Quote Originally Posted by No_Nick_Needed View Post
Also Thancred came out of the lifestream by himself, while Y'Shtola needed to be pulled out.
We can't really rule out that her blindness might stem from either the casting, or from being pulled out by the White Mages. Come to think of it, the second time she used that spell in Shadowbringers, she came back without further damage. This might be because she had already lost her eyes, so there was nothing left to damage, or maybe Emet was so much better than Kan E Senna and her compatriots, that he managed to get her out without damage, where the Seed Seer was less successful.

There's of course always the possibility of randomness, or maybe there being different zones within the lifestream, with their respective different effects on the living.
Or the damage the pair suffered might not even have been from the lifestream itself, but from some vengeful entities within it, who attacked them. In the Aitiascope we saw that it's entirely possible for evil beings to stay coherent for some time and attack the living, should they come in range.
Gladiator and rogue techniques both use aether of some kind though. That and we know Thancred can manipulate aether still; just that he's limited to his own aether. As I'm fairly confident that what he did in his fight against Ran'jit was use his own aether. Which we know from the conjure quests is a bad thing to do for long periods of time as it would be equivalent to slowly draining yourself of your own blood. I'm not sure if either of them were in a corporeal form while in the sea so I doubt they fought. Remember Flow is teleportation magics and you practically atomize yourself while keeping yourself from dissolving while in the sea. At least on the short term.

It's just that Flow is more like jumping into a riptide and hoping that you get spat out right away and still intact. Versus how most other regular teleportation works where it's more akin to driving on the free way and using an exit ramp. Thancred got sucked in willingly and shoved out in a small amount of time. Y'shtola on the other hand on the 1st time probably spent a few days if not longer inside the sea in an atomized state. She probably came close to what happened to those soldiers who got their destination blown up while in transit via teleportation.

And yes a man who has soul sight and whose very job it was to keep the sea in balance would have had an easier time pulling out a soul than needing to use aetherial entities that have a hard time distinguishing the aetherial signature of a person from that of anything else made up of aether. Y'shtola on the 2nd Flow use spent barely any time in the sea. That's probably why she didn't gain another handicap.