Are shards different?

[Lurina]

Back on topic, I don't think the whole "rejoining of the soul" is very well explained in the game and it's painfully obvious it was tacked onto the plot after the fact. Every rejoining doesn't increase your lifespan or else we would have heard about it in records or after the most recent calamity or from the story that leads into the 8UC. You would think that a group of people plus G'raha would have made a comment about any sort of change within them after experiencing 2 calamities but we don't hear of it. We would also have known about it from G'raha and all of the Scions on the First since the people on the First are just 1/14th, but again nothing. But at the same time it's a bit weird that as soon as all the rejoinings are complete, we'd all be "whole" 20ft-tall Ancients again at the same power level. A part of me wonders if it's not that simple and that a lot of that idea is Ascian propaganda fed to Varis in order for him to do what they wanted him to do.

Again, it's not just Varis. Emet spells out the same concept late in ShB.

Remember, you are of the Source. Unlike the halfmen here, you stand only to gain. Should you survive the remaining calamities, you will become our equal. A complete existence in a complete world.

This is during his moment of vulnerability when he almost addresses you as Azem right before you take the elevator in Kholusia, so I doubt they intended him to be talking out of his butt.

[EaraGrace]

I think (big emphasis on the think lol) that post Rejoining Zodiark would the one to set things back to what they used to be. Those still alive on the Source would be sacrificed as per Emet stated plan, and the now freed Ancients would be granted new life and I assume new bodies. Those who joined the Ascians beforehand, as he clearly tried to get us to do, would also get the same I’d think.

[Lurina]

I think (big emphasis on the think lol) that post Rejoining Zodiark would the one to set things back to what they used to be. Those still alive on the Source would be sacrificed as per Emet stated plan, and the now freed Ancients would be granted new life and I assume new bodies. Those who joined the Ascians beforehand, as he clearly tried to get us to do, would also get the same I’d think.

I suppose that's possible, yeah.

The other way you could hodgepodge this all together would be if there was a kinda 'tipping point' where once both the body and soul were fully Rejoined, they would go "Oh wait! I remember what I'm supposed to be!" and snap all the way back to Ancient-hood all at once, like finishing assembling a broken machine. So just having an Unsundered soul in the Sundered world wouldn't be enough.

But both of these sort of feel like doing the story's work for it to me.

(Another manner I guess you could interpret the situation would be that people from the Source are closer to Ancients than they initially appear. Setting aside Ran'jit, who seems to get his supernatural powers from the relationship with his weird dragon spirit thing, magic does seem less prominent in the society of the First versus in Eorzea. You don't really encounter many spellcasters, and the Ronkans, their version of the Allagans, have far more subdued, simplistic magitech. There's no evidence of whole societies of wizards like what emerged during the War of the Magi either.

We know from a couple bits of casual dialogue that being a magic user in this setting can allow you to increase your lifespan by a lot; Ququruka Tataruka is over a century old and still looks like a young Lalafell. Maybe being aetherically dense doesn't lead directly to quantifiable gains in physical strength and vitality for everyone, but instead specifically increases the amount of people with an innate ability to use magic, and makes it easier for those who do. So anybody could learn to do it regardless of their aetheric density, but they'd have to rely more and more on things from their environment, like how non-Ancients have to use reagents to conjure things instead of doing it from pure aether. Individuals can rise high, but civilizations on a broader scale are constrained.

So the Ancients wouldn't be special or stronger by virtue of their biology, but rather because their aetheric density was so high that the rate of what people in Eorzea would call gifted mages, and what in the First would be a once-in-a-generation prodigy, would be basically 100%, with that fact permeating their culture. So kids would learn how to purge their bodies of illness and aging in school, while in Eorzea those techniques are constrained to the most reclusive masters.

Again, though, pure fanwank on my part.)

[Jandor]

I always pictured Zodiark as being key to restoring everything. The Ascians rejoin the shards, Zodiark magics all the Ancient souls into new Ancient bodies, and together everyone prepares enough life to go through with the 3rd sacrifice.
Without Zodiark though, I can't really see anything happening.

It's like baking a cake innit, it's not enough to just dump the ingredients in a bowl, you've got to follow that up by switching the oven on and putting your cake-to-be in it.

[Cleretic]

Same with "mixed-race children are their mom's race", which was invented to explain why someone's half-elezen character looks like a 100% hyur.

Mostly unrelated, but this one actually does have something resembling evidence, because the two most known examples of mixed-race children in canon (Hilda and Arenvald) are both their mothers' race with some visual traits from their fathers'. Granted, sample size of two there, but works well enough as an answer for 'which race do I pick when making a mixed-race character'.

(Some people are definitely doing it because they're COWARDS who want to play a pointy-eared elf but don't want to go through the effort to make an elezen look good, but that's not really a lore question.)

[MikkoAkure]

Mostly unrelated, but this one actually does have something resembling evidence, because the two most known examples of mixed-race children in canon (Hilda and Arenvald) are both their mothers' race with some visual traits from their fathers'. Granted, sample size of two there, but works well enough as an answer for 'which race do I pick when making a mixed-race character'.

I don't take limitations of the game in showing off characters as concrete evidence. It was definitely easier to plop a uniquely-made face on top of an existing body rather than make a whole new body by scratch. There's nothing at all to suggest that genetics work differently here than they do in our world (except for miqo'te and viera, which I'll get to in a second) so I wouldn't see why a "real life" half-elezen wouldn't look half-elezen instead of "hyur, but with slightly pointy ears". That whole thing was debunked in Shadowbringers anyway since we have Severa, a half-Garlean who looks 100% Garlean except her third eye is black instead of white and her mom is a hyur. Up until that point, we didn't even know half-Garleans could have third eyes.

Garleans themselves are another example of how you shouldn't take character models at face value because half of them use midlander bodies and the other half use elezen bodies and we're never told why that is and there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to it except that there seems to be more female characters using midlander bodies and more male characters using elezen bodies. Though there are some male midlander body users like Jullus and Midas (Cid uses a midlander skeleton under a unique model but he's still a foot and a half shorter than Nero and Gaius) and female elezen body users like Livia, Lucia, and Nael.

Being a mixed-race person in the setting is so rare to begin with that we don't have anything to go on except for character models and basing anything off that feels like an excuse to RP something a certain way more than something that's based in actual lore. Unless it's actually written down anywhere, I won't believe it.


Segueing into the main topic though, this reminded me that there is one unexplained difference between the people of the Source and the people of the First. On the First, the mystel (their version of miqo'te) have an equal ratio of male to female. That makes me wonder about how the miqo'te equivalents are like on the other Shards and if they're more like the ones on the First or if they have a really unbalanced gender ratio like the ones on the Source. It also makes me wonder if the writers treated this as another piece of lore from 1.0 (and carried over from FFXI) that they'd rather just retcon or at least just forget about and they're just doing their own thing now.

[EdwinLi]

Considering what Emet said in his big Spoilers for future story events, we should probably expect the shards to be far different from what we seen in the First and Source.

Due to many possible differences in each shard we may find a Shard more technology focused, more pure magic focused, and maybe even one that is literally just modern day society where no magic exists like our world but with FF14 races.

A lot of possible outcomes that "may surprise us" as Emet said.

[EaraGrace]

Considering what Emet said in his big Spoilers for future story events, we should probably expect the shards to be far different from what we seen in the First and Source.

Due to many possible differences in each shard we may find a Shard more technology focused, more pure magic focused, and maybe even one that is literally just modern day society where no magic exists like our world but with FF14 races.

A lot of possible outcomes that "may surprise us" as Emet said.

Oh god we go the 12th and we see the area intro text pop up and it just says “New York”

[EdwinLi]

Oh god we go the 12th and we see the area intro text pop up and it just says “New York”

That will be a bit funny.

Still if they go the route that one shard is literally just Earth but with FF14 races then I can only guess they go the classic anime trope of it taking place in Tokyo. Even giving us access to FF14 version of Akihabara.

Even giving our character access to the Square Enix Cafe located in Tokyo. Got to try their special made potions after all.....

[sidurgu-12]

That will be a bit funny.

Still if they go the route that one shard is literally just Earth but with FF14 races then I can only guess they go the classic anime trope of it taking place in Tokyo. Even giving us access to FF14 version of Akihabara.

Even giving our character access to the Square Enix Cafe located in Tokyo. Got to try their special made potions after all.....

"come! we must defeat ifrit once again!"
wakes up with a headach.