Question pertaining to the afterlife in FFXIV

[SpiritualOcean]

For me, I don’t consider the artist’s intent when interpreting or enjoying the art. Once created, it is always up for interpretation by the audience.

But if you look at that interview, he talks about how the reconstructions (or reconstituted primals, etc.) are a piece of the original - but not a perfect recreation. In order for there to be a piece of the original, the original must be persistent (even if only a small part of it is accessible).

There’s an NPC spirit in shadowbringers whose very much who he was when alive. (But I’m not very far in, so take that with a grain of salt).

Anyway, it just seems to me there’s more to it than “the lifestream eats you.” A lot more. But I’m comfortable with that being up to the player.

[Larom]

For me, I don’t consider the artist’s intent when interpreting or enjoying the art. Once created, it is always up for interpretation by the audience.

But if you look at that interview, he talks about how the reconstructions (or reconstituted primals, etc.) are a piece of the original - but not a perfect recreation. In order for there to be a piece of the original, the original must be persistent (even if only a small part of it is accessible).

There’s an NPC spirit in shadowbringers whose very much who he was when alive. (But I’m not very far in, so take that with a grain of salt).

Anyway, it just seems to me there’s more to it than “the lifestream eats you.” A lot more. But I’m comfortable with that being up to the player.

Man, I really wish that was stated outright by the game or the devs. The Lifestream, especially the way VII describes it, is one of the darkest things I've ever seen in fiction.

[Daralii]

Man, I really wish that was stated outright by the game or the devs. The Lifestream, especially the way VII describes it, is one of the darkest things I've ever seen in fiction.

It is, actually. By ~73 you get a very detailed explanation of how souls and the Lifestream interact from Urianger.

[Larom]

It is, actually. By ~73 you get a very detailed explanation of how souls and the Lifestream interact from Urianger.

[MistakeNot]

Man, I really wish that was stated outright by the game or the devs. The Lifestream, especially the way VII describes it, is one of the darkest things I've ever seen in fiction.

Why? Dead souls dissolve into the lifestream, gets back into the world as aether, becomes part of some other living being, and so on.
Just like the physical body after burial becomes food for insects and worms and provides nutrients for plants. It all gets recycled back into life.

Why is that so depressing? Sounds much better than the eternal damnation that some real-world religions claim that most people will get after death.

[Larom]

Why? Dead souls dissolve into the lifestream, gets back into the world as aether, becomes part of some other living being, and so on.
Just like the physical body after burial becomes food for insects and worms and provides nutrients for plants. It all gets recycled back into life.

Why is that so depressing? Sounds much better than the eternal damnation that some real-world religions claim that most people will get after death.

You sound like you know first hand or something. Have your died before? Not many religions believe in a hell anyway. Christianity is pretty much the only one, with a heaven like realm and rehabilitation being in most others.
And no, the makeup of a persons body being a part of someone else's body in the future isn't "better". If it seems better to you, then you probably already think you're a bad enough person to go to "hell" when you die if you did believe in Christianity at all... But I suspect you're an atheist like the other dude.

I'm still wondering why you two are talking about real world religion in a discussion about a video game. Seems like you need to get something off your shoulders. Well actually, atheists do have that strange urge to tell other people how much of an atheist they are. Guess that makes sense. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Enkidoh]

You sound like you know first hand or something. Have your died before? Not many religions believe in a hell anyway. Christianity is pretty much the only one, with a heaven like realm and rehabilitation being in most others.
And no, the makeup of a persons body being a part of someone else's body in the future isn't "better". If it seems better to you, then you probably already think you're a bad enough person to go to "hell" when you die if you did believe in Christianity at all... But I suspect you're an atheist like the other dude.

I'm still wondering why you two are talking about real world religion in a discussion about a video game. Seems like you need to get something off your shoulders. Well actually, atheists do have that strange urge to tell other people how much of an atheist they are. Guess that makes sense. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well, for what it's worth, what people consider the Christian idea of heaven and hell is really a comparatively modern invention pinched wholesale from Greek mythology (and that was mostly because of Alighieri Dante borrowing ideas from the Roman poet Virgil's writings for The Divine Comedy which is what popularized the whole concept - 'Heaven' and 'Hell' being essentially the Greek Elysium Fields and Tartarus respectively with the serial numbers filed off (and Tartarus given a new name taken from the Norse goddess of the inglorious dead for good measure). But I did not come here to get into a theological debate (as they never end well).

Getting back to the FF concept of the Lifestream, the whole Lifestream idea originally came about due to FF creator Hironobu Sakaguchi who lost his mother to a car accident and the grief affected him so much he became interested in the idea of life living on after death, and decided to use that idea as a theme in the then latest FF game that he was developing (FFVII) - FFVII's main writers Kazushige Nojima and Yoshinori Kitase developed this idea from Sakaguchi and Tetsuya Nomura's briefings into the Lifestream concept along the lines of scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis's 'Gaia Hypothesis' (an idea that all life is interlinked on Earth and that, metaphorically speaking, makes the Earth itself kind of a living organism itself).

Nojima and Kitase took Lovelock and Margulis's metaphor and varied it, based on Sakaguchi and Nomura's ideas, making it a literal 'living' being, from which all life is born from and returns to after physical death. The energy that made up a living being's life returns to this mass of energy, but FFVII itself showed that the memories, the will, the very conciousness of that being still lives on within - they are not destroyed (if they were, how did Aeris and Zack return at the end of Advent Children? Or for that matter, how does Sephiroth keep coming back? Because the Lifestream was not an 'obliteration of the self'. The energy that made up your life returns to it, but your memories, your 'self' lives on within. FFXIV just builds further on that basic concept.

Sakaguchi had already touched on the concept of an afterlife earlier in FFVI, this time along more 'Western' lines with the idea of the Phantom Train taking the newly departed to the 'other side', but the Lifestream was when his ideas of life after death took centre stage in his game development (similar ideas also appeared in FFIX and X, along with the much-maligned FF theatrical film The Spirits Within that was developed by Sakaguchi from early scrapped concepts from FFVII).

Also before you pass judgement, the Compilation of FFVII also had a literal goddess of FFVII's Planet... until Zack slew her, that is.

But then FFXIV is a work of fiction so it's not meant to be taken that seriously, it is entertainment. I guess being agnostic it's easier for me to accept these ideas at face value and correlate them to my own beliefs, but that is something I will not be getting into).

[MistakeNot]

You sound like you know first hand or something. Have your died before?

Learn to read. I did not say anything at all about what will happen after we die, only about what some people claim will happen.

If it seems better to you, then you probably already think you're a bad enough person to go to "hell" when you die if you did believe in Christianity at all... But I suspect you're an atheist like the other dude.

You know very little about me, and your guesses are widely off the mark.

I'm still wondering why you two are talking about real world religion in a discussion about a video game.

When one is discussing religious concepts like the existence of an afterlife it is only natural to bring up examples from real religions as points of comparison.

[Allyrion]

Man, I really wish that was stated outright by the game or the devs. The Lifestream, especially the way VII describes it, is one of the darkest things I\\'ve ever seen in fiction.

The Lifestream is basically the same concept of reincarnation you’d find in traditional Buddhism (such as Theravada Buddhism). In Japan, Mahayana Buddhism is more popular in Japan where the concept of the afterlife and soul are much more palatable but sometimes you’ll see more traditional concepts in Japanese media.

In the first place, the idea of a soul is considered an illusion (in these schools). Even in life, you are just an amalgamation of desires propagating itself and you get stuck in a karmic cycle. In traditional Buddhism, Nirvana is actually a true death to escape the cycle of suffering.

But these games aren’t as depressing as that. Japanese Shinto beliefs have taken Buddhist concepts in more naturalistic way. We are essentially reflections of an Omni-Soul which is life itself. So when you die, you return to it.

The one thing that remains in most of these Buddhist concepts is that the sense of Self and Soul are an illusion and we are all one. That’s not so depressing (to me anyway).

I do think ShB may change the cosmology a bit. This seems even more relevant with some of the info from the MSQ. FF7 was a straight rip of Buddhist cosmology, but FFXIV has a lot more to it than that. As we learn more, I think it gets more nuanced and becomes its own thing.