(SPOILERS) Sin Easters in future content?

Something I found to be interesting; was kinda hoping to see some more stuff about Sin Eaters in future content, especially since we have so much stuff over the Voidsent currently. I mean, I know we got an entire expansion over them, but I do think that the devs could potentially take them a bit further on later down the line.

We could see Sin Eaters with actual personalities, for instance; Titiana and Innocence are proof that a Sin Eater can be something other than a mindless beast. Similarly, there could be room for some different varieties of Sin Eater designs; I mean, we did get a few unique appearances for the Lightwardens and such, but in comparison to the much more colorful and varied Voidsent, a lot of the designs were just a bit more forgettable.

What do you guys think?

I don't really see the point of it.

Not every monster has to turn out to be intelligent and reasonable deep inside. It's narratively okay to have a curse that turns people into mindless monsters we are forced to fight.

What benefit would we actually gain from having a plot about intelligent sin eaters that wouldn't just be repeating what we're doing with voidsent?

I actually like the idea that voidsent and sin eaters aren't simply equal opposites and that their different types of absolute aether imbalances give very different results.

Also the situation that led to the formation of the sineaters in the first place has since been resolved with banishing the Eternal Light from the First forever and fixing the Emptiness (restoring it's elemental balance), so the creation of new sineaters will start to wane as they're gradually destroyed and the stronger ones with the 'touch' start to die out.

And sineaters by their nature were mindless - Vauthry/Innocence and Titania were actually exceptions rather than the rule that came about due to exceptional circumstances (one can argue that Titania wasn't really all there in the head either and was utterly deranged, being a sineater formed from a fae. And Innocence was a result of Emet deliberately infusing sineater essence directly into a pregnant woman's womb to infect her unborn child, so those are exceptions to the normal sineaters and Lightwardens that formed from the Flood of Light).

Those are extreme circumstances that really will not and cannot be repeated, and the restoration of the Emptiness into aetheric stability has meant that the sineaters will fade away, in both lore and gameplay/meta wise.

I wouldn't say further storylines about Sin Eaters are impossible, and they'd definitely be more interesting to me than most other potentially returning antagonistic forces (no, I do not want More Goddamn Imperials or Ascians). But as Enkidoh pointed out: they're not exactly a renewable resource plentiful in places that we normally go. To do more Sin Eater Content we'd need to find a new source of Sin Eaters. And Iscah's right that doing that would most likely not lead to intelligent Sin Eaters, since those were a rare exception; more likely you're just seeing a zombie outbreak with more Biblical imagery, and... well, we've already done that, so why repeat it if you wanted a zombie outbreak when you could instead make different zombies we haven't seen, that don't need to adhere to a pre-existing ruleset?

Personally I liked the Sin Eaters from the 'weird monsters with barely a semblance of humanity left' angle, like we saw with the Cardinal Virtues, so your pitch of 'more Sin Eaters with personality' even falls dead to me, who would like more Sin Eater content. I'm not even sure you want more Sin Eater content, since the thing you brought forward were the exceptions to their default nature rather than the rule.

Sin Eaters were pretty awesome, I wouldn't mind seeing them return or if we got more lore about them.

It has been suggested that sin eaters may exist somewhere outside of the First given that the Amdapori golems were believed to have been inspired by visions of "beings from another plane" and preceded the flood of light.

Whether that's another shard or some new plane of reality entirely is something I'm curious to see.

I could see Sin Eaters coming back if we ever get more Amdapor content, to explore how the Amdapori knew what they were in order to make golems shaped like them. Maybe it could be in a Variant Dungeon.
(My theory is some Sin Eaters manifested on other shards just not nearly to the extent of the First; in the same way Voeburt had some Voidsent, or Leviathan has his Drowned pirate guys mutated by water aether).

They shouldn't have some secret intelligence though. I like the idea of them being different from the Voidsent in instinct vs intellect.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

It has been suggested that sin eaters may exist somewhere outside of the First given that the Amdapori golems were believed to have been inspired by visions of "beings from another plane" and preceded the flood of light.

Whether that's another shard or some new plane of reality entirely is something I'm curious to see.

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Perhaps from wherever Ultima came from. We STILL don't know where she was from, after all.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

It has been suggested that sin eaters may exist somewhere outside of the First given that the Amdapori golems were believed to have been inspired by visions of "beings from another plane" and preceded the flood of light.

Whether that's another shard or some new plane of reality entirely is something I'm curious to see.

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Time is not constant between the shards. It is entirely possible for the golems to have been cast in the image of Sin Eaters without mucking anything up.

Alternatively, as another poster has put forward, it could easily be that some Sin Eaters wound up in other worlds through various means. A world where the aether is still in balance would in all probability make it impossible for them to make more of themselves in the usual way - or at least make it more difficult.

I suppose if 100 years could pass in the span of what was merely a month or two on our side of things the flood could've reasonably happened during the time of Amdapor/Mhach.

I find the notion of the sin eaters not being strictly the domain of the First more interesting, though.

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Originally Posted by Absimiliard

Time is not constant between the shards. It is entirely possible for the golems to have been cast in the image of Sin Eaters without mucking anything up.

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Time isn't constant, but we do have the date for the Flood of Light, which was in its early stages when the Warriors of Darkness were brought to the Source, and then they returned with Minfilia.

It's not entirely impossible to wrangle it that sin eaters were already spawning in those early days, and the time alignment got really wonky around that point and the initial triggering of the Flood happened all the way back in the Source's Fifth Astral Era, but that feels convoluted to me.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I find the notion of the sin eaters not being strictly the domain of the First more interesting, though.

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In theory any sufficiently overwhelming light aether imbalance should turn someone, with nothing about the process requiring that it be on the First. I really think it's the easiest explanation for how Amdapor saw Sin Eaters.

A different plane of existence while we also explore XIV Ultima's backstory more :)

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Originally Posted by JeanneOrnitier

In theory any sufficiently overwhelming light aether imbalance should turn someone, with nothing about the process requiring that it be on the First. I really think it's the easiest explanation for how Amdapor saw Sin Eaters.

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They say somewhere that the process that makes the sineaters work only really works on the first due to the how over aspected to light the world is. On the source the light imblance that leads to the slow turning in to a sineater wouldn't happen as they would rebalance there ather with the ambient ather. The Amdapor stuff really doesn't seem to have any kind of meaningful link

I feel like there's still a lot about the nature of light/darkness we don't understand, like how their sway over a world is actually influenced.

We're simply told that the actions of Ardbert and company/the corrupted memoriates caused the influence of light/dark to swell until it eventually caused a flood, but we're not really told anything about why they were able to do that.

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Originally Posted by jameseoakes

They say somewhere that the process that makes the sineaters work only really works on the first due to the how over aspected to light the world is. On the source the light imblance that leads to the slow turning in to a sineater wouldn't happen as they would rebalance there ather with the ambient ather. The Amdapor stuff really doesn't seem to have any kind of meaningful link

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It doesn't - SE just reused models for two specific sineater enemies which happened to be the same design as the animated statues in Amdapor without any lore connection. Given we've seen voidsent taking the same form as plant enemies that 'naturally' occur on the Source (the dryad type which is a cross between a beetle, flower bulb and humanoid), similary without any lore explanation to my knowledge, I think the whole "Amdapor based it's animated statues on beings from another plane" thing is just window dressing with no deeper lore connection, and especially not to the First.

Hence unless SE states outright that theory as correct ("Amdapor statues were based directly on sineaters"), I'm going to regard it as just another model reuse with no deeper lore connection or implication.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I feel like there's still a lot about the nature of light/darkness we don't understand, like how their sway over a world is actually influenced.

We're simply told that the actions of Ardbert and company/the corrupted memoriates caused the influence of light/dark to swell until it eventually caused a flood, but we're not really told anything about why they were able to do that.

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My on the spot theory is unlike other forms aether light and dark aether are sort of linked to dynamis so strong emotions from a very large group can increase a certain type.

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Originally Posted by Enkidoh

It doesn't - SE just reused models for two specific sineater enemies which happened to be the same design as the animated statues in Amdapor without any lore connection. Given we've seen voidsent taking the same form as plant enemies that 'naturally' occur on the Source (the dryad type which is a cross between a beetle, flower bulb and humanoid), similary without any lore explanation to my knowledge, I think the whole "Amdapor based it's animated statues on beings from another plane" thing is just window dressing with no deeper lore connection, and especially not to the First.

Hence unless SE states outright that theory as correct ("Amdapor statues were based directly on sineaters"), I'm going to regard it as just another model reuse with no deeper lore connection or implication.

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I find it a little odd that they chose to specifically draw attention to the matter in-game because if you bring Alphinaud to Mt. Gulg, he remarks that the first boss has an uncanny resemblance to the golems of Amdapor.

Granted, that's literally the only time it's brought up, so it could just be more window dressing.

It's mentioned in Encyclopedia Eorzea (granted before we knew what Sin Eaters were) and Alphinaud brings it up at Mt. Gulg. There's something there, though Square themselves may not have even come up with the how yet.

We know that it's entirely possible to make artificial voidsent through means outside of what created the Void, so it stands to reason that the opposite absolutely creates Sin Eaters. And if there's any civilization that learned that through the classic 'fuck around>find out' pipeline, it was the one that invented White Magic. No connection to the First required.

Not that them connecting to the First probably would've produced anything; the wibbly-wobbly nature of time in relation to the shards seems to only relate to the fact they all flow in the same direction but different rates. If it was possible for them to be flowing backward, G'raha's plan would look very different, as would the Ascians' in relation to the Thirteenth. So if Amdapor found the First, they were more likely to have found Ronkans than Sin Eaters.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

We know that it's entirely possible to make artificial voidsent through means outside of what created the Void, so it stands to reason that the opposite absolutely creates Sin Eaters. And if there's any civilization that learned that through the classic 'fuck around>find out' pipeline, it was the one that invented White Magic. No connection to the First required.

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I remember reading a theory a while back that the Amdaphori were deliberately creating Sin Eaters to counteract the Mhachi; anyone remember that big War of the Magi in the lore, between White and Black Mages, that nearly drained the Aether from the world? I remember reading once that the Black Mages made heavy usage of Voidsent; I could imagine that the White Mages would have been willing to take some risks to counteract the Voidsent... perhaps via the creation of some Aether-heavy creatures of their own? Just a theory I read, felt like posting.

Anyway, I personally just hope that, if we do see some more Sin Eaters in the future, that we get some new designs or something for them. I mean, Voidsent have a variety of forms and abilities - the Shadow Queen is a bright white humanoid that uses light, after all - whereas the Sin Eaters all mostly just solid white reskins of previous enemies, that all just use light; even one of the Lightwardens was basically a reskin of Cerberus. If they come back, I'd like to see something new; give us a Sin Eater that uses darkness, for instance. I mean, the Warrior of Light primal that Eldibus turned into uses darkness, so why not a Sin Eater?

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Originally Posted by Travel

I remember reading a theory a while back that the Amdaphori were deliberately creating Sin Eaters to counteract the Mhachi; anyone remember that big War of the Magi in the lore, between White and Black Mages, that nearly drained the Aether from the world? I remember reading once that the Black Mages made heavy usage of Voidsent; I could imagine that the White Mages would have been willing to take some risks to counteract the Voidsent... perhaps via the creation of some Aether-heavy creatures of their own? Just a theory I read, felt like posting.

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Pretty much all of Mhach's story went over how they went hard into contracting voidsent later in the War of the Magi; it's brought up in Black Mage and the actual Mhach alliance raids most prominently. It's where Diabolos is from. Out of all three sides of the War of the Magi, Amdapor is the one we know the least about, basically only knowing their defensive measures against Diabolos and a single Nymian spy. Yeah, they probably did do some big shit we weren't aware of, but the only thing that even comes close to being considered proof is that Kuribu, the final boss of the City of Amdapor hard, is mentioned in the Encyclopedia Eorzea to be 'based on a creature from another plane'. Again, that can't really be from the First (unless they had Sin Eaters before the Flood, which isn't too implausible), but they were an extant phenomena, observed through unknown means by perhaps the biggest enigma of a civilization in the game.