Lordy, Lordy!

[shatteredvanity]

This subject matter has been meticulously avoided...

But hey- here it is in hopes of having a go.

Sephiroth says that as a boy, he was “Different from the other children.” What other children? As Shin-Ra’s most valuable asset, and the soul variable (at the time) for the Jenova project, what other children was he around? Did they drop him off at

Comments

[glacial_phoenix]

I always thought that Vincent assumed he was Sephiroth's father, myself. Though either way I suspect he would go "...!" Perhaps as a form of revelation, or perhaps because he's speechless that Hojo would boast about his paternity.

And I rather imagine that Sephiroth had a very bleak childhood; being the son of Hojo is no joke. Hojo's mad; he's obsessed with Jenova and with besting Gast, as evidenced by the fact that he actually tells Sephiroth that Jenova's his mother. Normal parents wouldn't name their kid Sephiroth - that's a name that carries a lot of connotations, and you'd have to be pretty ambitious to name your child Sephiroth. (Okay, so you wouldn't name your son Cloud either, but coming from someone called Myst, it just sounds bad.)

But Hojo's ambitious, isn't he? He wanted the perfect soldier, the ultimate soldier, and so he'd attempt to craft his own child that way through any means necessary. Cloud already mentions that Sephiroth's strength is unreal all the way in the first disc. It doesn't matter if it's his memories or Zack's - at least one of them has witnessed him fight as the SOLDIER General. And if they're Zack's memories and a SOLDIER First Class tells you that the General has unreal strength - well, you could put it down to JENOVA cells since he was a foetus in Lucrecia's womb. Which means that Hojo isn't likely to have left Sephiroth alone for a day without various experiments or testing to see how his body coped with the JENOVA cells, and given the man's obsession, he would have regarded other children as being inferior to his son and even tainted. I think he pretty much stuck Sephiroth in the laboratory for the duration of his childhood in order to craft him into this image of a perfect soldier.

No wonder poor Sephiroth feels isolated in the Nibelheim reactor; he's been singled out and set under scrutiny, and he can't even attempt to blend in because of his striking physical characteristics - nobody else in the game has silver hair.

[yrena]

Sephiroth probably grew up for the first few years of his life in Nibelheim, he says it was familiar in Cloud's first flashback.
There would be children there, but it'd be early enough for Sephiroth not to remember where he was.

But if he was in a lab all of his childhood, why wouldn't he have gone crazy with knowing he was an experiment then, when he became and adult and knew better? He probably just spent a lot of time with Hojo, but not enough to make him suspicious. At least not yet.

[glacial_phoenix]

He didn't know he was an experiment when he grew up, I think. For him to know that he was an experiment - that would entail telling him a lot about his family past.

Children can be tricked quite easily sometimes, especially if they've known nothing else, can't they? Hojo could've simply told him that they were just tests to see how he was; and if there were any side-effects of the Mako and JENOVA he could even have said that whatever tests he administered would make the side-effects go away.

But Sephiroth in Nibelheim said that his mother was JENOVA and that he didn't know who his father was. In fact, the way I see it, he actually wants to find out about his past because nobody knows and the only ones who do can't or won't tell him. Besides, you don't ask about your General's past, not when he's a guy with unreal strength and a superb swordsman to boot. Also, most of the information pertaining to him would have either been wiped or been kept in the Shinra Mansion's secret basement in Nibelheim.

Which is where he found out that he was an experiment and pretty much did go mad. The only reason why he was sane before that was because he was permanently kept in the dark. It would have been highly classified information, and Hojo's not likely to divulge it.