(11-07-2015, 04:45 PM)Ciel Wrote:About that last part: The way I see it, corpses in XIV follow the same pattern as corpses in real life. They 'return to the earth' through decomposition. I don't think its ever said that the bodies literally break down into raw energy, ever. But rather, 'return to the aether', as far bodies and other physical objects are concerned, could just be another way of saying they 'decompose'. After all the aether is energy that composes everything and everyone, including the earth, and a body breaking down to its smallest parts and being seeded into the earth the usual way is 'returning to the aether' just as much as it would be if it broke down into raw energy. I couple that thought with the thought of process in the opposite end of this spectrum: Conception of new life. I think we can safely assume that happens 'The usual way', and doesn't entail to Lifestream bombarding a woman's belly, forming a baby's body within her until it is done. So if a new person's body is composed the normal, biological way, then I'd say it's decomposed in the same manner.(11-07-2015, 04:23 PM)Teadrinker Wrote: Something this thread made me think about was the existence of fiends and pyrefly like creatures like in FF10.
I Would think that if a person's "essense" or "soul" if you will was able to stay in the physical realm and manifest it would be a very twisted remnant of what it once was. Some of this is implied in the main story but it's usually explained away with "voidsent".
It's somewhat canon for this to happen in XIV as it is. The ghost mobs (lost souls, etc) that look like floating blobs with wings are detached souls which haven't found their way back to the Lifestream, be it due to denial, bitterness at being dead, or whatever reason they might have. There are a few FATEs with lore blurbs around it as well.
Recently I've seen a bit circulating about how aether works, and how the soul and body both return to aether upon death, but there's part of this which leaves me confused, because we see in game that there are also zombies and magicked bones. Hell, there's even a cemetary at St. Adama Landama church in Eastern Thanalan. You even have quests where you retrieve and bury corpses, and neither zombies nor magicked bones would exist -without- those corpses. So there's a question of whether the physical body, when intact, might take a lot longer to break down into aether than the individual's recently released soul.
Likewise, the Lifestream, as far corpses are concerned, doesn't necessarily have to mean a flowing stream of energy. It could just as well refer to the cycle of life, being formed, living through its useful life and then breaking down.
Certain statements can't really have their meaning taken at face value because they're statements made by individuals who live in a different environment and society, with different concepts to ours, and that might lead us to describe the same process through different expressions.
Aside from that: Good call on the whole 'lingering souls' and the ghost mobs, as well as the idea of pyreflies. That's something I hadn't thought of.
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