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It seems common among roleplayers to declare that their body is aspected towards a certain element, such as water or fire. I was wondering if there's any basis towards this trend, as I was under the impression that an imbalance large enough to be called aspecting within Spoken resulted in mutation, death, or was just generally not good.
As far as I’m aware, being aspected towards a certain aspect is a result of tempering and if bad enough can lead to cases like Captain Madison’s or the WoL’s in ShB that threatened to turn them into a lightkeeper.
I don’t believe there’s any precedence for being naturally aspected towards an element other than 1.0 when you could choose resistances but nothing beyond that.
There’s a lot that comes out of the internet that is downright wrong so I wouldn’t really trust “lore” from community discords unless it’s sourced. I’ve heard really strange stuff before like Miqo’te supposedly having short lives or all hybrids being the mother’s race. The former’s case being made up from nothing at all and the latter being nothing but conjecture formed from model limitations (and later disproven).
So, aspecting a body's aether to a particular element can happen, most commonly with tempered folk. Even the ones that aren't mutated are aspected towards their primal's elements, as that's part of what tempering is.
This is, of course normally accompanied aspecting of their mind (memory) and soul aether, and the combination of these is what leads to them being enthralled by their makeshift deity. If the memories aren't present, the tempering is not complete. This can be seen with Gaia, who, presumably, is still aspected towards Darkness as she has control over it by her own admission yet does not seem to worship Zodiark. Of course Zodiark's tempered might be different as we do not know the exact changes between the original Deity concept and the corrupted summoning rituals perpetuated by the Ascians, but I digress.
If in your roleplaying adventures, you want to have your character's body's aether be aspected towards a particular element, as long as it's not too aspected, the character should still mostly function as a normal person. Even if this weren't the case (someone can correct me on this), in the end roleplaying is about self expression and does not need to stick too close to canon. However if you wish to have your character struggle with the imbalance of their body (small mutations that they keep hidden or something like that) or fear loosing control, well, overaspecting could be a compelling way to bring drama into the proceedings.
In the end it's all about having fun and telling stories to and with each other, so don't be afraid to cut loose, even if things aren't exactly 1:1 to lore.
The actual 'scientific fact' about souls being aspected (or rather, not being aspected unless something's gone weird) came surprisingly late for what feels like a base fact; it only came up in 5.4. On the other hand, the idea of souls having colors was around since 2.0, so the idea that souls were uniquely identifiable were there from the jump, albeit obscure.
I think we're just looking at an instance of the fact coming way after people ran with their assumptions; it's not people being malicious, ignorant or dismissive about the lore, it's just that people came up with it for their own characters before that lore, and are attached to that; it's a form of expression. Hell, even I'm guilty of it; my character's a primal researcher without the Echo, so I had her soul's aspecting be Wack As Hell because of all the times she got dangerously close to them. In my case I shuffled that back in her character because of that whole 'souls aren't aspected unless things are really bad' part came up specifically around tempering, so it was too close to her actual character focus.
The game's character creation dating back to 1.0 did have an elemental aspect based on certain factors (your choice of Guardian of the Twelve and your character's race) which entered into gameplay, giving you a slight resistance against one element but a slight weakness against another, and this was copied wholesale from FFXI. ARR neutered it though and eventually elemental resistance was all but abandoned, but your character's elemental alignment would still be reflected by this choice (for instance, my character being a Sunseeker miqo'te with Azeyma as guardian meant she has a slight leaning towards astral fire).
The lore suggestion thus was that outside factors would indeed affect the body's natural leaning towards a certain element, but only in a subtle way, because, as confirmed in ShB, over-aspecting a body's elemental atttribute... can cause negative effects (this is how tempering works, but isn't the only result - this is also how Voidsent and Sineaters are created, being over aspected towards Darkness and Light respectively).
Of course, it's entirelly up to you how you play your character including roleplaying. Elemental alignment is one such way of 'character building'.
Story wise, the Warrior of Light's elemental alignment is naturally aspected heavily towards Light which of course factored into the story of Shadowbringers, but really, you can roleplay your character however you wish.