Azem on the Final Days? A Perspective

[fulminating]

"My friend" - zenos durante, the giant blonde swordsman capable of holding his own with golbez. If it wasn't so close to 6.0 it'd seem less coincidental, but with the patches revolving around zero (zenos's avatar) it's just so suspect. There's enough parallels to draw that saying it's the reaper avatar 100% french french seems a bit hasty.

Afaik the evidence for the reaper avatar it's just that it showed up when called and the out of game ee3 speculation?

edit: presumably if the best match was otherwise indisposed by eg being stuck in a rock or having a pet dragon someone else would show up?

[Cleretic]

Afaik the evidence for the reaper avatar it's just that it showed up when called and the out of game ee3 speculation?

The Encyclopedia Eorzea 3 is full of, as confirmed by the developers, true information (or at least 'true enough at the time'), even when its in-universe sourcing is a bit tenuous. It does not lie, and it does not speculate wrongly, because then it just wouldn't be useful at its main thing.

[fulminating]

eh ee3 was written before patch 6.5, likely before 6.4.

[Cleretic]

eh ee3 was written before patch 6.5, likely before 6.4.

By the writers of the game itself. The latest thing mentioned in EE3 are the Hippo Riders, so that reasonably means the 'no new details' deadline was 6.15, but Golbez first walked on-screen in 6.2, do you think they're THAT short-sighted in planning? Do you really think that they'd have changed their mind so radically and on such short notice that they'd have retconned parts of it literally before it went on sale?

For the record I have counted, and there's eight pages of EE1 that are partially out-of-date at this point; there are no pages in 2 or 3 that are. The Encyclopedia Eorzea is stunningly on-point, and do a great job of showing how stable the team keeps their internal lore. Most of those misses in EE1 aren't actually the result of story updates, they're from job revamps that removed or tweaked abilities.

[fulminating]

Do you really think that they'd have changed their mind so radically and on such short notice that they'd have retconned parts of it literally before it went on sale?

Nothing's physically stopping them. After playing through the endwalker and the patches again, there was a noticeable shift around when the void stuff kicked off so if there was going to be anything accidentally overwritten with the changing of the writers, I'd be least surprised it it related to that.

I have also decided your previous answer encountered while trying to find what the external source actually says is better so I'll go with that.

The Avatar being their Reaper's shard is a theory described as 'both unverified and unverifiable'. To me, that reads as the writers saying 'we're never going to answer this, here's the biggest hint for people who are looking for that, but decide on your own favorite reading'.

And I think that works because it just does not matter. We have a lot of potential contenders for the Thirteenth's Azem shard: The Avatar, the CoD of Darkness, Golbez, Zero, Diabolos, Other Golbez, Cagnazzo, that one Hecteye; pretty much every single named voidsent is a possible answer... and any confirmation would change or deepen exactly none of them. What's the value in even answering the question at that point?

To answer its rhetorical question, the value is the same as in that of filling out the fishing log.

[Turnintino]

I, too, love to dismiss information out of hand that may contradict my head-canon.