Where's the aether? (Spoilers)

[kaynide]

He was attempting to sell the WoL on becoming an Ascian. Remember, the Ascians know how to pull souls and memories from bodies effectively making you immortal. Given six more calamities would likely take several thousand more years, when he says "should you survive" he meant as an Ascian, otherwise old age would get the WoL if nothing else did.

Minor point here-

My understanding is that there was only a need for one more calamity to cause a full rejoin, which we stopped in Shadowbringers; my understanding is once #8 happened, everything would cascade to full rejoin. I could be wrong though!

Annnd 2, very importantly, the Bahamut calamity revealed to the Ascians that calamities didn't require a full map-wipe (and therefore thousands of years). Rather, they could do Calamity causing massive damage but not reset humanity; they were planning to do calamity #8 (Flood of Light in Shadowbringers) about 5ish years from #7 (The Meteor project; some 5ish? 10ish? years pre ARR).

So, even if they DID need to do 6 more calamities, it could be easily done in like.. 30-50 years tops.

[ApolloGenX]

Based on the story so far, I am with the Ascians. I think we should rejoin all of the shards. Endsinger is done and souls will be reborn/rejoined.

Who cares if you kill people? They come back from the ethereal stream.

I don't think killing is bad in this game anymore. There is really no justification for the continuation of hardship and suffering.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Minor point here-

My understanding is that there was only a need for one more calamity to cause a full rejoin, which we stopped in Shadowbringers; my understanding is once #8 happened, everything would cascade to full rejoin. I could be wrong though!

Annnd 2, very importantly, the Bahamut calamity revealed to the Ascians that calamities didn't require a full map-wipe (and therefore thousands of years). Rather, they could do Calamity causing massive damage but not reset humanity; they were planning to do calamity #8 (Flood of Light in Shadowbringers) about 5ish years from #7 (The Meteor project; some 5ish? 10ish? years pre ARR).

So, even if they DID need to do 6 more calamities, it could be easily done in like.. 30-50 years tops.

While there is a line from Hydaelyn saying she will lose her grip if one more calamity happens in around 3.5, I believe? Shadowbringers has G'raha waking up hundreds of years after the calamity and Zodiark is not free and the world is not rejoined. So either she was mistaken about how many rejoinings it'd take to free him or the writers simply retconned that. And given even 200 years after the 8th calamity the world wasn't rejoined, we know most WoL (unless you play a young Viera) wouldn't make it even that long. So yeah, he was totally attempting to sell us on that Ascian life.

Also, the reason why the 7th umbral calamity didn't reset humanity is because of the twins grandfather. He wasn't around for the 8th and that did reset humanity. So the Ascians can't really just keep slamming shards into the Source or there will be no people left alive to cause the next calamity. They really do have to wait for people to rebuild.

Based on the story so far, I am with the Ascians. I think we should rejoin all of the shards. Endsinger is done and souls will be reborn/rejoined.

Who cares if you kill people? They come back from the ethereal stream.

I don't think killing is bad in this game anymore. There is really no justification for the continuation of hardship and suffering.

Rejoining the shards will not turn us into Ancients and/or end suffering. We'll just have the trauma of another half dozen brutal deaths etched into our souls. I'm sure that'll make us kinder to one another as species.

While it does look like some sort of rejoining is the direction the story is going. Just murdering everyone is a terrible plan. If not for moral reasons (which yes, for moral reasons) then because trauma impacts the soul for thousands of years and so far the only uses we've found for having a dense souls is holding a lot of aspected aether and curing someone else's soul corruption.

[Voidmage]

Rejoining the shards will not turn us into Ancients and/or end suffering. We'll just have the trauma of another half dozen brutal deaths etched into our souls. I'm sure that'll make us kinder to one another as species.

While it does look like some sort of rejoining is the direction the story is going. Just murdering everyone is a terrible plan. If not for moral reasons (which yes, for moral reasons) then because trauma impacts the soul for thousands of years and so far the only uses we've found for having a dense souls is holding a lot of aspected aether and curing someone else's soul corruption.

I don't think the story goes into a rejoining direction.
The thirteens will be healed, the first is on it's way to recover and the survivors of Alexandria have found a world outside the dome if they wish to leave it.
There could even be other survivors from former rejoinings if Yoshidas Interview is any indication and I think that is the direction they want to go.

The game makes a big point of remembering other people, the cultures and that they lived. If there are survivors then the cultures may not be lost yet.

That's also why I find that take you replied to... uh I don't have nice words for that.
Joining the Ascians and rejoining everything would wipe out those cultures, their history and their memories.
We would have never met Otis or Sphene (and I do like those). Imagine Ryne and the others from the first or even Zero just being erased without anyone remembering they existed in the first place.

I really don't know how someone can actually think like that tbh. I can't wrap my head around that.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

I don't think the story goes into a rejoining direction.
The thirteens will be healed, the first is on it's way to recover and the survivors of Alexandria have found a world outside the dome if they wish to leave it.
There could even be other survivors from former rejoinings if Yoshidas Interview is any indication and I think that is the direction they want to go.

The game makes a big point of remembering other people, the cultures and that they lived. If there are survivors then the cultures may not be lost yet.

That's also why I find that take you replied to... uh I don't have nice words for that.
Joining the Ascians and rejoining everything would wipe out those cultures, their history and their memories.
We would have never met Otis or Sphene (and I do like those). Imagine Ryne and the others from the first or even Zero just being erased without anyone remembering they existed in the first place.

I really don't know how someone can actually think like that tbh. I can't wrap my head around that.

NOOOOOO! You misunderstand me. When I said I suspect we might be going in the direction of rejoining the shards, I meant because we now have a safe means to do it with the hourglass thingy. A part of Alexandria was merged into the Source with zero casualties are far as I'm aware. And given that the Sundered world is unstable and might crash into itself if we stop praying to an answering machine, putting the world back together without murdering anyone might be our next arc. After all, we wouldn't have met Otis without the merge either.

And then Ryne could be with her daddy and Y'shtola could be with Ru...wait, nevermind, that's never happening. The men would riot.

[Voidmage]

NOOOOOO! You misunderstand me. When I said I suspect we might be going in the direction of rejoining the shards, I meant because we now have a safe means to do it with the hourglass thingy. A part of Alexandria was merged into the Source with zero casualties are far as I'm aware. And given that the Sundered world is unstable and might crash into itself if we stop praying to an answering machine, putting the world back together without murdering anyone might be our next arc. After all, we wouldn't have met Otis without the merge either.

And then Ryne could be with her daddy and Y'shtola could be with Ru...wait, nevermind, that's never happening. The men would riot.

Ah yeah. Guess I misread that, tehe.

It’s an interesting notion doing that but wouldn’t that undermine our efforts with Eden and the void if we just yoink those people to the source now?
Would they even be happy in some cases? It is their home with its own history after all.

I find the idea of Solution 9 good tbh. An “ark” for survivors and some kind of “anchor” for a shard to allow travel.
It’s like some kind of floating continent from ff3.

[Basteala]

They did to an extent explain that in Endwalker. Being Aetherically thin grants better access to Dynamis, so despite being weaker in one regard the reflections are stronger in another and balancing out.

To expand on this, some jobs care about aether more than others (and some, arguably, about dynamis more than others). For the sake of argument, a shard where people have lesser aether might have say....more potent dancers or dark knights (or their respective equivalents), but potent mages would be in very short supply.

Think about it. How many good mages were there on the First? Or on the Thirteenth for that matter? On the First, the only real cases we see from a caster standpoint that I recall were very specifically bred for generations to be the ultimate mage, and all that work seemingly paled compared to some of the greatest mages we've seen on the Source.

[Galvuu]

The people on the Source aren't more powerful than the people from shards for the same reason that 75% of the Ancient population is now in the aetherial sea to be reborn with their full, complete 14/14 souls and it will make little to no difference. I believe YoshiP described it as "maybe they'll be a little cooler, have a bigger mana pool." Their species has been eradicated. Their big thick souls will be stuffed into catboy and bunnygirl bodies, so it won't matter.

Actually, Emet-Selch states outright in Shadowbringers that (part) of the reason why the WoL "towers above their peers" (in terms of might, in context) was because he was "seven times rejoined".
Ofc we also know the last Azem was very powerful and aetherically dense (I recall Venat using the figure "twice as powerful" as her)- putting both together, Emet seems to be have been stating "you've been rejoined seven times" as "your soul is denser/has more aether" to a being which had a dense soul to begin with.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Actually, Emet-Selch states outright in Shadowbringers that (part) of the reason why the WoL "towers above their peers" (in terms of might, in context) was because he was "seven times rejoined".
Ofc we also know the last Azem was very powerful and aetherically dense (I recall Venat using the figure "twice as powerful" as her)- putting both together, Emet seems to be have been stating "you've been rejoined seven times" as "your soul is denser/has more aether" to a being which had a dense soul to begin with.

At the time he said that the WoL had a soul of the same density as everyone else on the Source. What made Emet-Selch care about the WoL wasn't the density of their soul, but whose soul it was. The added lore from DT does show that jamming a bunch of souls in you does increase your strength, but you can crack like a vase by doing that.

So I accept YoshiP's explanation that having a 14/14 soul might make you a little cooler, have a bit more mana. But it wouldn't make you an Ancient because they are essentially another species. They had physical vessels capable of doing more than ours, so even you jam pack us with soul aether we'll explode before we become Ancients.

Ah yeah. Guess I misread that, tehe.

It’s an interesting notion doing that but wouldn’t that undermine our efforts with Eden and the void if we just yoink those people to the source now?
Would they even be happy in some cases? It is their home with its own history after all.

I find the idea of Solution 9 good tbh. An “ark” for survivors and some kind of “anchor” for a shard to allow travel.
It’s like some kind of floating continent from ff3.

Given a bunch of lightening came with the merge with the shard that was falling to lightening, it makes sense that the 1st and 13th would need some restoration before being restored. But if you talk to players, you can see a lot of them dislike the idea of being broken people, they want to be whole. They want their WoL to be whole. You don't think that mentality wouldn't extend to the people in the actual game world? That they'd be content with their world and themselves being both fractured and threatening to crash in on itself at any moment as the god of stability is no longer there to manage it's fractured state? If you told me I'm a fraction of who I am meant to be and at any moment I might die from a planet crashing into me, I'd be like...uh...maybe we should look into fixing that.

[Voidmage]

Given a bunch of lightening came with the merge with the shard that was falling to lightening, it makes sense that the 1st and 13th would need some restoration before being restored. But if you talk to players, you can see a lot of them dislike the idea of being broken people, they want to be whole. They want their WoL to be whole. You don't think that mentality wouldn't extend to the people in the actual game world? That they'd be content with their world and themselves being both fractured and threatening to crash in on itself at any moment as the god of stability is no longer there to manage it's fractured state? If you told me I'm a fraction of who I am meant to be and at any moment I might die from a planet crashing into me, I'd be like...uh...maybe we should look into fixing that.

I actually do think that they are happy as they are now.
Regarding the WoL. Most players probably don't even care about all that stuff and I personally don't want them to be "complete" because that would mean the death of other shards of our soul.
The WoL themself probably don't want that anyway.

Same as the citizens of the first.
Even ignoring that most of them probably don't even have a shard counterpart... yes I bet most of them don't want to change their life they have right now, they may not even be aware of the source and other shards as was the first.
They are just shards. Their personality probably wouldn't survive a rejoining, even a not calamity one (look at Ardbert).
There is no happy rejoining between people. One of them will have their personality and memory erased and mostly this seems to be the case for the reflections. I don't see them wanting that.
I also don't think they see their world in a fractured state anyway. Ryne and the others were not really concerned with that notion, as was Sphene or even the Golbez (he just wanted to die).

The shards are for all intents and purposes complete worlds just not as dense.
Nothing suggests that they are unstable right now. If anything they should be more stable then ever before because:
> The Ascians are not there anymore to collapse them
> The new ex dungeon with the cactuars implies that there were far more rifts in the past then today between worlds so the source shouldn't have such a pull on them anymore.

Right now we have seen no instability of the remaining shards even though I also see that we know not in what state they are right now.
At most I agree for a save haven for them like Solution 9. A halfway rejoining or something but nothing more and even here we don't know yet if that won't have problems later.