Originally Posted by
Berethos
We can still take it literally - when Koji talks about him being a proxy, he's talking about the times we see him in scenes and doing things that our own characters do in-game. When he's talking about him as a real and separate character, he's talking about the one we see in the CGI cinematic trailers. Even with the Heavensward trailer, what the Derplander (and crew, for the 1.0 and End of an Era) is involved in doesn't quite match up with what we do - he's fleeing alone at a different time from when we split off, he heads into Ishgard alone, etc.
Basically some of the representations of Derplander are proxy, some are him as a character - it's not fully one or the other, and now we've actually met the character version (from what we know at present).