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I really liked the dynamic of conspiracy tabloid guy setting the tone and being way out there with obvious crazy bs, then getting humbled by the truth and being the straight man, and then immediately going back to zaney conspiracy gobbledegook. It's a fun cycle for the best nonsense silly side story.
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Apr 16, 2024 09:36
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The sundered convocation members thing is interesting, cause I don't know if it's quite clear how they awaken them. To my mind it seems like more of a mental imprint thing, like the Unsundered is basically pushing their memories of this person into the sundered person. I forget where the convocation crystals found in ShB are from, but maybe they're involved? Regardless, it seems like generally they wouldn't actually be recreating the individual members but a vision or memory of them, with the notable exception of Fandaniel who permanently imprinted some specific memories into his soul with the memory erasing thing.
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Apr 16, 2024 19:27
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The convocation crystals were made by the unsundered, after the sundering, with their memories of the other 11 seat members. Those were used to uplift shards of whoever to the seat, maybe like a souped up job crystal. Either way I think the shade of Hythlo walks through their uses. And yeah, memory wise they're just getting second hand knowledge of their ancient life. There might be more to it than that, as Loghrif had pretty intense memories of their relationship with Mitron, but maybe the unsundered were really into that juicy drama at the time.
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Apr 16, 2024 19:33
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They use the crystals to impart the memories of the convocation member onto the soul. I think it's implied it doesn't even NEED to be the same soul, it just helps.
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Apr 16, 2024 19:36
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Mainwaring posted:I think it's implied it doesn't even NEED to be the same soul, it just helps. I know I've seen this said somewhere in game, but I can't remember who or where.
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Apr 16, 2024 19:37
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I think it has to be the same soul, but the secondhand memories like, jog any deeper soul-memories in the same way the Echo is, itself, basically soul PTSD hammering you so hard you get the skills of your original Amaurotine life. The only example we see of souls being treated as utterly fungible is Pandaemonium, and even that's a little unclear - Themis is implied to be, seemingly, our Themis by what he says about recovering his memories of our clash on the Crystal Tower, but reconstruction-Lahabrea is some random soul running Lahabrea's memories emulator-fashion, and this is depicted as Athena's particularly amoral awful mastery of the soul.
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Apr 16, 2024 19:38
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Broadly speaking FFXIV takes the stance that it is possible to make an accurate recording of a complex being through observation and use that to create a copy. In other genre environments this would probably lead to someone saying "You can't learn everything Gaius Baelsar knows about swordsmanship just be watching him do it," but in FFXIV the corollary is more like "living things have a power to grow and change and defy their limitations that static recordings don't."
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Apr 16, 2024 19:39
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Jetrauben posted:I think it has to be the same soul, but the secondhand memories like, jog any deeper soul-memories in the same way the Echo is, itself, basically soul PTSD hammering you so hard you get the skills of your original Amaurotine life. This was my assumption of how it works too, but also Mithron and Loghrif were practically inseparable and their affection well known by everyone, per Elpis sidequests and webstory. So that part of their soul memory was locked down either way.
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Apr 16, 2024 19:49
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Jetrauben posted:I think it has to be the same soul, but the secondhand memories like, jog any deeper soul-memories in the same way the Echo is, itself, basically soul PTSD hammering you so hard you get the skills of your original Amaurotine life. Emet specifically said it does not have to be the same soul, but obviously you aren't getting any extra soul memories from a different soul, so they prefer to elevate a shard of the original soul.
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Apr 16, 2024 19:59
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There's (at least) three major components to a whole person in XIV - body, thought/memories, and soul. The body is a fairly transient shell, though most (modern sundered ones, at least) souls don't do terribly well separated from them for extended periods of time, and when a soul returns to the Lifestream, it's purified over time of existing thought/memory to be recycled into a new body with new thoughts and memories - though it's possible to imprint memories that can last through the reincarnation process onto a soul, e.g. through Kairos, and reincarnated souls seem to retain some innate tendencies (without necessitating that reincarnations are functionally the same every time). During Pandaemonium, the memories of Lahabrea and Erichthonius are explicitly grafted onto random, unrelated souls to reconstruct the two men as they were shortly after the earlier part of the story. This is while Claudien is still alive, and Claudien's soul is explicitly from Erichthonius. So you have a situation where there's two Erics - one possessing the thought, memories, and personality of a snapshot of past Eric (but not the power), and another who's a Sharlayan researcher, not completely in the loop, and temporarily overwhelmed by Athena in a similar manner to Lahabrea's body snatching back in ARR. Hypothetically, the Ascians could have brute-forced whatever members of the Convocation they needed at any given point, without ever searching for specific reincarnated souls, but this seems pretty counterproductive to the goals they hoped to achieve.
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Apr 16, 2024 20:28
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Yeah, the Ascians wanted to bring back their loved ones, not just paste on grotesque facsimiles. That's all Athena's bullshit, because Athena doesn't actually see anyone else as real people who matter. And of course, this is why the Echo is a thing, it's hearkening back to whatever it is that is preserved between incarnations to the original Ancient soul.
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Apr 16, 2024 20:45
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Also as we see with Amon the soul/memory pasting is not perfect. They grafted the Fandaniel/Hermes stone memories on but he remained Amon at heart.
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Apr 16, 2024 21:15
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That's probably not unusual. They just dump a bunch of memories into some otherwise normal person, and they can choose to embrace them. I'd have to imagine the result is typically just a fusion of who they were plus whatever the memories inspired them to me. Amon's just so damaged by that point, having a whole new collection of memories to deal with didn't do much for him.
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Apr 16, 2024 21:23
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A Sometimes Food posted:Also as we see with Amon the soul/memory pasting is not perfect. They grafted the Fandaniel/Hermes stone memories on but he remained Amon at heart. He was also actively engaged in spiting his past self which I've always felt complicates things, since Amon's entire life is a ghoulish parody of Hermes' life and values.
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Apr 16, 2024 22:08
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It should be noted, the seats of the convocation were, by design, supposed to pass on to new people. So Emet is absolutely able to raise someone who doesn't have a soul from the last convocation, but he absolutely would rather not for his own reasons, beyond whether their memories might be awakened. It probably wouldn't matter in the long run though, anyone not represented would be resuscitated when they do the big source sacrifice.
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Apr 16, 2024 23:19
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Won't the big Source sacrifice only bring back the sacrifices currently in Zodiark? I always assumed it wouldn't bring back anyone else, and that you'd be shoving a fair number of reunified Ancient souls into Zodiark in exchange for getting some out, even if you're also sacrificing non-sapient life.
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Apr 16, 2024 23:36
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Antivehicular posted:Won't the big Source sacrifice only bring back the sacrifices currently in Zodiark? I always assumed it wouldn't bring back anyone else, and that you'd be shoving a fair number of reunified Ancient souls into Zodiark in exchange for getting some out, even if you're also sacrificing non-sapient life. The plan was to reunify and then shove the excess life into Zodiark. Anyone who ain't part Ancient soul is mulch
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Apr 16, 2024 23:39
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Yeah, the way I understood it was that Zodiark was summoned using half of the living Ancient souls because they needed to get things up and running immediately as the Final Days were something that needed to be stopped as fast as possible. Step two would be to sacrifice all non-Ancient sentient/sapient life to Zodiark in trade for the souls of the Ancients. Venat stepped in before Step 2 and basically laid judgment on Ancient society with the view that paradise was over and they had no right to sacrifice the "lesser" souls. So she vaporized another half of the Ancient souls (a quarter of the pre-Zodiark total) to create Hydaelyn and sunder the world.
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Apr 16, 2024 23:45
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That's fair. I think I may just be very vague on how many souls are kicking around that aren't Ancient, because both metaphysics and demographics in this game setting are kind of ????
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Apr 16, 2024 23:49
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Mordiceius posted:So she vaporized another half of the Ancient souls (a quarter of the pre-Zodiark total) to create Hydaelyn and sunder the world. Nope. Only her crew, who became the Twelve and the Watcher. However, she did have some level of support among the populace. Also, you're forgetting the second sacrifice to basically un-gently caress the planet afterwards, so the Ancient world was already down to a quarter of the population.
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Apr 17, 2024 00:07
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Yeah, IIRC it's: 1) initial sacrifice of half the surviving Ancient population to power Zodiark 2) secondary sacrifice of half of the remainder (possibly to Zodiark again?) to unfuck the planet's aether and allow a stable ecosystem 3) Hydaelyn created and powered entirely by volunteers from Venat's project
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Apr 17, 2024 00:13
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Cleretic posted:Nope. Only her crew, who became the Twelve and the Watcher. However, she did have some level of support among the populace. Ah! That's right. I knew I was mixing up one of the details. I was combining the "Unfuck the planet" step with "make Hydaelyn"
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Apr 17, 2024 00:14
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The implication was that without Venat's intervention the ancients would have sacrificed more and more out of anguish until there was nothing left and Etheirys was just another Dead End
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Apr 17, 2024 00:22
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Yeah, it's pretty clear that they weren't psychologically capable as a society (or possibly species) of moving on, because living as immortal wizards doesn't prepare you for "something is gone forever and you have to deal with that," and the only tool they thought they had left in the toolkit was throwing lives at Zodiark.
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Apr 17, 2024 00:27
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Antivehicular posted:Yeah, it's pretty clear that they weren't psychologically capable as a society (or possibly species) of moving on, because living as immortal wizards doesn't prepare you for "something is gone forever and you have to deal with that," and the only tool they thought they had left in the toolkit was throwing lives at Zodiark. Which is further illustrated by Hermes having a meltdown that his mentor was "retiring." And even that wasn't a permanent "souls is vaporized" sort of thing.
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Apr 17, 2024 00:31
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Jetrauben posted:He was also actively engaged in spiting his past self which I've always felt complicates things, since Amon's entire life is a ghoulish parody of Hermes' life and values. Also, because of Kairos, every time Fandaniel was awoken with a memory crystal he remembered his previous lives remembering Elpis, which appears to have driven him to some serious depressive madness. Amon Fandaniel wasn't just getting Hermes' memories, he was also getting trauma memories from every time a Fandaniel was given his Ancient Memories.
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Apr 17, 2024 00:31
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Lord_Magmar posted:Amon Fandaniel wasn't just getting Hermes' memories, he was also getting trauma memories from every time a Fandaniel was given his Ancient Memories. Also Amon wasn't really well in the first place.
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Apr 17, 2024 00:36
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Wait how was Kairos involved with his memory restoration
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Apr 17, 2024 00:38
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Feldegast42 posted:Wait how was Kairos involved with his memory restoration While Kairos wiped out your memory of an event for "this" lifetime, in doing so, it burned the memory more deeply into your soul.
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Apr 17, 2024 00:39
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Mordiceius posted:Which is further illustrated by Hermes having a meltdown that his mentor was "retiring." And even that wasn't a permanent "souls is vaporized" sort of thing. Yeah, everything in the exchange about the old Fandaniel is a sign that the Ancients weren't great at processing grief and loss even on the peaceful, controlled terms of their returning to the star -- Hermes is freaking out, but the response of the others suggests it's considered socially inappropriate that he register any sadness at all about the impending loss of a loved one.
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Apr 17, 2024 00:43
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Feldegast42 posted:Wait how was Kairos involved with his memory restoration When you erase a memory, it basically burned it into the soul permamently. When the other memories are washed away entering the lifestream, those memories came back and plagued the next person with them. Amon, even before being uplifted, kept having dreams of Hermes and Meteion.
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Apr 17, 2024 00:43
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Antivehicular posted:Yeah, everything in the exchange about the old Fandaniel is a sign that the Ancients weren't great at processing grief and loss even on the peaceful, controlled terms of their returning to the star -- Hermes is freaking out, but the response of the others suggests it's considered socially inappropriate that he register any sadness at all about the impending loss of a loved one. Although it is worth noting other researchers at Elpis do understand Hermes' feelings because they're also dealing with them. It's just that none of them reach out to eachother particularly effectively to talk about these emotions.
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Apr 17, 2024 00:54
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Feldegast42 posted:The implication was that without Venat's intervention the ancients would have sacrificed more and more out of anguish until there was nothing left and Etheirys was just another Dead End Yeah, they don't draw the direct line of logic for you but it's extremely easy to see the Dead Ends as the natural end point of the Zodiark plan.
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Apr 17, 2024 00:55
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The Zodiark Plan's entire big flaw was that it effectively created a God of Sacrifice that they could sacrifice lives to in order to gain something. And that made sense for the initial "the world is ending" problem and even theoretically the second "We need to fix the world" problem but anything past that and it became very clear that "Sacrifice a bunch of innocent lives to our God" was going to become the thing the Ancients went to when disaster happened instead of learning to move forward and deal with consequences. They were Demigods who had a God and they could maintain an eternal status quo as long as they harvested lives to do it, and that wasn't a sustainable status quo because eventually something was going to go wrong. The various Dead Ends all show the kind of things that can go wrong. They might end up in a civil war that obliterates all life on the planet. They might encounter a terrifying plague. Or they might maintain their ideal status quo until live became nothing but that without growth or advancement because they had achieved what they consider 'perfection.' And we know from the raids that there were plenty of potential disasters lurking in the wings, the End of Days was merely one potential Bad End for the Star. The basic message is "You can't undo tragedy, you must learn from it, advance forward and become better, or else you will leave yourself forever consumed by the tragedy and the fear of it." And that's the kind of theme that goes throughout the entire game to that point. Even the Dead Ends are roughly connected to the major antagonists, be it Nidhogg's desire for all-consuming war or the Black Rose being a potential world-dooming plague.
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Apr 17, 2024 01:20
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The Ancients, like many other societies, had issues with mental health awareness. If only there were some posters in Elpis all of this could have been avoided. Maybe some stickers of ribbons.
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Apr 17, 2024 02:23
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Lord_Magmar posted:Although it is worth noting other researchers at Elpis do understand Hermes' feelings because they're also dealing with them. It's just that none of them reach out to eachother particularly effectively to talk about these emotions. well, also, again, there's a literal magic emotions flower AND a literal empathy spirit in elpis and both confirm no one else is feeling anything remotely on the scale of what Hermes is feeling. Antivehicular posted:Yeah, everything in the exchange about the old Fandaniel is a sign that the Ancients weren't great at processing grief and loss even on the peaceful, controlled terms of their returning to the star -- Hermes is freaking out, but the response of the others suggests it's considered socially inappropriate that he register any sadness at all about the impending loss of a loved one. yeah also basically every other elpis quest is aimed at highlighting their failure to understand these things, particularly the one that ties into the alliance raid and reveals the researchers don't even quite understand the concept of a funeral or memorial
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Apr 17, 2024 04:21
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I wouldn't say that about the Elpis quests, given how if anything people have a very wholesome and healthy degree of acceptance about death? If anything Hermes' morbid terror feels selfish to me, but we've had this argument.
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Apr 17, 2024 05:54
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Jetrauben posted:I wouldn't say that about the Elpis quests, given how if anything people have a very wholesome and healthy degree of acceptance about death? If anything Hermes' morbid terror feels selfish to me, but we've had this argument. See, my read is that Elpis' experience of death is rather detached. It's something that happens to other creatures, and they just observe and recognize it. Hermes is the only one that acts like death--including the death of one of his people-- should and does have weight. The yellow quests are all far less in keeping with Hermes' worldview, and far more with Hythlodaeus going 'oh yeah just unmake some innocent butterflies so I can make some robes'. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Apr 17, 2024 |
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Apr 17, 2024 06:06
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The game also shows that maybe the magical empathy things are not infallible after all considering, you know, everything else about Meiteon.
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Apr 17, 2024 06:06
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Mood flowers seem to be accurate and most everyone is actually content with life. I'm not sure Hermes' fear of death is a worldview. He shows dissatisfaction with Elpis and the Ancients great work and it's pretty reasonable stuff, but it seems to be coming from a deep-seated and unhealthy terror of death as a concept. There was a yellow quest with someone having to come to grips with a mentor retiring-to-death and they didn't treat it with some clinical detachment, they just didn't go to pieces like Herman. I still laugh when folks throw out Hyth transmuting butterflies into clothes like it's this chilling proof of the heartlessness of ancients. The WoL has slaughtered their way across the globe because some rando wanted a treat or to give a sweetheart a gift lmao Someone else said it best: Hermes is a "became a vet because he loves animals" guy who doesn't really have the temperament for it GloomMouse fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Apr 17, 2024 |
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Apr 17, 2024 07:22
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