Who on the 13th?

[Eisi]

It's the internet so I genuinely can't tell if this is a joke or not. If it is a joke, thank you for the laugh, it made me smile.

I'm glad about that it was meant as a joke.

[JepMZ]

The newest book, Encyclopaedia Eorzea III, brings up the Avatar and you as a reaper as "both souls once have been part of the same whole,". To be fair it says it's an unconfirmed theory. Like how they mentioned Yda has a sister in just one sentence in the entire previous book

[RavLandslide]

I just realized that this isn't necessarily true, as there are numerous souls that have been ferried away from the 13th. Just to throw out two different flavors of examples: Unuklhai and Rubicante.

So there's no guarantee that an Azem shard is still in the 13th. It could be somewhere else. And we've also seen that there are ways to destroy souls, so there could be other reasons why it is entirely out of circulation. Narratively I would bet against any shards of Azem's soul being destroyed due to plot armor, but it's technically within the possibility space and thus worth considering.

This is something I'm really interested in to learn about. There have been multiple voidsent who have been 100% summoned with soul and body to The Source and then died there. Does that mean that their Source counterpart could get rejoined in the Aetherial Sea?? Do they just become a "separate" person??

Please Squeenix, I need answers.

[Cleretic]

This is something I'm really interested in to learn about. There have been multiple voidsent who have been 100% summoned with soul and body to The Source and then died there. Does that mean that their Source counterpart could get rejoined in the Aetherial Sea?? Do they just become a "separate" person??

Please Squeenix, I need answers.

I would reason that it's probably the latter, because the former sounds kind of overly complicated; like, if that's how it works why would dying even factor in, and if dying matters wouldn't it require both souls to be roughly the same level of dead at the same time. But I would also argue--and I know that people are probably sick of it from me--that it probably doesn't matter enough to be worth answering.

More soul doesn't equal more better; we were getting our butts kicked just as hard by stuff in the First as we were in the Source. (Debatably moreso, I could make a case for Ran'jit being the most powerful 'just a regular dude' person we've ever fought.) In fact, we now know that what your soul was only really matters in death, when you go through that process of memory realization and then cleansing. So if someone merged with their Thirteenth shard on death, they wouldn't be meaningfully different... and if that Thirteenth shard was resurrected as a regular person, then both that ex-Thirteenth soul and that Source soul wouldn't be meaningfully different.

The only actual difference comes if that 'unverified and unverifiable' theory about Reaper Avatars being the Reaper's Thirteenth shard is true. If it is, and your Thirteenth shard was, say, Cagnazzo who died over on the Source, then you wouldn't be able to be a Reaper. ...but given how Reapers are like, I get the feeling that they'd probably call you lucky for that.

[RavLandslide]

I would reason that it's probably the latter, because the former sounds kind of overly complicated; like, if that's how it works why would dying even factor in, and if dying matters wouldn't it require both souls to be roughly the same level of dead at the same time. But I would also argue--and I know that people are probably sick of it from me--that it probably doesn't matter enough to be worth answering.

More soul doesn't equal more better; we were getting our butts kicked just as hard by stuff in the First as we were in the Source. (Debatably moreso, I could make a case for Ran'jit being the most powerful 'just a regular dude' person we've ever fought.) In fact, we now know that what your soul was only really matters in death, when you go through that process of memory realization and then cleansing. So if someone merged with their Thirteenth shard on death, they wouldn't be meaningfully different... and if that Thirteenth shard was resurrected as a regular person, then both that ex-Thirteenth soul and that Source soul wouldn't be meaningfully different.

The only actual difference comes if that 'unverified and unverifiable' theory about Reaper Avatars being the Reaper's Thirteenth shard is true. If it is, and your Thirteenth shard was, say, Cagnazzo who died over on the Source, then you wouldn't be able to be a Reaper. ...but given how Reapers are like, I get the feeling that they'd probably call you lucky for that.

This is enough of a satisfying answer for me, thank you.