Raiding in The Arcadion: Our Heroic Hypocrisy

[Vyrerus]

So, the new raid story for the Arcadion goes thusly(and spoilers obvs):

The Arcadion is a coliseum, more or less, where Alexandrians use their soul regulators to perform intense battles against one another.

Eventually this lead them to using feral souls to take on the characteristics of monsters, and this is the present day's method for having them duke it out. This is "safer" because it merely expends the spare souls in the regulator, and the fighters are still alive, and can even transform into their beastly states almost immediately again.

The Warrior of Light, having been the one to slay the king and queen of Alexandria is head hunted by the handler for the fighters, ?Memet? Sorry, I must confess I forgot how his name is spelled, but the tuxedo wearing Lalafell.

He proposes that the Warrior of Light fight in the Arcadion because it will draw a big crowd, due to the Warrior of Light not using a regulator or feral souls to fight. He also proposes letting us use the spare souls of warriors who once fought in the Arcadion without feral souls.

The Warrior of Light is given a dialogue choice, and both choices go towards saying that the use of souls for entertainment or fighting or enhancing ones self is wrong. (Case of Hypocrisy #1)

Hearing the objection, Mini-Tux says, "Hey, if you do this and win, we'll set the souls free." So the Warrior of Light abides, and comes to fight the feral soul using champions.

There they meet and fight:

Black Cat
Honey Bee
Discount Elden Ring Fire Giant (Bomb King)

Black Cat is a Turali Miqote turned Alexandrian, and she comes to admire and become the WoL's "Second" giving the WoL information about upcoming opponents. She also sings praises of her older sister, who was apparently the best feral soul fighter The Arcadion ever saw, until she mysteriously disappeared.

After defeating the Bomb King guy, who juiced on roids in the middle of the fight, Black Cat's older sister appears and does battle. Her moniker is, "The Witch of Electrope." And she is using the soul of an Ixion, in addition to Electrope cybernetics.

She claims to want the Warrior of Light's soul, but of course she loses, and she has to run away.

Finally we come to the big #2 case of hypocrisy.

After defeating The Witch of Electrope, WoL goes back with Black Cat to her bunker house, and there, Black Cat's sister returns to speak with her sisters. She reveals that feral soul use is actually not safe at all, and once a feral fighter has used feral souls enough, their own soul starts to corrode and disintegrate. She notes that she's found a way to heal the malady she possesses, and that's by taking in an, "exceptionally dense" soul. It's been a week or so since I saw the CS, but I was pretty sure the WoL was given the opportunity to again say that wanting someone else's soul is wrong, but it may have been Black Cat speaking. Either way...


This was an explicit call to attention that the WoL is further Rejoined than other Source souls, given that these Miqote sisters are Seven times Rejoined souls, being from Tural.

The WoL once had their soul nearly disintegrate on The First, where they then had to take Ardbert's soul into their own to fix themselves.

On top of that, the entire Sundered world and all of its lives live at the expense of and with the souls of the Ancient Ascians.

But that's not all...

Over the years we have made many special weapons and armors. Aetherial armaments carry the souls of past warriors within them. Materia is coalesced soul energy, not necessarily requiring death, but indeed involving soul bonding. Our job crystals are Spirit Crystals that retain the memories of the souls of the prior warriors who held them.

The ARR relic weapons had to be drowned in hundreds of souls, feral or otherwise, the upgrade books often specifically requiring strong humanoids killed (Garleans).

The Heavensward relic also required massive waves of slaughter and souls, and is eventually imbued with a soul of its own.

The Stormblood relic line involved Eureka, and in Eureka you eventually gain access to Logograms and Mnemes, which are the crystallized memories obtained from monster souls.

Bozjan Resistance relics follow a similar path with crystallized memories gained through the killing and taking from many many monsters and people.

So we are literally a warrior clad in armor clad in the souls and memories of myriad people, telling these people that they are wrong to do something similar. Something we've been doing for years, err excuse, however freaking fast the time bubble is supposed to be happening now.

I suspect we will find a way to aid Black Cat's sister that has some happy resolution, but at the end of the day, it doesn't change how hypocritical we are being in this raid storyline.

[Granyala]

So we are literally a warrior clad in armor clad in the souls and memories of myriad people, telling these people that they are wrong to do something similar.

I think the main difference here is that
a) the Alexandrians do it on an industrial scale. That WILL harm the planet in the long run. We are only one individual (at most, an extremely small group) that gets access to very special stuff vie heroic feats. So the impact to the ecology of the Aetherial sea is negligible.

b) The Alexandrians do it for dumb ass ENTERTAINMENT w/o any consideration for the consequences of their actions. We acquire these weapons to save our star / do good deeds. In that vein, Alexandrias squandering is frivolous whereas our use can be viewed as a hard but ultimately necessary sacrifice.

Personally, my issue with this Raid is that my WoL would never agree to fight just for entertainment. She fights to survive, she fights to save people she's come to love, she fights to liberate the oppressed.

But not for some popcorn chomping crowds. WTF.

[Voidmage]

There is no hypocrisy.

We don't eat souls to enhance ourselfes in battle. We fight with what we have only summoning allies.
The souls in the tournament are set free after we win. If anything we do them a favour.

We didn't use Ardbert to fix our disintegrating soul. He voluntary rejoined with us to enhance our aether capabilities to safe his own world, find an end to his journey and defeat one of his own enemies.
The use of the soul is also different.
Ardbert was rejoined with us. His souls didn't just juice up our soul battery like the Alexandrians it actually made our soul denser. Is it a good thing? No and it is never portrait as that. We remember Ardbert and his sacrifice and if we knew them we would do the same for the other rejoined souls.
The technology stuff is "eating a soul". Breaking down it's aether and preventing a joining into the lifestream for that soul.

It's true that we live with denser souls then the rest but that's not our fault. The Ascians forced that on the people of the source.
I'm pretty sure we wouldn't go around and snack on our shard counterparts just because.

Now my memory of the relics is pretty old right now and I don't remember every step.

The ARR weapon is strenghtened from aetheric energies and so it attuned with our soul (Nexus I think it was). It just uses ambivalent aether after the death of creatures (you know that poof the enemies make? That's aether being released, the body if you want.) and it's memory aether (in some steps).
The soul is different from that.
The soul is a separate form made of memories and the actual true soul.
I don't have the steps of the relics in my head but if I remember correctly we also kill robots in the books.
If you find the word soul in them I would asume that either refers to the memory or is old information. Note that they only introduced the true nature of souls in EW.

The HW weapon is more akin to summoning carbuncle. You use different stuff and ambivalent aether to give it a form.
Most of the time we rebuild the weapon because it can't house the huge aether amounts.
In the end we create a new soul out of all that aether just like what happens in the aetherial sea.

SB:
We learn that memories and souls are a different thing in EW.
The memory would just be flushed away in the aetherial sea anyway and these are monsters.

Bozja is the same.

We don't trap actual souls, only aether.
A soul is made out of aether but not all aether is a soul.
It is a really protected and it seems dense ball that is hard to break down.
There is a reason white Auracite was such a huge deal (Ascians, the traveling from the first). It's because a soul is incredibly hard to contain and even harder to break down.
Elidibus was absorbed by the crystal tower and even then he was able to go to the aetherial sea and be reborn.
Y'sthola was in the lifestream without a guiding beacon twice and is still alive.
Even in the aetherial sea it takes a long time to break down souls and memories (Papalymo and co) and then there is the whole thing of people with the echo not being broken down at all but just reborn without memory.

Did I miss something?
That's just from the top of my head. For more details I would have to look into cutscenes and the ingame lore and it is quite late here.
Maybe tomorrow evening or something.


Edit:
Please don't see this as a big contra point or as ripping your post apart.
It's a good topic to talk about.

Edit 2:
I can't cross out that there are contradictions in the game right now tbh.
We are supposed to see the separation of soul and memory in Solution 9 as something groundbreaking but you imply correct that we actually used memories for relics and also saw voidsent being affected by the memory of their victims".
We also learned that when voidsent die they release the aether and are at risk to fall prey to their former victims. Yet Solution 9 implies that the soul is used up in that whole process.
Someone please correct me if I understood something wrong here.

[Vyrerus]

There is no hypocrisy.

Au contraire, Firiel Felines~

The hypocrisy comes both from the long term things we've done, as well as the assertion we're making with the dialogue options. The assertion is meant to be a maxim of values, meaning the use of souls for yourself is wrong, no matter the context.

Even granting your well thought out post to be purely correct, it's still always true that the Sundered all rely on the souls of the Ascians just to be. Souls cut apart and disseminated into 14 different lifestream cycles, along with the lifestream itself. Our entire existence in XIV's setting is actually unnatural, and so for us to suddenly be arbiters of what's right and wrong about how souls are used or how they end is entirely hypocritical. There is, sadly, no way for it not to be as the world is presented to us.

*ahem*

As far as the ARR relic goes, I know they are quite old, but you can find the journal text for the questline quite easily. Here is an excerpt from one of the quests' journal entries:

"Gerolt believes that your relic has become so refined that nothing can enhance it further. Instead, he proposes that the next step upon your journey towards the Zodiac Brave's arms is to recreate one's frame, and infuse it with the soul bound to your current relic. To those ends, he bids you seek four items"

HW relic gaining a soul means that literally when we wield that weapon, we are wielding a soul as a weapon. It's even sentient.

And here's where the talk gets really interesting, and why at least the ends of Dawntrail are worth talking about:

Memories are actually more important in our setting than souls are. The memories are a person's identity, and naturally they go hand and hand with the soul, but Alexandria found a way to seperate the two. You see the process in the Origenics dungeon. The memories are removed from the souls, and then either discarded or carried on to Living Memory or back to the person. The Memory portion is colored, while the soul is pure white.

Remember how Ancients' soul sight discerned who was who by seeing the, "color" of the soul? Memories are supposed to be part of a soul, and they are arguably the most important part. And the Origenics separation process is the only one that truly separates the memories wholesale as far as we know. Meaning when we used memories for material in those StB Eureka quests, we were still using souls, too.

[Striker44]

Personally, my issue with this Raid is that my WoL would never agree to fight just for entertainment. She fights to survive, she fights to save people she's come to love, she fights to liberate the oppressed.

But not for some popcorn chomping crowds. WTF.

Doesn't the WoL initially object, and then only agrees to fight on the condition that the souls used to help him in each fight are then freed if he wins?

[Granyala]

Doesn't the WoL initially object, and then only agrees to fight on the condition that the souls used to help him in each fight are then freed if he wins?

Yes, the only saving grace of the quest.
It's as if the writers were quite aware that many WoL would not like to play Gladiator and probably yell "Are you not entertained?!".

You're on vacation, you will fight for entertainment and you will like it.

I was on vacation.... until ZJ made his move.
Now I have some Techno-witch gunning for my hide, to save her own steroid poisoned being.

Some vacation, huh?
What's next? Paparazzi and annoying Groupies?

[Chiru_Kai]

Alexandrians were not evil for the way how they used souls. They turned evil for FORCING LIVING BEINGS to be used for their technology/culture.


You ARE allowed to manipulate souls. Quickly gets into questionable ethics, but you know, not necessarily a bad thing. If you do it respectfully and honorably, you too can manipulate souls.

Pretty sure that there is also an ethical difference between having a soul be turned into a weapon, such as for a relic, which is still 'its own thing', so to speak. Or if you just... soak it up into your own soul, let it transform your physical body, and then discard it when used. There's a difference in value here, and in the amount of respect a soul is given. Pretty sure there's also a hint at the destructive nature of consumerism here.

Not really okay to force a soul into submissive gladiatorial combat for entertainment. Especially not after it turns out that doing so harms the combatants and they get sickies from it too. Kind of an indication that, whatever they're doing, is kinda bad™ for their Soul Health Bars. Where as we, with our magical soul weapons and armor, never really had an issue with the other souls eating away at us. So we likely did something right.

[TaleraRistain]

Doesn't the WoL initially object, and then only agrees to fight on the condition that the souls used to help him in each fight are then freed if he wins?

Metem insists that it would be unfair for the WoL to fight without anything to balance the scales against people who can use feral souls. He mentions they have souls of former champions in storage and they will use them to create allies for us. He says they will draw upon our memories for it so they will be compatible working with us. We're unconvinced and have two choices:
- That sounds a lot like the Endless
- Like the arcane manifestation of Gulool Ja Ja...

Metem in my screenshots say for the purposes of evening the odds that seven simulacra should suffice but I can't remember which option I chose that led to that. I want to say it was the arcane manifestation option.

We get two choices again
- Using souls for entertainment is wrong
- The souls in your repository should be set free

The one I chose that using souls for entertainment was wrong.

He says he expected we would harbor reseverations about the use of souls because those outside the barrier usually do. That's when he sweetens the pot and says if we win the souls that fought with us will be free. He says we will be the star who brings fresh change to the Arcadion. At that point, we agree to fight under the terms.

It should also be noted that when Metem meets you on the street he mentions that opening the Arcadion is meant to help give the people of Solution Nine something to help them forget their cares after losing Sphene by giving them something new. And that something new is the "people's protector" competing for their entertainment.

So it's kind of masterful how well he hit our key WoL points. We help make people happy, we get to fight, and we're working to free captured souls who fight with us and potentially help enact change about souls being used for entertainment by leading by example.

[-Teria-]

Personally, my issue with this Raid is that my WoL would never agree to fight just for entertainment. She fights to survive, she fights to save people she's come to love, she fights to liberate the oppressed.

But not for some popcorn chomping crowds. WTF.

I don't know about you, but I certainly picked the "That, I can not deny," option. You appear to be speaking for everyone's WoL here, as opposed to your own.
And even for your specific characterization of your Warrior of Light, there are dialogue options for a more noble justification for participating: That of seeking to free the stored souls.

[Calysto]

The whole Arcadion plot contradict the msq. "using a beast soul too much kills you"...

Meanwhile in the msq the queen explicitly explain that the regulators take care of that problem and purify the souls.
A much as she lies, that is the one thing that doesn't makes sense. She does care about her subjects, she should know ; either because victims never because endless or simply because it's been eons and she never saw one alive or dead again.
They can't really pulls a "the owner was the super-admin more powerful with all the secrets"

Another plot hole : every player in your team are dead, and their characters should be deleted at the end of the raid serie. That or they already harvested all the souls of WoLs across the multiverse.