What can I say about the Jenova Project? What was the point? Why put my son through so much, why kill so many, overlook the suffering of more?
The promised land? That was bullshit all along, and I think Shinra thought so too. He clung to the spectre of immortality the way children cling to their parents.
The SOLDIERs? No. They were a means to an end, not an end in themselves. Even Sephiroth, he could have been the end, the pinnacle, but he was not.
Science? Science is a tool to get somewhere. It was the way, and the way is only the reason and the destination if you’re a Wutaian philosopher.
No, the project was about perfection: restoring it to Jenova, and finding ascension through her. You can tell me it was insane, to seek enlightenment through mutation, but humanity is a limited species. By intermingling with it, the Cetra had limited themselves. Short of thousands of years of selective breeding — and even Ifalna was not as pure a stock as she seemed to like to think — the Cetran genetics were so dissipated as to be useless. The answer was the other extreme, Jenova, the Truth from the Stars.
(I don’t think it was an accident Ifalna chose to read that word as “crisis” instead of truth.)
Jenova was a new god, sent to us to change us. Sephiroth was her messiah, her son, and it was through him I understood that we had to die to become, die to humanity, die to the limitations we thought were insurmountable.
