Could Hydelan be a threat? [Spoilers]

[Crushnight]

this has been bugging me since 3.2 but could hydelan be a blessing but also something to watch out for. Don't get me wrong i don't think of Her/it as a villian just not perfectly good entity.

For starters take the fact she split the world into the source + 13 shades when she removed Zodiark she then had to divide her aether and her attention between all worlds this severly crippled her ability to be able to protect each world properly.

This ofc lead to 1 world being consumed by darkness and becoming the void and in 3.4 she clearly (at least in English) did not pay attention to the warriors of darkness world being consumed by Light till they themselves had to say to the word of the mother.

in 2.55 when it was just you and minfilia she spoke to Minfilia now this is very foreboding as this is how Minfilia became the word of the mother. Depending on what Hydelan said depends on how badly i personally view her;
1. she told her everything so Minfilia knew exactly what she was doing giving up her life (comitting suicide) to serve as Hydelan's voice
2. Told her to go back and nothing more so Minfilia gave her life without knowing she was doing so
Personally to me neither paints Hydelan in a pretty picture even though she did it out of necessity to continue talking to us and presumably other people with the echo but it also begs questions has she done this before or will she need to do it again in the future if 3.4 is an indication then hopefully not.

Sorry if seems a bit long winded but i was just wondering if others percieve Hydelan differently than before based on HW. Also sorry if any misspellings or number oversights kinda early and still in bed

[Anonymoose]

I'm about as "Team Hydaelyn" as it gets, but I'll try to keep my bias in check here, lol.

Yes; in some ways more than others, She can be thought of as less-than-implicitly-trustworthy. She is one of two diametrically opposed extremes that seems to have resulted from the will(s) of the aetherial sea drifting apart. When either of these wills interfere with the world, the balance is tipped. When the balance tips too far, nothing good can come of it—even if the Light is the victor.

A summary for the sake of establishing my point of view:

If the story we've been told is accurate, Zodiark was the first to threaten the balance—by taking too much power and threatening Hydaelyn. By expelling Him to/as the moon, she robbed Him of His power to influence the world(s) and His place in the sea. Incidentally, this stress on the cosmos shattered it into the original world and thirteen copies of it.

Since this time, He has been using the Ascians to exert His influence, destabilizing worlds with Chaos and Darkness in order to weaken the boundaries that exist between them in order to Rejoin the shattered pieces and resurrect Himself with their aether.

Elidibus keeps the Ascians from going too far. The black-robed Ascians are blinded by their lust for power and Zodiark's favor to the point that they will undermine one another and let an entire world be lost to a Flood of Darkness (which will create a void that Zodiark cannot use to empower Himself).

Until recently, Hydaelyn had no such emissary, which meant that Her own champions could pull an Ascian move and zealously keep on tilting things towards Light unchecked—believing they were doing the right thing—until the Flood destroyed them all. I'm surprised it took this long for The First to happen (unless She'd previously held back for this very reason but could no longer take the risk having lost this much).

So yes, Her efforts for self-preservation and the protection of Her children are less than measured, and in that sense we can't rely on her implicitly. Now, do the ends justify the means? We've been led to assume so. We've been led to assume that a world dominated by Zodiark would have no place for mortals at all. A world where mortals are "merely" at risk and continually struggling seems preferable for the time being.

The reason I keep faith with Her is because all of Her actions have been as far as we know reactionary. If Zodiark didn't threaten the balance, if Zodiark didn't send the Ascians, if the Ascians weren't threatening the existence of entire dimensions, She seems perfectly content to sit in sea and do nothing. During the Astral Eras, when the Dark sat idly by and let the world recover to the point that it could be coerced into throwing itself into chaos on a level required for Calamity once more, She did nothing but let Her children thrive.

At this point, there's just too much suggesting that She's the only one who'd have our backs in a fight, the only one who'd sit by and let Her children control the reins of history in their (as I've grown to refer to it) beautifully broken and balanced cosmos.

However, anything could upend this point of view. There's much we haven't seen.

From this point on is a tangential digression.

I'm hoping that Elidibus is the true bad guy here. He is the closest thing to Zodiark's actual will that we have, and he is a master of manipulating your point of view so he seems reasonable and justified and not a threat to your greatest interests. However, he does this not only by providing information that confirms it, but withholding information to the contrary. If we had nothing to fear on the greatest scales, he wouldn't be hiding his greater ambitions on the tiers just below them, in my humble opinion.

Also imho, in order to keep the story interesting until the end, Zodiark either has to be more than we've been led to believe, or He has to be undermined. It would be interesting to see that Zodiark simply has a different point of view about how life should manifest, given that he is associated with soul just as much as Hydaelyn is associated with the planet ("the star"). In this case, Elidibus would be finally vindicated in his assertion that he just wants to put things back how they were—the Sea would be rejoined, the world would be made whole, the binary would be brought back to center, the war would end. However, every time Elidibus speaks of this, there's a slyness about it that I don't trust at all. He didn't even pretend that mortals would make it through this transition back to the cosmos's original form, and that's just for starters.

Therefore, I'd prefer that Zodiark truly was everything we've been led to believe (though perhaps they could make us falsely doubt our instincts on that and question whether the above were the "right" thing to do). What I'd like to see is Elidibus come to terms with that. I'd like to see Elidibus realize that Zodiark is an active threat equal to Hydaelyn's reactionary threat and give himself wholly over to the Dark's lust for control and determination by usurping the entire plan. I'd like to see Elidibus attempt to rejoin all of the worlds, destroy everything that is, including both crystals, and reboot the entire cosmos as a healthy, newborn Genesis in his own image. Who could blame him? ... But for the sake of everything we are and everything we've fought for, he'd have to be stopped.

This would fulfill both Final Fantasy XIV's desire to on the deepest level be Good versus Evil, Light versus Darkness like the classic Final Fantasy titles, without being so simple. It also allows XIV to continue the ambiguity whereby Light = Good / Darkness = Evil is incidental. Hydaelyn just happens to be the one with our backs, not because Light is Good. Some past titles, as well, have had the truest evils be neither inherently light or dark.

[DroFrehter]

You're about to be Anonymoosed.

[Crushnight]

And i'm very grateful for the discussion as to me Hydelan has been questionable as of late to the point where if there was someone else with as strong an echo as Minfilia could she get them to willing give up their life essence to preserve more aether for communication (atm i don't think it will based on 3.4 with the word of the mother going to the warriors of darkness world to counterbalance the overflowing light).
I do however think between Hydelan/WoL and Zodiark/Ascians Hydelan is definitely the greater sense of good and that since she is a flawed being it makes her more interesting within the story

Ty for the reply Annoymoose ^^ and i rightly agree that its odd that Hydelan waited until Minfilia to have a 1st envoy especially given that there has been WoLs in the past

[Anonymoose]

Ty for the reply Annoymoose ^^

Lore campfires are love, lore campfires are life.

and i rightly agree that its odd that Hydelan waited until Minfilia to have a 1st envoy especially given that there has been WoLs in the past

There is no precedent or reason to think this, really, but I think it'd be fun if she did. Imagine if (when mortals were first created) She empowered emissaries to guide and protect them, but that the inherent battle within every person to fight their own internal darkness flawed those chosen from the get-go. Perhaps those chosen mortals raised unto godly status did more harm than good; neither the Mother nor Her children are perfect, after all.

It would not only fall right in line with Hydaelyn (and mortals) occasionally making mistakes, but it would have given Her reason to try to play it safe—to handicap Herself in Her own war by being conservative. A chosen set of potentials to receive the Echo. A chosen subset of those who answered the call. A chosen subset of those to give more power. A chosen one to be Her champion.

Perhaps there were a few such beings that had to be prevented from interacting with the planet any longer. Perhaps... twelve.

But, again, that's likely way too far out from the known to be anywhere near accurate, lol.

[Belhi]

She is definitely imperfect but then again, the entire situation is. I don't think this situation is her preferred outcome. Infact I think she has for the most part just been trying to keep things afloat in what has been for her a mostly losing battle. After all its hardly surprising she couldn't respond to the WoD when she could barely contact her chosen champion. More to the point, she seems to be very limited in how she can interact with the world. They way she says it in 3.4 makes me suspect that both she and Zodiark have to work through proxies.

I actually wonder if her whole 'look, think, feel' is her attempt to push her children to find an answer for themselves since she herself doesn't have a perfect solution. Unlike her, her children exist with both light and dark. Our role as the WoL isn't to simply beat the Ascians but to find a stable solution.

Regardless she doesn't seem to want dominance as much as balance and all our interactions with her show her as benevolent. Even with Minfilia, Minfilia stated that she gave herself willingly to be Hydealyn's voice.

[Kallera]

I kinda wondered this ever since the strange vision in 2.0 showing the purple crystal. I wouldn't be surprised if the mothercrystal was merely the means for the aetherial sea to communicate, and it could conceivably change hands in the right circumstances.

Ultimately, both Hydelyn and Zodiark are the result of a fractured realm.

[LineageRazor]

The whole deal with the Rejoining frequently makes me think back to the overarching plot of Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia in FFXI. That setting, too, took place on a world that had transitioned from one state ("Paradise", supposedly) to another (Vana'diel as we knew it) and there were villains plotting to return it to it's original, natural state (which would come at the explicit cost of pretty much wiping out all the non-Zilarts on the planet). The benevolent deity in that setting, Altana, was clearly a flawed being as well, pretty much eternally aching over the loss of her lover and only peer, Promathia. In spite of her sorrows, though, she clearly showed concern for the inhabitants of Vana'diel, and on rare occasions directly intervened to assist them.

Hydaelyn, too, seems to have the best of intentions, but is clearly limited in power and showing signs of becoming mighty desperate. That desperation COULD lead to her making some nasty decisions - again, still with the best of intentions, but nasty nonetheless. Minfillia's conversion could be one such desperate move. She's also a whole lot more hands-on than Altana generally was.

The Ascians clearly seem to believe that they're firmly in control. Pretty much every interaction with them shows them as being confident and patient (well, up until the moment they die, at which point they tend to be rather flabbergasted and panicked). As far as they're concerned, the Rejoining is right on schedule, and not only is there little we can do to stop it, but we're mostly just helping them along. Their confidence and Hydaelyn's desperation pretty much leads me to believe that the Ascians really ARE winning this war, and that's going to be pushing Hydaelyn ever closer to the Godzilla Threshold where pretty much ANY measure is acceptable compared to what will happen if she loses.

I think we can trust that Hydaelyn is on our side, but she's starting to have to scale back her expectations from "save all my children" to "save whomever I can". This may lead her to start making some "needs of the many" choices, which are rarely pretty.

And, just to play Devil's Advocate here... Do recall that Ifrit, upon finding that we could not be tempered, immediately jumped to the conclusion that we already HAD been tempered (though he admitted he couldn't sense another's "taint" upon us). This has lead some to speculate that Hydaelyn's blessing is actually a form of tempering, and that we don't really have any choice except to support her. I don't personally buy into that theory, but if true could be yet another sign of Hydaelyn's desperation.

[myahele]

While it was an act of self-preservation, the fact that Hydaelyn's Emissary (Minfilia) was able to stop Ardvard's body from harming her in such a way has me a little bit concerned. Compared to Elidibus simply blasing Minfilia upon their 1st meeting, Hydaelyn's emissary is shown to control one's body against their will.

If anything, Hydaelyn can be a threat if the WoL decide that the world don't need Her and Zodiark.

[Anonymoose]

While it was an act of self-preservation, the fact that Hydaelyn's Emissary (Minfilia) was able to stop Ardvard's body from harming her in such a way has me a little bit concerned. Compared to Elidibus simply blasing Minfilia upon their 1st meeting, Hydaelyn's emissary is shown to control one's body against their will.

Is she controlling his body against his will or just overpowering him on her own? The closer his axe gets to her, the more the swing slows down, and a little particle effect comes up around his forearms like he's pitifully trying to swing through a cloud of aether that's dragged him to a halt, or as if she's externally holding his arms "telekinetically" via aether for a moment ("Magic"). Is it so different from the handcuffs of Darkness Nabriales used, or even Arbert's own binding-chain magicks?