Why does emet selch consider us not to be alive?

if soul sundering causes you to lose soul aetheric density, and therefore make you less alive...
then are dragons more alive than the ancients? they certainly have much more aetheric density than any other creature, to the point that their scales are used as protection against meteion

if being less alive means being able to feel less things, or being at a lower level of consciousness than ancients (such as what animals are like), then that's not properly portrayed, as we can see that the inhabitants of elpis are just... bigger humans
they don't have a higher understanding of the self than what humans can achieve and they don't seem all that different from regular eorzeans in their range of emotions

once again, only dragons are portrayed as beings on a higher consciousness level than humans (until vrtra that is, who is just a human)
yet ascians still wanted to murder them using the allagan empire just as much as they wanted to murder the lesser beings

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Originally Posted by SeiyaSoiya

if soul sundering causes you to lose soul aetheric density, and therefore make you less alive...
then are dragons more alive than the ancients? they certainly have much more aetheric density than any other creature, to the point that their scales are used as protection against meteion

if being less alive means being able to feel less things, or being at a lower level of consciousness than ancients (such as what animals are like), then that's not properly portrayed, as we can see that the inhabitants of elpis are just... bigger humans
they don't have a higher understanding of the self than what humans can achieve and they don't seem all that different from regular eorzeans in their range of emotions

once again, only dragons are portrayed as beings on a higher consciousness level than humans (until vrtra that is, who is just a human)
yet ascians still wanted to murder them using the allagan empire just as much as they wanted to murder the lesser beings

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Dragons are basically aliens. He judges current 'people' of the world as less than alive because thats what they are compared to what people were like pre-sundering. It's not about it being some scale of 'personhood' based on aetheric density, its about the fact that once they were much more and aren't anymore. As for opinion of Dragons on Ascian end, we never really get to see it. We know they're more than willing to cause death and destruction involving anything and anyone as long as it fuels their goals. And I doubt they, seeking to restore their perfect paradise, see the alien species that settled on the planet after coming from outer space as any more favorable than the splintered husks of what once was humanity in their eyes.

The answer is that he's racist. (or whatever '-ist' you want to describe this as, I've seen a decent case for ableist.) I know that's a really blunt and brutal description, and might feel a little mean to people who like the character, but it's really just where we have to start here: he is making this argument out of prejudice and feelings, not out of facts and logic, and we shouldn't look for the latter in it because it's just not there.

The Ascians' view of 'I don't consider you truly alive' largely comes from them starting at the conclusion of being superior and then backfilled their justification; there isn't logic to it, or at least not logic that would hold up or be in any way agreeable or sympathetic. Yes, the dragons fly in the face of this statement; no, that doesn't put any more logical holes in his statement than there already was, because it already wasn't a statement made with logical grounding.

Some argue that when Emet's saying this, he doesn't really believe it and is mostly just convincing himself. I've never seen clear proof of this, nor do I necessarily think that makes it better (might actually make it worse, in fact, because now it's just him knowingly dehumanizing and justifying the murder of humans)... but also most of the Ascians seemed to be on the same page on this, so it's not exactly dismissable just because Emet might be lying.

I wouldn't consider a humanity that is lobotomized at birth to be as human as the humanity we have now so I have no idea why you'd think Emet's perception is baseless. It's not like the sundered are an entirely different species they are transformed Ancients. Going from being immortal and choosing when you die to having to die against your will every 70 to 200 years is a pretty drastic change in the human condition.

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Originally Posted by Tarrinus

I wouldn't consider a humanity that is lobotomized at birth to be as human as the humanity we have now so I have no idea why you'd think Emet's perception is baseless.

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Thank you for making the aforementioned case that his view is ableist, so that I didn't have to.

Because he's a pompous, arrogant ass who think the Ancients are so much better than the sundered beings.

Venat described what she did as casting people out of paradise. In order to think Emet is baseless you have to think her statement was as well. In ableism terms people who otherwise could be in wheelchairs are now crawling on the ground. The whole reason why Emet behaves the way he does is because our "condition" is ultimately reversible and the sundered humanity inflicts harm on itself either way. The crawling paraplegics are torturing each other to death anyway so why not do it yourself but in a way that gets them back in a wheelchair down the line.

Emet Selch is a deeply depressed man who'd lost his whole civilization and over the millennia since, cursed himself with the burden of always remembering, of tacking every agony onto his soul because he's afraid that if he falters for even a moment, everything will come crashing down. He creates a facade of himself so none ever see the burdens he carries, partly out of necessity because he could never explain it to the sundered people he frequently lived with and partly out of pride.

He says that he doesn't consider us human, ergo we're free reign to kill. But he doesn't kill us. He has every reason to and every ability to; he even goes sk far as to resurrect Y'shtola, and that was before he began putting the pieces together on who we were. Heck, he's delighted at the prospect that we might be able to handle the Lightwardens; it would mean he's that much closer to being done rejoining and that much closer to being done with the blood on his hands and millennia of scars on his heart.

He has had families with the sundered, led them, lived with them, and surely has their tragedies engraved on his soul too no matter how much he would strive to not admit it. So he has to believe that they're not truly alive, or at the very least, that through their death they will be made more whole, because not even he would be able to bear the burden of all the deaths he's witnessed and been the cause of. Nobody could.

Of course, that all assumes he even did mean it when he said it. Recall his tone; "Yes, yes. Moral relativism and all that. I don't believe you're truly alive, ergo its not murder if I kill you." (Paraphrase) It's dismissive, not even really being presented as an argument but more of "I really don't care to get into the weeds on this topic with you lot." I personally like to believe the former; the tragic tale of an immortal whose heart is burdened with memory, fighting always in the direction he thinks is right and hoping beyond hope that all the death means something and trying to find the strength just to wake up every day.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

Some argue that when Emet's saying this, he doesn't really believe it and is mostly just convincing himself. I've never seen clear proof of this, nor do I necessarily think that makes it better (might actually make it worse, in fact, because now it's just him knowingly dehumanizing and justifying the murder of humans)... but also most of the Ascians seemed to be on the same page on this, so it's not exactly dismissable just because Emet might be lying.

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Ascians deceive. And Emet-Selch deceives even himself, for he is Tempered*, and has no choice but to carry out Zodiark's plan to revive the ancients. This requires him to cause widespread death and destruction, contrary to his skills as a builder of civilizations. Dehumanizing mankind is how he can cope with the cognitive dissonance, because for Emet-Selch, even bringing back his brethren cannot justify murder of mankind.

* At least, considers himself to be Tempered. There's some argument on whether Ascians are in thrall of Zodiark, and I believe they are.

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Originally Posted by Kakurady

Ascians deceive. And Emet-Selch deceives even himself, for he is Tempered*, and has no choice but to carry out Zodiark's plan to revive the ancients. This requires him to cause widespread death and destruction, contrary to his skills as a builder of civilizations. Dehumanizing mankind is how he can cope with the cognitive dissonance, because for Emet-Selch, even bringing back his brethren cannot justify murder of mankind.

* At least, considers himself to be Tempered. There's some argument on whether Ascians are in thrall of Zodiark, and I believe they are.

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Yeah, that's also not really better, is it? It adds more factors, but not really in a way that absolves anything, or gives the line any greater weight in any particular direction; it's still post-hoc justification for why he's okay with what he's doing, which is absent of any actual facts, evidence or logic.

For what it's worth here, the way I read the Ascians being tempered is that yeah, they are--there's a line in 5.3 that describes the process of it--but that it's not really a 'full' tempering like we saw from people tempered by Ifrit and Lakshmi. I don't know where the OP actually is in the story (the characters listed in their profile top out in the 50s and don't even have jobs, so that's clearly not usable to figure it out), so I'll spoiler-tag the explanation so I can freely pull in later evidence.

Clearly Emet's of sound mind, and mentally is actually not particularly different than he was when we met him in Elpis (neither is Lahabrea; Elidibus and Fandaniel are but those are whole different situations). Instead, I think the Ascians are tempered in the way described by Tiamat in 5.5: it's a constant voice in their head, but one they externalize and can even dismiss to some degree. Consider Mitron in the Eden storyline, clearly off doing his own thing, and especially Fandaniel, who seems to go completely against what his tempering would probably be directing him to do. So while their tempering is pretty much an undisputed fact as far as in-universe information, it's clearly not strong enough to override any other desires, plans or priorities they might have.

Perhaps you could argue that's an element of Zodiark being a primal of darkness; a major part of the tempering process as we learned about it in 5.4 was an aspecting towards light removing the sense of self, so Zodiark as a primal of darkness... well, maybe just wasn't nearly as good at that part. But regardless of the 'why', I think the end result is pretty clear: Zodiark did temper them, but to such a light degree that it's easily rebelled against, as neither Mitron nor Fandaniel express much difficulty in doing so. Which, if that's true, casts a bit of a shadow on Emet using it as an excuse; given that those two can shirk the influence of tempering when it doesn't suit them, then perhaps Emet never actually disagreed with it.

In a much simpler sense, Emet believes that we never should have existed in the first place, hence not being truly alive. His world is one where we would never have been born, and that is the world he wants to return to.

He basically sees us as broken pieces of real people that have taken up minds of our own and are trying to stop him from putting the real people back together.
Why should he care about the opinions of small fragments of souls, formed from minds that can barely last 100 years before being reset upon death and reincarnation?
As far as he's concerned, once the rejoining is done, everyone will be put back together, their immortal souls complete again, and we'll thank him for it. We just lack the capacity to comprehend that now, and he's making the decision for us.
Sure, we'll lose a few decades of experience from those fleeting mortal lifespans, but what does that matter in the grand scheme of things?

Emet Selch is not racist.
First, to reach any reasonable conclusion we need to draw parallels between his persona and many others that we know outside of FFXIV.



At our current time, Emet Selch can be seen like Morgoth/Melkor from Silmarilion (Tolkien), Lucifer (Genesis) or Enki (Annunaki theory): He is so arrogant that he see us like a different species and he is not completely wrong. We can even compare our IRL story with homo sapiens versus homo neanderthalensis or homo sapiens versus rhesus.


Back in his days, people were born with exceptional capacities and their lives had a determinate meaning - to serve and serve well for the will of the star. Our time is chaotic, we are so stupid that we can't even draw a meaning for our lives and live it fully. We live because we don't have a choice and we are constantly running away from any danger instead of dominating our emotions. Hell, WOL can't even control the light in Shadowbringers. The ascians were the complete opposite: they dominate life fully, created and destroyed it as they wanted until they found themselves dealing with something unknown and beyond their control - for the first time ever "A rare occurrence always fleeting....but not this time" Elidibus.



Endwalker criticize such arrogance and force Emet to recognize his defeat once more in Thule.
Meanwhile, Venat is Prometheus and she use the knowledge of the old times to help us find a way forward and overcome limits they were unable to understand. She got punished by becoming the crystal and living for thousand years at the center of the star, sustaining the world like Atlas. Most of his anger - Emet - came from the incapacity to understand why the world was dying, he didn't believe Venat or Hydaelyn's summoning, his memory was erased and he had no reason to doubt his own faith. Reducing such complex as "duuuh he is racist" is simply wrong.

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Originally Posted by SilverArrow20XX

He basically sees us as broken pieces of real people that have taken up minds of our own and are trying to stop him from putting the real people back together.
Why should he care about the opinions of small fragments of souls, formed from minds that can barely last 100 years before being reset upon death and reincarnation?
As far as he's concerned, once the rejoining is done, everyone will be put back together, their immortal souls complete again, and we'll thank him for it. We just lack the capacity to comprehend that now, and he's making the decision for us.
Sure, we'll lose a few decades of experience from those fleeting mortal lifespans, but what does that matter in the grand scheme of things?

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so let's say hypothetically there is a race of beings capable of seeing up to 100,000 years of lifespan, that seemingly have a consciousness that is completely inconprehensible to humans
let's call them dragons.
would the ascians respect those beings as equals?

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Originally Posted by SeiyaSoiya

so let's say hypothetically there is a race of beings capable of seeing up to 100,000 years of lifespan, that seemingly have a consciousness that is completely inconprehensible to humans
let's call them dragons.
would the ascians respect those beings as equals?

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If the dragons came to Etheirys pre-sundering, they likely would.
Post-sundering, they are focused on resurrecting their people and evidently value those lives above dragons.
Emet never said he doesn't consider dragons to be alive. Just the sundered races.
I imagine if called out on that, he'd admit to it being bad, but that he had a responsibility to his people.

In Shadowbringers, Emet doesn't particularly care if his actions are ethical or compassionate. Mitron was an Ascian and yet Emet abandoned Mitron in an unresponsive wakeful state as Eden for a hundred years. He knew full well that if he ever needed another Mitron, he could just recruit a replacement shard. Even his former friends were tools to be discarded at will for the sake of Amaurot. We also know that he perpetrated Allag's invasion of Meracydia, so there's little there to suggest that he would have afforded the dragons additional respect.

Emet's justification in the Ocular around how 'it's not really murder' if he destroys populated worlds is a textbook illustration of antisocial behavior. He's able to read expressions and recognize that everyone in the room is horrified at his words, yet he is now devoid of the empathy required to relate with their emotion. The '12000-year-old wraith' is an apt description.

It's worth remembering that his character exposition happens in reverse. Endwalker shows us the values and virtues that Emet originally stood for, as a hero of his people. Shadowbringers shows us the monster he was ultimately destined to become. The dissonance between those two states is what makes him a tragic figure, and an excellent villain.

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Originally Posted by SeiyaSoiya

so let's say hypothetically there is a race of beings capable of seeing up to 100,000 years of lifespan, that seemingly have a consciousness that is completely inconprehensible to humans
let's call them dragons.
would the ascians respect those beings as equals?

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No, because the Ascians aren't thinking about this so logically.

Dragons are not Ancients. Therefore, to the Ascians, they are beneath the Ancients. This is where the Ascians would start in their perception and outlook; any 'logic' stated by them in doing so would ultimately be justification rather than actual evidence. This is especially true with the fact that Midgardsormr, the only fully-powered dragon any of them know about, is an ally of Hydaelyn, so they're innately coming from a place of hatred. However, the exact same would be true if we were instead talking about Omega.

They are not going to see the dragons as equals, because to the Ascians, the Ancients have no equals.

I'd need to mention that "I don't consider you [a person]" has historically been used to further -ist and -phobic schools of thought, propaganda, and outright violence. The more correct term would be "othering", and it's generally meant to, well, paint other people as something "other" than human (and by necessity "less than" human), and so any crimes against them wouldn't really be a crime. In this case it's simply that Emet considers us "less than" Ancients and thus not worthy of living.

Now, yes, the sundered are "less aetherically dense than" Ancients, but the whole theme of the story is that they're still people. They have feelings and lives and hopes and wishes, and deserve to live said lives to the fullest so their lives aren't worth less than the Ancients.

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Originally Posted by WhiteArchmage

I'd need to mention that "I don't consider you [a person]" has historically been used to further -ist and -phobic schools of thought, propaganda, and outright violence. The more correct term would be "othering", and it's generally meant to, well, paint other people as something "other" than human (and by necessity "less than" human), and so any crimes against them wouldn't really be a crime. In this case it's simply that Emet considers us "less than" Ancients and thus not worthy of living.

Now, yes, the sundered are "less aetherically dense than" Ancients, but the whole theme of the story is that they're still people. They have feelings and lives and hopes and wishes, and deserve to live said lives to the fullest so their lives aren't worth less than the Ancients.

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Yeah, this really needs to be said directly, and was what I was trying to get at. As someone who gets that sort of treatment in real life, this stood pretty obvious and starkly, and is why any justification of his view on any level comes in distant second to the intention of the statement itself.

He calls us 'not really alive' specifically because it makes us acceptable targets. We can't and shouldn't instead come at it from the other direction of 'what evidence could he have that we aren't really alive', because to do so is to legitimize an inherently illegitimate argument made solely for the purpose of Emet's own moral justification.

His feelings don't care about facts.

In the case of the dragons, i believe that if they had reached Etheirys before the sundering Emet and his people would have been more than happy to share the world with them and learn from each other, but they arrived post sundering and immediately allied with Hyedalyn thus becaming the Ascians enemies, and so their respect, if you want to call it that, for the dragons manifested in how they viewed them as a real threat to be removed, as in the meracydian campaign and the Dragonsong War.

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Originally Posted by Luizgazen

In the case of the dragons, i believe that if they had reached Etheirys before the sundering Emet and his people would have been more than happy to share the world with them and learn from each other, but they arrived post sundering and immediately allied with Hyedalyn thus becaming the Ascians enemies, and so their respect, if you want to call it that, for the dragons manifested in how they viewed them as a real threat to be removed, as in the meracydian campaign and the Dragonsong War.

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Bringing this back because I've been thinking a bit about it, I do think it's interesting to question as a pure hypothetical if the Ancients would have been amenable to supposed equals like the dragons rather than the Ascians. The Ascians were never gonna embrace that, but how would the Ancients, before everything exploded, have taken it? We know it'd be a new concept to them.

And maybe it's my general cynicism about them, but I honestly don't think even at their height, the Ancients would've taken it well, they'd just take it poorly in a different way than they did later. The Ancients seem to take it as a given that they're at the top of it all; they don't take this in a particularly evil way, they don't go supremacist with it like the Garleans (or the Ascians) did and more seem to take the approach of 'we're the doting knows-best parents of every single thing in the world'; more subtly paternalistic and patronizing than actively hateful. They do seem to take an approach that this position means different rules apply to them, though: they're certainly pretty horrified at Athena basically treating Ancients the way Ancients treat other life forms--justifiably so, but it's interesting to see where that line is for them. (There's also the question raised around Athena of what their relationship with the notion of 'gods' is, but we don't really have enough info to work with.)

All that is to say, I don't think their overall worldview has room for 'unlike equals', and they'd probably try to fit their view of dragons as somewhere beneath them as a result. Exactly how, I'm not sure, and I don't know if they'd even have one answer, but I don't think the dragons would be broadly treated and respected as equals. I think most of the Ancients we've met would've treated them as a scientific curiosity and research project, but that's largely because we mostly met Ancients in Elpis, their society's R&D center.

Ancients are not represented as thinking of themselves as being above all other life by default. Etheirys as a body and themselves as the head is a more apt analogy which is why Athena is viewed negatively. They probably wouldn't have treated the dragons as equals simply because the dragons would not have been able to manage the star like they could but seeing how amiable they are to artificial familiars simply when they possess some intelligence I have a hard time believing they would have treated the dragons, an independent alien life, badly either. Also I'm not sure there's any reason to think Midgarsormr would have taken offence to this given that he already accepted another ruler of the star's conditions for being allowed to live there.

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Originally Posted by SeiyaSoiya

if soul sundering causes you to lose soul aetheric density, and therefore make you less alive...
then are dragons more alive than the ancients? they certainly have much more aetheric density than any other creature, to the point that their scales are used as protection against meteion

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My interpretation of the text of the game is that Emet-Selch does not actually believe that sundered people are not alive. There's a variety of evidence for this, but the most authoritative is in Y'shtola's theory on the subject in Endwalker. The game's writers often use the primary Scions as mouthpieces with which to guide the player's understanding of FF14's lore, and despite generally being framed as musings or theories, they are rarely (if ever) proved incorrect at later junctures. So when Y'shtola says (paraphrasing) "it seems like Emet-Selch may have seen the sundered as something akin to children", my reading is that this is the writers telling us how we should interpret their world.

But beyond that, it's pretty clear that he thinks the unsundered are alive because he has conversations with them. And Emet-Selch of all people is well acquainted with the fact that something that is not alive cannot have a soul, which due to his exceptional abilities he would constantly be witnessing.

Emet-Selch is not always a reliable narrator, and what he tells others and himself is not always the truth; my interpretation is that he feels compelled to fulfill his duty, but is exhausted and depressed after millennia of it. So he tells himself and others the lies he needs to sustain himself and do what he feels is right without honestly engaging with his doubts. He may also be at least partially sundered, so it's possible that he is compelled to try to believe such lies.

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Originally Posted by SaberMaxwell

he even goes sk far as to resurrect Y'shtola, and that was before he began putting the pieces together on who we were.

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This is the one part I disagree with; I don't think there's any chance that Emet-Selch would ever not know that the WoL was a sundered fragment of Azem, because Emet-Selch is highly-skilled at seeing the color of souls, to the point where he can identify individuals based on them. If a mere simulacrum of Hythlodaeus was able to immediately clock the WoL and Ardbert, I see no reason why the actual Emet-Selch wouldn't as well.

In fact, I'd hazard that recognizing the WoL's soul as being of Azem might even be the reason why Emet-Selch tried to work with the WoL and their colleagues. Azem and Emet-Selch were amazingly close, after all; it's easy to imagine him hoping against hope that together they might see eye-to-eye.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

They are not going to see the dragons as equals, because to the Ascians, the Ancients have no equals.

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Exactly and this is further proven by him stating that they will offer the remaining people of the source to Zodiark to exchange them for ancients. This would have happened at a time where the souls would have been fully restored (if they do find a solution for the 13th), thus suddenly alive in their view, yet they would have still been killed.

It's made more explicit in some of the other localizations that he recognizes the Azem in us the moment he sees us in Lakeland for the first time; the wording used being "he/she has their soul" vs. "a soul such as their's" (Which is considerably more non-descript since we already know we're not normal in that regard and there's no clear distinction being made between us and the soul we bear).

Having only experienced the English localization, my interpretation was that he started having suspicions during the elevator fixing scene but it was only confirmed to him after we merged with Ardbert which made our soul that little bit more recognizable, which is why he started seeing us standing there in the Ancient robes.

Of course if other languages he outright says it at the start then I can't really argue with that lol

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Originally Posted by SeiyaSoiya

Why does emet selch consider us not to be alive?

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Personally, I think he was probably huffing the copium. He knows the sundered are actually alive, but if he actually acknowledges it he'll have to acknowledge that he's been acting like (to put it politely) a little bit of an arsehole for the past dozen or so millennia.