Revelations from JP Fan Fest (January 2024)

[Cleretic]

I think everyone's already overfocusing on Solution Nine and trying to figure out the solution to its mystery as a big grand revelation, and I don't think it's going to be, at all.

Their real origin is going to be fairly straightforward and non-relevatory, their core story relevance is instead what they've been up to in the present day, the real twist is probably closer to the Tulliyolal side of the storyline (or completely disconnected from both), there might well already be hints... and we won't notice because we've been too busy trying to build up Solution Nine as something it isn't.

We've done this before, all our predictions about Endwalker were totally broken because we bigged up the moon too much. Granted, that was fairly understandable as a mistake.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Ooooor.... Maybe it's just that it's new to us as of this FanFest and looks really really cool and unlike anything we've seen before, brain found connection and made the happy chemicals, and my neurodivergent mind loves looking for meaning in the funny letters :P

Plus, if there are any mysteries in the political Mamool Ja stuff, we don't have enough to speculate about it. What a cyberpunk city is doing in the middle of the Old West invites immediate theorycrafting.

[Cleretic]

Ooooor.... Maybe it's just that it's new to us as of this FanFest and looks really really cool and unlike anything we've seen before, brain found connection and made the happy chemicals, and my neurodivergent mind loves looking for meaning in the funny letters :P

I know it feels a little bit rude and stick-in-the-mud, but honestly, I feel like I can see the next half a year laid out in front of me in just people's responses to that particular thing, because I don't see this as just being a 'fresh new thing' sort of speculation that'll quiet down in a week or two. I think people are gonna fixate HARD on this one.

And I actually suspect that fixation's gonna lead to people making progressively more incorrect predictions, as we just start pre-emptively complexifying a twist that's probably not gonna be a huge swerve in the first place.

[YianKutku]

We've done this before, all our predictions about Endwalker were totally broken because we bigged up the moon too much. Granted, that was fairly understandable as a mistake.

Not necessarily. I'm approaching this as Solution Nine being like Elpis, in terms of story revelations, although its status as a player hub would probably mean it will feature early on (so maybe the second half of Labyrinthos).

And Elpis was a major story revelation, which still does not change the impact of the bigger story revelation of Ultima Thule.

I don't think this is a case of Gohn in ShB, where there was the big fiery devastation and Urianger calling Y'shtola "Master Matoya", and it turned out to just be backstory. I think it is going to have interesting lore discoveries, even if its presence here being revealed during Fanfest means it's not going to be the biggest twist.