Okay, so much crazy here I have to comment on it.
Sephirothslave said:
With my fandoms, I play the loyalty game to the extreme. With FFVII, if I don't think the character will aid Sephiroth, I don't care if they live or die. Characters I feel actively harmed him (Hojo, Cloud, Zack, Vincent, Mateus and Kuja (in Dissidia)...) I'd kill myself.
Because other people actually harm Sephiroth, you'd kill yourself? What's stopping you? Oh, you mean you would kill them by your own hands. That explains it then, everything's stopping you.
Sephirothslave said:
So then, the fanfiction:
1.) Thank God. My OC isn't a Mary-Sue. I'm glad someone else realizes that psychotic homicidal mania eliminates that, "So perfect she sparkles," factor.
Like Red, this made me laugh uncontrollably, but BECAUSE I knew you were serious. Being a homicidal manic doesn't eliminate Suedom if no one in the fiction recognized it, it actually cements it. Moreso when they approve ot it.
2.) My OC's behavior is truly unacceptable, I agree. However, in Wutai, there was a method to the madness. It was overkill, but I felt I had to set Yuffie to join AVALANCHE in game. If she was still friends with Sephiroth, she likely wouldn't have joined them. After I set them up as such close friends, I thought it would take something drastic to completely shatter that.
"No, you see I had to commit an act of genocide and scorched earth tactics. It was to ruin a FRIENDSHIP!"
3.) That said, I'm still a fan of Yuffie. But I felt I had to completely destroy that friendship to set the game up to happen accurately. (And remember, this was even before Advent Children.)
Advent Children has nothing to do with getting Yuffie's age wrong by a factor of ten years. It had nothing to do with making SEPHIROTH, the man you want to claim is not a monster, decide to set fire to every town and city he encountered in her homeland, kill her people indicriminately, and murder her mother before her very eyes, DESPITE their friendship.
Kiddo, you made Sephiroth a WORSE monster than the original game. At least in game, before his fall, he was an honorable, decent man. He wasn't Kefka.
Sephirothslave said:
As I said before, loyalty is the name of my game. Once I've chosen a side, I won't likely sway. In the case of Final Fantasy VII, and Sephiroth, every single character I'm introduced to gets run through an analysis that has become shorter and shorter as my patience wanes with the compilation and company spitting it out. It all boils down to one question:
Keeping in mind that I am certain Sephiroth is not evil, and can be saved: Will ___ be an asset, or an enemy?
"Can they be useful to me or not?" Very psychopathic thinking, that.
The rundown, pass or fail, then goes thus:
Cloud: Fail. He's an idiot, with no skill or talent to speak of. I'd kill him on sight.
Despite him being one of the most unkillable bastards on the planet, being able to best your loverboy every time they fight directly, and being able to sneak up on and suprise -an admittedly distracted sephiroth- and skewer him, but then, to be able to bodily lift Sephiroth BY THE SWORD and then fling him bodily into a pool of Mako, while impaled on that selfsame sword. The man got chopped up, stabbed, and shot through the chest, and still had the will to fight. He got exploded and while it required Deus ex Machina to restore his health, he was still alive.
You sue wouldn't be able to do it. Especially not with how often she forgets her materia. You? You'd fail instantly, and the worst thing about it? Boy would show your ass mercy.
[......]
Aeith: Fail. For God's sake, can I exorcise her from this game?! The sugar, flowers and cotton candy thing got old, fast. Hated her before I even had a great reason.
In short "Grr, Pink!" I've seen some pretty bad and some decent reasons to not like Aerith over the years. This one's one of the worst.
Vincent: Fail. Shut the fuck up. No one cares about your sob story any more. Either do something about it (silently) or put a bullet in your brain. Further, he attempted to kill "the love of his life's" only son. Double Fail.
Said love of life asked him to end Sephiroth herself. He did something about it.
[.....]
Zack: FAIL. Turns out, I was right. I minced words way back when, and portrayed Zack as accurately as I could with only FFVII to work off of. But I never liked him.I couldn't justify why until Crisis Core. Post Crisis Core I can fail the useless sack of meat with a clean conscience.
Now we're fulling into "Who will you believe, me, or your lying eyes" territory. There is NO way to reconcile the 'Zack' you created who savagely beats up women, has them electrocuted, and leaves them for dead with the Zack in FF7, much less the Hyperactive Puppy Dog or 'Honor, Pride, and friendship above all' Zack in Crisis core. He beat up Sephiroth a bit. HE MUST PAY.
Angeal: Fail. Only slightly difficult. Ultimately abandoning his friend and being a part of the Buster Sword lineage did him in.
Proving my above accusation, merely owning the weapon used to repeatedly shame Sephiroth is enough to 'do him in.' The irony here is that Genesis and Angeal are narrative foils to Sephiroth who show that redemption of those who become monsters IS possible... but you have to want it. Angeal retains his honor by dying honorably, in battle, against a superior foe before he loses his mind. Genesis is redeemed by begging the will of the planet itself for a second chance and being reborn. Sephiroth, however, doesn't want his humanity any more, he casts it aside, and begins trying to apotheose into godhood. Angeal dies, Genesis has a new beginning, but Sephiroth doubles down and WANTS to proceed as a monster, and so walks the path of the Sephiroth.
[.....]
Cisnei: Fail. Didn't need another mary-sue, thanks.
Apart from being 'Youngest turk ever,' what about Cissnei, note the double s, makes her a Mary Sue? Unlike your OC, not only is her interest in the Male lead not only never reciprocated, it's never even NOTICED. Or maybe this is more honest than that, and like others have suggested, you just don't want the competition.
[.....]
Rufus: Fail. If you're going to rule the world with fear, you should be the least bit intimidating first.
Man has basically the whole world under the boot already. All he has to do is let them know.
The rest of the Shinra Executives: Fail. Much like the American Government, we should kill them all and start over.
Interesting note: Everyone from the President to the mayor of your homtown and even lower down, if we want to get really nitty gritter, is part of the American Government.
But assuming you mean only the Federal Gov in Washington, you do realize you're advocating the killing of over 500 people, just included elected officials and cabinet members?
[/QUOTE]
Sephirothslave said:
First: Yes, this is still just a videogame discussion. That's why I can be so black and white about my judgments. After all, when I say I'd splatter Cloud all over the 7th Heaven and feel fantastic about it, I'm not talking about actually killing anyone real. If these were real people...well, I'd still probably kill Cloud, because I, as a human, am sick of his bitching.
"It doesn't matter, because it's not REAL, so it's not like I'm a horrible person when I say I want to kill these people. I'd totally do it if he was real, though."
Sephirothslave said:
For my part, I'm still not convinced that he ISN'T totally innocent. And, given the chance would stare the lovely folks at Square down and tell them to their faces that they are wrong.
"I KNOW THE CHARACTER BETTER THAN THE CREATORS!"
Sephirothslave said:
Cloud...is a moron. I'm sorry. His excuses and whining just got more and more ridiculous. Whenever I watch Advent Children these days, it's almost always in Japanese, because if it's in English I find myself telling Cloud to shut the fuck up every time he talks. I have ZERO tolerance for emo bitching, especially when plenty of other people have a right to cry. Cloud's life is not that hard! He has a woman who loves him (why, is eternally beyond me), a home, kids that love him and look up to him, friends...I guess, in a word, the continuous bitching pissed me off even before I comitted to Sephiroth as a favorite character.
So... you were pissed off by a behaviour he really only displayed during a 2 hour movie that came out years AFTER you decided Sephypoo was your favorite character?
Also, did you miss the fatal wasting disease he had and that his adopted son had that he felt entirely powerless to try and cure? Yeah, man was emo, but 'I am going to die and there is literally nothing I can do about it despite months of looking for a cure, and worse, the boy I brought into my home and take care of as I would my own child is also going to die because I can't find this cure." is a pretty damn good justification for feeling some angst.
When I say he is talentless, I mean: Every fight he's won against Sephiroth was by luck or Square's desire to piss me off.
I love that that's actually her justification for it. Nevermind that being able to go toe to toe with Sephiroth for any amount of time is an indication of Cloud's amazing skill with a sword, he only wins because Square HATES HER.
When he stabbed Sephiroth in the Reactor, Sephiroth was already in bad shape mentally and emotionally. (Cut to, Genesis...and a long stream of cussing...) In better shape, Cloud wouldn't have stood a chance. More importantly, by every rule of justice in the universe, Cloud would NOT have lived through the reactor! I'm sorry, but once you've been impaled and hoisted into the air, you are NOT going to get the leverage to pull Cloud's little stunt. He'd have been dead, plain and simple. The Last Order version of events was one shade more palatable.
"Even though the events CLEARLY show that it happened, IT COULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED!"
[more bitching about Cloud]
On and on, time after time, Cloud should not have lived...and did. He's just lucky. That's his only saving quality.
He's incredibly durable, he's a master swordsman, he truly believes that when he makes a promise, he should honor it, even if it's to a dead person. He can lead and organize people, and he truly does care about his family, and even though he doesn't always do the best things for them, he does what he does do under the mistaken belief that things will be better for them if he does.
Sephirothslave said:
Let's finish with my scenarios for killing him:
1.) I elect to dress down and blend in, and as I pass him on the sidewalk, plant my scythe in his neck, and quickly cremate him to keep him dead.
"I blend in with a five foot tall farming implement with a two to three foot long curved blade in the middle of a city. Cloud is TOTALLY NOT SUSPICIOUS of this blade. I then use this blade not primarily intended for stabbing, and stab him in the neck with it, ignoring the slow leadup time I would have to have to get power behind the swing due to the physics of how Scythes build up and apply their force.
2.) Point behind him, and yell, "Look! Aerith!" He's dumb enough to be distracted for a second.
In which time, you... what? I'll assume you're using a scythe again, and are lucky enough to have it in a position to begin a swing. I'll even assume you have an odd bout of superstrength. Even granted all that AND that your nonsense would work, you've still only got a swing going and Cloud has time to dodge or parry. Scythes cumbersome as weapons, designed to distribute power over a wide arc for farming purposes. They are terribly inefficient as weapons of war.
Sephirothslave said:
If I had a chance, I could have stopped the whole damned thing before it got to this place. If I could toss Zackary out on his head and kill Genesis, and go into that reactor with Sephiroth instead, the game I once loved would not have happened. Plain and simple. I could have stopped it - anyone with half a heart could have stopped it - if Sephiroth had known that he was wanted, respected, and loved. If he had known he wasn't alone, and had a place in that world, this would not have happened.
Firstly, his name is just 'Zack' Not Zach or Zackary or any of the other variations on it. Two, Sephiroth had a ton of adoring fangirls in universe. One more screaming bimbo wouldn't have changed his mind. Sephiroth WAS wanted, respected, and loved, but not by people he ever considered equals, exept for Genesis and Angeal.
Sure, had Genesis been removed from the picture- and no, I don't think you could do it- Sephiroth may never have lost his mind and would have simply retired from ShinRa and run off to live out the rest of his days in bumfuck nowhere, but the exact moment that Sephiroth was sent to Nibelheim to investigate, he can't escape being confronted with the truth of his heritage. His talk with Genesis just hurried things along. You need to kill Genesis and his armies well before the situation escalates to the point where Sephiroth has to be sent in, and this is a force capable of eliminating all but the hardiest SOLDIERS and which didn't get wiped out until right about five years after Sephiroth himself died the first time.
To sum up, to defend a man you think can be redeemed, you have the man commit irredeemable acts of heinous and genocidal slaughter long before he has a psychotic break from being confronted by his own origins, which is what begins to cause him to start comitting acts of heinous slaughter.
You'd kill the man who stops him from destroying the world simply because he stopped Sephiroth from doing so, despite both times meaning the death of millions or billions of people. Not that this makes much difference, because you had him essentially depopulate a nation as 'a good guy.' You've also stated that if he was a real person, you'd have no problem killing Cloud.
Where's the 'not evil' come into it? Seriously. Neither your version of Sephiroth or you for that matter show any sign of being anything but psychopathic, self serving, and just in general Evil. I don't mean your OC. You'd kill a man for being Whiny and for stopping a madman from destroying the world. That's not just evil, that's a special kind of evil. That's Stupid Evil.
Oh, and Lian, feel free to CP that to her Blurty if you like.
.
Speaking of, I love the ending of the last chapter. I heard that at the end of ShinRa Soldier Feffyslave ends up killing off all her OCs -- is it too much to hope that it's that particular group of MPs that gun down Julisue or Kococonut whatever his name is? 