have considerable superpowers in their world. You don't need to be a SOLDIER or a Cetra to have limit breaks or use materia. Aerith's special power is healing, but Yuffie also has a healing limit break. The only special power unique to Cetrans is the ability to speak with the Planet, and for Aerith that can sometims feel more like a curse than a blessing. (OG Aerith, at least). And everybody can use materia, though some have more affinity for than others, more "mana". Aerith does have more MP than anyone else, so maybe "being Cetra" is about practising techniques to cultivate one's mana and commune with nature.

(Maybe Wutaians in general are more closely "related" to Cetrans because they have retained a spiritual attitude towards the Planet and its various manifestations such as summons. Shinra is the ultimate avatar of the anti-Cetra human: they artificially manufacture materia to replace the powers lost by rejecting the connectin with nature.)

@ Obsidian: to my mind, your penultimate paragraph somewhat descibes what happened when "humans" split off from Cetrans, settled down and stopped speaking with the Planet. It seems as if the Planet regarded the Cetrans as its servants; their primary duty was to labour to increase the Planet's spirit energy. But human beings want to be nature's masters, not its servants....

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

I could be wrong, but I don't think you can tell a person's race by looking at their genes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_... populations are,to determine a person's race.
https://www.popsci.com/story/science/dna-tests-myth-ancestry-race/

If you could, race wouldn't be a social construct but a biological fact.

Your first link there says "there is a distinct statistical correlation between gene frequencies and racial categories."

Obviously there's not specific serial numbers for each race or ethnicity, but there's a reason a "one size fits all" approach doesn't work, say, medically or even with clothing.

 

[LicoriceAllsorts]

It also says this
"However, because all populations are genetically diverse, and because there is a complex relation between ancestry, genetic makeup and phenotype, and because racial categories are based on subjective evaluations of the traits, there is no specific gene that can be used to determine a person's race."
Like I said, I could be wrong, but my understanding is that if you gave a scientist the genome (if that's the right word) for an individual, they could not definitively tell you whether that individual was black, white, Chinese, Arab or whatever.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

But they could make an educated inference. Presumably that can be done with increasing confidence the more insular a population has been/the less interbreeding has gone on with them.