The echo and Hydaelyn's contact

[Shadotterdan]

So, for the longest time we were under the assumption that the echo was something gifted by Hydaelyn (and maybe Zodiark at times) since those with the echo were contacted by Hydaelyn. We now know this to be instead a relic of the Amaurotians that awakens in their reincarnations.

It has been mentioned though that it is the echo that keeps us from being tempered by primals, and while that may have been an assumption in game, I have a theory. Maybe Hydaelyn only contacts people with the echo because they would be tempered otherwise. Not willing to create puppets.

[Cilia]

Hydaelyn is constantly broadcasting her "Hear, Feel, Think" message; the Echo is just what lets people pick up on it. Cause and effect were mixed up for the longest time because people believed Hydaelyn speaking to them meant she had chosen them for a special destiny or whatever - that simply isn't the case.

Granted, it's still not clear how the Echo prevents tempering, or if it does so at all in light of Emet-Selch's admission that all the Ascians were tempered by Zodiark when they summoned him. My best guess is still that we are tempered by Hydaelyn, but owing to her raison d'etre she doesn't compel service or influence our behavior in any way.

[ObsidianFire]

To make matters more complicated... our own WoL heard Hydaelyn before we ever saw a star-shower. We were simply asleep and saw something in the Lifestream... including Lahabrea somehow? And even then, we don't hear Hydaelyn. We only start hearing her after we get our first Crystal of Light. Which is when we see a vision in our heads of a starshower... in the Lifestream.

We don't actually see something like the Starshower in real life until Elidibus does the thing on Novradant!

[JeanneOrnitier]

To make matters more complicated... our own WoL heard Hydaelyn before we ever saw a star-shower. We were simply asleep and saw something in the Lifestream... including Lahabrea somehow? And even then, we don't hear Hydaelyn. We only start hearing her after we get our first Crystal of Light. Which is when we see a vision in our heads of a starshower... in the Lifestream.

We don't actually see something like the Starshower in real life until Elidibus does the thing on Novradant!

I believe the story assumes your character participated in 1.x, in which case they saw the starshower quite a while before the ARR opening cutscene.

[Morningstar1337]

I believe the story assumes your character participated in 1.x, in which case they saw the starshower quite a while before the ARR opening cutscene.

Coils seem to support that.

[Cilia]

I believe the story assumes your character participated in 1.x, in which case they saw the starshower quite a while before the ARR opening cutscene.

Not necessarily. You're given the option to tell your merchant ride in the intro cutscene that it's your first time in Eorzea (or at least the city-state you're visiting), and at several points the game acknowledges whether or not you did participate in 1.x (though you have to have cleared a specific quest to get that), such as Cid remarking you saved Eorzea twice in the ending of A Realm Reborn or Count Edmont telling his children you've bested two legatuses when introducing you to them.

[Rosenstrauch]

Granted, it's still not clear how the Echo prevents tempering, or if it does so at all in light of Emet-Selch's admission that all the Ascians were tempered by Zodiark when they summoned him. My best guess is still that we are tempered by Hydaelyn, but owing to her raison d'etre she doesn't compel service or influence our behavior in any way.

One thing that muddies the water even further is that both Fordola and Zenos possess the Echo through artificial means. Fordola uses it to stop Lakshmi's attempts to temper the NPCs alongside Arenvald and WoL during a solo duty, and Zenos uses it to not only resist Shinryu's attempt to temper him, but is able to subvert the primal's will and take control of it himself. Unless both of them are tempered by Hydaelyn, too, it does seem like the Echo provides resistance to tempering on its own. It might just be that it relies on the strength of the person's will—the Convocation weren't strong enough to resist Zodiark, whereas Fordola and Zenos were strong enough to resist Lakshmi and Shinryu respectively.

[Veloran]

To make matters more complicated... our own WoL heard Hydaelyn before we ever saw a star-shower. We were simply asleep and saw something in the Lifestream... including Lahabrea somehow? And even then, we don't hear Hydaelyn. We only start hearing her after we get our first Crystal of Light. Which is when we see a vision in our heads of a starshower... in the Lifestream.

We don't actually see something like the Starshower in real life until Elidibus does the thing on Novradant!

I may be crazy here, but I thought that the Starshower and cutscene with Lahabrea was quite literally the first thing that happens after making a new character, while you're asleep on the carriage/boat, and Hydaelyn only speaks to you after you get your first crystal.

[Cilia]

One thing that muddies the water even further is that both Fordola and Zenos possess the Echo through artificial means. Fordola uses it to stop Lakshmi's attempts to temper the NPCs alongside Arenvald and WoL during a solo duty, and Zenos uses it to not only resist Shinryu's attempt to temper him, but is able to subvert the primal's will and take control of it himself. Unless both of them are tempered by Hydaelyn, too, it does seem like the Echo provides resistance to tempering on its own. It might just be that it relies on the strength of the person's will—the Convocation weren't strong enough to resist Zodiark, whereas Fordola and Zenos were strong enough to resist Lakshmi and Shinryu respectively.

Making things even more unclear is that, when your Echo first protects you from being tempered by Ifrit, he says something along the lines of "Your soul has already been claimed by another. And mortal souls cannot hold two blessings." In other words he's not unable to temper you because of the Echo, but because you're already tempered, implicitly by Hydaelyn.

Of course, I am also of the mind that the Echo does provide innate protection by allowing a contest of wills, but given contemporary Source souls are so much weaker and the power of the Ancients so fragmented in non-Echo users they can't win that contest. If one does have the Echo (an Ancient soul), their will is empowered enough to resist it - but even primals on the scale of true deities, like Hydaelyn and Zodiark, by Emet-Selch's admission cannot be resisted.

It's also important to remember that the Blessing of Light and the Echo are two separate things; the Blessing is what power Hydaelyn lends us, while the Echo is the awakened power of an Ancient's (in our case Azem's) soul.

It's rather unclear. Pretty sure the writers didn't have an endgame in mind when coming up with this, lol.

EDIT

I may be crazy here, but I thought that the Starshower and cutscene with Lahabrea was quite literally the first thing that happens after making a new character, while you're asleep on the carriage/boat, and Hydaelyn only speaks to you after you get your first crystal.

I started my first toon recently, so it's fresh in my mind:

You do have a vision of Hydaelyn and Lahabrea in the intro cutscene, while sleeping on your transport to [Eorzean City-State]. There is no starshower; that comes after getting the Water Crystal from the Lv5 instanced battle where you first meet your city-state's Scion warden.

You have another starshower vision after getting all six and obtaining the full Blessing of Light, for some reason.

[Enkidoh]

Irony is, in 1.0 upon immediately starting the game a player actually did see the starshower right away even before they arrived in their starting city, as it signified their awakening of the Echo (as they didn't realize it at the time, but they were immediately thrown into an Echo scene of events that transpired some ten years earlier when that city's Archon first arrived right away).

At the time no one knew what the starshower meant, although a later Echo vision in 1.0 depicted everyone in Eorzea experiencing the starshower ten years before (it was pretty much stated that was the actual moment the Echo first "sounded" and resulted in a sudden spike in people in Eorzea being awoken to it's power, and the result Sharalyan considered it a sign of impending Calamity). Back in the 1.0 era this later one was believed to have actually been the explosion of the Agrius over Silvertear Lake, but naturally the starshower was too big and high altitude for that. Of course we now know different, but back then we just didn't know squat.

Either way, SE altered things with ARR's opening depicting the starshower being shown to the player's character much later in leiu of a foreshadowing scene from ARR's climax of Lahabrea and Hydaelyn instructing the player's character to make "a Blade of Light" to banish the Ascian out, with that scene used for the awakening of the Echo, with the later starshower scene now repurposed to basically introduce Hydaelyn Herself properly, and more importantly, also depict the granting of the Blessing of Light, which is related but a different concept to the Echo.