(07-31-2013, 06:10 PM)Yssen Wrote:(07-29-2013, 04:39 PM)Garaf Wrote: This seems difficult to reconcile with the lore behind the split between the Wildwood and the Duskwights. Â The lore says that the Duskwights went underground, not that the Wildwoods came to the surface and seems to imply that the Wildwoods more closely resemble the "proto-Elezen". Â On top of that, I have a hard time picturing a race dividing along such disparate paths within 500 years. Â It seems like they would need much, much longer to develop into separate subspecies with distinct cultures. Â I would conclude then that Gelmorra wasn't a Duskwight/Elezen city so much as just a city with a diverse population and probably did not play much into relations between the two. Â It's definitely something that could use further clarification from SE, but I don't know if we can count on that. Â Everything I saw on Gelmorra came out of conversations with NPCs.I think the answer here lies in something different. I think the two tribes grew apart simply because they lived in very different environments, but still held on to a similar culture. The "split," in terms of why the two tribes have animosity for one another, is stated to have something to do with the founding of Gridanian (and to a seemingly lesser extent, Ishgard) by the Wildwoods. We know that the founders of Gridania made a pact with the Elementals in the Black Shroud in order to secure the city-state. This deal (or the events surrounding it) are probably what lead to Gelmorra being fully abandoned. The animosity between the two tribes being caused by disagreement over this pact with the Elementals. Wildwoods went for it, Duskwights refused. Duskwights got kicked out and retreated further into seclusion.
Gelmorra very well could have been one of the first elezen settlements when they came down from the north. This would explain why there are both above ground and below ground Gelmorran ruins. Long and short, my theory is that there was not a large amount of animosity between the two tribes when they gravitated to different living environments. The animosity came later, probably over what the Duskwights call the "loss of their homeland."
This is what I would have assumed to be the case at first, and at first it seems to make a fair deal of sense. The bit I can't get past though is that it implies, if not requires, that the biological distinctions between the two subspecies developed entirely in the last 500 years. It doesn't seem like a long enough period of time for physical adaptations (namely the wildwood's eyesight and the duskwight's hearing) to occur that would differentiate the two.
It's probably an academic point either way, and I apologize if there's been further discussion on it since Page 6. I haven't had the opportunity yet to catch up with everything yet.
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