Quote Originally Posted by YojimboM View Post
The reference of the stars (I suspect this is why Urianger turned to astrology). There is exclusivity of the beings that exist off-world from the Source. There is no evidence of a copy of Midgardsormr, Omega, or a copy of Minfilia (that wasn't spawned from our Minfilia). No second incarnation of the Twelve.
I think you're making some assumptions about the implications of some things.

The reference of the stars (I suspect this is why Urianger turned to astrology).
On "the reference of the stars", do you mean what stars can be seen in the night sky? I've just checked and while I can't compare everything at once, the major stars seem to be the same. I could see the Spire constellation from Lakeland, and some bright stars around the moon were the same when I warped from there to Southern Thanalan.

Also, astrology is a Sharlayan discipline focused on the concept of fate and predicting the future - it's a rather perfect match for Urianger and his fascination with prophecies. When you first meet up with him on the First, he mentions that he's taken up astrology to "navigate the sea of uncertainty" of their current situation. Also the stars haven't been visible due to the state of eternal Light, so he wouldn't have any idea if they did look different - and he's still successfully using an Eorzean card deck.

I checked Emet's comments on the Sundering as well - at least the easy-to-find ones - and when he's explaining the murals in Qitana he says that Hydaelyn "split the very fabric of reality".

Meanwhile the Exarch's explanation of the shards in 'The Lightwardens' does call them "physically separate" (which could be taken either way) but also talks about calamities "cracking the barrier" between Source and shard.



There is exclusivity of the beings that exist off-world from the Source. There is no evidence of a copy of Midgardsormr, Omega, or a copy of Minfilia (that wasn't spawned from our Minfilia).
Apparently Midgardsormr and Omega didn't arrive on the Source until after the Sundering. (Midgardsormr's pact with Hydaelyn suggests that She was already 'in control' of the planet at the point when he arrived.) So there are a few options depending on how far-reaching the dimensional split extends:

- if the entire universe was split into copies for each shard, then First-Midgardsormr might still be on the Dragonstar, and First-Omega (or the civilisation that created it) might not have ever been built.

- if the split is 'localised' to just the planet Hydaelyn, then Midgardsormr and Omega were never sundered - there is only one version of them that arrived after the worlds were already split.


On the lack of a "copy of Minfilia" as proof of anything, that argument only really works if we had a recognisable counterpart of every other character, but Minfilia was missing. The only counterparts we've seen (besides Ardbert) are a small number of "utility" characters where the resemblance is a shorthand explanation for them having the same purpose as their Source counterpart.

Ardbert confuses things because he's the WoL's counterpart and could be a lookalike for the "canon" WoL, but probably doesn't look like your character.

So it could go either way. If counterparts are always lookalikes, then why do we have Gerolt and Rowena but not Thancred, Y'shtola, Urianger, etc.? If we're missing them, then it isn't anything remarkable that we're also missing Minfilia.

Or if counterparts don't have to look like each other, then who can say we haven't met First-Minfilia, or any other characters' counterparts? It could be Ryne, for all we can know.

Anyway, since time flows differently on different worlds (surely one of the biggest indicators that they are not on the same physical plane?) then it seems unlikely that you would find counterparts of everyone at the same age at the point in time you went looking for them. They'd end up out-of-synch and you're back to not realistically expecting any perfect lookalikes, even if you do find someone with a counterpart soul fragment.



No second incarnation of the Twelve.
But where's our first incarnation of the Twelve?

Beside's Louisoix's almost-a-primal-summoning, that is.

There seems to be a long-running thread of "are the gods even real? Are they truly listening? Do they ever actually respond to prayers?" - and we've never had a solid demonstration that they're real. Plus we have things like the link between sun-gods Azeyma and Azim that suggest, if nothing else, some kind of core truth has been passed along and distorted in different ways by different peoples.

Additionally, we don't know much about religion on the First, but there a lot of unexplored references to a "Church of the First Light" that was generally abandoned once Light became something to be hated rather than worshipped. It could be another example of some core concept of the Twelve has taken its own local form over time - assuming that the Twelve do predate the Sundering and aren't an idea that came about on the Source afterwards.