Amdapor and Mhach

[BaroLlyonesse]

We know that Mhach summoned a host of voidsent, and in particular Diabolos, in their war with Amdapor. But everywhere we look in Amdapor (the areas we can see), it looks a whole heckuva lot like Amdapor was summoning Sineaters to fight them, maybe as a last-ditch effort?

Is there any lore to this? I'll admit this is based primarily around the dungeons, but it seems a little past coincidental that the bosses are a giant white-marble lion and a giant white-marble angel.

I don't think I'm bring clever here, I'm asking if anyone's seen or heard anything official that disproves or proves it.

[Mimilu]

Amdapor didn't actual summon sineaters, they're stone golems that were designed to look like sineaters. According to the second lore book, the White Mages of Amdapor had visions of the sineaters, which inspired the designs of the golems. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[MikkoAkure]

The “sin eaters” in Amdapor are golems made of stone and powered by white magic. Not sin eaters at all.

They’re mentioned in the encyclopedia as being made of stone and crafted and designed. The timing doesn’t match either and the Amdapori golems are ~1600 years older than the sin eaters. The 2nd book does say they were “made in the image of beings from a transcendent plane” so it could be that they saw visions of sin eaters somehow, but they’re not the beings themselves.

[rainichan]

Yup, above are correct.

If you take a look at the final boss in Amdapor HM, you can get a max of 3 different text boxes that pop up and tell you that the magic to power the statue has faded from the stones embedded in it, among other things (I'll have to go back and either grab new screenshots, or see if I can find the ones I had prior).

Also, the text from the Kuribu card states it as well:

Created by the magi of Amdapor using an advanced form of golem construction, this statue is animated by the gems embedded in its chest and hands. Kuribu commands formidable white magicks to aid in its battle against invading voidsent.

It hasn't been outright stated how the Amdapor knew about what the Kuribu and winged lions looked like, more hinted at, especially when ShB was newer. The official answer was basically a "haha idk, maybe you'll find out eventually" dodge to the answer, so either visions or visited by whatever could have done it... or they were old constructs from the Ancients, were found, and then they created the statues that way. I asked about it for the Fanfest lore/localization panel, so... perhaps we'll get an actual answer, maybe not.

[Kuroka]

Maybe its just "white magic creates these shapes" just like transforming into a sineater seems to have certain archetypes...

[rainichan]

Maybe its just "white magic creates these shapes" just like transforming into a sineater seems to have certain archetypes...

It could! I would love a concrete answer though, because their lore is a little... sparse. I can only infer things so much from the info we already have lol.

[Cleretic]

Amdapor's lore seems almost intentionally threadbare; White Mage is the only War of the Magi-linked job that doesn't even mention the War of the Magi. And I'm not sure what to make of that, honestly.

It's almost exceptional that one of the few things we know about them is something they didn't do--namely summon what we'd call Sin Eaters, although it does seem like they're either aware of them, or made some really good guesses. Granted, that's not to say that they're innocent; Scholar's Stormblood storyline shows they got up to some shady stuff, but it was a lot more subtle than Mhach; more of a 'black ops' side of things than open destruction. Thinking about it, it's actually a little interesting that despite being the second of the three major powers in that war, there's no known scars of an Amdapori attack like there is from Mhach, suggesting their attacks were much more subtle.

(For the person who's hankering to mention 'they caused the Flood': nothing actually claims that. Oha-Sok in the 1.0 White Mage quest takes implied responsibility, but Oha-Sok isn't especially reliable, and even then there's little indication Amdapor did much dealings with the Elementals on the level their successors do. No currently-available text either in or outside of the game credits it to them either.)

[Iscah]

Another possibility is that the Amdapori looked at certain voidsent (like the black-winged "angel" knights seen around the Void Ark) and designed their golems to look like "the inverse of a voidsent". Meanwhile, a sin eater is the natural inverse of a voidsent and results in very similar forms.

[Denishia]

Yeah unless the Fanfest panel gives us a concrete answer, I’m thinking it’s a convergent evolution and that extreme aether exposure to specific elements doesn’t create an endless array of body types and features but that there are certain defaults that are easiest to attune to. Pump enough light aether into anything and you get white wings randomly regardless (the final boss of Malikah’s Well as an example).

[MikkoAkure]

Amdapor's lore seems almost intentionally threadbare; White Mage is the only War of the Magi-linked job that doesn't even mention the War of the Magi. And I'm not sure what to make of that, honestly.

It's almost exceptional that one of the few things we know about them is something they didn't do--namely summon what we'd call Sin Eaters, although it does seem like they're either aware of them, or made some really good guesses. Granted, that's not to say that they're innocent; Scholar's Stormblood storyline shows they got up to some shady stuff, but it was a lot more subtle than Mhach; more of a 'black ops' side of things than open destruction. Thinking about it, it's actually a little interesting that despite being the second of the three major powers in that war, there's no known scars of an Amdapori attack like there is from Mhach, suggesting their attacks were much more subtle.

(For the person who's hankering to mention 'they caused the Flood': nothing actually claims that. Oha-Sok in the 1.0 White Mage quest takes implied responsibility, but Oha-Sok isn't especially reliable, and even then there's little indication Amdapor did much dealings with the Elementals on the level their successors do. No currently-available text either in or outside of the game credits it to them either.)

From the encyclopedia, I got an impression that Mhach was the main sort of trailblazer into advanced sorcery and everything Amdapor did was reactionary, which makes sense when you look at WHM plays, even compared to other healers.

Amdapor didn't have much to do with Elementals because the encyclopedia says that the city was established "on the plains of central Aldenard (or what is now the South Shroud" which means the Twelveswood didn't extend that far in the previous age. It's further described as being open plain with tons of rock outcroppings. It goes on a bit more on their relationship with the Elementals too:

The people of Amdapor attempted to commune with the enigmatic elementals of the Black Shroud, that they might partake in the bounty of the forest. The elementals - ever untrusting of men - declined any interaction with their new neighbors, content with the distance between them. The Amdapori respected this wish and did not forcibly encroach upon the sacred holt, save for the occasional pursuit of quarry during a hunt. It is worth mentioning, however, that the elementals did not entirely shun outsiders during this period; amicable relations were maintained with the Ixali tribes, the elementals allowing them ingress into the Shroud upon deeming the beastmen no threat to the forest’s natural balance.

Even in the early 6th Astral Era, it was the Ixal who were favored by the Elementals while everyone else avoided the area or made underground cities. Their relationship later soured and it was only then that the Gelmorrans were able to befriend the Elementals and create Gridania.

But ultimately a lot of the WHM/Amdapor lore is paywalled behind the encyclopedias and doesn't make its way into the game itself.

Yeah unless the Fanfest panel gives us a concrete answer, I’m thinking it’s a convergent evolution and that extreme aether exposure to specific elements doesn’t create an endless array of body types and features but that there are certain defaults that are easiest to attune to. Pump enough light aether into anything and you get white wings randomly regardless (the final boss of Malikah’s Well as an example).

EE says that Kuribu was designed based on "transcendent beings from another plane" but oddly, it also says that the winged lion is an Amdapor design original and was made that way to confuse the Mhachi, so we have some contradictory information and questions on why one later shows up as a sin eater.