Quote Originally Posted by EaraGrace View Post
I still think that would fit with Emet, in the optional dialogue he seems to speak of Zodiark similarly.
I don't see that as being similar at all, in that dialog he's merely stating Zodiark's elemental alignment. A far cry from something like calling Hydaelyn "the Light of the future".

My point more generally though is that the narrator should not be taken at her word, as she’s describing Emets view and tale. Even if she were to be out of synch with him in certain moments I don’t think I’d buy her statements as fact, even if they swung in the other direction. The fact she calls them “wretched creatures” I think seals the deal for me.
Why? They are wretched. They've literally been devolved into shambling animals.

Because nothing is changing about the scene, the only difference is the souls. The poses and positions are the exact same. And once again Emet is very clear that he still views them as malformed “half men” even after millennia pass. If his feeling that they were abominations was purely because of the initial effects that were visible after the Sundering, then those wouldn’t be valid to use on us or Varis right?
"Same scene slightly changed" is a very commonplace cinematic technique. The point is juxtaposition of elements in a timelapse, which is particularly evocative when you have a central figure that remains the same. This is literally a slideshow, they're doing their best here. The point is that even as mankind began to improve, Emet retained his impression of them as misbegotten creatures.

Around 15:45 in this video
That is what Zodiark, Hydaelyn's actual target, ended up as. Could be the whole "torn apart" aesthetic is what happened to everyone's souls at first, but over time they healed and coalesced into more stable forms. This sort of thing would explain the similarity between shards as we have seen them now, in fact.

I’m referring to the lost little troll sidequest, where we communicate with a small troll who only Grrrs. The echo allows us to understand him perfectly.
You mean the troll that is as intelligent as any human, way more than other trolls, to the point that it can not only understand human speech but can also read? I'm pretty sure this is a case of the exception proving the rule.

Ardbert and co. seemed just as smart as us, same with all the people we met on the First.
We don't really know what proportion of aetherial density each shard ended up with, or how the souls of the people on each shard may have changed over time.