Shifting and Concerning Moods Regarding the Writing

[Lunaxia]

The problem today is most Westerners haven't received a proper education and couldn't tell you their nose from the arse. What you have instead is westerners being asked why the curtains are red instead of being asked to research the philosophical origins of the narrative because nothing is original.

Unbridled arrogance and Intro to Philosophy references doesn't automatically make you sound intelligent or educated either, just FYI.

[Reap00]

Unbridled arrogance and Intro to Philosophy references doesn't automatically make you sound intelligent or educated either, just FYI.

Eh let them spout their nonsense day in and day out. It is good entertainment. Tis like the tabloids. Nobody in their right mind takes it seriously. I drop by these forums daily for a good giggle. People here think their wordy thought vomit actually matters.

[aveyond-dreams]

Agreed as well. I understand that it was meant to be innocent child looking up to her elder kinda thing, but it still made me feel uncomfortable with the attention. I meant to agree in my original reply that it wasn't only the familiarity that felt strange, but also her age. Thankfully we moved off that and have fully boarded the G'raha train. Well, thankfully of a sort I guess. G'raha's constant fanboying makes me feel amazingly uncomfortable too, he's just not a literal child. Although it does look like he will be a large part of the next expansion... so woo.

Do not think I have seen anything that made me less excited for an expansion than G'raha biting into that taco.

I am really hoping that the full trailer shows us some actual story beats to look forward to, because the only part of that trailer that looked even slightly interesting was the shot of us exploring that ruin. The happy go lucky beach vacation filler expac vibe didn't win me over even slightly.

Alisae has all the look and charm of a rodent. Both her and her equally unbearable brother should have aged up expansions ago but unfortunately there seems to be some misguided notion that any significant chunk of the playerbase considers her their “waifu” when in reality her and her brother come across as little than annoying brats especially to those of us who have long since tired of the Scions and their antics.

How unfortunate then that despite this being the most obvious point for us to switch over to a new cast that they have instead mistakenly decided to subject people to 10 more years of this cast. Why create new characters when you can force these same ones to go through the same arc over and over again? It’s not as if their fans have ever caught on to this and even sometimes appear surprised when this writing is called out for what it is.

The taco nonsense and worship coming from G’raha Tia is just icing on the cake, no one thinks of Final Fantasy and thinks of that much less is that likely to coax any new players into buying an expansion that only asks the question “What is the point?” When other games are offering stories and adventures of actual substance and consequence. I did not come to FFXIV for this kind of juvenile style writing, complete with preachy and ill-designed characters when we have been through expansions in this game where this game was anything but that – it was strong, there were stakes, there was real and lasting growth and actual sacrifices that weren’t undone by plot gizmos.

This is what happens when negative feedback is stifled and a positive feedback loop that cannot course correct itself is allowed to spiral out of control. A story that has gone so far off the rails while sucking all the magic out of the setting so that the only thing left is not even a “low stakes” adventure, but a pointless one that isn’t worth the 40 bucks to go on.

Again, FFXIV has done and must do better than this.

[Stormpeaks]

This is what happens when negative feedback is stifled and a positive feedback loop that cannot course correct itself is allowed to spiral out of control. A story that has gone so far off the rails while sucking all the magic out of the setting so that the only thing left is not even a “low stakes” adventure, but a pointless one that isn’t worth the 40 bucks to go on.

Again, FFXIV has done and must do better than this.

Have fun in your next game since FFXIV aint worth paying for

[Kes13a]

This is what happens when negative feedback is stifled and a positive feedback loop that cannot course correct itself is allowed to spiral out of control. A story that has gone so far off the rails while sucking all the magic out of the setting so that the only thing left is not even a “low stakes” adventure, but a pointless one that isn’t worth the 40 bucks to go on.

Again, FFXIV has done and must do better than this.

stifled? hardly, you post a lot, and usually negative. there are a LOT of negative threads on the forums.. so where is this stifling you speak of?

you said you were leaving and not coming back until they changed. they didnt change and yet here you are, back again/still.

you'll pay whatever to keep playing, complaining about graha eating, their advertising, their target group, their portrayal of the character you dislike this week... you know it, but more importantly, they know it too.

this is like complaining about the food at MacDonalds, but continuing to return because you expect them to serve italian...and "hoping" they'll change.

[Stormpeaks]

stifled? hardly, you post a lot, and usually negative. there are a LOT of negative threads on the forums.. so where is this stifling you speak of?

you said you were leaving and not coming back until they changed. they didnt change and yet here you are, back again/still.

you'll pay whatever to keep playing, complaining about graha eating, their advertising, their target group, their portrayal of the character you dislike this week... you know it, but more importantly, they know it too.

this is like complaining about the food at MacDonalds, but continuing to return because you expect them to serve italian...and "hoping" they'll change.

"This game is absolutely terrible, it sucks and honestly it aint worth paying for !"

also him : *takes credit card to pay for a subscription for the exact same game*

make it make sense

[Tsumdere]

When I call Y’shtola the worst female character in the entire Final Fantasy franchise I don’t feel like that is an exaggeration at all. She represents a failure to establish not only a basis from which she can reasonably grow as a character, but the subsequent failure to attempt any growth or semblance of at an arc at all. She quite literally is just a walking lore explanation device that was more rude than sassy a few times and suddenly some elements of the playerbase managed to invent a personality around that moment that is hardly reflected in the game at all – due to her primary function being the aforementioned walking lore device.

I think I can count on one hand the number of well-fleshed out main female cast members that CBU3 has produced: Ysayle and Ryne. All others have suffered from either impossible personalities or lack of growth, and unfortunately characters like Jill in FFXVI are affected by this as well. They are characters that do not make me sympathize or feel anything for them or their struggles. And a creature like Y’shtola has no real struggles, not when she can die and come back every expansion like it’s nothing.

Just responding to this that to say I agree with you on the Y'shtola point alone, but I disagree that there aren't more well-written female characters than Ysayle and Ryne.
FFXIV has a bad habit of not giving female characters depth when compared to their male peers, but there are still enjoyable female chars like Misija, Fordola, Yotsuyu, Athena, and Krile.

[Vyrerus]

Theory of forms

First off, thank you for your first post in this thread where you absolutely curb stomped Endwalker's narrative. <3 Secondly, thank you for continuing to post. You've alluded to some stuff that I've always found interesting (though I do wish you'd spell Emet right).

Now then, for the meat of my response:

Plato's Theory of Forms has issues. The issues it has mostly relate to mental perception and agreement on what the concepts behind the forms are. Like Plato believed abstracts like beauty or power are realer than any individual thing that presents them within itself. To assume this is true means one has to completely agree on what beauty or power is defined as. And it's only we the meat that make the definitions.

His Theory of Forms was an attempt to answer the Problem of Universals. Traits that certain things share. Like all females share the ability to give birth. All humans have nipples. All stars emit light. But what these all really share under his theory is the predicated ideas of what each is. The social construction, in other words.

The Theory of Forms is predicated upon the agreement of what a thing already is in order for you to even think about its abstract form. And these change at the whims of society.

For instance, computers. Think about a computer. What would you think that its form is, in Plato's theory?

Well, whatever you thought, it doesn't matter. Originally computers were people who performed arithmetic for other people as a profession or service. As time went on, eventually all computers were women due to unjust labor laws. Up into 70-80 years ago, human computers were still referred to as such, even though mechanical computers had been in the making since 1822. And the first commercial computer, the Z4, sold in a loan deal was only completed in 1945 after the end of WWII.

You might think, oh, our material form imperfections mean that we've never truly gotten close to what a computer's actual form is, but that would be to ignore that we humans in all our fleshy glory decided what a computer's actual form is. And we changed it over time to suit our needs.

Basically, there's no way to actually separate the world of forms from the world of flesh, because the world of forms cannot exist without the world of flesh. Imagine all physical existence erased. Literally no beings to conceive of forms. There would be no forms. They couldn't be expressed, and even if they could, there's nothing to perceive them.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, after all.

Now how that relates to FFXIV and their gods... Well, in much the same way I just described the computer, so it is with FFXIV's gods. Because not everyone in the setting of FFXIV will agree that each Primal or Eikon is a god, then none of them can be as they have nothing absolute to predicate their form. Of course, their own individual societies do actually believe them to be gods, and so they are. So you are correct to say that they are gods, but you gotta add the qualifier, "The Ascian's God" or "The Amal'jaa's God" because they aren't universal.

[Absimiliard]

The problem today is most Westerners haven't received a proper education and couldn't tell you their nose from the arse. What you have instead is westerners being asked why the curtains are red instead of being asked to research the philosophical origins of the narrative because nothing is original.

It has nothing to do with a lack of understanding on my part, I can assure you. I said you're overthinking things because the devs probably didn't think that deeply about individual components when they were writing the story. They took bits and pieces from different religions and philosophies, and they altered those sources to fit their own narrative. The story is what it is, and attempting to apply outside logic to a story that's already provided its own internal logic does not work. What you or I think or know is irrelevant so far as the story is concerned. It's fine to contemplate what the origin of X thing in the story might be, but managing to single out that origin does not mean the same logic one might apply to, for example, a given religion, is going to be applicable to a fictional world with its own unique set of rules.

The methodical approach to his creation isn't science, it would considered occult by our world as individuals have control over the fundamental forces of reality. This is actually the key philosophical distinction between occultism and science. Science is about understanding the natural world and how things work. Occultism is about having the innate ability to control and change the natural world.

He is explicitly linked to the need for salvation by Elidibus his heart or core constantly. It becomes his primary function to the point he's forgotten everything but his duty which is to perform his function. Anything with aether is made up of the building blocks of the soul. We don't actually know what constitutes a soul yet as seems to be something very specific but the fact that you can make one does say a lot. There is also only one line from Emit stating they were tempered but there is actually very little evidence to prove he was actually tempered as he shows almost no evidence of it and one would have to question his need for it because he was already driven by his duty to his friends and family, not a parasitic insemination of another beings aether. Tempering also seems to be one of the major differences between how the ancients constructed things versus the beast tribes as almost no ancient concept tempers people. Their ability to create seems to be complete and stable without the need for the concept to acquire more aether to sustain and grow.

When it comes to the primals you are correct they are glorified entities but that is actually what all gods are in the first place. I could make a chicken my god by worshipping it. This is why I said what grants Godhood is people worshipping an ideal that they find to innately have transcendent properties such as war, death, light, dark etc as it functionally important to their understanding of the world and their place in it. The 12 in FF14 setting are just glorified beings but they are still gods and perform the societal function of gods to the point they are moulded by this function.

(Mostly) in order:
The game refers to their methods as science, not occultism. Real world terminology need not always apply in a fictional setting. For example; a writer could decide that rubber chickens are called swords in their world, and this would not be an inaccuracy for their purposes. Writers often choose to alter or completely change words and their meanings to fit their stories.

Elidibus linking Zodiark to salvation after the fact is in no way indicative of his people's thoughts on the primal at the time of its creation. The creation of Zodiark was not initially any kind of religious or philosophical experience - it was the creation of a tool. Moreover, Elidibus himself was not subject to that salvation mindset initially. The fixation on salvation is implied to have come at some point after Elidibus separated himself from Zodiark to resume his role as mediator. Elidibus was rather unique in that he became a primal fueled entirely by hope as a result of separating himself, and the hope didn't even need to be fixated on him. So long as there was hope in the world, so too would there be Elidibus. I may also note that Elidibus ceased being Zodiark's heart the instant he separated himself. What he does or does not think or believe ceased having any bearing whatsoever on Zodiark once the two split.

In the case of Zodiark; he had no need for prayers, hope, or anything else. He was a wholly self-sufficient organism in that he required only the aether of the souls used to create him.

On the subject of primals:
Note I said glorified arcane entities, this being specifically to denote they are nothing more than soulless automatons, possessing no real will of their own outside of the parameters defined for them at the time of their summoning. In this context I am not using the term glorified in reference to them being raised up by the belief of their faithful. It's a more tongue-in-cheek term applied to something lesser being framed as something greater. For example, you might say a waffle is just a glorified pancake.

Anything with aether is made up of the building blocks of the soul. We don't actually know what constitutes a soul yet as seems to be something very specific but the fact that you can make one does say a lot.

That's the thing. You can't make a soul. That is a function of the planet. You could take preexisting souls and do something with them - or bits and pieces of souls, for that matter - but never actually create a soul.

Incidentally, there are two different types of aether noted in Final Fantasy XIV's lore. You have the body's physical aether (which is for the most part what fuels spellcasting, various skills, and the nigh-superhuman physical capabilities possessed by many Garleans). The other is spiritual aether, which is what comprises the soul. Depleting your spiritual aether means the complete destruction of said soul, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. You're just gone.

[Swordsman]

Unbridled arrogance and Intro to Philosophy references doesn't automatically make you sound intelligent or educated either, just FYI.

So basically the writers for EW, lmao. I remember I said something like this before. Parts of FFXIV's story sound awfully a lot like someone pretending to be knowledgeable about philosophy when in fact they barely understand any of it.