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Cleretic
@Cleretic

Recently, someone on Twitter declared it to just be a flat, verifiable fact that Golbez is an Azem shard, and Durante is a Zenos shard. Naturally they provided zero evidence for this, and while I’m certainly not against clowning on the FFXIV’s community habit of taking something created whole-cloth from a fan’s brain as truth with no evidence–just ask anyone who’s deep into lore about Black Mage eyepatches–that’s not the thing getting me about this one

This is someone being thick-headedly insistent about what, to me, is the most frustrating bit of FFXIV fan-speculation: who people’s alternate-shard selves are. Because this line of thinking isn’t just completely and utterly worthless, it also takes away from every character you could be linking this with.

I think it’d be interesting to start with the actual evidence, though. No, not for ‘Golbez is Azem’s shard’: something much more concrete.

What alternate-universe shards have we even met?

Surely for this to be a relevant discussion point, we should be able to find a lot of other examples. So, why don’t we pull up those previous examples, and see if we can find any common threads! And as it turns out, there are a few, this isn’t totally from nothing.

  • Of course, there’s the WoL and Ardbert
  • The Encyclopedia Eorzea 3 suggested Reaper Avatars might be the Reaper’s own soul-shard from the Thirteenth, but calls the theory ‘unverified and unverifiable’
  • Cid and Chai-Nuzz, probably; it’s never directly stated, but I think it’s pretty clearly an intended line for everyone to draw
  • The three traveling merchants from the start of ARR, and the one we meet at the start of Shadowbringers
  • Gerolt and Grenoldt
  • Rowena and Mowen

That’s it. That’s all of them. There are some tiny things that might be wink-nudge references (Granson from the tank quests might be related to Granville in the Noumenon), but that’s all in terms of the actual clear ones. Given how we spent a whole damn expansion in an alternate shard, think that’s surprisingly small! It’s an atypical amount of restraint for that sort of story; any time any other piece of media does an ‘alternate universe’ thing, the cast is 90% the same people doing ironically reversed things; consider Star Trek’s mirror universe, or any given superhero story doing a What If or Elseworlds. But still, it’s enough to start seeing two trends:

A: They’re very obvious. In half these cases it’s explicitly stated, and in most of the other half the hint is VERY clear. As in, ‘the same exact character model’, or ‘the Stoneworks is blatantly a riff on the Ironworks’.
And B: They’re usually jokes. Outside of Ardbert, and far unlike the Ancient equivalents (which were entirely serious), these nods are pretty much entirely done for a laugh. Sure, it’s not always a completely weightless, Hildibrand-style gag–the traveling merchant and Chai-Nuzz are more of a wry, pained chuckle, seeing these figures we know betraying the principles we know their originals to have–but it’s fundamentally a beat you’re supposed to laugh at and move on from.

The result is an interesting dichotomy; while comparing someone to their Ancient equivalent is meant to be largely taken seriously, albeit often framed more as a history to learn from or overcome rather than a path to retread, comparing someone to their alternate-shard equivalent is joke fodder. But in both cases it’s also very obvious, the connection is meant to be a major part of the character in question, either as the focus of the character or just as a foundational building block.

The more speculative shard mirrors don’t have the same sort of clear grounding. But more than just being wrong, I actually think it’s woefully reductive. And while this is true for any two characters you try to link like this, I think the most common–and most reductive–are claims someone is an Azem shard. So let’s talk about that, specifically.

Claiming a character to be an Azem shard rips away their character.

Let’s talk Golbez. In fact, rather than just talking about pre-Flood of Light, tragically-dead Golbez, let’s also talk about Durante, because he’s also been constantly claimed by people to be an Azem shard. What do we know about them as people?

Well, in terms of history, this is pretty simple: they were soldiers of Baron who fought in the Contramemoria. Their history before the siege of Baron where Golbez died isn’t stated, we don’t really know their motivations, backgrounds, or even any of their relationships beyond being allies of each other. But when Golbez dies to a tragic mistake, Durante flips out, takes Golbez’s armor and identity, kills the Thirteenth’s version of the Watcher, and goes through a whole elaborate villainous plan to, ultimately, provide the souls of the Thirteenth peace in death. In terms of personality Golbez seemed to be a good man, the voice of reason in the pair, but that’s also kind of it. Durante seems to be the more proactive, possibly more passionate, which explains his later journey as essentially one of fully-felt grief, that he wallows in for millennia because the nature of the Thirteenth kinda forces him to; it’s that, or go mad.

You know what claiming either of those to be an Azem shard does, in terms of their characters? Nothing. It adds nothing beyond checking some abstract boxes in favor of a story arc around shard equivalents that probably isn’t even happening. Hell, it’s worse than nothing, because the way people tend to take that sort of connection is claiming that this brings–and therefore explains–some intrinsic qualities. Typically, with Azem it’s read as some essential element of heroism; that they must be an Azem shard, because an Azem shard is a hero. But in doing that, we reduce so much of them. We don’t know much about Golbez, but wouldn’t it be so much more interesting if he had actual motivations, even if they weren’t important to our window of them? People use this read to explain this as why Golbez’s Memoria crystal reacted to us, but wouldn’t it be much more interesting if it was instead reacting out of desperation, trying to explain, or even protect his friend? And what about Durante; his entire big journey of grief, in the Azem shard theory, is just his innate nature of heroism going down a dark path. That he’d always be some kind of big hero, but this time it was an evil hero. But that takes away the fact that he was responding emotionally, to things surrounding him; it completely ignores the grief he feels, rejecting more interesting and direct comparisons to characters like Emet-Selch, or Nidhogg, in favor of… what, exactly? Some tiny victory of having connected meaningless dots?

Because it’s not even connecting dots, because both the Azem shard and Zenos shard theories completely ignore one of the connections we mentioned earlier: Reaper avatars. Surely, if shard mirrors are important and relevant, the Azem and Zenos shards of the thirteenth are the only ones we can’t talk about, because they’re already accounted for in our Avatar and Zero! It’s not just a connection that ignores and breaks character journeys in favor of some abstract, probably-imagined myth arc, it also ignores the myth arc! It’s off in some complete nonsense realm that doesn’t adhere to anywhere, and unlike those people who write fanfiction about Minfilia still being alive and the WoL’s girlfriend, it’s not even behin honest about that.

And that’s true of every Azem shard theory I’ve ever seen. Tenzen, Tiuna, Ramza, multiple other voidsent; in projecting that theory, you reject the actual realities of what might have led to that person taking that role, in favor of just arbitrarily claiming them to be part of a single soul’s ongoing journey, even when that breaks the actual story of those characters! Tenzen and Ramza can’t actually be Azem, their souls are accounted for and that’s a pretty big part of each of their stories, but that sure hasn’t stopped some people.

And yet somehow they’re not even the worst victim.

Claiming a character to be an Azem shard rips away the WoL’s character.

There’s a divide between heroes in stories like this that I like to put forward as ‘Hero by Rite’ versus ‘Hero by Deed’. Essentially, a hero by rite is a character that has some important role, place or title that means that they’re by nature part of this conflict, while a hero by deed is there because they choose to be, they’re a nobody who’s either been thrust into the events, or willingly joined them. Final Fantasy’s had plenty of both, including across the same game; taking FFVI as an example, Terra and Celes are heroes by rite, while Locke and Setzer are heroes by deed. There's strong ways to write both, but I admit, I have a preference for heroes by deed.

The Warrior of Light is a perfect example of a hero by deed, because they’re a complete nobody. They got off a wagon, walked into a bar, and just started doing whatever needed to be done until eventually getting invited to the main story. And as an element of the whole ‘MMO’ part of the game, they aren’t the only one doing these things; they’re the only one that winds up holding the sword that stabs the villain, but they’re just one of a sea of people standing and fighting, and that’s a huge part of their appeal.

In claiming Golbez or Durante to be who they were because they have some super-special soul, you’re not just taking away from Golbez or Durante: you’re taking away from the WoL. That the litany of deeds they performed weren’t because they made the choice, that they stood and fought and won when others might not have, but because they’re just arbitrarily special. That it’s no great feat to defeat somewhere near two dozen primals, because they’re an Azem shard; they were always gonna do that.

And maybe you don’t care about Golbez and Durante unless they’re magically connected to your favorite characters from Prime Etheirys. But I think the story deserves better than that, and the WoL deserves better than that.


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in reply to @Cleretic's post:

I’m with you that such speculation is really boring and is just not compelling storytelling. I think the only one I’ve heard so far that works for me is Zero, because she spends the Endwalker patches slowly coming into her own as a hero through her own volition (with a lot of help from a band of merry misfits), while at the same time learning more about her past. In other words, her story already parallels the player’s experience. I don’t think Zero particularly needs to be an Azem shard, but her character does fit that slot if they wanted to do something interesting with it later.

To be honest, I find the Avatar shard idea kind of even more boring than regular shard speculation? It’s been a while since I did the reaper quests but I don’t remember that part of it having much narrative intrigue. If they really wanted to hint at something like that, it would’ve been more DRK shaped of a story.

Though if we absolutely have to go with Avatars being shards, I like the idea of there being some sort of grand mixup in which we got Zenos’s and Zenos got ours. Took freaking three expansions to get him to stop following us. Of course his shard would keep tagging along anyway.