On Themis [6.4 SPOILER]

[Lurina]

While there's layers to it, I don't generally think the reason I like the Elpis and the Unsundered World overlaps with why I like Emet at all. If anything, it correlates more with why I liked the rest of Shadowbringers.

I prefer the Unsundered World and the First (at least before we solved all their problems) over the Source because they're very unique, tonally distinct settings where mankind is in a fundamentally different position to the real world in a way that provokes interesting questions about society and human nature. While the First had similar vibes to something like Children of Men where it's all about seeing the different ways people respond to having no future, Elpis provoked a lot of similar feelings to when I'm reading good sci-fi. I was filled with curiosity about what this world would be like because, with the fundamentals so different, I genuinely couldn't guess. Beyond just Amaurot, how have other societies developed different value systems in the context of having these powers? What are families like in a world where humans are still recognizably human (rather than falling into elf tropes) but live for thousands and thousands of years? How did this strange status quo come about - was it always so utopian and aggressively community-oriented, or was this something they arrived at after a disaster? How the hell does their economy even work? I could go on.

In contrast, the Source is so dull to me. It's a Forgotten Realms-ass fantasy kitchen sink with themes and motifs you can find anywhere, spread out without any underlying direction. I like some of the characters, but I don't give a damn about any of these factions and places - even the interesting ones like Gridania have had all their edges filed off since 1.0. When I hear people talk about how they hope the next several expansions get away from all this cross-dimensional stuff to focus on the Source, it makes me feel like I'm going insane. I don't wanna be here! It's so boring! Ahhhhh!!!!!!!!

edit: Whoops, sorry for sniping your high-effort post, Teraq.

[Teraq]

edit: Whoops, sorry for sniping your high-effort post, Teraq.

Haha don't worry. Old message boards and its pages happen. (Imagine seeing "Teraq is typing…" for one hour straight.)

I fully agree with your post. I've always found the setting of the Source… middling out-of-the-mill fantasy at best. It isn't helped by the fact that the races and tribes' lore feels like it isn't explored much, so a lot of the time the various people of the Source feel like they're just… regular people in a fantasy setting with schizophrenic tech, but some of them happen to have animal ears, fur or scales or an unusual skin tone. I'm thankful that we got two depictions of traditional Seeker of the Sun tribes at all, and the various tribes were a highlight of the Azim Steppes (not enough of them though… *clenches fist*), but otherwise… where are the Duskwight caves? The volcano dwelling Hellsguards? Male Viera as the unseen protectors of the jungle? Hrothgar's… everything? (hard to depict their society when you don't even have a model for women, I guess…)

And yeah, the Ancients fascinate me because they're human in every way, but with fundamental differences that change a lot. For this reason, I loved the tidbit in Pandaemonium tier 2 where Themis explains that typically people don't feel so intensely about their parents; it stands to reason that humans that live nearly forever compared to us, physiologically cannot die of hunger as opposed to animals (as explained by Euanthe) and possess magic that makes their society post-scarcity by default would have different social dynamics from ours. Once they grew into adults, they most likely didn't have to be caretakers for their parents as they grew into old age. They didn't have to depend on them for money, food or shelter. This would fundamentally change a lot of the interpersonal dynamic.

I am of the same opinion regarding how their society became so collective-oriented, stressing the use of their magic to benefit the community and The Planet™ rather than fostering individuality and material possessions. My headcanon on that is that their history was full of dark and darker things, because they are very well aware that everyone has dark impulses within themselves – it's literally the first thing you are told when arriving in Amaurot in 5.0. Combined with their myriad laws, regulated processes and comically tedious administrative paperwork (paging Fourth Seat Pashtarot to investigate Elpis… paging Fourth Seat…), thinking notably of the societal taboo around going Greek God Mode as "unsightly", or their insistence on doing certain things the mundane way rather than using their magic nilly-willy, it's very easy to imagine disasters HAVE happened and they are doing their best to prevent that from happening again. Honestly, I'm sure that even in the era we see them, their day-to-day lives could get… interesting.

As for their economy, I think the only thing we know for sure is that fish description that says Ancients wouldn't care about gold as a material itself, which doesn't mean they didn't have a currency that isn't that metal in particular… perhaps a currency marked with a particular aetherial signature that makes it incredibly hard to replicate? Or perhaps a trade economy of naturally grown goods. I wish we knew more.

[RyuDragnier]

From what I can tell, part of the reason people seem to obsess over proving Emet wrong may come from arguments we've had in these very Lore subforums back when ShB was first fresh. We all remember the constant arguments for Zodiark vs Hydaelyn, and how those spilled over into Endwalker after it first came out. There's a lot of bad blood from back then due to several posters who could get obnoxious about things. For some, this may be a final "take that" towards those posters.

[Vyrerus]

because so much is unspoken.

What we see of Hythlodaeus within the confines of Elpis is essentially a high tier government executive on their days off. It's a work trip, sure, but part of going to Elpis is getting to flaunt all of Amaurotine Society's rules (Run around maskless and cowl-less, transform at your leisure for research, dream your days away studying sleep, invoke creation magicks at will for literal years... the list goes on).

With regards to his position, he has to be objective all of the time while approving concepts for mass creation and use at the Bureau of the Architect. He's a man that sees too much, and is burdened by having to cut to the truth behind concepts day in and day out.

Narratively he serves to be the players' eyes into the real Amaurotine society and world, and they even gave him the speech to Hermes about Death and how it's viewed by their society. They also seemed to try to make him as appealing to the playerbase by exhibiting traits they experience/see commonly themselves.

I got the idea from his consistent self-deprecation that he is a man that likes to be humble, rather than someone who is depressed. His lack of concern for others and shrewd nature showcase more to me that he has most executive's superiority complex concerning people he does not value.

And that was what was supposed to relate to the terrifying nature of the Ancients that Yoshi-P mentioned in whichever interview it was. While also doubling as a tongue in cheek joke about suits in the real world, he was very much angling towards trying to get us to see the Ancients as dispassionate judges who create life at will and discard it just as readily. Something akin to Mark Twain's, "The Mysterious Stranger." Of course, it fell sideways like a cardboard cutout due to that consistent pesky mentioning of the fact that Ancients can't make new souls, and things need souls to be considered truly alive, whereas The Mysterious Stranger is under no such limitation (and also creates analogues for real people rather than mercing a few butterflies).

Hyth is just someone comfortable with expressing the truth, usually with a hardy chuckle, regardless of how harsh that truth may or may not be.

"What good is the ability to perceive a problem if one cannot act to address it?"

Course, he does also say that he is more open and candid with the WoL than with others, so perhaps we just see his nicest side in the MSQ.

[Denishia]

For me the “this place isn’t a paradise” is a Catch-22 because there’s a reason I use Vauthry’s Eulmore as the closest emotional parallel. We don’t leave Eulmore under Vauthry- or Ishgard under Thordan or any other place. And in those places we also get to explore the towns outside of it, the factions that oppose its status quo like Hilda or Ysayle, and learn about their history - like King Theodoric and the Autumn War for Ala Mhigo. For the Ancients we don’t get any info about the entirety of the planet that wasn’t Amaurot or Elpis, and any history at all is completely blank and must be headcanon. XIV’s story could only afford the little space it does -and a zone and a half and a full raid is pretty generous- for what is backstory of a past to the overwhelming majority (fractional estimate say best 1/30th). To me to start to like the Ancient World would require exploring the counterpoint parts and history and working to change its society and help its people in meaningful ways - but not only doing so would strand the player from the majority of the game, the years and years spent on everything else, but it would be even more gameplay in what is functionally an extended Echo flashback. And because as I listed out, while there are only a few places where I’m not at least neutral if not invested in exploring - Amaurot is that exception to the rule. To get the elements that would start to make its setting palpable (the cities that weren’t Amaurot, answers to where the Ancients came from and what Etheirys looked like before their creation Magic terraforming and if there were outside groups opposed to it) would require more forced interaction in the place least enjoyable and appealing outside of yet another High Allagan science dungeon. Pandaemonium was enough, and even then there’s stuff like P11 as fanservice that I’m not the audience for, same as all the Nier references in ShB.

I understand the fans invested in this one corner, truly I do, because I’m strongly prone to the same tendency to ignore the protagonists of various media and latch onto locations and people that only appear in side content and the past. I’ll be furious if the third Variant dungeon is given to any place other than Gridiana and specifically Gelmorra. My favorite zone area where I want more lore exploration is Voebrant. I love the parts of Werlyt that aren’t the Gundams. I wish we could use that time travel portal to go explore the Fifth Astral Era because I want to explore Nym and Amdapor in their primes and finally learn about the other two missing major cities and if they had unique magic. The other shards. I think it’d be cool if thanks to the Echo we get a flashback from one of the souls from a Shard that the Ascians wiped out in a Rejoining, not just ones almost removed like the First and 13th, so those places become more than just academic factoids.

[Teraq]

Honestly, I think people who are invested in the idea of "Amaurot VS the world" might be disappointed, because the few things we do know about the Ancient world… well… the Watcher in his short story speaks of the robe and mask being what the vast majority of the citizenry wore, and the Loporrits explain that they make your clothes robes and masks because "the Watcher told us that was what all humans wore". I think the point is moot here. Had it had any measure of importance, I surmise we would have heard about it, much like the existence of another "human" or otherwise sapient race at the time.

Is the implication, via pointed absence of any information contradicting it, that there was largely one global dominant culture weird, considering their physiology would naturally make their civilization vastly different from ours? I don't think so – look at our world and the internet and the emergence of something like a global "western" culture because we can share so much so easily via a common language and accessible technology, and we've only had the internet for half a century at best. Ancients were designed by the writers to be this highly advanced civilization with magical technology, as I vaguely recall from an interview. Does that make the setting less interesting? Not to me, but it probably does to you guys who don't like/trust Amaurot.

From what I can tell, part of the reason people seem to obsess over proving Emet wrong may come from arguments we've had in these very Lore subforums back when ShB was first fresh. We all remember the constant arguments for Zodiark vs Hydaelyn, and how those spilled over into Endwalker after it first came out. There's a lot of bad blood from back then due to several posters who could get obnoxious about things. For some, this may be a final "take that" towards those posters.

To be fair, I share a lot of opinions on the story with said posters… as personally, I entirely believe the Convocation's position was reasonable – not speaking of the Unsundered Ascians, though I will say I understand them. But anyway, I think the very fact that these arguments were had during Shadowbringers is testimony of the fact that it was a good story with nuanced morality, because both sides had their points and it was simply a matter of opinion.

Endwalker ruined this by making the conflict unambiguously one-sided.

I struggle to think of how any of Pandaemonium constitutes a "take that", frankly. Notwithstanding the qualification of "perfect" being a rather fallacious argument in the first place, personally I would always consider the Ancient world "better" by default, thanks to the simple fact that it is largely post-scarcity by default and that the means of production could potentially be everyone. This is… massive, frankly. Nobody is dying of hunger, or cold, or infectious diseases according to Emet's first short story. I find that to be a non-arguable jump forward in quality of life. The lack of vital resources to hoard also meant that one huge reason for human conflict simply wasn't there. The apparent absence of natural death from old age also likely meant that people were far less driven by their mortality to engage in acts of questionable morality. I don't condone what the Ascians decided to do, but like I said, I understand that they would look at the Sundered world and think "…all right, let us not have this".

Also, like Brinne said in one post, it is mildly amusing that the very worst person we know of in Ancient times has now been given the slightest excuse to act as she did: the auracite. Yes, it didn't change her and her underlying desires were always there, but we don't know, and will never know, as Lahabrea himself said, how Athena would have acted had it not been for the auracite. Everyone harbors dark desires within themselves, but most of us have mental filters in place that allow us to go "wow, let's not do this for real". I interpret the lines about auracite potentially influencing Athena as such: it made her filters gradually go pop.
(Personally, I really don't care for this maybe-perhaps-kinda-sorta addition to Athena's character. I like villains, and I liked her as a fully natural, wholegrain psycho. I find the inclusion of auracite unnecessary… and if the goal was to finally explain the Heart of Sabik, it didn't even do that well IMO, because of the retcon from it being linked to Zodiark. I guess Sabik is now in the Virgo constellation…)

I appreciate Pandaemonium for portraying a variety of Ancients in a much more human light than 6.0's sorry excuse for a narrative ever did.

I just resent it for being largely what I find to be a cop-out in terms of potential consequences it could have had on the story.

[Brinne]

As far as my beloved Athena goes, like I mentioned, one of the trepidations I had entering this final chapter of Pandaemonium was basically begging on my hands and knees for them to not ruin her or compromise her evil, and I was honestly truly happy with what we got. I was actually delighted and felt pretty mindblown at them actively rejecting, at every turn, every single opportunity to soften her or show any potential of the fundamental person being anything besides exactly what we were shown, and impressed at how far they were willing to go and how much they refused to back down.

Again, her turning into an apocalyptic boss is sort of not the main event for the appeal of her character or how refreshing it was for me. As Pandaemonium is a story about a family, Athena's appeal, to me, from a Feminist (!!!!) perspective, is correlated to how scarce depictions of a woman, let alone a mother, who just flat-out does not have any soft feelings or love for her child and family, who truly sees her child as a tool to the very end to suit her own purposes, is. Because making the assertion that a woman exists who is capable of caring about her personal ambition and little to nothing else, and who furthermore has no reason explaining it - this is simply how she is - is basically Unicorn Tier. Almost all narratives you see touching on this sort of thing, if not "explain," then ultimately relent in some fashion - for an easy example that I don't think is even bad at all, look at the DRK questline centering around Rielle and her mother, which still eased up at the last second with the implication of the loving smile her abusive mother gave her just before she died.

So the fundamental horror of Athena and how she stands in unrepentant defiance of many assumptions about women and mothers remained untouched. Maybe she wouldn't have gone full-blown world-destroying megalomaniac without the intervention of the Heart (I really doubt she would have.) But I think it's also made clear there was never really any possibility she could have ever loved her family or seen them as worth anything beyond their utilitarian use. There is no trace of love in her heart, only ambition and a passion for SCIENCE and contempt for people who need to get on her level. If there was anything there, anything, her last moments with Erich would have gone very differently.

Honestly, I think it's actually really fun to imagine a scenario where Athena, still her glorious self, didn't happen to become empowered by the Heart of Sabik. If for some reason she still had Erichtonios with Lahabrea, unceremoniously tossing the newborn kid over her shoulder for Hephaistos to deal with and immediately returning to her research. Raging and fuming about how that imbecile Chief of the Bureau of the Architect is denying her concept blueprints because it skews too close into active soul tinkering, and Lahabrea having to debate calling the cops on his wife because she's going to do her best to whistle innocently while ignoring Hythlodaeus's decision and do what she wants in their basement anyway. She's just so wonderful.

And, if you look at her minion description, she's even a dog person! I am seriously gonna marry this perfect lady and none of you can stop me.

[Dikatis]

Snip

While I do love a good, unrepentant villain, I'm not sure if Athena is meant to be seen as a "feminist" figure? FFXIV's setting as a whole is generally pretty feminist, between the core three city-states all being led by women and the general prevalence of women in positions of power (i.e. Roswen and the Sanguine Sirens, Lucia as the second-in-command of the Temple Knights, Livia as a Tribunus, Vergilia as Legatus of the IIIrd Legion e.t.c.). But Athena isn't really that? I guess she's in command of her own actions in pursuit of megalomaniacal self-empowerment, but she's not really a role model in any way?

I'll admit to not really reading things through a feminist lens much of the time, but I don't think sociopathy, megalomania, and general selfishness are traits to aspire for in a feminist figure. The subversion of the expectation that she must have SOME sympathetic reason for her actions makes her an interesting villain akin to Zenos, but again, I'm not sure if her lack of maternal instinct (or empathy in general) makes her someone to admire and emulate.

[Lunaxia]

I actually made a post outlining what exactly I enjoyed about Amaurot/ the Ancients last night, but wound up deleting it out of already feeling more than a little self-conscious that the thread is rather replete with my takes on things already, hah - suffice to say, the other posters have phrased it quite perfectly and far more eloquently than I could have hoped to, particularly in terms of how the Ancients manage to feel both novel and interesting with their unique powers, worldview and general way of life, while still possessing a very human heart and the crucial ability to feel fundamentally relatable. They feel new and refreshing compared to the typical fantasy fare in my eyes, and absolutely rife with material for constructing stories full of nuance, depth and meaning; while it has certainly been more than messy at times, I think the sheer amount of debate their storyline has generated does, at least, attest to that, even if on a more superficial level others may find them boring.

In contrast, the Source is so dull to me [..]

I love this purely for how it unabashedly echoes exactly how I feel about the Source, yet always felt a little too mean to state outright, lol. When the theories were flying around about our possibly heading to the New World or some such place, everyone seemed so excited while I was inwardly groaning, because in story terms it felt like getting out of the theme park to go to grandma's place. In hindsight, it also helps me realise why I enjoyed HW and ShB over the likes of ARR and SB, setting aside matters of pacing and such; concepts like the dragons as a race and the sin eaters really added something new and original to the world and the story feels revitalised for their presence, while from a lore perspective also offering something you can really sink your teeth into. I will give credit where its due and say FFXIV can actually come up with some great original content when it wants to (which makes these constant story rips all the more frustrating.) Where it lags is when the focus shifts to the characters in a more typically human setting, because, a few figures here and there aside... the writing tends to get very trope-y, preachy and predictable, to the point you just know where it's going and how everybody's going to act, and the characters we meet who might hold potential wind up suffocated against the narrative brick wall that is the Scions and whatever message the writers have chained the expansion's overall story to.

(And welcome back, even if briefly, Teraq!)

[Denishia]

As far as my beloved Athena goes, like I mentioned, one of the trepidations I had entering this final chapter of Pandaemonium was basically begging on my hands and knees for them to not ruin her or compromise her evil, and I was honestly truly happy with what we got. I was actually delighted and felt pretty mindblown at them actively rejecting, at every turn, every single opportunity to soften her or show any potential of the fundamental person being exactly what we were shown, and impressed at how far they were willing to go and how much they refused to back down.

Again, her turning into an apocalyptic boss is sort of not the main event for the appeal of her character or how refreshing it was for me. As Pandaemonium is a story about a family, Athena's appeal, to me, from a Feminist (!!!!) perspective, is correlated to how scarce depictions of a woman, let alone a mother, who just flat-out does not have any soft feelings or love fo her child, who truly sees her child as a tool to the very end to suit her own purposes, is. Because making the assertion that a woman exists who is capable of caring about her personal ambition and nothing else, and who furthermore has no reason explaining it - this is simply how she is - is basically Unicorn Tier. Almost all narratives you see touching on this sort of thing relent in some fashion - for an easy example that I don't think is even bad at all, look at the DRK questline centering around Rielle and her mother, which still eased up at the last second with the implication of the loving smile her abusive mother gave her just before she died.

All the Heart Eyes for this. XIV isn't alone in under-serving female characters in favor of giving male characters more plot focus and inner-textuality or for presenting a villain as apologetically evil. Like Rielle's mother in the DRK quests, it's the expected writing beat. Stormblood's strength in its antagonists were having Yotsuyu and Fordola instead of Zenos, and Valens the clearest recent example of unequivocal opposition without pity, but the only other semi-major female villains are a fraction of the voidsent and primals like Garuda, the High Seraph Ultima, and the Endsinger. Of them, Ultima is the closest to unapologetically pure evil.

Rare is an abusive or toxic blood parent allowed to end in media without a sop towards forgiveness and redemption via attempted justification, especially mothers. Athena got to be callously unloving to the end, Erichtonios got to have the last sting, and even with Erichtonios and Lahabrea's reconciliation in the past, the Lahabrea memory ghost refutes Claudien's attempted forgiveness for the emotional scars on behalf of Erichtonios. Thus Pandaemonium ended on a satisfying note.