When you realize Seph was so sleep deprived, aching, and mentally destroyed that he completely forgot he once had a photograph of his own mother and believed that a grey-skinned Ursula with an eye on its breast brought him into this world instead
I know I know- he prolly thought everything was a lie at this point and most definitely discarded everything Hojo once told/gave him. But it really does make you think how the logical part of Sephiroth鈥檚 brain was just completely shut down like a fast food restaurant caught with a rat problem
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adam back at it again with the banger memes
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Thinking about Vincent's involvement in the Queen's Blood storyline and how it's the perfect explanation for everything going south with the game in fairly recent history even though the game has canonically been around for decades. It's genuinely so clever, I'm in love.
So, for anyone who hasn't done the full questline, Vincent is the highest ranking Queen's Blood player in the entire game prior to facing off against the Shadowblood Queen herself and the completion of the questline. (After this, ranks are adjusted worldwide because of game mechanics; Nanaki is rank 10 in the QB Arena at Gold Saucer.)
A lot of people have poked fun at this, like Vincent apparently learned the game really fast and was just naturally really good at it鈥攂ut no, actually, Vincent played the game before. He's this good because he was champion level back in the 70s, back when he was human.
We know this to be the case because when you match against Lidrehl, he says "the Emerald Witch sleeps in Nibelheim with a monster of chaos, and that is where it will remain." This means that Vincent already had the card when Hojo killed him. It's not clear how the Emerald Witch came into his possession, but you don't make his rank without being a very active player, so it's clear that he was very prolific in the scene back then!
And back then, it was just a game. No mysterious deaths or disappearances. The myth of the Shadowblood Queen and the Emerald Witch was still there, as Lidrehl developed the game based on the story, but everything was fine.
This is definitely because Vincent was active in the scene, and he had the Emerald Witch. The Rebirth Ultimania implies that the Shadowblood Queen is a piece of Jenova (which I thought was pretty obvious since she calls Cloud a "puppet" and he's also apparently the only one capable of facing her head-on), and the Emerald Witch is the soul of a Cetra that serves as the silent warden to her imprisonment within the game. (Imprisoning monsters in cards is not new to the series, either, since FF8 literally allowed players to turn monsters into cards rather than fighting them.) Vincent being so active in the circuit allowed him to spread the Emerald Witch's influence through the scene and kept the Shadowblood Queen quiet, reminded her to keep her head down, kept her from trying anything at risk of being spiritually shitmixed again.
But then Hojo killed Vincent, and the Cetra warden Emerald Witch was in his deck, and that deck was tucked away with his things in Nibelheim. And so she spent thirty years unable to perform her ongoing duty to assure the safety of the planet. This time allowed Jenova the Shadowblood Queen to regain the power and confidence to manifest and start wreaking havoc again, finally building up enough strength to directly possess her current holder鈥攄uring the period that Sephiroth is calling for Reunion, which presumably helped to really draw her back to full consciousness.
There's a whole detailed storyline here that makes perfect sense, with Vincent's murder literally being the catalyst leading to the resurrection of the Shadowblood Queen, and Hojo never having a clue what he'd done.
This is super interesting to me not only because it actually showed some of the more far-reaching consequences of Vincent's death, but also because it indicates that Hojo has unwittingly been Jenova's most loyal emissary for decades. He gave her his wife, his son, himself鈥攁nd the first murder he ever committed served to imprison the only power holding a piece of her thought lost to history at bay, allowing her to manifest decades later with her own will and personality completely intact, something that she can't do through Sephiroth.
As it turns out, Hojo and Vincent have been opposing forces in supporting fate's "chosen ones," the forces around them capable of choosing the final fate of the planet, for much longer than either of them ever thought.
Still not a huge fan of the card game itself, but I adore the way it's been woven into the story, and strengthened it as a result.
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ok, you know what?- ffxivs your ffvii-
lucrecia, hojo, and vincent........or are they?
this one's called halcyon days and can technically be thought of as a side entry to the WoL stories. full explanations and such may never be necessary though, but little references to them will probably be made in future installments
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