Tale of Emet [FF14 x Nier Reincarnation event story]

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Originally Posted by Kozh

Leave it to you to twist it into emet's fault. Like Lurina said, if he who possess the echo couldn't understand what the sundered said, then it means the sundered doesn't have language to translate to. The echo wouldn't stop working just because we speak to what we deemed as lesser being.

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That isn’t how the echo works. It doesn’t need a language to translate from, that’s a gameplay convenience. We feel the intent and meaning of what something is trying to convey, which we gather meaning from. We literally talk to intelligent animals regularly, one’s who growl at us.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

We’re able to communicate with a “smarter than average” troll that read a book but is still grunting and grrr-ing so I find it hard to believe the the newly sundered Ancients came out less evolved than a troll who discovered “language” on his own and taught himself to read. We can also understand that specific troll, but not other trolls, but that specific troll can talk to other trolls, implying that they have their own language the Echo doesn’t work on.

There’s also the Mandragora, who have their own language and culture that’s indecipherable to both us and the Ancients.

But previously the Echo was stated to connect souls together so that one may understand the other. If one with the Echo is unable to make a connection with someone else, they won’t understand.

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Originally Posted by EaraGrace

That isn’t how the echo works. It doesn’t need a language to translate from, that’s a gameplay convenience. We feel the intent and meaning of what something is trying to convey, which we gather meaning from. We literally talk to intelligent animals regularly, one’s who growl at us.

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What if the reason why we're able to talk to that one specific troll is not a matter of intelligence but because it has a soul while the others don't? In the same way creations were granted their souls by the star maybe the animals we know in the post-sundering world don't have a soul by default.

So, with the immediate post-sundering humanity... What if the sundering left them soulless initially and the star eventually started granting souls back to humanity?

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Originally Posted by Sicno

What if the reason why we're able to talk to that one specific troll is not a matter of intelligence but because it has a soul while the others don't? In the same way creations were granted their souls by the star maybe the animals we know in the post-sundering world don't have a soul by default.

So, with the immediate post-sundering humanity... What if the sundering left them soulless initially and the star eventually started granting souls back to humanity?

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Sundering doesn’t strip anyone of a soul as far as we know, it divides. It strikes at everything that defines a target but leaves the actual thing alone. For it to strip someone of their soul would be to kill them, which doesn’t fit Emets description. I think this is where we recognize the bias of the narrator.

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Originally Posted by EaraGrace

Sundering doesn’t strip anyone of a soul, it divides. It strikes at everything that defines a target but leaves the actual thing alone. For it to strip someone of their soul would be to kill them, which doesn’t fit Emets description. I think this is where we recognize the bias of the narrator.

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But the description of the state of post-sundering humanity goes waaaay beyond "leaving the actual thing alone". I don't think we can expect consistency anymore, only "being up to date with the latest retcons".

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Originally Posted by Sicno

But the description of the state of post-sundering humanity goes waaaay beyond "leaving the actual thing alone". I don't think we can expect consistency anymore, only "being up to date with the latest retcons".

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Not a single word in the collab hasn’t already been stated by Emet in ShB. This is isn’t a retcon, this a characters perspective. Notice how the “malformed” souls are walking about in both images, they aren’t screaming for help or catatonic like you would see if they were stripped of their souls (we were shown what this looks like in the StB patch series). There’s little to suggest that’s what happened.

And Sundering itself would not strip anyone of language, it would be a wiping of memory that would do that.

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Originally Posted by EaraGrace

Not a single word in the collab hasn’t already been stated by Emet in ShB. This is isn’t a retcon, this a characters perspective. Notice how the “malformed” souls are walking about in both images, they aren’t screaming for help or catatonic like you would see if they were stripped of their souls (we were shown what this looks like in the StB patch series). There’s little to suggest that’s what happened.

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Now that you mention it... on the one hand yeah, the scions were left in a deep slumber while their souls were dragged away. On the other hand... we have creatures like creations that were able to function before being granted a soul. How is it that losing a soul would leave them in such a state if it's not needed for a creature to function? This makes me question more things about the story and the lore.

But back to Nier, having someone narrate those events gives me the impression this is how things transpired and not "his version" or "how he perceived it". Sure, some of it may be colored by what pertains to him, but it's not him doing the description. So it should be less biased.

I'm thinking now they may not have been completely soulless but rather, their souls/aether may have have been thin and unstable for a while so not even the echo worked on them. That's still something pretty brutal to have faced. There was certainly no mercy.

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Originally Posted by Sicno

Now that you mention it... on the one hand yeah, the scions were left in a deep slumber while their souls were dragged away. On the other hand... we have creatures like creations that were able to function before being granted a soul. How is it that losing a soul would leave them in such a state if it's not needed for a creature to function? This makes me question more things about the story and the lore.

But back to Nier, having someone narrate those events gives me the impression this is how things transpired and not "his version" or "how he perceived it". Sure, some of it may be colored by what pertains to him, but it's not him doing the description. So it should be less biased.

I'm thinking now they may not have been completely soulless but rather, their souls/aether may have have been thin and unstable for a while so not even the echo worked on them. That's still something pretty brutal to have faced. There was certainly no mercy.

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Well when it comes to how events are being told through storyteller's words, it is often either under exaggerated or over exaggerated compared to what really happened even if the storyteller is trying to describe the perspective of a individual for the story they tell. The process of how the sundered became what they are now could have been under exaggerated from what we are told in FF14 to a point it may have been far more horrifying to see to a point we may never truely comprehend how it was while some may have been over exaggerated due to bias views of certain characters and maybe done so for some flare to the story.

Heck, stories about WoL is often over exaggerated as we learn in FF14 so the people who only know WoL through stories being told to them often don't recognize him/her on first meeting either because of the stories maybe changing certain things, such as WoL's appearance, personality, events, and power, to a point the story is trying to give off a more negative view or positive view.

Argos is probably the simplest example of how reflections work, and the in-game text directly refers to his duplicates as such. He essentially sunders and rejoins himself at will.

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Originally Posted by EaraGrace

Was this said in one of the weapons?

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It wasn't. He's just making that leap on his own.

Another in-game counterpoint to this "literal malformed creatures" thing is Emet's own demonstration of the Sundering with Ryne. He produces a perfect copy of her, not a devolved blob – which surely would have been the quickest way to impart the sheer horror of what he had been through, if it is indeed what he had been through.

I'm inclined to take it as unreliable narrator plus writing to convey in broad strokes for a non-FF audience plus possibly Ishikawa not checking the finer points of what the Echo can do, because that entire thing has been out the window for some time.

The rules of what is the Echo and what is the blessing of Light got completely flipped sometime between being laid out in 2.X/3.0 and revisited in 5.X/6.0, and the lorebook descriptions are from that earlier era so I really don't know how much of it we can trust any more. We direly need a third lorebook to hammer all this out.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

But previously the Echo was stated to connect souls together so that one may understand the other. If one with the Echo is unable to make a connection with someone else, they won’t understand.

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That's an interesting way of looking at it too. If Emet, consciously or subconsciously, recoils from these sundered beings and refuses to see them as something he still can relate to, he can't connect to them and so reinforces his impression that they are in a worse state than they actually are.