Your feedback is appreciated!
Thank you for your time!
First, let me send my greetings and good vibes to FFXIV
friends and fellow OC writers! I wish you an enjoyable time playing Endwalker!
I have finally finished MSQ myself, and feel I’m finally in
a position to express my ideas on what I hope to do in response to the changes
to lore presented in EW. Never in a million years did I think I’d have to be
making these kinds of headcanons and revision.
Please, please, let
me know if you feel these concepts are plausible. I may normally bend lore
a bit to develop Amon’s character, but I wish to do my best to embrace and abide
by important in-game lore. My greatest concern is making all this too much of a
stretch to explain the Amon I’ve developed. But I feel there are enough
loopholes that I can (thank you S/E writers).
Leave a comment below!
Hit me up on Tumblr or Twitter! Please let me know your thoughts!
I have divided up this page up based on MSQ in order to
prevent spoilers the best that I can. The most important section is the first,
and the rest are supporting thoughts due to situations that came up as the MSQ
progressed.
So, it’s revealed that Amon became Fandaniel once he took Emet’s
offer and reclaimed the seat. This included receiving all of Fandaniel’s knowledge
and memories of his past lives. Honestly, Amon was already unhinged – what was
Emet thinking making the situation worse? A story for another time!
However, it’s also revealed that the Amon you fight and kill in Syrcus Tower is a clone. And this is
the most important element for my stories.
Being defeated in Syrcus Tower is a defining element of my
Amon’s experience. It has made him who he is. It also works extremely well for
me to claim that my Amon was not the real Amon, but rather the clone.
As for the Amon clone placed in the Tower, I suspect the
following:
In considering the above, I feel that the Amon I’ve written
in my stories, being the continuation of the Clone Amon, could remain plausible
even in light of the changes to lore. He believes he is the real Amon and has
no knowledge of the Ascian plans, or of his origins.
Through living a new life and his experiences in Eorzea,
this soul fragment has taken on its own identity. He is Amon, but he has begun
to change and develop into his own individual (which we’ve seen is possible for
a soul to do through Alpha’s story).
You could say, based on this, that everyone I’ve ever written with or interacted
with as Amon has had a hand in giving a lost soul fragment its own purpose in life.
And so, eventually Amon’s story reaches back in time to his
original unsundered form as Hermes.
I’ve made peace with
this revelation and I actually see many parallels that I can work with here. While
their basic personalities and how they handle their sorrow are quite different,
I feel that the two share curiosity, values, struggles for purpose and love for
their creations.
That being said, I don’t currently have plans to make Hermes
a big part of my Amon’s future development. I think I want Amon to know about
it eventually. But I don’t want this to change who he is in knowing it.
The ironic thing about writing Amon is that I’ve tried so
hard to keep his power level down as an RP character. The fun of writing him
was taking away his titles and powers and seeing how he lived as a regular
person – those experiences are what developed him, and not something I want to
be nullified due to a past lifetime.
There were times I worried about all the skills he was good
at – from barding to Allagan knowledge to sciences – it always felt like he was
an overpowered character that I had to take care to keep balanced.
And then he turns out to be connected to an Ascian Overlord
and a member of the Convocation in a previous lifetime. Go figure.
In this dungeon, we learned that fragments of souls can choose to remain with enough desire and will. The TT card for Amon the Undying states:
A fragment of the master technologist Amon's spirit, sunk deep within the aetherial sea. The soul was originally that of Hermes, before it was sundered by Hydaelyn and reborn countless times over the ages. Yet this lingering shard is no longer him, or even Fandaniel, but belongs wholly and utterly to Amon.
This lends to the idea that souls can have fragments that
maintain their own identity outside of who they were over lifetimes. I mean,
look at our own WoL characters. You can see that there, too.
So what’s to say a fragment of soul put into a clone couldn’t
become its own person in time? I’m going to lean on this in hope this can further
support my Amon Clone headcanon.