Why are sin eaters less intelligent than a voidsent?

Hello!

As written in the title, I'm curious as to why Sin eaters appear to be less intelligent than a Voidsent? Both are driven by hunger for aether, killing the living in their wake, but voidsents appear to be able to speak and demonstrate different kinds of personalities, from being cowardice to even heroic, while sin eaters are plainly just.... silent and expressionless.

Of course, this excludes Innocence due to his unique circumstances. It's more about the average voidsent & sin eaters and in general rather than a particular entity.

Light makes things slower. <ba-dum-tss>


I don't recall any specifics being given off the top of my head. (But I'll double check!)

If I was to speculate off the cuff, voidsent are said to have varying intelligence (often associated with the "rung" of the hierarchy given to them by Eorzeaen scholars), while sin eaters are ubiquitously said to be "mindless abominations" driven by pure instinct. I think part of it might be that voidsent and sin eaters weren't originally designed to be complementary, but became so as the plot made it convenient. It may also be playing a bit into how "darker" things in folklore are treated as wily and witty while "lighter" things just tend to naturally, instinctively follow some form of order (in this case, a corrupted one).

It may also be that they were all fairly mindless monsters at first and over the last ~10,000 years some voidsent have made a lot more progress than many of the sin eaters did in ~100.
Perhaps especially the ones who were warped "along the way" in the Contramemoria.

Voidsent are "humans" (et al) who while still living transformed into voidsent; this alone doesn't do much to change their personalities, though, so they're really not much different than the beings they once were.

In contrast, Sin Eaters are generally created following the actual death of a being. In some cases they retain certain echoes of what that person once was, but they're much more similar to zombies in that their will and personality are largely replaced.

In short, they're very different types of creatures.

Sin eaters and voidsent are very different kinds of creatures, due to the nature of the aether that corrupted them. Sin eaters are aether stuffed, they are passive and still, they don't lose aether and have no need to consume aether other than to gorge themselves more. Voidsent are aether starved, they are chaotic and willful, they lose all aether that they obtain and must always be taking more and more. This is due to the nature of umbral Light and astral Dark respectively.

Also, keep in mind, the voidsent we meet are the way they are after over 12000 years of existing, and the sin eaters have only existed for around 100 years. Who knows how they could have changed with time.

I thought sin eaters act on nature. It more hive mind right due to...... you know who being a warden.

The process of tempering holds the answer, I believe. A primal tempers life by suffusing it with umbral-aspected aether carrying the primal's own natural element. It's the umbral-aspected nature of this aether that suppresses the victim's will, while the elemental aether acts as a sort of "mini-primal" within the victim's mind, allowing it to command them even after the primal itself is killed. And as the same cutscene that explains this shows, too much of any given element will transform the victim's flesh in what is currently known to be an irreversible process.

This is what's happening with Sin Eaters. Their minds are being suppressed by the very Light that warped their flesh, leaving them in a zombie-like state where they only act on their base instincts unless commanded otherwise by a more powerful eater.

Vauthry is the exception, with this being attributed to him having been born half-eater, much like Zero was born half-voidsent. The Cardinal Virtues meanwhile were following the most significant, enduring memories of their host bodies, with no regard for changing circumstances. Titania appeared to be of sound mind for an all-powerful pixie, but may have simply been a less extreme version of the Cardinal Virtues. And Tesleen, though able to vocalize her pain and regrets, was nonetheless beholden to the will of the sin eater that turned her.

I always imagined that the sin eaters were somewhat of a hive mind, considering how Vauthry was able to exert absolute control over them simply because he was the most powerful among them. It would make sense--Light is commonly associated with order and hierarchy.

Conversely, voidsent are fiercely individual, only choosing to act as subordinate with either the promise of being provided aether or the threat of being consumed. Shadow is commonly associated with chaos and entropy.

Well, for a start, we've seen animals transformed into Sin Eaters, so them not being any more intelligent than the animal they used to be makes sense.
As for the Human-turned-Sin Eater, do we know whether they are less intelligent than Voidsent? Sure they generally don't speak, but being unable or unwilling to speak with us, isn't necessarily a sign of lack of intelligence.
There's also another issue. All the Voidsent we met, have been in that state for about ten millenia, so they had plenty of time to get used to their new bodies. Meanwhile the Sin Eaters are at most 100 years old and might as well have transformed just hours or days ago (of course not counting the ones that transform right in front of our eyes).

I think that their brains are frozen into inactivity by the stagnation of the light aether is rather unlikely. After all Hydaelyn is also pure light aether and seems to retain her full faculties.

But if they really are less intelligent, maybe Vauthry is the reason. Maybe his mind control of the Sin Eaters, works by suppressing the minds they would have on their own.