I wonder if there are ishgardian regional subcultures that have simply been lost with the change in climate. Communities in the lowlands with their own clothing and food and farming styles survived only by those who moved to the city, where they had no access to their own norms. Highland villages swept off the map, their microbreeds of karakul and hardy winter vegetables lost or run wild. Old embroidery patterns that don’t mesh with the city’s highly ingrained styles. Songs and tales that sound foreign and therefore suspicious to the city folk. Towns that thrived along the rivers, defined by their use of fish and reeds, more connected to eorzea than the city in the clouds thanks to trade. All lost.
Like i think we forget the sheer scale of the destruction here, the reverberations this loss would have for so many. Nobody lives in the highlands anymore. There are military encampments, and destroyed villages remade into military encampments. There are no settlements toughing it out in the western highlands there's one guy. I imagine if you wander through the Brume, you'll hear snatches of songs written and sung for hundreds of years in the green plains of Gorgane, now echoing off cold stone. There are nobles who had homes in ishgard to flee to or at least distant family with homes in Ishgard willing to take them in, but they still have their heraldry for a home they will never return to. They are home, and they are in exile.
