Magiteks are disgusting part 2
So this is basically my answer to @silverfantasy and @voxiferous on this first post, because both are raising interesting points, asking interesting questions, and making my mind go into deep and dark places. I’ll quote the different parts as I go but if you want to read their respective answers before, you’ll find them here and here.
Disclaimer: while I am trying to be as intellectually honest as possible in here, the sirens of body-horror are calling me at every step of the way so I might sometimes just get over-enthusiastic and leave the domain of pure analysis to push nice headcanons in the middle of this. Which calls for a second disclaimer: this might get really gore really fast at times. I don’t know. Surprise.
Now that we agree on the terms, let’s start with quoting voxiferous first:
Now I’m wondering if the MTs that you find in Niflheim vs. the ones you meet on the road are different, as well what the differences in the varieties of MT (Rogue Axeman vs. MT Trooper & Assassin, for instance) are. It would probably take going through a lot of clips to figure it out.
Also, I think the reason people think they are robots is because of the anime! [I won’t put the visuals, you can go back to the post to see it]
The difference between the MTs encountered in Zegnautus and the ones encountered anywhere else is that the Zegnautus ones are designated as “rogue”. On the wiki page for magitek infantry, you’ll find:
“MTs are different from natural daemons in that their behavior can be programmed, and thus Niflheim believes they can be controlled. This may be related to the serial number tattooed in each unit, which also allows them to pass through the imperial magitek laboratory freely. It later turns out however that yet unprogrammed MTs begin to go rogue.”
I’ll come back later on the implications of that but basically, the MTs in Zegnautus are the same than the others, but unprogrammed and unfinished. I’ll add a visual evidence:
It’s quite obvious I think that rogue axemen are just axemen but without all the decorum; and I’ll also come back on that later.
Now, to be honest, the anime is not the only place where you can see them looking like robots. In game, some of them happen to do stuff like that:
And in Kingsglaive too, you can see a magitek trooper doing this :
(also, see the guys behind with a different helmet? Yeah. I’ll talk about them later. We’re focusing on the nightmare-inducing ones for now.)
So, there are different kinds but they’re very similar. And at least up their elbows, they’re made of metal. I’m even tempted to say they’re made of a single template and removable parts, that can be assembled at will, depending on the kind of weapons Niflheim needs. This makes sense; it would allow changing strategies faster than having to build entire bodies with specific characteristics.
Still doesn’t mean there’s no meat in there. I’m now quoting silverfantasy:
I just want to point out if you go to the Niflheim Wikipedia page it explains the whole process? And they are robots in a way. In some of the jumpscare scenes if you pause and zoom in on the faces you can see blank faces under broken metal helms.
“The magitek infantry was developed with knowledge of daemons provided by Ardyn Izunia, who was made the chancellor of Niflheim sometime after he arrived in 722. Chancellor Izunia had introduced to research minister Verstael Besithia the method to mate daemons with the human soul, which is then incubated until it is strong enough to fight, attached to a magitek trooper frame, and encased in lightproof armor.”
So they start out as a baby who gets a demon bound to their soul and then incubated until they’re adults. And then from the wording I’m assuming that the “soul” which is BOTH human and demon are removed from the human body and put into a mechanical one and then encased in armor.
I’m pretty sure the troops look human as to not completely freak out the human Niflheim inhabitants. [...] I’m pretty sure this is also why they have actual humans in the army (Aranea, Bigs, Wedge, Caligo, Ravus, Loqi ect) Because they need to have humans to command the MT’s (I’m fairly sure they have no agency) and to keep up the appearance that the empire isn’t ruled by demons who we know the people of Niflheim have to deal with attacks from regularly.
About the “not completely freak out, this is indeed a good point, I’m just not sure it works as they still are incredibly creepy. Another sentence of the magitek wiki pages says : “Many find being in their presence uneasy as magitek troopers are silent and expressionless, move robotically, and don't react much to being damaged.”
And I like how it’s formulated in a way that implies people expect them to react as human beings.
I’ll come back to that later. This part is a good point. It could absolutely work like that. The only reason I’m partial to that is not only that I want them to be decomposing corpses, but that it’s sort of clear, from the lore, that the starscourge is a physical organism, and daemons are infected bodies; and the whole story has running themes around physical strength, physical pain, weakened bodies, illnesses, transformation. The ring burns people. Daemons are people. The King gets weaker from the use of the crystal. Luna gets sick. Ardyn gets sick. Ignis goes blind. Gladiolus gets more scars. Shiva’s corpse stays still in the middle of the mountains. Noctis gets physically swallowed by the crystal and even when the ghosts of the kings appear he dies from 13 swords literally going through him and into the afterlife as if his body was the door to access another plane of existence. It’s more elegant, I think, to keep going along this line and consider MTs as distorted bodies instead of just souls.
But it doesn’t invalidate your theory at all.
Since we’ve said that MTs need to be programmed – and so you are right, they have no agency – I’m tempted to say that the “mating with human soul” was Niflheim’s way of trying to make daemons compliant. A daemon with a “human soul” or a baby with a “daemon soul” (although, from what we know about daemons, it would be essentially the same) would be able to at least understand orders and do what it’s told. Now, I feel like the process would be closer to a sort of Frankenstein situation, involving lots of electricity in the brain, but that’s just me dreaming out loud.
No, that works just fine. The part where I’d like to object is the “attached to a magitek trooper frame” because this absolutely doesn’t imply they’re removing the body entirely.
I’m going to quote voxiferous again for this part because it’s also gonna answer this question:
Do you think whatever’s inside the MT suit has any kind of sunlight tolerance? Because if it doesn’t, then the MT would have to be really heavily armoured. Otherwise, a single hole in its armour could be completely disabling. Which would mean that any bullet hole could cause immense damage even if it pierced a nonvital area. (Prompto needs 2 know)
I’ll say, you answered your own question: you’ve shown the mask going off and as you both said, there are two layers of armor. I’ve shown it earlier with the axemen comparison too. So, first of all, I’d say they don’t have any sunlight tolerance but they are incredibly well protected, second of it, the first layer of armor is an exoskeleton.
I answered a few days earlier another comment about them being augmented humans and it would fit here: they can’t exactly be removed from the armor because they are attached to it and it serves to maintain their “human” shape. This could also possibly mean that, even if the armor was damaged and they started dissolving, the exoskeleton would allow them to keep fighting for a little while after they’ve started decomposing. We can also consider that the flesh fortifiers are meant to slow down the dissolving process.
Now!! Given that we’ve shown that their arms are robotic, this is the part where I formulate hypothesis:
1) MTs are fully grown adults attached to an exoskeleton and their members are cut to be replaced with removable robotic parts – or the robotic arms are transplanted on them. Gross, but possible.
2) The need for more and more soldiers forced Niflheim to rush the process and put “unfinished” bodies into the armors, thus the MTs being provided with mechanical limbs. We’re reaching out a bit but why not.
3) They’re made of human/daemon flesh but absolutely don’t look human. This is a complete reach but it’s my favourite, listen, there’s nothing telling us that the armor and the body can be dissociated. Maybe if you try to take off the mask, the skin of the face goes with it. Maybe they don’t even have skin anymore and just the armor. Maybe they look like daleks.
As voxiferous said: deformed beyond all recognition.
Now there is still one thing. You remember the other guys I’ve said I was ignoring for now? Well it’s time to talk about them, because the wiki presents them as “magitek infantrymen (former all-purpose model)”. Now I love that parenthesis because it sounds as if they are disposable objects too. Also, these are the guys we fight during the Leviathan fight, the ones that are led by Ravus. And during that scene with Verstael, Ravus and Aranea, they are indeed the ones we see:
And this place is definitely the throne room inside Zegnautus.
If you’ve followed it all and I thank you for that, you’ll have noticed that there are two times I’ve said “I’ll explain later” and didn’t. This is the moment. This is how it ties up:
The magiteks have a barcode that probably is linked to Niflheim’s ability to control them (given that it’s a tattoo, I’ll automatically assume that they’re chipped). Prompto has one too. Prompto and the infantrymen use guns. Prompto was probably meant to be one of those guys. There’s enough room in those designs for a complete adult body, by the way.
Many find magiteks to be uneasy because they “react robotically” as if they expect something else. They expect something else from those guys. They think those guys are humans. And, well, they’re not wrong. They are, but controlled. Brainwashed. Robotic.
Soooo, hypothesis 4) Niflheim started by using easily-controlled clones as “all-purpose models” and their research on “daemonized weapons” and the aversion of starscourge to sunlight led them to create things that were less and less human-looking and needed more and more lightproof armor, leading to these mechanical abominations that have nothing to do with actual bodies. Experiments on daemons backfired amirably, leading to the disappearance of people and the abandonment of the Zegnautus keep.
I can now answer the last part of voxiferous’ comment:
I’m also super confused why all those people who exploded out of their clothes didn’t turn into demons and just… disappeared. It’s true there are a lot of demons in Zegnautus Keep, but there aren’t enough to make up a whole Keep full of regular people… are there? And it’s not like they could’ve all just left, since we had so much trouble getting in… right? The thing is, if all those people turned into demons, shouldn’t those clothes be totally shredded to pieces? I know the demon particles (this science is kinda confusing to me, I’ll admit it) can’t survive in sunlight, but there are no windows in Zegnautus Keep.
Daemons have the power to phase in and out of existence, though. We see that all the time, when the giants just crawl out of the ground and the bombos appear out of nowhere. There are not enough daemons to represent an entire population but we have no proof that we’ve killed all of the daemons in here. We also know that there are leads somewhere, as the daemons have then managed to reach Gralea and the city had to be quarantined.
So the people did turn into daemons, and then, they’ve disappeared. As for the clothes shredded to pieces, it really depends how the transformation happens. But I don’t have much explanation on this. It can also be a limitation of the fact that we’re still discussing a video game - at some point the object just needs to be recognizable by everyone.
As for Prompto, silverfantasy said to wait the DLC so I’ll just say, either Verstael gave his own DNA to create the clones dolly-the-sheep style, or Prompto is his actual biological son that came out of a woman’s womb and Verstael wanted to experiment on him to make the MTs more horrific, FFVII-Hojo style, honestly I don’t know which one is worse and I can’t wait to see what square is gonna pull out that will ruin all my theories forever. But it’s been a fun ride.
