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dying-of-thirst-here · 7 years

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One thing: from what we know about the story, the Wall was covering the kingdom of Lucis entirely for ~120 years, until King Mors decided to reduce it to Insomnia alone. Doing so, he allowed Niflheim to occupy the territories of Lucis have been abandoned by the government. I say “abandoned” here because we have evidence of things that have just been left here in numerous places. Take for example:

This is the road that leads to Insomnia and you can see rusted cars that must have been left here for a while, and half-finished buildings. They could be building that have been damaged by Niflheim’s bombings, since we know Niflheim has airships, but I edited the picture a bit to give you better view of the two cranes:

So, yeah. Building site that was never finished. And if you take a wider perspective:

So, clearly, someone was building something here and suddenly stopped, leaving all the material in place. It’s interesting that they were erecting buildings,something we don’t see anywhere else – even Lestallum doesn’t have buildings that high. This is in Insomnia that we find buildings, and this is the place of the map that is the closest to the capital, implying that, maybe, there were attempts to expand the city? There’s already an excellent analysis of its size, but if we consider how empty the rest of the country is, it is safe I think to assume that 90% of the population of Lucis lives in the capital and that the city has an insane density of population, which at some point led to expanding it outside its own walls. I mean, look at that screenshot from Kingsglaive:

There are construction on the bottom right, just along the rampart, that seem like expansions of the city, and on the left you can see hints of villages that were constructed just on the other side of the river.

Not only that, but there are a number of places where you’ll find either destroyed habitations, unfinished constructions, and rusted cars that seem to have been left here for years. Industries also have been abandoned – see Balouve Mines. And this is especially true for Leide, which I can explain with two reasons:

It’s fucking hot in there so people are more eager to leave and go live elsewhere

It’s closer to Insomnia, so the people living here have been the first to take shelter inside the citadel. How do you think Hammerhead gets customers? It’s right there on the road,last bastion of actual civilization before the long bridge and the walls.

There’s also another thing you find quite a lot in Leide and not so much in other areas, and it is: abandoned Nif airships and constructions. There are also those huge sort of walls/barrages as you approach the road leading to Insomnia:

What are those things, seriously?

And this becomes really logical when we look at the fact that Insomnia is under siege.

But when I say “siege”, I understand it in a very specific manner. Cities continue to be under siege during modern wars but it’s become rare, they’re often short, and they imply tactics and equipment that differs a lot from ancient sieges.

I’m going to talk about ancient Athens specifically.

I’m sparing you the details on all of ancient Greece’s military history, but basically you can see three different periods in Athens’ defence:

1) For a long time the army was considered the only defence the city needed. The soldiers defended both the administrative city (greek name astu) and the immediate territory around it (chôra) that served for agriculture and animals and was delimited by temples. Anyway when two cities were at war they just sent their soldiers to the enemy’s chôra and they fought and whoever was standing last, won.

2) At some point Athens was ruled by this interesting dude called Pericles (well Athens was technically ruled by a council of several men but this one managed to get elected so many years in a row that he was basically in charge). Athens was also at war against Sparta at this time, and when Sparta invaded Athens’ astu, Pericles said “alright, we’re no gonna fight those guys. We’re gonna build a huge ass wall around the astu, and we’re also gonna build huge ass walls along the road that goes to the harbour. So now, we can safely hide all the population inside the city and we have access to the sea so we can’t die of starvation.”

Athens did win, because then Sparta couldn’t kill anyone so Athens was, by default, the last army standing. Sparta did destroy all the fields, though. And everyone hated this. Everyone hated seeing soldiers burn their fields and destroy everything without anyone fighting them. Also Pericles died during this time because the city was so crowded that it got full of diseases. But, through gritted teeth, they had to admit that the tactic was good.

3) So then,they put another tactic in motion: they’d keep the walls around the astu, to protect the people. But they’d also build other fortifications in the chôra, and put soldiers in it, so that if someone tried to attack again, they could still fight back. And this thing held on until Philippe II of Macedonia arrived and destroyed all the fortifications with huge ass catapults. But that’s another story.

My point is, Insomnia in M.E. 756 is somewhere in the second step and going towards the third. I’ve tried finding some sort of defence of the territory but there’s nothing – either the constructions look abandoned, the few stuff that could be used for military purposes are ruins (Costlemark probably had a military role at some point? but now it’s fucking empty), Lestallum has NO DEFENCE AT ALL and all the most recent constructions are Nif ones (but those things will be more detailed in the next parts).

Actually, the only example I could find was in Kingsglaive, during the fight at the beginning of the movie:

Screenshots are terrible because everything explodes, but I enhanced the contrast and if you look closely you can see this place clearly is a fortified town, and you can see the rampart and the burning buildings. On the right if you squint you can also notice another similar fortified town, which seems to imply that there are several of those things, delimiting a territory. It’s also very similar in architecture to an ancient or medieval town. I have no idea where it’s fucking supposed to be, the best hint we get is on this shot:

It’s above some canyon, apparently? A huge ass one, or this town is veery small. It might not be a town, though. It could be only a fortified place that’s meant to be occupied by soldiers. The position is strategic, blocking the path, and there’s a clear view of anything coming. This was the kind of constructions Athens and the Greek cities got during the third step, to defend the land. Although greek constructions were usually on a hill.

Now, given what I was saying earlier – Leide is full of rotting Nif airships and is the most damaged area – my theory is that Lucis only uses those kind of defences on the territory that’s just around the capital. It’s sort of a second rampart,just to prevent the empire to get too close to their walls. So Niflheim walks on Lucis, gets pushed back when they’re getting too close to Insomnia, and so they build bases here and all their airships crash on the land all around.

So, yeah, it makes people mad! Granted, Niflheim isn’t patrolling everywhere and killing people so most of them seem to just have adjusted, but the Glaives hate that Regis is basically Pericles and lets the land rot while the city is protected. And the people inside Insomnia don’t want to get “invaded” by those “outsiders” because they’d lose their comfort, the city would be crowded (look at the lower districts in Kingsglaive, this debauchery of stairs and small streets) and people would probably have no jobs, live in the streets, get sick, try to rob other people to survive.

Now I’ll also draw your attention to this screenshot from Kingsglaive’s intro:

In the text on the left, it says that Galahd was attacked because it “resisted the imperial call for surrender after the wall was withdrawn”, so it also means that all the other regions have accepted that surrender. All the other regions knew that Insomnia wouldn’t help them and people decided to either flee or limit the damage. Which is why Niflheim isn’t killing everyone in those areas. They have a hold on them already.

And this says a lot about the relationship between the capital city and the rest of the kingdom: places that are away from the center of the power are neglected or forgotten. It’s funny, because it’s a thing that did happen a lot in the past, because information travelled really slowly. It shouldn’t happen in Lucis - they have smartphones after all. Except, with the wall around Insomnia, the capital is isolated.

But also, it implies that the place where the battle happens at the beginning of Kingsglaive is somewhere that is also still resisting, and it’s likely that the areas around the crown city are still resisting because they still believe that they will be protected by the influence of the capital.

And this is also why the ultimate surrender of all territories is so badly accepted by the Glaives but not really by the rest of the kingdom. Lestallum probably gave up the hope of getting some support from Insomnia since a long time, is likely to feel disconnected from the kingdom for a while now; but places like the Cavaugh region and the northeast islands probably still expected some protection. The fact that so many of the refugees originally became Glaives kind of also hints at the idea that people from Galahd were mostly loyalists – even if half of them ended up betraying the crown, they once believed they could actually get their homes back by serving in the Lucian army.

So when Ardyn comes in and mentions the treaty, the choice Regis makes fits into this continuity. He would probably have handed his city to the enemy to save his son anyway, because the prophecy and all that, and he’s getting weak, etc; but the choice would have been very different if Lucis had any chance to win. Thing is, Insomnia has felt separated from the rest of the country since probably longer than the Wall holds up. Most of the kingdom has already adapted to Niflheim’s occupation anyway, lots of places and industries have been abandoned anyway. Despite the feeling of betrayal, everyone could see that defeat coming from miles away. Actually, they’ve lost for thirty years already.

And in next part, I’ll explain in more details why everyone could see it coming, and thank you for reading this to the end.

#domesticfluffsimulator #final fantasy xv #ffxv #meta #long but VERY interesting #not mine #I completely broke this post trying to add the read more break and now tumblr is making it look like it's mine but it is not!#I actually do have some insight on the bunker things outside Insomnia but I need to track down the video

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