posted by iamnotshazam on tumblr:
major endwalker spoilers: yeah it's funny how estinien probably doesn't realize who emet-selch is
but also he could be standing there at the end poker-faced because nidhogg remembers. ohhhhh nidhogg remembers. this guy. this is the allagan empire guy. the meracydian horde is either dead or still enslaved cause of him. whether directly or indirectly he screwed over half of the first brood. bahamut and (seemingly) azdaja are dead, tiamat's life was ruined, and baby brother vrtra ignored nidhogg's calls for at least a thousand years
nidhogg's memories start snarling at estinien to Kill This Fuck and estinien is like "?? this again? my dude we've been over this. we went to therapy. also pretty sure he's already dead. as are you" and nidhogg grumbles and wheezes in disappointment for a few seconds and then tries to snap out some witty gloat to the ascian, he was real good at those while alive but he's working with estinien's linguistic processing here, give him a sec - oops hades and hythlodaeus have already discorporated
the sundered are lost. i mean, completely. there is no way for Emet-Selch to regain the majority of his people as they were. even if they rejoin everything to the Source, figure out how to undo the mistake of the Thirteenth, all that will do is release the shards back into a single aetherial sea to reincarnate again, finally whole but in a different, unaware life, lacking the culture or guidance of Amaurot.
it’s all gone. Azem as they existed then is never coming back. neither are those he served with on the Convocation, or anyone else he might have called friend or brother, his entire way of life and the principles that they all lived by.
but if Zodiark is reformed, and huge swaths of life sacrificed again to buffer his strength, Emet-Selch could get back Hythlodaeus. A pure, intact soul unbound from its unending shackle, never split, never damaged. one that he could catch before it descended to the sea and return it to a corporeal state as he did Y'shtola.
his people restored to ignorance but no longer broken, and his friend returned to stand at his side; perhaps to finally chose then to return to the star together as they’d always promised.
yeah, i’d have dragged myself over glass for millennia as well.
Venat slaughtered her people. You could go all biblical and say that she cast out all the angels from Heaven and broke the gates behind them so they could never get back in. Hermes, who condemned his people - who condemned all peoples, all worlds to annihilation because he could not bear to lose even one more life in the biggest version of the trolley question ever, and who then hated himself for it in all his incarnations. Emet-Selch and Elidibus and Lahabrea who tried to fix everything somehow, who could not face the realization that even if they rehung the gates of Paradise, their people would not, could not be what they were. It had been too long and too much had been lost along the way.
Basically, you’re preaching to the choir, reverend, and I’m in the pews nodding along.
If my Azem had been left unsundered while Lahabrea was broken, I would have eaten worlds with Emet-Selch as well to bring it all back. My grief has roots in the past that I cannot let go. I would save Haurchefant, even if that would condemn Ishgard. That which is important to me is important to me and I will, as a person, always choose it selfishly. I love that this game will ask you these really introspective questions and everyone is going to answer for themselves, by which parts of the story make you cry.
__
¹ not everyone.
But I do especially love that Shadowbringers muddles the who is the good guy, who is the bad guy right until the very end and even when everything resolves, its still ambiguous depending on how empathetic you are to the ascian’s master plan.
Overtly villainous acts are performed by the Crystal Exarch. Overtly heroic acts are performed by Emet-Selch. And its not until the end that they switch roles and I think that’s very cash money of both of them (and their writer(s)).
(via the-ether-bnnuy)
For everyone saying they can’t choose over Hythlodaeus and Emet-Selch
Just remember
They chose each other over you <3
I follow a bunch of ffxiv related blogs (because of course I do, its a fantastic game and I want to watch other people rave about it too) and I have seen just about every take on Emet-Selch that is possible it feels like. From the “poor little meow-meow” to the above quote ripped from Brooklyn Nine Nine to the rallying cry of “Emet-Selch did nothing wrong!”
The question that FFXIV asks, over and over again is - faced with overwhelming grief, do you look forward? or back?
- Heavensward is about the loss of family.
- Stormblood is about the loss of home.
- Shadowbringers is about the loss of love.
- and Endwalker is about the struggle between looking back or looking forward.
So reducing Emet-Selch down to “cool motive. still murder.” kind of ignores the real question being asked which is can you let go of the worst loss of your life and move on to something, if not better, at least brighter than where you are now? In your grief, do you destroy everything around you because it no longer has value for you, or do you accept the wound and move forward into a future that no longer holds that which is most important to you?
In your heart, are you Sam Gamgee, holding to the quiet things of home and hearth and that spring brings a green world and that somewhere children will laugh, even if its in bombed out streets? Or does your grief compel you to ruin all you see, in the hopes that enough of it will make the world relent?
I don’t know. This game is full of real emotion and incredibly hard to answer questions and surface meta kind of only goes so far with discussion of tropes and literary devices and that the dungeon design kind of took a step back because of the new Duty system.
Who are you when the light of your world goes out? What are you willing to do to bring it back?
Posted by Feralkwe on Tumblr:
this sunnova is the only fucker not lying to me and i hate everything.
Emet-Selch is weary of all the things you are blissfully unaware of, and has no real inclination to even inform you of the depths of your ignorance.
Is a lie of omission still a lie? It permeates everything, all the way to the ground you stand on. But as he likes to remind you - he’d rather watch.
Good luck, hero.
Emet-Selch was winning. By all metrics, right until the Unsundered tripped over our Warrior of Light and it all started unravelling like a loosely knitted cardigan, the Convocation of Three was at the crest and just starting the downhill slide to utter victory.
Hydaelyn was leaking the last of her strength like a punctured balloon. Midgardsormr had to cut us off from the teat for awhile as our drain could easily have been the end of the Mother - if it turned out we weren’t the right Chosen One and she had to somehow struggle on just that little bit further, she had almost nothing left in reserve.
The Eighth Umbral Calamity was being held back by a thread and a hail mary pass at time travel. Nearly all of the First was lost, Light was starting to pour through the cracks into the Source and Black Rose was right there to receive and amplify it as the perfect confluence of events, oh so carefully set up by our darling empire-builder.
We’ve all got our opinions about why Emet-Selch engineered his own defeat, but please don’t say its because he was desperate and losing. He wasn’t. They weren’t. He could have simply stepped back for a nap for a hundred more years and returned to pick it all back up again with nary a blink of his golden eye, reset the pieces and played again. And again. And again, for as long as necessary. The fact that he didn’t is the most interesting thing out of all of it because he objectively had the higher ground and could so easily have kept it - and chose not to.
Hydaelyn would have been swept away, if they’d managed just one more Ardor. Just one more, that’s all they needed, they were so close.
____
yes, i read another post about how emet-selch knew he was on the ropes and was grateful to be stopped before “it went too far”. blech. ack. noooooo. so wrong.
And I mean that sincerely, and also a topic that’s up for discussion. Apart from the intention of my post, and addressing only the canon-as-reality interpretation of Shadowbringers - did Emet-Selch do wrong?
By “our” perspective, perhaps. Guilty of manipulation, guilty of grevious harm on a world-wide scale, guilty of mass murder and catastrophe.
From Emet-Selch’s perspective, he’s re-setting a bone so it can grow straight again. A necessary pain, a required healing.
In the real world, we don’t have a good equivalent to sundering to compare against. But maybe … think zombies. We’ve all got some understanding of the fictional state of zombiehood. Your loved ones are gone, dead, lost to you - and then by some horrific mirabilis - made unalive. Ravenous, bloodthirsty. Nothing left of who they were but face and form, rotting and twisted and incapable of rationality or memory and they prey on each other, consuming and consumed in turn.
Yet you are possessed of some skill that could reverse this damage. You could, given enough time and patience, completely undo this wreckage of your world. You have to kill them all, bury their corpses back into the ground where they may heal. So when they rise again they are a little more recovered. A little more themselves. One step closer to remembering and becoming who they were. Closer to being your brother, sister, father, lover again.
Over the course of time, you get exceedingly good at killing them in vast swathes.
Are you wrong? These are zombies. They are a perversion of the world. You know it, if they don’t. They wail and gnash their teeth and go once more to their graves screaming, but you know they will just rise again because you want them to rise again, to come back, to return to you.
So - did Emet-Selch do anything wrong?
Cool motive. Was it murder? The Warrior of Light thinks so, canonically. Do you?
So right now once I get in, I’ve only got about about an hour (two at best) to get anything done which in a cut-scene heavy story like Endwalker isn’t going to take me places particularly quickly. So I am now basically churning my wheels in mud until Saturday when I can get back on and like, go to town on the story for the whole day.
So in absence of anything resembling progression, I’m reduced to just having to think about it.
So I’ve been thinking about it and my god, social media is the best thing ever because now I can post about it too. So a bit of background here:
Like everyone else, by the time I finished Heavensward I was not only hooked by this game, I was filleted and fried. From the Steps of Faith to the Final Steps of Faith, I couldn’t put the game down. I consumed the MSQ in great, gulping chunks, desperate to know what was happening.
Was Aymeric stringing us along, on the surface a proponent of peace and reconciliation, or was he just another Teledji Adeledji in a taller, more pleasing Elezen package? What was Thordan going to want from us in exchange for this begruding sanctuary? Could we prevent civil war from breaking out between the downtrodden poor and their High House oppressors even as the dragons were poised for yet another assault in a thousand year series of devastating attacks - better yet, did I even want to try?
Did Ishgard deserve to finally fall?
Then, you know, Aymeric on the ground with a knife in his ribs. Then, you know, the Vault. Then, you know, The Singularity Reactor and as Thordan dies, he asks the burning question that is actually starting to haunt me - what ARE you?
I don’t know what I am. I’m starting to worry that nobody does.
After the Vault, I couldn’t touch the game for about a week except in the most nominal, casual ways. Chipping some rocks. Running my squadron through a dungeon. Checking the market board in the forlorn hopes of finding something pretty in my price range (0-poor).
I was really, really shaken by… I’ve spend a minute trying to find a poetic way to say that when Haurchefant died to save me, I know that I lost something because I felt it all the way down to the core of me. And the worst part is, I can’t even say what. Just something was gone that I didn’t even know I had held so close, some feeling of rightness in the world that he would always be there and always greet me like his most beloved friend and would always, always have my back.
And he was dead and lost in a heartbeat, just like that.
After The Final Steps of Faith, I couldn’t play again. I was standing in Castrum Oriens and Raubahn needed my attention and I couldn’t give it. I didn’t want to be helping anyone else, running hither and yon. I didn’t want to move any farther away from the snows of Ishgard and the last glimpse of Haurchefant turning away from me and I didn’t need anybody else’s problems because my heart missed all my people so much. I wanted so much to be back in Aymeric’s room, drinking wine and laughing. I wanted to sit by a grave and cry. I wanted to hear more of Estinien’s voice, dryly putting Alphinaud in his place and Alphinaud spluttering in defense.
But Stormblood and Lyse and Arvenvald and Fordola happened. Hien and Yotsuyu and the xaela happened. Zenos gave me somebody to hate unreservedly because at this moment I don’t care how he got where he is, he just plain needed to be staked to the ground and his heart torn out so he never got back up again. And oh, wasn’t that prophetic.
I don’t want to hear about a murdered sister. I don’t want to hear about a grief-ravaged brother. I needed something clean and savage and righteous and Stormblood gave me that in spades.
Then it gave me Shadowbringers.
This is where I just flounder, because I’ve never been hit quite this hard by a fictional anything before. Sure, I’ve had books that have held me riveted. I’ve watched movies that made me care. I’ve even watched the odd television series that kept me tuning in to find out what happened for a few seasons.
But this - this is something I’ve never really encountered before and because its half movie and half book and half again something else between the two, I’m just kinda emotionally lost.
What you need to understand is that when I realized I was going to have to kill Emet-Selch, that there wasn’t going to be any sort of different conclusion or sideways fake, I felt like I felt after The Vault - incredibly heartsick; stricken even. The kind of feeling where you sit there and want to cover your mouth with your hands so nobody can see your lips tremble - that instinctive urge to hide weakness because it hurts.
And it hadn’t even happened yet.
And it just became more and more obvious, more and more inevitable that this was going to go down how I really didn’t want it to go down at all or quite frankly ever - that both me and my character were locked into this final, wretched resolution.
Because Emet-Selch was right. His loved ones, his world, his people, his paradise - it was shattered but it wasn’t truly gone, wasn’t completely lost. There could be enough power to fix it, to return things to where they were before it all went so wrong. And for thousands of years, he and his brothers lifted that boulder back up the hill, over and over again.
Seven times they succeeded. Seven times did they piece together the shards. Each time it no doubt got harder and harder because mountains do not become flatter the closer you get to the peak. They were so close to the eighth, with one world stopped on the brink of the collapse by an avatar’s last strength and the other all but ripe to receive it.
And Emet-Selch turns to me near the end of things and says, “Do you really think yourselves the only ones worthy? When you could not, would not have done what we did.” And Elidibus says, “You fail and you fail and you fail and you learn nothing, let it all fall through your fingers.” Their claim to this star was deeper, vaster, more desperate than mine. I want only to preserve the lives of my friends and by that extension save the ones I care nothing about. They want to make the world whole again, one painstaking, screaming piece at a time.
If Emet-Selch grinds the shards under his heel as he does? Well, at the end it will be complete again, will it not? And all the damage caused along the way will no longer matter.
So why does this speak so much to me? Why I am sitting here with an Endwalker bingo card that has a single square that I pin so much into and onto that simply says “Summon Emet-Selch” - which, of course, is the polite way to say he’s mine he’s mine give him back to me you bastards.
Because the reason is - if I could turn back time and bring Haurchefant back, sundered and alive and smiling, I would. I know I would. I would risk almost everything in service to that, because even if it was meant to be, even if his death was the one necessary thing to pave the way for all else afterwards - the drive for revenge that had us chase Thordan to the ground and kill him there and thereby raise Aymeric into the needed power to be able to call for his peace and make it stick - I would still reject it and reach for something selfish.
And in my real life, which is where all this tangled, half-grieving, hard to quantify feeling is welling up from that I pin to this story, it comes from things also broken and unretrievable and unable to be recovered from long ago graves. This speaks to me so strongly, this one driving urge to just - fix it. Make it so that it never happened at all.
I have a tattoo on my wrist and it stands for greed. I will always, always choose myself and I need to remind myself and others of what that means - what I will risk over and over again in service of that one compulsion to take and sink claws into and consume what I believe I am owed.
Superman turned back the world to save the woman he loved. Emet-Selch crushes them as a rich man crushes grapes between his teeth. I would throw Ishgard back into war to return to me one, singular voice.
I want to know why, looking back, Lahabrea was so adamant on violent confrontation as the only option. I wanted Elidibus not to have failed, for all that I will never let G'raha Tia go. I wanted so much for Emet-Selch to have found a better path that perhaps he and I could have come to consensus on, could have been allies with. I wish that I could have held that Light, that I had been just that little bit stronger to prove I was worthy enough to be able to help find that mythical better way. When instead I gained that strength only at the last and I used it to carve a hole through a man who had survived so much already. Who had brought such unimaginable pain to the person who was my Other life. Who I both loved and hated so strongly that I cannot untangle it at all.
I guess I just really, really want not to walk out at the end of this story still grieving for having destroyed something that I really should have known to cherish.
