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servantofsadako-blog1 · 7 years

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while it’s cool to think of cloud gaining wings or stuff due to jenova cell’s influence, i hardly see anyone addressing the one special ability that cloud did manifest (that the only other person who did show it being sephiroth).

memory access.

from what we saw in the og, cloud can have access to other people’s memories from these two examples:

1. zack’s role in the nibelheim incident: cloud remembers things that he wasn’t there for so clearly, meaning that he, at one point, had access to zack’s memories before his death (or after? maybe the target doesn’t need to be alive for this to work?) and took enough to patch his role in nibelheim in a way he could cope with.

2. when tifa saw him at the train station: before he saw tifa, i believe cloud was a blank slate. he could walk (not steadily, but enough to make him reach midgar), he had zack’s memories of nibelheim, but he had no personality he could operate with. when he saw tifa walking by, he accessed her memories and based his personality on what she remembered him as and got up no sweat after he was just a heap leaning on the train, to the extent tifa believed he was cloud (luckily, he was in this case but still). you never see tifa say ‘you changed, cloud’ in game, just the opposite really, meaning his mimicking was perfect.

so the first example shows that cloud can access memories of events he wasn’t personally there for. the second example shows that cloud can mimic the personality of anyone based on the memories of the people who knew them.

ifalna said that jenova approached the cetra as a friend, deceived them, and finally gave them the virus. while cloud can’t shape-shift the way sephiroth can, he can still mimic anyone he wished if he tried. he could know anyone’s hidden secrets and kept memories by a glance.

it’s creepy. and kinda neat.

OH BOY I HAVE A LOT TO SAY ABOUT THIS!

Lemme just preface this by saying that the whole mindreading thing has never been my favorite part of the game… I honestly just like to ignore it because it’s only ever mentioned in passing and literally never explained satisfactorily in the OG and pretty much dropped completely from every other part of the canon. Both Advent Children and Crisis Core, which had every opportunity to expand upon it with their three - count ‘em - three Jenova babies EACH didn’t so much as mention it… the only place we see something that’s even close come up again is in DOC with Shelke’s Synaptic Net Diving ability…

So… if I were to hazard a guess at how Jenova’s mindreading powers work, I’d have to base it somewhat off of that… I think you mentioned before that you hadn’t played DOC so I’ll try my best to explain how this works (honestly this wasn’t explained exceptionally well in-game either, and it’s been a LONG time since I last played Dirge so if there’s anyone out there whoknows better feel free to correct me). What Shelke’s Synaptic Net Dives seem to be is a kind of combination clairvoyance/astral projection that allows her to see and minimally interact with people and things at a distance by travelling through the energy fields that power those things.

I say energy fields because I think the original purpose of this ability was to allow her to interact directly with stored data in a computer or other electronical devices (not sure why that was a necessary skill, but given the fact that Hojo was apparently able to upload his entire consciousness into a Deepground server from on top of the Sister Ray, even if I’m remembering this wrong the fact remains that this technology exists) so long as they are connected in some way (I dunno if they have to be hardwired or if Shelke can EMail her brain to people using wifi or what).

At the end of DOC Shelke performs an SND that takes her inside another lifeform/construct of the planet - Omega. If she could do this - literally send a piece of herself into another living being in order to peek at its insides (and potentially its thoughts, or the thoughts of anyone else she might do this to, seeing as brains are themselves just giant squishy balls of eletrical signals), we can assume that Jenova’s ability to do so probably functions on similar lines. Considering that Shelke was not connected to Omega during her final SND, nor does Omega have a functioning wifi router lodged somewhere in its body, it follows that the energy field she used to access it was the lifestream itself.

Jenova, given her absolutely massive amount of power (enough to wield meteor magic singlehandedly), was probably able to perform her mindreading abilities (and possibly also her shapeshifting abilities) out of sheer force of will alone, manipulating the lifestream directly in order to glean whatever information (genetic or memetic) she needed from the people she interacted with. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Jenova had the ability to do this on a worldwide scale - being able to read the thoughts or shift herself into the form of anyone at all, at anytime, anywhere on the planet (allowing of course for the time it would take to find the specific person she wanted). If her powers weren’t this widespread, how else would you explain the call of Reunion, where she drew Cloud (and the other clones) to her from all the way across the world. (Alternatively, it’s possible that the call of Reunion is a lower-grade power, and that’s what allows it to function on a global scale, while her other abilities must be somewhat more localized… but either way I think their radius of effect is probably still pretty terrifyingly huge). It’s just one of the lovely dangers that comes along with everyone literally being directly connected to everyone else via 'The Force’ - you get one bad apple in there and the infection spreads so quickly (as seen by Jenova’s extermination of the Ancients, as well as geostigma which we have a confirmation was purely spread by the flow of the lifestream and not by any other means of contact or exposure).

In order to SND, Shelke required a decade of rigorous training and numerous modifications made to her body and mind. She also requires the use of assistive technology to allow her to 'jack in’ to whatever she is interacting with. If memory serves, she and the other Tsviets (some of them anyway, I think Weiss and Nero might be exceptions to this rule) were given their superhuman powers primarily through exosure to Genesis’ DNA. This makes Shelke part of Jenova’s legacy - but only indirectly.

Basically, Shelke is a second generation Jenova Soldier, and that, to me, explains why she required such specialization in her training (she’s not a bad fighter and she’s got a pretty boss Shield materia, but her skills with SND so far exceed her skills with combat that after she locates Vincent the other Tsviets deem her to be no longer necessary and try to kill her), why it took so much out of her to learn and use her ability (she’s four-foot-nothing and looks like a ten-year-old because using her skill was so exhausting that her body didn’t even have the energy to make her grow, and suffers frequent fainting spells on top of this), as well as why she required the mechanical supports to successfully SND.

Genesis - her next closest 'relative’ up the Jenova family line never once shows himself capable of clairvoyance/astral projection/mindreading. Even Sephiroth does not exhibit these abilities until AFTER he gets tossed into the lifestream and loses his physical form (or at least the bottom half of it). To me this seems to suggest that not all of Jenova’s numerous powers transfer to her descendents as easily, or as equally - super strength? check. wing? check. mindreading? maybe a grain of potential for this existed in the Sephiroth/Genesis/Angeal generation, but it certainly wasn’t a skill they were instructed to hone, or possibly even made aware of at all (I think anyone in their right mind - or even Hojo despite certainly not being in his right mind - would be terrified at the thought of a living Sephiroth capable of mindreading or limited mind control).

As for Cloud’s apparent but unexplained proficiency for it… well like I said, I like to ignore this part of the game. There’s not really a solid reason given for why Cloud can perform this superhuman feat. I like to think of it (headcanon warning) more as a misidentification of what’s happening. Avalanche has been told that Jenova has the ability to mindread and Cloud in all his lack of self-confidence and willingness to name Tifa his savior in this situation probably assumes there was no way he could have pulled himself together in that moment after everything that happened and decides it must have been Jenova’s mindreading that brought him back to consciousness. I’d argue that the reason he’s so like the Cloud Tifa rembers from her childhood is actually a result of some degree of regression on Cloud’s part due to trauma, and Tifa’s own not-so-stellar memory. But again, that’s just me.

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