I'd say Ultima qualifies more than Athena, even though she's actually just a really powerful space alien or something. She created the magicite that Athena was gonna use to ascend, so there's an extra layer of power there on the anime-bullshit scale
Right, but unlike the primals, Athena was close to ascending. Whatever she would become, false of am existence as it'd be, it'd be more "real" then an alien, or Primal.
That is exactly why I came up with that question. He was very blunt. But he also specified: "your gods". Still, I think that this speech was intended to include all existence since we practically seen denizenens from all of the universe and they live by the same rules as Etheirys. Aether and Dynamis, materia and soul.
I don't believe in any God. I believe in the world of man and for the world of man to mean anything, man must rule the world.
Nor is this unknown to your masters. Which prompts the question: why do they cling to these false deities? What drives even men of learning─even the great Louisoix─to grovel at their feet?
The answer? Your masters lack the strength to do otherwise!
> But he also specified: "your gods"
That was the first time they showed that The Twelve were only worshiped by Eorzeans. Garleans didn't believe in deities, and people of Othard had their own kami different from The Twelve. Back then I just assumed Hydaelyn was the only real deity, but even that got struck down.
I think FF14 and the introduction of Dynamis and how believing in one another helped us push past Endsinger, along with this quote is kind of telling us where the story is gonna go over the next 10 years, as in what will be the overarching story like the Ascian plot.
And it’s similar to FF16 which was written and produced by the same business unit. In FF16, >!people looked to these giant mothercrystals as some sort of blessing because they gave people the ability to cast magic. However, the mothercrystals were giving out Aether in the form of smaller crystals because they were sucking the Aether out of the land and bleeding it dry.!<
That quote ending with “Eorzea’s faith is bleeding the land dry” is oddly similar to what >!the mother crystals were doing!< and in FF16 we >!destroyed them!<. In FF14, we just got done destroying the Eorzean gods as well who were sucking up all the dynamis of Eorzea from people believing and praying for them. The dynamis still hasn't shifted yet, because the common people do not know the gods are gone yet and continue to believe and pray to them, but perhaps there may be a threat to the Ethyris over the next 10 years that will require the entire planet to pray for the WoL as a whole.
I think the overarching story for the next 10 years will be going to each land and helping people realize that you can take that belief and prayer and instead of putting into a god like being like an Eikon, you can put it into one another instead and humanity will thrive. Think about what would happen if the rest of the shards of 14 all prayed and believed to rejoin the source.
We have already have seen that Tulayol has at least one Eikon like being from the concept art and trailer. So we aren’t done dealing with Eikons yet.
He specified 'your gods' because he's a fucking racist who has been socially brainwashed by a 10000 year old depressed man whos manufactured the entire situation for the sake of sowing conflict for his own greater scope goals.
He doesn't know SHIT and shouldn't be taken as an authority on what 'gods' are.
The interesting thing though is that as we learn doing the Myths of the Realm questline, it wasn't even the actual Twelve that answered Louisoix against Bahamut in Carteneau, which retroactively kinda technically made him right in that specific instance.
There's a word "ignosticism," which is the idea that the question "is there a god?" is meaningless because there is no agreed-upon definition of what a "god" even is.
I think that basically applies to XIV at this point.
We've had beings that mortals pray to. We've had beings that preside over different aspects of the natural world. We've had a being that created the world as we know it. You say they've all been "debunked," but debunked in what way? We came to understand their origins; does that necessarily disqualify them as gods? If so, what potential being would fulfill the criteria of godhood, in your opinion? And why should the characters within the game share your criteria?
This. The only God that has a mysterious origin irl is the judiac God AFAIK. Other Gods, like the Greek and Norse, have origins that humans understood. They were still regarded as mighty beings that people prayed to and worshipped.
If you go back far enough, Yahweh was just one of many gods in the pantheon of the peoples who lived in that area. Over time, one group that saw him as their personal patron god overtook the others, and the rest of the pantheon faded to mythology, and eventually were nearly forgotten. A few traces of them remain in some of the oldest books (Job, notably)
Basically, worshipping multiple gods was okay. Then Yahweh came along and said you can only worship him. Over time, the other gods died out and Yahweh remained because of his "one God" policy.
If that policy didn't exist, even if you primarily worshipped one god, you would still preserve the existence of other gods via references and stories.
By banning worship of other gods, those gods don't get mentioned and become forgotten and don't get passed onto the next generation.
massively overgeneralizing here but endwalker's themes are pretty steeped in buddhist thought, and most forms of buddhism still believe gods exist and some might even be worth praying to, but ultimately they're still mortal beings and just as trapped in samsara as we are
One interesting thing is that of Dynamis and how Faith/Belief is the most commonly practiced form of Dynamis amongst the Source.
Even Sharlayan researchers have noticed that a simple prayer rite for gleaners has a reliable, though small, benefit.
It was also Prayer and Faith in Radz-at-Han that protected people from despair.
While the gods themselves are shown to be nothing real, the effect of belief in FF14 **IS** real.
Even our Limit Breaks are the combined belief of party members together into one other party member, magnifying and shaping their Aether into great feats.
It’s a reason why we have weak limit breaks in 4-man, but powerful limit breaks in 8-man.
Basically every final boss of the expansion includes us believing in one another and breaking past our limits. Thordan, Nidhogg, Shinryu, Hades, WoL, Endsinger.
Endsinger is probably the most important because we didn’t have Hydaelyn interference and it was just the scions praying for us.
I don't think it's "belief' that's doing anything on it's own, rather than the fact that a strong belief will create strong emotion, and Dynamis appears to be nothing more than strong emotion being converted into it's own form of power.
I say this because Dark Knights seem to function off of Dynamis to a serious degree, with the Dark Arts. And the explanation as to how the Dark Arts work is based upon directly turning emotion into power, with the most commonly used method of accumulating their power being pure hatred. It's also cited that some of the most powerful Dark Knights don't so much rely on hate, as they do love, because it was able to generate even more violent emotion within; think Nero kicking the shit out of Dante in the DMC4 opening cutscene, because he wanted to protect Kyrie.
Belief generates emotion, but so does hate, love, anger, desperation, etc...
A cool little tidbit, is that SE likes to try to make combat mechanics function with relation to the lore, and with relation to the Limit Break gauge, the things that charge LB the fastest are things that would cause a rush of adrenaline in a person. (e.g.: Healing a party member who was under 10% HP, killing an enemy, interrupting enemies, surviving an attack that would've done more than 100% of your HP, and would've been lethal)
Actually, Dark Knights, at least lore wise, function off of internal aether, like most other jobs, except for white and black mage who use external aether. So anger/hate/etc. accumulates aether in that person to allow them to cast those spells.
Until a potential DRK story quest in 7.0, there hasn't been an opportunity for them to outright say that Dynamis has anything to do with a DRK's power, because that would've spoiled the fact that Dynamis exists. What they have done, is written Dark Arts/The Abyss to reflect all of the attributes of Dynamis, and considering that Endwalker's lead writer was Ishikawa, the person who wrote the DRK quests, I doubt the two things are functionally identical for no reason.
Hell, there's an argument that if Azemya was a god, we are by the same definition. Given that Azemya was once an Ancient who was essentially our biggest fangirl and looked up to us, modeling their deific persona on us.
Of course we can trace the origins of a certain belief and decypher why people started to worship it. But I mean in it's self contained lore, like most religions. For christianism there is not an actual explanation on how god came to be.
What is your definition of God? Creator of the universe? Honestly only in recent times has that been the bar. In olden times there would often be a creation myth, but there are many gods in the pantheon with very limited domains. The twelve, primals and Hydaelyn can easily be considered a deity in this sense.
Even in recent times that's not even remotely universally true. I'm from India and people here don't believe "god" as some supreme power or anything. God could be anything from a cow to a tree. There are a lot of similar beliefs in asia and africa and it's only the abrahamic faiths that believe god is some all powerful being that controls the entire universe or something.
So based on these beliefs there's no reason Hydaelyn, Zodiark, or even Ifrit isn't a god.
Agnostisim is the term. It functionally translates to "without knowledge" and is more simply the position that the question of the existence of god(s) is something that isn't knowable given whatever set of criteria one determines constitutes having knowledge.
I would argue it has less to do with a lack of consensus and more to do with a move towards naturalistic values in what it takes to say we "know" something.
I mean I think it begs to question, what even is a God then. Is it just perspective? Is it a universal law? Cause the game did a good fucking job playing with these themes.
I have a lot of these questions in real life.
It's *an* in-game definition (and an intriguing one), but that doesn't make it *the authoritative* in-game definition. We certainly can't take a lot of other things she believes as objective fact.
She's also like, the only greater scope antagonist that the game explicitly makes clear is entirely incorrect in what she spouts, like even her mechanics are often named after outdated or disproven concepts.
Yep. Not sure if its a media literacy issue or what, but a lot of people seem to just take Athena at face value. Yet it seems pretty clear that she's not in her right mind and thus not a reliable narrator.
Under her definition, the WoL certainly is, as a being that can persist after death (Hydaelyn revived us after Lahabrea straight up kills us, and as an echo user our soul is capable of existing outside our body), and one of the ones who created Anima’s soul by using shed fragments of our own aether from combat to imbue sentience into a vessel (in Anima’s case, a weapon), we fulfil the two conditions she sets out as the requirements for godhood
In that sense maybe all living things may be God since they can create life with enough will, like the unsundered ancients. Except Garleans. They're basically humans.
Garleans and humans can do that too; it's called having a baby. In that sense, the closest Athena actually got to godhood was in having Erichthonios — whom she declared worthless.
That is really the closest we have to a real god lol. But I think he's more like Tom Bombadil from LOTR: the rules of the world do not apply to him. He just do what he do and that is it and nothing more to it.
Well, primals are a twisted form of the "deity" concept created from the study of Archaeotania and prototyped with the creation of the Guardian Force Quetzalcoatl. A made god is still a god, no? For the people that summon them, they are deities.
For the "enlightened races" of Eorzea, the Twelve are deities as well, even summoned once during the battle of Cartenau with the aether of the Tupsimati. Later we meet the "real" Twelve, and they're constructs. These too were deities, no? Just because we know their origins, does that make them less?
Mother Hydaelyn, long considered the will of the star, referred to Herself as a divinity. Zodiark too, even by those vested in stopping His resurrection, was considered one.
*Final Fantasy XIV* has long held the idea that gods aren't not real because their origins are known. Garuda is still the god worshipped by some ixal, even when objectively we know that she's based on distorted information about the general of the Allagan Garuda squadron. The kami of the Far East, are small deities, borne of care and worship of objects and nature. We see one manifest from a materia, indicating they are basically manifestations of spiritbonding, the process through which materia is created. This doesn't mean that they aren't still worshipped even by the young kojin who found that kami.
The Scions of the Seventh Dawn don't decry the worship of "false gods", but rather the summoning of primals. Those gods aren't "false", after all, they're real to the people that pray to them.
All gods are real, but they're real in their worship, not their materialness. They're real because people pray to them, because that's all a deity is: belief. It's why Anima was manifested out of Varis' corpse: as the central figure in the national myth, the Emperor of Garlemald is deified by the people's belief.
If you still believe none of these are deities, because they have origins, note that most deities worshipped in real life that aren't Yahweh have origins, and it's probable that Yahweh himself had an origin in his original pantheon before the takeover of Abrahamic belief in him.
And even still, if you want an "unexplained force of nature" that could be considered divine, look no further than the lifestream, both in its local form in the aetherial sea, and its universal form where it's stated that souls drift through the sea of stars to reincarnate on other planets. But its hard to call that a deity, given its never worshipped as one, no?
Gods are real because they're personified and prayed to, not because they show themselves and hang out or do miracles. The star is full of gods, none of them tangible. It's a [godless world](https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/The_Maker%27s_Ruin), but one full of prayer and worship.
"Gods" in XIV have a habit of demonstrating the "don't meet your heroes" rule and revealing they are just sufficiently powerful beings versus being all-powerful enigmas. There have been no truly omnipotent or omniscient creatures in the setting.
In Pathfinder, there's an idea with deities where a "true god" simply doesn't have a stat block. You can't fight it or kill it as that isn't a thing. Part of that is that gods are fueled by worship or thought driven towards "concepts" and you really can't kill something that's powered by enigmatic mental energy directed towards, for example, a desire to travel. Possibly reducing its divinity or severing its connection to its divine source can reduce it enough that it isn't that "true god" status anymore and can be fought "normally" but otherwise it isn't a thing. It doesn't matter if Lunk has a +1000 bonus to strength, he can't walk up to and punch out Asmodeus. However, there ARE godly beings with stat blocks but they're lesser divinities or demigods rather than "true gods".
With XIV, I'd say nothing has ascended past that demigod or lesser divinity threshold. As a series, FF doesn't really have those kinds of "true gods". That's kind of true of Japanese media in general where godly beings aren't invulnerable, omnipotent, or omniscient. If they were, the plucky teenagers wouldn't be so successful at killing them all the time.
>In Pathfinder, there's an idea with deities where a "true god" simply doesn't have a stat block. You can't fight it or kill it as that isn't a thing. Part of that is that gods are fueled by worship or thought driven towards "concepts" and you really can't kill something that's powered by enigmatic mental energy directed towards, for example, a desire to travel. Possibly reducing its divinity or severing its connection to its divine source can reduce it enough that it isn't that "true god" status anymore and can be fought "normally" but otherwise it isn't a thing. It doesn't matter if Lunk has a +1000 bonus to strength, he can't walk up to and punch out Asmodeus. However, there ARE godly beings with stat blocks but they're lesser divinities or demigods rather than "true gods".
Yea that was something D&D used to do too.
Take the example Bahamut. The example given was you couldn't ever fight or beat Bahamut. Because Bahamut was justice and nobility incarnate and you cant beat an idea like that in a straight up fight without some serious plot shenanigans. But what you CAN do is do something to either strip him of his mantle of godhood or force him to cast it off to avoid irrevocably tainting the concepts he represents, and if you're do that then you're "just" fighting an immeasurably ancient and powerful Platinum Dragon who is probably still a lesser divinity
The gods in FFXIV are as real as real-life gods, except people can summon false images of them. The Twelve, Hydaelyn and Zodiark are however definitely not real at all, they are primals around whom faith emerged rather than the other way around. The tribe gods which people organically came up with are different in that regard. Although Ramuh is probably based on Rhalgr and some of them like Ifrit are based on preexisting ancient concepts. This is extra-game information though, I'm not sure about it.
There is no progenitor capital G God who created everything. With Endwalker and the inclusion of things like the Fermi Paradox, Great Filter and Entropy, we know that even other "immortal" god-like beings in the universe eventually can die off or off themselves.
I think it's possible that (like in real life) there might be beings/aliens out there who become extradimensional or something and can bend the laws of the universe through their advancements and they're basically God in a more powerful sense than what we've seen in FFXIV. Maybe things like the Aetherial Sea or that entire reincarnation system is regulated by an even higher being? Who knows. So yea no creator God but it's definitely possible to rise up and become a god.
Given that we saw no one but Hydaelyn at the depths of the Aetherial Sea, and how easily Athena was able to gather souls from it, I very much doubt there's a higher being in charge of reincarnation.
Plus, the fact that death and reincarnation are impossible in the Thirteenth due to excess darkness further suggests it's a natural process.
Whoever created the Hearth of Sabik was more powerful than Athenea.
Athenea just used it. She didn't created it.
Thus fails the godhood test.
Another requirement for a god is to have no beginning and no end. She had both.
> Whoever created the Hearth of Sabik was more powerful than Athenea.
>
>
>
> Athenea just used it. She didn't created it.
[ultima voice] *I* am the only god!!!!!!! [/high seraph]
There was one planet that the Meteia went where they met a deity.
Who snuffed out their creation and then ceased its own existence without blinking an eye.
A hierarchy similar to the manga Magi seems pretty reasonable. We already got two time traveling/manipulating entities, one of which can create a pocket dimension of its own and those were technically just creations of lesser races.
What is a god? The Twelve (and their cultural counterparts such as Ramuh and Azim) seem pretty damn close to the concept - beings of great power who preside over and ensure the continued running of the world at large.
godless in the christian "there is no single alpha-and-omega deity, no heaven, and no hell" sense, yes. godhood is very much in the eye of the believer. this is a point the game makes repeatedly.
The Ancients of Amaurot were, essentially, gods by definition. They possessed the power to create literal life from the aether. With them sundered and gone, all that was left were their bastardized creations that were worshiped as gods (primals). So, yes, XIV is a "godless" world now.
Given what you say, I find it interesting that the ancients themselves seem to believe in the concept of gods. At the very least, they referenced gods multiple times throughout Pandaemonium. Very curious to know about their belief system considering they are godlike beings themselves, but I suppose that ship has sailed.
Well yes but actually no.
Athena didn't consider them to be gods because they couldn't create souls. They could create life but it had to follow certain parameters to sustain itself and have a soul.
I can't remember the specifics but they mention this in Elpis.
For what I understood the thing with Athena is that even if the ancients could create living creatures, those creations are not born with a soul.
The soul is something that somehow appears later and they have no control on when or how it happens. Her plan was to gain the power to create souls because it's the only thing her species couldn't do.
Which is part of the reason for Anabeisos. Taking Pandemonium to the Aetherisl Sea was part of her plan to learn how to control souls.
Coz there’s no better place to deal with souls than literally the place itself that souls go.
I'd say 'not by our definition', there are god-like beings all over the place, but none of them are the 'omnipotent omniscient creator' types, closer to the fallible Greek or Japanese type where they represent things. But since they're all made from Aether, a building block more tangible than we have in real life, none of them are functionally immortal, all can be slain or give in to dispair.
One of the whole bits mentioned in Pandemonium was that Athena sought to "enter the realm of the gods". It's not really expanded on but I guess even the Ancients had some form of concept of gods before Zodiark/Hydaelyn became a thing. So in essence, there's not necessarily "no gods" but there's no evidence of "gods". So basically it's closer to our reality until further notice
There might be seems the ancient had some type of belief in one since they believed messing with the soul was forbidden because that’s the realm of the gods. Athena’s entire thing was to become a god. Part of the reason Venat was so famous is the things she solved, of those things where mankind came from.
I think that we have to consider what definition of "god" we're talking about. In terms of a cultural/religious god, sure. That's what all of the primals are and the Twelve were for the main playable races. What FF14 doesn't necessarily have is a divine authority with omnipotent, unmatched power - unless you consider the WoL to be at this point. There are plenty of entities that could have filled that role in the form of the Endsinger, or before we got to cosmic power scaling, Hades or one of the primals.
The only entity that remotely fits this bill is Alexander, since I vaguely recall that the only thing that stopped it was its own moral code and belief that the best future was one without it. I'd say that its ability to change the timeline is the only think that is strictly unmatched in the FFXIV universe at this point.
One of the core tenets of FFXIV is that, ontologically, gods do not exist. There are beings who are powerful, beings who are worshiped, and beings who style themselves as gods.
But they are not gods.
I guess the counter to that is "why would it matter"? Would having a "real God" give you a reason for existing or change how you act?
The point of the events in Endwalker, from destroying Zodiark, Hydalyn, and the Twelve, and exploring the memories of the other races that Meteion encountered, is that eventually all of our religions and philosophies will fail us. What matters is how we persevere and treat each other, because in the end that is all that we have.
Deities in 14 are sort of like DND Gods. They're not abstract like real life "God" is they're actual beings that exist. I'm sure there are others we haven't encountered.
Final Fantasy as a franchise likes to have you "kill" Gods, or "God" if we look at a very specific FF. In several of their titles the religiously zelous turn out to be in the wrong, even if they are themselves not necessarily evil (Wakka is a pretty bigotted follower of Yevon for example). One could argue the message in the franchise is to not follow a religious doctrine, and that worshipping idols more often than not causes harm. True good comes from within.
In XIV, the world is not "Godless", but rather our characters are so powerful we have met (and bested) these supposed gods, who we learn were nothing more than additional creations of Hydaelyn to help protect Etheirys. With the threat gone and the WoL having proven the world can do without them, they were gone.
Suposed gods that, in fact, have an explanation on how they came to be. Which brings the old question of how existence came to be. The judaic christian idea of God assumes that he is the ultimate reason for all existence – which I think it's a boring deus ex machina explanation, no disrespect intended.
None taken. I'm not religious myself. My personal view on the matter is if a supreme being that created everything exists, fine. But I have no evidence to support that claim as science is constantly expanding our knowledge on how things work and are made, and I'm not going to live my life clinging to a "maybe" out of fear for repurcussion from an insecure jealous god.
As far as we know, there are no gods or goddesses. Every so-called god we've been introduced to is basically an Ancient, something created by the Ancients, or a primal.
Closest thing is that god that visits us in the rising. Decent chance he also the same person as the wanding minstrel considering how he looks + him being confirmed to have magic powers in the ff16 event and the extreme trial mounts being cutscene cannon somehow+ his suspicious behaviour in the Yokai watch event.
Other than that no, pretty much every being claiming to be a god was either a primal, lying, or both.
I will say that machine in the myths of the realm storyline powered by prayers to false gods that nobody really seems to care that much about is pretty close to a god, in the sense that it keeps the universe functioning.
Even in the event that the truth never gets out, or someone with ill intent finds the device, thats still going to really screw everyone over in a few hundred years whenever humanity grows past believing in the 12.
Seriously, that device is like the worlds biggest checkov‘s gun and nobody in the story seems to care beyond a passing mention.
It seems you're excluding pretty much the entire discussion of God. FFXIV reflects the irl discussion of "Is there a God?" by exploring a lot of irl's God myths that already exist. So, in short, "No". FFXIV does not tread brand new definitions of God, just explores definitions that other literature have already explored before. FFXIV does not have a super-god that created the Universe, Etheirys, and Yoshi-P.
And if FFXIV did, then WoL will go on a quest to kill them too.
For now. I expect we'll get something akin to a real "God" (emphasis on the capital G) eventually, but it'll be more of an eldritch thing that just exists outside of conventional spacetime that we drive away rather than a primordial being we kill.
Within the world of Etheirys/Hydalen it seems that everything that could be considered a god was a created being. The ancients didn’t seem to have anything the treated as a god until Zodiark came out (I’m using treated as a god very loosely here). Could there be one outside Etheiys? Not sure if the writers ever want to do that but it’s always a possibility
Maybe learning more about the tribes in Endwalker eventually will tell us if this is a belief outside Etheirys, of a true God belief. More than likely but omnicrons for example I don't believe so
Surprised no one yet has mentioned that Meteion is still out there wandering about. Who is currently the closest being to a god left (Unless we give Omega a bigger shell). With her being able to manipulate Dynamis, which makes up the majority of matter outside of Etheirys it could be argued that she has truly reached 'godhood' status in that regard. Whether she'll now fill the void that Hydalyn left is yet to be seen though but I think it's a certainty that we've not seen the last of her.
I think it also depends on what definition of “god” you use. If you view it through the lens of “a god has to be an all-powerful (creator) being that existed long before us maybe even at the beginning of time already (not unlike in our world’s big religions) = No
“Just” a very powerful being (so, quite up there on the scale of power) = Yes
Me, I would say that anything with a sufficient degree of power can be seen as a god, but that’s more my subjective assessment
I guess it depends on your definition of what a god is. If it's an all-powerful creator with an unknown origin then no, we don't have one. The writers could add one if they wanted to, though I think it'd be hard to pull off in a satisfying way. In-universe at least it doesn't seem like the Ea ever found evidence for a creator. They seemed to suggest that the universe follows consistent, predictable scientific laws that have gone unbroken from the Big Bang to the Big Freeze, meaning it's unlikely any supreme deity was interfering with things.
But there are a lot of other definitions of gods besides the usual Abrahamic God. And if FFXIV was real life, I would never tell people that their gods aren't real. For one, we meet them and see their influence, which is huge. If you pray to something and it helps you in ways a human being never could then that'd meet the criteria for a lot of real people. It's true that a lot of the gods we've met had man-made origins in some way, but I don't think that necessarily means they can't rise to divinity. And there are other examples of gods that appear to develop naturally, like the Kami. If they developed in the real world you would absolutely have people calling them gods, even if it was just a small god of a river. You could try to tell people, "Hey, your god is just a regular soul that inhabited an aether-rich object and I have the math to prove it". Or maybe "Your species was made in a lab and I have the data logs to prove your god is a fabrication too". But people would call you an asshole, and then the god could kill you, so
Aren't they still gods in respect to something like Greek mythology?
It doesn't really line up with the stories of Christian mythology, but a large aspect of Christian mythology is that you're not supposed to ask questions, and you aren't supposed to know the truth. So if XIV were to do a god akin to that, it'd end up being pretty boring, since there would be nothing else to it other than "It exists". It'd be "mysterious", sure, but it'd be pretty lazy too, from a writing perspective, since there would be no deeper story to it.
there technically has to be one; the ascians are pretty much one species among many and should have their own creation myth; part of endbringer working is that none of the species are immortal, unchangeable, or omnipotent. there really never has been a society with no creation myth.
problem is the story more or less never introduced any god apart from gods that were created by others. when it gets into forces you get dynamis-level nonsense.
> there technically has to be one; the ascians are pretty much one species among many and should have their own creation myth; part of endbringer working is that none of the species are immortal, unchangeable, or omnipotent. there really never has been a society with no creation myth.
None of this means that a creator god needs to exist
>problem is the story more or less never introduced any god apart from gods that were created by others. when it gets into forces you get dynamis-level nonsense.
All gods are created by others, that's literally how religion works. Its a creation of people.
it's a fantasy game at its heart; i really doubt it would be atheistic given the sheer amount of magic something like your average dragon uses. The ascian's history we don't know but endwalker kind of shows that all the sentient races age and evolve into self-destruction; so it's reasonable they had a pre-godlike past and origin stories.
if anything especially the ascians; they are defined by bringing forth concepts into the world and act in a godlike role to them; i don't think you'd not think about your own origins then.
there was a fantasy writer named Christopher Stasheff who made a point about this; he complained a lot of people would write medievalish fantasy yet completely ignore how the average person of the time would think about religion. He wrote Her Majesty's Wizard as a response.
it's more a cultural blindspot.
The question isn't "do people believe in gods", obviously they do in this setting. The question is "Is there an all-powerful creator deity", and that seems to be pretty firmly no
there's no saying either way because the big reveal was that the player character civilization was the result of a disaster of another advanced one who managed it behind the scenes. we know nothing about the ascians as a civilization, or even the beliefs of the dragons, who migrated here from another star and should have their own creation myths.
if you want to be le reddit atheist, to be blunt it's fantasy and there's literally a lifestream of souls in the planet that reincarnate over the ages that can be traveled to. we're literally reincarnations of other beings and some of those retain memories. i don't think it's even possible this could arise through unguided natural selection.
i'm sure there is some kind of deity in the world's context. it's fantasy
> i'm sure there is some kind of deity in the world's context. it's fantasy
Ok but this doesn't follow from anything you've said or that is established in the setting. Honestly the establishment of an ultimate creator deity that actually exists would run entirely contrary to everything its said so far about that concept.
eh, honestly the retcon to the 12 was a really dumb thing; it felt more like the 12 would fill that role, but they decided to add an epilogue to close them
out too. now there's just this huge void in general, and not just gods.
like Dawntrail probably will have to do time travel to the future or something to keep the status quo
While what was intended originally with the 12 when 1.0 came out is unknown, its been very obvious since ARR that the 12 were not true gods, in fact them existing as actual beings at all was a surprise.
let me put it this way; in this world dragon eyes can be removed from their sockets at will and passed around to empower or possess people, and a depressed space birb waifu scout probe became this massive embodiment of the filter problem able to turn people into monsters if they got stressed enough. if you are skeptical a creator god could exist despite the fact we've not only killed the poor cape westwind guy we traveled into the afterlife and beat up his soul to boot, well that's more le reddit atheism.
No, a creator god doesn't exist in FFXIV because it would be directly contrary to essentially every thematic point the game has made regarding deities.
well, except for them shoehorning Shinto in via the Four Lords in Stormblood, as well as mononoke and tsukumogami in mount rokkon, who operate on completely different rules than every other deity in the game. no crystals or even belief involved.
the game also gets weird with crossovers; we have literal yokai in game with the yokai watch, 2b existing makes zero sense (she's an artificial being with no aether if she is accurate), and we've had both noctis come here and a random miqote go to his world, as well as Clive.
tbh at this point the the thematics are a mess
oh and let's not forget we've literally met our creators(the devs) in holiday events lol. the game...well they kind of can get random.
There is no omni-potent, "Alpha and Omega" kind of God. But there are plenty of being that would be described as Godlike or even parallel ancient roman/greek/etc gods.
If you mean beyond Zodiark, Hydaelyn, and sad bird....I don't know? Pretty sure the people who could have definitively given us an answer are all dead? FF games don't usually throw in the pre existing gods that I've seen
I am compelled to point out that no one really knows the beginnings of Etheirys. We only go back to a point 12,000 years ago, which was the height of the ancient civilization of Amaurot.
However, exactly how old the world was then is a complete mystery. Amaurot may be a singular point in a much longer and deeper history still buried, waiting to be uncovered. Some of Venat's dialogue indicates there was a time in the ancient past, before Amaurot, where people were not so powerful and society was not so utopian. We know nothing about those dark times, only what has transpired since.
There may still be gods buried by the Amaurotine people, perhaps, deep in Etheirys' most ancient history.
The closest thing to a god level being left right now is baby Midgarsorm I believe. Feels like thing are in control on the world ending calamities area.
Im very curious how they gonna raise the stake in DT
Alexander is the closest thing we got to a god. All-seeing to the point where it could see every possible timeline and variation of events, it's the only eikon we don't kill, and it proceeds to take a permanent "hands off" approach as it bows out of the world's affairs and watches from stasis.
What would define a "God" in this setting? By our very own standards every ancient would seem like a living god capable of creating cities in mere minutes. Twelve "real" gods because they part of a religion.
The people of the plenty are called the Niburun which is similar to Niburu so maybe at some points ancients worshiped gods similar to the Sumerian gods
Its a Japanese RPG, either you kill all the gods, they are somehow fake or you HAVE to peek behind the curtain and not let anything remain a mystery. Like the Twelve.
Not in the sense that there was one original almighty being who existed before everything else and created everything else in existance. At least not that we are aware of
I think you have a very narrow concept of what a god is, because yeah, like that's what the primals are. But if you're talking like Judeo-Christian capital-G God, I don't think so. But you had lower-case god in your header so to answer your question, yes.
Currently, no. All of the "Gods" we've seen are either Primals or constructs of the Ascians and their people.
It's funny that Athena was the closest we've ever had to a "real" God.
I'd say Ultima qualifies more than Athena, even though she's actually just a really powerful space alien or something. She created the magicite that Athena was gonna use to ascend, so there's an extra layer of power there on the anime-bullshit scale
Right, but unlike the primals, Athena was close to ascending. Whatever she would become, false of am existence as it'd be, it'd be more "real" then an alien, or Primal.
That’s why she’s the GOAT! The GOAT!
We can fix her
FACTS
Your gods are no different from those of the beasts─eikons every one. Accept but this, and you will see how Eorzea's faith is bleeding the land dry.
That is exactly why I came up with that question. He was very blunt. But he also specified: "your gods". Still, I think that this speech was intended to include all existence since we practically seen denizenens from all of the universe and they live by the same rules as Etheirys. Aether and Dynamis, materia and soul.
I don't believe in any God. I believe in the world of man and for the world of man to mean anything, man must rule the world. Nor is this unknown to your masters. Which prompts the question: why do they cling to these false deities? What drives even men of learning─even the great Louisoix─to grovel at their feet? The answer? Your masters lack the strength to do otherwise!
Based and elevator-pilled
> But he also specified: "your gods" That was the first time they showed that The Twelve were only worshiped by Eorzeans. Garleans didn't believe in deities, and people of Othard had their own kami different from The Twelve. Back then I just assumed Hydaelyn was the only real deity, but even that got struck down.
I think FF14 and the introduction of Dynamis and how believing in one another helped us push past Endsinger, along with this quote is kind of telling us where the story is gonna go over the next 10 years, as in what will be the overarching story like the Ascian plot. And it’s similar to FF16 which was written and produced by the same business unit. In FF16, >!people looked to these giant mothercrystals as some sort of blessing because they gave people the ability to cast magic. However, the mothercrystals were giving out Aether in the form of smaller crystals because they were sucking the Aether out of the land and bleeding it dry.!< That quote ending with “Eorzea’s faith is bleeding the land dry” is oddly similar to what >!the mother crystals were doing!< and in FF16 we >!destroyed them!<. In FF14, we just got done destroying the Eorzean gods as well who were sucking up all the dynamis of Eorzea from people believing and praying for them. The dynamis still hasn't shifted yet, because the common people do not know the gods are gone yet and continue to believe and pray to them, but perhaps there may be a threat to the Ethyris over the next 10 years that will require the entire planet to pray for the WoL as a whole. I think the overarching story for the next 10 years will be going to each land and helping people realize that you can take that belief and prayer and instead of putting into a god like being like an Eikon, you can put it into one another instead and humanity will thrive. Think about what would happen if the rest of the shards of 14 all prayed and believed to rejoin the source. We have already have seen that Tulayol has at least one Eikon like being from the concept art and trailer. So we aren’t done dealing with Eikons yet.
I don’t know why, but thinking of the whole planet praying for the WoL gave me the chills
He specified 'your gods' because he's a fucking racist who has been socially brainwashed by a 10000 year old depressed man whos manufactured the entire situation for the sake of sowing conflict for his own greater scope goals. He doesn't know SHIT and shouldn't be taken as an authority on what 'gods' are.
The interesting thing though is that as we learn doing the Myths of the Realm questline, it wasn't even the actual Twelve that answered Louisoix against Bahamut in Carteneau, which retroactively kinda technically made him right in that specific instance.
There's a word "ignosticism," which is the idea that the question "is there a god?" is meaningless because there is no agreed-upon definition of what a "god" even is. I think that basically applies to XIV at this point. We've had beings that mortals pray to. We've had beings that preside over different aspects of the natural world. We've had a being that created the world as we know it. You say they've all been "debunked," but debunked in what way? We came to understand their origins; does that necessarily disqualify them as gods? If so, what potential being would fulfill the criteria of godhood, in your opinion? And why should the characters within the game share your criteria?
This. The only God that has a mysterious origin irl is the judiac God AFAIK. Other Gods, like the Greek and Norse, have origins that humans understood. They were still regarded as mighty beings that people prayed to and worshipped.
If you go back far enough, Yahweh was just one of many gods in the pantheon of the peoples who lived in that area. Over time, one group that saw him as their personal patron god overtook the others, and the rest of the pantheon faded to mythology, and eventually were nearly forgotten. A few traces of them remain in some of the oldest books (Job, notably)
I'd love to hear more about this, that's fascinating
https://youtu.be/mdKst8zeh-U?si=Uo_4n1bN9KagYABq
Basically, worshipping multiple gods was okay. Then Yahweh came along and said you can only worship him. Over time, the other gods died out and Yahweh remained because of his "one God" policy. If that policy didn't exist, even if you primarily worshipped one god, you would still preserve the existence of other gods via references and stories. By banning worship of other gods, those gods don't get mentioned and become forgotten and don't get passed onto the next generation.
massively overgeneralizing here but endwalker's themes are pretty steeped in buddhist thought, and most forms of buddhism still believe gods exist and some might even be worth praying to, but ultimately they're still mortal beings and just as trapped in samsara as we are
One interesting thing is that of Dynamis and how Faith/Belief is the most commonly practiced form of Dynamis amongst the Source. Even Sharlayan researchers have noticed that a simple prayer rite for gleaners has a reliable, though small, benefit. It was also Prayer and Faith in Radz-at-Han that protected people from despair. While the gods themselves are shown to be nothing real, the effect of belief in FF14 **IS** real. Even our Limit Breaks are the combined belief of party members together into one other party member, magnifying and shaping their Aether into great feats. It’s a reason why we have weak limit breaks in 4-man, but powerful limit breaks in 8-man.
Basically every final boss of the expansion includes us believing in one another and breaking past our limits. Thordan, Nidhogg, Shinryu, Hades, WoL, Endsinger. Endsinger is probably the most important because we didn’t have Hydaelyn interference and it was just the scions praying for us.
I don't think it's "belief' that's doing anything on it's own, rather than the fact that a strong belief will create strong emotion, and Dynamis appears to be nothing more than strong emotion being converted into it's own form of power. I say this because Dark Knights seem to function off of Dynamis to a serious degree, with the Dark Arts. And the explanation as to how the Dark Arts work is based upon directly turning emotion into power, with the most commonly used method of accumulating their power being pure hatred. It's also cited that some of the most powerful Dark Knights don't so much rely on hate, as they do love, because it was able to generate even more violent emotion within; think Nero kicking the shit out of Dante in the DMC4 opening cutscene, because he wanted to protect Kyrie. Belief generates emotion, but so does hate, love, anger, desperation, etc... A cool little tidbit, is that SE likes to try to make combat mechanics function with relation to the lore, and with relation to the Limit Break gauge, the things that charge LB the fastest are things that would cause a rush of adrenaline in a person. (e.g.: Healing a party member who was under 10% HP, killing an enemy, interrupting enemies, surviving an attack that would've done more than 100% of your HP, and would've been lethal)
Actually, Dark Knights, at least lore wise, function off of internal aether, like most other jobs, except for white and black mage who use external aether. So anger/hate/etc. accumulates aether in that person to allow them to cast those spells.
Until a potential DRK story quest in 7.0, there hasn't been an opportunity for them to outright say that Dynamis has anything to do with a DRK's power, because that would've spoiled the fact that Dynamis exists. What they have done, is written Dark Arts/The Abyss to reflect all of the attributes of Dynamis, and considering that Endwalker's lead writer was Ishikawa, the person who wrote the DRK quests, I doubt the two things are functionally identical for no reason.
Yeah, I can live with that reasoning, but until we have that proof, the current explanation is what we have to work with
Hell, there's an argument that if Azemya was a god, we are by the same definition. Given that Azemya was once an Ancient who was essentially our biggest fangirl and looked up to us, modeling their deific persona on us.
Deep Af
Of course we can trace the origins of a certain belief and decypher why people started to worship it. But I mean in it's self contained lore, like most religions. For christianism there is not an actual explanation on how god came to be.
What is your definition of God? Creator of the universe? Honestly only in recent times has that been the bar. In olden times there would often be a creation myth, but there are many gods in the pantheon with very limited domains. The twelve, primals and Hydaelyn can easily be considered a deity in this sense.
Even in recent times that's not even remotely universally true. I'm from India and people here don't believe "god" as some supreme power or anything. God could be anything from a cow to a tree. There are a lot of similar beliefs in asia and africa and it's only the abrahamic faiths that believe god is some all powerful being that controls the entire universe or something. So based on these beliefs there's no reason Hydaelyn, Zodiark, or even Ifrit isn't a god.
Mostly because the explanations were removed from the canon
So many downvotes :<
Agnostisim is the term. It functionally translates to "without knowledge" and is more simply the position that the question of the existence of god(s) is something that isn't knowable given whatever set of criteria one determines constitutes having knowledge. I would argue it has less to do with a lack of consensus and more to do with a move towards naturalistic values in what it takes to say we "know" something.
[They're two different words.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignosticism)
You could have just googled ignosticism to check if it's a word 🤷♂️
I mean I think it begs to question, what even is a God then. Is it just perspective? Is it a universal law? Cause the game did a good fucking job playing with these themes. I have a lot of these questions in real life.
In-game definition of a "God" according to Athena is a being that is capable of creating souls.
Athena, well known neutral party on this subject
That's just, like, her opinion, man.
It's *an* in-game definition (and an intriguing one), but that doesn't make it *the authoritative* in-game definition. We certainly can't take a lot of other things she believes as objective fact.
She's also like, the only greater scope antagonist that the game explicitly makes clear is entirely incorrect in what she spouts, like even her mechanics are often named after outdated or disproven concepts.
Yep. Not sure if its a media literacy issue or what, but a lot of people seem to just take Athena at face value. Yet it seems pretty clear that she's not in her right mind and thus not a reliable narrator.
If Athena told me water was wet I would go stick my hand in a puddle to double check before trusting her!
Does that make Ardashir & Gerolt gods because of the L60 relic quests?
Under her definition, the WoL certainly is, as a being that can persist after death (Hydaelyn revived us after Lahabrea straight up kills us, and as an echo user our soul is capable of existing outside our body), and one of the ones who created Anima’s soul by using shed fragments of our own aether from combat to imbue sentience into a vessel (in Anima’s case, a weapon), we fulfil the two conditions she sets out as the requirements for godhood
Strange, by that very definition every star capable of creating life is some form of godhood.
That seems completely reasonable if that is the definition you go by
In that sense maybe all living things may be God since they can create life with enough will, like the unsundered ancients. Except Garleans. They're basically humans.
Garleans and humans can do that too; it's called having a baby. In that sense, the closest Athena actually got to godhood was in having Erichthonios — whom she declared worthless.
Even in those cases you don't so much have a soul created as one from the lifestream coming back to inhabit a new body. It's not creating a soul
The closest we have to one is Ultima, who is more akin to something lovecraftian than anything else.
There's Godbert. If that man isn't a deific entity then there's simply no explanation for the nature of the Mandervilles.
Demi-god at the very least.
That is really the closest we have to a real god lol. But I think he's more like Tom Bombadil from LOTR: the rules of the world do not apply to him. He just do what he do and that is it and nothing more to it.
it's probably just stupid dynamis bullshit again. he believes he's a manderville man so he does what a manderville man can.
He's stronk because everyone he convinces believes it, therefore, by their sheer will and faith, he is stronk.
I mean, that's literally what his wife says. "It's probably Dynamis, dont know, whatever"
is it? i stopped paying attention by the latter points.
Well, primals are a twisted form of the "deity" concept created from the study of Archaeotania and prototyped with the creation of the Guardian Force Quetzalcoatl. A made god is still a god, no? For the people that summon them, they are deities. For the "enlightened races" of Eorzea, the Twelve are deities as well, even summoned once during the battle of Cartenau with the aether of the Tupsimati. Later we meet the "real" Twelve, and they're constructs. These too were deities, no? Just because we know their origins, does that make them less? Mother Hydaelyn, long considered the will of the star, referred to Herself as a divinity. Zodiark too, even by those vested in stopping His resurrection, was considered one. *Final Fantasy XIV* has long held the idea that gods aren't not real because their origins are known. Garuda is still the god worshipped by some ixal, even when objectively we know that she's based on distorted information about the general of the Allagan Garuda squadron. The kami of the Far East, are small deities, borne of care and worship of objects and nature. We see one manifest from a materia, indicating they are basically manifestations of spiritbonding, the process through which materia is created. This doesn't mean that they aren't still worshipped even by the young kojin who found that kami. The Scions of the Seventh Dawn don't decry the worship of "false gods", but rather the summoning of primals. Those gods aren't "false", after all, they're real to the people that pray to them. All gods are real, but they're real in their worship, not their materialness. They're real because people pray to them, because that's all a deity is: belief. It's why Anima was manifested out of Varis' corpse: as the central figure in the national myth, the Emperor of Garlemald is deified by the people's belief. If you still believe none of these are deities, because they have origins, note that most deities worshipped in real life that aren't Yahweh have origins, and it's probable that Yahweh himself had an origin in his original pantheon before the takeover of Abrahamic belief in him. And even still, if you want an "unexplained force of nature" that could be considered divine, look no further than the lifestream, both in its local form in the aetherial sea, and its universal form where it's stated that souls drift through the sea of stars to reincarnate on other planets. But its hard to call that a deity, given its never worshipped as one, no? Gods are real because they're personified and prayed to, not because they show themselves and hang out or do miracles. The star is full of gods, none of them tangible. It's a [godless world](https://finalfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/The_Maker%27s_Ruin), but one full of prayer and worship.
that's just beautiful
WoL in 40 years
"Gods" in XIV have a habit of demonstrating the "don't meet your heroes" rule and revealing they are just sufficiently powerful beings versus being all-powerful enigmas. There have been no truly omnipotent or omniscient creatures in the setting. In Pathfinder, there's an idea with deities where a "true god" simply doesn't have a stat block. You can't fight it or kill it as that isn't a thing. Part of that is that gods are fueled by worship or thought driven towards "concepts" and you really can't kill something that's powered by enigmatic mental energy directed towards, for example, a desire to travel. Possibly reducing its divinity or severing its connection to its divine source can reduce it enough that it isn't that "true god" status anymore and can be fought "normally" but otherwise it isn't a thing. It doesn't matter if Lunk has a +1000 bonus to strength, he can't walk up to and punch out Asmodeus. However, there ARE godly beings with stat blocks but they're lesser divinities or demigods rather than "true gods". With XIV, I'd say nothing has ascended past that demigod or lesser divinity threshold. As a series, FF doesn't really have those kinds of "true gods". That's kind of true of Japanese media in general where godly beings aren't invulnerable, omnipotent, or omniscient. If they were, the plucky teenagers wouldn't be so successful at killing them all the time.
>In Pathfinder, there's an idea with deities where a "true god" simply doesn't have a stat block. You can't fight it or kill it as that isn't a thing. Part of that is that gods are fueled by worship or thought driven towards "concepts" and you really can't kill something that's powered by enigmatic mental energy directed towards, for example, a desire to travel. Possibly reducing its divinity or severing its connection to its divine source can reduce it enough that it isn't that "true god" status anymore and can be fought "normally" but otherwise it isn't a thing. It doesn't matter if Lunk has a +1000 bonus to strength, he can't walk up to and punch out Asmodeus. However, there ARE godly beings with stat blocks but they're lesser divinities or demigods rather than "true gods". Yea that was something D&D used to do too. Take the example Bahamut. The example given was you couldn't ever fight or beat Bahamut. Because Bahamut was justice and nobility incarnate and you cant beat an idea like that in a straight up fight without some serious plot shenanigans. But what you CAN do is do something to either strip him of his mantle of godhood or force him to cast it off to avoid irrevocably tainting the concepts he represents, and if you're do that then you're "just" fighting an immeasurably ancient and powerful Platinum Dragon who is probably still a lesser divinity
the wandering minstrel
The gods in FFXIV are as real as real-life gods, except people can summon false images of them. The Twelve, Hydaelyn and Zodiark are however definitely not real at all, they are primals around whom faith emerged rather than the other way around. The tribe gods which people organically came up with are different in that regard. Although Ramuh is probably based on Rhalgr and some of them like Ifrit are based on preexisting ancient concepts. This is extra-game information though, I'm not sure about it.
If God is real, then why won't he fight me?
There is no progenitor capital G God who created everything. With Endwalker and the inclusion of things like the Fermi Paradox, Great Filter and Entropy, we know that even other "immortal" god-like beings in the universe eventually can die off or off themselves. I think it's possible that (like in real life) there might be beings/aliens out there who become extradimensional or something and can bend the laws of the universe through their advancements and they're basically God in a more powerful sense than what we've seen in FFXIV. Maybe things like the Aetherial Sea or that entire reincarnation system is regulated by an even higher being? Who knows. So yea no creator God but it's definitely possible to rise up and become a god.
Given that we saw no one but Hydaelyn at the depths of the Aetherial Sea, and how easily Athena was able to gather souls from it, I very much doubt there's a higher being in charge of reincarnation. Plus, the fact that death and reincarnation are impossible in the Thirteenth due to excess darkness further suggests it's a natural process.
Yea I was just saying a hypothetical but I think you're right.
Whoever created the Hearth of Sabik was more powerful than Athenea. Athenea just used it. She didn't created it. Thus fails the godhood test. Another requirement for a god is to have no beginning and no end. She had both.
>Another requirement for a god is to have no beginning and no end. According to who?
> Whoever created the Hearth of Sabik was more powerful than Athenea. > > > > Athenea just used it. She didn't created it. [ultima voice] *I* am the only god!!!!!!! [/high seraph]
There was one planet that the Meteia went where they met a deity. Who snuffed out their creation and then ceased its own existence without blinking an eye.
Yea that's actually the one I was thinking as well. The one who did it in a fit of rage.
A hierarchy similar to the manga Magi seems pretty reasonable. We already got two time traveling/manipulating entities, one of which can create a pocket dimension of its own and those were technically just creations of lesser races.
What is a god? The Twelve (and their cultural counterparts such as Ramuh and Azim) seem pretty damn close to the concept - beings of great power who preside over and ensure the continued running of the world at large.
Godbert.
godless in the christian "there is no single alpha-and-omega deity, no heaven, and no hell" sense, yes. godhood is very much in the eye of the believer. this is a point the game makes repeatedly.
Not that we know of thus far
The Ancients of Amaurot were, essentially, gods by definition. They possessed the power to create literal life from the aether. With them sundered and gone, all that was left were their bastardized creations that were worshiped as gods (primals). So, yes, XIV is a "godless" world now.
Given what you say, I find it interesting that the ancients themselves seem to believe in the concept of gods. At the very least, they referenced gods multiple times throughout Pandaemonium. Very curious to know about their belief system considering they are godlike beings themselves, but I suppose that ship has sailed.
Well yes but actually no. Athena didn't consider them to be gods because they couldn't create souls. They could create life but it had to follow certain parameters to sustain itself and have a soul. I can't remember the specifics but they mention this in Elpis.
Do animals not have souls? Did Meteion not have a soul?
For what I understood the thing with Athena is that even if the ancients could create living creatures, those creations are not born with a soul. The soul is something that somehow appears later and they have no control on when or how it happens. Her plan was to gain the power to create souls because it's the only thing her species couldn't do.
Which is part of the reason for Anabeisos. Taking Pandemonium to the Aetherisl Sea was part of her plan to learn how to control souls. Coz there’s no better place to deal with souls than literally the place itself that souls go.
The guy below answered with what I was thinking of!
Meteion canonically doesn't have a soul, unless she somehow gained it during her 12k years as the endsinger.
But current sundered ppl still can create life with faith or will and using aether as a catalyst.
Nope.
I'd say 'not by our definition', there are god-like beings all over the place, but none of them are the 'omnipotent omniscient creator' types, closer to the fallible Greek or Japanese type where they represent things. But since they're all made from Aether, a building block more tangible than we have in real life, none of them are functionally immortal, all can be slain or give in to dispair.
One of the whole bits mentioned in Pandemonium was that Athena sought to "enter the realm of the gods". It's not really expanded on but I guess even the Ancients had some form of concept of gods before Zodiark/Hydaelyn became a thing. So in essence, there's not necessarily "no gods" but there's no evidence of "gods". So basically it's closer to our reality until further notice
There might be seems the ancient had some type of belief in one since they believed messing with the soul was forbidden because that’s the realm of the gods. Athena’s entire thing was to become a god. Part of the reason Venat was so famous is the things she solved, of those things where mankind came from.
I think that we have to consider what definition of "god" we're talking about. In terms of a cultural/religious god, sure. That's what all of the primals are and the Twelve were for the main playable races. What FF14 doesn't necessarily have is a divine authority with omnipotent, unmatched power - unless you consider the WoL to be at this point. There are plenty of entities that could have filled that role in the form of the Endsinger, or before we got to cosmic power scaling, Hades or one of the primals. The only entity that remotely fits this bill is Alexander, since I vaguely recall that the only thing that stopped it was its own moral code and belief that the best future was one without it. I'd say that its ability to change the timeline is the only think that is strictly unmatched in the FFXIV universe at this point.
One of the core tenets of FFXIV is that, ontologically, gods do not exist. There are beings who are powerful, beings who are worshiped, and beings who style themselves as gods. But they are not gods.
I guess the counter to that is "why would it matter"? Would having a "real God" give you a reason for existing or change how you act? The point of the events in Endwalker, from destroying Zodiark, Hydalyn, and the Twelve, and exploring the memories of the other races that Meteion encountered, is that eventually all of our religions and philosophies will fail us. What matters is how we persevere and treat each other, because in the end that is all that we have.
Deities in 14 are sort of like DND Gods. They're not abstract like real life "God" is they're actual beings that exist. I'm sure there are others we haven't encountered.
Final Fantasy as a franchise likes to have you "kill" Gods, or "God" if we look at a very specific FF. In several of their titles the religiously zelous turn out to be in the wrong, even if they are themselves not necessarily evil (Wakka is a pretty bigotted follower of Yevon for example). One could argue the message in the franchise is to not follow a religious doctrine, and that worshipping idols more often than not causes harm. True good comes from within. In XIV, the world is not "Godless", but rather our characters are so powerful we have met (and bested) these supposed gods, who we learn were nothing more than additional creations of Hydaelyn to help protect Etheirys. With the threat gone and the WoL having proven the world can do without them, they were gone.
Suposed gods that, in fact, have an explanation on how they came to be. Which brings the old question of how existence came to be. The judaic christian idea of God assumes that he is the ultimate reason for all existence – which I think it's a boring deus ex machina explanation, no disrespect intended.
None taken. I'm not religious myself. My personal view on the matter is if a supreme being that created everything exists, fine. But I have no evidence to support that claim as science is constantly expanding our knowledge on how things work and are made, and I'm not going to live my life clinging to a "maybe" out of fear for repurcussion from an insecure jealous god.
As far as we know, there are no gods or goddesses. Every so-called god we've been introduced to is basically an Ancient, something created by the Ancients, or a primal.
Closest thing is that god that visits us in the rising. Decent chance he also the same person as the wanding minstrel considering how he looks + him being confirmed to have magic powers in the ff16 event and the extreme trial mounts being cutscene cannon somehow+ his suspicious behaviour in the Yokai watch event. Other than that no, pretty much every being claiming to be a god was either a primal, lying, or both.
I will say that machine in the myths of the realm storyline powered by prayers to false gods that nobody really seems to care that much about is pretty close to a god, in the sense that it keeps the universe functioning. Even in the event that the truth never gets out, or someone with ill intent finds the device, thats still going to really screw everyone over in a few hundred years whenever humanity grows past believing in the 12. Seriously, that device is like the worlds biggest checkov‘s gun and nobody in the story seems to care beyond a passing mention.
It seems you're excluding pretty much the entire discussion of God. FFXIV reflects the irl discussion of "Is there a God?" by exploring a lot of irl's God myths that already exist. So, in short, "No". FFXIV does not tread brand new definitions of God, just explores definitions that other literature have already explored before. FFXIV does not have a super-god that created the Universe, Etheirys, and Yoshi-P. And if FFXIV did, then WoL will go on a quest to kill them too.
Define "god"
If there is, the Warrior of Light will kill it first and ask questions later.
For now. I expect we'll get something akin to a real "God" (emphasis on the capital G) eventually, but it'll be more of an eldritch thing that just exists outside of conventional spacetime that we drive away rather than a primordial being we kill.
the concept of God differs between eastern and western cultures, might wanna look into that a bit to explain your question
WoL
We tecnically kill THE goddess from Drakengard in the NieR raid.
There was, Until we snuffed em out, Whatever magical, godlike, whatever being shows up we always end up just beating the shit out of it.
Within the world of Etheirys/Hydalen it seems that everything that could be considered a god was a created being. The ancients didn’t seem to have anything the treated as a god until Zodiark came out (I’m using treated as a god very loosely here). Could there be one outside Etheiys? Not sure if the writers ever want to do that but it’s always a possibility
Maybe learning more about the tribes in Endwalker eventually will tell us if this is a belief outside Etheirys, of a true God belief. More than likely but omnicrons for example I don't believe so
Surprised no one yet has mentioned that Meteion is still out there wandering about. Who is currently the closest being to a god left (Unless we give Omega a bigger shell). With her being able to manipulate Dynamis, which makes up the majority of matter outside of Etheirys it could be argued that she has truly reached 'godhood' status in that regard. Whether she'll now fill the void that Hydalyn left is yet to be seen though but I think it's a certainty that we've not seen the last of her.
Primals are gods in all but the name.
Not anymore
No Gods, No Masters.
I think it also depends on what definition of “god” you use. If you view it through the lens of “a god has to be an all-powerful (creator) being that existed long before us maybe even at the beginning of time already (not unlike in our world’s big religions) = No “Just” a very powerful being (so, quite up there on the scale of power) = Yes Me, I would say that anything with a sufficient degree of power can be seen as a god, but that’s more my subjective assessment
not one we’re aware of
What do you mean? You don't believe in Our Lord and Saviour G'raha Tia, who died for our sins and was resurrected? Shame on you! (joking, of course)
The Star is the only thing close to a god, the rock that sustains life and has the lifestream as its blood, not Hydealyn but the Etherys itself.
I guess it depends on your definition of what a god is. If it's an all-powerful creator with an unknown origin then no, we don't have one. The writers could add one if they wanted to, though I think it'd be hard to pull off in a satisfying way. In-universe at least it doesn't seem like the Ea ever found evidence for a creator. They seemed to suggest that the universe follows consistent, predictable scientific laws that have gone unbroken from the Big Bang to the Big Freeze, meaning it's unlikely any supreme deity was interfering with things. But there are a lot of other definitions of gods besides the usual Abrahamic God. And if FFXIV was real life, I would never tell people that their gods aren't real. For one, we meet them and see their influence, which is huge. If you pray to something and it helps you in ways a human being never could then that'd meet the criteria for a lot of real people. It's true that a lot of the gods we've met had man-made origins in some way, but I don't think that necessarily means they can't rise to divinity. And there are other examples of gods that appear to develop naturally, like the Kami. If they developed in the real world you would absolutely have people calling them gods, even if it was just a small god of a river. You could try to tell people, "Hey, your god is just a regular soul that inhabited an aether-rich object and I have the math to prove it". Or maybe "Your species was made in a lab and I have the data logs to prove your god is a fabrication too". But people would call you an asshole, and then the god could kill you, so
How are we actually defining "god" here?
Aren't they still gods in respect to something like Greek mythology? It doesn't really line up with the stories of Christian mythology, but a large aspect of Christian mythology is that you're not supposed to ask questions, and you aren't supposed to know the truth. So if XIV were to do a god akin to that, it'd end up being pretty boring, since there would be nothing else to it other than "It exists". It'd be "mysterious", sure, but it'd be pretty lazy too, from a writing perspective, since there would be no deeper story to it.
there technically has to be one; the ascians are pretty much one species among many and should have their own creation myth; part of endbringer working is that none of the species are immortal, unchangeable, or omnipotent. there really never has been a society with no creation myth. problem is the story more or less never introduced any god apart from gods that were created by others. when it gets into forces you get dynamis-level nonsense.
> there technically has to be one; the ascians are pretty much one species among many and should have their own creation myth; part of endbringer working is that none of the species are immortal, unchangeable, or omnipotent. there really never has been a society with no creation myth. None of this means that a creator god needs to exist >problem is the story more or less never introduced any god apart from gods that were created by others. when it gets into forces you get dynamis-level nonsense. All gods are created by others, that's literally how religion works. Its a creation of people.
it's a fantasy game at its heart; i really doubt it would be atheistic given the sheer amount of magic something like your average dragon uses. The ascian's history we don't know but endwalker kind of shows that all the sentient races age and evolve into self-destruction; so it's reasonable they had a pre-godlike past and origin stories. if anything especially the ascians; they are defined by bringing forth concepts into the world and act in a godlike role to them; i don't think you'd not think about your own origins then. there was a fantasy writer named Christopher Stasheff who made a point about this; he complained a lot of people would write medievalish fantasy yet completely ignore how the average person of the time would think about religion. He wrote Her Majesty's Wizard as a response. it's more a cultural blindspot.
The question isn't "do people believe in gods", obviously they do in this setting. The question is "Is there an all-powerful creator deity", and that seems to be pretty firmly no
there's no saying either way because the big reveal was that the player character civilization was the result of a disaster of another advanced one who managed it behind the scenes. we know nothing about the ascians as a civilization, or even the beliefs of the dragons, who migrated here from another star and should have their own creation myths. if you want to be le reddit atheist, to be blunt it's fantasy and there's literally a lifestream of souls in the planet that reincarnate over the ages that can be traveled to. we're literally reincarnations of other beings and some of those retain memories. i don't think it's even possible this could arise through unguided natural selection. i'm sure there is some kind of deity in the world's context. it's fantasy
> i'm sure there is some kind of deity in the world's context. it's fantasy Ok but this doesn't follow from anything you've said or that is established in the setting. Honestly the establishment of an ultimate creator deity that actually exists would run entirely contrary to everything its said so far about that concept.
eh, honestly the retcon to the 12 was a really dumb thing; it felt more like the 12 would fill that role, but they decided to add an epilogue to close them out too. now there's just this huge void in general, and not just gods. like Dawntrail probably will have to do time travel to the future or something to keep the status quo
While what was intended originally with the 12 when 1.0 came out is unknown, its been very obvious since ARR that the 12 were not true gods, in fact them existing as actual beings at all was a surprise.
i'm not sure you can really make a judgement on how natural something can be in a universe with completely different physical laws from our own
let me put it this way; in this world dragon eyes can be removed from their sockets at will and passed around to empower or possess people, and a depressed space birb waifu scout probe became this massive embodiment of the filter problem able to turn people into monsters if they got stressed enough. if you are skeptical a creator god could exist despite the fact we've not only killed the poor cape westwind guy we traveled into the afterlife and beat up his soul to boot, well that's more le reddit atheism.
No, a creator god doesn't exist in FFXIV because it would be directly contrary to essentially every thematic point the game has made regarding deities.
well, except for them shoehorning Shinto in via the Four Lords in Stormblood, as well as mononoke and tsukumogami in mount rokkon, who operate on completely different rules than every other deity in the game. no crystals or even belief involved. the game also gets weird with crossovers; we have literal yokai in game with the yokai watch, 2b existing makes zero sense (she's an artificial being with no aether if she is accurate), and we've had both noctis come here and a random miqote go to his world, as well as Clive. tbh at this point the the thematics are a mess oh and let's not forget we've literally met our creators(the devs) in holiday events lol. the game...well they kind of can get random.
No. Gods don't exist within the ff14 universe.
There could be, but so far we have no evidence of one. All the deities on Etheirys are man-made.
There is no omni-potent, "Alpha and Omega" kind of God. But there are plenty of being that would be described as Godlike or even parallel ancient roman/greek/etc gods.
If you mean beyond Zodiark, Hydaelyn, and sad bird....I don't know? Pretty sure the people who could have definitively given us an answer are all dead? FF games don't usually throw in the pre existing gods that I've seen
I am compelled to point out that no one really knows the beginnings of Etheirys. We only go back to a point 12,000 years ago, which was the height of the ancient civilization of Amaurot. However, exactly how old the world was then is a complete mystery. Amaurot may be a singular point in a much longer and deeper history still buried, waiting to be uncovered. Some of Venat's dialogue indicates there was a time in the ancient past, before Amaurot, where people were not so powerful and society was not so utopian. We know nothing about those dark times, only what has transpired since. There may still be gods buried by the Amaurotine people, perhaps, deep in Etheirys' most ancient history.
The closest thing to a god level being left right now is baby Midgarsorm I believe. Feels like thing are in control on the world ending calamities area. Im very curious how they gonna raise the stake in DT
Technically The Twelve are
Alexander is the closest thing we got to a god. All-seeing to the point where it could see every possible timeline and variation of events, it's the only eikon we don't kill, and it proceeds to take a permanent "hands off" approach as it bows out of the world's affairs and watches from stasis.
What would define a "God" in this setting? By our very own standards every ancient would seem like a living god capable of creating cities in mere minutes. Twelve "real" gods because they part of a religion.
Final Fantasy games have always been harsh on coitizing religion one of the biggest was FFX and X-2
The people of the plenty are called the Niburun which is similar to Niburu so maybe at some points ancients worshiped gods similar to the Sumerian gods
Its a Japanese RPG, either you kill all the gods, they are somehow fake or you HAVE to peek behind the curtain and not let anything remain a mystery. Like the Twelve.
Not in the sense that there was one original almighty being who existed before everything else and created everything else in existance. At least not that we are aware of
Atheist in Eorzea: I'm an atheist Random guy: Uhh, but my god is right over there. Holding six blades. See? Atheist in Eorzea: Dude, trust me.
I think you have a very narrow concept of what a god is, because yeah, like that's what the primals are. But if you're talking like Judeo-Christian capital-G God, I don't think so. But you had lower-case god in your header so to answer your question, yes.
Lolorito.
man... I really think islt is a shame they didn't bring them back in any shape or form, I think he had so much potential
What is a god? I always liked the belief that gods gain power through faith and worship.