Azem on the Final Days? A Perspective

[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.

[Turnintino]

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

[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For the record I have counted, and there's eight pages of EE1 that are partially out-of-date at this point; there are no pages in 2 or 3 that are.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.

[StormChase]

I mean, we got one person to willingly rejoin with us. What's six more?

Personally, I think that it'd be an interesting plot if we ate another Ardbert and suddenly became more Ancient than not. Fragmented memories of our past life as Azem start to come back to us, and we start to feel the smallest inkling of regret that we didn't let the Paragons cook a little more.

I really don't want us to rejoin with all the remaining Azem shards because that'd contradict the point of Shadowbringers. We don't need to be "whole" to be worthy. I think the one reason it had us rejoin with Ardbert in the first place was so he could have a second chance at being a hero.

[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.