Quote Originally Posted by Fenral View Post
Oh, look, first post after mine is Cilia contributing absolutely nothing.
Humor isn't constructive? /trolling

Quote Originally Posted by Fenral View Post
Point is, if you take time to look at how the individual elements combine, there's a lot of overlap between games besides the ones handily labeled for your convenience. Not every reference to past FF games needs to come with a trademarked label and an appropriately numbered Legatus.
And if you take a look at individual elements instead of the whole, you can construe anything into a reference to something, like how Lolorito could be construed into a more shrewd President Shinra (self-made man with virtual control over Ul'dah, owns a private army, deals in ceruleum (mako), very professional and courteous despite being an absolute douchebag, etc), or if he actually usurps overt control of the city-state he's a President Shinra in the making. It's true that not everything needs a flashing neon sign to be a reference, but if you pick apart things into minutiae anything and everything is a reference. Nothing new under the sun, y'know.

Since we have to be constructive, here is one of my hypotheses:

The reality we live in is one that "should not exist," and only exists because Hydaelyn's blessing is forcing the world down a path that "should not exist." Basically, Hydaelyn's blessing is allowing us to override the flow of fate and break reality. According to Lahabrea the Echo is the power to "break down the barriers of existence," and its Japanese term, the "power to overcome," is extremely nebulous. In other words, as Pope Thordan notes our ability to overcome King Thordan and the Knights Twelve should be literally impossible, but the Echo, Hydaelyn's Blessing, and our own combat prowess allow us to break reality and overcome impossibilities.

We're basically overriding causality; instead of defeating Thordan and the Knights with sheer power, we change fate so that we can't lose. If there's even the faintest chance we can win, we override whatever chance that may be and make it 100% so we can't possibly lose. And if there is no chance we can win, we make such a thing possible, no matter how improbable.

Put in terms of Schrodinger's cat, we remove the radiation source so the hammer cannot possibly break the poison bottle. We literally cannot lose, and the effects of this are... not good. Aside from Hydaelyn never getting time to rest through a proper Umbral Era, as I posited earlier we are in a reality "that should not exist," and that's going to have negative effects down the road. According to Lahabrea Hydaelyn's activities are going to break down aetheric and physical laws, which sounds an awful lot like breaking reality... regrettably this sounds an awful lot like XI: Wings of the Goddess, or so I've heard, but that's the best I can come up with right now.

By my theory on this, the Warriors of Darkness are "us," or people like us "as we should be," pulled over from the reality "that should exist" to set things right. The most interesting thing is that Derplander changed to DRG, but Darklander is apparently still a WAR...

Well, we'll see. Done being the constructive straight man for now. Can I go back to being the jester?