Quote Originally Posted by Anvaire View Post
There is certainly ample evidence to suggest the WOL is tempered by Hydealyn but still retains free will.
Another way of looking at Hydealyn is that she is essentially an ANTI-Primal, created far differently than Zodiark who was the First. Zodiark was an attempt to stabilise the world and restore it after the End of Days/Terminus but to do so he needed fuel to be able to act which meant more Aether etc, the problem is that eventually with half the surviving population lost to create zodiark and another half of those lost to restore life to the world that eventually there would be nothing left. He even has to bend the will of people by Temperment possibly to stop disintegrating or simply to stop the survivors basically being scared shitless into summoning monstrosities by accident which looks to be the original cause of the Termination: Some horror appeared and murdered people and those witnessing it were so terrified they ended up accidentally creating more by mistake which kills others which ends up triggering a runaway effect.

Those who survived realised that if they kept just offering up more to Zodiark it would possibly end up consuming everything so they summon Hydaelyn, she's summoned but her tempering doesn't enslave people in a traditional sense but rather acts the opposite: Her influence shield's the person's will from any external interference. There's likely more to her as well as Zodiark being the first should have had vastly more power than a newlyborn Hydaelyn but not only did she win with a fraction of the power Zodiark had but ended up hitting Zodiark so damn hard it shattered reality into 14 different worlds. It will be interesting to see what happens down the line but I expect both Zodiark and Hydaelyns true power and abilitys to be drastically different from the regular run of the mill primal which are essentially cheap knockoff's of other original beings.