#(not to mention it was her echo in Zenos which makes a full loop with Zero)

[elizabethrobertajones]

So I've been thinking about Fransi way too much, on account of now levelling up what was a side character in Frog's journey and becoming completely invested in a tiny rude farmer :)

Obviously the suggestion that your reaper avatar is your shard is incompatible with the suggestion Golbez (original flavour) is your shard from the 13th, both of which are now supported choices for the player to make and leave you rationalising the other option. And I picked the harder one since saying Golbez is your shard just means your pacted voidsent is some other guy.

I've been turning that over in my head, wondering what else he could be if not that.

Then it hit me that of course we know a handful of people with the echo so it's easy to quickly assign one of them to Golbez and maybe even just knowing them would be enough to manifest some weird shit.

Like, there's the ambiguity of if this was a past life for you or Estinien or just Your Weird New Bond with the dragoon job stone is what manifests Haldrath out of our dragoon stone in the level 50 Dragoon quest - I lean to it being our past life but it is pretty vague on account of the lore being so unknown to us at the time that we have no framework for this, vs like, even in SB patches when we learn about Tenzen we're sort of putting the dots together a bit more thanks to the Dotharl that this is a definite in-world mechanic. Although I'll always be mad everyone's so mean to Ysayle, who may absolutely not be Shiva's reincarnation but up until that point we shouldn't have been mean to her because we did know reincarnation was how souls worked in this universe, it just seemed to be very fringey to KNOW who you had been. And she still has a strong bond to Shiva regardless of not being her because of her echo memory of her. She may have made a Primalsona of her based on her expectations but at the end of the day I think they'd made a connection.

So there's fully a ton of reasons to think we could have reacted to Golbez's memory so dramatically, especially if he was a shard of someone we knew.

Then I was like, so who is that. Who is the best possible person for it to be.

Of course the whole theme of the story with him and Zero and the Thirteenth falling from a ton of mistrust and in fighting and manufactured war, and the crux of what may have saved them (well probably not but it created a What If) was Zero not daring to reach out. The whole story was about empathy and friendship.

THE most obvious soul to me to have been the shard of the person lumbering around in Golbez's armour trying to rally a dying world (while the Azem soul shard was off working a farm, oblivious) is the 13th shard of Krile with her hyper-empathy and friendship based echo.