Quote Originally Posted by Edax View Post
It's possible. Mankind slaughter animals for their meat. For some this is fine, for others this is barbaric. Mankind destroys entire ecosystems (forests, jungles, rivers, Detroit, ect.) for resources. For some this is fine, for others it is not. A forest need not have a soul to have it's loss be lemented. Perhaps for Hydaelyn, rendering the planet barren again to remake the dead Amaurotine after so much work recreating life was too much.



Primals are fueled by aether and crystals. We can grind flowers into crystals in this game but few would dispute that flowers have no "soul".
How do we know that flowers truly have a soul? Just because they are made out of aether does not mean that they have one. Also it was not Hydealyn that decided on stuff but her summoners. Hythlo even mentions that these people wanted to leave the planet in the hands of the new life and later on Emet comments how he does not see us spoken races as good enough to be the stewards of this planet. All of this together paints the picture for me that we are talking about the sacrifice of living people. Not plants, not animals but sentient and sapient beings.

I would also argue that there is a difference in killing something to eat it which is natural for a lot of animals on the planet and going through whole genocide. Also not sure what our own rl problems with the destruction of our planet has to do with the topic?

In the end I really doubt that any of the ones that summoned Hydealyn would have done this huge change just because the Ascians decided to plant some trees and later chop them down to sacrifice to Zodiark..and I somehow doubt that these trees would have a soul anyway.