Okay this is gonna get complicated but I'm gonna try.

Quote Originally Posted by Eisi View Post
Doctor Hermes was less aetherially dense I assume than the other ancients? Cause he had the Elpis flower react.
Hermes was some level of emotionally or neurologically atypical; probably depressed, but we can't exactly diagnose him. His extreme situation let him get it to actually express something different, but that is very clearly an unusual situation that wasn't happening very often, and likely didn't require much dynamis manipulation in the first place.

So creation magic is kind of the opposite of dynamis manipulation am I getting that right? Basically magic in general?

Beings that are not dense in aether can manipulate dynamis and they do so with their emotions.
Creation magic is not the opposite to dynamis, but Ancient creation magic was making things that were less dense in aether than their creators. The same is also true of sundered people.

And on the other end of the spectrum beings that are aether-rich can manipulate aether via creation magic which is not emotions, but something else, I don't know what, it's magic. The desperation/prayer whatever that leads to summonings is coincidental, emotions certainly don't hamper magic.
Creation magic is magic, yes; it's specifically probably a very aether-intensive form of magic compared to the forms we know. You're right that emotions don't hamper magic, but in some cases they go along with it; you're not exactly going to find someone who's highly desperate or religiously devout who's not also fairly emotional about those things.

Not everything physical is aether, right? So the creatures in Ultima Thule for example are just dynamis and can of themselves also influence dynamis and also interact with aetherial beings like us. Are we even made of aether in UT? Or do we get a dynamis body after Thancred's sacrifice?

So when we fight let's say a Stellar Dragon in UT, we aren't actually physically fighting it, we are manipulating some dynamis into no longer expressing in a hostile way which is substituted by physical form. In fact the form of UT itself is just a substitute for us to make sense of it rationally, does that make sense?
Ultima Thule is a space completely shaped to essentially run on dynamis instead of aether; it's hard to say how much of it was there before us versus how much was shaped for our needs, but my read is it was probably already there. We're running on aether biologically when we're there, but dynamis is heavy enough there to be more easily manipulated. Whether or not you're whacking that hypothetical dragon with dynamis or aether probably depends on what combat style you're using exactly, because some jobs are said to pull heavily from the world around them so they'd probably be pulling from dynamis (i.e. BLM), while others are mostly running internally so they're probably not doing anything too differently (i.e. Monk). One thing I can say is that the matter there is roughly compatible with aetherically-based matter, because the Omicron tribe questline shows that cooking, including with a mixture of Ultima Thule and Etheirys ingredients, works completely fine.

However, Ultima Thule is ultimately the land where terrestrial science and logic doesn't apply, so any of these really specific questions both weren't answered and don't really matter in the first place. Ultima Thule works like it looks like Ultima Thule works, and doesn't work like, say, Thavnair works; any more specific than that is guesswork into irrelevant minutia.