Reply #29: I think Seph was actually a rather sympathetic villain [View All]

[Chovexani]

While he didn't exhibit signs of remorse or anything like Vader did, I still found him a sympathetic villain. I think it's because when you look at the circumstances of his life, there really was no other way he could have turned out. He was bred as a biological weapon, never had love or nurturing from anyone (with the exception perhaps of Professor Gast, but he was murdered). He probably felt alienated from others since the day he was born. No wonder he snapped and lost it. I felt more sorry for him than anything else, and even though I am a big Aerith fan I couldn't even hate him after he killed her. Sephiroth just seemed really sad to me. I wanted to save him from himself more than I wanted to kill him.

I also remain convinced that Jenova drives people mad. If you look at everyone who got her cells either ended up crazy or came to a horrible end: Sephiroth, the clones, Hojo, Lucretia, even Cloud (he alone didn't come to a bad end, but those disassociative episodes he had were the doing of those cells, I think). An idea I toy around with in fanfic is that Hojo used Jenova cells in his experiments on Vincent and that's why he was plagued by those nightmares. Maybe we will find out what really happened either in Advent Children or Dirge of Cerberus.