Ok Why Dawntail did not work for me.

[Anonymoose]

A struggle with these kinds of topics (imho, anyway) is that, even when analyzing fiction for fun (especially on a large scale, over a long time), it's tempting to assume (consciously or unconsciously) that "facts" in fiction work like facts in the real world ... that there is some immutable truth to uncover; that if we don't understand or the information seems to conflict, we just need to keep over-thinking it until we discover that truth; that even if new lore was written with reframing and cleaning up old lore in mind, that truth must have existed "back then", too, and we must have simply misunderstood it at the time but now we can see it clearly.

The fact that FFXIV can keep the illusion so long is a credit to the commitment of the writers' efforts, imo; but sometimes the lore just has to be a little mercurial to continue to function over 15 years.

All we can do is list citations and speculate about what was "known" when those citations were dropped, what they were intended to mean, and how later citations are intended to relate to earlier ones. In that same interview, Koji jokes that (by the end of Stormblood) the very definition of "aether" has evolved a lot over the game's development (but it's more fun if you blame that on Eorzean misunderstanding instead of openly acknowledging ongoing world-setting and narrative development in an "immersion-breaking" kind of way).

The lore can both feel real and organic and be fiction-in-development, so we're always left wondering what we really knew at any given time, I think. That's part of the fun, though.



Addendum: A good example on this topic might be the various ways NPC have talked about "souls" in general. They used to talk about the "soul" of a primal - the soul of Shiva, the soul of Thordan - as if that was what was shattered in the blender. But if - for example - Garuda was an Allagan general, then the true soul of Garuda would be washed of memory and reincarnated, while the memories made by that person, the memories of that person, that person's former corporeal body, etc. would be the things forever drifting in the Lifestream. Even if it turned out that the word "soul" is evolving as much as the word "aether" did, behind the scenes, it might still be tempting to say, "Eorzeans just don't know the truth." or "We the players must have misunderstood the truth."