Originally Posted by
Xellith
You have Endless (basically vampires!) who need life force to sustain themselves? Why dont we see about whether or not we can just get them new bodies instead? Or perhaps we can just harvest the life force of clones? Its my understanding that the soul and life force are two distinct things. So the Alexandrians need life force? Can we supply it? I hear the Garleans are adept at cloning technologies. Is getting the endless new bodies for use or life force extraction a viable solution?
I honestly think that adding "life force" to the world building was one of their biggest mistakes because it's a contrived "I said so" point tagged onto the previously established canon about souls just to make their plot work at all costs, even though it doesn't enrich the lore by adding anything that was needed to fill lore gaps or that is truly interesting. Instead it just makes part of the worldbuilding that was already complete and worked perfectly well worse at best, and completely illogical at worst.
“Message” first, lore second.
Yap yap under the cut:
In EW and so forth we learned souls are a core (made from aether?) holding a person's "essence" or true self that seems to be pretty indestructible unless you are a Hydaelin-level primal (and even then the shards still contain a person's true essence).
Around that core is our physical body made of aether which we leave behind when we die, and our memory aether which stays with us when our souls enter the aetherial sea/life stream but which slowly fades away with time. After that happens we can be reborn.
We also sustain our mortal selves by consuming aether in the shape of food and we have seen Emet-Selch giving Y'shtola a new body after her soul is pulled from the aetherial sea by giving her a part of his aether (he does the same when we time travel to Elpis).
There is also the primal summoning which gives these entities physical, tangible forms/vessels in our mortal world.
So in all of these instances we are talking about normal aether as a force of life and we have seen instances of normal aether sustaining us (food, voidsent), healing us (magic) and even creating whole new bodies (Emet, primal summoning etc.).
And suddenly there is "life force".
It's very special aether that can't be (artificially) syntethised from food and it is indispensable for a tech that is basically an auto-resurrection device.
But it can only heal lethal physical injuries. It cannot prolong life (even though it is the most special life force that literally sits in our souls and that is a much, much bigger deal than normal aether) and it cannot heal sickness or natural causes of death (so if you die of heart failure as a child your heart cannot be repaired by life force but if a beast plays ping pong with you and smushes your heart that’s no problem! Somehow the “naturalness” cannot be circumvented because, well, because.).
So somehow, despite being so special, this "life force" seems a lot weaker than normal aether, which can theoretically do all those things mentioned above if you have enough of it.
(Granted you'd probably need Emet-Selch or primal-summoning levels of aether but it was still never classified as anything different than aether. You could perhaps still shoehorn life force into Emet's case, i.e. him not sharing his normal aether but his “life force”, but it seems contrived given that there are many other instances where aether from crystals, magic or food (see Zero) is perfectly fine for said purposes. And the aether from the aetherial sea from which our physical bodies are created has also never been described as anything other than … aether.)
But for some reason Alexandrians need this new energy that lies directly within the soul, which has never been an issue before, to heal a very narrow area of physiological problems and nothing else will do.
They can absolutely not synthesise this life force from food or normal aether/crystals even though they can transplant souls into robots and have mastered the art of recreating the soul cleansing process of the literal life stream.
In fact, they have been doing both things for centuries but for some reason their technical innovations regarding souls stopped right afterwards and that whole “sustaining bodies with normal aether” business has just been too complex for them for the last 400ish years. Can’t be helped. Because the writers said so. Lore and logic be damned.
At the same time though, life force can't really be a force that powers our physical body in a unique way (in a way consuming normal aether can't) because then it would be depleted when a person dies of natural causes. But evidently, when somebody dies it can be harvested for further use to grant another person a whole new life.
At the same time if placed in the right vessel, like a robot body à la Otis, a soul can theoretically exist forever and not run out of life force.
So it seems like there is a reverse relationship: it's not life force which holds our physical bodies together at the cost of consuming itself, it's our physical bodies which anchor our souls in this world and if we have immortal bodies our soul can stay in the mortal world forever.
Hence, it doesn't seem like there is any (significant amount of finite) life force being irrecoverably used up to nourish our bodies. We seem to purely sustain our mortal vessels by ordinary means and with ordinary aether (food, mechanical maintenance of robots, ceruleum? etc.)
Yet somehow, for Alexandrians life force and only life force is needed to heal their physical bodies after wrestling matches in the wild or in the colosseum.
Why? Don't ask.
Also, souls themselves still seem to survive the extraction of life force because we are made to believe Erenville will meet his mum's soul when he's dead. I believe he was a writer's mouth piece in that moment to give the audience some "closure"/reassurance
(The fact that her memories have already been washed away by Alexandria's procedures and her soul cannot remember him anymore, because only her freshly cleansed core ready for rebirth should remain at this point, seems to be forgotten by the writers though. Sorry, Erenville!)
We also see some souls escape Zoraal Ja when we defeat him. It could be those he hasn't consumed yet but since this happened after his big magical lizard transformation it looked more like the ones he had previously used to me.
So it seems like there is the metaphorical "life force" of our mortal body, our corporal aether, that degrades over time and then there is this other energy, actual life force, in our soul, but extracting that life force doesn't destroy the soul. So the soul is more of a shell/cointainer of the true self and can return to the aetherial sea even without life force.
So, what is it even for? It serves no purpose. Before its invention there was no physiological or soul-related function that was not properly explained by aether and that needed "life force" to be added to the lore to make sense.
The story wasn't able to properly sell us this change to the world building.
So in conclusion: Now we have life force which resides in souls, which is not like normal aether and can therefore absolutely not be synthesised by other means so Spehne AI HAS to harvest humans (she's so sad about it tho! ))): ), but when consumed heals aether-related problems, i.e., lethal injuries to our corporal vessel created from normal aether (even though life force doesn't actually seem to be responsible for keeping us alive) but not all problems, but consuming it also doesn't destroy the souls, so the soul (core of one's true self) and its life force, which is not (normal) aether, are two different things but are also not tied to our memory aether and our corporal aether.
I’m sorry but this addition was not needed. Life force didn’t make canon better, more complete, or answered any open questions. It was a mistake.
It serves no proper world building purpose and has only been created for a badly conceived plot that collapses under any scrutiny.
The problem is that it's now canon, even though it's not good canon. They added a new crucial component to the world building without thinking through what it should logically entail. But it is there, so now you constantly have to live with the cognitive dissonance of "it's an ingame "fact" but it also makes no sense".
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