Solution 9 - Unfounded Speculation!

[Denishia]

Spitball Theory: Calamity of Lightning. Solution Nine is the last surviving remnant of the civilization that rose after the first calamity and that the First Astral Era did reach a little beyond "to forge stone tools and established settlements and towns, which grew into kingdoms that soon went to war, each seeking to expand their domain." Just a tad. And to add to the Shinra vibes, "To forge their tools and weapons, mountains were gutted and skies blackened." So, this society was older than Allag but younger than immediate Pre-Sundering. Enough so that the proto-script survived unaltered. In Tural the memory of this civilization survived as folktales said as Allag did back east, with the same recentish rediscovery by North Tural's version of Saint Coinach, hence Heritage Found. Nothing wackier than that.

[Kranel_San]

I understand things being incomplete and not ready to show, but it's a bit weird that they haven't even shown us 2D concept art of S9's inhabitants, no?

I don't think it's the inhabitants themselves, since the trailer can confirm Hyurs do live there (One of the billboards has a female Hyur fashion model)

If it's about the inhabitants, then it could be likely the clothes they're wearing.

[Vyrerus]

I actually like Mikko's idea.

As for my own... well this post will contain spoils for a 24 year old game.

*shapes tinfoil hat into a cowboy hat*

In Final Fantasy IX, Zidane is a manufactured person. He's a Genome that was given a soul and a mission. He forgot the mission. His mission was to destroy all of the inhabitants of Gaia, so that the inhabitants of Terra could populate the fused planet after Terra consumed Gaia's crystal heart. Terra was a wandering planet of highly advanced beings whose planet was dying, due to their incidental killing of its crystal core.

Mothercrystals in prior Final Fantasies have always been important. Either bestowing power directly to heroes or maintaining the forces of nature. Sometimes both. In IX, they started the tradition of The Crystal calling souls back to itself when beings died, like a fusion of the old crystals and FFVII's planetary rebirth cycle. They flesh this out and explicitly show it in FFXI.

Anyway, in IX, The Terrans having essentially killed their world... They needed a way to live. And they found out that they could move their planet to other planets and have it merge its empty core with a new crystal core, and this would stave off their extinction. Of course, this meant that they had to replace a cycle of life. A young crystal would not work, and the natural flow and evolution of crystals and worlds was too slow for them. So they traveled from world to world, sometimes shepherding primitive peoples till their world was ripe, more or less, and then they replaced them with themselves.

It's been an awful long time since I've played through IX, so I don't remember if that had happened once or twice or multiple times before. I just remember that in IX it was currently what was happening to Gaia, and it was the reason for things like The Mist and Kuja and Zidane.

With that backdrop in place, it wouldn't surprise me one way or the other, whether Solution-9 was alien or it was ancient. The Ascian's civilization has actually been responsible for prior FFIX references and is utterly alien to our real world, so it could easily be that. It could also be an amalgam. You know, "Why not both?"

Just as Venat as Hydaelyn took in the alien race of Dragons as both refugees and allies, so too, perhaps, did her controlled opposition.

We've already been shown in the Hildibrand questlines of EW that there are multiple alien races already caught up in present day affairs. The symbiote race responsible(but possibly not responsible) for the Hildibrand clan's prodigious power. The blue alien race for Pupu. These came to Etheirys of their own will, in need.

But what if, what if perhaps Etheirys took in another world, not a shard, to save itself? What if under the auspices of the Ascians, another world, or at least its denizens, were taken in?

What would such a fusion mean for Rejoinings? What would it mean towards the larger threat that was always out there til just recently? And what would it mean with regards to the WoL and who the WoL is?

Perhaps there are still puzzle pieces in our own origin that have yet to be laid bare. As it stands, a lot of folks like to believe that the world of FFXIV is a solved equation. We've certainly been shown that to be the case. Yet, with XIV dev's love for subverting expectations, what if there's a few more motes of light that have yet to twinkle?

What if the WoL is a strange Zidane analogue crafted by both Ascians and Aliens? An Angel of Death sent to reap Nihilism.


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Yeah, never gonna happen, but YEEHAW!

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Here is my entirely baseless theory. The Final Days hit and you have a world full of super wizards attempting to figure out what to do about it. Some want to sacrifice half the population to make a god, others want to eradicate the species. Perhaps, Solution 9 is the literal 9th idea on the list of ideas (with the absolute worst ideas at the top for some reason). What if one group of Ancients decided to either digitize themselves and take the servers out of phase with the universe. And we know taking things out of phase with the universe is within their power because the shards are out of phase with our universe. Or they figured out a way to send their city to the future beyond the issue. Or they flew to another more aetherically dense world and have returned now that the threat is over. My theory is that Solution 9 is gonna be Ancients in one form or another so they can rollback the unintended suggestion that some peoples are so culturally and/or genetically inferior that there is no choice but to wipe them out.

[NekoMataMata]

https://twitter.com/MlNRATHOUS/statu...21541337715199

https://twitter.com/KyrenXIV/status/1743844058320294174

Since no one has posted it, I will. The Altima bit is a slight reach, but the use of the proto-alphabet notable.

[Cleretic]

https://twitter.com/MlNRATHOUS/statu...21541337715199

https://twitter.com/KyrenXIV/status/1743844058320294174

Since no one has posted it, I will. The Altima bit is a slight reach, but the use of the proto-alphabet notable.

I don't think it's just 'a slight reach', I think it's desperation from the Ascian-lovers for their story not being done. Not only does it not resemble Altima's sigil from the Ivalice games, it also doesn't resemble how the Ascian sigils are drawn in the first place: they're far more vertically-oriented (probably because they go on the face), and symmetrical (probably because they have to cut them in half sometimes).

[Eisi]

I don't think it's just 'a slight reach', I think it's desperation from the Ascian-lovers for their story not being done.

This sounds so demeaning, why you say it like that? No, it's drawing a connection to something that's known, also we have never seen an Ascian that moved on from being an Ascian and not turn into something even worse. Would be nice to see just a normal Ascian having moved on and working as a florist or something.

I also think it's a massive reach obviously, everybody who looks at it can see it, but I don't think people have issues desperately clinging to Ascian relevance.