I think it's also worth noting with the "we should fight the elementals" argument, that even with the cultural context, the elementals aren't really shown to be helpful. We are told they are helpful, and told quite often, but early on in arr we are shown what their deal is "A man is sick and we won't help him because he is different." He is not in a worse spot than he would be anywhere else, because Gridania is the only place that let's healing be handled exclusively by the church. We are also show in EW that the elementals won't help when they are scared. The few positives we do see from them are usually "Their wrath was pointed at someone else." I don't want them dead, I don't mind their role in the story, but I can't blame anyone who doesn't like them, because their aid is generally speaking nebulous at best. Y'shtola's saving was a good start, but there are many times where the shroud's prosperity could have been more explicitly credited to the elementals if you ask me. Honestly Gridania needs a bit of a lens put on it, like we got with limsa in post shadow bringers, or Ul'dah in any given part of the story.
TBF they're not really helpful or harmful, they're just indifferent, gridania just has permission to exist in their realm because they fight in such an attritional manner that the elementals kinda respect, and Kanne-senna being probably one of the few people who has the balls to even try checking them. But realistically outside of the WoL there is kinda FA anyone could do if one day they decided gridania was a bit too annoying a presence to them and just wiped it off the map. Sure, the bear in your garden might be something you want to remove at some point, but the bear has friends just on the treeline, and they all have heavy artillery and and RPGs the collateral damage will be immense and unavoidable. Baelsar's wall was as much about keeping the elementals away as it was the alliance probably moreso.
I was so invested listening to your video, especially when you pointed out that our primary interaction with the game is violence. I paused for a sec to wrestle with myself about how we have had moments where the answer to a problem was to lower our weapons and talk, but somehow that's not enough for some people because it's not "active" enough. And lo and behold, when I continued listening you called out those reasons too! I would love a variant dungeon about Gridania's history and Gelmorra, and I can see us helping one or both of the Senna siblings investigate it in search for Oha Sokk (I think I got the spelling right?). Thank you for this video!
The correct spelling according to 1.0 is Oha-Sok, but I was spelling it with double Ks in my script to make sure I hit the sound, and I don't know nearly enough about the Ainu language to know how transliterating it would work anyway. FFXIV has an interesting clash between recognizing that violence shouldn't always be the answer, but also that violence is a REALLY FUN answer, and you can rwally see the results of that at play both in the audience and the game itself.
@@EinDosethat tension does kinda come from the very thing that's actually iterated on quite a bit and best put by the scythe wielding "friend" at the edge of reality, the WoL is kinda at their core someone who started in probably the most violence oriented occupations in Eorzean, and especially during a time where violence was a preferred method. The WoL is also often used by those around them, especially the nation leaders as a kind of WMD, we're brought to negotiations as an intrisic threat to the other party and are even seen by those who somehow survived our slaughters as something out of a horror movie, the mere sight of sending them into panic attacks. Even when violence isn't our primary goal, or our goal at all, our very presence in a situation tends to be an immediate perceived escalation of force and we aren't exactly averse to the idea of getting our hands dirty. Hell, dark knight adds the fact that mentally, we aren't exactly the most stable of people, with that wild bloodthirsty side of us actually disturbing us and creating both self esteem and guilt issues strong enough to not only disassociate when given the chance but full on manifest those disassociations into physical forms
You have articulated things I have been thinking for months and years- the player bases' in-build desire to fight everything and anything best summed up by Hydaelyn, plus yes that Western and especially US-centric dislike of more shamanistic religious attitudes coupled with a general disdain or at best paternalistic view of nature. And how much I want a Gridanian (Gelmorran) variant dungeon precisely because Gridania and its elementals gets brushed off by the general and lore-focused player base and that because it would be combat-based content it wouldn't be overlooked like BOT, LTW, and CRP are but that it would by necessity of a variant be more than just 'fight an elemental trial boss'.
This is super interesting. As a duskwight WoL, my sympathies for Gridania are...still in the negative over a decade later, but I've warmed to some of the characters. Elementals, to me, are basically a non-issue at this point. Don't like 'em, but whatever. They're there to stay. The people though...look no further than the two Wailers hassling a Duskwight kid in city limits, either outside of the Archer's guild or the Lancer's. ACAB, essentially.
Given that they "reported to" Nophica in the end quests to Euphrosyne, I am guessing they are the very same elementals that we see in Elpis. They are likely single minded magical beings that don't have a lot of time for any person or thing that gets in the way of their jobs. We could very well find out that they are tied to her in the final segment of the raids (Thalia). I have a strong feeling that Nophica was the ancient Cloris (A name meaning "Green" or "Blooming" from the ancient Greek Khloros) located at the aptly named Twelve Wonders. She has a quest where she explains that their purpose there is to regulate the flow of various aspects of aether to maintain the various biomes in Elips so life can be sustained. It involves inspecting the flower beds which results in getting attacked by an earth sprite which she says is a byproduct of too much of that type of aether in one place. As an aside, the flower beds around the twelve wonders form the wheel of the twelve if you fly to max height and look straight down at the wonders.
I didn't mention the Nophica part because it's hard to tell how true or important it is, since the intention of that line is more to be Nophica's alibi for the lie she's IMMEDIATELY caught out in. As to the Elpis stuff, I think you're mixing up the Elementals and the sprites; understandable, a lot of people did that, but they are different. The Elementals are also in Elpis, but they're made by a different guy, a man named Epiphron.
Always felt there was a small bit of druidism/Druidry and maybe shamanism within the white mage stuff. In some Celtic pantheons some behave very similar to the elementals to some capacity. There is an Irish goddess called the Sionnan where a river is called after her and she behaves very much like a water elemental do. if you don't take care of the river she will be anger towards you. I'm probably way off here, but this is perspective from growing up in Ireland.
There's definitely an echo in there; I don't know if it's necessarily an intended one by the devs or sort of a parallel belief to what they were inspired by. Both druidism and Shintoism essentially came from trying to ascribe agency and personality to nature, which by necessity requires them to be unruly and difficult, because sometimes nature just lashes out.
The problem with “let’s kill the Elementals” to me is that they are, by all technicalities, another race of sentient people that deserve respect in the exact same way as beast tribes have been elevated to allied tribes. The issue is the Elementals saw *US* as the beastly ones and things like the laws they implemented to protect the forest and Padjali and hearer intermediaries were the method to find harmony between the two very different species. I just have a hard time with the idea of wiping them out after HW and EW had plots dealing with literal aliens with vastly different rules around how life fundamentally works for them finding a peaceful compromise with the races we get to play as.
So if you want an example of people talking to solve their problems yet the community complaining about the lack of "action" in the game is to look no further then Endwalker. Most issues in that game were resolved without the use of violence when you get to the nitty griddy. We would "fight" to level the playing field, then resolve the issues in of themselves required the WoL to force equal grounds between 2 parties to talk. Garlemald was resolved with talking. Old Sharlayan was resolved with talking. Even the final fight with Meteion was resolved with opening our own soul for her to read into. Endwalker was filled with plots being resolved from talking. But if you look at the "casual" speech among ffxiv players, they would say there was not enough "fighting".
The role quests (including tank) are a great example of how to balance it in a way that makes people happy. There's something to fight, but that's mostly the short term problem for us to solve while everyone else grapples with a more societal problem.
@EinDose As much as I did not like the role quests stories, I do agree they had a good balance. I also will say I have no issue with talking resolving issues. It's what I really loved about Endwalker. We didn't need to force submission of peace but aim for those who want to prevent the talks from happening in the first place. WoL became less of a peace enforcer but more of a peace creator.
There is a chance the elementals might have been a core element of shadowbringers. They might have been the fey. Or at least to start out with. Later into the development they might have shifted to something else, but they share a lot of basic traits.
Another thing I don't see mentioned enough is that the elementals were there first. It's their homeland that they agreed to share with Gridania in an act of generosity. The implications and parallels of killing them to better exploit their land are. . . Not Great
It's absolutely a valid point to make, but given how many people aren't sympathetic to that logic in real life, it's also maybe not the most convincing one.
I think the big problem with the elementals is just... almost every interaction we *personally* have with them is negative. Either they're absentee authority figures whose inability or refusal to act causes problems, or when they *are* active, it's usually to bring down the wrath of God on some poor schmuck. It doesn't help that they're barely active in 2.0 onwards and almost everything they do in 1.0 is "kill people." There definitely is a cultural disconnect here - similar to the differences in reactions to Hydaelyn's death between the Japanese community versus the English community and the reactions to Shadow of Werlyt between the Japanese community versus the English and Korean communities - but the game almost never shows the positive side of the elementals, and usually only after having to practically pull teeth to get them to do anything. Explanations for why they suck are plentiful, explanations for why they're necessary are few and generally put in out-of-the-way side content, with most positive comments being vague platitudes (see: Nophica's talk in Myths of the Realm).
We actually have had positive experiences with them in the live game, it's just usually not an unvarnished positivity. It'd be really hard to write a story where we have positive interactions, though, because... well, we're not farmers, we don't care if the crops are good.
@@EinDose The two main positive interactions that immediately spring to mind are 1. Saving Y'shtola from the Lifestream, which *is* good, but also, like... Emet-Selch did the same thing, and he's still an omnicidal bad guy, even with extremely understandable motivations on his side. Saving Y'shtola from the Lifestream is not exactly a sign of strong moral fiber. 2. Helping out in the tank role quests, which is also good, but also falls into the "practically pulling teeth trying to get the elementals to do something" category, as well as being locked being having a lv90 tank, making it *very* easy to miss.
800% agree with the variant dungeon. I was hoping this one would've been it tbh. It feels like gridania got left out real bad after such good msq moments for limsa and ul'dah. And it really slaps the exploration and atmosphere in front of the combat. Also I think they taste good, probably like sugar cubes.
I think the only reason people want to fight or kill the Elementals is that they are god-like creatures reveared by a nation. And since gamers want to kill gods and god-like creatures out of principal, they think its a swell idea -.-
I do feel that it is a mix of somehow killing the elementals would solve Gridania's xenophobic and racist problems. Along with some people having a deep seething for anything that could be labeled as tree hugging hippies. It doesn't help that post relaunch you only see physical forms the Black Shroud elementals in one of the later cnj quests. I feel that between guarding Amdapor Keep and the Lost City from your average person whatever else they're dealing with has them so busy they need others help to put out the smaller fires. Probably doesn't help that we haven't seen them vaporize a poacher or two in "recent" time.
It would be nice to see them really flex their power again, but I worry that if you do it improperly then it'd just flip these kinds of people into 'see we're right, they are dangerous'.
There's less 1.0 lore than you think that didn't just carry over into the live game, but now that I say that, that might in fact mean it's an interesting focus for a video. "Okay, you think you missed things in 1.0? Here's ALL OF IT, it's not much."
I can't believe people want to fight the Elementals! 😢 I NEVER felt like they were a danger unless you harm the Shroud. And why, as the WOL, would we do that?
@Cleretic I see, I've never played 1.0. 👀 I wonder why the Elementals aren't as outwardly active after Bahamut's attack? They seem so much more "docile."
I feel like elementals arent necessarily that strong. There were elementals on Eureka, where elements were significantly stronger due to imbalance, and yet an AoE or two from a mob is enough to kill one of them.
you haven't mentioned the Elementals being revealed to be the minions of Nophica who seems equally stupid/ditzy to the point Halone looks out for her. the elementals carry out Nophica's charge.
I mentioned it back in the 6.3 roundup, but I missed it here because it honestly doesn't seem super relevant or useful, nor necessarily completely true; that scene is Nophica being caught out in a lie, so it casts some doubt on the other things she said. I also really don't read Nophica as stupid or ditzy for that reason, she was just distracted and not great at lying.
I think people want to murder the elementals because they are mad about all the fetch quests they've had to do for them. Ask Minfilia how much players want to kill you if you give them a bunch of fetch quests.
I think it's also worth noting with the "we should fight the elementals" argument, that even with the cultural context, the elementals aren't really shown to be helpful. We are told they are helpful, and told quite often, but early on in arr we are shown what their deal is "A man is sick and we won't help him because he is different." He is not in a worse spot than he would be anywhere else, because Gridania is the only place that let's healing be handled exclusively by the church. We are also show in EW that the elementals won't help when they are scared. The few positives we do see from them are usually "Their wrath was pointed at someone else." I don't want them dead, I don't mind their role in the story, but I can't blame anyone who doesn't like them, because their aid is generally speaking nebulous at best. Y'shtola's saving was a good start, but there are many times where the shroud's prosperity could have been more explicitly credited to the elementals if you ask me. Honestly Gridania needs a bit of a lens put on it, like we got with limsa in post shadow bringers, or Ul'dah in any given part of the story.
TBF they're not really helpful or harmful, they're just indifferent, gridania just has permission to exist in their realm because they fight in such an attritional manner that the elementals kinda respect, and Kanne-senna being probably one of the few people who has the balls to even try checking them. But realistically outside of the WoL there is kinda FA anyone could do if one day they decided gridania was a bit too annoying a presence to them and just wiped it off the map. Sure, the bear in your garden might be something you want to remove at some point, but the bear has friends just on the treeline, and they all have heavy artillery and and RPGs the collateral damage will be immense and unavoidable. Baelsar's wall was as much about keeping the elementals away as it was the alliance probably moreso.
I was so invested listening to your video, especially when you pointed out that our primary interaction with the game is violence. I paused for a sec to wrestle with myself about how we have had moments where the answer to a problem was to lower our weapons and talk, but somehow that's not enough for some people because it's not "active" enough. And lo and behold, when I continued listening you called out those reasons too! I would love a variant dungeon about Gridania's history and Gelmorra, and I can see us helping one or both of the Senna siblings investigate it in search for Oha Sokk (I think I got the spelling right?). Thank you for this video!
The correct spelling according to 1.0 is Oha-Sok, but I was spelling it with double Ks in my script to make sure I hit the sound, and I don't know nearly enough about the Ainu language to know how transliterating it would work anyway.
FFXIV has an interesting clash between recognizing that violence shouldn't always be the answer, but also that violence is a REALLY FUN answer, and you can rwally see the results of that at play both in the audience and the game itself.
@@EinDose does the padjal and elementals reference the ainu language? That's incredible I never knew that!
@@EinDosethat tension does kinda come from the very thing that's actually iterated on quite a bit and best put by the scythe wielding "friend" at the edge of reality, the WoL is kinda at their core someone who started in probably the most violence oriented occupations in Eorzean, and especially during a time where violence was a preferred method. The WoL is also often used by those around them, especially the nation leaders as a kind of WMD, we're brought to negotiations as an intrisic threat to the other party and are even seen by those who somehow survived our slaughters as something out of a horror movie, the mere sight of sending them into panic attacks. Even when violence isn't our primary goal, or our goal at all, our very presence in a situation tends to be an immediate perceived escalation of force and we aren't exactly averse to the idea of getting our hands dirty. Hell, dark knight adds the fact that mentally, we aren't exactly the most stable of people, with that wild bloodthirsty side of us actually disturbing us and creating both self esteem and guilt issues strong enough to not only disassociate when given the chance but full on manifest those disassociations into physical forms
You have articulated things I have been thinking for months and years- the player bases' in-build desire to fight everything and anything best summed up by Hydaelyn, plus yes that Western and especially US-centric dislike of more shamanistic religious attitudes coupled with a general disdain or at best paternalistic view of nature. And how much I want a Gridanian (Gelmorran) variant dungeon precisely because Gridania and its elementals gets brushed off by the general and lore-focused player base and that because it would be combat-based content it wouldn't be overlooked like BOT, LTW, and CRP are but that it would by necessity of a variant be more than just 'fight an elemental trial boss'.
This is super interesting. As a duskwight WoL, my sympathies for Gridania are...still in the negative over a decade later, but I've warmed to some of the characters.
Elementals, to me, are basically a non-issue at this point. Don't like 'em, but whatever. They're there to stay.
The people though...look no further than the two Wailers hassling a Duskwight kid in city limits, either outside of the Archer's guild or the Lancer's. ACAB, essentially.
Given that they "reported to" Nophica in the end quests to Euphrosyne, I am guessing they are the very same elementals that we see in Elpis. They are likely single minded magical beings that don't have a lot of time for any person or thing that gets in the way of their jobs. We could very well find out that they are tied to her in the final segment of the raids (Thalia). I have a strong feeling that Nophica was the ancient Cloris (A name meaning "Green" or "Blooming" from the ancient Greek Khloros) located at the aptly named Twelve Wonders. She has a quest where she explains that their purpose there is to regulate the flow of various aspects of aether to maintain the various biomes in Elips so life can be sustained. It involves inspecting the flower beds which results in getting attacked by an earth sprite which she says is a byproduct of too much of that type of aether in one place. As an aside, the flower beds around the twelve wonders form the wheel of the twelve if you fly to max height and look straight down at the wonders.
I didn't mention the Nophica part because it's hard to tell how true or important it is, since the intention of that line is more to be Nophica's alibi for the lie she's IMMEDIATELY caught out in.
As to the Elpis stuff, I think you're mixing up the Elementals and the sprites; understandable, a lot of people did that, but they are different. The Elementals are also in Elpis, but they're made by a different guy, a man named Epiphron.
Always felt there was a small bit of druidism/Druidry and maybe shamanism within the white mage stuff. In some Celtic pantheons some behave very similar to the elementals to some capacity. There is an Irish goddess called the Sionnan where a river is called after her and she behaves very much like a water elemental do. if you don't take care of the river she will be anger towards you. I'm probably way off here, but this is perspective from growing up in Ireland.
There's definitely an echo in there; I don't know if it's necessarily an intended one by the devs or sort of a parallel belief to what they were inspired by. Both druidism and Shintoism essentially came from trying to ascribe agency and personality to nature, which by necessity requires them to be unruly and difficult, because sometimes nature just lashes out.
Excellent video, research, contextualization, and arguments
You do very good work.
The problem with “let’s kill the Elementals” to me is that they are, by all technicalities, another race of sentient people that deserve respect in the exact same way as beast tribes have been elevated to allied tribes. The issue is the Elementals saw *US* as the beastly ones and things like the laws they implemented to protect the forest and Padjali and hearer intermediaries were the method to find harmony between the two very different species.
I just have a hard time with the idea of wiping them out after HW and EW had plots dealing with literal aliens with vastly different rules around how life fundamentally works for them finding a peaceful compromise with the races we get to play as.
So if you want an example of people talking to solve their problems yet the community complaining about the lack of "action" in the game is to look no further then Endwalker. Most issues in that game were resolved without the use of violence when you get to the nitty griddy. We would "fight" to level the playing field, then resolve the issues in of themselves required the WoL to force equal grounds between 2 parties to talk. Garlemald was resolved with talking. Old Sharlayan was resolved with talking. Even the final fight with Meteion was resolved with opening our own soul for her to read into. Endwalker was filled with plots being resolved from talking. But if you look at the "casual" speech among ffxiv players, they would say there was not enough "fighting".
The role quests (including tank) are a great example of how to balance it in a way that makes people happy. There's something to fight, but that's mostly the short term problem for us to solve while everyone else grapples with a more societal problem.
@EinDose As much as I did not like the role quests stories, I do agree they had a good balance. I also will say I have no issue with talking resolving issues. It's what I really loved about Endwalker. We didn't need to force submission of peace but aim for those who want to prevent the talks from happening in the first place. WoL became less of a peace enforcer but more of a peace creator.
There is a chance the elementals might have been a core element of shadowbringers. They might have been the fey. Or at least to start out with. Later into the development they might have shifted to something else, but they share a lot of basic traits.
Another thing I don't see mentioned enough is that the elementals were there first. It's their homeland that they agreed to share with Gridania in an act of generosity. The implications and parallels of killing them to better exploit their land are. . . Not Great
It's absolutely a valid point to make, but given how many people aren't sympathetic to that logic in real life, it's also maybe not the most convincing one.
I think the big problem with the elementals is just... almost every interaction we *personally* have with them is negative. Either they're absentee authority figures whose inability or refusal to act causes problems, or when they *are* active, it's usually to bring down the wrath of God on some poor schmuck. It doesn't help that they're barely active in 2.0 onwards and almost everything they do in 1.0 is "kill people."
There definitely is a cultural disconnect here - similar to the differences in reactions to Hydaelyn's death between the Japanese community versus the English community and the reactions to Shadow of Werlyt between the Japanese community versus the English and Korean communities - but the game almost never shows the positive side of the elementals, and usually only after having to practically pull teeth to get them to do anything. Explanations for why they suck are plentiful, explanations for why they're necessary are few and generally put in out-of-the-way side content, with most positive comments being vague platitudes (see: Nophica's talk in Myths of the Realm).
We actually have had positive experiences with them in the live game, it's just usually not an unvarnished positivity. It'd be really hard to write a story where we have positive interactions, though, because... well, we're not farmers, we don't care if the crops are good.
@@EinDose The two main positive interactions that immediately spring to mind are
1. Saving Y'shtola from the Lifestream, which *is* good, but also, like... Emet-Selch did the same thing, and he's still an omnicidal bad guy, even with extremely understandable motivations on his side. Saving Y'shtola from the Lifestream is not exactly a sign of strong moral fiber.
2. Helping out in the tank role quests, which is also good, but also falls into the "practically pulling teeth trying to get the elementals to do something" category, as well as being locked being having a lv90 tank, making it *very* easy to miss.
800% agree with the variant dungeon. I was hoping this one would've been it tbh. It feels like gridania got left out real bad after such good msq moments for limsa and ul'dah. And it really slaps the exploration and atmosphere in front of the combat.
Also I think they taste good, probably like sugar cubes.
The lightning one HAS to be the best-tasting. It's purple, the purple one always tastes the best!
I think the only reason people want to fight or kill the Elementals is that they are god-like creatures reveared by a nation. And since gamers want to kill gods and god-like creatures out of principal, they think its a swell idea -.-
I do feel that it is a mix of somehow killing the elementals would solve Gridania's xenophobic and racist problems. Along with some people having a deep seething for anything that could be labeled as tree hugging hippies.
It doesn't help that post relaunch you only see physical forms the Black Shroud elementals in one of the later cnj quests. I feel that between guarding Amdapor Keep and the Lost City from your average person whatever else they're dealing with has them so busy they need others help to put out the smaller fires.
Probably doesn't help that we haven't seen them vaporize a poacher or two in "recent" time.
It would be nice to see them really flex their power again, but I worry that if you do it improperly then it'd just flip these kinds of people into 'see we're right, they are dangerous'.
pls more 1.0 lore stuff!!
There's less 1.0 lore than you think that didn't just carry over into the live game, but now that I say that, that might in fact mean it's an interesting focus for a video. "Okay, you think you missed things in 1.0? Here's ALL OF IT, it's not much."
I can't believe people want to fight the Elementals! 😢
I NEVER felt like they were a danger unless you harm the Shroud. And why, as the WOL, would we do that?
They were dangers in 1.0, but I feel like that gets VASTLY overblown in some people's minds.
@Cleretic I see, I've never played 1.0. 👀
I wonder why the Elementals aren't as outwardly active after Bahamut's attack? They seem so much more "docile."
I feel like elementals arent necessarily that strong. There were elementals on Eureka, where elements were significantly stronger due to imbalance, and yet an AoE or two from a mob is enough to kill one of them.
Very different priorities there, though!
you haven't mentioned the Elementals being revealed to be the minions of Nophica who seems equally stupid/ditzy to the point Halone looks out for her. the elementals carry out Nophica's charge.
I mentioned it back in the 6.3 roundup, but I missed it here because it honestly doesn't seem super relevant or useful, nor necessarily completely true; that scene is Nophica being caught out in a lie, so it casts some doubt on the other things she said.
I also really don't read Nophica as stupid or ditzy for that reason, she was just distracted and not great at lying.
I think people want to murder the elementals because they are mad about all the fetch quests they've had to do for them. Ask Minfilia how much players want to kill you if you give them a bunch of fetch quests.
There's definitely an edge of this, but they're fairly distant from a lot of the required busywork, so I feel like it's minor.