What lore do you ignore?

[Iscah]

I want to ask an important question [...]

I ask because I think a lot of people are just using this thread to air 'lore/story I don't like', and that... doesn't sound right. Sure, a game you like did a thing you don't; are you really ignoring that, or are you just here to passive-aggressively say they shouldn't have? And if you are ignoring it solely because you don't like it, is that how you handle any media doing the same? Are you trying to create some perfect internal FFXIV rather than accepting that it may have flaws or disagree with you?

I think that is essentially what I am doing if I say I am ignoring lore, and I don't see a problem with it as long as I know what I am doing, and don't confuse it with actually claiming things happened my reimagined way.

Ultimately, this is a thing I am playing to entertain myself, and if I look at it and think "this bit wasn't very good, it could have been better if they wrote it in this specific different way" then I am going to get enjoyment out of the idea of the altered thing.

I think because the game involves a self-created character and/or silent protagonist, but I am at all times filtering this game through a thought process of, what would my character be saying in this scene? Does this make sense for her personally? ...so I'm already in that mindset of reconfiguring some parts of even the story unfolding right in front of me here. I tend to go over the other characters' dialogue with a proofreading sort of mindset as well, I think - not at the expense of enjoying it, but if I hit something jarring then I'll be imagining better ways to word it.

As far as I can remember, it's always been something I've done with similar character situations. Right back in Pokémon Silver, my teenage self was keeping lengthy fanficcy notes about my actual character versus the enforced single protagonist, and how "her version" of the adventure played out, hitting all the main notes of the story but varying in the details. (There's something quite MMO-ish about Pokémon, especially of FFXIV's "solo story plus ways to interact with others" approach, but with the individualised character aspect of it sort of dangling out into the real world rather than within the game itself.)

But anyway. This game. The things I will mentally tinker with are mostly those that won't be touched on in future. It's not trying to change the trajectory of the plot, but to deviate from it in ways that improve the story (to me) without disrupting the overall flow.

The game isn't perfect. I think they have had some dreadful plot point ideas, but they sit next to a lot of good plot and other things I really do like about the game, and in the long run it's a story I'm invested in and want to keep enjoying. And if that means fanficcing over the parts of it I dislike, then what does it matter to anyone else? All that matters is that if I'm discussing lore here, I stick to the actual lore.

[Lalahee]

The "everything that has transpired since 2.0 to 6.0+ has been less than one year" nonsense. If there is anything that needs a retcon, it is the unfathomably stupid timeline.

As far as I'm concerned, it's been 10 years since the 7th Umbral Era's end. Years literally pass and yearly holiday events are numerous by *lore*. It feels like an excuse not to age up the Twins to me.

Please, Square, don't Ash Ketchum the Twins.

[Lyth]

As far as we've seen so far, Convocation stones just seem to be the precursors to job crystals (i.e. upon the surface of this multi-aspected crystal are carved the myriad deeds of Azems from eras past). The Sage questline suggests that not anyone can pick up a soul crystal and learn its secrets. It has to specifically resonate with your soul. The same is likely true for the Convocation stones, although we're yet to see what happens with that Chekhov's crystal in the conclusion of Pandaemonium.

I was under the impression that the convocation stones were how Emet reinstituted the sundered Ascians back to their former Convocation posts. Amon had vague memories of his former life in flashbacks, but it's only after Emet found him that he was able to confirm those memories were real, presumably against the crystal. But much like Gaia, those memories are also something that he views as external to himself. And they're still incomplete. He only remembers that you were on Elpis after you remind him of it, despite having flashbacks of the place.

I don't really think there's a good rationale from selectively 'ignoring' lore unless the writers have specifically gone back and rewritten an in-game event such that you have two conflicting versions of the same story. You could, of course, still make the case that both 'accounts' are simply different retellings of the same legend and take both with a grain of salt. Dogma is prevalent everywhere, though, so it isn't surprising.

[Necrotica]

Ignoring plot points in an MMO is normal in my mind because of how much of it has to be adjusted because it is an MMO. Doing every job, being able to change race and sex with a potion and no one mentions it, the mountains of dead animals we have created in the process of leveling. While some of this is mechanics, a lot of it had nods to it actually happening in what npcs say.
Like some mentioned earlier, the Primal fights are reacted to like we did solo, while talking to npcs in the are before the fight mention you grabbing some friends real quick.

MMOs are a buffet. You don't have to do all the side quests. You don't have to level every class. You pick and choose want you want to take part in. The lore is no different.

[Rannie]

I think the only thing I would ignore and at this point it's only "word of God". Is Yoshi-P's explanation on how the races evolved from the sundered ancients. It sounds too much like an ass pull and something they just gave a 5 minute thought about instead of having anything planned....

[SilverArrow20XX]

I dismissed everything Meteion said pretty quickly, and chalked it up to her using outdated terminology or exaggerating.
The math just doesn't add up. She was only on a 108 year mission.
The terminology used by Alphatron in later patches seems to support me.

End of the Universe = Edge of the Galaxy.
All Stars in the Universe = A couple dozen planets in the galaxy. Then she assumed all planets would be the same despite the relatively small sample size.

I also kind of ignore Alphatron being destroyed.
There doesn't seem to be much evidence that they're not just still in standby mode, but everything in game acts like it was destroyed.
Meteion shouldn't really be able to even do anything to them, unless she just made Sir so depressed he ordered the entire civilization to self destruct.

[SannaR]

I guess the things I ignore is the one year for events, Q&A answers for how the races came to be, that Azem was just doing whatever you think they were and the Nier raids. For me a lot of why is because it makes no sense to me. Neir just asks for it to be ignored. If it integrated itself more into the world of XIV and didn't come off as another thing a Yoko Taro fan needs to be aware of I might not want to pull a Lahabreha and cast it off. To me it doesn't make sense for Azem to do what they did just because they've gotten behind on their knitting projects or whatnot. The races things goes against what little we do have with how genetics and evolution work in the game.

[Lyth]

I can understand why some people consider the collaboration events as being 'external' to the game lore depending on how well it is integrated with the story. But there are a lot of things that can be handwaved with 'wanderers from another dimension'. I don't think the writing takes itself seriously enough to be rigid with this.

A: What Venat’s successor to the seat of Azem was doing during the Final Days is a secret, one that may or may not be revealed in the future. However, we do have some idea of what they were up to. Whatever you imagine you would’ve done if you were Azem is probably the closest we can get to the truth. (laughs)

This essentially reads as: 'We already have a story planned around what happened to Azem, but we can't tell you yet.' The last line is just Yoshi-p being clever about Azem's identity i.e. 'You tell me what you were doing all this time.'

[Iscah]

I think another aspect of this "reject your lore and substitute my own" thing is that the devs literally don't know the truth of at least some of their plot mysteries at the time they are established, meaning that they are essentially setting themselves the same puzzle that is set before the fans: here are the fragments of facts established so far; what coherent story can you construct that ticks all of these boxes?

In some cases, I think I have found a better and more satisfying solution to this problem than they found for themselves, in which case it feels frustrating that the official version doesn't "fit the evidence". Sometimes I get the feeling that they do it deliberately just so they won't present the logical conclusion that fans have already reached, so they can "surprise the players" at the cost of something less logical and foreshadowed.

[Lyth]

Every serial work ever is written over time. You can have a rough plan of what you want to do with a creative work, but that's not realistically going to be static as you write.

I think it's fun to try and guess what's happening next, and sometimes you're lucky and your prediction is accurate. But you're also not the writer, so you're not going to come up with the same ideas that they do. People only get wound up over this because they set up unrealistic expectations for themselves. But again, this happens with every serial work ever.

This concept of 'ownership' of a creative work is the reason why fanfiction exists. People get attached to characters and storylines and want to inject their own ideas into the universe. Yet at the same time there's still an 'official' version of events. It is what it is.