I'm going to continue this in the replies since I'm going over the character limit.
This is sort of a follow-up to a thread I wrote a few years ago back before Patch 6.1 was released. It had to do with a plot point that had been clarified in a recent Live Letter when someone asked Yoshida what Hydaelyn meant when she said that not even her soul would remain as she was dying. Yoshida explained that due to the difference in the number of sacrifices used to create Zodiark and Hydaelyn, the aether comprising the souls of Hydaelyn's sacrifices would need to be used in addition to their corporeal aether in order to give her a fighting chance against Zodiark. This meant that Venat's followers had to expend their entire souls during the battle with Zodiark, and Venat met the same fate while she was fighting the Scions, having kept her own soul in reserve for that moment.
Well, in the patches following 6.0, the lore surrounding Hydaelyn's sacrifices got changed somewhat. We discovered that being sacrificed to Hydaelyn doesn't actually have to consume the sacrifice's entire soul. The first sign we got of this was in the Omega: Beyond the Rift quests in Patch 6.15, when the Watcher explains that he isn't just a simulacrum of one of Venat's companions, but that he was actually created from the essence of that companion after he had already sacrificed himself to create Hydaelyn. Myths of the Realm took this further by revealing that the Twelve are actually constructs created from fragments of the souls of Venat's followers.
Taking all of this into account, it's clear that what Yoshida said about Venat's followers having expended their entire souls to defeat Zodiark is untrue. There had to be some fragments left over. The reason why this happened isn't clear. Perhaps Venat purposefully tried to preserve her followers' souls during the battle with Zodark, or perhaps it just happened that way naturally. We know from the short story A Friendship of Record that the members of Venat's faction were under the impression that "not even their souls would remain" when they agreed to summon Hydaelyn, so I suspect the latter.
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This is sort of a follow-up to a thread I wrote a few years ago back before Patch 6.1 was released. It had to do with a plot point that had been clarified in a recent Live Letter when someone asked Yoshida what Hydaelyn meant when she said that not even her soul would remain as she was dying. Yoshida explained that due to the difference in the number of sacrifices used to create Zodiark and Hydaelyn, the aether comprising the souls of Hydaelyn's sacrifices would need to be used in addition to their corporeal aether in order to give her a fighting chance against Zodiark. This meant that Venat's followers had to expend their entire souls during the battle with Zodiark, and Venat met the same fate while she was fighting the Scions, having kept her own soul in reserve for that moment.
Well, in the patches following 6.0, the lore surrounding Hydaelyn's sacrifices got changed somewhat. We discovered that being sacrificed to Hydaelyn doesn't actually have to consume the sacrifice's entire soul. The first sign we got of this was in the Omega: Beyond the Rift quests in Patch 6.15, when the Watcher explains that he isn't just a simulacrum of one of Venat's companions, but that he was actually created from the essence of that companion after he had already sacrificed himself to create Hydaelyn. Myths of the Realm took this further by revealing that the Twelve are actually constructs created from fragments of the souls of Venat's followers.
Taking all of this into account, it's clear that what Yoshida said about Venat's followers having expended their entire souls to defeat Zodiark is untrue. There had to be some fragments left over. The reason why this happened isn't clear. Perhaps Venat purposefully tried to preserve her followers' souls during the battle with Zodark, or perhaps it just happened that way naturally. We know from the short story A Friendship of Record that the members of Venat's faction were under the impression that "not even their souls would remain" when they agreed to summon Hydaelyn, so I suspect the latter.
Continue reading...