Sundering the Nibirun

[Lyth]

I absolutely do not think we "have to accept" this.

Quite right, you don't. Was there anything else?

[FireMage]

No, the Sundering was never necessary.

It absolutely was, to both stop the cycle of sacrifice and to give mankind a chance at stopping Meteion. Full stop

[dynus]

I wonder if the Nibirun have enough aether to be sundered like we were. I haven't finished the quests yet, and maybe I'm forgetting some things, but our Ancients were a lot denser aetherically than the others, right?

If we go by the dragons size vs the size of the ancients vs. the size of everything else on Ultima Thule, I'd say they don't. That they are closer to us now (four sevenths for most peoples of Hydaelyn, 9/14ths for the WoL and G'raha) vs us unsundered.

Of course, that just asks a lot of other questions.

[redheadturk]

Then there is already someone like Lahabrea that casts away his emotions because he does not want to handle them.

Correction. It wasn't because he "didn't want to handle them." It was because the whole thing came with corruption due to the knowledge that Athena had planted. The tearing away of his emotions was a side effect, not the main idea.

[thegreatonemal]

Correction. It wasn't because he "didn't want to handle them." It was because the whole thing came with corruption due to the knowledge that Athena had planted. The tearing away of his emotions was a side effect, not the main idea.

Wasn't it more like he also had those thoughts of doing unethical experiments but would never act on them but after getting to know her soul in that way he feared that the temptation would be too great so he cut that part out of him. Sounds like not handling your emotions to me.

[Cleretic]

Wasn't it more like he also had those thoughts of doing unethical experiments but would never act on them but after getting to know her soul in that way he feared that the temptation would be too great so he cut that part out of him. Sounds like not handling your emotions to me.

It's almost definitely the temptation thing, yeah; whatever she was doing (which we don't entirely know yet) was too enticing for him to not pursue if he knew it--which we more or less know because Hephaistos couldn't resist it. Of course, difficult to say if it'd be that tempting to anyone, or just him. It's probably not some kind of malignant cognitohazard thought virus; I admit we don't have direct evidence that it isn't, but at the same time, we also don't have direct evidence that Nashu Mhakaracca isn't secretly an Ascian responsible for the Fourth Calamity. Stuff like that just isn't on the table as far as we know, so they can't just be brought up as 'fact' without some SERIOUS evidence.

However, without knowing what it was, we're not sure exactly how irrational or what kind of irrational Lahabrea was being by doing that; for all we know that could've been the right call. We also don't really know how different Lahabrea actually was after doing that; we know Emet-Selch could literally see it, and we know Igeyorhm knew him well enough to suss out that something happened, but beyond that, no idea. Even his son didn't notice, but granted, his son mostly wasn't giving him the time of day afterward. I feel like we can assume that wasn't a normal thing to do, but beyond that, we just don't have enough info.

Basically: jury's still out on if Lahabrea performing memory surgery on himself was an extremely stupid thing to do, a tragic necessity in the circumstances, specifically a 'him' problem, something that anyone would've struggled with, or anything in between any of those points. It's ABSOLUTELY fair to side-eye Lahabrea for doing that and not give him a pass yet, and he absolutely hasn't earned the benefit of the doubt at least for me, but we don't yet have any surefire evidence to either condemn or forgive him for it. (There's a laundry list of other items to condemn him for before then, anyway.)

[Lyth]

If you've witnessed the phase transition cutscene in P8S, you'll know that Hephaistos is the part of Lahabrea that still loves Athena and wants to be reunited with her. The entire reason why he originally decided to merge souls with her in the first place was to find out if she loved him in return.