New Yoshitaka Amano CE Artwork

[Fleurette]

oh, awesome! I'm glad I'm not the only person who thought the goddess lady in the background was Hydaelyn--that was my first thought when i saw her there. i had to squint a bit to see Gaius, too, but there he was! i'm liking the theory someone mentioned where the adventurers are leaving the mother crystal to go out into hydaelyn/the world again.

it'd be very cool if it were Nymeia (she's my patron goddess so it'd be cool to see what she actually looked like!) but i don't think it matches her official description...i think in the old character creation screen where it described each of the Twelve, it says Nymeia's usually pictured with a spinning wheel/loom and a white veil or something.

also where in the hells did you guys get the idea of it being siren?! like...am i missing something? was it just because she was singing or something in the openings? or is there an actual giant theory post about it like there usually is? (because if so i'd like to read it!) ...if you really wanted to stretch it i guess maaaayybe they could make it so Hydaelyn and Siren are the same entity in some weird twist of fate...but still. :P

as for the scholar issue i don't care either way, but i am leaning to it being another name for ACN...the similarities to the official art of arcanist was uncanny. although with the new dev blog it's difficult to say for sure, since according to Ferne, all of the armor the characters are wearing in that one picture is in the game, so I think he's implying it to be another AF, in which case...yeah.

[Myranda]

oh, awesome! I'm glad I'm not the only person who thought the goddess lady in the background was Hydaelyn--that was my first thought when i saw her there. i had to squint a bit to see Gaius, too, but there he was! i'm liking the theory someone mentioned where the adventurers are leaving the mother crystal to go out into hydaelyn/the world again.

it'd be very cool if it were Nymeia (she's my patron goddess so it'd be cool to see what she actually looked like!) but i don't think it matches her official description...i think in the old character creation screen where it described each of the Twelve, it says Nymeia's usually pictured with a spinning wheel/loom and a white veil or something.

also where in the hells did you guys get the idea of it being siren?! like...am i missing something? was it just because she was singing or something in the openings? or is there an actual giant theory post about it like there usually is? (because if so i'd like to read it!) ...if you really wanted to stretch it i guess maaaayybe they could make it so Hydaelyn and Siren are the same entity in some weird twist of fate...but still. :P

as for the scholar issue i don't care either way, but i am leaning to it being another name for ACN...the similarities to the official art of arcanist was uncanny. although with the new dev blog it's difficult to say for sure, since according to Ferne, all of the armor the characters are wearing in that one picture is in the game, so I think he's implying it to be another AF, in which case...yeah.

It's a running thing across all the hard core lore fans. Basically it started with the idea of Siren giving players the gift of the Echo because of the associations with voice (like casting silence on enemies when summoned in previous games).

[Anonymoose]

also where in the hells did you guys get the idea of it being siren?!

I'm seeing you post around here more and more, I guess you should have a crash course XD

Long ago we were discussing what the hell Ifrit was talking about when he implied we had a primal. The sylph, too, mentioned something to the idea that we had one, but should not summon it. I've let it go for now, but it really does seem to imply that it's not just the Twelve we have access to.

It's possible that, much like like other primals are ancient deities from amongst the aether who latched onto a community, influencing its members and building a sort of cult, that one of these entities has taken an interest in us and, for the most part, we've been ignoring it for the Twelve.

Back then we had a lot less information, and one of the ideas was Siren. Keep in mind, this is before the Siren artwork was released, and it's a house of cards of a theory that was one of many speculations at the time.

Basically: We think we might have a primal; that primal possibly gave us the echo; when you get the echo you hear a harp melody; Siren has a harp; an NPC playing a harp plays the the song that you got when you woke to the echo; and the fact that we have the "The Echo" and are called "Woken" correlates to Siren's two main attacks, Hope Song, which silences you (silence bring cured by Echo drops/herbs and the attack itself sounding like the core idea of Answers in the first place), and Sleep.

Like I said, it's a house of cards - some of it disproven, some of it still possible but unlikely, some it it could easily be an auxiliary to the main story... but it was a pretty big open door for a few pages of GC Midlander, so it got a nod in Ferne's atomic lore bomb reply:

1. The beast tribes have their primals, so what about the 5 races? Do they have their own? Is it Siren? It’s Siren, right? It doesn’t matter if you tell me it’s not Siren, I know it’s Siren. (Please tell me it’s Siren...)

This is a touchy subject. I can tell you that you’ve done a remarkable job of picking up a lot of the subtle hints that were dropped in the 1.0 story (the Ifrit diatribe being an excellent example), but the story was served to you incomplete (in addition to being served over a period of two years), and so you’ve been left to fill in the blanks yourselves. This has lead to a lot of unnecessary confusion, and fixing this for ARR has been one of the main things that Yoshi-P has been preaching to the new quest team. In other words, release more info, with fewer gaps in-between, so that players can better follow the story. So what we’ll see happen in ARR is an influx of quests that try to paint a better picture of what was going on in 1.0. That means, for info regarding this ‘another’ of which Ifrit speaks and the ‘paragons’ who supposedly taught the beast tribes how to summon the primals, you’ll have to wait until ARR begins.

What I have been allowed to say is, the Sanguine Sirens are different from the sirens which are mentioned in the blacksmith/armorer class quests, and both are different from Siren of Final Fantasies past (who has not been mentioned in-game). And then there's the provisional artwork that was recently released...

So wait, does this mean there is no Siren primal? Well, that remains to be seen.

Flash forward, sometimes when an unlikely theory or an unanswered primal question pops up, the knee-jerk reaction is SIREN! just for fun. For instance, in the Developer's Blog entry, NSFW!?

Much like pop-culture references hidden in quest titles and dialogue, or how people keep mistaking the ridiculous (and often hysterical) plural forms of item names for typos, it has become somewhat of a running-gag that embodies how our theories, especially my theories, are often like birdshot... the bulls-eye was probably hit by one of them pellets... maybe...

[Fleurette]

Ohh, gotcha! So...if I'm getting it right, it's something sort of like this:



thank you for that fine lecture in lore theories 101, professor moose. it was very insightful. (and yeah honestly i would be posting here a lot more if i actually had stuff that was worth contributing...but usually i don't so i just watch from the sidelines. :P)

all memes aside, though, that is a really cool theory--i'm not as much learned about general FF lore as you guys probably are (so like the series' summons/primals and stuff were pretty new to me aside from like...ifrit. 'cause everyone knows ifrit.) since this is actually the first numbered FF I've played. (i figure the first crystal chronicles and tactics advance/2 don't count...) So the idea of it being Siren didn't really connect with me at first. But I can see why you found it a very real possibility.

I remember that dialogue about the five races having a primal all their own; I was really intrigued by the implications and remember doing research on it and i think right after the first glimpses of 2.0 came out people were assuming our primal was Odin (and a good few people in my linkshell agreed with that idea for a time) ...although at this point with the new info we've gotten which states he may have only appeared in Eorzea just recently (i think?), the outlook on that theory's changed a bit. Wasn't something also mentioned by the sylphs like "well, you guys probably have a primal supporting you, but the means of summoning it are far too advanced for you--even if you happen to find that out, JUST DO NOT DO IT because you will get messed up like the amalj'aa and the ixal" or something. i feel like i remember them saying something where they told us that the five races were just too simple to even comprehend how to summon a primal, and it could possibly corrupt us just like it did with the beast tribes. (and van darnus's actions before/during "To Kill a Raven" kind of prove this when he goes dalamud-crazy after calling forth the red moon, due to Bahamut's influence.)

...although i could be making stuff up. it's been over a year since i've done that quest.

anyways, either way it sounds like we'll be seeing Siren in some way/shape/form come ARR, so I'm sure we'll find out what her real purpose is soon enough. Although now that I think about it...we didn't hear Answers in the beginning cutscene of you-know-what, but we still got the "hear...feel...think" thing later on.

...oh man. do you think maybe it was siren in 1.0 but then she retired from giving people the echo because bahamut megaflare'd her vocal chords and so she gave her echo-giving powers to hydaelyn and then went to her beach home in la noscea?!?!?!

please no one take that seriously...

[NoloeTazier]

Ohh, gotcha! So...if I'm getting it right, it's something sort of like this:



thank you for that fine lecture in lore theories 101, professor moose. it was very insightful. (and yeah honestly i would be posting here a lot more if i actually had stuff that was worth contributing...but usually i don't so i just watch from the sidelines. :P)

all memes aside, though, that is a really cool theory--i'm not as much learned about general FF lore as you guys probably are (so like the series' summons/primals and stuff were pretty new to me aside from like...ifrit. 'cause everyone knows ifrit.) since this is actually the first numbered FF I've played. (i figure the first crystal chronicles and tactics advance/2 don't count...) So the idea of it being Siren didn't really connect with me at first. But I can see why you found it a very real possibility.

I remember that dialogue about the five races having a primal all their own; I was really intrigued by the implications and remember doing research on it and i think right after the first glimpses of 2.0 came out people were assuming our primal was Odin (and a good few people in my linkshell agreed with that idea for a time) ...although at this point with the new info we've gotten which states he may have only appeared in Eorzea just recently (i think?), the outlook on that theory's changed a bit. Wasn't something also mentioned by the sylphs like "well, you guys probably have a primal supporting you, but the means of summoning it are far too advanced for you--even if you happen to find that out, JUST DO NOT DO IT because you will get messed up like the amalj'aa and the ixal" or something. i feel like i remember them saying something where they told us that the five races were just too simple to even comprehend how to summon a primal, and it could possibly corrupt us just like it did with the beast tribes. (and van darnus's actions before/during "To Kill a Raven" kind of prove this when he goes dalamud-crazy after calling forth the red moon, due to Bahamut's influence.)

...although i could be making stuff up. it's been over a year since i've done that quest.

anyways, either way it sounds like we'll be seeing Siren in some way/shape/form come ARR, so I'm sure we'll find out what her real purpose is soon enough. Although now that I think about it...we didn't hear Answers in the beginning cutscene of you-know-what, but we still got the "hear...feel...think" thing later on.

...oh man. do you think maybe it was siren in 1.0 but then she retired from giving people the echo because bahamut megaflare'd her vocal chords and so she gave her echo-giving powers to hydaelyn and then went to her beach home in la noscea?!?!?!

please no one take that seriously...

We could indeed still have our own Primal, that's not ruled out yet. But a Primal could also smell like the Mother Crystal, especially if that's where aether/Primals come from. Like he's literally smelling his mama but doesn't know it's his mama. Which in the case of us having a Primal, it's obviously Siren!

As for the Beastmen and their Primals, don't forget the Paragon(s) taught them how to summon them. But according to Ifrit the Primals were warned by the Paragon(s) about the "godless blessed," which is assumed to be us with the Echo. Yet I still say the Paragons will have something to do with the Summoner Job-quests, after all it's a "lost art."

The voice that we heard in the final days of 1.0 and the "hear...feel...think," was the Mother Crystal. But we've seen the concept art for Siren so she has to fit in somewhere, she's definitely a Primal or at least definitely "should" be. Siren and Fenrir at least are the current unassigned (Elder) Primals.

[Anonymoose]

As you can see, there are a few Lore topics where we are clued into what is obviously an important issue, but have only enough details to basically paint our picture with a barn brush. We could just never talk about these issues, but that doesn't help us get what facts we do have in order, nor is it fun. On the other hand, we'd surely start accidentally creating fanon if we took ourselves too seriously and started letting any theory go unquestioned. A fringe theory as a straw man does a lot of unexpected good, sometimes, lol.

We have no idea who this figure is behind the mother crystal. We can create a hierarchy. Statistically, it's most likely a manifest Hydaelyn. We've heard Hydaelyn's voice - she is female. ("Hear... Feel... Think"). Strangely, this art also shares much in visual common with two female primals we've seen so far.

Long story short, if anyone can offer dissuasive evidence that it is not the go-to fringe theory of Siren, we have an idea that has at least defeated the minimal proving ground possible. If that cannot even be done, we just get to throw quotes back and forth and joke about how it's obviously Siren.

Watch Mjollnir for other good examples. His imagination can run even more wild than mine on issues we have barely any evidence on, and on the days I can't burn a Mjollmnir straw man, I've got way more work to do before I act like I know jack.

[Miliant]

Hydaelyn.
Also, it's hardly proof against SCH. The artwork for the cover may predate the decision to include a Scholar. I don't suppose GLA is the only playable class in 1.0 because of the cover now, do I?

[Anonymoose]

I don't suppose GLA is the only playable class in 1.0 because of the cover now, do I?

That would have been an odd choice considering all the classes in the logo, but now that you mention it, anybody else remember when that logo confirmed samurai in 2010?

Bah, anyway, as of the self-deletion of my way-too-long ramble about logical hierarchies in the SCH thread... I'm retired from speculation about game mechanics. I live to lore.

[ArkhamNative]

On a lighter tone: All this Hydaelyn = Siren speculation has me wondering whether Claudia Black (v1's "hear...feel...think") will be returning. I think she'd be a great voice for Siren.

[Yrusama]

That box art looks familiar...