Tale of Emet [FF14 x Nier Reincarnation event story]

[Iscah]

He also says that in addition to the soul, a single sundering would half both strength and intelligence. The full sundering would have left people with - at most, depending on the exact method - 1/14th their original intellect and physical strength. So even if, in that example, both Rynes looked the same with his projection, in reality they would both be half what they were previously in every way.

1/14th the physical strength and I doubt any Ancient would even be capable of standing and moving around with those huge bodies of theirs. They probably all just died of exposure on the spot, if their organs were even capable of functioning and pumping blood and oxygen throughout their forms at that point.

If you're going to get "sciency" about it, then you can't simultaneously have Ryne splitting into two visually identical entities (logically must be halved in density to remain the same size) and be concerned that the ancients would not be able to support their bodies with 1/14 of their strength. If strength is reduced and weight reduced to match, then – setting aside the properly sciency technicalities of how such things interact at different proportions – there is no issue. Their altered strength matches their altered bodies and all is even.

Or to look at it another way, if they all collapsed under their own weight and died immediately, the modern races cannot be descended from them.

Of course, you literally cannot halve "everything" about a person, numbers-wise. Halving the height of something while keeping the same proportions brings it down to an eighth of its volume. So there's a degree of ambiguity in exactly what would be reduced and by how much.

I have wondered in the past, but haven't fully investigated, if the relative size of human and ancient might work out to them being 14 times the volume – that would add up if the ancients are a little under 2.5 x the height of a human, which from memory sounds about right.

In Rak'tika Emet describes Zodiark with terms like "His grace", "A savior mighty and magnificent", and Hydaelyn as just "Hydaelyn" or very derisively as "your Mother". Hardly descriptors like "dark god", "dark deity", or "brighter god" and "the Light of the future".

Actually, there's at least one example of Emet using "dark" in the same positive connotation that we would normally use light/bright – specifically from the Dying Gasp: "dream now of a dark tomorrow" to mean a hopeful one for the ancients.

I have to say i find it a bit ironic that people talk about Emet lying or having a biased view meanwhile these same people are the ones who 100% trust venat/hydaelyn despite her lying and manipulating us far more and take her pity walk scene at face value without questioning it’s authenticity. Double standards i suppose…

I had a lot of trust for Hydaelyn and how Hydaelyn was presented to us, because I thought to invert it at such a late stage would be poor storytelling.

Even at late post-Shadowbringers, she seemed to be a primal designed to act as a mother-goddess, and it was conceivable that the narrative was designed to maintain her as ultimately "good" and the Sundering some kind of accident, A.I. logic failure or urgently needed as the lesser of two evils.

Quite frankly, the writers failed to take any of these paths, diminished Hydaelyn from being something "bigger than us" to just a single person putting on an act, and gave her a motive that... well, aligns with what the game presents as thematically good, but rings hollow to me.

I'm not questioning this narrative of Emet's because I support Venat; I'm questioning it because it contradicts what Emet himself told us in the game.