Just A Heads-Up: Gamer Escape Interview with Koji Fox (Fan Festival 2018)

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

In FFXIV's case, calamities are occuring every couple hundred years and Hydaleyn eats a shard to rebalance the source's aether.

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Calamities happen roughly every millennium and a half, not every couple of centuries.

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Originally Posted by Fenral

That aside, sometimes you word stuff like you're getting ready to fight me

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If it's hypothetical vs. hypothetical (as opposed to pointing out how the hypothetical is at odds with established themes or precedent) and I decide to reply anyway, it's usually because I found it interesting when juxtaposed against my own ideas, so then I felt compelled to very clearly state my current positions and thoughts (often because they were somehow altered or crystallized by the reflection). In this way either I get it on paper or inspire you to hit me back and cause further evolution, lol.

Think of it like theorycraft Omega sh[kupo!]t.

And that door swings both ways. Whatever I'm thinking or predicting or theorizing, smack it. See what breaks. As long as you don't smack me, we're still buds.

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Originally Posted by Anonymoose

Think of it like theorycraft Omega sh[kupo!]t.

And that door swings both ways. Whatever I'm thinking or predicting or theorizing, smack it. See what breaks. As long as you don't smack me, we're still buds.

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I'll admit that I said it half (20-25%?) for you, half (75-80%?) for the audience at home. My recollection is hazy, but last time I went anywhere with Light vs. Darkness here, I got a little impassioned, you got a little impassioned, one or two other people may have stepped in to try and "defeat" me in your place, I probably made someone cry and definitely got blacklisted by some folks. But here we are again.

Definitely game for that, but I'll get back to you with more in the morning, after I've slept on it a little more. Assuming it isn't all buried pages deep by then.

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Originally Posted by LineageRazor

Unfortunately, the answer given does NOT allow us to discard the possibility that the big H is chowing down. People in Eorzea don't seem to think she is, and those that know about her seem to hold her in high regard, but it also notes that they don't know WHAT is happening, exactly - just that "something" breaks, then "things" go crazy, then healing "happens". That's a whole lotta vagueness, and that last bit is disturbingly unclear as to just HOW healing happens. It leaves plenty of room for a planet-munching scenario! Especially so, given that later in the same article it's noted that what the people believe may not be what's actually going on; they think Hydaelyn is great now, but maybe they don't know the whole story...

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In my defense, I did say "to the best of our knowledge..."

As it's incredibly unclear exactly what is going on beyond the drawing out of massive amounts of aether from the planet, saying that She's eating shards is a pretty big jump to a conclusion. Best to operate under the "false until proven true" and "correlation does not even imply causation" maxims.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

... [C]alamities are occuring every couple hundred years and Hydaleyn eats a shard to rebalance the source's aether.

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Every few thousand (the one that wiped out the Allagans was ~6000 years ago; the one that ended the War of the Magi was ~1500 years ago, if I recall correctly), and saying a shard is eaten is jumping to conclusions (see above).

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Originally Posted by Fenral

(And don't you dare give me any of that Urobutcher "Darkness is just stronger than Light because lol heat death of the universe" bullcrap. Ahem. That wasn't at you, Moose.)

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Er... well, technically, if chaos is one of Zodiark's domains, then so is entropy... which would make His victory all but inevitable.

I'm not saying that the balance was upset just because it was in Zodiark's nature to lust for power and thus do so; exactly why He would suddenly do so if the two existed in harmony for untold ages beforehand remains a great mystery. Entropy does lead to darkness, and thus Darkness could be considered more powerful than Light on the most basic physical level. Entropy is what makes the primals so dangerous.

... but that's just physics, probably not too important in a fantasy world, lol.

Pretty much everything we know of Hydaelyn and Zodiark is coloured by in-universe bias. What we do not know is shrouded by mystery and subject to speculation and debate.

We're likely due some major plot revelations very soon similar to those revealed at the end of 4.4. The sort that shake things up quite a bit. :')

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Originally Posted by Cilia

Er... well, technically, if chaos is one of Zodiark's domains, then so is entropy... which would make His victory all but inevitable.

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Except more current projections suggest that as the universe expands, its maximum possible entropy increases at a greater rate, moving the system further from heat death over time. But all that really means is that when any of the other possible end scenarios takes place or the universe reaches equilibrium, it won't be completely devoid of warmth, at least.

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Originally Posted by Anonymoose

Perhaps when a distinction was made between Light and Darkness, a division between forces of genesis (order, separation) and entropy (disorder, consolidation), it was merely the Dark's inherent nature to covet and consume.

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I think you have separation and consolidation backwards there. So long as collectivism is considered a virtue by the writing team (we've had how many heroic sacrifices now?), it stands to reason that unification is an aspect of Light, and not Darkness.

It also makes "Darkness is necessary" an easier pill to swallow if you think of Darkness as being responsible for our individual forms, as while individuality is the root of all conflict, without it we wouldn't have empathy and compassion. A world lost to Darkness has a bunch of life-starved immortals flapping about, while a world lost to Light has nothing. It's (perhaps) a unified whole in which distinction itself ceases to exisit.


We might also be able to extend this a little further, too. Hydaelyn can create life ex nihilo, but she creates it as a perfect whole. Meanwhile, Zodiark cannot create, but he can separate. Instead of destroying Hydaelyn's new creation, he separates it. Destroys the perfect unity of the whole. Empowers it to destroy itself. After all, what is destruction but the undoing of structure?

"But Zodiark created the Ascians". But did he? In response to, or perhaps right before, being sealed away, he separates Himself. Fourteen (plus one) individual mini-Zodiarks cast out from the main body to intervene in the world.

Meanwhile, Hydaelyn doesn't split Herself off directly, but instead gives out Crystals of Light. "She's separating her power! Light is separation!" I think instead, She's loaning it.

If the assumption is that all aether sooner or later cycles back into the lifestream and through the Mothercrystal, then Hydaelyn is free to give out as much aether as She wants in the short term, on the assumption that it will get paid back after use. One of the wrenches thrown into this particular machine is Primals, which act as alternate foci for aether distinct from the Mothercrystal. Another is Rejoining, in which the Ascians syphon off as much aether as they can from a dimensional collapse to feed to Zodiark.


Assuming these rules of aetherophysics hold, we arrive at the million dollar question I stumbled upon while writing all this up: what happens to the aether released when an Ascian dies?

...Uh, oops?

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Originally Posted by Anonymoose

This is Final Fantasy! Anything that stands between man and control of his own destiny and we will smote its ruin upon mountainside with the power of friendship and /gpose.

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Agreed! In general, though, I never put forward theories that I think will lead to anything otherwise. So even when I say "we need to reconcile Hydaelyn and Zodiark", it's not to say, "we need to end the universe as it is," but always, "this may be the only way to keep our universe."

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Originally Posted by Fenral

I think you have separation and consolidation backwards there.

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I think you are assuming I had a different connotation of the words in mind. :p Entropy is a gradual accumulation of chaos; everything gets consolidated and blurred, predictability and order decay. Think the active blender of the Lifestream, but everything, souls included, going the other way. (Turns to look at Ascian Prime, turns back.)

"Let expanse contract, eon become instant..."

The Light, making constant distinctions as it generates new things, would thus be separating that mass into ordered blocks. Perhaps that's why energies associated with Hydaelyn are neatly separated into a rainbow of discrete elements, but all of Zodiark's are the same dark purple. And yet that connotation can be taken wrong, too. You could also arrive at the idea that a messy pile of LEGOs is far less orderly than Zodiark's blurred and consolidated mass.

Even in that sense, though, I agree with you about most of the rest. If you remove all separations and consolidate everything, individuality vanishes.

"If you truly mastered the Echo, there would be no strife between our peoples─for we would be of one mind."

Right, and then there's the Echo, more literally the power to transcend barriers of language/space/time/etc.

If it's Hydaelyn's power, then hers is the power to break down barriers and return things to their true form, i.e. a bunch of aether in the Mothercrystal. But when you put it that way, it makes me think back to the pet theory that the Echo is a parting gift to creation from Zodiark, not Hydaelyn, and she merely reaches out to those who have it to keep them from doing anything drastic.

But if all that's true, then Light and Dark voids should be reveeeeeersed! *kicking and screaming*

I actually had to look up a years-old post to remember how the hell I phrased it, but you could also see Hydaelyn's Echo not as adding ability, but subtracting limitations, as in choosing not to subject you to the standard program; "jailbreaking your soul". Recall Lahabrea cursing you for using the power of Hydaelyn to "restore the walls" from which Zodiark saw him freed. It would be the equivalent of a Mothercrystal-sanctioned black operations mission in violation of the laws of the known corporeal world, lol.

The Echo isn't even necisarrily specific to Hydaelyn. The Ascians all have it and they need to get it somehow. They could have gotten from Hydaelyn and misused it from how she wanted them to use it. Or then could have gotten it from Zodiark and are using it exactly how he wants them too.

It'll be interesting to learn how the Resonance fits into everything, since it's basically an artificial version.

My thought on it is that the Echo is like an installation (or de-installation) of a security suite on a computer. Specifically a program that is customized to what it is installed into (or taken out of).

The Resonance would be copying what was installed (or taken out) without knowing how it was customized for the specific computer. So while it does work, not everything works correctly.

Since that seems to be the direction the discussion is taking, I'll reiterate cosmological points.

Were you expecting images? Too bad!

LIGHT / DARKNESS

Light is the separation of things, Darkness is the blending of things.

Think back to the Ascian Prime.

"Let us show these mortals the true power of the Echo. The power to break down the barriers of existence."
-Lahabrea

"I am become you..."
"... and we are become one!"
-Lahabrea and Igeyorhm fusing into the Ascian Prime

"What walls are these?! Damn you, Hydaelyn!"
-Ascian Prime (upon defeat)

The Ascian Prime suggests that at least some of what Hydaelyn's Light does is "put up walls / barriers on existence." While that sounds bad, remember that it's what allows individuality in mortals. Without those "walls" applying to souls, all mortals would just be lumps of aether.

Now, let's look at the nature of their respective Voids.

Darkness-type Void (13th Shard) is visited at the climax of the Crystal Tower raids (World of Darkness). There's very little terrain and only unliving beings (voidsent) there - without aether (energy) time effectively does not pass, and the few things that exist there have simply managed to escape aetheric compression. Everything has been blended up and compressed into a singularity.

Light-type Void (1st Shard, partially) has everything bleached of aether; everything has been taken out, leaving nothingness in its wake. In other words, walls have been set up between everything - all aether (matter) has been separated from all other aether, so nothing can exist. As opposed to the 13th's black hole-like singularity, this one is an apt void.

(For reference here's a similar phenomenon from Magic: the Gathering's Zendikar, before and after being subjected to Ulamog's eldrazi corruption which similarly leeches mana (aether) out of the land.)

https://overmental.com/wp-content/up.../oran-rief.jpg

Essentially, at the extremes Darkness is compression while Light is erasure. Both are needed for mortal life to exist... which raises many questions, not the least of which is "would mortal life be able to exist if Zodiark's Darkness were the dominant force?" Debatable.

THE ECHO

As Lahabrea says above, it is "the power to break down the barriers of existence."

In other words, Hydaelyn's walls can be ignored using the Echo. If "walls" are used to separate souls, the Echo lets one peek through a gap into the souls of others - pulling a brick out of the wall, then putting it back. The Ascian Prime is simply this concept taken to an extreme - the wall is wrecked with a sledgehammer, letting Lahabrea and Igeyorhm fuse Dragon Ball style until the Warrior of Light's punishment reinforces Hydaelyn's laws (walls).

Zenos' use of the Echo (Resonance) to hijack Shinryu is another extreme - taking down the "walls" of his soul and bending the eikon to his will through force. Fordola likewise "peeks through the walls" of others' souls to anticipate their attacks and dodge / counter with preturnatural ease for a combatant of her level. (Cf. the fight at Rhalgr's Reach where she's curbstomped, the fight at Castellum Velodyna where the Warrior of Light still defeats her handily, and the fight in the Resonatorium where her Resonance has to be overloaded to stand a chance of even hitting her for a brief period of time.)

The Japanese term for the phenomenon - "the power to overcome" - explains how it protects from tempering. The primal's will is simply overcome by the Echo user's... which pretty easily explains how Zenos was able to use it to control Shinryu, actually.

Resonance is simply an artificial copy of the Echo, though seemingly with glitches owing to its root in artifice. Without knowing whether or not Zenos' Resonance has the same flaw Fordola's does we can't really say whether it was simply an imperfection in the process used on Fordola or endemic to Resonance altogether. Or perhaps it's a flaw in the process, but can be remedied with more R&D.

Most of this is tentative inference from what's been explained to me, but this is my understanding of the nature of Light and Dark and the Echo with what information I currently have.

Where are things headed? Ionno, I'm not psychic.

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Originally Posted by Cilia

LIGHT / DARKNESS
Light is the separation of things, Darkness is the blending of things.

Darkness-type Void (13th Shard) is visited at the climax of the Crystal Tower raids (World of Darkness). There's very little terrain and only unliving beings (voidsent) there - without aether (energy) time effectively does not pass, and the few things that exist there have simply managed to escape aetheric compression. Everything has been blended up and compressed into a singularity.

Light-type Void (1st Shard, partially) has everything bleached of aether; everything has been taken out, leaving nothingness in its wake. In other words, walls have been set up between everything - all aether (matter) has been separated from all other aether, so nothing can exist. As opposed to the 13th's black hole-like singularity, this one is an apt void.

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That's reaching, I think. You're probably not wrong, per se, and may even be proven right, but I still think the opposite is the simpler explanation (stuff vs. no stuff). Granted, I am EXTREMELY BIASED from studying Zoroastrianism (among other religions) in college, as our present understanding of the Origin of Man in FFXIV is extremely close already. We're basically just missing an admission that Hydaelyn created Man one way, and Zodiark broke it, resulting in banishment and our present cosmology. (Trying to get me to accept otherwise in FFXIV is indirectly asking me to rethink my philosophical understanding of our universe, which flat-out isn't going to happen.)

Keep in mind, I'm also trying to understand some benefit to Dark in the current order, because at present, and especially if unification and separation reversed from what I expect, there doesn't seem to be any obvious reason we shouldn't just get rid of it entirely without digging into themes from other games that haven't been presented in-game outside of the lyrics to Answers. (And that's kind of a big problem.)


Might be that we're all wrong and unification and separation are on a perpendicular axis to Light and Dark, free to be toyed with by Hydaelyn and Zodiark alike, and the Echo is consequently within both their powers to give. Order and chaos I'll buy as tied to Light and Dark, as perfect order can be equated to stasis, and time could easily lose meaning in a world of total chaos, but unification and separation are starting to look like the wrong tree. (As in, it's too easy to push one side so far to one extreme it loops around and comes out the other.)

Since I've slept on it:

I think, if anything, barriers can be a means to uphold order, but not a primary attribute of order. Tearing down a retaining wall, for example, would lead to more chaos.

At the same time, barriers can be used to incite chaos. Language barriers can lead to conflict, the distinction between individuals can lead to conflict. Tearing down those barriers (via the Echo) would thus lead to more order.

An ordered world has no need of barriers, as each and every particle is uniform. No separation required. A chaotic world, on the other hand, the barriers are so strong that every one and every thing is just cut off from one another forever, in eternal conflict and unable to return to the Lifestream (that is, surrender your barrier and die).


At this point, there are just too may philosophical holes in attributing barriers one way or the other (regardless of text), that I can only see them as the tool of both, to be manipulated freely by their chosen ones.


(Definitely starting to see why Theodric gets salty about upvotes, though.)

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Originally Posted by Cilia

The Ascian Prime suggests that at least some of what Hydaelyn's Light does is "put up walls / barriers on existence." While that sounds bad, remember that it's what allows individuality in mortals. Without those "walls" applying to souls, all mortals would just be lumps of aether.

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HUMAN INSTRUMENTALITY PROJECT INTENSIFIES

One Shower + Coffee later:
Wait a sec guys. If the only real indicator we have associating Hydaelyn with barriers is that line from Ascian Prime, what if we're reading it backwards?

What if the issue isn't that Hydaelyn and her tricksy barriers are getting in the way for the 1000th time, but that Hydaelyn is putting up a barrier period? As in, She's stepping into what is supposed to be Zodiark's domain?

I think I can use this reasoning to segue back into the question I posed earlier: "What happens to the aether released when an Ascian is killed?"

Regardless of whether the Ascians are fragments of Zodiark or simply former humans imbued with His power, they're still souls carrying power alien to Hydaelyn. If one were to die, the soul would be released to be absorbed into the Lifestream and flow back into the Mothercrystal. Where normally Hydaelyn and Zodiark would be there to sort things out together, with Hydaelyn as the sole resident, She is suddenly the sole recipient of that power. Zodiark's power.

If their power is supposed to be in balance, simply killing an Ascian would be enough to tip the balance towards Light, as it takes a percentage of power from Zodiark's total and adds it to Hydaelyn's.

By that point, we've already killed Nabriales, which means his soul would have returned to Hydaelyn along with whatever power from Zodiark he bore. Suddenly, Hydaelyn has limited access to an entire moveset that used to be outside Her domain. She can separate things now. Block them off. The WoL, as her champion, now has the ability to not just resist tempering, but actively create new barriers to shield others. Our Echo wasn't just upgraded, but fundamentally altered.

With the Shadowhunter running around killing Ascians, Arbert and co. killing an Ascian, and us slated to possibly kill Elidibus, we could be destroying the balance between Light and Dark even as the immediate concentration of Darkness we face appears to be growing stronger.

At a certain level, aether is just aether. The Lifestream/Aetherial Sea is where all aether is supposed to go when the life associated with it dies. It has also been likened to a giant aether blender. The aether that makes something up doesn't stay the aether of that thing in the Lifestream. Instead it's broken down into the fundamental parts of aether to be turned into the aether of something else when it is reborn.

The Ascians are deliberately bypassing the Lifestream by going Somewhere Else when they die or are forced out of bodies. Their aether isn't going where it is supposed to go. Killing off the Ascians for good isn't even really about killing them. It's about sending their aether to the Lifestream which is where their aether should have gone in the first place when they died the first time. Killing off Ascians is about removing an aberration in the natural order. This is in contrast to the Warriors of Darkness who willingly go to their Shard's Lifestream once Hydaelyn goes to fix their Shard.

Hydaelyn has always been associated with aether, and is oftentimes thought of as being the source of aether itself. Zodiark seems be associated with a lack of aether or the consumption of it.

As for the Ascians having powers alien to Hydaelyn... I don't think they do. Both the Ascians and the Warriors of Light/Darkness have the Echo. The only difference between them seems to be in how they use the Echo. The Ascians use it to pervert the natural order while the Warriors use the Echo to maintain the natural order.

Well, this is a lot to get through.

Ahem. On the origin of man and the planet as we know it, the one passage we actually have from the Gerun Oracles provides some information. We didn't fully understand it at the time, but some of it's been accurate, so it's fair to say the rest likely is as well.

http://img.finalfantasyxiv.com/t/f03...a629018c_3.png

"To the seas She cast Her children, for fear of the Moon.
For hate of the Star, to the seas He cast His doom."

Now, there are a number of ways to interpret this bit. Were mortals sent out because Hydaelyn was afraid for them, or to be used to protect Herself from Zodiark's wrath? "His doom" obviously refers to the Ascians, especially if you look at the other language versions translated. Past that I can't say much. (I just go where evidence leads me.)

As for the exact mechanisms that are creating the Light void on the first shard, that much is just speculation. But we do know that it's essentially an aether-bleached wasteland akin to the Burn or the before/after picture in my last post; this was confirmed in the PAX 2017 interview with Koji Fox. (I really had to dredge for this one, but given I answered it correctly beforehand I was rather proud of myself for that. So I remembered, just had to snag a reference.)

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Gamer Escape: Would a “Light-born” void differ from the “Dark-born” void we know?

Koji Fox: Actually, yes. There’s that that “blank, white perfection” line in the game. That’s accurate. The Dark void that we know is void of aether, but you still have the people and animals that were there and they’re aether-starved and trying to break through into our world and suck that aether back into their own. Whereas in a light void there’s NOTHING. It’s empty. Beyond that I can’t say anything.

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Again, the exact physics and metaphysics of it are up for interpretaion, but this much we can take as certain fact. Relatively.

As for "natural order..." Whose natural order? Hydaelyn's?

Echo users of all walks seem to be able to flout Her rules regarding the Lifestream. It isn't just the Ascians using their Dark Crystals to hightail it when things go south: the Sahagin Elder and now Zenos (seemingly) have both cheated death through its use alone (though Sahagin Elder ended up a snackoo for Leviathan shortly thereafter). Perhaps the Echo was what let us survive Aulus' soul-tearing technique. Perhaps all "non-natural" Ascians were once Echo-using mortals. (Solus? He made the Empire into what it was to fulfill the Ascians' goals regardless...)

Zodiark, I would argue, isn't about a lack of aether but is about the consumption of it. All of it - every kind. This fits in with the "Dark is a blend of everything" in typical fantasy cosmology. If Hydaelyn is a "prism" capable of separating aether to create the world as we know it, Zodiark would be the opposite - taking all kinds of aether and compressing them into one kind (Dark).

White light refracts into all colors; but if you take, say, buckets of paint and mix them up you'll never get white paint out of it. That's the line of thinking I'm presently using to understand the two and their relationship with aether.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

Koji curses a lot for such a good writer

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I'm guessing 3 beers in, lol

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

Koji curses a lot for such a good writer

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I'm guessing 3 beers in, lol