Quote Originally Posted by Anonymoose View Post
Back when humanity was as ignorant of the cosmos as most on Hydaelyn are, lights in the sky were mysterious fixed objects ... aside from the seven that weren't.
Just a minor clarification: It wasn't so much that stars were "fixed" as they were travelling on a "fixed" route across the night sky, from east to west. The five inner planets became known as the "wanderers" because, unlike the stars, their paths across the sky weren't fixed, but were varied instead.

Moreover, I suspect that, for the longest time, humanity did in fact believe that the "wanderers" were just special stars (hence the propensity to name them after gods and goddesses). Venus, for example, was known as the "Evening (or Morning, as the case may be) Star".

I'm not entirely sure when humanity first realised that the planets weren't special tiny lights in the firmament, but were actually other spherical objects like the Moon. I would guess it was most likely after the invention of telescopes and, even more likely, only after Galileo broke the Copernican model, by establishing that the Earth orbited the Sun, and not the other way round.

Lest we get trapped in a eurocentric, Anglo-Saxon worldview, bear in mind that, even today, there are cultures that explicitly name the planets as "stars". Mars, for example, is known in Chinese as 火星 (huo3 xing1), or literally, the "Fire Star". In fact, the Chinese named the planets after elements, hence: Mercury 水星 (sui3 xing1) "Water Star"; Venus 金星 (jin1 xing1) "(Gold) Metal Star"; Jupiter 木星 (mu4xing1) "Wood Star"; and Saturn 土星 (tu3 xing1) "Earth Star".

And guess what? Given the fact that the Japanese language borrowed heavily from Chinese, the people of Japan know the planets by the same names as the Chinese.

Hence: Mercury is すいせい (sui-sei, or water star); Venus is きんせい (kin-sei, metal star); Mars is かせい (ka-sei, or fire star); Jupiter is もくせい (moku-sei, earth star); and Saturn is どせい (dou-sei, or earth star).

In short, the recognition of planets as spherical objects in orbit around a burning star is fairly recent phenomenon in human history. So, it doesn't break immersion by any measure for a faux mediaeval society like Eorzea's to refer to planets as "stars".

To be sure, Eorzeans may not even understand planets the same way we do, as we have no real idea of how the firmaments actually work, what with Zodiark being the moon, and the Hydaelyn being a giant crystal (both of which is not even likely to be common knowledge among smallfolk, who, as far as I can tell, still associate the moon with Menphina, and remember Dalamud as Menphina's Hound).