Why does emet selch consider us not to be alive?

[Cleretic]

In the case of the dragons, i believe that if they had reached Etheirys before the sundering Emet and his people would have been more than happy to share the world with them and learn from each other, but they arrived post sundering and immediately allied with Hyedalyn thus becaming the Ascians enemies, and so their respect, if you want to call it that, for the dragons manifested in how they viewed them as a real threat to be removed, as in the meracydian campaign and the Dragonsong War.

Bringing this back because I've been thinking a bit about it, I do think it's interesting to question as a pure hypothetical if the Ancients would have been amenable to supposed equals like the dragons rather than the Ascians. The Ascians were never gonna embrace that, but how would the Ancients, before everything exploded, have taken it? We know it'd be a new concept to them.

And maybe it's my general cynicism about them, but I honestly don't think even at their height, the Ancients would've taken it well, they'd just take it poorly in a different way than they did later. The Ancients seem to take it as a given that they're at the top of it all; they don't take this in a particularly evil way, they don't go supremacist with it like the Garleans (or the Ascians) did and more seem to take the approach of 'we're the doting knows-best parents of every single thing in the world'; more subtly paternalistic and patronizing than actively hateful. They do seem to take an approach that this position means different rules apply to them, though: they're certainly pretty horrified at Athena basically treating Ancients the way Ancients treat other life forms--justifiably so, but it's interesting to see where that line is for them. (There's also the question raised around Athena of what their relationship with the notion of 'gods' is, but we don't really have enough info to work with.)

All that is to say, I don't think their overall worldview has room for 'unlike equals', and they'd probably try to fit their view of dragons as somewhere beneath them as a result. Exactly how, I'm not sure, and I don't know if they'd even have one answer, but I don't think the dragons would be broadly treated and respected as equals. I think most of the Ancients we've met would've treated them as a scientific curiosity and research project, but that's largely because we mostly met Ancients in Elpis, their society's R&D center.

[Tarrinus]

Ancients are not represented as thinking of themselves as being above all other life by default. Etheirys as a body and themselves as the head is a more apt analogy which is why Athena is viewed negatively. They probably wouldn't have treated the dragons as equals simply because the dragons would not have been able to manage the star like they could but seeing how amiable they are to artificial familiars simply when they possess some intelligence I have a hard time believing they would have treated the dragons, an independent alien life, badly either. Also I'm not sure there's any reason to think Midgarsormr would have taken offence to this given that he already accepted another ruler of the star's conditions for being allowed to live there.

[LilimoLimomo]

if soul sundering causes you to lose soul aetheric density, and therefore make you less alive...
then are dragons more alive than the ancients? they certainly have much more aetheric density than any other creature, to the point that their scales are used as protection against meteion

My interpretation of the text of the game is that Emet-Selch does not actually believe that sundered people are not alive. There's a variety of evidence for this, but the most authoritative is in Y'shtola's theory on the subject in Endwalker. The game's writers often use the primary Scions as mouthpieces with which to guide the player's understanding of FF14's lore, and despite generally being framed as musings or theories, they are rarely (if ever) proved incorrect at later junctures. So when Y'shtola says (paraphrasing) "it seems like Emet-Selch may have seen the sundered as something akin to children", my reading is that this is the writers telling us how we should interpret their world.

But beyond that, it's pretty clear that he thinks the unsundered are alive because he has conversations with them. And Emet-Selch of all people is well acquainted with the fact that something that is not alive cannot have a soul, which due to his exceptional abilities he would constantly be witnessing.

Emet-Selch is not always a reliable narrator, and what he tells others and himself is not always the truth; my interpretation is that he feels compelled to fulfill his duty, but is exhausted and depressed after millennia of it. So he tells himself and others the lies he needs to sustain himself and do what he feels is right without honestly engaging with his doubts. He may also be at least partially sundered, so it's possible that he is compelled to try to believe such lies.

[LilimoLimomo]

he even goes sk far as to resurrect Y'shtola, and that was before he began putting the pieces together on who we were.

This is the one part I disagree with; I don't think there's any chance that Emet-Selch would ever not know that the WoL was a sundered fragment of Azem, because Emet-Selch is highly-skilled at seeing the color of souls, to the point where he can identify individuals based on them. If a mere simulacrum of Hythlodaeus was able to immediately clock the WoL and Ardbert, I see no reason why the actual Emet-Selch wouldn't as well.

In fact, I'd hazard that recognizing the WoL's soul as being of Azem might even be the reason why Emet-Selch tried to work with the WoL and their colleagues. Azem and Emet-Selch were amazingly close, after all; it's easy to imagine him hoping against hope that together they might see eye-to-eye.

[Alleo]

They are not going to see the dragons as equals, because to the Ascians, the Ancients have no equals.

Exactly and this is further proven by him stating that they will offer the remaining people of the source to Zodiark to exchange them for ancients. This would have happened at a time where the souls would have been fully restored (if they do find a solution for the 13th), thus suddenly alive in their view, yet they would have still been killed.

[KageTokage]

It's made more explicit in some of the other localizations that he recognizes the Azem in us the moment he sees us in Lakeland for the first time; the wording used being "he/she has their soul" vs. "a soul such as their's" (Which is considerably more non-descript since we already know we're not normal in that regard and there's no clear distinction being made between us and the soul we bear).

[SaberMaxwell]

Having only experienced the English localization, my interpretation was that he started having suspicions during the elevator fixing scene but it was only confirmed to him after we merged with Ardbert which made our soul that little bit more recognizable, which is why he started seeing us standing there in the Ancient robes.

Of course if other languages he outright says it at the start then I can't really argue with that lol

[Jandor]

Why does emet selch consider us not to be alive?

Personally, I think he was probably huffing the copium. He knows the sundered are actually alive, but if he actually acknowledges it he'll have to acknowledge that he's been acting like (to put it politely) a little bit of an arsehole for the past dozen or so millennia.