thank you for your posts! they've been super helpful in understanding far cry 5 lore better. if you don't mind, i have a lore question; i've seen people claiming that the faith seed in the game killed her predecessor (in the cult, not joseph's wife), and other people claiming that joseph and/or john killed her. do you know if there's anything in fc5 that says or implies who killed the former faith?
You’re welcome! I’m glad you enjoy my posts :)
People who claim that Faith killed her predecessor have probably played the Far Cry 6 Collapse DLC. In that game, she explains she pushed the previous Faith off the statue of Joseph and that’s how she took her place in the cult. It was her test, the “leap of faith” she talks about in Far Cry 5, but according to the DLC, she didn’t actually jump.
Technically, she isn’t really the one telling this story because everything Joseph experiences in Collapse is a creation of the Voice and/or his tortured mind. Still, even though he’s upset when “Faith” says what she did, it’s more in a “don’t remind me of my mistakes” way than in a “stop telling lies” way, I think, so it seems it’s supposed to be true and not Joseph/the Voice distorting the facts.
The problem is that this was never mentioned in Far Cry 5 and that the DLC has a different writing team. It’s still official, and to some people that’s enough to make it canon, but to me it’s not, and I’ve noted too many inconsistencies to consider it a reliable source of information. It was also Collapse that “revealed” Joseph’s wife was the first, original Faith Seed, but this was never mentioned anywhere before, either; she didn’t have a name in Far Cry 5.
So it’s not really wrong to say Faith killed her predecessor because it’s the story officially told in Collapse, but it’s not what Far Cry 5 said, so I don’t consider this canon (it’s just my opinion, though). Maybe the DLC’s writers felt they had to explain how she survived jumping off the statue because they thought it would have killed her (even though we know the leap of faith isn’t always lethal)...
In Far Cry 5, there unfortunately is almost no information about what happened to the other Faiths. We just know there were at least two, Lana and Selena, and that, according to the author of the “Grieving Note”, Lana died and her body was disposed of at the Horned Serpent Cave. It seems it was then Selena who replaced her and that she was the predecessor of the current Faith, Rachel, but her whereabouts are unknown.
The note “A Confession” implies the Faith who wrote it was afraid of Joseph’s reaction if he found out that her devotion to the Project was “plagued by doubt”, so that suggests he might be at least partly responsible for her presumed demise. That said, no one clearly explains anything and the previous Faiths are barely mentioned, so we can only speculate about what exactly became of them. The Father says Rachel “was not the first”, and he must know the truth about her predecessors, but we don’t.
As for John being the murderer of the former Faith(s), I guess it’s not completely improbable since we can imagine anything, but there’s zero evidence he was directly involved in whatever happened.
