Solution 9 - Unfounded Speculation!

[Cleretic]

My guess is that we're looking at some kind of barge rather than a port or something, so technically Solution Nine's location doesn't really exclude it. It's not like North America is a completely dry slab of land, either; you've got the great lakes that could plausibly make for a situation like this. This might be a Shaaloani thing, since that's apparently got a big lake.

[Taliriah]

Couple of ideas regarding solution 9:
- One of the surviving reflection evolved into a technologically advanced civilization and decided to invade the source. (it could happen for any number of reasons - it could be a combination of ascians not being around to keep them in check or creating calamities over there, and time passing much faster there relative to the source etc.)
- It comes from the future somehow by the way of time travel (replaying EW recently, I was thinking about how Hythlodaeus mentioned that we might meet again in this life or the next - assuming that there is anything to it, the only way the WoL in their current incarnation might meet reincarnations of Hythlodaeus and Emet-Selch is if they time travel from the future)

[Cleretic]

A pretty solid theory I've seen on Twitter for that red sign in the Arcadeon that people were fixated on: What if it's the Armodullahan from FFIX?





It's got the right claws and horns, and if you approach it from that angle then the weird mass of lines in the middle can read as a pretty decent approximation of its face maybe biting down on something.

Of course, the Armodullahan's a pretty 'nothing' boss from FFIX, so if that's true then it's also a guarantee that it's a 'middle of the first tier' filler fight, like Catastrophe or the Hippokampos. ...which, in turn, means that we can intuit jack squat about its actual story, because the Armodullahan's hardly a stretch to fit in to an FFIX-inspired expansion with a high-tech corner of it.

[MikkoAkure]

A pretty solid theory I've seen on Twitter for that red sign in the Arcadeon that people were fixated on: What if it's the Armodullahan from FFIX?

It looks like part of Ultima’s glyph from FFXII upside-down now that I see it closer. And that’s where the Ascian glyphs come from.

I don’t exist on Twitter/reddit, was this possibility already discussed there?


Edit: my extremely rough analysis:

[Cleretic]

It looks like part of Ultima’s glyph from FFXII upside-down now that I see it closer. And that’s where the Ascian glyphs come from.

I don’t exist on Twitter/reddit, was this possibility already discussed there?


Edit: my extremely rough analysis:

That theory came from Twitter, and is extremely easily debunked, because they don't look anything alike.

The Ascian glyphs are exact pulls from parts of the XII Esper sigils, one-to-one. They don't look 'sort of maybe' like part of it, you can overlay them near-perfectly. In fact, I have done that in a video to prove exactly this point; the imperfection here comes from the fact Emet's face is at a slight angle, not any alteration to the sigil.



People saw a red sign and wanted it to be an Ascian, it doesn't track whatsoever.

[MikkoAkure]

That theory came from Twitter, and is extremely easily debunked, because they don't look anything alike.

The Ascian glyphs are exact pulls from parts of the XII Esper sigils, one-to-one. They don't look 'sort of maybe' like part of it, you can overlay them near-perfectly. In fact, I have done that in a video to prove exactly this point.

People saw a red sign and wanted it to be an Ascian, it doesn't track whatsoever.

Obviously it's not 1-to-1 and it's not on an actual person's face, but it looks like it could be a stylized version of it copied over and over for a long time to a point where it's lost its original meaning.

I think the three lines on each side + horns + spiky crown + mess in the middle + wavy line on the bottom stand out and makes a more compelling or at least more interesting argument than an obscure boss.


Until release we can say just about anything since we don't have anything to really go on and this is the unfounded speculation thread.

If I wanted to really get my tin foil hat on I could say that the script under the 6 vertical lines is proto-Eorzean for "X", "upside-down L", "T", "I", "backwards M", "upside-down S": "Xltims", and that after getting killed by Gaius and reforming incompletely, Altima suffered amnesia/soul damage and can barely write her name or form her glyph anymore but a half-remembered mission on a shard resulted in her bringing a whole bunch of people to the Source in Solution Nine. Or she did show up long ago on a shard and the gylph became a symbol of being saved and over thousands of years became what we see now.

[Cleretic]

Obviously it's not 1-to-1 and it's not on an actual person's face, but it looks like it could be a stylized version of it copied over and over for a long time to a point where it's lost its original meaning.

I think the three lines on each side + horns + spiky crown + mess in the middle + wavy line on the bottom stand out and makes a more compelling or at least more interesting argument than an obscure boss.


Until release we can say just about anything since we don't have anything to really go on and this is the unfounded speculation thread.

If I wanted to really get my tin foil hat on I could say that the script under the 6 vertical lines is proto-Eorzean for "X", "upside-down L", "T", "I", "backwards M", "upside-down S": "Xltims", and that after getting killed by Gaius and reforming incompletely, Altima suffered amnesia/soul damage and can barely write her name or form her glyph anymore but a half-remembered mission on a shard resulted in her bringing a whole bunch of people to the Source in Solution Nine. Or she did show up long ago on a shard and the gylph became a symbol of being saved and over thousands of years became what we see now.

Okay, then what's this part?



Because here's the thing: that red sign wasn't the only thing in that art. It wasn't even the central thing in that art; my eyeballing says it's not even 10% of the picture. It's just the only thing most people are speculating about, because 'what if it's an Ascian' caught on as a theory really quick and some people really want that story arc to not be put to bed, despite its evidence being tenuous as hell. But I've never once seen the theory stretch to include any of the rest of the art.

If we accept that the red sign is reflective of a probably-filler boss that we may or may not have seen in a previous Final Fantasy game, these demon heads track: obviously those are another boss even if we don't have an ID for them, they certainly don't resemble anything in FFIX. But they're clearly deliberately designed, all three heads have different horn shapes, so it's not just a generic 'here be demons' sign.

So if the red sign is against all odds an Ascian, what are the demon heads?

[Lyth]

That's really interesting. Actually, the red 'glyph' in the picture also looks like it could represent three horned heads, now that I look at it.

Perhaps it's a historical insignia of a triple-headed Mamool Ja who founded the place.

[MikkoAkure]

It's just the only thing most people are speculating about, because 'what if it's an Ascian' caught on as a theory really quick and some people really want that story arc to not be put to bed, despite its evidence being tenuous as hell. But I've never once seen the theory stretch to include any of the rest of the art.

The theories we have for anything right now are tenuous as hell, which is why it’s easier to hang onto the ones that are interesting. The artwork is designed to tease and it’s done more than its own fair share apparently.


The thing about the “glyph” is that there’s not just one of it. Look down at the bottom and you can see there’s ANOTHER of the same exact red glyph mostly cut off at the bottom of the image spread on a billboard.

A hologram of it floating above the city and also on a billboard down below seemingly makes it more important than a potential trash mid-boss based on a forgettable boss from long ago. The past 2 raid artworks featured teasers key to the story of the raid more than the content anyway.


As for the 3 demon heads, my baseless speculation is that they’re the Alt(ima)-rock band that’s playing from the concert venue across the street from the Arcadion where all the purple lasers are coming from. Linkshellhead is known across Solution Nine for their song Paranoid Mammet and will be our introduction into the raid.