Bahamut and Eikons and Ascian[s], Oh my [hint: this has spoilers and speculation]
My internet is crappy and rather than disconnecting/having my pc crash on my 4th levequest between yesterday and today, all for guild marks, mind you, I thought I would come here and talk about dead ends in the FFXIV mission quests.
I'm not a crazy lore buff, so some of what I say is purely speculative and could be wrong.
First up I would like to talk about the release of the eikons from the "explosion" that ensued after the death of Bahamut and the Garlean airship. Unfortunately, it's really difficult to tell if the explosion was a result of Bahamut, the airship, or something within or beneath the Mor'dhanan lake. Either way, the eikons/primals were somehow released.
This brings up the first problem with FFXIV and its story. Bahamut is dead, and I'm not really sure anyone likes this; it seems weird and is something I would consider would reverse itself in the future, which pretty much brings up the basis of this post.
The second thing to discuss are the items that are found in the Ul'dahn and Lominsan storylines. In the Lominsan storyline, an artifact of some kind has the ability to control aspects of "Leviathan".
Likewise in the Ul'dahn storyline, the characters are investigating a threat, and when one of the characters decides it's worse than the Garleans, the story instantly focuses on a "mysterious horn", which to me is very similar to the artifact in the Lominsan storyline.
Unfortunately, Gridania doesn't fit well into this storyline because well.. they fought a prismatic elemental.. grats guys.
After the storylines drop the main characters and remain unresolved we jarringly join the main storyline involving the beast tribes.
During this storyline, we're introduced to the best, or second best, monster model in the game, the Ascian.
For those of you who don't know or don't remember, Ascian = death.
Our Ascian friend first made his appearance in the mission "Toll of the Warden", which you can read about here.
http://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Toll_of_the_Warden
The appearance of the Ascian comes at a time where the Amajaljjaja [normally I just throw the letters "a", "m", "j", with one "l" together to describe them, but their official name is Amalj'aa clan] and the Ixali [that's my plural form for them] are pretty intent on summoning their respective primals there and now [Ifrit and Garuda].
It's mentioned that everyone is going to die when either are summoned, although I guess that didn't matter a few quests later when Ifrit is summoned, but the Amalj'aa don't seem to care, and neither do the Ixali.
Anyhow Mr. Ascian shows up, in a seemingly random display and suddenly everyone is scared of dying.
That's pretty much the extent of Ascian lore - they have a name, look like death, and they scare the beastclans more than the eikons.
Later, Ifrit talks about not worshiping false gods, which seems to indicate that eikons seem to consider themselves gods, but this is never expanded upon, and therefore I'm considering it completely random text for my purposes.
Trying to be optimistic on the storyline [cynicism will come at the bottom - I promise it's there for you!] I decided to attempt to tie it all in together in a horribly speculative discussion.
Speculation:
The death of Bahamut caused the release of the eikons. The eikons were either the composition of Bahamut, or they were being used as energy to power the amazing airship power of the Garleans, but for my purposes I'm going with Bahamut.
Each of the antagonists within the Lominsan storylines seem to have evil purposes that don't exactly get revealed, but it's known to not be Garlean in nature. These intentions may be tied to the eikons, since at least one of the artifacts has some control of Leviathan.
Bringing the Ascian randomly into play may have a purpose too:
It would be interesting if the Ascian is searching for the souls of the primals to resurrect Bahamut. This solves some problems because no longer is the Ascian random in nature, it solves the problem of Bahamut being dead, and it would explain why the beastclans have no fear of the primals, but fear the Ascian.
This is not a good theory because the Ascian actually has a name, and it's referred to as "an Ascian", suggesting more than one.
So that's my speculation.
Taking it a step further, resurrecting Bahamut might actually have a purpose to the three nations, which would be a reason to try and attack Ifrit seemingly randomly.
Garlemald seems overbearing in power, and I can't even imagine how the three nation states can even hope to combat the Garlean airpower. I mean what are they going to do, shoot arrows at them? Only Bahamut seems to give them hesitation.
As for the antagonists in the early quests, perhaps both of them wanted to wield some sort of revenge against Garlemald.
Cynicism on the speculation, and cynicistic [this isn't a word yet] speculation:
FFXIV was rushed out of the gate years too early. The Lominsan storyline, at its point, was clearly polished more than the Ul'dahn or Gridanian storyline, and it has some of the most epic parts in the game. Ul'dah and Gridania have nothing at all in comparison to its quality.
It seems to me that the idea would have been to have one eikon per main storyline with Leviathan, Ifrit, and Titan [each of which have models that were shown prior to launch].
At some point I think someone went lulz, there is no time to finish the story - let's come up with a new combined storyline. Frankly, there are some immensely dull moments in the combined storyline, and it's shocking that some of those quests even made it into the game as they advance the story by one line and are immensely anticlimactic. What seems to be happening with the deaspected crystals is an extension of the crystal problems between the beasttribes, but it's difficult to predict at this point, or if that's even tied into the upcoming devastation.
I think that the writers of the story had something finished, I just don't think it's what ended up being shown to players.
I hate how scattered the lore is in this game. I have no grand finale to this, that's just what I thought might be scrapped up from what's in the game. Feel free to tear holes into anything I said.
