#and the message the writers THINK they're conveying is extremely often not the one they're actually conveying. which is always fun :)

[ardentpoop]

hey. hello. are you getting this. is it obvious enough yet.

[altocat]

I wouldn’t put this in the tag, but why do certain people in this fandom get so mad when Seph gets any form of humanization so much?? Keeping a bunch of his background a mystery is a reasonable request absolutely, but why is it so bad to see him emote and have connections and deal with shit before his downfall?

Why is it so bad to add to the subtle and delicate writing that surrounds his “fallen angel” arc? I mean, do people want a smirky, one-dimensional villain forever? (Not that he ever was one-dimensional anyway but apparently some think he was).

No villain should just be evil for no reason, and if we want their reasons to be a little mysterious, that is entirely able to be done without stripping them of their emotions or tragedy. Everyone’s favorite villains have carefully crafted downfalls and often there is tragedy and misunderstanding involved.

Seph is an absolutely iconic villain and deserves more of this treatment. He is frankly, overdue for some humanization that isn’t bound to the limits of an older game like Crisis Core that often suffered from a lack of deeper exposition or elaboration. He’s earned it after being a terrifying, mysterious villain for so long.

Just a touch of it doesn’t ruin anything. The writers seem to be treating it with care and delicacy so far, which is good. That’s what we need.

Anyway, sorry for the rant. Twitter is getting on my nerves because people are saying things like “He better just stay crazy and enjoy burning shit for no reason.” and accusing people that disagree of “not actually being a true fan of the character.” (As if Crisis Core didn’t already make him more sympathetic!!)

(I’m also not using his full name so that this doesn’t show up in anyone’s search results if you don’t want to draw any contention. Cheers).

Pure evil villains are boring, unless it's full camp or they're having fun and it's delicious to watch.

I think people aren't paying attention to context. This isn't CURRENT Sephiroth, this is Sephiroth as a child. If he was always evil and always sadistic, it would take away a lot of the message the original game was trying to convey with him--Sephiroth is the product of SHINRA, the product of immoral ethics, war, and greed. Sephiroth was a normal baby given abnormal enhancement, shoved into extremely traumatic rules and expectations, and subsequently loses everything that ever made him human in a mad quest for revenge and control. To say Sephiroth was evil from the moment he was born is a HUGE disservice to his character, and his story as a whole. Sephiroth is a monster. But he is the monster Shinra created.

Now do I think Sephiroth should be redeemed? No, probably not. It's not about his journey back into the light, it's about his descent into darkness. That's what makes his character interesting. For the record, I don't want them to woobie him either. Part of the reason I find those Disney Remakes insufferable is how they take fun villains (Cruella, Maleficent) and try to make them all weepy and sympathetic. THOSE are villains where being pure evil works. It's entertaining. Their evilness is infectious. They're chewing the scenery and it's great. They're nasty little shits and they ENJOY it and they're cartoony enough to where you don't have to take it seriously. Sephiroth is a completely different beast, with an actual message to his story.

I've always found serious pure-evil villains completely uninteresting because there's no layers to them. No pathos. No depth. Part of having a good villain is looking into their eyes and seeing something of yourself in there. YOU could be that. YOU could become that. These are moral lessons for adults as they try to navigate a confusing and unfriendly world. You shouldn't turn into this because, in the end, succumbing to anger and hate ISN'T good. It ISN'T healthy. And these villains, at the end of the day, are extremely unhappy people who bring about their own destruction. You lose that when they're just a smirking sadistic killing machine. It's an empty husk that just exists for the heroes to defeat. I'd like to think that Sephiroth is more than that, and has always been more than that.

Anyway, rant over. Twitter is dumb, hence why I'm not on it. I'll agree with them if the Remake Trilogy attempts at a redemption arc and it's clumsy and unjustified. But this? A tragic Seph backstory was always a given when you look at the lore. So long as they go about it in a balanced morally gray way, it fits very well with his character.

[maryellencarter]

So there's this trope I don't like, and I think I may have finally figured out why.

(It may have a name on TVtropes. I'd be interested to find out.)

So the trope goes thusly. There is a Team. It either does not have an official leader or has been operating without one. It is often, but not always, a ragtag band of misfits thrown into a Situation.

On the Team, there is a Perfectionist. I've only ever seen this trope done with male characters, so the Perfectionist is a he/him in my head and I'm not going to be bothered to edit to they/them throughout, but I'm also really curious if this shows up as a female character archetype and how it differs.

Anyway, the Perfectionist is extremely smart / knowledgeable / skilled, very driven, holds himself and everyone around him to super high standards. At the beginning of the story or the Situation, he's generally the de facto team leader and respected or at least deferred to by most of the others.

There is also an Other Person. This person can take any form, depending on the writer's cultural values and the lesson they would like to teach. I'm thinking of a couple of specific examples, one is an extremely shy bookish child with zero confidence, another is an impulsive himbo. The Perfectionist finds this person very annoying, for a specific reason -- they're too hotheaded, too slow-thinking, whatever; this also is determined by the Lesson to be taught.

(There is furthermore a Rest Of The Team, usually at least two or three other people. For this trope, their only purpose is to exist and need leadership.)

So! The Team is thrown into the Situation. Circumstances eventuate. At some point, the Perfectionist fucks up -- makes the wrong call, gets injured, has a complete mental breakdown and becomes functionally a piece of luggage -- specifically his perfectionism fails him. He stops being perfect or demonstrates that he isn't perfect enough, and this loses him the trust and respect of the Rest Of The Team.

Enter the Other Person. Whatever traits the Perfectionist found most annoying about them are exactly what's needed to save the day! The Rest Of The Team promptly and happily transfers allegiance to the newly realized Destined Leader, and the rest of the Situation runs smoothly, either with the eventual grudging acceptance and cooperation of the Perfectionist (if he gets to learn the Lesson about what qualities are actually valuable along with the audience), or just dragging his now-useless ass along with them.

Tiny JT hated the fuck out of this trope and couldn't articulate why.

As we been knew, of course, I am (or have a strong tendency to be) exactly this kind of hardassed overeducated perfectionist with knowledge applicable to many Situations. I also am (or can be, or was as a small child) a loudly confident extrovert with strong opinions about how to do things.

The message of this kind of story is, I think, *supposed* to be directed at the unconfident or impulsive or whatever-else child who has the supposedly underappreciated characteristics of the Other Person, to teach them that they have value and mustn't allow themselves to be squelched by hardassed perfectionists.

The messages it actually conveys are, approximately, "Perfectionists are annoying everybody hates you" and also "You're doomed to be a fuckup no matter how hard you try" but also "If you just manage to be perfect *enough* and be adaptable to enough Situations and never fuck up then people might like you and respect you" and also "Be very wary of anyone else close to your level because they might be the Destined Leader and fuck you over".

As a matter of fact, I'm a crappy leader, and an even worse teacher. And those *are* to do with me being this type of perfectionist, but not in the way the trope says.

I'm a crappy leader because I know I'm right. I know exactly what to do in a Situation, which is a completely different skillset from being able to communicate to the Rest Of The Team *why* we need to take this approach to the Situation. (Plus, most people who make up a Rest Of The Team in real life *also* think they're the Destined Leader and know exactly what to do in the Situation. It's extremely rare to have more than at most one person on a ragtag band of misfits who actually wants to take direction. This is a big problem in any natural disaster.)

I'm a terrible teacher, both because I'm a genius with a freakishly good memory so I don't have much personal experience with the same kinds of learning struggles as most people, and because I just don't really grok *not* being intensely driven to excel.

You could tell a story about a Perfectionist who learns how to appreciate and even defer to a Leader with better communication skills, or better empathy skills, or even just the ability to lower their standards when having higher ones isn't actively helpful.

You could tell a story about someone like this learning to accept that they're not good at leadership, that they don't even enjoy it, that there's a *place* for them that doesn't have to be on top of the heap -- that they don't actually lose their entire worth or their ability to be respected if they lose that position. That their options aren't just "take charge" or "be a worthless piece of luggage until you learn to submit to someone you consider incompetent on the basis of their past actions".

You could. Hypothetically. I've never seen it done.