Hello, I hope I'm not bothering you. I have a question regarding your pinned. You mention Seph being 30 and I'm still confused about the ages. I'm new to ff in general and thought asking a loremaster would help clear things up

Sorry if my ask gets send twice, my connection is ass lately

- Asked by manglednatalia

No worries! While the series never explicitly gives a date for Sephiroth’s birth, the timeline established in the actual games (not the official meta, which contradict one other) is pretty clear.

Simple Explanation: Vincent was born on Friday, the 13th of October, 1950. Vincent was killed by Hojo at 27 years old, at which time Lucrecia was pregnant with Sephiroth. This means Sephiroth was born in 1977 or 1978; the game title number and Science™ imply that it was late ‘77 rather than early '78. Meteorfall occurred on January 21, of '08, so Sephiroth was 30 years old.

Links To More Detailed Explanations: The timing of Vincent’s death proves it, as stated above; although Angeal’s age has been overtly retconned since that post, Sephiroth’s birth year remains unchanged based on how Angeal refers to the difference in their age in Japanese, stating that he’s older than Sephiroth using language indicating a difference of a year or less. Believe it or not, the timing of real world human gestational patterns actually also helps to clarify Sephiroth’s birthdate, when taken in conjunction with Vincent’s death, Lucrecia’s seizure, and how Sephiroth’s strain of Jenova functions. Add in the timeline established in the opening cutscene of the First SOLDIER battle royale, and it’s even more set in stone.

Sephiroth died in Nibelheim in 0002, of course, so we can kind of assume he’s physically 24-25 the same way Vincent is physically 27, but he was born 30 years ago.

FOR THE ASK GAME! i know you've posted a ton of amazing analysis, but i would love more of your vincent thoughts. If you're tired of writing about him right now, i'd also like to hear your thoughts about Glenn, who i don't know if i've heard you talk about a lot. 🖤

- Asked by sephirthoughts

💭 How I feel about this character

I will never get tired of talking about Vincent Valentine. He is my favorite character in the whole of fiction, my blorbo of blorbos, and I consider him the single most personally compelling character ever created. I’m not sure I can quantify how much I love this character.

One issue I do run into with regard to how much I adore the guy is assertions and assumptions that it’s because he’s hot so I wanna fuck him, which is 1000% not the case. I do appreciate his looks—his Rebirth design in particular makes me slightly feral—but it’s not from a place of attraction, per se. I personally have no interest in boning Vincent Valentine! I do think he deserves to do some boning, though.

💞 All the people I ship romantically with this character

I ship Vincent with Veld, Cloud, and Genesis, and often Cloud and Genesis at the same time. Also Reeve. Sometimes Tseng, but that’s complicated.

I was the first person on the English-speaking side of fandom to draw VinVeld fanart, way back when Before Crisis was still fairly new, and I have RP’d VinVeld with multiple partners since about 2009. Chapter 19 of BC happened, I got fed a loose translation on LiveJournal, and my brain chemistry was changed—another Turk, still alive, who knew Vincent? And they don’t refer to each other with any honorifics at all? And he recognized Vincent immediately when even Lucrecia didn’t? Those two were basically married, I’m sure of it.

That said, I actually shipped Strifentine before I shipped VinVeld, and I still ship it really hard. My current slice-of-life slow-burn WIP fic is Strifentine, and in Ye Olde Fandom Dayes it was intended to be a core component of my massive Sefikura Bodysharing AU that temporarily broke FFN’s review system, although I never got that far.

I’ve shipped Vinesis since Crisis Core, because Vincent and Genesis are kindred spirits in a way that is similar to Vincent and Cloud while also being completely different, and I love that for them. Two men-turned-monsters-turned-Weapons, doomed to walk the planet until its death, paying for crimes that were never their fault in the first place. Lovely.

While I’ve never personally posted much if anything related to Valenstrifesodos, I think the dynamic between the three of them would be amazing. Also, as I described to a friend literally yesterday, it’s like this: Genesis is Sephiroth’s soulmate by fate, Cloud is his soulmate by force, and Vincent is Sephiroth’s only living relative so he inherited both of them when the guy died.

Reeve and Tseng are much less commonly shipped with Vincent for me, mostly because I ship them with each other as endgame 100% of the time. In my head, Vincent was kinda with Reeve for a bit postcanon but it just didn’t work, and he’s honestly pretty attracted to Tseng but doesn’t ever pursue it because Tseng kinda hates him. (Tseng does not hate him, it’s complicated and entirely Veld’s fault, if Tseng ever gets over it they’d have a really fun dynamic.) Sometimes—assuming he doesn’t get back with Veld or enter into a relationship Cloud and/or Genesis—I feel like Vincent would occasionally be a third while Reeve and Tseng are together, but it’d be very rare.

🤝 My non-romantic OTP for this character

Also Genesis (in universes where Valenstrifesodos doesn’t happen they’re generally platonic for a very long time before anything happens between them), as well as Barret and Reeve, but I think my favorite option here is Shera.

They don’t really have any canon interactions to speak of, but I spend a lot of time thinking about Cid talking to Vincent in Dirge, telling him that Shera is worried about him and will want to know if he’s been eating enough—so they’ve had interactions, offscreen, between the OG and Dirge. Enough that Shera fusses over him and worries about his diet and sends messages along with Cid to make sure Vincent is doing all right. That’s adorable. That’s so sweet. I love that for both of them.

🚫 My unpopular opinion about this character

I feel like I have a lot of these, but it really depends on what one considers “unpopular.” I guess the biggest is that he isn’t in love with Lucrecia anymore? Even though that’s…canon. Like that’s canon. That is something explored in Dirge, the conclusion of their shared storyline is that Vincent was never actually in love with Lucrecia at all, because he never really knew her, and now that he does he actually appreciates her more, but is able to move forward and leave her behind. (Which is literally what she wants for him! She wants him to be happy without her! This was her goal and she succeeded! But god forbid women do anything!)

The next one is that he would not enter into a relationship with Cid because even if Cid is his type (which he is!) he’s in a dedicated relationship with someone else, and Vincent has already done the song and dance of “fool around with a scientist under Shinra’s banner* who has a highly intelligent scientist partner who isn’t afraid to go to extremes for their work.**” It has nothing to do with interest or a lack of interest, it’s because Vincent literally, canonically got killed and turned into a monster for poaching*** and he’s never going to even entertain the idea of that ever again.

* Cid is an engineer in Shinra’s Department of Space & Aeronautics

** Shera is also an engineer in the same department and was literally cool getting burned alive if it meant the Shinra No. 5 launch would go off safely

*** Lucrecia and Hojo were canonically married and were already in a relationship at the time that Vincent showed up in Nibelheim

The rest include such hot takes as Chaos’ consciousness being gone at the end of Dirge (which is also canon), Vincent being Sephiroth’s biological father (which is not canon but fuckit), and him being unabashedly pansexual (any character that expresses romantic or sexual interest at any time in any media is bi or pan until proven otherwise) but not having relationships with cis women or anyone who could ever theoretically conceive—he interacted with Nero, immediately knew what happened there, and is not so irresponsible as to risk making any more monster babies capable of flattening the planet when they have a tantrum. (This is actually super rough for him because it’s a big part of his sexuality that he just has to cut off forever out of safety concerns and that’s pretty fucked up but there’s nothing he can do about it.)

🌟 One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon

It’s funny, because prior to Rebirth’s release I said the one thing that would make up for Vincent not being playable would be if he turned into something and attacked the party, but obviously the devs wouldn’t do that with a character everyone is supposed to trust—and then they did! I wanted to see them do something with the asymmetry established in Dirge, maybe give him a wonky eye or something like I draw him a lot of the time, but the devs would never do something like that—and then they did! I wanted him to be more fleshed out, like it would be nice to know if he ever had hobbies, but the devs would never waste time on that—and then they did! Rebirth Vincent was made especially for me.

All I really want now are more interactions between him and Cloud moving forward into FF7Re3, and I have a decent amount of faith that it’ll happen.

[ for the character breakdown ask game ]

howdoipost:

So i’ve been under s rock and missed ff vii rebirth! (Vincent! Yay!)


I have questions.

I get that Hojo is mad and all, but. Why did he dress Vincent tike that??? Why heavy decorated coffin and not literally anything else? That look hella expensive and hella.. lot of work on something you are ditching????

In og game Vincent was nearly cut out, and whole thing is there for aesthetic reasons, i get it. But rebirth???

Dirge pretty heavily indicates that Lucrecia dressed him like that, actually! He appears to be wearing his father’s clothes because Lucrecia had a problem.

In Rebirth they aren’t in such good repair—and in fact seem to have been patched together a bit here and there, the belts on his chest appear to have been put in to replace missing buttons, and you can literally see some hand-stitched seams on his mantle—but I assume it’s the same.

With that in mind, I think we can assume the rest of it is also Lucy’s doing, and Hojo just rolled with it after she “died”/disappeared/etc. Vincent has been awake on and off for about a year at the point we find him in Remake—according to BC, Veld woke Vincent in late ‘06 and said he’d be back, which explains why the room looks kinda lived-in—but I don’t see him spending that time sprucing up his tomb.

image

Okay. So. This literally means that Project G took place in 1976. Which means that the Ultimanias are actually even more wrong than I thought? If we assume that the series itself is always the better source (which we should), this means that the claim of all three Jenova babies being born in 1980 is completely 100% refuted by canon, directly and undeniably.

This takes place in 1992. Angeal is sixteen. That means he was born in 1976, not 1980 or 1977. Which means that CC and Rebirth’s retcons stating that the Jenova Project didn’t even start until July of 1977, when Jenova was allegedly “confirmed to be a Cetra” are entirely incorrect.

I mean, we already knew that was incorrect, given the timelines established by the majority of the series, not to mention the fact that Jenova’s headplate in AC literally says outright that she was discovered in 1959 and was interred in the Nibel Reactor in 1967. But if this is accurate, and Angeal is sixteen in 1992, that means Gast was literally lying intentionally in his notes in Nibelheim, which has been my headcanon since the CC date retcon. I kind of assumed the dates in the Shinra Manor library were his attempt to cover up the existence of the failure that was Project G—and this timeline could easily support that.

Also, again, this means the Jenova Project specimens were not born in 1980. None of them were. A four year difference when the elder person is sixteen years old is not “just a little older than you,” it’s a more than a quarter of both character’s entire lives.

certifieddragonenjoyer:

People interpreting Cloud as little more then a whiny edgleord seems to have mostly gone away with remake and rebirth but I always go crazy thinking about it because like. When I see people say that they always seem to be referring to his appearence in kh2 or otherwise a version of him based off advent children and it’s like yeah I guess you can say Cloud is whiny in the movie where his trauma recovery gets interrupted by shinra and jenova’s bs again and also him and his surrogate son contracting magical, incurable cancer. I can imagine that would make a man a little gloomy

I also like to point out to people that Advent Children takes place within a couple months of Cloud turning twenty-three, which is the age that Zack died. From that point on, he’s really and truly outliving him. He will experience more life than Zack did—and he’s got magical incurable cancer, which it turns out is the result of an energetic immune response to the overpowering pain of a dead man who almost destroyed the planet in his attempt make it pay for the crime of bringing him into the world in the first place.

I also feel like Cloud gets a pass for his behavior there. Just saying.

princeof-flowers:

getvalentined:

princeof-flowers:

Wonder if Vincent will ever sit and admit to himself that Lucrecia was not the idealized version of her that he’s kept in his memory. Wonder if he’ll ever unpack and unravel all her flaws and admit that yes, he did love her and always will in some part of him, but also admit that she really fucked up and hurt him in ways he now has to live with for the rest of his life.

Wonder if he’ll ever stop blaming himself for Sephiroth and realize that it was also Lucrecia’s fault and not just Hojo’s fault. Wonder if he’ll ever accept that it genuinely wasn’t his fault that she made the decision to use her baby as an experiment, that she ended up the way she did, that he ended up shot and killed and experimented on until he was brought back to life.

This is basically the main subplot of Dirge? That’s why it ends the way it does, with him thanking her for saving him and then (finally) leaving her behind. Closure for everyone!

I mean you’re right, I think that was the intended message there and it did feel like some sort of closure and means of Vincent like. Moving on from Lucrecia, but it also felt really lacking to me as well? Mightve been due to uh…how…Dirge wasn’t exactly the most well-written thing…

I thought it was really clear and solid, but also I got to basically go through it in Japanese with a friend translating first (the friend was playing it and giving me play-by-play via Livejournal posts for an indication of how long ago this was!), and I assume it’s significantly better in that format. As with most FF games.

The whole thing is that Vincent didn’t actually know that Lucrecia experimented on him at all—he found out when Shalua accidentally referred to him as one of Lucrecia’s “subjects,” because she’d never seen one before. Vincent straight up didn’t know what she was talking about. He found out about Lucrecia’s part in his own body horror extravaganza during the course of the game, which I’d imagine was a lot to process in the midst of an already stressful event.

His big showdown with Hojo, where Hojo explains that he’s the one that made Vincent’s body indestructible, thereby allowing Lucrecia to turn him into a demigod, kind of reads to me as the culmination of that whole realization for Vincent. Because that wasn’t her being manipulated and he knows it, his flickers of memory prove it. Hojo wasn’t even there for most of it, he wasn’t forcing her into it. She did this to him of her own free will, which means she did those things to her child of her own free will too, which means that his idea of her as a helpless victim at Hojo’s hands was inherently and undeniably incorrect.

So after he gets partially atomized and reconstitutes in the place that Chaos used to sleep, after Chaos’ consciousness has returned to the Lifestream and nonetheless left Vincent as the immortal vessel to its power, after he has undeniable confirmation that what Lucrecia did to keep him “alive” is going to keep him alive forever—he finally says goodbye. He thanks her one more time, because now he also knows that she was just trying to save him the way that he was trying to save her, and then he leaves her behind.

Lucrecia is gone at this point, the flickers left of her spirit are so eroded she’s barely ever even close to cognizant anymore, meaning Vincent is the only one who was there during the course of Project S that is still alive. He’ll have to deal with that, but he doesn’t have to feel like it’s all his fault anymore. The woman he loved—because he did love her, even if she didn’t love him the same way and even if he doesn’t love her anymore—did everything she could to save him.

It wasn’t his fault, and she never thought it was. He’s the only one that ever blamed himself for any of it. His condition isn’t a punishment, it’s the result of one desperate, brilliant woman’s heartbroken attempt at salvation. He may never truly blame her for her part in what was done to him, but he doesn’t have to blame himself for what happened to her, either.

Through Lucrecia’s sins, Vincent finds absolution, and in that absolution, he finally moves on. I think it’s a really good story.

I love when folks ask me Fandom Old questions and I get to be like “Yeah, uh, that’s from my old online RP group, no it’s not canon at all, yes we just made it up, no we did not claim it was canon but the mid to late aughts were a strange time.”

It’s honestly a shock to realize how often this has happened. I mentioned earlier that Reno’s fanon surname came from this same group, but that’s not even the half of it. I once made a bunch of screenshot manips based on the most ridiculous ships anyone could think of—someone slapped a random line of text onto one of them and to this day it’s used as a “cringe FF7 fandom” meme. I saw it on the twits a bit back and almost fell out of my goddamn chair.

If you’ve ever heard Scarlet referred to with the surname “West,” read about Tseng fighting with metal fans, seen Elena’s older sister being called Anna instead of Emma, come across Vincent portrayed as having a PhD in spite of being a Turk, or caught references somewhere to Grimoire experimenting on Vincent as a child, that started with this group. That was us.

One of the funniest examples of this, for me specifically, is that we don’t actually know which arm Veld is missing? The fandom generally goes with his left because that’s how I drew him in the first picture of the guy ever posted on devart way back in 2005, but it may very well be his right. I’ve seen people offer “proof” that it’s his right based on a scene in the opening cutscene, but you can’t tell there either, and with BC’s graphics there’s literally no way to tell on his sprite.

Hell, this year we found out everyone’s assumed timeline of the Kalm fire is wrong, and that’s our fault too because we made some assumptions about Felicia’s age for an LJ RP that were entirely wrong. She’s around Zack’s age, not Sephiroth’s! She’s old enough to run with a terrorist group in BC, but she was a child when Kalm burned, and that happened in 1997—we know this because NPCs in Rebirth literally refer to the fire in Kalm having happened “just ten years ago.” Veld has only had his prosthetic for three years when BC starts. (This also implies that, contrary to popular belief, Veld may actually be younger than Vincent. Vincent may have been the senior partner, and that’s why he was sent to Nibelheim alone while Veld was left at headquarters.)

We were really wrong on this! But we were working with what we had. There’s no canon evidence for the vast majority of these things (the most notable exclusion here is Vincent being educated) but we weren’t claiming there was. We were filling gaps, and canon was so sparse that we had a lot of gaps to fill. So if it turns out that Veld lost his right arm, then I’ll just have to start drawing him that way—because losing his left was never canon.

Tragically, there’s nothing any of us can do to make people stop assuming these things are canon at this point; there aren’t a lot of us still in the fandom, and it’s not like any of us have those old chatlogs anymore. People from this RP group have DIED since those days. It’s been over 20 years since most of us met, and around 15 since most of us were in a public fannish space together.

“Prove it,” people say, and I literally can’t. Do you know how many computers I’ve been through since then? 75% of the platforms we used no longer exist. This all started on a BBCode forum! There is no proof!

But…there’s no evidence any of these things are canon, either, so maybe think about that? The Kalm fire, Tseng’s weapon of choice, Veld’s arm, character surnames—none of these are retcons because there was no lore there to retcon. We made it up for our specific purposes, and it escaped containment in an era when there was really no way to do online contact tracing.

It’s just one of the weirdest feelings in the world to see younger folk arguing about A or B point in canon, about X or Y retcon—referencing something my friends and I thought up at like 10 o'clock at night on a now-defunct IM client in August of 2005, because we needed something to refer back to for a specific scene in an RP and the source material had nothing to offer.

Absolutely fucking bonkers.

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