Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker

The Hydaelyn-Zodiark saga is the singular greatest narrative experience in gaming, a story which has constructed its own complete metaphysical system, then occupied it with individuals embodying their own distinct and internally coherent philosophical position all enhanced by the form the game takes. It is an extended philosophical investigation into whether individuation can justify itself without reference to the universal and how it does so with only the accumulation of irreplaceable particularities.

The foundational metaphysics of the game rest upon aether: a monist substance but with a twist. Aether, as this universal substance, is conserved via the eternal cycling through the aetherial sea, such that nothing is ever truly annihilated. There is merely new configurations of the same general substance, and so within Etheirys there is no actual negation at the level of substance.

Form, however, is a different thing, as it is the specific configuration that makes a particular being this thing rather than some other thing, an emergent pattern that can't be derived from merely the constituent aetherial parts it has. Thus, it is mortal in a way substance is not. When the Sundering happens, the aetherial mass persists, but is diluted, as its form changes and the original configuration is gone. The irony, however, is that the entire Ancient society was build on a similar industrialized management of form negation.

Creation magic is essentially the negation of all possible forms except one, in such the same way that to create a specific animal is the negation of an infinite range of alternative animals. Thus, every determination of what enters being is simultaneously a determination of what remains unrealized. The general project of the Ancients then is essentially the star's slow refinement towards perfection via this justified negation of particular forms in the service of this final end.

This is what Hermes could not accept, for his character is the system's own critique of itself. As the prime administrator of this form-negation, he has an existential crisis about it focusing primarily on the teleological justification. When asking whether it's right to sacrifice all lives for the sake of the star, he's asking a structural question about the justification: either these positive ends infinitely regress (and thus, what is perfection for?) or they arbitrarily stop (we will call this specific point perfection without further elaboration). Neither answer can bear the weight of the specific particular being dissolved in order to achieve it. However, Hermes' civilization essentially had no cultural form of expression for such ideas.

Thus, did he build Meteion, the empath machine made of the rare substance that is not aether, dynamic, thus subverting the original monist claim the ancients believed in. Meteion is essentially an empathy machine, and Hermes sent it out as an instrument of experiential inquiry to answer an analytical question. It returned with the data such a flawed premise would naturally generate: there is no universal meaning or everlasting existence. His attempt at pushing his own personal questioning towards the wider cosmos, even when structurally incompatible, naturally failed.

When the Final Days arrived, two forms of negation were the Ancients' responses.

Zodiark was mass self-sacrifice, as each Ancient gave their lives to give the form of a specifically configured and concentrated being. This is again a dissolution of form into undifferentiated content (aether) to produce Zodiark. Thus did the many get consumed into the one as the particular is annihilated to produce the unified, for Zodiark's power is negatively correlated with the amount of Ancients who are still themselves.

Hydaelyn's act of the Sundering however is fundamentally different. It is a division, for all of Etheirys was sundered into the source and the shards, and is an absolute annihilation of the original particular in service to a new form of it. This new form are the people of the sundered shards, and they have self-consciousness, unlike those who were dissolved into Zodiark. This is, however, a self-consciousness lacking permanence, unlike the Ancients, which allows for a new form of meaning to be generated. This is because Post-Sundering existence is an unfinished one, where history and meaning are continually reshaped, and such the state of “being” transitions into “becoming.”

The Ascian's Rejoining is an attempt to undo the negation of the Sundering by performing the same kind of negation Zodiark did (which I shall call "determinate negation") but in reverse. Rejoinings destroy a reflection's worth of developed self-consciousness to recover the underlying aetherial mass, and thus is the loss of the particular enacted twice. Thus, Emet's solution ultimately has the same structure as the tragedy he's trying to avenge.

So now, let us go more into Emet-Selch's character:

Emet isn't merely nostalgic, as his longing for the past has a fundamental justification in that the past possesses a higher degree of being. The past is fundamentally superior, both culturally and metaphysically as their souls were denser with aether. Their civilization was more unified with the world's substance itself.

So when Emet says that mortals are "lesser fragments" he is speaking from his perception: as the man with the strongest soul sight among the ancients he constantly detects the diminishment of sundered humanity: "Unlike eons ago, however, there was no brilliant shine to greet his sight, but a wan, sickly glow. A guttering candle where once a signal flame blazed." His "anti-time" philosophy is a response to continuous lived contact with degradation

However, his hatred never fully stabilizes into hatred like someone like Nidhogg for his campaign is fundamentally based around love. Love is the force continually producing exceptions to his ideology: "Yet in spite of himself, when he cradled the newborn in his arms and stroked that downy hair, he could not help but hope." The compassion he feels here is fundamentally antithetical to his ideology This actually makes him mirror the metaphysics of the game itself in regards to the Sundering, particularity, permanence, and meaning.

Emet rejects the becoming the Sundering offers conceptually, however he has already been psychologically infected by it. His attachment to particular mortals proves that the present has generated value independent of the ancient totality. However, the most interesting thing is that while the game defeats his conclusions, it never destroys his premises. The ancients were comparatively extraordinary (even if they did have some flaws in their societal/cultural structure Emet could not perceive), the Sundering did annihilate his civilization, the present is fundamentally built upon a sense of exclusion, time does destroy things, and the presence of alternatives does allow for exclusion.

To elaborate on my part about exclusion, the Sundering also acts upon mereology (the study of parts and wholes) and the philosophy of alternatives requiring exclusion: to actualize the Unsundered world, the Sundered world would need to be excluded. In other words, existence is built upon the principle of exclusion. This fury is partly the fury that his civilization required destruction in order for current existence to exist.

Emet's failure is that he can't move beyond his loss. Alphinaud after Emet gives his speech before the Amaurot dungeon only says one line: “The ones you love are in the past. While ours are here in the present.” This rebuttal is one of temporal priority, Emet grants ontological authority to the past due to the idea of it possessing greater metaphysical density, beauty, and completeness, while Alphinaud asserts the ethical primacy of the present as the present for the living matter because they exist now.

Emet's sense of value derives from perfect being, while Venat's value derives from the becoming. Emet's ideology is such that it revolves around a more fixed static point.

His philosophy, "anti-time" as I like to call it, is such that change = corruption, time is a degrader of being (rather than a force for becoming) in the sense that it dilutes what was once pure. He wishes to revert the fundamental condition that made loss possible in the first place.

And his biggest sociological irony is that he must use the tools of time as death to destroy time to revert civilization back to its pre-lapsarian essence. Think about it, he cultivates Allag (hyper advanced science fiction tech), creates Garlemald (advanced tech), uses imperialism/technological acceleration and calamities all to his advantage within his plan. In short, he uses tools of death and time (via technological advances) to intensify historical motion. He industrializes entropic tools to reverse entropy, and in so doing becomes the very force he despises.

There was a short story where Emet observes a bird or phoenix in the ancient past that is exactly the same as him: it refuses dissolution, is trapped within continuity, experiences repetitive suffering, views his immortality as imprisonment, and persists onwards against the natural cycle of life and death. Hades pitying this bird is such that he once knew, in the past, that such endless resistance to the cycle will produce suffering and allow him to become the ultimate violator to the cycle.

To elaborate upon the cycle, the aetherial sea represents return and reincarnation (or continuation through dissolution within the metaphysics of the game). Emet refuses this by preserving configuration indefinitely rather than allowing re-integration to turn into becoming. so, Emet is fundamentally anti-cyclical: he wants memory without transformation, civilization without death, and most importantly continuity without change.

What allows Emet to now be truly transcendent as a character is the partial recognition at Ultima Thule without complete ideological surrender: "The future you seek is not the past we loved." This line acknowledges the incompatibility between himself and the sundered world, he doesn't randomly decide that Venat was right but he more so accepts historical defeat while preserving metaphysical disagreement.

And then he says this: "Expand your horizons." This is clearly a reference to Azem, and Azem matters because Azem represents openness to the notion of contingency via his sense of adventure. This is Emet recognizing ancient culture's hidden flaws, as he knows he cannot become Azem yet perceives what his civilization lacked.

There is no redemption or moral purification for him at the end, only a tragic sense of lucidity. The world that defeated him possesses something that his own world could not generate within the confines of the conditions it established: the capacity to continue through fracture (as evidenced in the Venat sundering cutscene in Endwalker).

The dichotomy of negations is further complicated by the void, as the ancients brought ruin without any potential for continual life (via the aetheric sea) to it. It's unusable for Ascian rejoinings as its substance is actually negated and resides in a state of ontological lawlessness. Primals, by contrast, are cyclical negation, as they consume aether from the cycle but the cycle recovers upon their demise.

Dynamis as a force is clearly analogous to dark energy in real life, as both are stated to make up 68.3% of the universe. More importantly, it is a substance molded by form, for it takes the form of the emotional content that is directed at it, and thus the Final Days are the world's latent emotional content attacking itself immanently. The substance of dynamis then becomes self-negation, and the Endsinger as a being is substance configuring itself into such a specific orientation.

Thus, the Warrior of Light killing the Endsinger is negating the negation of the world by returning the substrate from its self-negating orientation back to its infinite potential. The prayers at Ultima Thule are dynamis events countering civilizational despair such that their hope is a generation of enough hope or love-aspected dynamis to recondition what it's currently doing.

However, there is another implication to consider here, that being that to exist in the world is to negate. Every form closes off alternatives just as every act of creation negates all the forms that would have occupied the same aetherial content. The heroic resolution of destroying the Endsinger, is also a negation for the negation of negation is still ultimately a negation. Thus, Hermes' unanswerable question is the structural condition of self-consciousness that has fully understood what its own existence requires. To live is to be Fandaniel, to be the administrator of your own form-negation and be unable to justify it but also be unable to perform it. Thus, does existence negate itself, and upon infinite negation does the world realize itself.

The antagonists Ishikawa tend to write end up having a certain failed relationship to particularity. Emet grasps specificities and destroys it by demanding such a thing be universal, for he loves specific Ancients and moments and pursues their restoration through the Rejoinings which destroy all other specific configurations. Hermes cannot accept particulars as sufficient because of his a demand for a universal grounding. Zenos collapses specificity to a point, deriving meaning away from the apathy by finding "the time between the seconds," a moment so dense with "presence" that his awareness dissolves entirely and only a blissful euphoria remains. Yet this moment is extracted from the web of relationships that ultimately make it valuable, and thus that is his failing. Elidibus loses the capacity to register any such particularity at all, for he has sacrificed everything and refuses to utilize memory crystals, thus discarding his self. Furthermore, he breaks people down into archetypes, other "Warriors of Light" and in so doing do specific lives become an instance of such a generalized, universal type. Varis abolishes particularity be abolishing that which he believes to be the root of all conflict, difference, and returning all to a unified race.

The answer to this comes in the most cathartic short story of the game: Days Gone By, Days Yet to Come. As Hythlodaeus dissolves into the aetherial sea, he reduces his existence to three simple nouns: a garden, a sky, and a man. Not because they have intrinsic value, but because of the particularity residing within them, and that particularity is inherently irreplaceable for memory is aetherial, it has physical weight and is a causal force within the metaphysics of the game. The Echo’s ability to access other souls' memories is such that the past is present within consciousness as an active force rather than a “recording.” The Eden raids prove this by having Warrior of Light's memories of the primals physically reconstruct elemental aether in the Empty, and so memory is applied to an aetherial medium. Furthermore, the Echo is a physical re-enactment of all experience, not just a vision. The ancient’s soul crystals are literally memory storage devices, the primals are collective memory given sufficient aetherial force to achieve an autonomous existence, and at the scale, the aetherial sea is a memory system for the universe by maintaining the substance from which future consciousnesses will be formed. And so, memory is an active force in the present as well.

Hythlodaeus' position is the only one that actually answers Hermes' question rather than sidestepping. The value he was searching for is not universal, but infinite within each of the particulars. Meteion only understands this at the end, realizing the answer was within Etheirys the entire time.

In the end, Zenos asks whether this life was a gift or a burden. The game withholds a response for the question is addressed to the player as the player, and the answer can only be found within the particular among the infinite.