Solution 9 - Unfounded Speculation!

[Cleretic]

Shaaloani in Xak Tural (Fantasy North America) is described as maintaining their traditions despite all the changes occurring including the construction of a railroad due to the discovery of ceruleum.

Solution Nine is described as being a wholly separate civilization from Tuliyollal


There seems to be a theme of changes and technological progress already going on. Wuk Lamat’s brother Koana, one of the other heirs to the throne, is already technologically minded and has been attending the Studium. In the Dawntrail trailer there are a lot of miqo’te wearing more “non-native”-looking clothing like suspenders, who may be from Shaaloani. There’s also a shot from Shaaloani showing a bar that is very clearly labeled in Eorzean but I don’t know if it’s because that region is colonized or because the devs decided everyone writes Eorzean now (except Solution Nine).

I wonder if a part of the plot may involve discussions or attempts to bring Solution Nine into the Tural fold. We know one of the brothers is a warmonger and there’s shots of burning Solution Nine-looking architecture.

Though there’s also scorch marks on a cliff side in Yok Tural in the Andes-looking region and that’s where the warmonger brother is in the benchmark.

Basically, given all the individual pieces of the expansion that we have, it is fairly likely that there's some kind of 'traditionalism versus modernity' thing going on, but nothing has explicitly been said. Ayche probably just jumped a couple reasonable conclusions ahead, and then forgot she did.

I suspect it's not the whole thing, and there's probably more facets to it all, but I would expect a major element of the central conflict is in how much Tulliyolal should stick to what's already worked for them, versus how much they should modernize and become more like their neighbors from the north (possibly by taking said neighbor's stuff). It'd actually be a fairly clean way to slot in that inter-Scion conflict that's been hanging over the plot, that I feel like we should be speculating more about and just don't have enough info to do so; out of every Scion I could easily see Thancred being the one to take the side of modernity, and meanwhile there's a few Scions I could pitch as being the types to stand in support of 'there's no need to throw out the old ways', G'raha's one of the ones most likely to in my book. (The actual most likelies being Estinien and Y'shtola, who are still wildcards.)