#protagonist claudia strife au

[tossawary]

I keep bouncing off of watching playthroughs of Final Fantasy VII, because while there's stuff there that I really like (I know the broad strokes of the plot), I am just not vibing with the voice acting / dialogue style in the Remake and the original is mostly just text so I can't listen to it while I'm working. (I watched my way through the original yeaaaaars ago, so I'm due for a proper refresher.)

Anyway! With the disclaimer that I don't 100% know what I'm talking about: I think one of the absolute funniest potential "Sephiroth is saved" Canon Divergence AUs + "Sephiroth / Original (Audience Insert) Character" AUs would be an AU where Sephiroth gets together with Cloud's Mom.

On the Nibelheim mission, the plot forces Cloud back home for some reason, then Cloud is forced to introduce Sephiroth and Zack to his mom for whatever reason. I've seen some fics where Cloud's Mom was a teen single mom, so this woman could still be in her thirties, and even if she was older... Uh, there are arguments to be made here about Sephiroth being into a MILF. There definitely might be something resembling "mommy issues" among his many other "being a super soldier experiment from birth and later an actual child soldier" issues.

Zack, watching Sephiroth quietly hit it off with Cloud's very pretty Mom: "What... what is happening right now?"

Proceed in this Canon Diverence AU to orchestrate scenarios in which Sephiroth ends up not getting sufficiently close to the last straw that is Jenova for some reason. Some reason being partially that he's too busy flirting with / hooking up with Cloud's Mom. Sephiroth needs (excuse the pun) a fucking break. Poor Cloud Strife does NOT know what to make of his childhood hero / current boss sliding into the beginnings of a step-dad position. What the hell.

[tossawary]

I'm fascinated by little overlaps of character experiences in a timeline. In "Final Fantasy 7" as I vaguely remember it, Sephiroth is born in Shinra Manor in Nibelheim. The house has a secret basement laboratory, but people can't really spend months locked inside a house without losing it, so there must have been SOME interaction between the scientists in the manor and the people of the local village.

Like, they would have needed to get food somehow? And Shinra could be delivering all of their food by helicopter or something once a week, among other supplies, sure, but it's also possible that they might have had their food delivered through the village. Over the months or years that they were there, someone must have gone out drinking at the local pub or gone out to buy cigarettes at least once. There are different levels of lockdown that all seem feasible. It's possible that the situation was chill enough that Shinra employees might have semi-regularly gone out to eat dinner in town and simply not talked about what they were working on while out and about (Project S / the Jenova Project).

According to the wiki, Cloud is 21 during FF7, which means he was 17ish during the Nibelheim mission, I think? Some additional materials somewhere suggest that Cloud's Mom was only THIRTY-THREE (33) when she died, so I'm putting him at 17 because that means she would have been 16 when he was born. Which, depending on how old Sephiroth is exactly (wiki puts him at 25-30ish during FF7, which means he's probably 21-26ish during the Nibelheim mission), means that Claudia Strife would have been 7-12 years old in Nibelheim when Sephiroth was born.

It's perfectly possible that Claudia Strife at some point met Vincent Valentine, Hojo, or even a heavily pregnant Lucretia. She was supposedly a precocious girl with big dreams (before apparently becoming a teen mom), so she might have tried to hang around Shinra Manor at some point, and, idk, Vincent on his smoke break might have casually told her to fuck off for her own good. If the Project S people stayed in Shinra Manor for several years, it's very possible that one of the security guards or someone else there might be Cloud's father, who slept with a 15yo local and eventually left when he got sick of rural life. In which case, Claudia Strife might even have had the motivation to belatedly try to record who was at Shinra Manor and when, as part of an effort to find and contact her baby's deadbeat dad again.

(It's also possible that Cloud's Mom paid zero attention to any of the Shinra people back then and knows nothing about them, of course. Small towns are small, but also, sometimes you do the smart thing and just don't go poking around the mysterious corporate compound on the edge of town. That's just none of her business.)

Anyway, I think it's funny that Sephiroth is trying to figure out the secrets of his past, and they (Sephiroth, Zack, Cloud) could have potentially easily learned both Lucretia Crescent and Vincent Valentine's names if Zack had had one (1) conversation with Cloud's Mom. Claudia Strife was around back then as an adventurous young girl! She might honestly know a little something! Cloud, go home and talk to your mother!