The appropriately-titled fourth installment of my “7 Reasons Why Lucrecia Crescent Is an Important Character” series for Lucrecia Crescent Appreciation Week 2k15. Please read, enjoy, and share!
5. She represents themes of emotional and domestic abuse survival.
One of the things that broke my heart about Dirge of Cerberus is the way that we see Hojo treat her. Now, you could make a whole bunch of arguments that sidestep the point, like “That’s why I don’t like DoC” or “I refuse to consider it because they had a character mistreated by her husband to up the angst factor,” but that would do away with the valuethat there is to be found in such a story: Lucrecia could very well be an important symbol for domestic abuse survivors.
And at the risk of driving away all my friends who are Hojo fans (coughcrimcough), I do think that the way Hojo treats Lucrecia qualifies as emotional abuse. He kills someone she cares about, mocks her work, mocks her grief for Vincent, and above all he takes her infant son from her, refuses to let her see him, and then mocks her for that too. Maybe many people see Hojo doing these things and displaying these behaviors and think “ah, well, that’s Hojo,”* so it eludes them to see this as a situation of domestic abuse, but he is her husband. This is extremely abusive relationship behavior.
(*That Lucrecia seems to be criticized for choosing Hojo far more often than Hojo is criticized for mistreating Lucrecia probably says something pretty telling and awful about our society!)
Moreover, we have no reason to think that Hojo displayed that sort of behavior in the beginning, and judging by the surprise that Lucrecia often shows to his cruel behavior, we have every reason to believe he wasn’t. Because no one enters a relationship with an abusive person fully aware of their abusive behavior. They always seem normal and even loving in the beginning.
First of all, so that we’re all on the same page and because it’s never a bad idea to make sure everyone is aware of these things, here are some signs of emotional abuse in a relationship from HelpGuide.org:
Your partner humiliates or yells at you.
Your partner criticizes you and puts you down.
Your partner ignores or puts down your opinions or accomplishments.
Your partner blames you for their abusive behavior.
Your partner sees you as property or an object rather than as a person.
Your partner has a bad and unpredictable temper.
Your partner acts excessively jealous and possessive.
Your partner hurts you, or threatens to kill you.
Your partner controls where you go or what you do.
Your partner threatens to take your children away or harm them.
Your partner keeps you from seeing your friends or family.
Your partner threatens to commit suicide or hurt themselves if you leave.
Your partner limits your access to money, the phone, the car, etc.
Your partner forces you to have sex.
Your partner destroys your belongings.
The bolded points are behaviors that I believe Hojo exhibits, but the rest are there because they’re important and I want people to know them anyway just in case they sound personally familiar.
Another hallmark of abuse that I want to highlight is isolation. The abuser will seek to isolate their victim from their support network (usually so that the victim can’t talk about what’s going on and have any other close, trusted people convince them or help them to leave the relationship). Considering the participants of the Jenova Project were shipped to Nibelheim, they were probably already isolated from their friends and family at home, but Hojo killing Vincent is important here. Vincent was an ally of Lucrecia’s, someone who was seeking to protect her and may have offered her counsel. When Hojo kills her only friend, he is performing an abusive act of isolation (as well as, you know, murder).
Another trademark of someone who is in an abusive relationship is that their demeanor changes. They may have very low self-esteem, even if they used to be confident. They may show major personality changes, such as an outgoing person becoming withdrawn. They may become depressed, anxious, or suicidal.
We do know, of course, that Lucrecia became very depressed and suicidal after her son was taken from her and she believed she lost Vincent (two things which were also Hojo’s doing). But even before that, Vincent notes that “after that day [that Lucrecia ran from me and began a relationship with Hojo], the light left her heart.” (In Japanese, he says something along the lines of “she never smiled in front of me again.”) Vincent notes the shift in behavior that Lucrecia exhibited throughout her relationship with Hojo. Although he (and we) may have thought it was more about the strain in her relationship with Vincent and how she acted around Vincent only, this behavioral change that he notes could very well have been an effect of the relationship she was in.
And even if none of that was the case—even if Lucrecia was not affected by Hojo’s treatment of her in those ways, or even if the game creators held a press release tomorrow saying, “Nope, there was canonically no emotional abuse going on in their relationship”—what’s important is that she stands there as the symbol. God knows there’s enough mistreatment there that a victim of domestic abuse could identify with, regardless of what anyone wants to say it “actually” was.
And Lucrecia stands up to him.
I believe that when Lucrecia discovers Vincent shot at Hojo’s feet, that is the moment when she realized her husband’s true nature and that it was time to stop making excuses for Hojo. At no point after Hojo murders Vincent does Lucrecia side with Hojo or even offer him so much as a smile. She’s still in Nibelheim, yes, which I am more inclined to believe is because she was forced to stay there—either by her contract with ShinRa, by Vincent needing her there, by the fact that Hojo had her child, or a combination of all of the above—but despite the power that Hojo wields over her (as her superior on the project—which was later attributed to him and not to a partnership between the both of them—and also as a clearly unstable man of greater mass and physical strength who just killed someone and could feasibly kill her at any time), Lucrecia stands up to him.
She yells at him to stay out of her lab and takes a physical stand to block him from seeing her work when he tries. She takes Vincent’s body from him and tries to bring him back to life. And she demands that Hojo give her child back, even going so far as to grab him by the shoulders and shake him (despite aforementioned difference in physical size/strength and overall threat that he presents).
Later, she works against him in other ways. She leaves the recording for Vincent on the off chance that he ever recovers after she leaves. Her data fragments continue to fight alongside him, against Hojo—which could possibly be attributed to Shelke’s will rather than Lucrecia’s, but I got the impression that it was the fragments of Lucrecia within Shelke taking over Shelke rather than the other way around, since it sounded more like Lucrecia’s personality than Shelke’s—and she is the crucial agent in returning the Protomateria to Vincent so that he can undo Hojo’s work.
But before all that, back in Nibelheim: between the time when Hojo shot Vincent and the time when Lucrecia fled Nibelheim, she was living under Hojo’s thumb and displayed remarkable strength in standing up to him anyhow. While I hope that no one reading this has ever been caught in an abusive relationship that was difficult or dangerous to leave, I hope we can all respect what a character like Lucrecia Crescent might mean to anyone caught in a situation like that.
Ravy Nevemore 