Something has been bothering me since the release of Dawntrail, which has intensified with the announcement of Evercold—namely, the condition of the remaining four Shards/Reflections (the 4th, 8th, 9th, and 11th Shards).
Prior to Dawntrail, did anyone here believe that the remaining, unexplored Shards were in similar conditions to the First? As in, victims of massive elemental cataclysms?
I certainly didn't, nor did I know anyone else (among lore fans) who believed that.
To be clear, I am not talking about a general tilt towards an element, like how the Ninth was experiencing prolonged storm seasons for most of the year. That's much more "natural" and understandable.
I'm instead talking about the fact that the Storm Surge brought about so terrible a (lowercase "c") calamity that most of the Mist Continent (and possibly the rest of the Ninth's world) is largely uninhabitable outside of the domes surrounding Alexandria and Treno.
Similarly, the Fourth is a world that is apparently locked in Ice to the point it seemingly only survives through the existence of skyborne civilizations on floating islands. Because we don't actually have any information on the Fourth's timeline relative to the Source, I will primarily be focusing on the Ninth in this post.
This is... very strange to me, for a number of reasons, but the main one is that it doesn't seem to match up with the Ascian's mode of operating.
"Wait a minute, what do you mean elemental imbalance on the Shards isn't the Ascian's method? That's the whole point of them!", you may want to say.
This is true, but the way that Ninth for sure and possibly the Fourth have been presented aren't in line with their methods, for reasons I'll try to outline.
Before I can, though, I need to establish some timeline facts, because a lot of players seem very confused about time dilation and anchor points.
For simplicity's sake, the Ninth's timeline will consist of Before Fusion (BF) and After Fusion (AF). The Storm Surge was 454 years ago from the present day of 30 AF, putting its date at 424 BF.
The Ninth has been in the post-Storm Surge state for over 400 years in it's own time, and it has been in that state for almost 400 years for at least the past 20 Source-years. We know this because the events that occurred in Containment Complex 10-29 were "decades ago" in the Ninth's timeline. Taking into account the fact that a reasonably competent English speaker would refer to events over 100 years ago as a century rather than "decades", this means that the facility could have been abandoned anywhere from 69-1 BF, or 99-31 years ago. As Robor and Alayla appeared on the Source 20 years ago during this time frame, the Ninth had already experienced the Storm Surge at least as long as 350 years ago in its own time. This is well before the Seventh Umbral Calamity.
Furthermore, while there is some debate over whether the Yok Huy were dreaming of the Ninth's present or it's future; we can at least acknowledge that the "Present-Dreamer" theory does give us another solid anchor point if it's true.
Living Memory was constructed around ~418 BF, and wasn't converted into a home for the Endless until "centuries after" its construction. Being generous and saying 175 years is roughly the minimum where people would start rounding to two centuries or more, the earliest point the Yok Huy dreamers could have glimpsed (regardless of whether they dreamt of the present or future) was around 240 BF (BF for simplicity), at around 500 6AE.
With that established, I can now provide my reasons for thinking the state of the Ninth is odd.
Emet-Selch: There are no strict rules governing how we work, though that has not been without its consequences. In the beginning, we were each responsible for a shard, and free to do as we wished, but Igeyorhm's impetuous temperament showed us the folly in that.
This theory runs into several problems, the first of which is that it's really not clear the Ninth meets what could be the criteria for being Flooded. While we only have a single example of a completed Flood, the Thirteenth suggests that a Flood is so utterly devastating that it fundamentally breaks the world (death itself doesn’t even meaningfully exist in the Void anymore). Even the only mostly-Flooded First has had almost all of its surface area replaced by an endless expanse of blank nothingness.
In order for the Ninth to have suffered a Flood but not be brought to a point of complete and total devastation, the alleged Flood of Lightning would have to have been halted in some way, akin to what Minfilia did in her role as the Oracle of Light. However, there is no clear mechanism by which a Flood could have been stopped on the Ninth.
Finally, and what I take to be most damning for the the theory, is the simple assumption that the story should make sense, and it's nonsensical to the point of absurdity that the Ninth (and possibly, as some claim, the other three unexplored Shards) have been Flooded for the past decades-to-millennia, permanently ruining the Ascians' plans, and they just failed to mention it at any point at all.
While we don't yet know the Fourth's history, and it's conceivably possible that its Ice-based cataclysm occurred very recently in the Source's time (such as after Endwalker); it is nevertheless still extremely odd to me that the Ninth is in the state that it's in, and that we still don't have any explanation as to why or how it was "permitted" to fall into such a dangerous state.
Thank you for reading, and I welcome any responses or discussion.
Continue reading...
Prior to Dawntrail, did anyone here believe that the remaining, unexplored Shards were in similar conditions to the First? As in, victims of massive elemental cataclysms?
I certainly didn't, nor did I know anyone else (among lore fans) who believed that.
To be clear, I am not talking about a general tilt towards an element, like how the Ninth was experiencing prolonged storm seasons for most of the year. That's much more "natural" and understandable.
I'm instead talking about the fact that the Storm Surge brought about so terrible a (lowercase "c") calamity that most of the Mist Continent (and possibly the rest of the Ninth's world) is largely uninhabitable outside of the domes surrounding Alexandria and Treno.
Similarly, the Fourth is a world that is apparently locked in Ice to the point it seemingly only survives through the existence of skyborne civilizations on floating islands. Because we don't actually have any information on the Fourth's timeline relative to the Source, I will primarily be focusing on the Ninth in this post.
This is... very strange to me, for a number of reasons, but the main one is that it doesn't seem to match up with the Ascian's mode of operating.
"Wait a minute, what do you mean elemental imbalance on the Shards isn't the Ascian's method? That's the whole point of them!", you may want to say.
This is true, but the way that Ninth for sure and possibly the Fourth have been presented aren't in line with their methods, for reasons I'll try to outline.
Before I can, though, I need to establish some timeline facts, because a lot of players seem very confused about time dilation and anchor points.
For simplicity's sake, the Ninth's timeline will consist of Before Fusion (BF) and After Fusion (AF). The Storm Surge was 454 years ago from the present day of 30 AF, putting its date at 424 BF.
The Ninth has been in the post-Storm Surge state for over 400 years in it's own time, and it has been in that state for almost 400 years for at least the past 20 Source-years. We know this because the events that occurred in Containment Complex 10-29 were "decades ago" in the Ninth's timeline. Taking into account the fact that a reasonably competent English speaker would refer to events over 100 years ago as a century rather than "decades", this means that the facility could have been abandoned anywhere from 69-1 BF, or 99-31 years ago. As Robor and Alayla appeared on the Source 20 years ago during this time frame, the Ninth had already experienced the Storm Surge at least as long as 350 years ago in its own time. This is well before the Seventh Umbral Calamity.
Furthermore, while there is some debate over whether the Yok Huy were dreaming of the Ninth's present or it's future; we can at least acknowledge that the "Present-Dreamer" theory does give us another solid anchor point if it's true.
Living Memory was constructed around ~418 BF, and wasn't converted into a home for the Endless until "centuries after" its construction. Being generous and saying 175 years is roughly the minimum where people would start rounding to two centuries or more, the earliest point the Yok Huy dreamers could have glimpsed (regardless of whether they dreamt of the present or future) was around 240 BF (BF for simplicity), at around 500 6AE.
The question is whether the Ascians were responsible.
With that established, I can now provide my reasons for thinking the state of the Ninth is odd.
Quote:
Emet-Selch: There are no strict rules governing how we work, though that has not been without its consequences. In the beginning, we were each responsible for a shard, and free to do as we wished, but Igeyorhm's impetuous temperament showed us the folly in that.
While I would like to invite discussion from this point on, I feel compelled to first address a theory/interpretation I have seen suggested by multiple people. This theory entails that the Ninth did not merely suffer an elemental cataclysm, but a full-scale Flood of Lightning. The evidence for this consists in factors such as the Warding Scale activating on the Ninth, as it did in the known-to-be-Flooded Thirteenth, and the scale of the devastation.
This theory runs into several problems, the first of which is that it's really not clear the Ninth meets what could be the criteria for being Flooded. While we only have a single example of a completed Flood, the Thirteenth suggests that a Flood is so utterly devastating that it fundamentally breaks the world (death itself doesn’t even meaningfully exist in the Void anymore). Even the only mostly-Flooded First has had almost all of its surface area replaced by an endless expanse of blank nothingness.
In order for the Ninth to have suffered a Flood but not be brought to a point of complete and total devastation, the alleged Flood of Lightning would have to have been halted in some way, akin to what Minfilia did in her role as the Oracle of Light. However, there is no clear mechanism by which a Flood could have been stopped on the Ninth.
Finally, and what I take to be most damning for the the theory, is the simple assumption that the story should make sense, and it's nonsensical to the point of absurdity that the Ninth (and possibly, as some claim, the other three unexplored Shards) have been Flooded for the past decades-to-millennia, permanently ruining the Ascians' plans, and they just failed to mention it at any point at all.
While we don't yet know the Fourth's history, and it's conceivably possible that its Ice-based cataclysm occurred very recently in the Source's time (such as after Endwalker); it is nevertheless still extremely odd to me that the Ninth is in the state that it's in, and that we still don't have any explanation as to why or how it was "permitted" to fall into such a dangerous state.
Thank you for reading, and I welcome any responses or discussion.
Continue reading...