What lore do you ignore?

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Originally Posted by Edevane

Huh, would you be able to tell me where is this said? I can't remember it being mentioned.

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Iirc shade hythloe explained it before seat of sacrifice. Basically emet made it in secret after azem was stripped of his title.

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

Number 1: that bit of text that states au ra are not dragons on the race selection. There's too much evidence in and out of universe saying otherwise.

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What "evidence" are you talking about? There's nothing within the game that indicates they have a special link to the dragons, and outside of the game we've just had the devs telling us they're not connected.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

That's not what Azem's crystal does. It is explicitly mentioned that it does not have any actual memories of Azem, only that one spell. It doesn't function like the others, because it wasn't designed in the same way or in the same batch.

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It actually isn't explicitly stated anywhere with what you say. It is explicitly stated that it has Azem's spell, but it is also stated that it contains the name and role of the office. There's nothing that Hythlodaeus says that says it's different other than it was made in secret.

The issue lies in, it would be Emet-selch's memories of Azem just like how the other Convocation stones are said to be, "As remembered by the Unsundered."

Unless you're going off some additional context from another language. I haven't looked into the scene beyond English.

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Originally Posted by sidurgu-12

Iirc shade hythloe explained it before seat of sacrifice. Basically emet made it in secret after azem was stripped of his title.

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Specifically, the passage in question:

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Originally Posted by Fake Hythlodaeus

Defectors having been deemed unworthy of commemoration, no crystal exists for the individual in question.
...Or shouldn't exist, at any rate--and wouldn't, had a friend not created one in secret.
A crystal bearing the forgotten name of her office, along with a magick of her own conceiving--a singular incantation embodying her spirit.

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That seems very, very specific to me: it only contains the name of their office (which was presumably in the form of that passage in Seat of Sacrifice) and the spell we keep using to justify trials after that point. There is no indication that it contains anything else in it, not even the faintest grabs that all the other crystals have that generally 'reminds' them.

Remember just how reliable this source is: Fake Hythlodaeus is a figment of Emet's imagination separate from all the other shades specifically because Emet reasoned that Hythlodaeus was smart enough to know it all anyway. While this nature doesn't make him a perfect, objective source on subjects like the End of Days, it makes him literally the most reliable source it's possible for there to be on the subject of 'a thing Emet-Selch did in secret', as Hythlodaeus is also not the type to lie or withhold information.

If you approach the question from a more logical 'what would Emet-Selch do' perspective, it also doesn't make sense he would've done it: the purpose of the crystals was to ascend the Convocation that stood at the end of Amaurot's days, all fully on Team Zodiark. Essentially, the Unsundered got together their most agreed-on, staunchest allies (granted, Fandaniel didn't go super well). From that perspective, Azem wasn't just cut from the lineup for organizational reasons, they were cut because also ascending the one guy who disagreed strongly enough to leave would be a really bad idea. Possibly the worst idea, in fact. Emet might be sentimental, but he's not stupid.

EDIT: Unless, of course, you just decide to ignore all that, as is the subject of this thread. Which again, you have pull power to do, but I never like, partially for this reason; if you want to ignore Thing A, what's stopping you from also ignoring Related Thing B? Ahd then there's Tangentially Related Thing C, and eventually it's not even clear how much we even hold in common, which can really suck depending on why we're talking about things.

Wording on that is odd. Azem did not join Venat. So who did they defect to? Had Azem just abandoned the Convocation for their own cause they would call them a deserter.

Was there a secret third party in the Zodiark vs Hydaelyn debacle that Azem joined?

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

Wording on that is odd. Azem did not join Venat. So who did they defect to? Had Azem just abandoned the Convocation for their own cause they would call them a deserter.

Was there a secret third party in the Zodiark vs Hydaelyn debacle that Azem joined?

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I think they kept it vague on purpose. For me azem kept doing what he did best until he got hit by the sundering.

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

Wording on that is odd. Azem did not join Venat. So who did they defect to? Had Azem just abandoned the Convocation for their own cause they would call them a deserter.

Was there a secret third party in the Zodiark vs Hydaelyn debacle that Azem joined?

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One theory that I like is that there was another threat Azem was dealing with at the time when the Sundering occurred. I personally believe the final boss of Pandaemonium will be that threat, and finishing Pandaemonium is basically waving goodbye to the Ancients and to the last case of "unfinished business" Azem left behind.

I ignore our best friend coming to save us and then we fight him on a ocean. I ignore that our best friends partner, the punchable face guy saved us after we switch bodies because times up.

I ignore that emo twitter was the final boss and the build up we were waiting for.

Also ignore that the talking crystal lady was good.

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Originally Posted by LalafellDown

I ignore our best friend coming to save us and then we fight him on a ocean. I ignore that our best friends partner, the punchable face guy saved us after we switch bodies because times up.

I ignore that emo twitter was the final boss and the build up we were waiting for.

Also ignore that the talking crystal lady was good.

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Zenos did not deserve to go out happy. I wanted to flip him off and let him wallow at the edge of the universe.

I want to ask an important question that I think is being missed in a lot of these things people are saying they're ignoring.

Why? Not why as in 'why this thing specifically', but why as in 'why have you chosen to ignore it', why was that what you chose to do? Is it a functional thing, where you're roleplaying or writing fanworks and this element is too much effort to include or works against what you're going for? Is it a mental health/comfort thing where that part is personally triggering or upsetting enough that it's better to put it out of mind? Something else that's just not occurring to me?

I ask because I think a lot of people are just using this thread to air 'lore/story I don't like', and that... doesn't sound right. Sure, a game you like did a thing you don't; are you really ignoring that, or are you just here to passive-aggressively say they shouldn't have? And if you are ignoring it solely because you don't like it, is that how you handle any media doing the same? Are you trying to create some perfect internal FFXIV rather than accepting that it may have flaws or disagree with you?


In writing this, though, I did realize there is part of the game's lore I do 'ignore', but it is more complicated than that: the concerning amount of uses of sexual assault basically solely for 'darkness' and shock value in ARR especially. I don't entirely block it out, but I do my best to just leave that as far away as possible from both my roleplaying and lore discussions, including my videos (although unfortunately, my next one does have to touch on an instance in HW). I find it genuinely uncomfortable just how much it was done and with so little respect, but fortunately the devs both use it less now and treat it with more respect when it comes up; after HW it's basically only Yotsuyu, and that part of her is done quite well. I'll readily call ARR out for it when it comes up, but it's generally just better to put it out of mind for the most part.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

I want to ask an important question that I think is being missed in a lot of these things people are saying they're ignoring.

Why? Not why as in 'why this thing specifically', but why as in 'why have you chosen to ignore it', why was that what you chose to do? Is it a functional thing, where you're roleplaying or writing fanworks and this element is too much effort to include or works against what you're going for? Is it a mental health/comfort thing where that part is personally triggering or upsetting enough that it's better to put it out of mind? Something else that's just not occurring to me?

I ask because I think a lot of people are just using this thread to air 'lore/story I don't like', and that... doesn't sound right. Sure, a game you like did a thing you don't; are you really ignoring that, or are you just here to passive-aggressively say they shouldn't have? And if you are ignoring it solely because you don't like it, is that how you handle any media doing the same? Are you trying to create some perfect internal FFXIV rather than accepting that it may have flaws or disagree with you?


In writing this, though, I did realize there is part of the game's lore I do 'ignore', but it is more complicated than that: the concerning amount of uses of sexual assault basically solely for 'darkness' and shock value in ARR especially. I don't entirely block it out, but I do my best to just leave that as far away as possible from both my roleplaying and lore discussions, including my videos (although unfortunately, my next one does have to touch on an instance in HW). I find it genuinely uncomfortable just how much it was done and with so little respect, but fortunately the devs both use it less now and treat it with more respect when it comes up; after HW it's basically only Yotsuyu, and that part of her is done quite well. I'll readily call ARR out for it when it comes up, but it's generally just better to put it out of mind for the most part.

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For me its because of my personal beliefs actively hurt my enjoyment of the game so i try to either headcanon it or ignore it outright. But while i do have a few headcanons the lifestream is the only thing i ignore.
Edit: though tbh i dont actually ignore the ancients connection to everything despite being kind of bothered by it.

The "everything that has transpired since 2.0 to 6.0+ has been less than one year" nonsense. If there is anything that needs a retcon, it is the unfathomably stupid timeline.

As far as I'm concerned, it's been 10 years since the 7th Umbral Era's end. Years literally pass and yearly holiday events are numerous by *lore*. It feels like an excuse not to age up the Twins to me.

Please, Square, don't Ash Ketchum the Twins.

As far as we've seen so far, Convocation stones just seem to be the precursors to job crystals (i.e. upon the surface of this multi-aspected crystal are carved the myriad deeds of Azems from eras past). The Sage questline suggests that not anyone can pick up a soul crystal and learn its secrets. It has to specifically resonate with your soul. The same is likely true for the Convocation stones, although we're yet to see what happens with that Chekhov's crystal in the conclusion of Pandaemonium.

I was under the impression that the convocation stones were how Emet reinstituted the sundered Ascians back to their former Convocation posts. Amon had vague memories of his former life in flashbacks, but it's only after Emet found him that he was able to confirm those memories were real, presumably against the crystal. But much like Gaia, those memories are also something that he views as external to himself. And they're still incomplete. He only remembers that you were on Elpis after you remind him of it, despite having flashbacks of the place.

I don't really think there's a good rationale from selectively 'ignoring' lore unless the writers have specifically gone back and rewritten an in-game event such that you have two conflicting versions of the same story. You could, of course, still make the case that both 'accounts' are simply different retellings of the same legend and take both with a grain of salt. Dogma is prevalent everywhere, though, so it isn't surprising.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

I ask because I think a lot of people are just using this thread to air 'lore/story I don't like', and that... doesn't sound right. Sure, a game you like did a thing you don't; are you really ignoring that, or are you just here to passive-aggressively say they shouldn't have? And if you are ignoring it solely because you don't like it, is that how you handle any media doing the same? Are you trying to create some perfect internal FFXIV rather than accepting that it may have flaws or disagree with you?

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FFXIV is not just a story. With a book or show, if you don't like what it's doing, there's absolutely no reason other than sunk cost fallacy to not just drop it like a hot rock - the plot is all it has going for it. With a game, though, it becomes complicated because you can hate something about the writing enough that you'd be done under normal circumstances and still have a stronger motivation for staying. Maybe all your friends are playing it and quitting means not getting to socialize with them as much. Maybe you're really into some specific gameplay niche like savage raiding, or a social one like roleplay. Maybe you just really like Triple Triad.

In a situation like that, sometimes the only thing you can really do to keep enjoying the part you enjoy without experiencing cognitive dissonance is to blot you don't like out of your mind. (Again, this is only for stuff that would normally be so overwhelmingly offputting you'd wanna quit. For smaller complaints it's easy to just accept the game isn't perfect - probably people who say "ignore" in that sense just mean "dismiss")

To use your example, I would normally throw a story that used sexual assault as a throwaway plot point in the midst of an otherwise light-hearted, fun story out the window, but because I like the rest of it enough, I try to block it out of my mind.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

Well, the game does act like you've solo'd a lot of those primals. Hell, it's why the Grand Companies wanted the WoL so badly, they SOLO'D a primal, who wouldn't want such a person in their forces?

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It does and doesnt. Like Susano and your fishing friends..so to make it all sense I just assumed that this is just some bad talk ingame and we did them all alone.

Ignoring plot points in an MMO is normal in my mind because of how much of it has to be adjusted because it is an MMO. Doing every job, being able to change race and sex with a potion and no one mentions it, the mountains of dead animals we have created in the process of leveling. While some of this is mechanics, a lot of it had nods to it actually happening in what npcs say.
Like some mentioned earlier, the Primal fights are reacted to like we did solo, while talking to npcs in the are before the fight mention you grabbing some friends real quick.

MMOs are a buffet. You don't have to do all the side quests. You don't have to level every class. You pick and choose want you want to take part in. The lore is no different.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

I want to ask an important question that I think is being missed in a lot of these things people are saying they're ignoring.

Why? Not why as in 'why this thing specifically', but why as in 'why have you chosen to ignore it', why was that what you chose to do? Is it a functional thing, where you're roleplaying or writing fanworks and this element is too much effort to include or works against what you're going for? Is it a mental health/comfort thing where that part is personally triggering or upsetting enough that it's better to put it out of mind? Something else that's just not occurring to me?

I ask because I think a lot of people are just using this thread to air 'lore/story I don't like', and that... doesn't sound right. Sure, a game you like did a thing you don't; are you really ignoring that, or are you just here to passive-aggressively say they shouldn't have? And if you are ignoring it solely because you don't like it, is that how you handle any media doing the same? Are you trying to create some perfect internal FFXIV rather than accepting that it may have flaws or disagree with you?

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That's a good question. As mentioned, in my case, I ignore the Yorha raids because they make themselves ignorable. So based on that, I would say it's a mix of "I personally don't like the story" and "functional issue", in that I personally don't like the story because it's a functional issue. It doesn't tie into FFXIV in any meaningful way, so there's a very strong sense of "why shouldn't I ignore it?" when it comes to working with FFXIV lore.

Compare to, say, the Ivalice content, which makes itself at home in FFXIV, for better or for worse. I don't personally like the Ivalice content either, but I accept them as part of FFXIV's world, including the retcon about "no non-pureblood Garlean can be a Legatus". So when discussing and speculating about FFXIV, I have to take the Ivalice stuff into consideration, even if I'm personally not that interested in it.

But the Yorha raids, as I often say, can be excised entirely from FFXIV with absolutely no effect on lore before and after. Hence, it is technically a problem of "too much effort" to include for discussions of FFXIV lore, where "too much effort" here means "any effort at all".

I suppose it's a form of frustration: "Why should I care, when it gives me no reason to care?"

I think the only thing I would ignore and at this point it's only "word of God". Is Yoshi-P's explanation on how the races evolved from the sundered ancients. It sounds too much like an ass pull and something they just gave a 5 minute thought about instead of having anything planned....

I dismissed everything Meteion said pretty quickly, and chalked it up to her using outdated terminology or exaggerating.
The math just doesn't add up. She was only on a 108 year mission.
The terminology used by Alphatron in later patches seems to support me.

End of the Universe = Edge of the Galaxy.
All Stars in the Universe = A couple dozen planets in the galaxy. Then she assumed all planets would be the same despite the relatively small sample size.

I also kind of ignore Alphatron being destroyed.
There doesn't seem to be much evidence that they're not just still in standby mode, but everything in game acts like it was destroyed.
Meteion shouldn't really be able to even do anything to them, unless she just made Sir so depressed he ordered the entire civilization to self destruct.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

I want to ask an important question [...]

I ask because I think a lot of people are just using this thread to air 'lore/story I don't like', and that... doesn't sound right. Sure, a game you like did a thing you don't; are you really ignoring that, or are you just here to passive-aggressively say they shouldn't have? And if you are ignoring it solely because you don't like it, is that how you handle any media doing the same? Are you trying to create some perfect internal FFXIV rather than accepting that it may have flaws or disagree with you?

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I think that is essentially what I am doing if I say I am ignoring lore, and I don't see a problem with it as long as I know what I am doing, and don't confuse it with actually claiming things happened my reimagined way.

Ultimately, this is a thing I am playing to entertain myself, and if I look at it and think "this bit wasn't very good, it could have been better if they wrote it in this specific different way" then I am going to get enjoyment out of the idea of the altered thing.

I think because the game involves a self-created character and/or silent protagonist, but I am at all times filtering this game through a thought process of, what would my character be saying in this scene? Does this make sense for her personally? ...so I'm already in that mindset of reconfiguring some parts of even the story unfolding right in front of me here. I tend to go over the other characters' dialogue with a proofreading sort of mindset as well, I think - not at the expense of enjoying it, but if I hit something jarring then I'll be imagining better ways to word it.

As far as I can remember, it's always been something I've done with similar character situations. Right back in Pokémon Silver, my teenage self was keeping lengthy fanficcy notes about my actual character versus the enforced single protagonist, and how "her version" of the adventure played out, hitting all the main notes of the story but varying in the details. (There's something quite MMO-ish about Pokémon, especially of FFXIV's "solo story plus ways to interact with others" approach, but with the individualised character aspect of it sort of dangling out into the real world rather than within the game itself.)

But anyway. This game. The things I will mentally tinker with are mostly those that won't be touched on in future. It's not trying to change the trajectory of the plot, but to deviate from it in ways that improve the story (to me) without disrupting the overall flow.

The game isn't perfect. I think they have had some dreadful plot point ideas, but they sit next to a lot of good plot and other things I really do like about the game, and in the long run it's a story I'm invested in and want to keep enjoying. And if that means fanficcing over the parts of it I dislike, then what does it matter to anyone else? All that matters is that if I'm discussing lore here, I stick to the actual lore.

I guess the things I ignore is the one year for events, Q&A answers for how the races came to be, that Azem was just doing whatever you think they were and the Nier raids. For me a lot of why is because it makes no sense to me. Neir just asks for it to be ignored. If it integrated itself more into the world of XIV and didn't come off as another thing a Yoko Taro fan needs to be aware of I might not want to pull a Lahabreha and cast it off. To me it doesn't make sense for Azem to do what they did just because they've gotten behind on their knitting projects or whatnot. The races things goes against what little we do have with how genetics and evolution work in the game.

I can understand why some people consider the collaboration events as being 'external' to the game lore depending on how well it is integrated with the story. But there are a lot of things that can be handwaved with 'wanderers from another dimension'. I don't think the writing takes itself seriously enough to be rigid with this.

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Originally Posted by Letter from the Producer LIVE Part LXVIII (03/03/2022)

A: What Venat’s successor to the seat of Azem was doing during the Final Days is a secret, one that may or may not be revealed in the future. However, we do have some idea of what they were up to. Whatever you imagine you would’ve done if you were Azem is probably the closest we can get to the truth. (laughs)

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This essentially reads as: 'We already have a story planned around what happened to Azem, but we can't tell you yet.' The last line is just Yoshi-p being clever about Azem's identity i.e. 'You tell me what you were doing all this time.'

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

Definetly for me it was EW's silly retcon of the Blessing of Light being what protects against Primal influence/tempering rather than the Echo despite the game constantly stating and proving it was the Echo doing the protecting for a decade. It's a clunky attempt to fix a minor plot hole that appeared in SB (how to explain the 'tempering shielding' ability the WoL used during the 'Return of the Bull'), and only snowballed in ShB (where the Ancients/Ascians were revealed to be tempered by Zodiark and yet still had the Echo). .

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That point and dynamis are things I'd rather pretend didn't happen...though I think the latter is liable to end up becoming too deeply ingrained in the plot for that to be reasonable in the longterm.

It tries to retroactively attach deeper logic to something that didn't need it. Overcoming obstacles through sheer heroic willpower is more romantic to me then doing so through my unmeasurable ability to subconsciously manipulate invisible nonsensium.

I think another aspect of this "reject your lore and substitute my own" thing is that the devs literally don't know the truth of at least some of their plot mysteries at the time they are established, meaning that they are essentially setting themselves the same puzzle that is set before the fans: here are the fragments of facts established so far; what coherent story can you construct that ticks all of these boxes?

In some cases, I think I have found a better and more satisfying solution to this problem than they found for themselves, in which case it feels frustrating that the official version doesn't "fit the evidence". Sometimes I get the feeling that they do it deliberately just so they won't present the logical conclusion that fans have already reached, so they can "surprise the players" at the cost of something less logical and foreshadowed.

Every serial work ever is written over time. You can have a rough plan of what you want to do with a creative work, but that's not realistically going to be static as you write.

I think it's fun to try and guess what's happening next, and sometimes you're lucky and your prediction is accurate. But you're also not the writer, so you're not going to come up with the same ideas that they do. People only get wound up over this because they set up unrealistic expectations for themselves. But again, this happens with every serial work ever.

This concept of 'ownership' of a creative work is the reason why fanfiction exists. People get attached to characters and storylines and want to inject their own ideas into the universe. Yet at the same time there's still an 'official' version of events. It is what it is.

I suppose it's not outright ignoring, but I very liberally interpret the Blessing of Light as being a protective ward that subscribes to the idea that the best defence is a good offence. Builds on top of the echo and lets us do things like create weapons of light to poke holes in Ascians, or slurp up some of that excess light on the first so we can split the sky in half and reveal the night.

I don't really think that's what they were going, but it works well enough for me. Plus, that sort of "active protection" philosophy seems like something a former Azem would come up with.

Personally I only ignore a couple of things in-game and don't care much for what's not stated in universe.

For example, the timeline. When my character hears people talk about the calamity happening 5 years ago, I just take it as "it's been longer than that but it doesn't feel that way now, does it?" While I don't have a specific timeframe in my mind for how long each expansion lasted, I like to think it was at least 1 year, maybe a bit more (with the exception of ShB).

Another thing I ignore is how "awesome" and "expert" my WoL is. While I may have all jobs at level 90, in my mind I'm only a thaumaturge with some knowledge of Black Magic but not even close to the level of the Mhaachi mages. Crafters it's the same. I have dabbled in all professions but I'm not the expert some people claim my character is. I just do this because it makes it more believable when someone threatens my character and he just stands there.

The final thing I ignore is when some of the dialogue options only give you the chance of being nice to certain NPCs. I roleplay my character as being too polite but he doesn't like some people so I would be colder in my interactions with them while still agreeing to help or whatever.

Other than that, I accept the lore no matter how much I dislike the direction it takes. If it contradicts itself I just take it as different interpretations of the truth or that we were working on incomplete information.

I'm ignoring everyone automatically using the name Etheirys. It's so cringy and massively gatekeepy towards Free Trialers. I'm fine with Lollopits saying it since they're the only living boomers left and are contained in Endwalker exclusively. But everyone else saying it is a big no for me. I found out earth used to be called Tonantzin, I'm not gonna start calling it Tonantzin now just because that's what it used to be called. We spent two expansions fighting against terrible Etheirys residents from commiting global genocide, and Meition got away with it too with 100% complete forgiveness.

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Originally Posted by JepMZ

I'm ignoring everyone automatically using the name Etheirys. It's so cringy and massively gatekeepy towards Free Trialers.

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Gatekeeping them from what, exactly?

Personally I would have appreciated an alternate name for it sooner. It was always unnecessarily confusing to have the planet and the entity referred to by the same name.

You don't even need to spoil anything for newbies if they ask why you're calling it Etheirys. Just say it gets introduced later as a term specifically for the planet so it's clearer which one is being talked about.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

Gatekeeping them from what, exactly?

Personally I would have appreciated an alternate name for it sooner. It was always unnecessarily confusing to have the planet and the entity referred to by the same name.

You don't even need to spoil anything for newbies if they ask why you're calling it Etheirys. Just say it gets introduced later as a term specifically for the planet so it's clearer which one is being talked about.

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That entire comment of his guaranteed the odds that he's a troll. So let's just ignore him.

Gatekeeping people from enjoying any content creation where the name is used instead of Hydaelyn. So YouTube videos come to mind and forums where the topic titles doesn't indicate there's Endwalker spoilers in them.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

That entire comment of his guaranteed the odds that he's a troll. So let's just ignore him.

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I don't appreciate being called a troll for participating in a discussion. You don't have to be a troll to dislike something. Especially when I already list my in-game lore reason why it doesn't seem to work in-game.

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Originally Posted by JepMZ

Gatekeeping people from enjoying any content creation where the name is used instead of Hydaelyn. So YouTube videos come to mind and forums where the topic titles doesn't indicate there's Endwalker spoilers in them.



I don't appreciate being called a troll for participating in a discussion. You don't have to be a troll to dislike something. Especially when I already list my in-game lore reason why it doesn't seem to work in-game.

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Your in game reason doesn't read as an in game reason though. Most people who write lore videos or talk about Endwalker things tend to have a spoiler warning attached to them. I'm not sure why a person with the free trial would be watching or reading about subjects that most likely would be spoilers for them.

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Originally Posted by SannaR

Your in game reason doesn't read as an in game reason though. Most people who write lore videos or talk about Endwalker things tend to have a spoiler warning attached to them. I'm not sure why a person with the free trial would be watching or reading about subjects that most likely would be spoilers for them.

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Yeah, as a lore-talker, I am going to say I go to lengths to avoid any clear spoilers in the thumbnail, title or any part of my videos before the spoiler warning itself. Oftentimes this is actually very easy, because there's a difference between 'showing things that spoil the story' and 'showing things that happen to be from later in the game'; if you don't have the context about something, it can often be hard to get enough of it to know there's a spoiler in the first place, and often there's beats that are so innocent and publicly known they aren't spoilers, like 'we go to Sharlayan'. Other times it can be very difficult, though; a great example is when I made a video comparing Emet-Selch and Fandaniel, where it was fairly easy to get a picture of Emet since he doesn't really have any spoilers in appearance, but it's actually damn near impossible for Fandaniel because he wears three faces, and every single one of them is some kind of spoiler.

I think it's right to be concerned about spoiling people who aren't done with the story or are on a free trial, but if I'm going to listen to anyone tell me what to do there, it's going to be someone who actually is or has been in that position. And JepMZ isn't that; they joined the forums in 2015, have seven jobs at level 90, and a lineup of minions that they couldn't have unless they were around for multiple years of events. So this smacks of a 'won't somebody please think of the children' style of straw-moralizing, attacking people for threatening or marginalizing a community that's basically completely fictionalized and abstract.

After all, if you're going to say we're wrong for talking about the story in a way that's 'not friendly to those on a free trial', how are we, as people who have finished the story, supposed to freely talk about it amongst ourselves?


EDIT: Incidentally, this is exactly what I was talking about with my question about 'why are people ignoring these'. Because there's perfectly legitimate reasons to ignore that being the standard and immediately-adopted name, that sort of language update doesn't happen overnight no matter how 'correct' it is... but that's not what they're arguing, they're mainly just using this thread to say 'Thing I Don't Like Is Bad'.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

...there's perfectly legitimate reasons to ignore that being the standard and immediately-adopted name, that sort of language update doesn't happen overnight no matter how 'correct' it is...

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Across a large population, probably not, but for the adoption of the term Etheirys we're really just talking about the Scions and a small group of Sharlayans who are "in the know" – and the Sharlayans quite likely were already familiar with the term from their previous correspondence with the Loporrits, where again it would have been immediately practical in their discussions to have distinct terms for Hydaelyn-the-entity and Etheirys-the-planet to avoid confusion between terms.

Plus Sharlayans are snooty scholars from a snooty pacifist nation. Of course they'd instantly embrace lost knowledge about the planet's true name.

And for some reason they are a super well respected society, I suppose due to western hemisphere aethereyte distribution. It absolutely cannot be all that previously mentioned snooty, pacifist isolationism.

But yeah, this is a setting where teleportation exists. World leaders get in the know quickly (and should really never not be in the know, since having teleporting messengers is almost as fast as email once the attunements have been done).

Dissemination of knowledge in this setting should basically make any major news proliferate at about the speed it does in the real world with the internet. I mean, I'm sure the aethernet is slightly slower, but not that much slower.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

Dissemination of knowledge in this setting should basically make any major news proliferate at about the speed it does in the real world with the internet. I mean, I'm sure the aethernet is slightly slower, but not that much slower.

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On the other hand, the majority of people are probably oblivious to high-level Sharlayan research altogether – from memory we have specifically been told (probably by Koji) that most people don't even know to call the planet Hydaelyn in the first place, or possibly don't even know of Hydaelyn at all.

We're basically dealing with a small pool of high-end researchers using a terminology all their own, about concepts that the average person has no idea about. This isn't about the plausibility of getting a whole population to use new words for an old concept – they probably aren't even aware of the concept, because the entire thing is beyond their knowledge.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Iscah

On the other hand, the majority of people are probably oblivious to high-level Sharlayan research altogether – from memory we have specifically been told (probably by Koji) that most people don't even know to call the planet Hydaelyn in the first place, or possibly don't even know of Hydaelyn at all.

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I still find it very funny that Sharlayan has verifiable, evidenced proof of how the afterlife works, and are clearly just not telling anyone. Granted, that might be a good idea, I imagine suddenly going public with that stuff would cause some holy wars.

I think the barrier isn't actually with the travel of information, though, and more with just people being stubborn. People don't change their language on a dime even if they do know it's right to (believe me, I'm a trans woman, I've seen it first-hand). Realistically we should see either people having to stop themselves using 'Hydaelyn', apologizing for doing so, or a couple jerks making a big weird Thing out of them deliberately not using the newly-established name.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

Realistically we should see either people having to stop themselves using 'Hydaelyn', apologizing for doing so, or a couple jerks making a big weird Thing out of them deliberately not using the newly-established name.

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Oh dear, new headcanon that Sevestre is leading his reactionary Sharlayan faction into trying to ban the term Etheirys -dressed up in language about it coming ultimately from a forbidden knowledge adjacent source- and it's the raging debate in the Forum eating up all valuable time.

This is kind of the inverse of "ignoring lore", I suppose, since it's the current English ADR team that's ignoring it (I can't speak for the others), but the topic reminded me...

I personally pretend that everyone is still pronouncing Seeker of the Sun names as they're described in the naming guides. As it is, you can conceivably hear different pronunciations of "Y'shtola" in a single scene lol. The way they pronounce "G'raha" is at least consistent, but wrong nonetheless.

Of course, inconsistent pronunciation is a problem in general, and a common one in any project where actors are reading the words from a script rather than hearing them in conversation, as most of the characters would in-world. That's on the director(s) for not setting them straight. And that inconsistency is really more annoying to me than any inaccuracies (one could argue the previously established rules are arbitrary -- and I don't necessarily disagree, but I appreciate rules for things like this), solely because it breaks my immersion. Especially in the case of something like "Y'shtola", where none of her CLOSE FRIENDS can settle on a single way to pronounce her name lmao.

Now, granted, I think most of us have probably heard people butcher "uncommon" names or words irl, even when they're repeated or otherwise clarified. I don't think it's impossible for there to be inconsistencies in that context. But in a highly produced work of fantasy like this (where there's an obligation to convey unfamiliar things clearly to the audience), I'd argue the standards are a little different, particularly in cases like this, when said mispronunciation isn't being discussed or acknowledged in the text.

But I realize this isn't a sticking point for most people. u_u

How are the names supposed to be pronounced?