My Mom The Warrior of Light QA Sastasha Edition
Check out my bio for my bsky. There I'll be posting pictures, updates, hot takes and answering any questions.
SheildofBrotherhood comments: that is true Pippin does exist almost forgot about him theres also the last brother of the thermatorgery guild, and you are right the original azem and subsequent wols would carry a gremlin energy, dont like how you went about explaining the summons saying that azem shattered into a million pieses just seem pardon my french "sucer une bite" azem was just never that powerful going with alternetimelines woud make more scents, the wol is not nigh immortal we just keep reincarnating or to be more appropriate were just the current incarnation of the former Azem
Before I explain, please note that I'll be touching on a lot of spoilers for Shadowbringers to the current content. If you haven't played it yet, I suggest coming back to this later.
From what I understand, prior to Shadowbringers, trials and dungeons operated under the silent notion that we were recruiting like-minded individuals to tackle the content. There wasn't a clear rhyme or reason—until the Seat of Sacrifice, where the Warrior of Light indirectly learned the summoning technique from Emet-Selch. From there, all the way up to the Fractured Abyss, we used that summoning technique.
I believe (though I haven't seen the pre-cutscenes in a while) that it reverted to the old style for Worked Lar Dor and Everkeep, but I do remember that we used summoning for The Interphos.
There isn't a clear explanation of who we're summoning (outside of using it to summon our friends during Endwalker); it's just that we do, and it's other players.
My explanation of Azem being fragmented wasn't to say they're strong, but rather that they were sundered the hardest. The only other Warrior of Light reflection we've met was Ardbert from the First. We haven't met the one from the Thirteenth (though I personally speculate that it was the original Golbez), and we don't know what reflection we're dealing with currently.
In my view, it's easier to say all players are shards of Azem. We can consider that we're summoning from alternate timelines (as hinted in the dialogue with Alia and Vergo, where Alia comments on how her G'Raha Tia was acting versus what Vergo knows). The game also touches on this with the Crystal Exarch being a version of G'Raha Tia who had seen the Eighth Umbral Calamity with the poison the Garleans were producing, and you taking his soul crystal to the G'Raha Tia left sealed in the Crystal Tower of the Source to combine the two.
Any explanation is valid until proven wrong by Yoshi-P himself, and even then, it's a 50/50 chance. Remember when he came out on stage wearing a TMNT shirt and the Internet went wild thinking we were getting a turtles collab?
Currently, in the new raid tier, we're using stockpiled souls to reflect allies to help us fight. We even get called out by one of the fighters!
So yeah, it boils down to interpretation! One of my friends doesn't even entertain the thought of their characters being the Warrior of Light. All I'm doing is trying to make sense of MMO mechanics using tropes, conjectures, and ideas!
To anyone else, you can reach me on bluesky. I know a lot of people are hesitant to use that site but it is creative friendly.