Elementals and the Shroud

The Hearer in the Leatherworker 60-70 quest-line, Marmaduke, does make claims about the Will of the Elementals that turn out to be false and just him trying to support his own opinions, so there's definitely some leeway and bias in what Gridania can claim is the Will of the Elementals versus what the Elementals actually care about.

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Originally Posted by MrThinker

I feel like there is some miscommunication going on.

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The link is for the OP, that post is basically to try to make up for me semi-derailing the thread, albeit to a related point.

As far as Quarrymill goes, shucky darn, NPC dialogue changes after Stormblood completion, so I went to one my alts that's around 2.4. I redid all of the Quarrymill quests, looked through all the leves there, and shucky darn could not find the line I remembered.

I thought Wlfric on the upper partition said it after you do his quest, but no, he just says something along the lines of, "If the refugees are of no use to the wood, then they must be ousted. Call me a bloodless demon if you will, but they must go." After Stormblood completion he says, "With Ala Mhigo now free, you'd think the refugee situation would improve but..." In my memory it was something along the lines of, "The refugees are of no use to us, save the women, they'll do quite nicely, hehehe." But I guess I dreamed that up. Sorry to detract from the thread.

Of course, Albreda is a spurned, single woman. She's the only readily apparent Ala Mhigan allowed, though Deidra has the same pants and shoes as her and the other refugees. The way the Leves portray Quarrymill, there's enough accepted Ala Mhigans that they form a band of "free swords" that help the Wood Wailers deal with bandits and poachers.

Insofar as the Elementals' approval goes, foreigners are required to spend one night in Quarrymill, as that's the amount of time the Elementals need to judge them worthy or not, apparently. Prior to POTD I don't believe that Padjali was there, but even without him the place has two Hearers. But I mean, reading through stuff about Hearers there's no way to tell how good they are, and if they tell the truth or not all of the time. Basically, non-Hearers have to take it on faith that what the Hearers are saying is true. The angle my wrong-memory has is that the Gridanians basically can lie to outsiders on a whim, because the Elementals largely do not care about the affairs of men, so long as they do not harm the balance of the Black Shroud.


Alas, it seems all I was able to come up with, directly from Quarrymill, is mere implication. I was really hoping to comeback with what I remembered.

The whole "We obey the elementals' will, even when that will is to leave this poisoned man to die for no apparently good reason." is definitely the thing that turns me/my WoL off the most about the Shroud. Like... the elementals are jerks. Or the people interpreting their will are.

The Elementals might have their reasons about not allowing extra people in for settlement, like "the ecosystem can only handle so much", etc. And that's fair enough. The Elementals were there first, after all.

But in the Quarrymill case, the Ala Mhigans were already rejected. They'd accepted the rejection. They were trying to leave. They just needed some aid before doing so. And rando adventurer WoL just kills some antelope for horns, trades em to Buscarron for powdered horns, gives the Ala Mhigans the aide they need... and nothing happens to us. Thus, the Elementals seemingly didn't have a problem with Meffrid's man being cured. But the Gridanians who refused aide sure act like they think that was the case.

So either the Elementals are bluffing about the consequences of defying them, the Gridanians aren't interpreting the will of the Elementals correctly, or the Hearers are lying about what in particular the elementals have said/they are embellishing the answers cus the elementals aren't giving a complete answer to everything they ask. Or, they assumed Meffrid's group being rejected meant that they were untouchable, even if the Elementals are in reality indifferent. Safer to let the strangers die than incur the green wrath. And unless you become a Hearer (which I assume is WHM?) then there's no way to tell the right of it.

Gridania may be one of the most pleasant areas geographically, but its got some real drawbacks. Gimme my freedom loving ruffians, volcanic isles, and Mediterranean climate with a mild chance of earthquakes and tidal waves, anytime. lol

...and then the guy goes on to be one of the Griffin's helpers and convince a whole lot of people to join a cause that would lead them to their deaths.

I don't know if the elementals can sense the future, but things have unexpected consequences.

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[EDIT]

I'm out of posts for the day so I'm going to do that annoying sequence-breaking thing of replying to a post made after this one.

I'm saying the elementals aren't human and may not have human sympathy, just a sense of the larger scale, but maybe if they can sense the future then they judge him on that sense that "this man will do terrible things and we don't want him here".

It's hard to know how it works exactly, but it's one possible explanation why they'd do it. I'm not saying I agree with that decision.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

...and then the guy goes on to be one of the Griffin's helpers and convince a whole lot of people to join a cause that would lead them to their deaths.

I don't know if the elementals can sense the future, but things have unexpected consequences.

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Not really okay with punishing people for what they might do in the future, personally, even if the Elementals could see it. (Again, not the the Elementals seemed to have actually cared if he got healed cus they don't react when we do it anyway. lol)

Plus, maybe he wouldn't have gone extremist and had more faith in the alliance's efforts visa vi Ala Mhigo if he'd been shown some reason to think its official members actually gave a darn about him/his people/cause and were willing to provide the bear minimum of aide. I mean, fact is, they were trying to leave. They couldn't b/c he was poisoned. The group was being ostracized for not leaving, but couldn't leave b/c they were being ostracized. Someone was being dumb, and those someones were the locals.


EDIT:
I just realized I may have misinterpreted the tone of your post, Iscah. Were you saying that their chickens came home to roost with this guy precisely b/c of how he was treated in Quarrymill? Or were you saying he should have been treated like that b/c of how he would act in the future?

The thing about minority reports is that we don't know which Elementals are making judgments. Gridanians make it sound like all Elementals are in consensus when they aren't. They differ in power, fury, location, element, sound, influence, and pretty much everything other than being intangible aetherial beings. The Hearers can't even hear all of them. Most foreigners aren't going to know that though, which makes it really easy for Gridania as a community to take advantage of them, and cite what basically amounts to their God. The 1.0 Elementals at least had the very real furious Elementals that disintegrate people with Woodsin.

But I digress, basically, even if they could see the future, we don't know which ones can. How far they can see. What parts of the future they see and so on and so forth. If they could see the future of each individual with 100% certainty, then they would know that the WoL was going to help the man anyway. At that point, why forego having the Gridanians aid him? Why not attempt to change the future by having him fall in love with the Twelveswood, such that he leaves the Resistance to stay there.

I think it's simpler. We know from Kan-E-Senna's dialogue that the Elementals don't actually speak. They communicate their feelings about other beings as, "whispers" to those receptive to them. The Hearers in Quarrymill spend the night communing, and they get the feel from The Elementals of, "Bad" or "Anger" or "Grief" etc. Interpret it as condemnation.

Also, there's a daily post limit? :O What's the daily posting limit?

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

Basically, non-Hearers have to take it on faith that what the Hearers are saying is true. The angle my wrong-memory has is that the Gridanians basically can lie to outsiders on a whim, because the Elementals largely do not care about the affairs of men, so long as they do not harm the balance of the Black Shroud.

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In support of this theory, there IS an in-game example of a Hearer using their influence to throw their weight around, with the implication that the decrees he was laying down were his own self-righteousness at work rather than any actual whisper from an Elemental. The Stormblood Leatherworker quests feature just such a Hearer, who finds the taxidermy we practise during that questline to be personally distasteful, and uses his influence to put an end to it. So it's at least POSSIBLE that the plight of the Ala Mhigans was a plot by a bigoted Hearer who wants them run out of town - but there are few or no clues in the quest dialogue to support this interpretation.

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Originally Posted by Alleluia

But in the Quarrymill case, the Ala Mhigans were already rejected. They'd accepted the rejection. They were trying to leave. They just needed some aid before doing so. And rando adventurer WoL just kills some antelope for horns, trades em to Buscarron for powdered horns, gives the Ala Mhigans the aide they need... and nothing happens to us. Thus, the Elementals seemingly didn't have a problem with Meffrid's man being cured. But the Gridanians who refused aide sure act like they think that was the case.

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The Elementals have a weird relationship with the WoL that doesn't always make sense. The WoL can apparently do whatever they damn well please in the Shroud, and we never get any flack for it.

There's some evidence that the Elementals are less powerful than they used to be, following the Seventh Calamity. It's possible that the Elementals are a whole lot less able to bare their teeth than they used to be, but the Gridanians are hesitant to test their limits anyway. They know what the Elementals can be like when they're at their worst, after all - is it worth the risk to start rebelling, just in case they MIGHT be more passive than they were before?

I'm also of the opinion that the "worst" the Gridanians are so fearful of (basically, the Great Flood of the Sixth Calamity, which the elemental Oha Sok unleashed upon the world to end the War of the Magi), can never actually be repeated - at least, not to the same degree. We've since learned that the disasters of each Calamity have been massively magnified by the flood of Aether from a Rejoining world. While it's likely Oha Sok could have caused a lot of damage on its own, the Rejoining is what caused it to become a flood large enough to put an end to all civilization in Eorzea.

It may well be that the Gridanians are on more equal footing with the Elementals, now - but it's entirely sensible that they'd approach this possibility with an enormous amount of caution!

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Gridania may be one of the most pleasant areas geographically, but its got some real drawbacks. Gimme my freedom loving ruffians, volcanic isles, and Mediterranean climate with a mild chance of earthquakes and tidal waves, anytime. lol

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You left "Systemic oppression of the natives" off the list! XD Each nation has its dark side, no doubt about it.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

You left "Systemic oppression of the natives" off the list! XD Each nation has its dark side, no doubt about it.

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Systematic oppression of some of the natives while also encouraging friendlies to enter the city and trade. But I have not forgotten the ways Limsa has screwed up and that part of the reason there are unfriendlies in the first place is their own fault.

So here's a thought: I wonder if the viera's forests have a high concentration of elementals too.

In FF12 the viera personified and revered the forest. They could hear the Wood's voice, did as it said, and asked it for guidance. It was portrayed in a similar way to 14's conjurers and padjal. So if we ever explore more of the viera in this game I wouldn't be surprised to learn Skatay Range and Golmore Jungle have elementals as active as the Black Shroud's, it's a perfect way to translate the Green Word into this game's setting.

Gridania is... pretty much a PG-13 take on "Shadow Over Insmouth" by HP Lovecraft. Only it's with tree spirits instead of Great Deep Ones and people don't get born half-fish people on purpose, they get born that way by accident.

The key thing to realize about Gridania is that everyone in the Shroud basically gets no say in how they live there. The Padjal and Hearers are there to hear the Will of the Elementals and make sure people know what it is. They aren't there to tell the Elementals what the people in the Shroud want. Complicating this is that Elementals aren't human and have a very hard time telling individuals apart. So they tend towards "punish the group for the sins of the individual" logic. Which makes leaving people who don't obey the Elmentals out and about in the Shroud really dangerous. The only reason why Gridania exists is because the Elementals gave the people of Gelmora permission to build it in the first place.

For better or for worse though, the Elementals have been loosing power since the Calamity. They used to be able to keep the ruins of Amdapoor (both the city and keep) warded so people couldn't find them. Now that is no longer the case. So the Elementals probably aren't following up on people doing stuff they don't like how they used to before the Calamity. Which... actually could have some interesting implications going forwards for some parties.

What makes Gridania stand out from Limsa Lominsa and Ul'dah is that... the problems it is facing are supernatural in nature. Limsa Lominsa and Ul'dah's problems are entirely human in origin and therefor human when it comes to finding solutions. Gridania's problems ultimatly stem from them being in the same place as the Elementals are and can't really be fixed unless the Elementals change their minds about things for whatever reason.