Speculation on Fandaniel's Motive

[Veloran]

In my opinion, Fandaniel's desires are a reflection of the Sound and what it represents. Bear with me.

Firstly, we're told in Amaurot that the Sound is "a force inimical to life", which grew to fester and spread, warping everything it came into contact with and even choking the Lifestream itself. Given the Ancients were forced to restart the cycle of life with their sacrifices, it can be assumed that the cyclical rebirth of souls through the aetherial sea had effectively been halted or destroyed by the Sound.

Now, it's my belief that the Sound is something that was born in the aetherial sea as a byproduct of eons of the Ancient's creation magics, a sort of subconscious will they had been suppressing by trying to eliminate individual disparity. I would characterize this as something like a subconscious will towards destruction and death, an antithesis of life's overt desire for prosperity and propagation. Of course, this matches Fandaniel's stated goals of wishing for everything to die and to restart the Final Days, and furthermore it provides an avenue for how he's doing it - Through the summonings of twisted "dark primals" which are born through a combination of stunted creation magic and the tortured souls of their summoners, the byproduct of these magics, the will of death, is again taking shape within the Lifestream. Of course this also connects to his association with Zenos, who is himself all about inflicting death on others with his obsession with "the hunt", which might be said to be a proxy for the innate necessity of life to consume other life.

To touch on why he believes as he does and wishes for death, let's just look at his nature as a sundered Ascian. He was raised up and entered into his station and given the memories of his past life as Fandaniel, but attendant to this would naturally be the recognition that he's lived countless other lives, to him most likely all meaningless. So in addition to his Ascian status having forcibly bound him to an ancient crusade and faded memories, he, like everyone else, is subject to a cycle of life, death, and rebirth, repeating everything endlessly for thousands of years. As we see he's ecstatic to be free of his given mission in 5.3, so too does he want to be free of the cycle of life which is imposed upon everyone.

To tie this all together with some musical cues, the weariness of the soul's endless wandering is something that's been present as a theme in the story at least as far back as Answers. If the question is "Why were we given life just to die?", then Fandaniel's answer would be that there is no reason and that everything should just return to oblivion. And on that note, there is a particular shared intonation during Fandaniel's segment of the Endwalker trailer. Firstly, this rendition peaks with the line "Now we go for freedom!" as Fandaniel ascends the tower, and as I've already laid out I think he is very closely associated with the concept of freedom, and as a character believes that true death equals freedom. However, the second part of this comes at the end of his segment, in which a very specific sound is heard.
https://youtu.be/XJ-51r-sG4k?t=162
Does that screeching tone before the cut sound familiar to anybody? Well it should, considering it is precisely the same tone present in the Scions & Sinners rendition of Return to Oblivion, after the very line, "The soul yearns for oblivion, oblivion!".
https://youtu.be/ZTEPqYwvAzw?t=68

I ask you, what are the chances this is a pure coincidence? The exact same piercing sound present in two different songs, both of which are associated with the concept of a neverending doomed fate and the repeating rebirth of the soul?

On to my last point, and this will be getting into further speculative territory, but I think we may be able to pin down the ultimate end of Fandaniel's story here. A surprising amount has been made within the narrative about somehow talking with Fandaniel and resolving things peacefully. People are pretty bewildered at this considering that we didn't reach any such ending with any of the previous, far more sympathetic Ascians up to this point, but with Fandaniel such a thing would, in fact, have far more impact. If it is indeed the case that the nature of the Sound is as I've postulated above, simply killing Fandaniel or destroying it would be, thematically, completely backwards. If the idea is accepting the cycle of life and death, as indeed the entirety of the conflict with the Ascians has been about given how deeply their motivations are fueled by grief and loss, inflicting death to end the conflict is a self-defeating resolution. And if I was to touch on Ishikawa's prior writing, WoL simply being the "Weapon of Light" and smiting the evil seems rather out of character, no? Rather, it would be that an acceptance of those subconscious impulses and the nature of death and rebirth, rather than repression, destruction, or rejection of it, is what's necessary for actualization into a healthier and more balanced world.