Sharlayan origins and the Endwalker Trailer

[MikkoAkure]

The issue is we have no evidence for previous Warriors of Light ever stopping any Calamities. Historically they're known to appear on the eve of an Umbral Era, which implicitly suggests that they have a very low success rate. Even the instances where we know they've done heroic things, such as with Tenzen or Ramza, we neither know if those situations would have developed into Calamities (as Ascian involvement looks to have been zero), nor to what degree Hydaelyn was even involved.

A lot of the problem with making conjectures regarding the past events is that all of this is being told in the medium of a video game and not a chronicle of events of another world with no "plot". If past WoL were very successful at stopping calamities, then there wouldn't be much at stake would there? As much as I like the game and its lore, I don't think that it's meant to be thought about this much. Besides, the writers can always say that the successful attempts at stopping calamities were so successful that we didn't hear about them. Hydaelyn herself is so secret that the general populace of the world doesn't know of her existence, let alone mystical magical warriors who fight against the powers of Darkness.

The Ascians are always doing things in the background too, they don't make just 1 plan and throw all their eggs in the basket. Look at the whole plot of Heavensward. That was kicked off because 1000 years ago an Ascian told king Thordan I that you can get power by eating dragon eyes, and then he left and the whole region fell into chaos. I don't feel like that was done specifically to cause a calamity, but they're certainly trying to make a mess of things and reap their harvest down the line depending on what has grown from the seeds they've sown. The thing with the Ascians' goals to cause a calamity is that they only have to win once.

It's the hypocrisy that bothers me.

Well I guess we'll all find out in a few days what happened since we don't have the complete story yet and we're jumping at conclusions right now without all of the facts. My current stance is that when a primal tells its indoctrinated and tempered followers that it will totally return all of the souls of the summoned in exchange for more aether, I'm disinclined to believe it, as I'm sure Venat was as well. Some of the Ascians definitely seemed to have been drinking the kool-aid more than others since Lahabrea outright referred to Zodiark as a god despite the fact he more than anyone else should know better while Emet-Selch treated his tempering casually as a matter of fact.


On topic, I wouldn't be surprised if the Ascians had something to do with Sharlayan, for the same reason I mentioned above for the Ascians starting the Dragonsong War. Their reasoning with Sharlayan will probably be a lot more subtle than that but we'll know this weekend.