Question pertaining to the afterlife in FFXIV

[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).

[Odstarva]

Aye, pretty much me. I was raised Christian and consider myself smack dab between a Christian and a Deist now haha. I Big Lebowski it up and try to think positively about death. That's why I can't wrap my head about questions like "Why do you need a promise of eternal life to be happy?". The idea that someone wants to be wormfood like him hurts my brain.

It's not that anyone wants to be wormfood.

At least, for me, I can't believe in something just because it'd be more convenient for me, more comforting. In fact, I don't choose to believe in anything. I either do or I don't, and that depends on a bunch of different factors (which, frankly, I doubt you'd be interested in).

On another note, I don't think you should be so rigid with this sort of things - I mean, do you kill people on a daily basis? You kill people in-game all the time. I don't see why this, the lifestream, of all the things shown in the game, this is what puts you off.


I get not wanting to be confronted with your own mortality, it's pretty scary, but I think you're taking it to a whole new level when as you said it yourself, it's just a video-game.

[ShinShimon]

Thanks again for the information guys. I'll probably be dropping XIV, as much as I don't want to. I've been playing off and on mostly for the story and atmosphere (Which WoW completely lacks anymore). This whole "The soul of every character gets destroyed upon death and nothing matters in the end" plot point really ruins that. I don't know why any writer would even include that in their story in the first place.

There are hints now that this isn't completely true. Specifics would involve massive spoilers for ShB, but it looks like reincarnation or some kind of persistence of souls might exist, at least for some of them.

[Seraphor]

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)_/¯

LineageRazor explained why.
I've never heard anyone claim the Lifestream was a downer before. Your religious views influence your perception of these fantasy concepts.
You've specifically brought up the subject of a fantasy game's fictional afterlife, and how it compares to real life concepts of afterlife.

You're the only one being antagonistic here, trying to call out atheists.
All I did was ask a question. If the answer to it bothers you so much, maybe you're the one with the issues?
If you're the one getting offended and worked up over an issue that nobody else is, take a step back and reflect on this for a bit.

Again, it's been explained that the individual is not destroyed in the lifestream. Aerith and Zack return after death, there are spirits in XIV, etc.
This isn't a Christian v Atheist thing, it's a western v eastern thing.

[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.

[Jaywalker]

Oh boy, this spiraled hard.

Non-Christian religious person here who believes in some manner of existence after death (no elaborately described afterlives in my faith), not 100% current in Shadowbringers but making headway. People who are current can feel free to correct, but as far as I can tell the answer might fall along the lines of "shit's weird".

Idk that there's a universal in-game setup. The Lifestream exists as the most common route, but not as a destructive thing. Souls being independent from life-energy capable of repurposing themselves into new forms as they accumulate aether is also a phenomenon, the Dotharl may or may not have a legitimate system going where their lifelong will channels souls and energy to new bodies, what the Twelve are and are not hasn't been fully addressed yet. I mention this because the Twelve appear to exist in some form given lore surrounding the Unending Coil of Bahamut, and their nature might have a hand in the nature of an afterlife given there's lore surrounding that too. And then there are certain Ascian-related twists I won't speak of complicating the mess.

There is a lot of lore. Not all of it matches up, but this is a world where the will of people can shape aether--aether being literal life energy among other things--and effect real world situations. I'd be pretty surprised if everything was nixed except for a destructive-Lifestream as described in this thread.

It's not worth stressing over or dropping the game. There's ambiguity and room to interpret a lot.

[QT_Melon]

On another note....

Isn't there also something kind of scary at play about what is going on

Matoya in HW mentioned that the aether levels are dropping. Which kinda hampers the whole lifestream recycling?

[MrThinker]

On another note....

Isn't there also something kind of scary at play about what is going on

Matoya in HW mentioned that the aether levels are dropping. Which kinda hampers the whole lifestream recycling?

5.0 spoilers

that seems to have been caused by excess light from the first fleeing back to the source and causing a stagnation of aether. But we fix it, so things should return to normal

[SannaR]

Midgardsormr also before he left us said he was sleeping in the lifestream. Course he is an alien so who knows exactly how a dragon's soul works since we know they only really die if they don't have at least one eye in their body. Heck i want to say their blood seems to also turn into some kind of mist? At least that's the only thing I can come up with since we see a lot of purple mist stuff around Timat. In SHB it's hinted that at least for our character's soul it's been not only splintered at least once it's also been reincarnated.

[QT_Melon]

5.0 spoilers

that seems to have been caused by excess light from the first fleeing back to the source and causing a stagnation of aether. But we fix it, so things should return to normal

Mmm I don't know if it's that simple as I finished MSQ and there's also the fact

we also have the 13th shard that is a void