Are shards different?

[EaraGrace]

My own conception of aetheric density is that while rejoining increases the density of one’s soul, the world itself still places those souls in bodies that remain 1/14 Sundered. We don’t have records after the calamities of people living longer lifespans, nor is their any indication that people are getting noticeably better at wielding magicks. When Yoshi P said that Emet and Hyth when reborn would just be a little better at things than everyone else, the implication seemed clear. The soul is Unsundered yet the body wouldnt be anything special. Combine that with Emets line about being stifled by his flesh (which he took from a random citizen of the 1st), the fact Ardbert was able to hold his own against us despite us being 7 times Rejoined, the Ascians and their “uplifting,” all the comments on our weak aether in Elpis and Amaurot etc. etc.

[Cleretic]

I unfortunately can't cite the miqo'te lifespan thing, it's just something I heard in RP from a friend who generally has their facts straight RE: miqo'te lore. I kinda take their word on that and move on, because my interests are elsewhere.

My own conception of aetheric density is that while rejoining increases the density of one’s soul, the world itself still places those souls in bodies that remain 1/14 Sundered. We don’t have records after the calamities of people living longer lifespans, nor is their any indication that people are getting noticeably better at wielding magicks. When Yoshi P said that Emet and Hyth when reborn would just be a little better at things than everyone else, the implication seemed clear. The soul is Unsundered yet the body wouldnt be anything special. Combine that with Emets line about being stifled by his flesh (which he took from a random citizen of the 1st), the fact Ardbert was able to hold his own against us despite us being 7 times Rejoined, the Ascians and their “uplifting,” all the comments on our weak aether in Elpis and Amaurot etc. etc.

Yeah, this one tracks for me; even if a fully unsundered soul is in a body on the Source, they're still in a body that's a fundamentally different species with different abilities, so they can't make full use of what the Ancients could. They'd also be being raised and learning how to manipulate aether in a world that's largely used to far smaller aether reserves. As comparison, imagine if random cars suddenly had nigh-infinite fuel; theoretically it's possible to make a car that can use that for amazing feats, but realistically you're gonna end up watching the same old Toyotas you always see doing basically the same stuff Toyotas always do, they're just worrying less about where the nearest gas station is.

[MikkoAkure]

I unfortunately can't cite the miqo'te lifespan thing, it's just something I heard in RP from a friend who generally has their facts straight RE: miqo'te lore. I kinda take their word on that and move on, because my interests are elsewhere.

I've heard the miqo'te thing over and over in RP and no one can point to where they got it from in-game and just reference another RPer or a discord. That's one of those "facts" that people often cite that has no actual reference in-game or in any interview or supplementary material but continuously gets passed along and repeated. Same with "mixed-race children are their mom's race", which was invented to explain why someone's half-elezen character looks like a 100% hyur.

Koji had said in an interview from 2014 that 4 of the 5 original races have the same lifespan as we do on Earth except for elezen, and that also explains why it takes a little longer for elezen to reach their adult height. Eorzea is a rough place though so we're still working with medieval period life expectancy for the average person. He said he doesn't expect the average person to live longer than 30s, 40s, or 50s.


Back on topic, I don't think the whole "rejoining of the soul" is very well explained in the game and it's painfully obvious it was tacked onto the plot after the fact. Every rejoining doesn't increase your lifespan or else we would have heard about it in records or after the most recent calamity or from the story that leads into the 8UC. You would think that a group of people plus G'raha would have made a comment about any sort of change within them after experiencing 2 calamities but we don't hear of it. We would also have known about it from G'raha and all of the Scions on the First since the people on the First are just 1/14th, but again nothing. But at the same time it's a bit weird that as soon as all the rejoinings are complete, we'd all be "whole" 20ft-tall Ancients again at the same power level. A part of me wonders if it's not that simple and that a lot of that idea is Ascian propaganda fed to Varis in order for him to do what they wanted him to do.

[Lurina]

Back on topic, I don't think the whole "rejoining of the soul" is very well explained in the game and it's painfully obvious it was tacked onto the plot after the fact. Every rejoining doesn't increase your lifespan or else we would have heard about it in records or after the most recent calamity or from the story that leads into the 8UC. You would think that a group of people plus G'raha would have made a comment about any sort of change within them after experiencing 2 calamities but we don't hear of it. We would also have known about it from G'raha and all of the Scions on the First since the people on the First are just 1/14th, but again nothing. But at the same time it's a bit weird that as soon as all the rejoinings are complete, we'd all be "whole" 20ft-tall Ancients again at the same power level. A part of me wonders if it's not that simple and that a lot of that idea is Ascian propaganda fed to Varis in order for him to do what they wanted him to do.

Again, it's not just Varis. Emet spells out the same concept late in ShB.

Remember, you are of the Source. Unlike the halfmen here, you stand only to gain. Should you survive the remaining calamities, you will become our equal. A complete existence in a complete world.

This is during his moment of vulnerability when he almost addresses you as Azem right before you take the elevator in Kholusia, so I doubt they intended him to be talking out of his butt.

[Cleretic]

Same with "mixed-race children are their mom's race", which was invented to explain why someone's half-elezen character looks like a 100% hyur.

Mostly unrelated, but this one actually does have something resembling evidence, because the two most known examples of mixed-race children in canon (Hilda and Arenvald) are both their mothers' race with some visual traits from their fathers'. Granted, sample size of two there, but works well enough as an answer for 'which race do I pick when making a mixed-race character'.

(Some people are definitely doing it because they're COWARDS who want to play a pointy-eared elf but don't want to go through the effort to make an elezen look good, but that's not really a lore question.)

[MikkoAkure]

Mostly unrelated, but this one actually does have something resembling evidence, because the two most known examples of mixed-race children in canon (Hilda and Arenvald) are both their mothers' race with some visual traits from their fathers'. Granted, sample size of two there, but works well enough as an answer for 'which race do I pick when making a mixed-race character'.

I don't take limitations of the game in showing off characters as concrete evidence. It was definitely easier to plop a uniquely-made face on top of an existing body rather than make a whole new body by scratch. There's nothing at all to suggest that genetics work differently here than they do in our world (except for miqo'te and viera, which I'll get to in a second) so I wouldn't see why a "real life" half-elezen wouldn't look half-elezen instead of "hyur, but with slightly pointy ears". That whole thing was debunked in Shadowbringers anyway since we have Severa, a half-Garlean who looks 100% Garlean except her third eye is black instead of white and her mom is a hyur. Up until that point, we didn't even know half-Garleans could have third eyes.

Garleans themselves are another example of how you shouldn't take character models at face value because half of them use midlander bodies and the other half use elezen bodies and we're never told why that is and there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason to it except that there seems to be more female characters using midlander bodies and more male characters using elezen bodies. Though there are some male midlander body users like Jullus and Midas (Cid uses a midlander skeleton under a unique model but he's still a foot and a half shorter than Nero and Gaius) and female elezen body users like Livia, Lucia, and Nael.

Being a mixed-race person in the setting is so rare to begin with that we don't have anything to go on except for character models and basing anything off that feels like an excuse to RP something a certain way more than something that's based in actual lore. Unless it's actually written down anywhere, I won't believe it.


Segueing into the main topic though, this reminded me that there is one unexplained difference between the people of the Source and the people of the First. On the First, the mystel (their version of miqo'te) have an equal ratio of male to female. That makes me wonder about how the miqo'te equivalents are like on the other Shards and if they're more like the ones on the First or if they have a really unbalanced gender ratio like the ones on the Source. It also makes me wonder if the writers treated this as another piece of lore from 1.0 (and carried over from FFXI) that they'd rather just retcon or at least just forget about and they're just doing their own thing now.