[7.0 Spoilers] Regarding the Milala

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Originally Posted by No_Nick_Needed

What is a more interesting question to me is, what happens to those who traveled from one shard to another and died over there? Like the native Alexandrians, who came to the Source. Does their soul somehow go back to their own shard,

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There's nothing in the lore that suggests that souls have any sort of true connection to their relative shards; on the contrary, there are numerous instances of souls of the dead playing by the rules of the shard they are in and needing explicit labor to be ferried between them. To name just one example, the soul of Minfilia is explicitly ferried from the First to the Source by Hydaelyn.

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Originally Posted by No_Nick_Needed

If one of the two dies, do their souls merge, or does the dead's soul wait for the living one to also die to rejoin, or is it just going to be reborn as a seperate being, until both parts of the soul end up being dead at the same time? Or does the lack of a proper rejoining mean, they'll never re-fuse and will stay seperate?

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I don't think we have a definitive answer to this. Though we could easily learn the answer if something unfortunate happened to the Rowena or Gerolt in Solution 9. Y'know, for science!

My guess would be that there isn't anything particularly special happening during a Rejoining, that everything in the shard dies and simply gets deposited into the Source. If that's the case, it would mean that the souls of the dead have some manner of magnetism to their counterparts (living or dead) and fuse with them. The demonstrated exception to this rule would be souls that are "undead" like Ardbert; he's technically dead, but in a way that has resisted the natural process of what happens to souls after death.

(I wonder what this means for the Scions who spent years in the First? Y'sthola would have noticed if their souls had become more dense, suggesting they didn't join with their counterparts. Does that means that they have living counterparts somewhere on the First? Or that the rules work differently for the type of out-of-body experience the Scions were having? It will be interesting to see whether whatever explanation the writers eventually provide is internally consistent.)

Living counterparts for the Scians in the First... I wonder if that might have been the reason why the connection between their physical bodies and souls weakened over time. Both the characters in the story and most of us players thought it was a timelimit of how long you can seperate a soul and body, but what if it was actually their souls being pulled by their counterpart body in the First.

But I just remembered one factor which I never thought about before in context of rejoined souls: The Seventh Umbral Calamity happened during the lifetime of all the characters we know, except some very young children. Do we know for sure that the WoL and G'Raha have 9 and everyone else from the Source 8 parts of their soul, or do we just know that pair has one more soul fragment than everyone else? Because if it's the former, we already have our answer to whether a dead soul can join with a living one.

It also makes me think about the voidsent. Just in our own stories, we killed many voidsent in the Source and between the Allagan wars and the War of the Magi, entire legions of voidsent found their end in the Source, which thanks to post-Endwalker MSQ we know means they died for good. So wouldn't that mean that there are plenty of other people who are rejoined just as often as G'Raha and the WoL, thanks to their soul-fragment from the 13th having come to the Soure? It could also mean that the WoL and G'Raha might even be 10 soul-fragments rejoined.

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Originally Posted by No_Nick_Needed

The Seventh Umbral Calamity happened during the lifetime of all the characters we know, except some very young children. Do we know for sure that the WoL and G'Raha have 9 and everyone else from the Source 8 parts of their soul, or do we just know that pair has one more soul fragment than everyone else? Because if it's the former, we already have our answer to whether a dead soul can join with a living one.

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Before the climax of Shadowbringers, Emet-Selch referred to the WoL as something along the lines of "a vaunted hero of the Source seven times rejoined". Emet-Selch sometimes stretches the truth, but I don't see any reason to doubt his words here.

Beyond that, the Rejoining itself immediately had an impact on everyone in the Source: they could now all understand one another. Before the most recent Rejoining, only those with the Echo could understand the various tribes.

And while there's no explicit link here, in Endwalker they talk about how after the Calamity there was a brief period of universal memory loss; one possible explanation for that would be the mass rejoining of souls. That would surprisingly fit in well with Dawntrail's lore on souls and memories.

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Originally Posted by No_Nick_Needed

So wouldn't that mean that there are plenty of other people who are rejoined just as often as G'Raha and the WoL, thanks to their soul-fragment from the 13th having come to the Soure? It could also mean that the WoL and G'Raha might even be 10 soul-fragments rejoined.

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This is a really good point; there are plenty of Voidsent that have died on the first. Cagnazzio and Rubicante for sure, and probably Diablos, Scathach, Echidna, Ferdniand, and any number of their minions...under what conditions those souls might rejoin with their Source counterparts is an interesting question.

And this is where I take a step back and wonder how much I can expect of the writers. Broad internal consistency is not a strength of FF14; there is unfortunately plenty in FF14 that contradicts itself if one's memory is nerdy enough. Dawntrail is full of examples of this, but even a fantastically written expansion like Shadowbringers had to officially retcon the functionality of Light and Darkness and transform the Ascians from cackling bringers of chaos to a principled group that was focused on a very non-chaotic goal.

All of which is to say, I love analyzing the implications of all the lore and stories we've received over the years, but part of me doesn't trust the writers to not negate their premises when it suits them. I hope they write something that is internally consistent, something that is grand and unifying and complete. I hope for that and I want that. But I've apparently thought so much about this topic that I've remembered the ways it hasn't worked out before, and now I'm feeling pessimistic... XD ^^; T-T

But they did find two ways out to explain the cackling, moustache twirling Ascians of ARR and Heaven's Ward. Lahabreha was corrupted by the Heart of Sabik and as we've seen with Amon/Hermes, the lesser, sundered Ascians can be dominated by one of the lives they lived as sundered souls, so they might be drastically different than their original Ancient self. So it's at least a well covered-up retcon. ^^

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Originally Posted by No_Nick_Needed

But they did find two ways out to explain the cackling, moustache twirling Ascians of ARR and Heaven's Ward. Lahabreha was corrupted by the Heart of Sabik and as we've seen with Amon/Hermes, the lesser, sundered Ascians can be dominated by one of the lives they lived as sundered souls, so they might be drastically different than their original Ancient self. So it's at least a well covered-up retcon. ^^

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Personally, I found their attempt at a Lahabrea retcon to be contrived, as the final twist was dependent on a smart, well-reasoned man making an incredibly dumb decision. Broadly speaking I don't mind when characters make dumb decisions, as real people do that all the time. But a well-written story foreshadows such things by introducing us to the character flaws that will eventually result in a character making a poor choice, so that when they finally make that choice, it feels true to the character. And by my read, Lahabrea's choice felt like it was in conflict with everything we had previously experienced of his character in Pandemonium. And that made it feel like they just replaced one plot hole with another.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

Personally, I found their attempt at a Lahabrea retcon to be contrived, as the final twist was dependent on a smart, well-reasoned man making an incredibly dumb decision. Broadly speaking I don't mind when characters make dumb decisions, as real people do that all the time. But a well-written story foreshadows such things by introducing us to the character flaws that will eventually result in a character making a poor choice, so that when they finally make that choice, it feels true to the character. And by my read, Lahabrea's choice felt like it was in conflict with everything we had previously experienced of his character in Pandemonium. And that made it feel like they just replaced one plot hole with another.

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Sorry but Lahabrea is the kind of stupid that only someone smart can manage. Man tore his soul in half on the off chance that he might agree on some level with Athena. Making poor choices was always an element with him.

Re: Lahabrea, I'd say the fact that he reabsorbed his markedly unhinged alter ego by the end of the Elpis-based quests was foreshadowing enough. Said alter ego showed us a part of him that was a lot less far removed from the Lahabrea we met in ARR. The reason Panda-Lahabrea was so different, to begin with, was precisely because he'd literally compartmentalized that part of himself.