Every Job Symbol Explained - FFXIV Lore

[Music] when it comes to a theras there are many questions we all have who are the 12 what is the nature of the soul and just as importantly what do all the symbols on soul crystals mean one set of items near all players have but perhaps not all pay close attention to are these chunks of rock pieces of crystal with memories of past wielders etched into their surface allowing for the passing of skills from user to user and generation to generation but we aren't here to talk about function we're here to talk about form take a look at each individual crystal and you'll see a primary symbol engraved upon their face these are not just for show but very literally represent the collection of skills the soul crystals stand for and contain and what we know as jobs what then do each of these symbols as symbols represent save for two and a half specific examples all icons are based off the weapons or primary skills of the corresponding job and they can be obvious or obtuse depending on the level of abstraction an example being the white mage which is pretty readily apparent but the monk a little less so the symbols aren't the only attribute of abstracted personality and disposition soul crystals have now and then there's even a lot we can take away from the soul crystal's shape and even the color but other times there doesn't seem to be a very specific corollary like what exactly the bright yellow of the gun breaker soul crystal could possibly mean but let's talk about the list starting with our bestie blue boys we have the tanks two of the four examples are simple enough and the other two may be a little less obvious number one is our poster boy the paladin and by far one of the most basic both in symbol and in player base as a stalwart guard the paladin's symbol is its iconic shield and reflecting its occupation as defender of the sultana for the sultana sworn paladins or defender of the realm for free paladins there's not a lot to say about the crystal's traits beyond the shield icon it's bright blue in color generic in shape and glows whenever you need to know who the alpha paladin is something you'd expect less from the sultana sworn and more from the second straightforward job the warrior with its symbol being an actual double-sided axe head matching the battle axe it wields and its aggro berserker nature the angry crimson hue that i can only really describe as cherry flavored and crescent shape that makes up the warrior soul crystal is like the flames of rage that all warriors channel for their abilities and match the characteristic red eyes they have while channeling their primal form you could also choose to interpret these points as a nod to the horns which are a recurring motif on warrior's armor the other two tank job symbols are a little more vague the easier one being the dark knight symbol which is its greatsword this becomes more clear when the symbol is flipped on its head and as self-assigned judge jury and executioner of the wicked the blade with which the dark knight brings just death is a fitting icon reaching a little more as a further detail the starburst pattern could be read as the tendrils of shadow that eek out from the dark knight's crystal and if all this wasn't enough just look at the color and facets of the crystal which whether or not is indicative of anything tells you that the job is both metaphorically and literally edgy last of the tanks bodyguards both in inception and in current days the gunbreaker symbol has been said by some authorities to be the image of a crosshair with a slash through it the literal image of a gun being broken befitting its name alternatively is the reading of the image as the gunbreaker's weapon as seen straight on by its victim with the slash as the blade and the circle as the gun cylinder ready to fire now with tanks out of the way we're on to our second pair of four with healers like the white mage whose symbol is pretty self-evident as it's just its staff as wise healers attune to the elements of the world the white mage as a role is complemented with its crystal shape and color a soft calming white it's smoothed oval of a stone matching the history of its creation and purpose as time and the element have worn away the lost city of amdapor so have many hands and ages worn smooth the crystals facets and speaking of smooth let's look at the butterscotch candy looking astrologian be they from charlien or ishgard the astrologian symbol is its cards which are as or more archetypical than its astrolabe the cards are easy to parse two of them stacked together the only real question is if the line that cuts through the cars is indicative of movement use or something hearkening to a shooting star's trail any of them are possible and it's also just as likely it's just a stylistic flair for a more interesting and parsable design though reading and casting cards are our primary skill in their arsenal the astrologian is interesting but not singular in its job symbol not actually being of its primary armament but instead skills since both tools and abilities are used to facilitate the reading of stars the broad rule for icons and their representations hold now the shape of the soul crystal actually says a lot despite being near featureless other than the color a perfectly domed circle it reflects the celestial spheres of the stars in space from which the astrologian draws aether and reads the future and speaking of charlieian somanatic practicing doctors of the northern empty the sage symbol isn't hard to figure out it's therefore new lists their primary means of healing and self-defense the white color of the soul crystal matches the traditional coats of the sage or maybe it's just symbolic of the sterile but more humorously is the appearance that the crystal is the shape of a tooth perhaps somanatics is also the root of a theorist's future dental practices as well the one wheel odd man out amongst the healers and first of our major exceptions the other being its twin is the scholar in place of a tome or fairy we have an abstraction of the clothing of the job a pair of spectacles that can be found with most scholar panoply but the scholar symbol of spectacles while fitting is kind of funny when you have to ask yourself of scholars of the past what happens if a practitioner did not require glasses as a note on alternative theories as to what the scholar symbol could be i once heard from a rather eager lollaphal in his cups the theory that this symbol is in fact an upside down open book with its ends been back the mental gymnastics required to see such a thing are a wonder but nonetheless it is a perspective i suppose the scholar's stone itself both in shape and color doesn't really tell us anything other than it being identical to the summoners albeit rotated 180 degrees since they're both an extension of the arcanists and rooted in the using of aether to create arcane elemental familiars it seems a fitting parallel even if the cultures that spawned them were separated by thousands of years and now with blue and green jobs down it's time for a cavalcade of red jobs starting with the ones responsible for bringing the pain at close range like the monk who with a flurry of punches and as servant of the destroyer are a rambunctious lot and whose symbol is three parallel lines at first underwhelming it turns out there are multiple meanings to these lines all of which are to do with the monk's weapon of choice the symbol slashes represent the cuts of their clawed weapons as well as lines made between the fingers by the five fingers of a monk's closed fist as it plunges towards its enemy a real hash mark of death the soul crystal shape also hides another little secret as it matches one of their other weapons the horror if you filled in its negative space on to the dragoon the dragoon as lance wielding high leaping dragonblood armor wearing soldiers of slaying have a plunging spear as their symbol but treat these lines as a neck or horns and this triangle is a head and it also has the appearance of a dragon with the spear as the symbol of its prowess and the root of their power in the dragon be it by male blood eye or any combination thereof the symbol ends up standing for all the facets of the job especially if you treat the shape of the actual crystal as the aimed force and aerial trail of a dragoon signature jump with its indigo color matching their armor but across the world from ishgard are the shadows of doma the ninja whose symbol is a shuriken twofold with both its image and the actual soul crystal being the throwing star in shape which makes me question if you were really desperate to throw it at someone as a weapon does it count as a double hit and while we're speaking about othard and hearkening back to the gunbreaker we have the samurai whose symbol is the image of a katana from above with the blade near invisible and only the tsuba cross-guard apparent simple enough it would track then that the metallic gray of the crystal itself matches the cold steel of a samurai's blade having just mentioned steel and cold those are both all too familiar to our next job the reaper the reaper symbol is unsurprisingly its scythe with a circle representing a head the more ambiguous point is the question is the head that of the reaper or of their harvest or is it something else less grim altogether the pitch-black curved shape of the crystal also takes the shape of a scythe with its more organic facets hearkening onto the ethereal darkness of the void scent with who through the soul crystal the reaper makes their pact a true match for the dark knight's edge guns bows and chakrams oh my the rangefolk await starting with the songster extraordinaire the bard with their symbol which is unsurprisingly a harp since a bard can use their bow to play music either by its strings or the physical addition of a liar into the weapon the harp keeps with the trend of the battlefield weapons as symbols despite not actually being a depiction of a bow the actual crystal hides its own musical theme as if you look close it's an abstracted eighth note the many varied forms of firearm are represented in the machinist souls crystal and there's not really much else to say it's a gun i will say however that the actual crystal itself tells us two interesting things as an incredibly young discipline the soul of the machinists that exist are all newly minted within the past couple of years crafted with intentionality and planned in mass quantities the first observation then is the symbol of the job is carved intentionally into a soul crystal and is not an image accrued as a byproduct of use or some other phenomena and the second observation is that the clean edges and precise cuts of the crystal enhance the stone's more manufactured nature compared to the many more organic shapes of the jobs that were made with less mechanical precision in mind and are far more ancient this is also echoed with one of our jobs later on but we'll get to that in a second now the industrialization of ishgard that led to the machinist is a far cry from the dancers of thavener with their elegant movements and bladed boomerang circles of death the symbol of the dancer is a lovely heart that represents said chakrams as well as more vaguely the connection dancers have to bringing joy to people all over the world and relieving them of their despair the pink lemonade looking crystal seems to be the chakram writ large but i'll leave that up to you regardless it looks delicious and now it's time for the big booms the casters dealing with a symbol within a symbol again the black mages icon and soul crystal itself have the form of a comet the reason requires a bit of context over 2000 years ago during the fifth astral era a comet was going to crash into the star the maki made shitoto divides the art of the black mage in order to stop it and ended up becoming an associated symbol even doning it upon stabs its destructive power is matched in the methods and madness of the black mage's own spells which is to say nothing of our next contender part two in our diparty clothing crystal is our eggie enforcer the summoner whose symbol is the horn and like the scholars represent its panoply rather than its armament so why a horn both in this world and others the summoner's horn is an iconic piece of imagery for the job which uses it as a focus point of ethereal manipulation and control over their summoned beings it also matches the scholar symbol in representing the job's classic headpiece rather than any other part of its outfit on the topic of foci and casting the red mages symbol at first seems pretty clear-cut as an abstraction of their catalyst which with their dueling sword makes up the red mage's weapon but look closer you'll see a combination of two symbols we explored prior with the white mages staff and black mage's comment since red mages are inheritors of the practices of white and black magic from amdapor and mock this dual representation packs an incredible amount of meaning into a single symbol if you need me to explain why the crystal is red there is little i or any other can do to help you last but not least our final symbol is the mask of the blue mage as a potential third example of a symbol being a job's clothing like with the summoner and scholar the addition of the right flared line looks suspiciously like a blue mage's cane this curious in between matches up with the job's limited and odd nature though the skills of the blue mage are sourced in the new world and maybe hundreds if not thousands of years old the actual soul crystals on eorzea are extremely recent both in mass creation and distribution making its clean cut facets sync up with machinist and as for color some mysteries must remain unanswered 20 symbols later and we have our answers and that about wraps it up although i feel like i'm forgetting something the glasses lightning round gladiators use swords marauders use axes lancers lance things pugilist punch things archer's wheeled bows rogues their daggers conjurers use wands tharmaturge use fire spells but i have no clue why there's a pot something to do with the thaumaturgists guild and incense and the arcanists is an armillary sphere which are tools rooted in tracking and charting celestial bodies and can be used at teaching tools or for mathematic calculations and which may have been used to track the flow of aether of the star and with which the arcanist created the geometric patterns that act as the root of the spells of the arcanist scholar and summoner and as arcanism comes from the south sea isles it may have been used by the lalafells there who originated the craft for their long sailing voyages and all of this is totally different than the astrologian's astrolabe we swear okay that last one may have not been exactly a lightning round answer but you get the point and now we're actually done but what do you think do you have a different take and with future disciplines what symbols shapes and hues might we see this content was brought to you by the aorzian archives if you enjoyed this video help us please the 12 by leaving a like and subscribing for new content every thursday and comment down below with any topic you'd like to see our archons cover in the future for even more content discussion and exclusives please check out our discord and consider supporting us on patreon

Channel: The Eorzean Archives

Views: 80,995

Keywords: ffxiv, final fantasy 14, lore, ffxiv lore, ff14, endwalker, eorzea, Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy 14, Final Fantasy xiv, final fantasy xiv, lalafell, ffxiv jobs, ff14 jobs, paladin, gunbreaker, dark knight, white mage, sage, scholar, astrologian, warrior, bard, dancer, machinist, summoner, red mage, black mage, dragoon, ninja, samurai, monk, reaper, blue mage, job symbols, job icons, soul crystal, job crystal

Id: xtxWE--sXZM

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Wed May 18 2022