Speculation on Fandaniel's Motive

[Vyrerus]

So Fandaniel, Fandango, Fancy Dan stated that he wants to kill everyone and everything. Especially people who ask such meaningless questions like what I'm speculating.

I'm a big fan of the Youtube channel, Pursuit of Wonder. It's a creative writing channel with animated visual aids. It's quite good. Anyway, they recently did this piece:

Why Living Forever Would (Probably) Be Awful

If you don't have time to watch it, basically it's about humans in the future who find a way to become immortal, and then their cybernetic progeny who then, thousands of years later, find a way to revert to being mortal at a whim. The end is inconclusive, pointing out that living beings are never satisfied even when they have complete control over life and death. (There's a very interesting segment that almost mirrors how I picture what happens when the Ancients did die or used to)

The big take away from the people who asserted that mortality's special because it ends... it made me think about Fandaniel.

When he shows up in the Royal Menagerie, he immediately has a minor fourth wall break. Through the rest of the dialogue, he shows a keen awareness of everything the plot's given to us throughout the course of SHB.

When he says that he wants everything to die, and that he has no creed about it we all wonder if that's true. I guess my speculation is that, though in the present era individuals are no longer immortal or nearly immortal, the overall society and legacy is.

No individuals are immortal, but a collective may be. It makes me wonder if Fandaniel views that the world cannot actually be special, because the world cannot end. It's another kind of 4th wall break, because the nature of MMOs doesn't allow them to end.

I believe this is the lens with which they will focus on Fandaniel for us. It's also hinted at in SHB in Phantom Amaurot, by a phantom who says, "But even inspiration has its limits. For all of the wonders we have wrought, I do wonder if there will come a time when we have fully explored the potential of our powers---when there is truly nothing left unmade, and only iteration and imitation and stagnation remain." This leads us into the debate questline which provides us with the Lousoix line vs. the DRK line, and an Amaurotine Firebrand who is upset that the Bureau of the Architect will only approve beneficial, the most beneficial, concepts for society's use.

Basically, I think the story is going to use Fandaniel as a pivot point to let us know that the dev team knows that a lot of the gameplay content is recycled and they are stagnating. I'm quite looking forward to November either way.

What do you think?

Also, won't it be funny if they use Sharlayan to 4th wall break and dunk on lore enthusiasts, playfully? Hehe.

[KageTokage]

I immediately felt like his line about preferring to be offed by "one who has it all, rather then an inferior" was a hint to his actual reason for wanting to destroy the world.

We already know Amaurot was a place inhabited by the elite of the unsundered world, as they seemingly wouldn't even allow you to become a citizen if you didn't possess some minimum level of creative potential and despite the Convocation's lofty position, they didn't seem too eager to aid the outside world, considering that only Azem wanted to bother averting a disaster entirely while the rest were content to simply arrange an evacuation plan for those affected.

Perhaps Fandaniel was a victim of their apathy and lost his home and/or people close to him, but opted to claw his way into their ranks as a part of a revenge scheme...or he might've already been part of the Convocation but they decided they didn't want to do anything. His memory crystal having an extremely garbled recording suggests that the unsundered may not have known much about him at all, and him being only a recent addition to their ranks could be a possible explanation for that. If he already had a jaded view of the world pre-Sundering, then he'd certainly find its present state even more appalling and he comes across to me as someone who's so broken that he just wants to drag everything down with him (Particularly during his little motive speech where he seemed to show very genuine contempt for everyone).

[Anonymoose]

My money is on plain old "he specifically wants to get to Zodiark and thinks Zenos is a useful idiot."

As much as I love (and expect) new and exciting ideas, by the final chapter I think most of the cards are on the table. However, I also think that blinds me sometimes. I focus so much on what we've seen that my mind hesitates to make leaps to the unprecedented.

Based on precedent I see two major paths:

1. Fandaniel has a very twisted take on his tempering. Why would a true acolyte of Zodiark want to return the world to the state it was before He existed? If I truly believed Zodiark was the one true god (and didn't share the Originals' vision of what the world that was supposed to be saved was), I would want to sacrifice the rest of existence to Him so he could remake the world in His image, faithful I would have a high place in His kingdom. I'd loathe the Originals for treating me like expendable fodder while insulting Him like that.

2. Fandaniel is what Emet-Selch warned us about: You can raise someone to an office who wasn't its original keeper, but they're unreliable. Fandaniel's broken and using his Ascian powers for something unexpected.

But precedent is sometimes a poor predictive factor in fiction.

[Vyrerus]

I like both of your takes. I've been musing on them the past couple of days. It's hard to come up with a response, because it's just more rampant speculation, but uhh I seem to be into that.

The responses put together, particularly Moose's second precedent option and Kagetokage's whole jam.

I'm kind of wondering if perhaps some of the Overlords tried setting up a different kind of society than an empire. With 13 minds at their disposal, not all of them originals, surely not all of them figured that Garlemald or Allag were the only way forward with puppet civilizations?

Perhaps we will find that one of them, say Fandaniel himself even(kind of unlikely, given his propensities though), came from Amaurot's sister city in the past. They got themselves onto the Convocation to keep an eye on them/get that revenge ploy. Being unable to stop ]them, they've set about on the next best thing. Recreate the sister city or at least create a civilization that will honor its legacy. Perhaps, this is Sharlayan. Perhaps when Fourchenault said, "If it were truly the Final Days, we would know."

I'm wondering if perhaps they may even know a friendly Ascian of those that remain from the Convocation. Mayhaps said friendly warned them of each Calamity's coming. Was Sharlayan being groomed to be the civilization that remained once all Rejoinings concluded?

[Veloran]

In my opinion, Fandaniel's desires are a reflection of the Sound and what it represents. Bear with me.

Firstly, we're told in Amaurot that the Sound is "a force inimical to life", which grew to fester and spread, warping everything it came into contact with and even choking the Lifestream itself. Given the Ancients were forced to restart the cycle of life with their sacrifices, it can be assumed that the cyclical rebirth of souls through the aetherial sea had effectively been halted or destroyed by the Sound.

Now, it's my belief that the Sound is something that was born in the aetherial sea as a byproduct of eons of the Ancient's creation magics, a sort of subconscious will they had been suppressing by trying to eliminate individual disparity. I would characterize this as something like a subconscious will towards destruction and death, an antithesis of life's overt desire for prosperity and propagation. Of course, this matches Fandaniel's stated goals of wishing for everything to die and to restart the Final Days, and furthermore it provides an avenue for how he's doing it - Through the summonings of twisted "dark primals" which are born through a combination of stunted creation magic and the tortured souls of their summoners, the byproduct of these magics, the will of death, is again taking shape within the Lifestream. Of course this also connects to his association with Zenos, who is himself all about inflicting death on others with his obsession with "the hunt", which might be said to be a proxy for the innate necessity of life to consume other life.

To touch on why he believes as he does and wishes for death, let's just look at his nature as a sundered Ascian. He was raised up and entered into his station and given the memories of his past life as Fandaniel, but attendant to this would naturally be the recognition that he's lived countless other lives, to him most likely all meaningless. So in addition to his Ascian status having forcibly bound him to an ancient crusade and faded memories, he, like everyone else, is subject to a cycle of life, death, and rebirth, repeating everything endlessly for thousands of years. As we see he's ecstatic to be free of his given mission in 5.3, so too does he want to be free of the cycle of life which is imposed upon everyone.

To tie this all together with some musical cues, the weariness of the soul's endless wandering is something that's been present as a theme in the story at least as far back as Answers. If the question is "Why were we given life just to die?", then Fandaniel's answer would be that there is no reason and that everything should just return to oblivion. And on that note, there is a particular shared intonation during Fandaniel's segment of the Endwalker trailer. Firstly, this rendition peaks with the line "Now we go for freedom!" as Fandaniel ascends the tower, and as I've already laid out I think he is very closely associated with the concept of freedom, and as a character believes that true death equals freedom. However, the second part of this comes at the end of his segment, in which a very specific sound is heard.
https://youtu.be/XJ-51r-sG4k?t=162
Does that screeching tone before the cut sound familiar to anybody? Well it should, considering it is precisely the same tone present in the Scions & Sinners rendition of Return to Oblivion, after the very line, "The soul yearns for oblivion, oblivion!".
https://youtu.be/ZTEPqYwvAzw?t=68

I ask you, what are the chances this is a pure coincidence? The exact same piercing sound present in two different songs, both of which are associated with the concept of a neverending doomed fate and the repeating rebirth of the soul?

On to my last point, and this will be getting into further speculative territory, but I think we may be able to pin down the ultimate end of Fandaniel's story here. A surprising amount has been made within the narrative about somehow talking with Fandaniel and resolving things peacefully. People are pretty bewildered at this considering that we didn't reach any such ending with any of the previous, far more sympathetic Ascians up to this point, but with Fandaniel such a thing would, in fact, have far more impact. If it is indeed the case that the nature of the Sound is as I've postulated above, simply killing Fandaniel or destroying it would be, thematically, completely backwards. If the idea is accepting the cycle of life and death, as indeed the entirety of the conflict with the Ascians has been about given how deeply their motivations are fueled by grief and loss, inflicting death to end the conflict is a self-defeating resolution. And if I was to touch on Ishikawa's prior writing, WoL simply being the "Weapon of Light" and smiting the evil seems rather out of character, no? Rather, it would be that an acceptance of those subconscious impulses and the nature of death and rebirth, rather than repression, destruction, or rejection of it, is what's necessary for actualization into a healthier and more balanced world.

[Tensaihime]

It's also hinted at in SHB in Phantom Amaurot, by a phantom who says, "But even inspiration has its limits. For all of the wonders we have wrought, I do wonder if there will come a time when we have fully explored the potential of our powers---when there is truly nothing left unmade, and only iteration and imitation and stagnation remain."

That’s why I always thought living forever would become boring, because you’d eventually run out of stuff to do. I imagine Danny Boy is bored too -and you don’t need a creed to be bored!

Maybe he’ll find a cool hobby after we yeet him into the Lifestream and he comes back as someone less omnicidal.

[Tensaihime]

On to my last point, and this will be getting into further speculative territory, but I think we may be able to pin down the ultimate end of Fandaniel's story here. A surprising amount has been made within the narrative about somehow talking with Fandaniel and resolving things peacefully. People are pretty bewildered at this considering that we didn't reach any such ending with any of the previous, far more sympathetic Ascians up to this point, but with Fandaniel such a thing would, in fact, have far more impact. If it is indeed the case that the nature of the Sound is as I've postulated above, simply killing Fandaniel or destroying it would be, thematically, completely backwards. If the idea is accepting the cycle of life and death, as indeed the entirety of the conflict with the Ascians has been about given how deeply their motivations are fueled by grief and loss, inflicting death to end the conflict is a self-defeating resolution. And if I was to touch on Ishikawa's prior writing, WoL simply being the "Weapon of Light" and smiting the evil seems rather out of character, no? Rather, it would be that an acceptance of those subconscious impulses and the nature of death and rebirth, rather than repression, destruction, or rejection of it, is what's necessary for actualization into a healthier and more balanced world.

The trailer shows monsters and destruction, so Fandaniel and/or Zenos will definitely start to make their goals reality. If we don’t destroy the Sound, how do we stop it and save everyone and everything from being turned into meat sauce and smoking rubble?

[thegreatonemal]

His current incarnation simply doesn't care about the world is what I'm going with. Sure this fragment might have his second hand memories of what the world was but he simply doesn't care. He says it himself that he saw the other three were obsessed and he, as a sovereign individual doesn't really care. Elidbus simply had him on a leash and he's dead so he can do what he wants now.

[RyuDragnier]

I have a feeling that somebody Fandaniel knows is the reason he's so nihilistic. If I were to take a guess...the worst life can do to you probably happened to them, possibly also a "fate worse than death", with the individual being somebody Fandaniel cares about more than anybody else. If the world can be so cruel to do that to them, why should the world be allowed to exist? Why shouldn't he end it all and free them so they can be together in death?

[Cilia]

"The time has come to fulfill your heart's desire! My desire! To relieve those wretched creatures of their meaningless existence!"

I believe the secret to Fandaniel's motivation lies in figuring out who exactly who he's talking about. Though he may be going completely off the rails set by Elidibus, there's no reason to believe he isn't trying to resurrect / free Zodiark, and as we all know when released from imprisonment primals tend to be... furious, outraged, and sick with anger.

Why he would want to do this can only be similar to why the unsundered wanted the same - he sees contemporary mortals as "wretched" and "meaningless," and (possibly due to being raised from a normal person instead of a Convocation reincarnate) doesn't want to resurrect the Ancients either.