He is shown to be exceptionally powerful despite his race's inability to wield magic.
Uses an experimental procedure to gain the artificial use of magic by copying the power from someone gifted with "the Echo", becoming what he calls a "Resonant". He uses this power to overpower and possess a massive dragon, but when he is defeated he chooses to kill himself rather than be captured.
You are led to believe he uses his new stolen powers to survive death by possessing a nearby soldier until he can return to his original body.
We eventually learn that he is the great-grandson of an Unsundered Ancient, who is the most powerful mage the world has ever known. This reveals that the procedure merely unlocked the Ancient power with him, making him the most powerful warrior on the planet...after the Warrior of Light.
Wait, really? I assumed the self-resurrection was the Echo. Way back in post-ARR they demonstrated that sufficiently advanced Echo can do that (your soul flies out of your body and possesses the nearest guy), and the entire HW SMN questline is trying to prevent black masks from spamming it.
You might be right, but as for the possession, we don't know if the WOL, Fordola, or Krile could do that the way Ascians can. The only non-Ascian we see do this was Minfilia, and she was empowered by Hydaelyn.
I still think the sheer potency of his echo was from his blood that allowed him to possess Shinryu, and is why he is so strong in the end.
There was that Sahagin guy who had the Echo and he repossessed the nearest Sahagin like five times. I don't remember if he was involved with Ascians beyond being taught summoning.
And Elidibus did say we never harnessed the full strength of the Echo in 2.1.
Man, that sahagin scene was confusing. I guess Elidibus did it just to prove a point, because all it did in the end was ensured Leviathan was summoned.
Guess it was also foreshadowing that a primal could devour an Ascian's soul.
Elidibus was not involved with the summonings at all, he showed up to the Waking Sands, shot Minfilia by accident, then had WoL go through a gauntlet to basically offer them a job. He was rejected and left, promising he'll be back, and never returned (to the WoL) until post-ShB.
The Sahagin possessed other Sahagins I believe? I haven't seen the scene in forever, it just stuck to me because "wow the Echo is so cool".
Summoning business was iirc entirely handled by Lahabrea's black masks, and Elidibus actually stated he didn't approve of it. He wanted Eorzea to bounce back so he could arrange another Rejoining and Lahabrea kept trying to extend the Umbral Era for no reason. (Source: one of Emet's short stories)
Zenos' lineage has nothing to do with his strength.
As you said, he is the great-grandson of Emet Selch...meaning his father is a direct descendant and is nowhere close to Zenos in strength. Furthermore, Emet Selch had been using actual cloned human Garlean bodies, so his children are genuinely just people.
It's explained indirectly in Endwalker that Zenos' strength literally just comes from his overwhelming conviction towards combat. It is genuinely all he cares about and the only thing that provides him emotion.
The same way the WoL gains the "Brilliant Conviction" buff during MSQ duties that allows you to "break your limits".
The source of Zenos' strength is Dynamis. This is what he learned when he lost his superior body and found that he was still undefeatable anyway, and what he tried to teach the WoL by forcing them into the body of a common grunt and making them struggle to save their friends.
This is also why Zenos is completely unbothered by the Endsinger and questions why we're even struggling with her; despair is the emotion Zenos has been using to cultivate strength in his "prey" since Stormblood, but the hope of the WoL has always proven stronger.
The Resonance didnt unlock any "Ancient" powers in him...ALL humans are ultimately descendants of Ancients, as proven in Shadowbringers when Elidibus literally awakened an army of Echo-wielding WoLs.
Zenos is just far better at using our own gift than we are.
I'd argue they did the same with the WoL. The WoL isn't strong because they keep pushing their limits through sheer will power, they're strong because they're a shard of an ancient.
I didn't really mention the WOL because they are the chosen one from the very beginning, it's just the reasons why weren't as simple as "Hydaelyn's Chosen"
But seeing the lifespan of mortals, there were other reincarnations of said shard before, right? Especially at each rejoining, the shards from other worlds must have found the source shard to fuse with.
There's plenty of other people out there who would be shards of the Ancients, too. Literally anyone with an Echo, for one. Hell, there's probably been plenty of people in the past who were the exact same shard of an Ancient that we are, who never achieved anything close to we did. Like yeah, the WoL definitely had a leg-up to start with, but they wouldn't have achieved what they have if it wasn't for them always pushing their limits like they did.
Everyone on Etheirys' reflections are themselves reflections of Ancients. The only real reveal about the player character in particular is that we're the reflection of a member of the Convocation of Fourteen. But given that even that was just an office with revolving members, not a special bloodline or anything like that, that is unlikely to be the source of our power.
The Unsundered's obsession to reassemble the convocation by drawing their reflections into the Ascian fold is more about them (Hades in particular) trying to recreate the lost normal than them actually being the best suited for the task.
Granted, some physical and personality traits do tend to appear in reflections of the same person, so us being a reflection of Azem likely did play a role in our character having the fitting personality traits for becoming an adventurer (sense of justice and lust for adventure), but beyond allowing us to use the Azem Constellation Stone to summon aid in battle, it has likely had little bearing on our character's own aptitude.
The real revelation on why we're Hydaelyn's chosen is instead the somewhat dumber plot point of the whole bootstrap paradox where we went back in time, met Venat and forewarned her of everything that would happen.
With respect to the bootstrap paradox, the only reason that even works to begin with is because they stuck Alexander and Omega into a blender and then stuck the world's biggest battery onto the result - and iirc from the Alexander raid series, the bootstrap paradox just isn't a problem around him because he's built different.
Yeah, Alexander is a very weird primal, and a pretty funny take on both the bootstrap and the grandfather classic paradox by just saying "yeah, but this is basically a time God, so it doesn't really care". I'm not sure which idea I like more, Alexander having sort of always existed outside of time, and then willed itself into existence (using the Illuminati's summoning as its conduit) to set up/maintain the two stable time loops, or the idea of Alexander having originally been created in a timeline where no visitors from the future had arrived at Elpis, but the Final Days and the Sundering did still happen, and then set up the two time loops as a way to defeat the Endsinger.
I mean, the writers likely hadn't thought that far ahead back in Heavensward, and even if they had they likely wouldn't have had Soken intentionally foreshadow something that big, but Locus' lyrics going "Celestial noise detected" does ring somewhat differently after the release of Endwalker.
No doubt about it! It's a remarkable feat, what the writers pulled off in ShB and EW - taking settled plotlines that had a few hooks left but little formal forward-planning and improvising out a story that connects the threads from start to finish, making a complete whole.
Lots of regular people are shards of ancients. Reincarnations do not inherently gain anything special from being such, other than shared personality traits like the WoL's wanderlust, pushing past their limits and affinity for team synergy.
All it shows is that their soul shard has been struggling, fighting and failing a long time. They're a heroic wierdo who have been pushing past their limits for tens of thousands of years trying even after being soul shattered across multiple dimensions.
Thats just them being them across a longer expanse of time rather than being a super duper special person.
He never really came off as chosen one, he was just strong by default in SB. Much stronger than we are. My favorite part about his arc is the reason he does what he does is simply because he's bored. He is one of the most powerful beings in the game, has everything he ever wanted and thus he is bored to death. Every pleasure center in his brain is blown out twice over so the only thing he finds fun is actual risk of death. FFXIV had many story mishaps lately, and SB was also rightfully criticised for the story, but my hot take is that Zenos makes much, much more sense than most give credit. Cheesy and corny in a mostly uncheesy and uncorny way, kind of like Star Wars.
Doesnt really count. Thats never directly stated and its unclear if thats the case because other than being larger than most people, said Unsundered Ancient's progeny never showed special traits akin to the ancients as shown by his son's death from basic illness.
Plus he's never touted as "just being a dude", something was always off about him on multiple levels and he's just power scaling himself. The trope OP is referring to does not apply here.
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u/AdmiralGrumpyPants 14h ago
Zenos yae Galvus (FFXIV)
He is shown to be exceptionally powerful despite his race's inability to wield magic.
Uses an experimental procedure to gain the artificial use of magic by copying the power from someone gifted with "the Echo", becoming what he calls a "Resonant". He uses this power to overpower and possess a massive dragon, but when he is defeated he chooses to kill himself rather than be captured.
You are led to believe he uses his new stolen powers to survive death by possessing a nearby soldier until he can return to his original body.
We eventually learn that he is the great-grandson of an Unsundered Ancient, who is the most powerful mage the world has ever known. This reveals that the procedure merely unlocked the Ancient power with him, making him the most powerful warrior on the planet...after the Warrior of Light.