| The Cetra Diaspora |
[Mar. 27th, 2009|12:42 pm] |
This is based off of the original planning I did here. That needs, of course, massive updating since I wrote it over a year ago, but the basics are there.
This post mainly accounts for why the Cetra reach the point of no return and lose viability...or interbreed with humans so much that they loose their 'Cetra'-ness.
The thing with the Cetra in general is odd; it's never made clear if they wandered Gaia settling (and thus were native to the planet) or wandered the universe and some settled on Gaia. There are indirect hints either way; one thing I find kinda trippy about the Japanese is how everyone uses 星 ('star', 'planet') to refer to Gaia in FF7, which is really weird because why use the same word for your own planet that you use for others, unless there's some kind of subtle understanding that your planet is not the only inhabitable one? That could be a linguistic legacy of the Cetra if they were not originally from Gaia but ended up meshing with the human populations.
But that's a whole other thing right there. ^^;; This post is about why the Cetra went bye-bye, and my theory is that there had to be a Cetra diaspora. What I'm thinking is, is that after Jenova made everything go BOOM, the planet was in pretty shitastic shape. And what the Planet did in that case, when it was that threatened, was do whatever it needed to make sure there was more Lifestream available for it...meaning there needed to be a lot more death. Yeah, there were Weapons, but I'm also betting there were natural disasters and all sorts of fun times as the planet tried to generate more 'blood', especially if the Cetra found a way to seal up/cause the Weapons to "sleep". They'd be walking a tightrope to keep the planet from waking them up, and as the edge passed, natural disasters and climate changes would have been disastrous enough cause enough death for the Lifestream to replenish and the planet to heal. But.
The Cetra, of course, would have handled all that death badly, especially since they knew how to guide the Planet. Which makes me think a diaspora happened--many of them took up 'wandering' again, in this case leaving the City of the Ancients to go to other parts of the world to try and coax more, well, efficient ways of the planet using the Lifestream it had so there would be less death. It would have been a big job, more than a few people could handle, and especially in a time without cars or motorcycles or guns to make traveling a big world full of monsters (and Weapons) faster and safer. Entire groups would have set out, and in different directions, to canvass as much of the world as possible. Along the way, new Cetra would have been born, ones who would have closer ties to the places they lived and the humans they interacted with than their people halfway around the world, and interaction with humans and 'normal'--settling, having a family, working--would have been things they aspired to, not wandering the world on a quest that had little to do with them (especially if there's a big warring period like I speculated and am using as my personal fic-canon--it would have been dangerous to be a group of people wandering around.) The original plan might have been to return to the City of the Ancients, but something like that would have quickly turned into a "why?" and then to just a tale...the "Promised Land" where they wouldn't have to wander any more.
But many of them stopped wandering and didn't see a need to go back to a place they'd only heard about in stories, and they had lives and loves among the humans, and without a strong culture telling them to keep separate and only wed other Cetra, well, the ties would grow weaker and weaker as the blood grew thinner and thinner. Over the years, decades, and centuries, the number of pure-blooded or even half Cetra would dwindle and become smaller and smaller, and the abilities they had lost. Occasionally genetics would do funny things--the Cetra abilities would come out randomly--but by and large, they were gone save for a small, dwindling, and unsustainable population.
Which would by why, by the time FF7 happens, there is only one half Cetra left, and even had Aerith lived and had children, once she died, the Cetra would effectively be gone, because her children would only be a quarter, and their children an eighth, and by then, it's more or less genetically gone. |
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