Ok Why Dawntail did not work for me.

[Anonymoose]

I think the Scions present are immediately off-put by it, Alisaie especially, but given that...
- the running theme of the expansion is being curious before judgemental and trying to respect cultural values
- Alexandrians claimed to be happy and saw the system as good
- the process was a man-made replication of what the aetherial sea already does*
- we had bigger fish to fry with Zoraal Ja at the time
...our distaste for "souls as commodities" was temporarily set aside.

*When a soul reaches the Lifestream, memories are washed from the soul, drift apart, and dissolve forever into the aetherial sea (not counting the ones "indelibly etched" onto the soul itself). In Sharlayan, Montichaigne referred to a shift that previously happened in the underlying lore of the game: where the lore used to assume the Lifestream was a "soul blender" where souls would be reduced to pure aether, coalesce with that of others, and create new souls, but newer lore assumes the soul remains whole but is washed and reborn anew, which is what Alexandria did manually ... except instead of being reborn as a baby it was just socketed into someone's almost-dead body and synthetically loaded with a memory back-up.

Alisaie immediately says that there's "nothing noble or comforting" about it and that she "cannot accept" it and none of the Scions really disagree; even Wuk Lamat says she struggles to believe Tuliyollal would accept it. Imho, the WOL was against it and saw it as a corruption what we understood the natural order to be, but that the Scions - because of the context - took their time to ensure they knew what they were judging and knew they could and should intervene. (Doing otherwise would be fairly hypocritical, not only in light of not only this expansion's themes, but arguably also our struggle against the Ascians, who saw our entire existence as an aberration of the natural order.) And the story story seems to be currently heading in the direction of the dismantling of that system being validated as the righteous thing to do, as well. (Albeit more because Preservation's system didn't do what it claimed and, even if it did, still came at an unacceptable cost.)

There have also been a few references here and there that make me not rule out a past Ascian connection just yet, but we'll see; I know the risk of seeing shapes in the clouds, lol.

[Iscah]

where the lore used to assume the Lifestream was a "soul blender" where souls would be reduced to pure aether, coalesce with that of others, and create new souls, but newer lore assumes the soul remains whole but is washed and reborn anew

We may have already had this conversation, but what's the source for the "soul blender" concept?

It's not quite as simple as "old and new lore" because we're told right from the beginning (if you speak to the guards at the starter city aetheryte plazas) that people believe that while the body breaks down into aether after death, they have a soul that goes on to an afterlife -- which they say is the same thing as "returning to the Lifestream", but then there are also other specific traditions about going to particular heavens or hells according to their deeds.

But that could all be folk belief versus the then-truth that the soul might not be immortal anyway.

[17cupsofcoffee]

We may have already had this conversation, but what's the source for the "soul blender" concept?

It's not quite as simple as "old and new lore" because we're told right from the beginning (if you speak to the guards at the starter city aetheryte plazas) that people believe that while the body breaks down into aether after death, they have a soul that goes on to an afterlife -- which they say is the same thing as "returning to the Lifestream", but then there are also other specific traditions about going to particular heavens or hells according to their deeds.

But that could all be folk belief versus the then-truth that the soul might not be immortal anyway.

The Montichaigne bit they're referring to is from the quest 'Sound the Bell, School's In', from fairly early on in Endwalker:

Montichaigne:
Barring that, we must wait until we return to the aetherial sea...
For there we will be purified. The blots upon our souls washed clean...
And our memories drift apart and dissolve. Rather defeating the purpose, I suppose.
But there are those memories that are indelibly etched upon our souls, some believe.

Alisaie:
What happens after that?

Montichaigne:
We are reduced to pure aether, coalesce with that of others, and create souls anew.
Alternative schools of thought assert souls remain whole and return to the corporeal world, reborn into another form.
Both theories have their proponents. Personally, I consider each equally probable.

When I was playing through Endwalker, I definitely also read this as them trying to reconcile older lore with newer lore by saying they're both just unproven theories. That being said, I must admit I can't find any cases of the game explicitly stating the former as being true!

The closest I could find (via this Tumblr post, which is an absolute treasure trove of random bits of lore about aether) was Minfilia, in ARR:

Minfilia:
Let us begin at what some might call the end. When we who dwell in the material realm die, our spirits dissolve into the flow of aether, and are returned to the aetherial realm. In turn, the restless energy which suffuses the plane streams back into our world, giving rise to new life.

But that depends on how literally you take the word 'dissolve', I guess?

[Cleretic]

The closest I could find (via this Tumblr post, which is an absolute treasure trove of random bits of lore about aether) was Minfilia, in ARR:



But that depends on how literally you take the word 'dissolve', I guess?

I fully expected Anonymoose to have some super esoteric source that I've never thought to check, which it turns out he did! But my read of this whole thing has been that we made assumptions about how souls work back in ARR, and they remained unquestioned for long enough that we just assumed it was fact, rather than having any actual evidence towards it.