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Chillgamesh posted:Emet's definitely seeing Amaurot through rose-tinted glasses but he's consistently depicted as being forthright about the information he presents. Amaurot probably wasn't as paradisaical as he's remembered it, but I think their only real failure as a society was that they couldn't pull an entirely new way of life out of thin air when theirs suddenly became untenable amaurot also generally had a policy of non-interference going. in one of the side stories when a volcano was threatening to wipe an entire island from the map, the official convocation stance "yeah whatever the locales can just move" while it was azem and friends that decided to beat up the volcano. then there's the bit in the msq where two amaurotians are treating another city being on the brink of destruction and whether to aid them as a polite rhetoric exercise. there's a lot of intentional parallels going on, so old sharlayan having itself a very paradisical aesthetic but a host of issues under the surface is probably going to end up as a means of exploring amaurot some more
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Sep 26, 2021 19:47
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a cartoon duck posted:amaurot also generally had a policy of non-interference going. in one of the side stories when a volcano was threatening to wipe an entire island from the map, the official convocation stance "yeah whatever the locales can just move" while it was azem and friends that decided to beat up the volcano. then there's the bit in the msq where two amaurotians are treating another city being on the brink of destruction and whether to aid them as a polite rhetoric exercise. Notably the locals themselves felt the exact same way, This wasn't an Amaurotine peculiarity, the Ancients in general seem to have been very fatalistic and "the Will of nature." Which, well, they were very long lived, that might naturally be a logical set of values.
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Sep 26, 2021 20:13
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Jetrauben posted:Notably the locals themselves felt the exact same way, This wasn't an Amaurotine peculiarity, the Ancients in general seem to have been very fatalistic and "the Will of nature." Which, well, they were very long lived, that might naturally be a logical set of values. The story doesn’t say that the locals felt the same way, just that Emet-Selch presumed that they did. The story doesn’t say how the locals feel about the whole thing, or that the Convocation consulted them
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Sep 26, 2021 20:48
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If you can literally create an entire city in an afternoon (and I want to note that Emet-Selch can and has done this exact thing), fighting the volcano honestly is kind of crazy and quixotic.
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Sep 26, 2021 21:02
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On the subject of Sharlyan aesthetics
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Sep 26, 2021 21:27
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Chillgamesh posted:Emet's definitely seeing Amaurot through rose-tinted glasses but he's consistently depicted as being forthright about the information he presents. Amaurot probably wasn't as paradisaical as he's remembered it, but I think their only real failure as a society was that they couldn't pull an entirely new way of life out of thin air when theirs suddenly became untenable They don't seem to like much diversity of thought or behavior beyond certain strict parameters. You can do respectable argumentation but you better be wearing those loving black robes. It's a kind of conflict-averse conservatism that probably goes to why they had such a hard time adapting. Also probably why all the unsundered seem utterly convinced that nothing good can come of there being a bunch of different races running around. edit: Arguably a necessary social feature when an errant thought while making your coffee can summon a rampaging coffee shark, but still. Also I'm going to bet we'll find out their way of life didn't suddenly become untenable but they saw signs of the End of Days coming, because I'm betting their constant creation magic poo poo is what did them in. TGLT fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Sep 26, 2021 |
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Sep 26, 2021 22:15
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TGLT posted:They don't seem to like much diversity of thought or behavior beyond certain strict parameters. You can do respectable argumentation but you better be wearing those loving black robes. It's a kind of conflict-averse conservatism that probably goes to why they had such a hard time adapting. Also probably why all the unsundered seem utterly convinced that nothing good can come of there being a bunch of different races running around. It should be underlined we don't actually have an outlook on the general public of the Ancients. We have two actual lenses: 1. Emet-Selch's confirmed biased worldview of a man who wasn't actually doing a lot of interaction with the outside world, and also had prejudices that he continues to hold into the modern day. 2. A single meeting held in the back of a glorified library, that frankly sounds exactly like every single grassroots political movement meeting I've ever been to. Everything else is extrapolation based on whatever facts you find most compelling. Personally I think that a bigger crowd than we're outright told summoned Hydaelyn, because... well, it's Hydaelyn, she fought a purple rock powered by half the planet's population and won. But at the same time, I also think that the overall population of Amaurot, if not the entire Ancient world, just isn't very good at understanding selfless and altruistic actions. It's not that they hate it, it's just that they don't really get it, because for all their supposed academic intelligence a lot of the Ancients we're aware of seem... rather dim.
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Sep 27, 2021 00:50
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Unless Emet-Slech and the rest of the Ascians - the possibly unvarnished soul stones you get in before the Elidibus fight included - are lying about the nature of the sacrifices to Zodiark, giving up your life to save the world is pretty selfless and altruistic. I think the core issue with the Amaurotines is a fear of conflict and subsequently a lack of a sense of self. They're unwilling to embrace individuality and difference for fear of creating conflict. Also Hydaelyn won by what amounts to trickery. She doesn't need to be more powerful than Zodiark, just powerful enough to split concepts into halves - to create a diversity out of conformity. Creation magic being what it is, that's probably not actually that tall of an order.
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Sep 27, 2021 00:59
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Hydelyn won because she was made to do explicitly one thing. She was tool made to weaken Zodiark, that's all. It's why she struggles to do basically anything else.
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Sep 27, 2021 01:03
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The FF Maximilian Pegasus responsible for all the TT cards just has a very strong premonition echo and uses it to design for a card game instead of anything more useful.
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Sep 27, 2021 01:20
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Hydaelyn seems to be doing a pretty loving good job, actually, minus needing some help to deal with petulant ghost wizards mad they aren't Cabinet members anymore. Granted, we don't really know what her job is exactly. We have a general idea, but no actual criteria to judge her on. But I'm struggling to think of anything that'd be on her plate that she's failing at.
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Sep 27, 2021 01:24
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I mean, is she? She cracked Zodiark into 14 parts the one time, then completely dropped the ball for every calamity before the start of the game before going on to a Minfilia based life support system.
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Sep 27, 2021 01:32
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Cleretic posted:Granted, we don't really know what her job is exactly. We have a general idea, but no actual criteria to judge her on. But I'm struggling to think of anything that'd be on her plate that she's failing at. We know what her job was. WE literally saw the meeting where they were talking about it and Emet alludes to it in the big post 75 dungeon speech. She was made to diminish and bind Zodiark. That's it. It's why shielding you from poo poo was actively killing her and she had to nab Minfillia so she could communicate with people because direct communication was also very hard for her. It's also why she just raises random people that can hear her automated message instead of Zodiarks MO of Having His Living Heart break free from his whole to guide and empower his agents directly. The entire Midgarsormer plotline in 2.X to 3.0 was him going "Okay this is hurting her let us see if you're worth anything without her boosting you." ZenMasterBullshit fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 01:35
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TGLT posted:I mean, is she? She cracked Zodiark into 14 parts the one time, then completely dropped the ball for every calamity before the start of the game before going on to a Minfilia based life support system. I feel like it's worth pointing out that we don't know how many calamities she *prevented.* There are absolutely cases of heroes showing up and stopping bad guys through history. The problem is that it only takes one to get through and when your enemies are near-immortal superwizards they can afford to gamble on that chance.
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Sep 27, 2021 01:40
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It also kind of assumes that "stopping calamities" is Hydaelyn's job rather than something closer to "hold the laws of physicks in a stable configuration".
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Sep 27, 2021 01:43
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Rand Brittain posted:It also kind of assumes that "stopping calamities" is Hydaelyn's job rather than something closer to "hold the laws of physicks in a stable configuration". Yeah, this is the thing. If she's a god that works in Normal God Ways, she probably can't exactly stop Calamities, which is partly why she enlisted the help of Midgardsormr (who's not super useful since he could cause a Calamity if misused anyway, so he couldn't exactly burn down the Crystal Tower to stop one) and random adventurers who are up to snuff. What she IS responsible for is ensuring that seasons exist, that water remains non-toxic, that animals get born, and that the law of gravity doesn't get repealed. And given most of that generally works, we can trust she's getting things right. She just doesn't have the power to stop a whiny ex-politician from blowing up the ocean.
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Sep 27, 2021 01:55
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Zodiark rewrote the rules of reality so that the planet would sprout new life, and whatever was causing problems before would cease. Then Hydaelyn's job was to split him apart as an Ascian-safety lock to prevent them from asking him for bad stuff like killing all that new life in exchange for getting old lives back. The only threat we've really been working under is "all the mortals on every shard will die as part of calamities and the Ascians' endgoal." If she was personally holding reality together I feel like that would've been mentioned as a threat of her waning power by now, and so possibly Zodiark's rules are still what's doing that.
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Sep 27, 2021 01:58
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Cleretic posted:What she IS responsible for is ensuring that seasons exist, that water remains non-toxic, that animals get born, and that the law of gravity doesn't get repealed. And given most of that generally works, we can trust she's getting things right. She just doesn't have the power to stop a whiny ex-politician from blowing up the ocean. No, Zodiark did all that. Hydaelen's sole purpose is to keep Zodiark split and bound now that his work is done.
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Sep 27, 2021 02:00
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SirSamVimes posted:No, Zodiark did all that. Hydaelen's sole purpose is to keep Zodiark split and bound now that his work is done. Yeah, and now her job is to KEEP that poo poo happening, because after kicking him to pieces she took his place in keeping that generally going. Because he can't do it anymore. And given that we've heard no reports of stuff like fire suddenly tasting like liquorice that aren't caused by Ascians deciding that mass genocide is an appropriate problem-solving mechanism, she's probably not doing a cataclysmically awful job. EDIT: and if her only job WAS just to kick the poo poo out of Zodiark... well, I'd say she did a good job at that. So really it's baseless in multiple directions to say that she's failing at being a god; either she did her one thing really well and then clocked out, or she kept things running after turfing the last guy which she seems to be doing well at. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 02:06
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Cleretic posted:Yeah, and now her job is to KEEP that poo poo happening, because after kicking him to pieces she took his place in keeping that generally going. Because he can't do it anymore. No, she's not doing any of that. Zodiark fixed it and went back to bed. Weather and seasons and the fundamental laws of reality just work now.
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Sep 27, 2021 02:07
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Yeah I was gonna say, Hydaelyn's sole purpose is keeping Zodiark from gobbling up everyone to become turbo-Zodiark.
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Sep 27, 2021 02:07
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TGLT posted:Yeah I was gonna say, Hydaelyn's sole purpose is keeping Zodiark from gobbling up everyone to become turbo-Zodiark. And if that's true, she's not failing.
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Sep 27, 2021 02:09
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Cleretic posted:And if that's true, she's not failing. Zodiark is 8/14 parts complete. Her track record hasn't been great until she recruited the current WoL
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Sep 27, 2021 02:17
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I mean, there have been 7 successful rejoinings. You could consider any of those a failure at her job. It's possible that she (through empowering heroes and what have you) has successfully prevented many rejoinings, but it's clear that she is slowly losing this fight.
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Sep 27, 2021 02:18
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Pigbuster posted:The FF Maximilian Pegasus responsible for all the TT cards just has a very strong premonition echo and uses it to design for a card game instead of anything more useful. I hope there’s an Eorzean Maximillian Pegasus and he talks exactly the same way as the show
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Sep 27, 2021 02:22
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WrightOfWay posted:I mean, there have been 7 successful rejoinings. You could consider any of those a failure at her job. It's possible that she (through empowering heroes and what have you) has successfully prevented many rejoinings, but it's clear that she is slowly losing this fight. Again, that's a problem in that it's difficult to stop for someone of her scale. Consider that the way Calamities work is to first bring a shard to the brink, before setting off a disaster big enough to consume its aether. We don't really have a fantastic idea of what goes on with that plan on the shards (since the only examples we saw were the two failures), but in terms of the Source, she's in a pickle on stopping a Calamity, because any effort big enough to stop one short would probably just cause a different one. She wants to stop the nuclear bomb detonation of Calamities, but her only toolset to do so herself is 'other nuclear bombs'. So her best strategy is either to motivate smaller individuals to fight on her behalf, or to deploy one of those bombs at a time that wouldn't cause a Calamity (which I suspect was behind Midgardsormr smashing the Agrias). Neither of those is an especially foolproof strategy.
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Sep 27, 2021 02:31
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Cleretic posted:And if that's true, she's not failing. Barring ImpAtom being right and there's just groups of past scion-types in history we don't know about, she could not be failing harder. Like it takes time to bring one of the shards to the brink of collapse I'd guess which seems like the only reason Zodiark isn't at full strength. edit: Also the Source has to recover as well, so lot of time gating for poor Zodiark. TGLT fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 02:33
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I imagine 'she could be doing better' will be the entire point of EW, but I'd say the fact that we likely saw some kind of avatar of hers at the end of 5.55 means that while the Unsundered were fuckin around she was on the defensive more than anything and likely had more on her plate than what we did with her power.
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Sep 27, 2021 02:58
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Do we actually know enough to say that Zodiark's rewriting of the star's laws was permanent and that Hydaelyn doesn't have to maintain those laws? If they decayed once, it makes sense that they could decay again and would need a tender in Zodiark's absence.
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Sep 27, 2021 03:04
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Rand Brittain posted:Do we actually know enough to say that Zodiark's rewriting of the star's laws was permanent and that Hydaelyn doesn't have to maintain those laws? If they decayed once, it makes sense that they could decay again and would need a tender in Zodiark's absence. That's a difficult question to answer, since we don't actually know what caused the End of Days in the first place. There was The Sound, yeah, but we don't know what that was, or if it's a symptom or a cause. I suspect only Our Biggest Fan knows that.
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Sep 27, 2021 03:10
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Rand Brittain posted:Do we actually know enough to say that Zodiark's rewriting of the star's laws was permanent and that Hydaelyn doesn't have to maintain those laws? If they decayed once, it makes sense that they could decay again and would need a tender in Zodiark's absence. We don't, but we also don't know if Hydaelen is even capable of such a thing.
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Sep 27, 2021 03:27
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Yeah, for the moment we have no reason to think they decayed especially when the last time they failed there was a whole society of people who could just imagine up whatever unreal bullshit they wanted. Honestly despite saying she's failing, I don't really know if she could be doing better. She might very well be doing what she can and it's just not enough.
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Sep 27, 2021 03:27
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yea if I had to guess (guessing FF14 plots always is fruitful and never ends up making you look like a chump right???) the core struggle between them will be 'Hydaelyn can kinda keep things going as long as she has warriors of light to help but she really just doesn't have the power to actually gain ground on Zodiark' vs 'Fancy Daniel and Our Boyfriend are going to supercharge Zodiark so he can finally end the stalemate'.
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Sep 27, 2021 03:35
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My counter guess is that Fancy Dan has one goal. End existence. He's being honest in what he says in that regard, he hates the Ascians, he hates their mission, and he wants to bring it all down. His only action toward Zodiark is going to be ensuring Zodiark's destruction, no matter what.
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Sep 27, 2021 03:38
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Eimi posted:My counter guess is that Fancy Dan has one goal. End existence. He's being honest in what he says in that regard, he hates the Ascians, he hates their mission, and he wants to bring it all down. His only action toward Zodiark is going to be ensuring Zodiark's destruction, no matter what. I think that Zodiark getting roided out is part of destroying everything though. Like he needs Zodiark to push the stalemate (well he doesn't NEED him specifically, but Hydaelyn isn't going to work with him) but if I had to assume I'm pretty sure cosmically speaking a super-primal getting all hopped up on soul juice probably will self immolate and take most anything he didn't kill in his roid rage down with him. Fancy Dan gets his oblivion, Zenos gets his grand final battle with us before it goes down as we side with Hydaelyn to fight Zodiark, everyone wins except the countless souls getting snuffed out.
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Sep 27, 2021 03:52
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I just think with how the writing has worked in the past, and frankly it'd be more interesting, is that we are going to be on Zodiark's side in this somehow. The straightforward oh look Venat is good and yay Hydaelyn would be a. extremely boring and b. doesn't really fit with how they've been writing her at all.
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Sep 27, 2021 03:53
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Eimi posted:I just think with how the writing has worked in the past, and frankly it'd be more interesting, is that we are going to be on Zodiark's side in this somehow. The straightforward oh look Venat is good and yay Hydaelyn would be a. extremely boring and b. doesn't really fit with how they've been writing her at all. ...'consistently friendly'? I'm not saying we aren't going to fight Hydaelyn somehow (although I think 'oh no Hydaelyn is bad' would be the single least inspiring direction they could take), but Venat and Hydaelyn have actually been more consistent than any other forces on their scale as being on our side and believing in us.
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Sep 27, 2021 03:57
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tbh I agree and hope that if I'm right it'll be less 'light mommy good shadow man bad' and more 'this sucks, we all hate this, I've got no real beef with Zodiark but these dumb fucks are pushing things'. Zodiark may have gotten wrecked in their fight but I imagine considering we've seen very little of HIM actually doing...anything (in fact literally have we seen him DO anything at all?) he probably has very little investment in the Ascian plots even if he's much more dormant and bound than Hydaelyn is. I still hope the final fight isn't with him (still holding out hope for maximum FF4, Zenos becomes Zeromus as our final fight) but I think he will be an antagonistic force if not by his own will. Though it would be fun if our payoff for the possible Hydaelyn avatar showing up is her taking us to a Zodiark avatar right away and both being all 'what the gently caress you guys what are you people even DOING?!'
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Sep 27, 2021 04:02
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The only thing we've seen that may be Zodiark acting is the Idol of Darkness. Also arguably literally everything Elidibus has done was Zodiark acting.
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Sep 27, 2021 04:11
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Isn't the Idol of Darkness just 'the fairy' that Gaia was talking to, which means it's Mitron? In any event I don't think it will be as simple as 'Zodiark bad Hydaelyn good'. Either both of them are good or their morality doesn't matter because they're primals and everyone knows what we have to do with those.
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Sep 27, 2021 06:10
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