Quote Originally Posted by Iscah View Post
Even though that is inarguably what has been written, it doesn't sit right with me, because we have demonstratable proof that they were not so thoroughly reduced to unintelligibity – specifically, the paintings in the Qitana Ravel.

Either people retained both enough memory and artistic skill to record these images as first-generation Sundered, or they possessed the ability to retell it to their children and pass it into legend.

If they were truly reduced to nothing of their former selves, that story could not have survived.

At worst, they could have been in a situation where they had lost language but retained intelligence – but is it alternately possible that Emet, being still unsundered, simply perceives it as thinned down compared to himself? As if everything that was once solid has turned to smoke, voices muted to the slightest whisper? But perhaps it doesn't seem quite the same way to those caught up in it.

It just doesn't add up – and while it's not the first time that Emet's account in Shadowbringers has been contradicted, this time it is another story from his own perspective and not someone else's conflicting understanding.
It doesn't really feel like a big mystery. You don't need knowledge to do basic art; even someone with 0 experience can smear a very rough image, like what you see in the cave paintings, just by recognition and imitation.

Language, on the other hand, requires knowledge. Anthropologists actually believe that painting predates complex speech. https://www.inverse.com/article/4151...uage-evolution