Hi! Question for you, fellow writing friend: how do YOU get into the Jenova Mind Set (tm)?
Oooooooh Jenova! Heck yeah! Evil step mom. Mother Dearest. Soccer mom without the soccer. That’s always such interesting territory! >:3c Your Jenova stories are SO insanely good!!! So perfectly twisted and spooky and always capture the looming, icky presence that makes mumsy who she is.
So! For me, when it comes to Jenova, her aura gets split down the middle depending on the tone of the fic. In complete crack/stupid Nibelheim fix-it settings, she’s usually just a device to lure Sephiroth to the basement—not much of a full character—and is really only made known through bold/italics saying her generic, programmed things (Hello, my son, now it’s independent reading time). Head is pretty empty writing her this way! Hardly intimidating and easily shooed away, and barely any description too. She’s usually the butt of the joke getting flicked off. Then just kinda gives up. Eh. Next mentally unstable experiment.
Now on the OTHER hand…. there’s Jenova. The dangerous, horrid, calamitous organism who eradicated an entire race through infecting her prey, poisoning each and every Cetra, who shifted her amorphous figure to confuse/manipulate their crippling, infected minds and turn them against their loved ones, and whose cells course through Sephiroth’s blood. This is my preferred side >:3c. Because I love CC Sephiroth and of all his kind humanness, I am very stubborn to let this side go, and this leads to me crafting Jenova as someone with a complete autonomous mind, and pretty much frame her as being a puppet master with cellular mind-control abilities. She’s much more than just a voice in Sephiroth’s head nudging him towards his insanity; she’s furious at humanity for sealing her away, and she’s gonna make sure Sephiroth helps her enact her revenge (and, y’know, munching on planet debris while she’s at it).
Getting into the true Ellen Ripley mode takes some lights off and some dramatic music, but the premise of her bringing a steering wheel to Sephiroth’s mind is just so fun to me that I’m usually so eager to write anything to do with it! x3 With her presence being so consuming and real now, I love taking full advantage of her overall horrific concept and diving headfirst into that nastiness—mind games and all. Writing Jenova slowly breaking into Sephiroth’s car is a blast, and I’ll usually tackle it by making her pry out his worst, most vulnerable memories and bring them to the surface. She doesn’t just spew the generic come to me stuff anymore. She’s hitting Sephiroth where it hurts most. Making those emotions so severe and tumultuous that they consume him: Genesis, Angeal, Gast… they abandoned him. Traitors. Jenova will pounce in the moment Sephiroth begins to succumb and accept those feelings, shoving him out of the front seat and plugging in her keys (ok enough with this car analogy). Once she has him where she wants him, she’ll whisper into something much more hypotonic, whispering kind, loving reassurances into his ears… and all of a sudden Sephiroth wants nothing more than to burn humanity to the ground. They locked up Mother… kept them separated for so, so long—and then those inferior, wretched dullards became the dominant species.
Jenova offers a whole lot of imagery too, and there’s so much room for horrific description >:3 She won’t just get into Sephiroth’s mind; she will claw her way in, rake her nails against the surface of his skull, stab into his mind, her cellular pull pulling the blood in Sephiroth’s body and making it crash against his skin, make his veins throb, making it feel like they’re being torn from his skin and into her… er… tentacles. Lots of adjectives and verbs to describe her: slimy, oily, slithering, squirming~ So much fun to add Jenova into any equation! She’s a real party person!
Oh! I also capitalize her pronoun bc powerful space entity.
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academic bias is so funny because you’ll be reading about the same historical event and one person is like “Despite the troubles that befell his homeland and near constant criticism of the court King Blorbo remained strong in the face of adversity” and the other one is like “after letting his people carry the brunt of his cringefail decisions Blorbo the Shitface refused to listen to any reason and continued to be a warmongering piece of shit. Also he was ugly.”
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you're in the habit of denying yourself things.
if someone asked you directly, you would say that you love a little treat. you like iced coffee and getting the cookie. you drink juice out of a fancy cup sometimes, and often do use your candles until they gutter out helplessly.
but you hesitate about buying the 20 dollar hand mixer because, like. you could just use your arms. you weren't raised rich. you don't get to just spend the 20 dollars (remember when that could cover lunch?), at least - you don't spend that without agonizing over it first, trying to figure out the cost-benefits like you are defending yourself in front of a jury. yes, this rice cooker could seriously help you. but you do know how to make stovetop rice and it really isn't that hard. how many pies or brownies would you actually make, in order to make that hand mixer worthwhile?
what's wild is that if the money was for a friend, it would already be spent. you'd fork over 40 without blinking an eye, just to make them happy. the difference is that it's for you, so you need to justify it.
and it sneaks in. you ration yourself without meaning to - you don't finish the pint of ice cream, even though you want to. the next time you go to the store, you say ah, i really shouldn't, and then you walk away. you save little bits of your precious things - just in case. sometimes you even go so far as putting that one thing in your shopping cart. and then just leaving it there, because maybe-one-day, but not right now, there's other stuff going on.
you do self-care, of course. but you don't do it more than like, 3 days in a row. after that it just feels a little bit over-the-edge. like. you can't live in decadence, the economy is so bad right now, kid.
so you don't buy the rice cooker. you can-and-will spend the time over the stove. you can withstand the little sorrows. denial and discipline are practically synonyms. and you're not spoiled.
it's just - it's not always a rice cooker. sometimes it is a person or a job or a hug. sometimes it is asking for help. sometimes it is the summer and your college degree. sometimes it is looking down at scabbed knees and feeling a strange kind of falling, like you can't even recognize the girl you used to be. sometimes it is your handprint looking unsteady.
sometimes it is tuesday, and you didn't get fired, and you want to celebrate. but what is it you like, even? you search around your little heart and come up empty. you're so used to denying that all your desires draw a blank.
oh fuck. see, this is the perfect opportunity. if you had a mixer, you'd make a cake.
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So I'm leaving work and something darts in front of me, maybe 10ft away, too fast for me to see what it is. Peek around the tree blocking my path and I see this
Just like... a whole ass hawk. Dude's gotta be about 1.5ft tall. Massive fucking bird. And it's just staring me straight in my soul like this, even as I try to move ahead. It didn't budge. And there's only this path back to my car unless I want to walk on a busy highway. So I have the option of Death By Raptor or Death By Truck.
So I walk in the poison ivy filled patch off the sidewalk. Guy still isn't moving. Still staring me directly in the eyes. And I do this thing when animals are behaving strangely where I'll talk to them, so I'm just like, "Hey, man. I don't know you. You don't know me. This feels really threatening. I'm just trying to get to my car, dude. Can I get some space please? You're a big fucking bird. I see those claws. You could kill me right now, but I'd appreciate if you didn't, ok?"
It didn't move until I was about 2ft away. Again: I'm as far from it as I can be without walking into the street. It clearly wasn't going to budge. I walk past, thing flies up (silent, btw. Scary) and lands on a brick wall a little further ahead
Anyway. Weird guy. Nearly shit my pants when I noticed a bird big enough to carry off a fully grown cat was just... there, staring me in the face, unwilling to move away from me, a human, something it should see as a threat. I watched behind me the whole rest of the way to my car, just in case this bird decided to help me shed this mortal coil. 10/10 experience. Super cool guy.
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an angle i enjoy in cosmic/eldritch horror is when, instead resorting to the old classic "the horrors being so incomprehensible that they break your brain and drive you mad" cliché, the premise is that in comprehending the horrors you are so changed by the experience that your new state is indistinguishable to an outside observer from madness. you comprehend the unknowable just fine, but actually communicating that to anyone else is impossible because they just don't have the mental framework required to understand it. the eldritch horrors don't drive you mad. what does is the ordinary everyday horror of finding yourself isolated, ridiculed and doubted at every turn, no matter how hard you try to make yourself heard and understood.
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