Final Fantasy XIV: A Little Sin Goes A Long Way

Adapted from a Tumblr post on my now deleted FFXIV side-blog into a comprehensible article.

This analysis is for folks who have at least finished the introductory quests of critically acclaimed MMO (with a free trial up to level 60) Final Fantasy XIV’s expansion Shadowbringers. You will know you have reached this point when you encounter horror in the desert zone of Shadowbringers. This article will not make any sense otherwise and may take some punch out of the emotional story beats of the expansion’s storyline, so…play it, watch someone stream it, and experience it however you want before coming back to this piece because this will not give you the foundational context that I am going to be analyzing.

Many people were able to pick up that many of the Lightwardens are named and themed after the Greek models of love. Eros, Philia, Storge are the blatant ones, given their names, but many have speculated about assigning the other models to the other Lightwardens.

I am not here to do that today.

Today, I want to teach you what a sin-eater is because it is not precisely mainstream information (most folks playing Final Fantasy XIV assumed that the main scenario designer of the expansion, Natsuko Ishikawa, invented them. While talented and creative, Ishikawa did not invent them; she adapted them). Instead, I came across it when researching occult history, which is a pretty niche concept overall. Once I am done explaining, then, I am going to come back around and showcase how the real-life history of sin-eating influenced a lot of Shadowbringers and its narrative, even the parts where there is not a sin-eater in a 20 malm (Final Fantasy XIV’s version of a mile) radius.

Sin-eating is very much an umbrella term. It is a religious practice in many places worldwide, a ritual where an eater eats a person’s sins, symbolized through food. This action was a typical ritual to cleanse a recently deceased person of their sins so they could rest easy in the afterlife, though it was sometimes performed for the living.

This topic came up very briefly in my anthropology course at university when we discussed the Aztecs and what pieces we could put together of their civilization. The framing then was that sin-eating was just an Aztec thing: in my experience, when academia comes across something like sin-eating, there is a pattern to attribute this to non-white cultures and Other it distinctly. Only later, when digging into Wales's occult practices, did I find out that this was a deeper topic than my anthropology professor would have had me believe. Most surviving texts today on sin-eating (that I have found and read; the thing about occult studies is that there are always more texts, usually where you never expect them [sometimes in a used bookstore in Southern California, being sold for $2 give or take sales tax]) are about the Welsh practice of sin-eating, and that is a lot of my specific understanding of the topic.

However, with that in mind, I cannot stress enough that this is a kind of ritual that we have found all over the place. A lot of what examples I am going to mention are quite simply the most common.

The two well-known examples of sin-eaters, outside of the Welsh tradition, are:

• Tlazolteotl: Aztec goddess of vice, purification, steam baths, lust, filth, and the patroness of adulterers. Ritually, her name is invoked in redemption rituals, where a person can tell her about their misdeeds, and she will cleanse their soul by “eating the filth of their mistakes” (her name translates out to “Sacred Filth,” by the way, probably for this reason). We see her influence in FFXIV via Eros, who visually has Aztec inspiration and is tied to romantic love. Eros’s Triple Triad card gives us this one bit and bob:

“A chimeric monstrosity, Eros was thought to be the amalgamation of several unfortunate creatures that were caught up and fused together by the Flood of Light. The meaning of its name─“romantic love”─is a mocking play upon the intimate and uncontrolled embrace which resulted in its present appearance.”

• Jesus of Nazareth: I do not think I need to introduce Jesus in this time and age, but he is acknowledged by academia as the universal example of a sin-eater as, according to broader Christian practice, less by literally eating the sins of people, but his sacrifice is narratively similar to the ritualistic role of a sin-eater, so folklorists and cultural anthropologists count him. I think his best FFXIV “parallel” is Innocence, in that Innocence is very much a “Jesus gone Wrong” in the same way that sin-eaters in FFXIV are “Light gone wrong.” Innocence and Jesus are demi-humans who are given a life path by those with power above them, but the motives with that gift with each one are drastically different.

Now, interestingly, as we get through to the Welsh texts, chronologically, we can see a decline from this being a more exhaustive public service ritual and into the depths of a “witchcraft” occult ritual. By around 1926 (I double-checked that one with Wikipedia), we see an example of a sin-eater who purposefully isolates himself because of how much sin he takes on:

Professor Evans of the Presbyterian College, Carmarthen, actually saw a sin-eater about the year 1825, who was then living near Llanwenog, Cardiganshire. Abhorred by the superstitious villagers as a thing unclean, the sin-eater cut himself off from all social intercourse with his fellow creatures by reason of the life he had chosen; he lived as a rule in a remote place by himself, and those who chanced to meet him avoided him as they would a leper. This unfortunate was held to be the associate of evil spirits, and given to witchcraft, incantations and unholy practices; only when a death took place did they seek him out, and when his purpose was accomplished they burned the wooden bowl and platter from which he had eaten the food handed across, or placed on the corpse for his consumption.

(Source: Funeral Customs by Bertram S. Puckle; shout-out again to Wikipedia for having this quote in a better record than my own bloody notes.)

This detail ties neatly into the Light Wardens, more often than not, being in isolated spaces behind their sin-eater thralls.

Honestly, as previously alluded to, I think we can also take the Light Wardens as allusions to sin-eaters in folklore.

Eros and Innocence I have covered, but my general speculation for the others are:

• Titania: Ties into the sort of Welsh/Welsh-adjacent history of the practice of sin-eating; not a specific figure, but potentially just a nod to the Welsh/Welsh-adjacent origin as a whole.
• Philia: Tricky, but I think the argument that Philia ties into the history of sin-eating as a communal ritual might be a valid one. From what we can tell of the environmental storytelling of Holminster Switch, they show up in what was once a bustling community. I think, given Shadowbringers having a lot of outside novel allusions (Amaurot being inspired by Utopia by Thomas Moore, for example), I could also get away with some of Philia’s attack names referring to a specific familial dynamic potentially marking Philia as a potential reference to The Sin-Eater by Alice Thomas Ellis? It makes more sense if you have read that quiet family-based horror story.
• Storge: This one is my least strong argument, mainly because Storge has so little around it outside of like…potential interpretations for why the Light Warden named after familial love is at the bottom of a mining shaft and well. You can make the argument that Storge has a relative resemblance to the way that many people interpret Christian angels, which sort of gives me a time-stamp on potential real-life influence there. Storge might (and I say might because this could just be me reaching for straws and I want to acknowledge that one) be a nod at the previously quoted socially ostracized sin-eater from Puckle’s Funeral Customs. Christian institutions, particularly in Europe, had a historical tendency to push out historical customs to replace them with Christian customs, which might explain the Biblical angelic appearance. The only other detail we know about Storge is a potential legend about it, from its Triple Triad card: “Legends tell that Storge feasted upon the memories infused within its domain─upon a queen’s adulation for her departed king.” I honestly cannot make heads or tails of that detail, but I nonetheless thought it necessary to note.

Beyond just the mob titling of specific areas, sin-eating plays into the overall narrative of Shadowbringers overall, with its narrative about grief and letting go.

The Warrior of Light, bursting with Light like a sin-eater, consuming a secret and goal given by Emet-Selch after the Hades Trial, serves the role of a sin-eater. By accepting his request to remember Amaurot as it once was, the Warrior of Light metaphorically consumes Emet-Selch’s guilt and helps him move on (not necessarily sin-free; the guy did invent the Garlean Empire after all, and there are not enough eggs in the game to consume to cleanse that particular sin. Not that Emet would consider that sin at all, mind you) from his ancient existence of bearing the burden of the memory of his people; after all, with Elidibus a partial amnesiac and Lahabrea dead from Heavensward, there was quite frankly no one else to bear that weight.

However, now it is you.

Even if the Warrior of Light never physically mutated or twisted in the same way we saw other sin-eaters do throughout Shadowbringers, by the end, even as we cleanse the Light from our systems by fighting Hades, we are sin-eaters (even if just by technicality).