Tales from the Dawn #3: "A Question of Life" (Hermes)

[Lurina]

But we are not historians, trying to piece together the truth of what really happened based on the evidence in front of us. If we were, this level of skepticism would be justified. We are analyzing a piece of literature, and when presented with a factual ambiguity like that, it's important to look at the story from a thematic and metaphorical level too.

Two of the big themes of FFXIV has always been, one, that it is understandable, but wrong to value your own kind over others, and two, it is important to place faith and hope in the future, and not cling to the ways of the past.

The choice between the third sacrifice and the sundering represents the ultimate expression of that conflict, with Venat being the ultimate expression of the "light" aspect. 'I value people outside my own ingroup that will sacrifice my own people for thier sake, I trust and value the future so much that I am willing to erase the past for the sake of the future.'

Many of the characters involved talk about the targets of the third sacrifice being capable of inheriting the will of the star, becoming stewards like the ancients were, or just being allowed to decide thier own future. Rhetoric that resonates if they are indeed people, will the potential to have a future. Which is why on a thematic level, it makes the most sense for them to be some form of people.

If the targets of the third sacrifice were instead trees and livestock, what would that mean on a thematic level? Suddenly one of the central conflicts is stripped of any weight, and Venat looks like a rabid enviromentalist - which would be fine, if the theme of nature versus technology has ever been a central plank of the conflict between Zodiark and Hydaelyn, but that really is not the case.

The issue is that the way the themes have been applied to the Sundering narrative since it was introduced in 5.0 hasn't really been consistent, though.

Like, I would have agreed with you back in the days of Shadowbringers, when the emphasis of the conflict was heavily on how the Ancients 'ought' to have stepped aside and let the new life thrive. (Though I can only recall one actual instance of the third sacrifice being framed as the successors to the Ancients as stewards, which is during the conversation with Hythlo in Amaurot - what else were you thinking of?) Back then, everyone kind of took it as a given that the third sacrifice was the player races. That made the story line up very nicely. The Amaurotines wanted to wipe 'us' out 12,000 years ago to bring their people back, but Hydaelyn stood in opposition to them, which led to us inheriting the world. However, Emet and the Ascians still want the same thing in the present: To kill us and save their own people and bring back their civilization as it was. Nice and clean, right?

...but in Endwalker, the framing shifted towards the player races being descendants of the Sundered Ancients instead, which was ultimately confirmed explicitly in an interview. So now everything is muddled. There's no obvious conclusion to draw about what the third sacrifice was, and despite what Hydaelyn's efforts, whatever they were didn't end up inheriting the star after all - we did. Or rather the Ancients kept it, just Sundered.

This makes the message very muddled. My guess is that the original intent in Shadowbringers was that the player races were the new life, but they decided to change that in Endwalker to fit with the narrative about the Sundering's purpose being to force humanity to understand grief and loss. It's no longer a tale of people resisting passing the torch, but a tale of people refusing to accept loss and change and having it forced upon them, then collectively overcoming far in the future. In Shadowbringers Hydaelyn fights Zodiark to save the new life from her people, while in Endwalker Hydaelyn fights Zodiark to 'save her people from themselves'.

But this change left the identity of the third sacrifice blank - a hole in the story. Which the developers decided to address by, well, just not talking about them.

It's hard to really make a good-faith judgement about writer intent when it feels overwhelming like the writer intent isn't even completely consistent behind the scenes.