Ok Why Dawntail did not work for me.

[RavenLure]

I might be alone in this, and that is why I took so long to post my thoughts on it. But remember this is just my thoughts and opinions. So please no hate and I also would like to state I have not read anyone else's opinions out side of the titles about the shift from the WOL to Wuk Lamat, was not a big deal to me. I would have like to have seen a bit more competition between the WoL and Thancred and Urianger. What they did show was fun. And now I have an orange and a mint flavored kat boys to drool over....

My beef comes with the story line AFTER that. About the souls most. How can the WoL not be pissed at the souls being wiped clean of their memories, while those who has died have stolen the souls for they themselves to use. Those souls can never rejoin with the other parts of the soul. The twat is yellow I do not like not from the first. I would have freed those souls that have not been wiped of their own memories and destroyed the technology that made that possible. and made her watch as I did before ripping that thing from her head.

I did not like the flashy city nor the flashy dungeons. I only did what dungeons I needed to, to get through the main story line.

I have not played any of the maintance patches or what ever they are called and I am waiting to see where the story takes the WoL in the next expansion before investing time after the main part of Dawntrail. If I do not like it needless to say I will not be purchasing any more expansions until there is some cohesion in the lore and story lines..

Ok down off my soapbox. I just wanted to say that in case THEY can and do read this.. maybe just maybe they are working for the Asians? So do not be surprised if I do not respond I rarely visit forums anymore.

[Anonymoose]

I think the Scions present are immediately off-put by it, Alisaie especially, but given that...
- the running theme of the expansion is being curious before judgemental and trying to respect cultural values
- Alexandrians claimed to be happy and saw the system as good
- the process was a man-made replication of what the aetherial sea already does*
- we had bigger fish to fry with Zoraal Ja at the time
...our distaste for "souls as commodities" was temporarily set aside.

*When a soul reaches the Lifestream, memories are washed from the soul, drift apart, and dissolve forever into the aetherial sea (not counting the ones "indelibly etched" onto the soul itself). In Sharlayan, Montichaigne referred to a shift that previously happened in the underlying lore of the game: where the lore used to assume the Lifestream was a "soul blender" where souls would be reduced to pure aether, coalesce with that of others, and create new souls, but newer lore assumes the soul remains whole but is washed and reborn anew, which is what Alexandria did manually ... except instead of being reborn as a baby it was just socketed into someone's almost-dead body and synthetically loaded with a memory back-up.

Alisaie immediately says that there's "nothing noble or comforting" about it and that she "cannot accept" it and none of the Scions really disagree; even Wuk Lamat says she struggles to believe Tuliyollal would accept it. Imho, the WOL was against it and saw it as a corruption what we understood the natural order to be, but that the Scions - because of the context - took their time to ensure they knew what they were judging and knew they could and should intervene. (Doing otherwise would be fairly hypocritical, not only in light of not only this expansion's themes, but arguably also our struggle against the Ascians, who saw our entire existence as an aberration of the natural order.) And the story story seems to be currently heading in the direction of the dismantling of that system being validated as the righteous thing to do, as well. (Albeit more because Preservation's system didn't do what it claimed and, even if it did, still came at an unacceptable cost.)

There have also been a few references here and there that make me not rule out a past Ascian connection just yet, but we'll see; I know the risk of seeing shapes in the clouds, lol.

[Cleretic]

The way the story writes the soul supply system is written as abhorrent, but it's also written as not just a less urgent problem than the reasons we turned up, as Anonymoose said, but also a way bigger problem that can't just be solved by stabbing someone. This is a big societal thing, both in terms of there being a lot of cultural challenges to overcome, and in terms of being a big infrastructure problem; even if you were to go full terrorist and blow up the system, I don't think it works, there's a point where the system is too big to topple by force.

One other thing I'll note is that across the latest patch specifically, we learn about a growing minority of people in Alexandria who don't use the regulators, and the way it's written feels like the objection is more cultural than anything; there's no overt moralizing about it on either end (outside of our crew, and that's mostly in the initial reactions and internal feelings), it's just that some people see themselves and their relationship to the world around them differently to the point where they just... don't. It actually feels similar to how generally progressive societies treat vegetarianism; at this point the underlying issues are broadly known, and with that understanding comes a bit of a... mellowing of the stakes. Yeah, everyone knows what goes into this system, they've all made their peace with what side of it they land on; any convincing is either halfhearted (Yaana going 'hey this is a good idea, no, I'll drop it' to us), or circumstantial (Milos' mom gives it up because it's unhealthy for her kid). It's honestly kind of tragically true-to-life; I know that morally speaking, I should go vegetarian or even vegan, I've heard all the arguments... but I haven't, because that's too difficult for me, and the fact I made that decision years ago means it's really easy to keep making unless something else forces the issue.

That also actually makes it a much harder problem to solve. You can't just go 'Soylent Green is people' and shock everyone off the subject; they already know. And you can't just kill the beast and free everyone; not only is it too big to kill, they're a lot more used to it being there than not.

[Iscah]

where the lore used to assume the Lifestream was a "soul blender" where souls would be reduced to pure aether, coalesce with that of others, and create new souls, but newer lore assumes the soul remains whole but is washed and reborn anew

We may have already had this conversation, but what's the source for the "soul blender" concept?

It's not quite as simple as "old and new lore" because we're told right from the beginning (if you speak to the guards at the starter city aetheryte plazas) that people believe that while the body breaks down into aether after death, they have a soul that goes on to an afterlife -- which they say is the same thing as "returning to the Lifestream", but then there are also other specific traditions about going to particular heavens or hells according to their deeds.

But that could all be folk belief versus the then-truth that the soul might not be immortal anyway.

[17cupsofcoffee]

We may have already had this conversation, but what's the source for the "soul blender" concept?

It's not quite as simple as "old and new lore" because we're told right from the beginning (if you speak to the guards at the starter city aetheryte plazas) that people believe that while the body breaks down into aether after death, they have a soul that goes on to an afterlife -- which they say is the same thing as "returning to the Lifestream", but then there are also other specific traditions about going to particular heavens or hells according to their deeds.

But that could all be folk belief versus the then-truth that the soul might not be immortal anyway.

The Montichaigne bit they're referring to is from the quest 'Sound the Bell, School's In', from fairly early on in Endwalker:

Montichaigne:
Barring that, we must wait until we return to the aetherial sea...
For there we will be purified. The blots upon our souls washed clean...
And our memories drift apart and dissolve. Rather defeating the purpose, I suppose.
But there are those memories that are indelibly etched upon our souls, some believe.

Alisaie:
What happens after that?

Montichaigne:
We are reduced to pure aether, coalesce with that of others, and create souls anew.
Alternative schools of thought assert souls remain whole and return to the corporeal world, reborn into another form.
Both theories have their proponents. Personally, I consider each equally probable.

When I was playing through Endwalker, I definitely also read this as them trying to reconcile older lore with newer lore by saying they're both just unproven theories. That being said, I must admit I can't find any cases of the game explicitly stating the former as being true!

The closest I could find (via this Tumblr post, which is an absolute treasure trove of random bits of lore about aether) was Minfilia, in ARR:

Minfilia:
Let us begin at what some might call the end. When we who dwell in the material realm die, our spirits dissolve into the flow of aether, and are returned to the aetherial realm. In turn, the restless energy which suffuses the plane streams back into our world, giving rise to new life.

But that depends on how literally you take the word 'dissolve', I guess?

[Anonymoose]

As for the specific word "blender", I think we started using that after...

As has been mentioned in past quests, most primal summoning comes down to the faith of the primal's followers. That faith acts as a beacon for the primal's dispersed aetherial essence, allowing for the remanifestation of a being whose infinite number of parts were tossed into that giant blender known as the Lifestream. If enough followers of Bahamut (or perhaps Dalamud, which, ultimately is the same concept) were to gather and perform a summoning, then technically anything is possible (with the proper amount of aether to act as the catalyst), and it doesn't necessarily need to be on Meracydia (which, in many places is still a smoldering waste, even today). What needs to be understood is that the state of the believers when the summoning occurs directly affects the manner in which the dispersed essence of the deceased is reconfigured. Tiamat, knows of this first hand due to her failed attempt to resummon her fallen beloved. She and Bahamut's brood knew Bahamut better than anyone, but since their hearts were darkened by sorrow stemming from the loss, coupled with hate directed towards the Allagans, the Bahamut that was ultimately brought back ended up being naught but a twisted shell of the dragon Tiamat remembered. This also explains the differences between the actions and temperaments of other primals spanning from 1.0 to 2.0. The needs and desires of the believers doing the summoning changed following the Calamity, resulting in changes in the primals they summoned, Ifrit and Titan, even Shiva all being good examples (though Shiva's differences span back further than just 5 years ago).

Which got harked back to when we spent one of those "I bet this will have an entertaining answer" questions about where old lore stands by checking in on Shiva:

GE: On the official forums, you went back for some unanswered Q&A questions at one point. You talked about how Bahamut was re-materialized by his summoning. A dead thing goes into the Lifestream, it gets blended into pieces, and then people pray and that beacon draws and reassembles them somehow, even though it’s never really that thing again. So…Ysayle. She reaches out; she summons Shiva…allegedly. But, Hraesvelgr alleges that he ate Shiva and that she’s been with him the whole time. Where’s Shiva?

Koji: Well, yes, the eating part is still there. But remember how we once talked about how there could be multiple Ifrits? You’re just assembling pieces from the aether and forming them into something. There are parts of that being and parts of just regular energy in that core. It’s not all of their pieces. It’s some of the memories and then you’re filling out the rest. It’s kind of like when they find some tyrannosaurus bones and have to recreate the rest with plaster copies. It’s not the actual being. And then it dies off, and a little piece of it, while it’s existing in that form, goes back to the Lifestream.

When you’re talking about the Lifestream, there’s all this weirdness. And then it seems like every patch there’s a new way to summon a primal…but that’s not my fault! We have to keep thinking of new ways because they want special situations. But the essence is that, yeah, you’re pulling a piece of that person and filling in the rest of the energy that is formed based on what the summoner is thinking at that time.

(Keeping in mind of course that some of this can be read with even more complex context/nuance after the 5.0- and 6.0-eras had stories that went hard on speculation about physical vs. spiritual aether and the various components of each; from Save the Queen to the Aitiascope to meeting Venat. I think a good chunk of old lore could lean pretty heavily on the memory-as-identity-as-different-from-core-soul-kernel thing.)

[Cleretic]

The closest I could find (via this Tumblr post, which is an absolute treasure trove of random bits of lore about aether) was Minfilia, in ARR:



But that depends on how literally you take the word 'dissolve', I guess?

I fully expected Anonymoose to have some super esoteric source that I've never thought to check, which it turns out he did! But my read of this whole thing has been that we made assumptions about how souls work back in ARR, and they remained unquestioned for long enough that we just assumed it was fact, rather than having any actual evidence towards it.

[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."