Revelations from the Shadowbringers E3 Trailer

[JeanneOrnitier]

I don't think we should be looking at Light as "good deeds" and Dark as "bad deeds". They're just types of aether, that doesn't mean there's a morality assigned to them.

[Anonymoose]

I keep looking for places I might jump into the conversation, but it always feels like I'm coming in sideways, lol. Is it just me, or are we - in our rush to gush over a sensational trailer and fresh unknowns - forgetting some of the stuff we do know? Shadowbringers is about finally articulating points of view.

It's about Light not inherently meaning good, and Darkness not inherently meaning bad. It's about how, even for those who walk in the light of the Crystal, too much of anything, including Light, will have negative outcomes. That doesn't necessarily mean that the facts on the ground change.

For example, why should we assume that just because Light is not inherently good that Hydaelyn doesn't have mortals' backs? What do those two things have anything to do with one another, either? Mortals aren't necessarily good. "Light isn't necessarily good." might just be a way of saying that Hydaelyn has your back incidentally, not that She doesn't.

In the same vein, Darkness need not be evil. But if Zodiark wants to upend the world we know and love, He incidentally must be stopped. And if a Flood of Light threatens a world, we can incidentally use Darkness to stop it without being anti-Hydaelyn or pro-Zodiark or anti-Mortal or anything.

Even this "Hydaelyn and Zodiark are the eldest of primals." thing need not change facts on the ground to explain something in context. Solus says this interpretation of their existence is "after a fashion" or "in terms even we can understand," suggesting that it's not a 1:1 correlation to, "Hydaelyn is basically Ifrit, but bigger."

My mind wanders back to Shiva, since the incarnate primals violate the mechanics as we knew them. By drawing the primal essence of Shiva (containing some of the spiritual-aether of the original Shiva's shattered soul) directly into her own soul with the Echo, Ysayle herself was changed. If Hydaelyn the crystal were the spiritual core of Hydaelyn the physical planet akin to the core and body of a primal, if we are born from and die to the Lifestream, what can we change without losing ... everything we fought for?

Elidibus already admitted that "Hydaelyn would be lost" and the the land, the world, its people would all "change." It's entirely possible for the Ascians to see their objectives as "good", as the "right thing to do", and for us to still incidentally have to put them down. Even the Gerun Oracles, which Louisoix and Elidibus both put forward as truth, plainly said the "Moon" hates the "Star" and Her children.

Granted, "Hydaelyn has our backs incidentally and I'm on Team Mothercrystal" has been my position for a long time now, and if that ship goes down I'm going down with it. Feel free to take all this musing as the addled ramblings of someone whose favorite interpretation of The Story So Far requires minimal adjustment for these new revelations, lol

[Theodric]

Eulmore is described as a military nation. It's possible after sustaining heavy losses they found themselves in a situation where a pact with the Sin Eaters proved to be the lesser of two bad choices. With the other option being that they were wiped off of the map entirely. The Governor looks as though he'll be an antagonist, though the brief glimpse of the well dressed men and women standing around shows them looking shocked. I doubt they're going along with it for anything other than survival and I think they'll turn against him at the first opportunity provided they have a guarantee that the Sin Eaters will not be able to claim them.

[EdwinLi]

Light and Darkness has never been Good nor Evil but people label them as those thing because of the things they choose to relate to Light and Darkness.

The True Nature of Light and Darkness is nothing more than "they are just are what they are".

Light is always guiding people and in light people can see things better but too much light can blind people from the harms they are doing and what will happen ahead in the future.

Darkness is one of mystery where people go into to protect themselves from harm because in Darkness no one can find them and no one can know who are the protectors nor attackers. However, just like light too much of it can blind people.

Both protects, attacks, and most of all they guide people through the world but through different means.

Light Protects and attacks in clear view but Darkness protects and attacks from the shadows where no one can see.


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On another topic:

Looking back at the trailer we get a hint at hydaelyn and Zodiark's origins or atleast their original form they were once when fused together being "through prayer and sacrifice the will of the star was made manifest"

So basically the people alive before the creation of the current world of Hydaelyn began praying for the world itself for some reason and even sacrificed things in hopes of their "god" to answer which resulted in the "Origin" creation then eventually the "Origin" split into Hydaelyn and Zodiark.

This also hints more to a time when Hydaelyn and Zodiark are not needed for life to exists.

(I'm just calling this being Hydaelyn and Zodiark originally were "Origin" since that thing is the Origin of the current FF14 world that replaced the old world with FF14 world)

[RopeDrink]

The True Nature of Light and Darkness is nothing more than "they are just are what they are".

"We were blind to the truth once so I tell you this as one fool to another. Light, dark, it doesn't matter. What matters is how you choose to use them." - Arbert.

We all know the theme plays on the simple concept that Light/Dark does NOT mean Good/Evil, and tugs at the expectation of players who take things at face value. Since the start, we've had no major reason to ask such questions because we create characters, are told we're blessed by the Light of the crystal and heed the word of Hyde, who hasn't exactly had us do any morally ambiguous antics (thus far) and thus we, as players, can immediately assume we're the 'good guys' and go do 'good things', but not all 'good things' explicitly mean 'in the name of the light', much like not all bad things are done for the sake of Darkness. We're also led to believe that if she doesn't have our best interests at heart then she at least doesn't oppose those trying to go through their day-to-day, which is at least neutral-good. Meanwhile, reps of the opposite side have been up to shenanigans that go against standard moral practice in the name of Dark, or in some cases, a balance we had yet to understand, which only had a flashlight pointed directly at it during the WoD questline - there have been hints, but nothing that blatant up until now.

It was the first blatant questioning of morals, leveraged by the existence of people representing Darkness despite them not actually being Ascians, having a goal that (if it didn't involve calamaties and wanton destruction) one might consider noble.

What you have to remember is that for this day-to-day to continue, both need to exist to a degree. One conquering the other sums up the same ultimate result in the grand scheme of things - the respective world being nigh unto uninhabitable due to being drowned in Light/Dark, or at least barely habitable by normies, if not just destroyed. So, the dilemma is already there - we oppose Ascians who are very easy to assume are 'evil' because they represent the chaos-side of the balance, some/most of which would see the full will of Zodiark to completion (which is bad from OUR perspective/moral ground), and to them, they see us as the evil ones because their perspective is mostly just an inverse of ours, with Hyde as the baddie. If we bested them all in the name of Hyde then we know how that pans out.

There will obviously be some revelations related to both sides of the divide that will get us thinking out of the box, which is good. Thus far, the only constant is that trying to maintain a middle-ground is not exactly the most feasible plan, and we'd be crazy to think that we won't be battling Solus/Selch in the future. Elidibus (it seems) is the closest to the middle-ground from the Dark side of the divide as we may get, yet I can't see him surviving either, not with Zenos on the prowl for whomever took his body and/or the likes of Gaius looking to up his Ascian kill-count with little context of the balance at all, and then we'll have the joy of dealing with Black Rose on the Source no matter which way you cut it.

[EdwinLi]

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That is what i am saying.

For Light and Darkness, nothing really matters which side of Good vs Evil they are on as they are neither Good nor Evil. They are just what they are, Light and Darkness.

Light and Darkness never chooses a side, it is the people who use them that choose the side and for the most common plot of a story the Users of Light is often pictured as the Good/Savior and the Users of Darkness is often pictured as Evil/Destroyer.

and I heavily emphasize the word "Pictured" because for a very long time in Fantasy storylines, the Hero has mostly been a User of Light while the antagonist been a User of Darkness. The general shift in fantasy storylines and more current released fantasy series from this generic plot can probably be related to the demand for a more "interesting" story that does not just follow this generic story plot but goes deeper into what it means to be Good and Evil.

Of course when we look into these plots, the reason why characters usually picture Light as a symbol of Good is because it often represents a Beacon of Hope that guides the people to safety and salvation while Darkness is seen as something engulf people into their darker nature and blinding them with their "inner darkness". Then we have the plots that look the other side of things where Evil people use the Light to promise fake salvation and justify their crimes (*cough* evil religion factions with paladins/crusaders/Priests that abuse their position of power *cough*) while Heroes use the Darkness to protect those who are trying to escape the Evil within the Light and to strike at Evil without being seen nor known.

[YianKutku]

It was the first blatant questioning of morals, leveraged by the existence of people representing Darkness despite them not actually being Ascians, having a goal that (if it didn't involve calamaties and wanton destruction) one might consider noble.

Who were taking orders from an Ascian, who were willing to create death and destruction and chaos on another world just to "save" their own (as in killing everyone on their world anyway, but at least they have a chance at having their life force recycled), and who explicitly decided to just kill us immediately specifically to make sure nobody could stop the suffering they were intending to cause.

The problem with "Dark is not Evil" is that up until now, every single representative of the Dark (as in the cosmological Dark, rather than just "using darkness" like DRK) has been doing things that are actions we have to stop anyway. We've long since known that not everyone with the Blessing of Light is good; Iceheart had it, but she used it to summon Shiva and wage a guerilla war against Ishgard, and she never did apologize for hijacking the shipment of crystals to Revenant's Toll that were our responsibility to the Doman refugees. But we have not seen a single representative of the Dark who hasn't been at least jerking us around, if not actively causing suffering for our world.

(I don't count Unukalhai, since he's barely part of the Dark, and by the end of the Warring Triad, he seems to have renounced that. During the Warring Triad questline he was certainly attempting, if poorly, to follow Elidibus's guidebook in attempting to trick us and be all Mysterious about it.)

I am perfectly fine with "Dark is not Evil" as a hypothetical concept, but I don't think it's actually possible to prove it right now, based on events that have happened (as opposed to events about to happen being teased in the future). Much like the Qestir, I place far less consequences on what people say than what they do. And in this case, the Dark has no history of being beneficial to us and ours. Will it? Obviously, given the marketing of Shadowbringers. Has it? I have yet to see any proof.

[polyphonica]

Even this "Hydaelyn and Zodiark are the eldest of primals." thing need not change facts on the ground to explain something in context. Solus says this interpretation of their existence is "after a fashion" or "in terms even we can understand," suggesting that it's not a 1:1 correlation to, "Hydaelyn is basically Ifrit, but bigger."

I do think this is an important point. The Japanese rendering of this line makes it more clear that Solus is talking down to the Scions ("let me put this in terms you can understand..."), and he knows the conclusions they will draw by him explaining it that way. We can also assume that him explaining it this way is likely part of a justification of the Ascian cause: that they are trying to "put down" the primal Hydaelyn in the way the Scions have been putting down the other more-minor primals, but they are operating on a much broader/wider scale because they understand the bigger picture (and because of the bigger scale, they can't fight directly in the way we do against normal summoned primals). Those are the terms he thinks the Scions can understand. I imagine he'll argue that the Ascians serving Zodiark is no different than the WoL serving Hydaelyn; just two sides of the same coin -- which, from all appearances so far, seems to be the literal nature of Hydaelyn and Zodiark themselves (equal inversions of each other). He'll probably also further the devil's temptation by pointing out how much we don't know/Hydaelyn hasn't told us about the truth, and therefore she shouldn't be trusted -- that Hydaelyn doesn't want the WoL to know the truth because then they'd turn their power against them. (Go figure -- Garden of Eden allusions in this expansion pack where Eden, good and evil, and light and darkness are central to the story...)

But the point that matters to us has nothing to do with which primal team we play for, but (as you say) how they treat the lives of mortal beings. From all appearances so far, Hydaelyn is the one that sent her servant to the First to stop the flood of light, and will seemingly allow the WoL to harness the power of darkness to push back against the light. Even if the flood of light can be attributed to her and to her solution in the first place, it sure doesn't seem like it was her intention or goal (more like an unfortunate side-effect that seemingly couldn't be stopped until now). Meanwhile, the agents of Zodiark have been causing calamities resulting in great loss of life for centuries seemingly without a care; they basically treat mortal life as pawns in their giant god-war. I'm sure that we will learn more that will muddy the waters, but in the end you're right: it doesn't really matter what Hydaelyn's nature/origin is in that sense. If we end up having to eliminate both Hydaelyn and Zodiark for the on-going good of all life as we know it, fine, but we're judging them by their deeds not simply by whether they're primals. The revelation, while shocking to be revealed/confirmed in a trailer like that, actually doesn't change that much for us. We'll see if the other upcoming reveals do.

[Remus]

Well seems based on this Solus isn't blowing smoke on the primal business. I find it amusing how Yoshi-p considers this minor info compared to everything else they will show. Also seems 5.0 will finish up 80% of this arc.

[MrThinker]

Well seems based on this Solus isn't blowing smoke on the primal business. I find it amusing how Yoshi-p considers this minor info compared to everything else they will show. Also seems 5.0 will finish up 80% of this arc.

Then will the 5.x series finish that last 20% or would they save it for 6.x/7.x?