Revelations from Patch 6.3: Gods Revel, Lands Tremble

[Alenore]

I think you're getting the sequence mixed up.

Hydaelyn has burned through all the souls within her over the centuries, so Venat is all that remains now, and her own soul is consumed to fight and test us. This is explained in contrast to Zodiark who, either due to the larger amount of sacrifices or his stasis, has not had to consume souls and may still be running on their corporeal aether or something.

If she created beings at the beginning, when most of the souls were still intact, she could have removed those specific souls from within her.

Actually...

I always interpreted the sacrifice as "I had to consume their souls to become Hydaelyn". I can't find where she mentions that right now, but do you have a source for that? She had to do that to match Zodiark's power because of the relative small number of people participating in the summon.

[Tehmon]

Regarding the Twelve and their relationships

I'd assume that whatever change dynamis potentially has on the Twelve, it isn't affecting their relationships. Althyk and Nymeia don't seem to be incestuous lovers, Byregot calls Rhalgr his Master (even though Thaliak is supposed to be his mentor) and not his father, and Halone doesn't seem excessively bitter towards Nophica in any way whatsoever, they actually seem to have a pretty close relationship. I think the only confirmation we have about the Twelve's relationship is that Althyk and Nymeia are siblings and that's it. Everything else seems to just be beliefs, and these beliefs don't seem to have any real effect on the Twelve.

[Rannie]

Actually...

I always interpreted the sacrifice as "I had to consume their souls to become Hydaelyn". I can't find where she mentions that right now, but do you have a source for that? She had to do that to match Zodiark's power because of the relative small number of people participating in the summon.

During the LL Q &A after Endwalker first came out that was part of an answer that Yoshi P gave for the lore. If you look at the previous Live Letters in the Forums it will be there with a link to the YouTube segment with the Live translation.

Q: Venat said that not even her soul would remain, but what does that mean? I’m really fond of her character and want to see her again.

（03:24:56）

A: Souls are also made of aether, and she had used so much aether that even her soul was gone. Zodiark absorbed those who were sacrificed and was still able to maintain their souls within, whereas Hydaelyn did not have the leeway to preserve the souls of the summoners, including that of Venat herself. This difference was because Venat’s group was a very small minority compared to the group that had summoned Zodiark based on the Convocation’s decision. Venat’s soul, which was the last to remain, was used up in the trial against the Warrior of Light and their allies.

LL Direct link which is a bit more than what they transcribed I believe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2TWmsce_eg&t=12296

[Cleretic]

The Myths of the Realm bugs me more than a little because my character is a Raen, which means that she comes from another culture with a different religious belief.

And the Euphrosyne storyline indicates that the Twelve were probably created by Hydaelyn. Although their appearances have changed with people's prayers and imaginations, their names are remembered correctly all along.

Does that mean that only Eorzean on the planet believe in "real" gods but people from other cultures are pagans?

And who spread the gods' true names in Eorzea and Eorzea only?

In ShB Urianger mentioned that Azeyma and Azim might be both originated from Azem, which made perfect sense because all people on the planet had the same subconscious memories of the Ancient time, and the god's name just diverged because of different cultural backgrounds.

But now that the game tells you that the line "a realm embraced by gods" is "literal" -- this line doesn't appear in the English version as often as in Japanese actually -- it begins to bug me a lot.

It's bothering enough to know that the Source is more privileged than the Shards in EW MSQ (Hydaelyn made a Plan B only for the Source), and now you tell me Eorzea is more privileged than the rest of the planet? That's not a good move.

Yeah, this does annoy me, because it does place one religion as 'Right And Correct' as opposed to most of the others who were some level of in-universe misinformed (Garuda was an Allagan general, Ifrit was an ancient creation, Leviathan might've just been a big fish). This has actually been bothering me ever since the start of the raids.

There's the element that the Kami in the Far East seem to be mostly accurate, but it still kinda places the 'mainstream' religions as more true and valid than everyone else. Which is pretty at-odds with the game's overall very kind approach to religion, and feels weirdly condescending in that lens. 'It's wrong to discriminate against these people and their beliefs' doesn't really square super well with 'our beliefs are verifiably right and their views are quantifiably wrong'.

[Lurina]

Yeah, this does annoy me, because it does place one religion as 'Right And Correct' as opposed to most of the others who were some level of in-universe misinformed (Garuda was an Allagan general, Ifrit was an ancient creation, Leviathan might've just been a big fish). This has actually been bothering me ever since the start of the raids.

There's the element that the Kami in the Far East seem to be mostly accurate, but it still kinda places the 'mainstream' religions as more true and valid than everyone else. Which is pretty at-odds with the game's overall very kind approach to religion, and feels weirdly condescending in that lens. 'It's wrong to discriminate against these people and their beliefs' doesn't really square super well with 'our beliefs are verifiably right and their views are quantifiably wrong'.

It seems we're at the point in thread where people are stopping bothering with spoiler tags (which is fair, I don't think anyone who didn't want the patch spoiled would read 14 pages in) so I guess I will too.

I feel like there's an increasing have-its-cake-and-eat-it-ism to the way the setting wants to have a critical, somewhat-postmodern perspective on its own world, while at the same time indulging in a lot of typical RPG worldbuilding tropes where the whole setting kinda revolves around the player characters and their homeland. I think I've brought this up before, but another good example is the human/beastmen dichotomy. Despite it having been emphasized since EE1 that "beast tribe" is more of a racist cultural label than anything grounded in quantifiable reality, we've recently learned that the player races - and seemingly just the player races, since the answer given referred only to them and there are hints of beastmen being creations in Elpis, while of course we know that some others are products of the Allagans - are uniquely descended from the Ancients. If you say on the one hand that characters and institutions who believe in there being an inherent distinction between man and beastman are bigots, and then go on to establish there is a scientifically-quantifiable distinction, that just makes it come across like you're saying the bigots are right.

Anyway, taking this back to the gods, the reveal of them being what they are also makes their regional specificity even more peculiar in universe. Like, why would you root the beings you created to keep the world stable and inspire hope in mankind around just a single continent? Or hell, a single shard?

I'm not interested in making any more arguments about how Venat comes across as a dubious person based on what is probably just yet another set of unforeseen consequences of the writers post-hoc worldbuilding, but it's hard not to think it.

This whole explanation also just kind of takes away from the mystique of the gods and their role in the setting for me. Like, before, Halone had a very unique and severe sort of identity rooted around Ishgardian culture and values. But now we know she's basically just a normal lady who rolls her eyes at that stuff. And of course she's not even an Elezen, but rather just looks like an Ancient lady because, well, that's what she was based on. As much as I like Amaurot, the decision to make most aspects of the present day setting ultimately derivative of the Ancients is really starting to drain something from it, and I imagine it feels even more tiring if you're not playing a Hyur and/or don't even like them.

[YianKutku]

The Myths of the Realm bugs me more than a little because my character is a Raen, which means that she comes from another culture with a different religious belief.

And the Euphrosyne storyline indicates that the Twelve were probably created by Hydaelyn. Although their appearances have changed with people's prayers and imaginations, their names are remembered correctly all along.

Does that mean that only Eorzean on the planet believe in "real" gods but people from other cultures are pagans?

And who spread the gods' true names in Eorzea and Eorzea only?

In ShB Urianger mentioned that Azeyma and Azim might be both originated from Azem, which made perfect sense because all people on the planet had the same subconscious memories of the Ancient time, and the god's name just diverged because of different cultural backgrounds.

But now that the game tells you that the line "a realm embraced by gods" is "literal" -- this line doesn't appear in the English version as often as in Japanese actually -- it begins to bug me a lot.

It's bothering enough to know that the Source is more privileged than the Shards in EW MSQ (Hydaelyn made a Plan B only for the Source), and now you tell me Eorzea is more privileged than the rest of the planet? That's not a good move.

To me, it's a case of defining "real god". Which isn't a copout about "but what is reality", but more a genuinely interesting exploration on what the term "god" means to each individual.

Based on what the Twelve have told us so far, they don't need (or ask for) worship, and they do not interfere with the lives of mortals in any way, whether benevolent or malicious. They can wish us well, but that's limited entirely to silent encouragement. (Which might have some small effect via dynamis, but I'm not sure that really counts as a blessing.)

And given the obvious differences in language and communication between the time of the Ancients and the present day, I'd also say the "true names" of the gods would also be subject to interpretation to fit with modern languages, so what we have now are the "close enough" interpretations. And even then it could be another aspect that the gods received from people's prayers and imagination, as you say.

So my interpretation is the Twelve are as real as the stones they stored their information in. They exist physically, in a plane of existence that can be verified. But that doesn't mean the worship of them is any "truer" than non-worship, any more than the worship of the Four Lords is "truer" than the worship of the gods of the Mol.

Tangentially, I've always assumed that of course Eorzea is privileged in significance on the planet, not because of anything about Eorzeans or their culture, but simply because that's where Lake Silvertear happens to be located. And a lot of Eorzean "culture" got spread by the actual world-spanning empire of Allag.

[Rosenstrauch]

I have not even played up to 6.3, and probably won't—I only resubbed for the sake of a fanfic project that I'm likely never going to start. But I do have two cents to throw in regarding the whole "The Twelve are Real Gods" thing.

I really don't see why they can't just be primals without realizing it. Pretty much every primal we've met has believed itself to be a real god. And technically speaking, primals are as real as any other would-be divinity in this setting. So it seems weird to me that the writers shot down them being primals right from the beginning, only to come up with a convoluted explanation about how they work that really amounts to "they're basically primals, but we don't want to call them that".

It's also kind of annoying that they're tied into the Ancients. Unlike some folks, I can't get enough of Ancient lore and story being added to the game, and would be happy as a clam if we ended up getting a full expansion set in the Unsundered World in 8.0 or so. But explicitly making them pseudo-reincarnations of Venat's twelve followers (and herself, apparently?) undermines the actual religions that cropped up around them, which bothers me just as much as they "unlike those primals, they're real gods!" stuff.

Moreover, though I doubt anyone cares, I got sick of referring to Venat's followers in vague terms while writing my last fic, and ended up assigning soft identities to a few—two of them ended up with the names Gerun (after the only other named Occuria in FFXII) and Cleobulus (after one of the Seven Sages of Greece), while a third became a character in her own right (Eumetis, named after Cleobulina, a renowned poetess from Ancient Greece and the daughter of Cleobulus). I actually came to like that character, so it's a little frustrating to see that the writers have had semi-hard confirmed identities for the Twelve and just... neglected to show us this.

And unless they're willing to dive back into the Unsundered World (I hope so!), what's even the point of it? Does knowing that the brother sister pair in the Twelve are actually based on a brother sister pair we met in Elpis even matter? They may as well have just left them all as nameless and faceless as the Watcher, for all the difference it makes.

[Alleo]

I think you're getting the sequence mixed up.

Hydaelyn has burned through all the souls within her over the centuries, so Venat is all that remains now, and her own soul is consumed to fight and test us. This is explained in contrast to Zodiark who, either due to the larger amount of sacrifices or his stasis, has not had to consume souls and may still be running on their corporeal aether or something.

If she created beings at the beginning, when most of the souls were still intact, she could have removed those specific souls from within her.

Edit:

Thanks for the link Rannie!

Well I guess this could go either way. She could have lost them over time or she used up the souls with the summoning and only hers remained. I still think its the latter because I really doubt that if she had such a low amount of followers that she would be able to just let some of them go. (If not all because that cutscene in Shadowbringers made it look like she only had the handful of followers anyway)

About the discussion that they are confirmed as real:

I mean does it really matter? They seem to be Ancients or reconstructions of former Ancients that gained certain powers in the thousands of years since the sundering. They are in that way only gods because people made them into that. They do not intervene, they do not stop calamites or anything like that. And if they dont intervene then do they really directly help the people? Did Byregot somehow give the people means to build houses? Did Nophica make the flowers bloom? I honestly dont really know. So if they would disappear would it matter? Would nature suddenly die?

For me it just seems that they are simply here to help people deal with their lifes by giving them something to believe in. They are imo just very powerful beings.

So for me it makes sense that there could be other beings like them out there too. Maybe the Kami are simliar to the twelves. Maybe they too somehow where created over the thousands of years by the belief of the people around them. And they are just as real and important as them.

[KageTokage]

The period prior to the first calamity was coined the "age of the gods" due to a belief that the Twelve walked among men during that time, and given the later context that the Ancients were essentially reduced back to being primitives by the Sundering, it may have been to ensure that they'd be able to thrive again and not simply go extinct in light of their vastly diminished capabilities and unstable existence.

[Iscah]

I have to say it doesn't feel like the awkward patch title has earnt its place. "Gods Revel" is fine but there isn't any trembling going on in relation to it.

Did they take a left turn at title brainstorming for "something to do with a revelation about the gods"?