How many Calamities have been accounted for?

[Anonymoose]

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Awesome explanation of the Calalmities. Thanks for this!

Not only a concise rendering of the knowns,
but an accurate accounting for the oft overlooked elementality of Calamities in spite of the recent associations with Light and Darkness!

A few small liner notes that seem like relevant tack-ons.

- For some calamities we don't really have a good sense of how widespread they were, with hints such that even SE might not have fully committed to which were global and which were regional but mistakenly assumed to be global. Far Eastern NPCs aren't as helpful as we'd hoped here.

- History so poorly remembers the time between the Great Sundering and the First Umbral Era that during some eras of the game's development some people assumed they might be the same event (almost certainly impossible). What happened in this era of Prehistory remains ambiguous, but I like to think it had something to do with some tragic truth about Twelve's true nature and where it went having them around after the fall of Zodiark. The First Umbral Era is, after all, remembered as the catalyst for "the gods leaving".

- The fourth Calamity was an act of desperation. Xande - backed into a corner as the Warriors of Light laid siege to his stronghold - fully discharging Dalamud into the Crystal Tower and trying to throw the voidgate open all at once. Instead, the tower buckled and discharged that energy into the planet.

- If we try to account for which worlds were consumed in which Calamities, there seems to be no real rhyme or reason to it ... but there's a suspicious overlap in the number of the world and the element associated with it. For example, the fifth Calamity was ice and marked the rejoining of the Sixth. Compare to FFVI's infamous snow march opening. And the sixth was water marked the rejoining of the Tenth. Compare to FFX's infamous blitzball opening.