What lore do you ignore?

[Iscah]

Secondly, and more importantly, the timeline. We have literally taken multi month (?) ship rides, traveled all over the continent, fought a dozen if not more primals, rallied armies multiple times... and it's been like a year? I think 4-5 years, at minimum, should be expected- if not more. Not least with the formation of the Crystal Braves, the Doman War, Ul'Dah's reforms, and more.

At current each expac would be months and that just... doesn't fit. If anything taking "real world" time into in game would make sense to me.

The much-repeated claim that "the devs say the story officially happens within a year" misunderstand the intention of that stance.

It's not that the story happens within a year, but that they have made an official decision to not count any time passing, so character ages and "years since X happened" never move forward. This becomes more noticable as the amount of present-day events gets larger, and perhaps they regret it in hindsight, but they're sticking with it for now.

When Heavensward was the current expansion, the events of ARR and Heavensward apparently fitted within a year, which was fine.

When Stormblood was current, the events of ARR, Heavensward and Stormblood apparently fitted within a year, which was starting to stretch things but not enough to protest about it.

Now at the tail end of Endwalker, the events of all five expansions still apparently fit within a year because the calendar is still firmly at "five years since the Calamity" even if that shouldn't be the case any more, so it becomes more important to understand that this is a deliberate and artificial situation and not actually a statement of how long it actually took from one event to the next.

Even if you could count up all the events and conclude that it has unquestionably been (say) three years from the beginning of ARR to the end of Endwalker, the calendar remains firmly frozen at Day 1 of ARR, and that is only going to change if and when the devs change their policy regarding timekeeping.

[MikkoAkure]

How Allag fell. Basically the idea that a single Earthquake led to the collapse of a civilization (and yes, it had rot, don't get me wrong), and that all that tech was lost.

There was a giant revolt against the emperor right at the very end and the earthquake swallowed up the Crystal Tower and likely the capital. The Crystal Tower was also the main power source for the entire empire’s technology.

We never see what the average Allagan citizen’s life was like and how much technology was involved in their day-to-day. We’ve only visited their secret labs. The average person could very well have only experienced life improvements like the better roads while stuff like the robots and airships were only used by the military.

On top of all that, by the late empire all their knowledge was being put on tomestones. If they suddenly lacked the ability to read from the tomestones at the same time the fall of the empire, civil war, and the and power source for everything gets swallowed up in a calamity, I can see technology falling backwards. IIRC the reason why Principia was a magic familiar in a paper book was just in case something like that happened so she could assist future generations with primal problems.

That said, not all knowledge of technology was lost since the Onishishu seem to have been able to keep knowledge preserved through generations unbroken since the Allagan Empire.

[MikkoAkure]

Concrete, a major technology for buildings and fortifications, was lost when Rome collapsed. Other technologies may have been as well -- indoor plumbing perhaps? -- but concrete is the one that stuck in my head.

"Concrete is the second-most-used substance in the world after water,[1] and is the most widely used building material. Its usage worldwide, ton for ton, is twice that of steel, wood, plastics, and aluminium combined." -- Wikipedia, "Concrete"

The Eastern Roman Empire kept going on with the same technology and was the core of “Roman” society before even the west fell. Greeks called themselves “Romioi” until only about 200 years ago when Greek Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire became a thing. The only reason they didn’t use concrete was because it required volcanic ash they no longer had access to with the fall of the west since I think that came from Sicily or Naples or something.

As far as that goes with FFXIV, if there’s no clear successor empire to the fallen capital and an irreplaceable piece of the technology (Crystal Tower power) is no longer accessible, loss of application of the technology will occur and then knowledge will follow soon after.

[Cleretic]

It's been five thousand years since Allag dunked itself into the ground in what by all appearances was a continent-wide earthquake. That's a lot of chance for knowledge to get lost, especially considering the fact that they were by all appearances a very centralizing nation, and that nobody liked them, including their own citizens.

Basically all it would take to lose a huge bulk of Allagan knowledge after their fall is one modestly successful generation of 'let's return to the earth'. They had a lot of institutional knowledge (including knowledge of how to read their own surviving records; computers aren't as easy to use as, say, a book) that would've been lost, and once that's gone it's leagues harder to retain.

The women we see in Sastasha, the post moogle quest of stroking the haft, many female npc speech bubbles in Limsa hint to said activities. The Ninja quest Ninja Bathin'.. The mamool Ja that you beat up in the fate Peeping Ja. His "dance" is implied to be more about what he wants to do with some of the female Miqo'te bathers. Also Haurchefant, Aymeric, Zenos and any other npc that can be seen as flirting with the WoL don't care about their gender. Magnai and Daidukul being rare exceptions. As Magnai only wants to flirt with you if you're female and well all Buduga only want to interact with other men.

Yeah, that's a pretty workable starting list. I was going to mention the Ul'dahn merchant making some very unsubtle threats to the Ala Mhigan woman outside the Quicksand, and in a more indirect form there's the numerous bastard children in Ishgard, but other than that you've got most of the big ones.

If we're going whole-game the other big one to mention is Yotsuyu, but I think the game's approach to the subject becomes very different sometime around when Kazutoyo Maehiro left to do FFXVI; Yotsuyu is emblematic of a very different era.

[Anonymoose]

I try to advance the idea of seeing the "frozen on day one" phenomenon (aka the Simpsons Bubble) as a blank check and a baseline.

First, it's already difficult for the developers themselves to keep a 12,000-year history straight numerical terms. Imagine how many more dates that are different today than they were on the first day we saw them we'd have to contend with before we even factor in the ongoing adjustment of open-world dialogue. I'm glad it doesn't move.

Second, one of my favorite one-two punches is to ask a large group, "How many think we should pop the time bubble?" (Overwhelming majority.) "OK everyone suggest how long it feels like it's really been." (Overwhelming disagreement.) It's been static for too long to change it without another concrete universal jump to another bubble, imho.

So I like to say that the developers gave everyone a blank check they can cash in for however much time they want their WoL's journey to be, and you have a very handy never-changing number from which to do all of your time-related calculations.

I've seen some RP groups agree on a pace and then all share that pace going forward, for example.

I just use real life earth days for Moose. Every patch is a few months of time spaced however makes sense to me.

[Mortex]

I wish I could ignore elpis. It’s one of the better areas in endwalker but by all that is holy does it destroy the journey the WoL has. I hate time paradox/loops so much and even more if they are written bad as hell. I assume the WoL told venat, hades and hyda about his entire journey and future and what roles they play in the entire grand scheme of things (also what we tell is vague of purpose. Like did we tell the entire information about allagan empire or what did we tell?). The entire personal journey and decisions we made as a character just became so obsolete it’s insane. The choices and decisions we made as character were already written down by us to venat, so she can make it happen (I don’t think venat is “evil” for sundering but it just feels like the entire sundering process was starting by us telling venat about the future). Like she effectively let lose mass murders on the source and shards that have no memory expect “make amoraut great again” and go over millions of bodies before we get to that part in the loop.

[Emitans]

[EW spoilers]

We are tearing scales off of Vrtra in order to make charms to protect people against tempering, meanwhile in Garlemald it turns out there's a metal that's so common even poor people can afford radios made out of it and it just blocks tempering? And we never even think of trying to use it? It feels like they needed a way to handwave some Garleans being untempered and never thought of it after that.

[Cleretic]

[EW spoilers]

We are tearing scales off of Vrtra in order to make charms to protect people against tempering, meanwhile in Garlemald it turns out there's a metal that's so common even poor people can afford radios made out of it and it just blocks tempering? And we never even think of trying to use it? It feels like they needed a way to handwave some Garleans being untempered and never thought of it after that.

The Garleans being untempered was basically a freak accident born of a very specific set of circumstances, it was far more than just 'a common metal', and most likely only worked because the primal they were dealing with was specifically Varis. The warding scales are a lot more versatile and generally useful in practice. And of course then there's what both elements actually represent beyond the literal, which I think is worth remembering--the radios work because it reflects that Garlemald's national identity is at the same time grossly linked to and ultimately independent of Ascian manipulation, while the Thavnairians use Vrtra's scales to show in a very physical way that Vrtra will suffer for his people, it's basically an instant way to show that Vrtra's not the bad guy that the setup of his reveal might suggest he is.

And yes, obviously it works the way it does because they wanted untempered Garleans in Garlemald, but I don't think seeing the reason they wrote in a thing should invalidate the thing. In fact, I feel like people would be even madder if Garlemald included literally no untempered Garleans.

[Emitans]

The Garleans being untempered was basically a freak accident born of a very specific set of circumstances, it was far more than just 'a common metal', and most likely only worked because the primal they were dealing with was specifically Varis. The warding scales are a lot more versatile and generally useful in practice. And of course then there's what both elements actually represent beyond the literal, which I think is worth remembering--the radios work because it reflects that Garlemald's national identity is at the same time grossly linked to and ultimately independent of Ascian manipulation, while the Thavnairians use Vrtra's scales to show in a very physical way that Vrtra will suffer for his people, it's basically an instant way to show that Vrtra's not the bad guy that the setup of his reveal might suggest he is.

And yes, obviously it works the way it does because they wanted untempered Garleans in Garlemald, but I don't think seeing the reason they wrote in a thing should invalidate the thing. In fact, I feel like people would be even madder if Garlemald included literally no untempered Garleans.

Ok, this is an interesting way of looking at it I never considered before.

[Iscah]

We are tearing scales off of Vrtra in order to make charms to protect people against tempering, meanwhile in Garlemald it turns out there's a metal that's so common even poor people can afford radios made out of it and it just blocks tempering? And we never even think of trying to use it? It feels like they needed a way to handwave some Garleans being untempered and never thought of it after that.

We only discovered the freak properties of the radios after the warding scales had been made.