LicoriceAllsorts
Donator
Why do I think it's better for the story when Hojo is Sephiroth's dad? Well, for one thing making Vincent his father is too melodramatic to fit with the spirit of the game as a whole, which strove to subvert a lot of these cliches. Tragic father forced to kill the son he never knew, both of them turned into monsters by the evil scientist who stole the mother's love and then cast her aside.... This story arc lays on the tragedy with a trowel, but that's about all it does. Plus it adds to the wrongs Vincent has suffered, as if he didn't have enough already. It makes Hojo more evil (like that's necessary), Lucretia more of a bitch; it makes everything more black and white, in a game that strove for subtle shades of grey.
Whereas, in what I like to think of as the received version, Hojo and Lucretia are kindred spirits, so wrapped up in the pursuit of science that they are willing to experiment on their own child. This is their sin, and Vincent's sin is that he stood by and allowed it to happen. Blinded by his love for Lucretia, he let these people use a defenceless unborn child for their own purposes. If that child were Vincent's child, the moral (I don't think that's really the word I'm looking for, but whatever) - the moral would be diluted, because the offense would become personal. Vincent would no longer have sinned by abandoning a child to the merciless scientific curiosity of its mother and father; he would have sinned because he'd failed to protect his own child, which is a substantively different offense. Hojo was a monster; Vincent stood by and allowed Hojo to seduce Lucretia into becoming a monster, and then, when he finally challenged them, they made him a monster.
Heaping the sin of filicide on Vincent's already burdened shoulders just seems like overkill to me. All the members of Avalanche are supposed to find redemption through the role they play in defeating Sephiroth, but how can being forced to kill your own child ever be seen as any kind of redemption?
If Sephiroth is Vincent's son, what we have is the pseudo-tragedy of a father being forced to kill the son with whom he has no relationship whatsoever. On the other hand, if we accept the canon (and it is canon) that Hojo is Sephiroth's father, we are presented with the much more interesting and fruitful (IMHO) situation of a man whose son is also his greatest science experiment. And aren't we all, in a sense, our parents' experiments?
Many parents would be pleased to know they'd raised a war hero; most would be devastated to know they'd raised a mass murderer and criminal lunatic. Hojo, however, is fascinated and thrilled by everything his son does; in that sense, he's everybody's dream parent. He never utters a disapproving word about Sephiroth. He is tremendously proud of his son, and Sephiroth's contempt for him seems to give him a perverse pleasure. Why he never told Sephiroth that he was his father is a mystery about which we can only speculate. More mysteriously still, there seems to have been nothing written about Sephiroth's paternity in any of the books he was reading in the basement of the Nibelheim mansion during the week before he burned the town down.
If Vincent were Sephiroth's father, the dynamic between Sephiroth and Hojo would lose all its poignancy and power. Every time Sephiroth said something scathing to Hojo or called him a second-rate scientist, we could imagine Hojo secretly rubbing his hands with glee and thinking, Oh, if only you knew what I did to your father, my boy....
Hojo's inability to distinguish between a child and a science experiment, and the fact that he loves both exactly the same, is a crucial factor in the development of one the game's themes, namely, the many ways in which parents fail their children. If Sephiroth were Vincent's son, all of this would be lost, to be replaced by a trite melodrama.
Whereas, in what I like to think of as the received version, Hojo and Lucretia are kindred spirits, so wrapped up in the pursuit of science that they are willing to experiment on their own child. This is their sin, and Vincent's sin is that he stood by and allowed it to happen. Blinded by his love for Lucretia, he let these people use a defenceless unborn child for their own purposes. If that child were Vincent's child, the moral (I don't think that's really the word I'm looking for, but whatever) - the moral would be diluted, because the offense would become personal. Vincent would no longer have sinned by abandoning a child to the merciless scientific curiosity of its mother and father; he would have sinned because he'd failed to protect his own child, which is a substantively different offense. Hojo was a monster; Vincent stood by and allowed Hojo to seduce Lucretia into becoming a monster, and then, when he finally challenged them, they made him a monster.
Heaping the sin of filicide on Vincent's already burdened shoulders just seems like overkill to me. All the members of Avalanche are supposed to find redemption through the role they play in defeating Sephiroth, but how can being forced to kill your own child ever be seen as any kind of redemption?
If Sephiroth is Vincent's son, what we have is the pseudo-tragedy of a father being forced to kill the son with whom he has no relationship whatsoever. On the other hand, if we accept the canon (and it is canon) that Hojo is Sephiroth's father, we are presented with the much more interesting and fruitful (IMHO) situation of a man whose son is also his greatest science experiment. And aren't we all, in a sense, our parents' experiments?
Many parents would be pleased to know they'd raised a war hero; most would be devastated to know they'd raised a mass murderer and criminal lunatic. Hojo, however, is fascinated and thrilled by everything his son does; in that sense, he's everybody's dream parent. He never utters a disapproving word about Sephiroth. He is tremendously proud of his son, and Sephiroth's contempt for him seems to give him a perverse pleasure. Why he never told Sephiroth that he was his father is a mystery about which we can only speculate. More mysteriously still, there seems to have been nothing written about Sephiroth's paternity in any of the books he was reading in the basement of the Nibelheim mansion during the week before he burned the town down.
If Vincent were Sephiroth's father, the dynamic between Sephiroth and Hojo would lose all its poignancy and power. Every time Sephiroth said something scathing to Hojo or called him a second-rate scientist, we could imagine Hojo secretly rubbing his hands with glee and thinking, Oh, if only you knew what I did to your father, my boy....
Hojo's inability to distinguish between a child and a science experiment, and the fact that he loves both exactly the same, is a crucial factor in the development of one the game's themes, namely, the many ways in which parents fail their children. If Sephiroth were Vincent's son, all of this would be lost, to be replaced by a trite melodrama.
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