Crisis Core Minerva Discussion

[The Witch]

I don't get Minerva... The hell is she? I mean, I know what she does in CC and I know all the basic information about her, but her existence makes no sense to me. She seems so out of place in VII's lore. She looks like xenosaga character with all of those robotic traits. Anyway, does anyone have any ideas about how she fits into the lore of the game? Crisis Core was pretty vague about it. She "revives" Genesis, she's summoned directly from the Lifestream (by her own will) instead of a Materia shard. I've seen some fans say she is the lifestream manifested in a human form and she follows the consciousness and will of the lifestream. In essence, the lifestream is Minerva, and Minerva is the lifestream. I've yet to look in my guidebooks about her (partly because I have no one to translate) but maybe some of you all can make sense of her.

To me, if she is a human manifestation of the lifestream, then does that mean the Lifestream will "transform" into that when it leaves the planet during a crisis? Because the Lifestream got to VII's planet via space travel. I assumed the lifestream traveled in gasly cloud formations of the sparkly green orbs, but if the lifestream can manifest into whatever shape it wants, then I guess that's how the lifestream did it... and that just sounds so stupid to me. Another thing is... her character design makes no sense to the lore of the game. Like I said, she looks like a roman robot or something. She's not dressed like the ancients/cetra people or anything close to it.

Why did the Lifestream choose that as its human manifestation? Is that the attire of the first civilizations (aka the ancients)? Because the ancients we come across in FFVII look like your run of the mill FF mages.

Doesn't she seem out of place to you all?

 

[Galadín]

I always assumed that Minerva was the Goddess whose gifts were infinitely mysterious. I saw her more as a context for LOVELESS which I always interpreted as some sort of prophecy rather than an actual play. Since Crisis Core has limited relevance to Final Fantasy VII, I also assumed Minerva's presence as Gaia's conscience was restricted to the contextual enactment of LOVELESS with perhaps no further reflection of the Lifestream.

Personally I like the fact that this aspect of Crisis Core isn't packaged up in a neat explanation. It makes the concept alluringly elusive and only invites individual interpretation.

 

[Dionysos]

Minerva is part of a new lore that they made up and added without really clarifying how she fits within the pre-existing lore of FFVII, I think.

Square-Enix were naturally making things up as they were going along with the FFVII Compilation. Loveless in the original FFVII game was just a poster in Midgar advertising the My Bloody Valentine album Loveless. You see it for a brief moment during an iconic scene with Aerith at the beginning of the game, and I guess that its placement during this scene had the result that a lot of people noticed it and started to talk about it. There are other posters of the album dotted about Midgar too.

So when Crisis Core came out Square-Enix decided to retcon Loveless and reimagine it as an in-game poem with the same relevance to people on that planet as Homer, Shakespeare, or the Bible is to people on our planet.

The Loveless poem relates to Minerva, and it does double as a prophecy (or at least Genesis believed so and acted to fulfil the prophecy). Minerva is interpreted as ‘The Goddess’ of the poem by Genesis, and he believes that Genesis, Sephiroth and Angeal are the three main characters of the poem.

That is Genesis’ interpretation, but as to who Minerva really is (if separate from The Goddess of the prophecy) I think it is ambiguous. If she really is an embodiment of the Lifestream then that seems to run counter to what we learn about the Lifestream in FFVII. Perhaps she is just a manifestation created by the Lifestream or the planet Gaia for some unknown purpose.

I can’t remember where I read it (perhaps even on this forum) but I remember reading a theory that Minerva is Gaia’s version of Jenova: a sort of cosmic entity which can represent the planet and if needed transfer the essence of the planet elsewhere. That’s pure speculation and I don’t believe that there is much to go on in the FFVII Compilation to shine light on Minerva (and there is still much we do not know about Jenova too!). (EDIT - Actually, isn't Omega Weapon in Dirge of Cerberus supposed to serve the function of becoming the Lifestream and blasting off to space to find a new home instead?)

I’d say she is just another superbeing created by the planet for the purposes of preserving the planet, like the Weapons. Perhaps she acts as an intermediary between the Lifestream and corporeal life, enabling the Lifestream to communicate more directly with people? I’m not sure.

Minerva’s namesake is the Roman goddess of warfare and wisdom though, and this will explain why she looks more like an anime interpretation of a Roman warrior goddess than a Cetra. The representations of the Cetra are fairly varied as well though. We have the Black Mage inspired character models of the Cetra, but we also see very Egyptianised Cetra on the wall decorations of the Temple of the Ancients. I feel that there isn’t a concrete image of what the Cetra looked like, and there were perhaps a diverse variety of subgroups of Cetra.

 

[ZaXo Ken'Ichi]

Minerva is a deus ex machina which completely contradicts the original game, because there is no logical reason why she shouldn't have appeared when Sephiroth and Meteor were such a threat. Other than that, what you said basically is all the info I've found as well, and I'm not sure there is too much more than that.