Old Crow's Big Ask about Auracite, Memoria, KURO SEISEKI SABIKU

[unlimitedBLACK]

Okay so...

• 2.0 MSQ: JP: "kuro seiseki Sabiku" --> EN: "the Heart of Sabik"
• 2.5 MSQ: JP: "shiro seiseki" --> EN: "white auracite"
• 3.x Warring Triad, when Unukalhai talks about the corruption of the Warriors of Light on the Thirteenth: JP: "seiseki" --> EN: "auracite"
• 4.x Return to Ivalice and 5.x Save the Queen: JP: "seiseki" --> EN: "auracite" in reference to what the Zodiac Stones and the sword Save the Queen are made out of, with the implication that all auracite comes from the High Seraph. This is consistent with "seiseki" being localized as "auracite" in FFT: War of the Lions (when the original FFT just called them the Zodiac Stones).
• 5.x Sorrow of Werlyt: The Weapons are shown being based on a Synthetic Auracite System as a replacement for the Heart of Sabik, which is what kinda flagged the NA audience to investigate the whole "is the Heart of Sabik auracite?" question in the first place, while JP was just like "well, duh."
• 5.x Void Quests: ... there's probably a reference to auracite here? (I honestly can't recall, that's part of why I'm posting about it)
• 6.x MSQ: JP: "memoria" --> EN: "memoria" in reference to the crystals that Memoriates sealed jerks into, which then leaked jerk energies and turned the Memoriates into jet-black villains. IF YOU'VE COMPLETED WARRING TRIAD, Zero SPECIFICALLY says she'd never heard of "seiseki" being used to refer to memoria. IF YOU'VE COMPLETED VOID QUESTS, Cylva reveals she was a Memoriate.

So what it sounds like is that JP consistently used "seiseki" and EN consistently translated that as "auracite" with the exception of the Heart of Sabik... until 6.x, when both JP AND EN SPECIFICALLY choose to ID the stones used on the Thirteenth as "memoria" instead of "seiseki"/"auracite."

"Does this mean that memoria is auracite?" Given how we're shown the behavior of both auracite and memoria in various places and it seems similar it feels like a reasonable conclusion that yeah, it's the same stuff. But the devil is in the details.

• It's reinforced a lot that the High Seraph is the source of all auracite during RtI and StQ, which is consistent with the High Seraph creating all the Zodiac Stones in Tactics (and Matsuno is gonna Matsuno).
• It's SUGGESTED, but not made EXPLICIT (because P12S is fanfic) that the High Seraph was somehow responsible for Athena getting to create the Heart of Sabik, but that introduces larger questions about when and where the High Seraph appeared on the Source in relation to the Sundering.
• Eureka Orthos explains that Allag switched over to using Eureka to create trigger weapons because of limited supplies of auracite. Implying that the Allagans hadn't cracked a way to manufacture auracite.

[unlimitedBLACK]

CONTINUED because long:

But if it's the case that memoria is auracite, and auracite can only be created by the High Seraph, then why are memoriates on the Thirteenth able to create memoria willy-nilly? And why were Moenbryda/Urianger/Beq Lugg able to manufacture white auracite? Because THAT implies that auracite should be relatively easy to create, actually, so, what the deal fam?

THE POINT: Introducing "memoria" as a Thirteenth-specific term and retconning(*) Unukalhai's earlier comments about the Warriors of the Thirteenth using auracite is about trying to square all of the content together into a sense of consistency while solidifying the Thirteenth's terminology for stuff like crystals and primals. But it leaves open additional questions about whether or not memoria is auracite, and whether or not memoria is related to Ancient concept crystals.

(*): To be clear, this is a retcon that is entirely reasonable to have done and makes perfect sense in context. All of the stuff about the Contramemoria wasn't established when Warring Triad was being written, so using Zero's story to rectify it all together is a reasonable thing to do many years later with lore that hasn't otherwise been touched. Retcons are not universally bad and they serve a purpose, even if generally, as an audience, we'd like to avoid them. Let me promise you, creators like to avoid them too.

[Anonymoose]

I suspect that...

• ...the 2.x EN localization was being cautious about introducing a term as big as "auracite" for a single plot device item with no exit strategy associated with it, just in case that term needed to be something else one day and it would cause problems.

• ...the planning of the 3.x Warring Triad mention predated knowledge that the High Seraph, introduced by special guest writer Matsuno-san, would be part of FFXIV.

• ...the effort to combine all the mentions without breaking the lore is deliberate and ongoing.

We know that "auracite" was one of the names given to memoria, one that Unukalhai and Cylva knew but Zero did not.

I think it's possible that "white auracite", "black auracite", and "memoria" are all synthetic auracite like the weapon cores, made by Moenbryda, Athena, and inhabitants of the Thirteenth, respectively. It's possible that across time we've taken to calling any crystal with similar properties to what we know as "auracite" by the same name, when in fact many are unrelated or synthetics inspired by the true Ultima-forged auracite, which go unrecognized for what they truly are.

If so, we could start calling it "deifacted" auracite vs. "manufacted" auracite just to be cheeky.

[unlimitedBLACK]

we could start calling it "deifacted" auracite vs. "manufacted" auracite just to be cheeky.

Which I think is probably a good way to actually square the circle here.

Deifacted auracite includes the Heart of Sabik and all of the High Seraph's Zodiac stones... (which #1 leaves open the opportunity for the Heart of Sabik to have been actually CREATED by Athena, rather than crafted by the High Seraph and given to Athena to MODIFY, and #2 maintains the idea that the High Seraph's wish-granting stones come from a deity-grade entity, which Athena still arguably qualifies as)

... while manufacted auracite includes white auracite on the Source and the First, potentially the Ancient concept crystals employed by the Ancients, and memoria on the Thirteenth. You could even introduce an element where the Allagans MADE some manufacted auracite, but because it didn't have the same capacity as the deifacted variety, they abandoned it for Eurekan products. Because at the end of the day, while the Allagans had a lot of stuff at their disposal, when they completed the Ultima Weapon, they put the Heart of Sabik at the center of it even without really knowing what it was capable of, and it would not be hard to extrapolate that the reason they did this was because the Heart of Sabik's potential capacity was just THAT FAR BEYOND anything they could create.