**How can you care?** 'Because I choose to.' **You make it sound so simple.** 'That's because it is simple. Hard sometimes, but simple.'

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Woke up yesterday morning a bit feverish, with a sore throat and a bit of a dry cough. Since my sister came up with strep throat Thurseday and I saw her daughter, who had a juicy cough, that night, I figured that as much as I don't have the sick leave, I'd better stay home and rest it out, or I would miss a lot more than one day. Last year strep throat cost me an Urgent Care visit, IV fluids, and 3 days off from work. :-p

So I spent the day playing FF VII, and the following is some rambling as I try to work out Cloud and what he is, exactly.

Timeline-wise, we know things happen in this order:
1) Sephiroth is born, Lucrecia "dies", Vincent is turned from Turk into Vincent
2) Gast leaves Nibelheim and ends up in the frozen north, where he meets Ifalna, the last Cetra
3) Aerith is born, Hojo kidnaps her and Ifalna, Gast dies
4) Cloud is born

We know Cloud is a real person by the middle of the second disk of the game, when he and Tifa piece together his shattered persona in the Lifestream. But Hojo insists several times that Cloud is a Sephiroth clone, and a failed one at that. This confused the hell out of me for a while, but now I think I can say that the two are not contradictions.

For all that Rufus calls Hojo and second-rate scientist, I think it's pretty obvious that he's not. When Nibelheim happened (and boy, was "Last Order" a retcon or what?), Hojo's biggest experiment, his son Sephiroth, was gone, as well as a chunk of JENOVA. All he had left was the boy who had somehow managed to hurt Sephiroth, and he was in pretty bad shape, and a headless blob of JENOVA, which might or might not have been sentient. Wanting to save the boy so he could figure out how he was able to defeat the undefeatable, he jammed the broken body with JENOVA cells and Mako energy to try to save it.

Unfortunately, Cloud's mind could not handle it, and he was deamed a failure. So we end up with a broken-minded Cloud being rescued by Zack, who is eventually killed by Shin-Ra soldiers. When Tifa finds Cloud in Midgar, it's not until she says his name that he pulls himself together, but what he grabs is some weird combination of himself, Zack, and even Tifa. I have a feeling that the JENOVA cells made him a bit telepathic, and he picked up memories from the two people who cared for him and made them his own, even though that didn't fit, because it helped make him somewhat whole.

Please feel free to debate this with me... I'm sorta tossing this out there so I can get some things straight in my head for a bunch of FF related fan fiction.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Um, yeah. You know, you can't rest bacteria out of your body. That's a virus thing. Strep is bacteria. You may need antibiotics.

Anyway....This explanation is about as close to Cloud as I can get. As I've told you before, Sephiroth makes perfect sense to me. His motives are perfectly clear. Wrong, and counterproductive to what he really wants, but clear.

And I understand where he comes from with no problems.

Cloud? Is mud. I can't get through his mental process at all and his origins have never made sense to me.

I always assumed that Sephiroth and Hojo got it wrong about him and that he wasn't a clone, but if he wasn't, why does he have Mako eyes and why is he susceptible to Sephiroth's telepathic manipulation?

This makes more sense than anything actually put in the game. - Dawn

Anonymous said...

lol, I actually found here by also trying to find the meaning of memetic. Weird! I also think Mimetic is a close description of what's going down in FFVII:AC.

Having played through the game several times (Sometimes not restarting by choice. I really should be more careful when saving...) I think that what you're saying about the timeline is pretty accurate.

Unfortunately we don't get many answers from that movie sequence in Gasts lab, except Aeris' origins. That REALLY frustrated me!

JENOVA is not necessarily sentient, but it's pretty certain that the cells have an overwhelming influence over the mind. I think anyone with JENOVA cells can detect others with the same cells, so his 'telepathy' with Zack might how, despite being near-death the whole trip, he picked up on his thoughts and feelings.

Sephiroths assumptions on Cloud being a clone comes from him being top of the JENOVA foodchain. All those freaks in black cloaks are there purely to succumb to his will, and believes Cloud is the same. I'm guessing other clones are exposed at birth, or like Sephiroth, infused beforehand, whereas Cloud being a late bloomer, and also not receiving the full treatment, has some degree of resistance to the influence of JENOVA.

Hojo's attempt to rebuild the perfect warrior was deemed a failure as neither Cloud nor Zack could accomplish the same power and influence Sephiroth had.

My memory ain't what it used to be, so Hojo's eventual goal is uncertain to me, but unless anyone says otherwise, I'll believe that he was also under the influence of JENOVA.

JENOVA's goal is very simple though. Control and destruction. As shown at the end of FFVII direct attacks don't hold much truck against the lifestream, so needs to infect it and eventually overcome it.

*sigh* I'm really talking bollocks lol

Anyways, thanks for helping me flex those grey cells. I'd love to read your fanfic, it's been a long time since I was part of that fandom.

Shaun
msn: speedbump5@hotmail.com