Head-Canon: Sephiroth (Final Fantasy VII, Kingdom Hearts, Dissidia)

• The Seph-in-my-head defaults to asexual by preference, because he really wasn't raised as a human being. He can't recognise most human sexual cues, or understand them in context of applying to him. He can recognise the effects of his own physique, legend, charisma and so on in others - indeed, he's able to deliberately manipulate people using their vision of his sexuality, but he doesn't really feel anything about it. It's a biological function, it appears to have some use in controlling others, but he doesn't understand why they react in such a fashion, only that they do.


• His fascination for Cloud, therefore, is much more intellectual than hormonal - he's constantly confused by the way the younger man keeps resisting him, even with the Jenova connection between the two of them, even though he remembers Cloud as a hero-worshipping young trainee.


• He doesn't really think of himself as a people, although he would have liked to be one, back before Nibelheim. Genesis and Angeal between them were originally helping him to understand what being a people would have meant, and Zack was sort of helping toward the end there, but then Genesis deserted, Angeal followed, and Sephiroth locked himself up tighter than a maglocked safe.


• Yes, it was him running things with regard to the Black Materia and Meteor. He'd cracked back in Nibelheim, and thrown the biggest tantrum known to humanity as a way of proving he wasn't human any more. What survived the reactor wasn't much more than his need for revenge, and his desire to destroy - much more primal than intellectual, and much more visceral than either. He wanted to hurt people as he'd been hurt, and he had the capacity to do it, so he did it because he could.


• There wasn't much left of him by the time Advent Children came along - just the hunger to get his revenge, and to return; he needed those last Jenova cells to manifest, but what manifested was already more Kadaj than Sephiroth, and wouldn't have lasted long in any case (at least part of the reason Kadaj was dying when Sephiroth dissipated was because Sephiroth had taken just about everything he had to offer, even before Cloud hit him with the Omnislash). The Great Gospel that Aerith was throwing out would have taken him down even if Cloud hadn't succeeded, because it was purifying the Lifestream from the inside out.