How Did Shulk Become A God | Xenoblade Explained

Appreciate you all watching!
Did you find the idea of Shulk miraculously turning into a god a little confusing? If so this is the video for you. In this video, I provide and explain my understanding of how Shulk became a divine being. I discuss the possible explanations of how this came to be and other related topics including Alvis' influence on the situation and others. I hope you all enjoy 😊

If you all enjoy this style of content then leave a comment below letting me know and put your own questions down there as well. At some point I will make sure to get round to them if this series does well. ALSO let me know if you'd like a spoiler warning on future episodes of this series as I'm not sure if its really necessary, but lemme know anyway 😁

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0:00 Intro
0:39 When Did Shulk Become A God?
3:10 How Could Shulk Use Zanza's Monado?
5:08 How Shulk Killed Zanza
7:12 Alvis' Influence On Shulk
7:57 Outro

Songs In Order:

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[lpfan]

Tbh, Alvis' line can also be read as "homs as a species were created by Zanza, Shulk is a homs, so Zanza indirectly created the new god", though the theory is very sound otherwise and basically what the game implies anyways.

4:07 Personally, I believe it is the result of Zanza subdividing himself. His mind was still fully possessing Arglas who was sealed away. He couldn't overwrite Shulk's sense of self because he was lacking his own at the time, he was simply a part of Shulk instead of the other way around, which may be why he internally appears as a second self. With each step towards Zanza being whole again(Shulk permanently picking the monado up, it being unsealed, Arglas dying and thus his mind merging with the rest again), his influence over Shulk grew, but it was already too late to completely erase him as a person because being under constant weaker influence made him resistant and he grew too independant under those conditions.

I'm a fan of the fantheory btw that when Zanza is implied to finally materialize in Shulk(the scene where Shulk gets monado-damage in mechonis), the only reason he survived was that the apocrypha was still running and at least partially supressing the Monado's and thus Zanza's power.


Also as an aside, I gotta say that after all this time, I am still in awe at how immaculate the storytelling surrounding Alvis is. The pieces are laid out to where one never really questions him at any point on a first playthrough(even when the plot makes him intentionally suspicious, one never really expects it to run multiple layers deeper), but it makes so much sense upon rewatching the cutscene that something was always amiss and only continued to be weirder with each new layer of new information.

At first, him having perfect control over the monado, somehow knowing about its specific ether wavelengh drawing in telethia and even the camera tricks that mask how he has to teleport to move the way he does, it's all obvious bs in hindsight. And it really always extends further, even in the endgame after he is revealed to be in the trinity of desciples, there are some tricks left, like how the player does not think about how he can see the future(as an alternative explanation was given earlier, that it is an ability of whatever family he supposedly hails from), when Zanza makes clear that it is a power that only gods should have(Because Alvis is one, lol). Sometimes I just wonder about the alternate universe where the game's name was never changed to Xenoblade and the cultimation of the whole narrative would have blown everyone's mind even more because of it just being "Monado: The beginning of the world".

Funfact to extend the aside because I love this too much: The further the story goes, the more Alvis claims that he cannot see the future clearly and definitively. Assuming he isn't lying about it, it is noticable how it vaguely corresponds to how the other gods become more active in the narrative. There are too many substancial interactions with the flow of fate to determine what is really going to happen. Something similar is actually also going on between Zanza and Shulk at the end of the game. Zanza cannot see visions past them meeting each other and Shulk has to put extra concentration into getting any during the fight(Expressed through a QTE), presumably because they are cancelling each other out. When Shulk obtains the Monado 3, his control exceeds Zanza's, so he once again gets visions normally. All of these things are just so detailed and defined if one looks for connections, it is insane.

[VGF]

I like to imagine each event as different phases of Shulk's godhood starting from an inactive god since the expedition, to a full god when he unlocks his true monado.

[ThadFC]

personally i do believe Alvis gave Shulk at least some of the power

Monado archives explains Alvis with this "he uses the passage of fate to
guide this doomed world towards a new existence. He is
searching for a new god, one he can trust to liberate this
stagnant world, and create a new world teeming with new
forms of life."

[RudiMyDear]

The answer for how Shulk became a god is hinted at repeatedly: "The Pre-Established Harmony" is a phrase uttered multiple times in the game and is actually a real philosophical concept coming from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's "The Monadology". I'd recommend reading into it more if you're curious about how all of it works since it also subtly explains how the Monado itself works in lore and also helps to clarify the distinctions in different types of Monados, due to a hierarchy of different types of Monads. It also gives us a good Idea of what the Monado itself is.

If you're curious about more of this I could probably DM you a summary of how the Monadology works-- since I've explained this like 600 f*cking times already, *god what am I doing with my life?*

The main thing you can take away from this is that your theory is actually confirmed to be (mostly) correct due to how Monadology works. There's just even more to it than you realize.

[randomzombie]

i think your explanation makes sense. cool video. i love the xenoblade series. at what point do you think Tatsu became a God?

[presion]

I always thought he became a God when he picked up the Monado in colony 9 since he hadn't had any visions or anything up to that point, thus leaving no proof that he had any kind of power, let alone God powers

[CrocvsGator]

I thought Alvis was talking about how he (Alvis) used to be a computer that was invented by Klaus when he talked about old gods being defeated by their creation. I could be wrong though. Though the theory that the Third Monado is Alvis' power and not Shulk's kind of fall flat when you realize Malos is similar to Alvis in both origins and power, yet Malos couldn't hurt the architect, who is part of Zanza.

[michaelbrent]

So is Shulk as Powerful as other Video Game characters like Pit(Kid icarus Uprising), Palutena(Kid icarus Uprising), Link(Legend of Zelda), Cloud, Mario, Roselina(Super Mario Galaxy) and Sora(Kingdom Heart)?