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.