The Weeping City of Mhach - FFXIV Lore Talk

[Music] welcome to lore talks episode two this week's topic is mock i'm elio foschera i write and produce the videos on the youtubes uh i'm nanieri neri i write most of the articles on the website and i'm doing some more videos now woohoo very exciting very exciting okay so let's do what we did last time with nim and go over the topic of mock the city uh that existed during the fifth astral era full of black mages and black spell users correct that's absolutely correct yeah uh a a very interesting city uh not my favorite nim is my favorite but uh certainly one that gives us plenty of information to go off definitely if nothing like i mock and amdapor are not necessarily my favorites but they are so fascinating and dense as to be compelling regardless yeah i agree completely okay so we'll start with the basics then so when as i stated it existed during the fifth astral era and when exactly was the fifth astral era so the fifth astrologer actually comes along after perhaps the most mysterious era in history now that we've had shadowbringers um the fourth astral and fifth umbral errors and we know almost nothing about these arrows because the vast majority of people became essentially luddites they hated knowledge and technology written language died pretty much entirely besides a few religious authorities would retain written language and use it to sort of propagate their religions and any technology was destroyed because obviously this was post-alec so there was a lot of it going around after allag caused the third or sorry fourth umbral calamity they people were just uh very much wary of all technology after that point correct yeah pretty much yeah um and like i said the religious authorities authorities of the era became really very powerful um they were the only groups allowed to learn to read and write so they they sort of rose to the very top of society um but the error ended as all do in a calamity of sort of bitter cold and all agriculture was destroyed by the ice um and that is the fifth umbral calamity and the age of frost correct that's right that's correct yeah it does seem there's some stuff to suggest that the southernmost parts of the world were still habitable um but a lot of people died and the makote actually returned to bayersia because they were exiled by alag so they returned via the ice bridge from ilzabad to aeolia to get some of these southern regions where they could survive more ably yeah and and just to double clarify that because i've seen people confused they went from from aorzia to ilsa bard and back to eorzea right exactly yeah just worth noting because i have seen uh quite a bit of confusion on that point even after people have seen the video there is a lot of theories on that um most of them a little outdated um yeah but based off of tenuous information yeah so after the fifth astral era is quite simple it was the sixth astral era uh which is when the modern states of eozio took form and uh 1.0 took place yeah uh one point and on 1.0 would have taken place in the late uh 16th centuries or the late 1500s of the sixth astral era right so right at the very end because obviously um 2.0 and onward to is the seventh yes yes it is well with that covered let's i guess go on to the main who what where's whens and whys uh what is mock so mac is one of 12 of the city states of aortia during the 5th thus flower later narrowing down to about six as six of them were destroyed or conquered um it was an extremely aggressive nation that relied really heavily on destructive magics and forging ties with void scent to sort of conquer a swathe across the continent uh it was also a major crisis and was ruled by a collective of mages known as the coven interesting that seems bound to lead to warfare like you're inevitably creating a power structure that is incentivizing people to be destructive and powerful and therefore they are going to want to use that yes absolutely um and there is a reason that we'll discuss at a later point in one of my uh one of my prompts that a reason for why mac became so posturing and so aggressive essentially little big man syndrome yeah little i guess especially because they had started out as smaller than am deport that makes a lot of sense yeah smaller younger populated by mostly lalafell so literally little big man fantastic fan fantastic point which uh populated by lalafell which is part of why thaumaturges in ulda carry on their legacy yes exactly yeah that's right so then where was mock so mark was in an area known as your fame which is would be if you looked at your fame back in the day it would be almost unrecognizable from how it is now so it was originally really really fertile and there was these big glacial rivers coming down from coerthus and abalaffia's spine geographically it's to the northwest of mordona right between mordona and curtis yeah so sort of north of modena east of the shroud and um south of quartus uh yeah but like i said it's become extremely different nowadays and we'll discuss that a little bit more later but your fame is essentially just uninhabitable nowadays and and we covered this prior but just real quickly then when was mock so mark arose about 500 years into the era um and the era was about a little bit over one and a half thousand years old um by the end of it so marco rose about 500 years into it so mock existed during the fifth astral era which and the fifth actual era lasted about 1500 years about as long as the sixth astral era yeah the astrologers seem to last a similar amount of time um so essentially when you sort of look at the pre-history of mike you see these little tribes and cultures all around dotted around your fame because it's this really fertile area and food supplies were short in the aftermath of the calamity of ice obviously mark sort of was a joining together of these peoples um and was pretty unimportant it was a backwater um amdapor was the real and the dominant nation out of all twelve and that was for the vast majority of the fifth astral era yeah underpaw was really powerful it wasn't a conqueror but anderford didn't really conquer teams it sort of acted as the un almost um and mack didn't rise in power until about 300 years after its founding um which is when it discovered black magic and skipping ahead a little bit but that falls in line with chatoto yeah it falls exactly and i wish too yeah who lived in mark so with name we have very little knowledge on who lived in there right so we only knew that there were planes for la lafall that we didn't know who else was there we had a little bit more with mac it had a more diverse population there was a lot of dunes work there but the midlander here seemed to have been pretty prominent as well and are we able to tell that from textual information through conversations i know we can make that supposition from the corpses that we find in places like amdepour hard that that are in maki clothing that are clearly hurrian in size so we can make it from that we can make it from cesare who we'll discuss later who is it here of course um and i i believe that it's mentioned just because of the fact that the people of your fame were mentioned as being somewhat like desperate and um diverse before they formed mark okay not necessarily most importantly but really fundamental to what comes next in the sixth astral era why and how did mach fall so mark's fall um more than any other state was largely self-inflicted nim was sort of content to keep to itself in trade and amdapor while somewhat domineering wanted to achieve that hegemony by diplomatic means um mac was absolutely hell-bent on conquest it was somewhat bitter because it was so minor before it discovered black magic but once they had discovered black magic they essentially became this superpower overnight and unfortunately that didn't stop there they started to develop even more destructive magics void magics and actually we have mentioned here that they expanded on sort of elegant techniques or at least they learned a lesson from alec they could sort of perceived of i like as a having made a mistake in forged ties with voidton and thought if we're really careful if we create sort of safeguards then we'll do much better than them yes and i'm sure that went particularly well yeah it went really really well um so they um sort of summoned a lot of void scent and they developed these really destructive void and black magics um and went to war against a number of states including amdapor um i'm before they went to war with sort of last because andapol was able to force a stalemate sort of a cold war and what prevented them from and i think we touched on this a little bit in nim but what what ended up leaving nim amdepor and mock sort of the last three standing i believe there were others but the those were the three primary ones yeah so we know there were three of those but we don't really know anything we know that scala wasn't one of them um interesting we don't know in fact we know that scala died before the war of the mage broke out um with uh with my name sort of their geography really helped them obviously they were across the city they could only send flying voids and over um and the nimians had their royal marines and their scholars who were excellent at sort of just defeating the maki through sort of ingenious measures and then in the case of amdapor white magic was a huge deterrent and so were the constructs the stone constructs that the end before he used it made their capital at least pretty much impregnable and so what was it what became the final straw in the coffin that allowed for either mock to break that impregnable fortress that it was their city or cause the inevitable cataclysm that it becomes the sixth astral error um sex umbral calamity right so we don't actually know a great deal about that um we know that there was a spark um but it's actually commented on that we don't know what it was um there was a gradual stepping up of tensions uh that sort of led over centuries and centuries and centuries to this war but we don't know what actually kicked off but the war that ensued was insanely brutal though countless killed the land itself was drained of ether and of course so severely drained that a calamity was triggered it would be interesting to know whether or not the singular spark because you have the fourth umbral calamity caused by allag which does happen in a sense in a moment right you have you have the the tower receiving the aether from dalamud and basically causing a massive shock wave that begins the earthquakes that cause the fourth orbital calamity i would wonder i would wonder if then there is a singular moment like that when it comes to the war of the magi because the fact that they had that then this skips forward a little bit but the fact that the maki had time to create dunskeith and the void arc would imply that there was more of a gradual oncoming of the the floodwaters yeah in fact we have some evidence in some of the aosia books that they actually knew it was coming before the era started um they had received the signs that seers had found out um i actually kind of have a theory about why it was a calamity of water outside of you know um elegant uh like an asian shenanigans uh so my theory is that when you look at black mages right and you look at white mages um and you look at scholars none of them have significant water spells the white image has a little bit um so their spells weren't draining water either right oh that's that is actually some really interesting conjecture so the idea being that the most result the eighth are most left to them would be water because it's the least drained correct yeah that's my theory that that is why it was a climate in water you know outside of the cycle and all of that yeah whether we have any confirmation for it i think there's no reason to assume that it is it could have been a contributing factor that's for sure yeah that's just a fun theory that i've had for a while in fact i've had that before we knew about the cycle so well honestly i've mixed that with the other theories throughout our conversations that you've you've mentioned i've really appreciated them either because they recontextualize small deep bits of information on how i perceive a thing and also helps me remember certain key things that there is enough within this game story and lore wise is uh to have such nuanced i want to say theory crafting that's not even totally the right word but theory crafting it's it's just lovely yeah it is it's such a great part of what we do as well it's such a large part of why we do it i think yes yes you have to simultaneously if you were just loving dry history i mean you can get a lot of it but you have to have a certain love of creativity as well you do it's true half storyteller half historian um so let's get back to the downfall of mock real quick okay so um like i said they saw it coming they saw the calamity coming um and the nations involved in the war pretty much immediately laid down their weapons they were at least rational enough to do that um and each of them sort of came up with their own plans for how to survive this or mitigate the damage because the nimian plan wasn't really we want our nation to survive this it was we want to not all die there is something about the nimian wall plan that is much more seems much more desperate than some of the plans and implemented by amdapor mock yeah and i think that can largely be sort of attributed to the the plague having destroyed much of their government so mark's plan was to build like we said earlier a void arc a big ship that was powered by voidson essentially um and that could fly um the a large chunk of the people of mark up to uh dunskey this sort of refuge uh a sanctuary in the clouds yeah exactly yeah that's it's a floating island essentially um but the might the mark either mark or the maki people had other plans as well a lot of them fled to garibanya some remained and drowned uh and we know that at least some survived um outside of the ones that stayed in girbani because when they went back to your fame they found it completely uninhabitable um because when salt water sort of assaults and stays in a place you can't farm there anymore so they couldn't receive food and of course there was void scent just wandering around the city and that's why it's called the your famed salt more because it's the saltwater swamp i just to clarify just to make clear you're saying that a demon-infested salt swamp is not conducive to regular life it's not believe it or not at least not in any sort of organized fashion baffling and the maki of course in this flood had lost their means of controlling the voice and the millstone which also meant that the void arc uh plan failed completely so mark was destroyed almost entirely besides some survivors in gurbania and some survivors who would later go on to finland okay well then with that in mind why don't we touch on sort of the cultural and practices of mock because i think the past uh the last bit there i think touches on both the you know null stone black magic void magics all sorts of stuff so let's start off with the black mage in the history of the black mage right so like we said um the black magic sort of discipline was innovated around the year 800 by shitoto chateau who was a lalafell mage we'll discuss her a little bit later on um but some sources this is a little bit of sort of an inconsistency some sources state that she found the roots of this magic somewhere and developed from it some stated that she just invented it wholesale she was a genius either way but and for any of those who have played the black mage quest a bit prone to boasting so her own accounts of the events could have done a lot to make it uncertain for everyone what the truth was exactly yeah i would imagine so um so blackmagic is unique because it draws power from the environment from ambient ether thomaturgy conjuri red magic all sorts of other magics draw from either inside or sort of reserve sources like crystals or tomes and stuff like that but black magic draws from the air around you the land itself the uh the weapons actually that were used by the mages so these staves were originally signs of religious office they were sort of like things that priests carried um and they just so happen to be made out of materials that sort of lent themselves to casting magics for black mages though before black mages existed was there a legacy of um thaumaturges was that a ubiquitous part of uh maki life before black mages came onto the scene so i i would say so i know that there are some people who disagree with this but my read is that conjuri and somaturgy although known by different names are sort of common threads throughout spoken life in in the world um it's hard to find a culture that doesn't have at least some of them i would feel confident in looking at shitoto who was sort of obsessed with destruction that she was a thomator just before she was a black mage um and at the very least the staves that the black mages use were originally thermo church weapons yeah i think all i would agree that all the circumstantial evidence we have and the fact that they would have been able to pick up black magics kind of to me fundamentally implies they would have had to have had some form of legacy in thaumaturgy even if it wasn't quite as ubiquitous at initially as it became later yeah i think that's right why don't we cover the second aspect of the magics used in mock and that is with the void scent void magics and everything surrounding that right so just to discuss sort of void scent first then yes uh voicing are creatures of the void or um okay so voitin are creatures of the void or the 13th shard um most of them are horribly mutated spoken it seems so you know people of the 13th chart that have been sort of twisted and starved of ether by the uh the flood the flood of darkness that hit their home others are presumably animals and then there are some that are just so difficult to categorize who knows what they could be they are extremely hungry for ether um it's pretty much all at least the lower ones think about just getting more of it and devouring it and they don't really mind if that ether is currently the thing keeping someone alive so that's why they don't get on so well with most people on the uh on the source and uh so and that's where the rungs come in right the 12 uh rungs of the void zone yes absolutely that is a system of taxonomy that just explains but it is a very valuable system of people on eorzo saying this void scent is this level of danger if it is extremely dangerous like the most dangerous like oh it's the king of the void scent it would be of the first rung if it's something like an imp or just like the most nothing void scent it'd be of the 12th rung correct exactly yeah um the the only sort of core of the universal truth that i could apply to that is that it does seem as if the first rung as ruler second rung is sort of a higher noble and third rung is lesser noble does seem to hold true a lot of the time yes the only problem is that we know so little about their society that it holds true for our understanding of what they tell us but we know how many fault bad narrators there are within the confines of uh some of the people we know in aorzia so it makes it i would agree but also we can never be sure um actually an interesting thing about voidsen is that they're not only created by the void um some are artificially created uh the kobolds create artificial ones they create bombs all the time like thousands and thousands of them they refer to bomb breeding and that always was very that was fascinating to me because of the fact that it doesn't like you say like you say it doesn't necessarily mandate that void scent are come from the void in the first place though it does make sense in that part of how void zen function is that they are a soul within the void that comes forth into our realm and inhabits a physical vessel and so i mean if if you have a soul in a physical vessel that's just what we are it's what spoken are so i mean there's no reason that they shouldn't be able to procreate in theory yeah that's true um that's absolutely true we do know that of course some do genuinely come out of the um come out of situations other than the void um anyone who's played shadowbringers and certain class quests we'll know about that vital information as it were yeah if you want to understand the law then you really should be playing the class quest or role quest yes yes just just emphatically yes how does mock then use the void scent in order to both supplement their armies and and how did they function within their culture right so um they used void magic now the first while the first black mages that we know of are marquee the first void mages that we know of aren't they elegant of course who had heavy um interpret heavy heavy interaction with the void um and zandi actually signed a contract with the cloud of darkness of course that is tied to the crystal tower questline it certainly is yeah you can find more about that in there um but the marquee sort of represent or seem to think they represent a refinement of these techniques um mostly this refinement seems to be that they create um safeguards so they create the millstone they create binding techniques stuff like that um we don't know much about void magic they can tear portals into the void um most people who summon void scent and don't use proper void magic just sort of usher lesser voicing into a shell into a corpse or a livestock or something like that but the voice are able to actually create a physical portal and the shells that void zen inhabit are limit the power that the regardless of how strong the void scent is if it's inhabits a weak shell it is weakened by that yes and the maki seem very very coherent at this they use this with um which we'll discuss later how did they go about trying to keep the void center under their control so uh it seems as if an individual void mage is able to exert direct control to a degree but they they actually seem to give the voicing quite a lot of leeway because they send armies of them out without really much supervision um and the way they control them is using the null stone so to discuss the null zone it's essentially a super weapon but a very restricted one it can only affect void scent by sort of banishing them instantly if they break their pact it seems to be mostly used against the really high ranking void scent but its power was to specifically sever the soul of the void scent from its vessel and therefore force it back into the void yes right so there's a little bit of inconsistency here as well which is interesting so certain sources in the law say that only that when you use proper void magic only the really strong voids that need physical vessels and you can pull other ones in without it seems to imply that um whereas the null stone being used into all of them sort of implies that all of them had physical vessels so what i would imply is that it's able to essentially just um if we wanted a better word yeet unless avoids him out of the uh out of the source i mean frankly i think that is the most apt term you could use i mean you think about how cat says what cats does diablos and you know i think that eating is appropriate yeah i think i think you've got a point in that um but with stronger ones it absolutely you are right it cuts this tie between the physical form and the actual body of the width with that in mind then how did the void art function because specifically it seems that it's powered by void scent were they trapped or how how does it feed on them yeah absolutely so the voidok is um an active hubris on a grand scale which is very marquee that they like that quite apt it's a huge airship huge enough to carry either a majority or a significant chunk of mark's population livestock rations seeds supplies everything they needed to sort of restart and the ark like you said was powered by void sen and they sort of seal these voids and in the ship inside this big suck off a guy and they don't actually seem restricted to the ship because we know of them being used elsewhere with color wise um yes the maki uh these maki coffin devices are yeah seen in the red mage quest as well both with uh callaways and lilith the arc is if you go into there if you've done the rate you see just the walls are covered in these coffins and each one has or more likely had a void in it um and they were enough to sort of power it but to get it actually off the ground and to push it forward they needed a really really big one so again in an act of legendary hubris they decided to get a ruler a first ranked ruler of the void um and shove her into a really big one which was insane because they are extraordinarily powerful and wise um it would basically be akin to of summoning the cloud of darkness directly into our world in order to power a car essentially yeah pretty much um and to make it even more insane uh the knoll stone which as we discussed allowed them to uh counter void scent was gone it was covered by the flood waters so they couldn't actually use it um so what they didn't said was put and we'll discuss this character a little bit more later um the incredibly talented and kind which is the only time that you'll hear me say that about someone who lived in the fifth astral era um hi void mage sister blackwind she was given command of the ark and was told to essentially um keep all of the voyant under control especially skaha and cesar really disliked the idea of the void arc she told them that it was reckless and arrogant and dangerous since we're here why don't we just uh talk about her a little more she was also responsible for summoning diablos but not uh not under her not desirably she uh was very much a protester of the entire of uh mock's disposition for for warmongering yes so she was um arguably from what we read she seems almost like the greatest mage of mark at least in her lifetime um she was able to summon and bind really really powerful voyage like diablo since gaha and i think we can forgive her for not being able to control scar her and thousands of voids sent personally yeah yeah well and also i they they they make reference to the fact in the void art quest line that the main reason that the void arc seemed to have failed is because diablos is the one who taught them how to use many of the magics for it and that he had inherently sabotaged what they knew yes stabilis is very cunning and sabotages all of that yeah so so i i think she did not only better than could have been expected but she did everything right and sadly gave her life to make sure that even when it failed it would still the world would be safe yes so she did um so where mark was this deeply bloodthirsty conquering nation cesaro wanted either peace or at least a little bit of temperance in how they did war um although she summoned diablos she summoned him to act as a deterrent but the coven the ruling body of marx said no i think we're gonna throw him at amdapor um and like you said her her final act was ceiling skaha within the sarcophagus and that was the last thing she did before she died since we're hitting on the void arc why don't we then talk on where it was headed with dungeons so dunskey is this pre-constructed refuge essentially sort of a mini city built atop a floating island um where the void dock would dock and the people of mac would get out um the arc of course didn't reach it at least not with any people alive on it uh but duns gate was really rather beautiful and you know had these big lush gardens this elaborate sort of castle-like structures and manners and terrorist houses all throughout it sort of semi-victorian inspired to my eye yeah very much so though it's in in a way that's distinctly clean and elegant rather than not to say that victorian architecture isn't elegant at all times but when you tend to see it presented it's often there's a there's a dirt to it and both even in its own in its own uh media and its own depictions that's true i mean industrialization and all that but just a little fun um a fun fact for everybody here dunski's is a real castle um it was named for the personal castle of skaha from irish mythology and it's a real castle in scotland oh that that that's really cool and then also makes sense seeing as kaha ends up being one of the bosses for it exactly yes so if you want to discuss skaha again that is that is to the best of my knowledge how it's pronounced i'm not irish myself um but that is i think we can be forgiven for doing our best i mean there's literally there was an interview with a bunch of the voice actors for final fantasy 14 recently where they all said look we have a hard time with these names and are not necessarily sure what the correct pronunciation is so don't worry about it so i think if we do our due diligence and we do our best to get it right and then if we find out later via let's say a word that's never been said before ends up getting a voice line we'll just change it then yes agreed um so onto skaha she is like i said a first ranked voigton so in the void of hierarchy she's at the very top which normally implies that they sort of rule their own i'm not going to use the word nation because i don't think that's a fair term to apply to it but their ancient yeah their own territory whatever you want to call it within the void and she calls herself queen of the void which is not quite a true title because there's quite a lot of those who call themselves sort of monarchs of the void like cloud of darkness and all that yeah they all seem to think they're the number one so it's likely that there's quite a few of them yes yeah i agree completely um so scathach was like i said originally someone to power the void arc like a big sentient battery um but the restrictions uh that like you said diabetes have given them were failing over time pretty quickly actually as they sort of took off and uh uh cesar and she had 53 i think void majors with her um used their sort of final moments to seal the coffin so that scar wouldn't destroy the world because she was of course this extraordinarily powerful for incent um and this worked for a long time until diablo has managed to liberate her escarha her true form does not actually seem to resemble how we fight her um so like you touched on earlier elio um the monkey knew that if you put a really powerful void in a really fragile form it weakens them so they put skaha in the form of a very young very fragile woman um to sort of weaken her a little bit which is why she appears as she does when we find her in uh dunskeith as the second to last boss i believe of that she is the second to last bus yeah the final ones um devilish hollow and she's named just i'm not gonna do a fallout tomorrow's section but she's named for a legendary scottish warrior woman who ruled um in irish myth from the castleton skate i also believe that that is uh a naming schema though i don't know where it's used um but it's a very common practice for the final fantasy devs to use be it irish or other you know irish scottish or other mythological names for uh and repetition throughout the games it is so actually um within the voice in ffx movie um uh ferdiad who is a boss from um weeping city i believe i know he's actually the first boss from duns gate uh and poor heart yes and i'm the pohard he's the last boss of that uh is from the same mythological cycle and so is kukulen um from the uh from the dog yep and uh kate sith uh yeah okay yeah so it's it's a very it's a it's a common thing to see not some of the names are come from fully original and are just weird but often they're from mythological either heroes or creatures or even just historical names occasionally yeah definitely since we're talking about dunskate then let's talk about maki architecture because as much as we get to see it in the second alliance raid for the void arc the duns case is the first time that we truly get to see like a what mock might have actually looked like in its heyday yeah yeah i agree so um mark has quite a lot of influences from mikey none of them entirely um sort of obvious but um we know that most of the buildings are made out of stone um the majority of the houses like we said in dunski appear to be sort of british victorian inspired although a lot of them are sort of covered in these runic sigils so that's obviously a departure um meanwhile and this is entirely baseless but just coming for someone who lives in southeast asia um some of the towers that are in mark itself or this could just be the destruction um look almost southeast asian like khmer or sort of like some of the um indonesian places i've seen yeah they do with how with how sort of jagged and sort of turrity they are you know what it also reminds me of it even reminds me of when um the british empire came into a lot of the spaces or other western powers they would even when they made brick structures they would often even still have like that like much more elongated turdesque look to them um yeah quite a few places in japan like that um yeah so there's actually that's actually i hadn't thought of that but that's a really good i mean mac is the closest thing outside of elegant garlic and the guardians um that the closest thing sort of colonizing power that we have so that would make some sense um yeah especially if you think about amdapor almost like a mainland europe and then mach has the britain over in the corner being like i'm gonna i'm gonna get you guys [Laughter] um so obviously the defining structure of mark of the city is the huge pyramid um these sort of clean sheets of silvery plating all over and then the bottom of it looks almost like the void arc it looks almost organic flowing sort of almost grotesque in that way sort of looks like a circle yeah very gegeresque um and obviously that is where um osmo is and all that um yes asthma one of your favorite entities yes i do quite like azuma um so while we don't know much about sort of the influence behind the pyramid uh many civilizations have built pyramids i just think this pyramid looks really cool and that's the rationale behind that it makes me wonder if it's uh what is it called um it reminds me of the luxor in las vegas i can see that that's what i whenever i see it that's immediately the thing because even at the top of it it has a giant led light and so like the top of it it's tip is a is a light and there's the like near the top there's the barrier lines that create the false sky when you fight osma so that's that's just what i always think of meanwhile it reminds me of the bass pro um shop uh the pyramid okay fantastic okay sorry about that tension back onto sorry your love of asthma okay so um osmo is this artificial super weapon whereas the north stone is this really restricted super weapon that only works on potent osmo works on pretty much anything that you'd want um it was actually however built to destroy volitem it was intended to destroy whole armies of white and in one hot fel swoop um but later used to destroy whole chunks of enemy cities um well and we assume because the mid fight for osmo when you go into it basically you see floating parts of destroyed cities and very specifically you see parts of nimian cities yeah we would have to assume that it's an immunity it looks very obviously miriam it has nimian pillars with their designs and stuff if it's not and it's just an asset reuse it's such a flagrant if it was unintentional it's too ex too specific to discount um it's probably not just asset reuse also the devs historically even even at the worst of times have been very careful about stuff like that yes i agree um so osmo works by taking a big bite out of the world essentially and subjecting it to something that's called dimensional compression now i'm not totally sure what that is and it's not explained um but it does seem to contain these sort of destroyed areas within itself um or at least in an area that it can access um so i'm assuming that it's sort of like take putting in a pocket dimension essentially and sort of crushing it yeah my understanding was very much that it is basically if you took you know an area the size of a house and put it into a basketball and then compress it down to a basketball size without destroying the things within it and then storing them yeah i think that makes a lot of sense um interestingly it's a sulkin which sort of implies that it was an inanimate object before it got sort of filled full of magic turned into a big spectral orb um who knows what it was it could have been a big crystal or sort of a marquee mechanical device or honestly who knows with the marquee could have been something elegant i always like to put alec in these videos yeah well it's because i mean if you don't know and just shrugging and saying probably a lag you're not like there's at least a 50 50 you're right regardless of the topic um the thing that's so interesting about osma though is that the fact that it exists and yet it would didn't become the singular weapon of the society it didn't become like they continued to use void magics that continues to avoid sense it became more of a fail-safe really than a weapon that was i mean it was a weapon it was used against other cities but it it wasn't the leading man strangely yeah i i have to admit it is a little odd um one would imagine that the tales that we have of the era which uh in the universe we know quite a lot about the about the um the fifth uh astral era the people of ayoze know quite a lot about it um and by far it's the one we know the most about we know very we know painfully little about any of the other astral eras and what we know of the third is almost entirely about allag yes absolutely um so i i am surprised that every book written about the word of the majority does not contain asthma especially if it was used on them um yeah but that there are ways to rationalize it perhaps nim was literally so fraught and so destroyed that when ozma hit it when the refugees fled uh vilbrand they were happy to just forget about ingo back to their simple island lives it's also possible that it was so destructive that the people who were destroyed by it there's so few survivors left that there wasn't a lot of tales told yeah i think that's entirely plausible if it came into play late enough in the fifth astral era too it may not just have didn't have enough time to be seen in action yeah it could have been um who knows maybe they were wheeling out to unleash on amdapor before they discovered the calamity um and realized okay well we need to stop fighting yeah we have bigger issues now yeah existential doom is a little bit bigger than uh land grudges yeah so osmori is sort of an enigma but a really interesting one um and a really interesting way to put this um final fantasy 9 boss into into the universe we all love so much it's just very pretty too it is really pretty actually and this just because i think we're going to make a habit of this at this point noting interesting things in the environment when you fight osma if you look around you when you go up there it looks like you're outside it looks like you're there's a you're surrounded by sky but it also looks like a really bad jpeg if you look outside of the pyramid when you're when you're going through the alliance raid you realize what you're seeing is actually a fake projection of the sky and that's why it looks bad because pyramid at the top has actually four bands that are meant i don't know why they they're situated i don't know why they have that region where they had to make it look like fake sky but i guess they just didn't want to be surrounded by regular sites of mock yeah i wonder if maybe osmo just didn't look very good in the dark so they wanted to be like rather and they had already built the pyramid texture so rather than just scalp the top off of it they wanted to sort of like add this little section at the top it is interesting to note that assuming that they are magically created seeing as there wasn't a lot in the way of forge kin there that magic has the ability to create led screens which makes me wonder about like okay are there tvs in aorta in the future i mean i don't know i'm just saying i could see it i could see it the tower becomes a ceo oh my god tatara becoming a media magnate oh that is that is that is a theory i can get behind so situated within the pyramid itself is also califisteri which is a very interesting and important character yes i agree california is is very interesting so a lot of people who do the rage will probably look at california and think avoid scent um but she's not um she is a chimera actually uh she was a human magus of mark who was assigned to defend the molestone and sort of as mark fell california presumably recognized that the demands of her task were going to outstrip her um so she undertook this sort of dark ritual using aether crystals and void scent blood to turn herself into a chimera that sort of has um prehensile hair and all sorts of magical abilities um and also presumably immortality um and we can talk about her name being extremely similar to callaways who also used blood magic to influence a void scent in the red mage questlines and the fact that their names are very very similar um so that's something that i have been thinking on but haven't yet managed to create a theory for yeah whether it just be a simple echo of repetition or there being a lineage between them i think it's it's it's worthy of note that the kelloway's bloodline and its entire narrative around it is dealing with void scent blood and and that's also very specifically kala festeri's whole thing yeah it's remarkable enough to be remarked on yeah we have to discuss it we have to mention it so in the fallout of the sixth honorable calamity were led to the events of well we're led to the ex exodus from mock and of the people of both mock amdapor and nim to places like garibanya and that inexorably leads to the founding of bella daya so what is this sort of legacy going on there with those uh with those peoples right so we hear about three groups right that survive we hear about the voice the three groups that attempt to survive we hear about the void arc which fails we hear about the people who go to girbanya and later found alongside other refugees um al amiga and red mage red magic and red magic and then we hear about this other group that somehow escapes perhaps goes up to caribbean we'd have to assume um and then goes back and they find that your fame is a salt mall is uninhabitable um and while we don't know that the fans have better diet with these people i would assume so um just putting two or two together it makes sense and the marquee did indeed go on to found builder in fact more directly than any other state um than the gurubania or any of it states um belladoo is very very tight to the black mages of um of mark because after the calamity of water understandably people hated mages they destroyed civilization itself um and even those who casted even the the most simplest of magics that sort of that the hedge wizards and all of that faced really violent persecution um and a number of monkey majors fled civilization they sort of settled in the most remote areas of aortia we're not entirely sure where but somewhere near thanoland but over time sort of as they sort of preserved their traditions um prejudice dwindled and they were able to sort of travel so they traveled to sanolin which wasn't really very heavily inhabited at that point you know it's um it's a hostile landscape right um mostly populated by the amalga at that point and they actually use their magical abilities to find water sources so a peaceful use for either black magic or thermateurgy probably thormaturgy by that stage um and settle a town actually they founded a well on a water source which then became a town which then became the nation of baladaya that leads to still d uldah and basically at least the thanoland nation state that we know today yes yeah it definitely does we know that ulda's patron deity is uh naldthal but who is the patron deity of mock because we know amdapor was nafka right right that's correct so this is a really interesting question and there's a few ways to go on this um we don't know obviously um but i've seen some theorized that alfiek could be the patron i didn't really see much weight behind that they were saying that he could have been it because of his control of space and time but that's not really a marquee thing so no that that honestly is something that's proffered through multiple civilizations at random points that's it almost seems like all thick is very specifically no one's deity in specific yeah yeah i would have to agree um i mean osma's abilities are a little alpha key but yeah my argument would be that it would probably be nalto as well not now not only because of ulda's legacy not only ulda containing nalthal as its patron deity but because during the black mage quest lines weeks find books that were from the era of mock and the fifth astral era and they are specifically the books of gnoll and thawl which i mean yes you could argue could have been written by anyone but the fact that their black magic and void scent related is to me indicates that they were at least of the nation state of mock right so we've um we've discussed some some small rectifiable inconsistencies in this video so far but this one is a bigger one so encyclopedia rayoza itself states that kukuruka wrote the books of naltal then it also goes on to state that he developed his bright magic by finding a tome on black magic so we then have to sort of question which of the two it is um and obviously kukaruka thinks that he can hear the voice of nalthal in his head or of naldenthal in his head um so either he wrote the books of nalthal or he found the books of nalthal whichever way i think it's plausible that um mark worshipped naltal we see that there the the means that they used to um sort of confine the voyant is a sarcophagus or a coffin so uh nalton is a god of the afterlife of course you could sort of link those um so i think it's entirely plausible and at the order of nalthal itself so the the one that we meet in game the the black mage guild and the character thomas guild and the priests of nol tal in ulda know who shattered was they have quite a lot of knowledge on shitoto actually we found out so that could strengthen the theory that malthal was the god of mark i also have a theory which is that it could be ralga raga is much more convincing sorry not convincing uh raga raga's theory is much simpler um the meteor and destruction right so the maki have comets in their culture with chatoto who destroy the comet to save the world um and he's often related with destructive magics and warmongering so um now that i've looked into nonfarmhead all that i think they're sort of neck and neck for me um it could be either of the tail i mean i the fact that roger is supposed to be a magus right and the fact that he is so associated with a comet and all these things to me i think makes a lot of sense the only thing that may the only one that part that runs counter with roger is the fact that part of his symbol being a comet actually i would wonder how long his symbol has been the comet because there's the no no because i'm thinking about it backwards i just the comment that is followed in girabanya is then assumed to be roger's comet his symbol must have been the comet you far earlier than that i mean it's entirely the fact that they assumed that the comic was raga i would have to assume that right um if raga is not the god of mark he must have been a god of some civilization that had um that had refugees uh heading into urbana we might assume uh it may just be one of those mysteries that we never know it may be um something it so i when when i first heard this sir actually the naltol one i thought well then why did it go mark worship no at naltol bella daya worshiped azeemer um and then ulda worships naltal but then i thought and i thought well um bella daya wasn't as mercantile kingdom as as oldaris and malta is sort of a god of merchants so that would make sense sort of shifting back we it also makes you wonder though if the culture had shifted just a bit too during the time of you know living in thanolin and the sun right and how the sun is connected to culture and how azima's connection to the sun yeah i see that and from what we see of your fame although this again could be entirely because of the calamity or because of the void scent it seems pretty dull so you know it would make sense to switch away from that to a sun god when you move into a desert it's definitely a gloomy landscape it's definitely gloomy yeah i mean this with sincere love but it reminds me of my time in london um i was there for two weeks not a day was not overcast which i love like please give me overcast for every day but it was uh it was quite of a thing hey more links to the victoria yeah exactly there you go see okay with all that said then why don't we go ahead and talk about our sort of final remarks and any extra ideas that we have i for me one of the things that i really wanted to talk about is in dunscafe you see the a prototype ultima weapon what exactly is going on there with that so my theory with that has to be that so we know that mark knew about alec that they knew quite a lot about aleg and they even knew that they used void scent um so they had probably found sort of elegant ruins and i would just have to assume that they found this prototype and weaponized it one of the interesting thing that i believe it's ee2 notes that one of the things that makes the prototype ultimate weapon different from the regular one is that it's not pilotable and it's run by a very simple sort of ai program and that's why it doesn't actually function quite as well however it weirdly enough still has the ethereal capabilities of being able to draw in primal energies if not quite as well yeah it's it is an odd one i mean it's one of these things in one of the if it might be the only thing in the game that i look at and i think this might just be um sort of developer caveat um but uh i i would have to say that the most rationalizable explanation is that it's a primitive um but not entirely primitive form of ultima that they found sort of dug up and stuck in that pyramid uh no sorry stuck in dunski's uh presumably to defend the people of um to defend the people who have done skates uh from any void center might escape from the void dark it makes sense i mean they would have been severely hampered and weakened and even if we assume it wasn't specifically for the void scent it could have also been just deterred for any future you know attackers they wouldn't have the the armies at their beck and call that they would have had prior yeah that's true it would have just been a utopian society ruled by my favorite cesare i love your love for them i truly do love them just give you a nickname of cats kate sith um so i believe you said that you you told me uh that you had a sort of fun fact to mention yes i got two first one is that um so you know that the taurus voice and these big bulky uh voices another one the one that casts doom in you in um khan yes yeah so the taurus uh the the first boss of khan won the costume on you and that type of void zone um there's a comment in e1 uh it turns out that they used to get summoned accidentally all the time and that's actually what the one in khan is because priests like to sacrifice livestock in their rituals and chant over them and taurus likes to occupy the bodies of livestock and chanting and sort of religious acts can channel aether accidentally so they used to just summon these voyages all the time by accident oh that would be so much more funny if it wasn't so horrifying oh god that's that's i god okay just for anyone listening to this if you have a chance read encyclopedia or as you have volume one or two they are reprinting them they are going to be much cheaper to get a hold of and not even core knowledge the core information everything that you need to know for the story and even beyond is in the game but the little details just the little smidgens of things that are hidden within those books that just add a little extra flavor are just wonderful they are they're absolutely wonderful and i got one more fun fact um i'm not sure if anyone remembers it it might be mentioned in the questline i'm not sure if it is but kate sith um although i believe the japanese meant to catch you but um that would be that yeah that makes sense i think the actual way pronounce it is so the little cloak that he wears was hand sewn by cesar yes yes it's adorable and that's why and he uh has kept it safe and clean all even 1500 years later yeah it's just this week i love that the devs put these little sort of heartfelt things in the game yeah when all the little detail when all the major things matter and all the little details matter it's a lot easier to feel emotionally connected to what's going on yeah it absolutely is so i guess the final thing then to touch on is what is the legacy of right so while we didn't have much to sort of touch on with nim's legacy um mark we have a lot so black magic obviously um the paladins we wouldn't have paladins if we didn't have belladier yeah which was founded by maki um we didn't have all da we wouldn't have um we wouldn't have if we would have images yeah we wouldn't have black mage you wouldn't have white mages white magic was formed specifically to counter oh yeah uh mark obviously your fame has become sort of a the way that i imagine it because it's referred to as the weeping city and i imagine that is sort of a post error um thing that's been applied to it i imagine that it's sort of a horror story told to people that live nearby um i mean it's a very very imposing sign obviously extremely dangerous well and it feels ghostly and ethereal with the like magical flames that just like linger on and the corpses the ashkin that are all you know beyond just the voids and there's ashkin hanging around there is a lot of ashkin hanging around that's right um but i mean we wouldn't see um al amigo in the way that we do without um without you wouldn't have read magic we wouldn't see red magic exactly um we wouldn't know nearly as much about the voyager i don't think no because i mean beyond the alligan's you know experience with them there was not another culture that seemed to have contended with them to nowhere near the same extent as far as we know the one interesting thing to note though is whether or not reapers will have in any way have been part of the legacy of mock yeah so that's a really interesting thing to discuss isn't it yeah i mean there's only so much speculation we can have but we know that that it was a sort of ill-sibarian art but one of the things there's two things that it's interesting to me one of which is that it would make sense for a legacy if someone in mock it's 1500 years of time right there's plenty of time for people to go to ilsa bard after the fall of you know mock and amdapor and then be there for a time and that are eventually becoming that or well not or but and it's really fascinating to note that the place you pick up reaper is ulda that is interesting i'm really excited to see how that goes on your topic of isobarian migration i mean uh so we have this huge community of making at least this significant community of marquis settling down in gurubania and a lot of the black mages and a lot of the white mages say okay we're going to stop drawing on ambient aether and start drawing on their own aether and become red mages um presumably there were some black mages that said i don't want to do that and where is there left to go besides back into the place that you've just run away from in girabanya you have to go straight to israel you have to go through the um oh my god why am i forgetting it's the uh gimlet dark yeah and i mean who besides the black mage like a community of black mages they're pretty well equipped to go through goomba dark yeah yeah and to make that full journey uh the beauty of trying to speculate on a class that you have a paragraph for yes that's the situation we find ourselves in i'm not even trying to speculate about sage no no no no i mean like as far as i'm concerned until i hear otherwise it's just like yeah the the charlaines were charlene's and they made sage you know it's okay maybe i have one small theory about sage yeah which is that they're the little gundam guns are related to the bits the you know the um elegant boots or the gallium um no so it's called the bit so you know what when you're doing a boss fight against the guardian bus and those little tiny hovering things come out yeah yeah sorry yes the new list sorry yeah so nero created those personally uh well recreated them from elegant ruins um and they they're kind of similar right so maybe there's something there what's interesting to me is that it doesn't seem that charlene has been as obsessive about allag as garlic garlamalde or even neorzia has necessarily been so yeah it would make me wonder the thing that's i think to me the most interesting thing about sage by far is not even necessarily the specifics it will be whether or not sage has developed in between the time of um the twins existing in cherlene and now or if sage has been a thing that's been around for a long time like that's to me is i think what's going to be the biggest defining not biggest defining people that's going to tell you a lot about the world state of the world and about yeah arts like that yeah like is it a mechanist style new does it or is it like a source sorry summoners this sort of style we've rediscovered this ancient technique or something yeah entirely is it something that we find in uh labyrinthos for instance it could be yeah um the guardians for bearers were once yep guardians four bears there we go yep the guardians four bears were once humble farmers who made their home among the sun-drenched fields of southern ilsibard that was until they were driven from this paradise by invaders wielding arcane magics forcing force north into the frigid mountains the survivors saw a means to tap into the reservoir of aether otherwise close to them a daring few found their answer within the void binding themselves to its creatures to gain verboten power power fed by the souls of the slain once more they took up their sides this time to reap a crimson harvest so that's interesting then so it's not just communist ones it might not be marquee but they could have had contact with them certainly um and it's post ridierana then so they've left the lighthouse in the island um by that point well but the thing about this too so there's two things going on here though right one of which is that they didn't necessarily have much in the way of etheric powers they would have needed someone who knew the art to figure out how to so they could have had contact with at least a singular machi individual and that's the person who would have helped them find out about it now multiple cultures are able to experience the void without like needing that so it's very possible it's not but it isn't it is i don't think this discounts the idea that mock did not in some way talk connect to the legacy of reapers yeah it's entirely plausible um i mean there's so many you could also go i mean the guardians love them some alex they may not have loved alex so much back then um because you know solos wasn't around but yes that's true maybe they found an elegant record or something um i mean it could really be anything and i'm i'm extremely excited to go and find out what it is me too i mean i i'm not having trouble with this but boy am i like okay do i need to like take a break from the msq to go play the like job stories just because not even for not even because i want sage and reaper which i do but not even for that but just because i was like i want to know their what is their lore like yeah tell me yeah so what i did in i used to be an astromage uh astra mean and what i did in heaven's world was i well in the early access actually i went back and leveled it i spammed um kwan and then i spammed every other dungeon except for aurum which i insisted on going and doing eastern tunnel in um levels instead um but uh i don't know if i'm gonna do that with sage i'm probably gonna go white mage and then go back i think i think that's what i'm gonna do too because one i'm gonna have a at least a week set aside for it so i think i can complete the msq within that time but on top of it i'm not worried about someone like accidentally spoiling me on reaper lore like if someone does tell me a thing on that i'm like i'm not gonna be like oh i'm gonna be like oh okay cool you know like it's not nearly as big an issue whereas like a plot beat oh yeah yeah that would be extremely frustrating well this has been yet another lovely conversation uh yeah it absolutely has we've gotten a little off topic but i hope that the viewers enjoy that well on the bright side i can always add that stuff to the extras for patreon members so it's never never quite a problem that's true since i do the editing there's uh no no big worries um so i've been elio forsharon uh and i've been the neary neary and thank you so much for listening yeah it's been a real pleasure to talk to you all see you next episode see ya 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 you

Channel: The Eorzean Archives

Views: 11,899

Keywords: FFXIV, eorzea, ilsabard, final fantasy, ff14, squareenix, square enix, eorzean, archives, explained, shadowbringers, endwalker, lore, au ra, a realm reborn, wanders palace, oschon, ARR, la noscea, limsa, limsa lominsa, vylbrand, fairy, allag, allagan, 5th astral era, astral era, 6th umbral calamity, flood, podcast, mhach, mhachi, void ark, voidark, voidsent, black mage, BLM, weeping city, diablos, scathatch

Id: 86PNTcnLYlU

Length: 66min 5sec (3965 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 09 2021