CL's Treatises on Tales of Symphonia

[Apollo the Just]

That's what I'm here for

...literally that's it I just go around re-awakening buried ToS love in people until they all experience an irresistible urge to replay it and eventually cave and then liveblog it at me

[Apollo the Just]

Another DP because I remembered something else I intended to talk about in my Lifeless Beings megapost but never got around to working in:

Spirits, divorced from their bodies, are something you encounter multiple times in the game and it's worth noting how that ties in as well.

The chief of Mizuho is in a coma, and if you do the sidequest where you fight Kuchinawa and then return to the vice-chief, you actually learn that the chief's spirit has been severed from his body and this is the source (or result) of his physical ailment. You encounter his soul freely wandering the Temple of Lightning, and leading it back to his body results in him finally recovering after so many years.

If you do Genis's Katz costume sidequest, it involves you interacting with a couple people who you later learn were ghosts of deceased people with no physical form. Once you bring them closure they finally move on from this world and disappear.

These are kind of interesting from a purely folklore-y perspective because they're kind of like ghost stories, but they also provide more instances in which the soul and body are severed (or one exists without the other), which can't really be deemed conscious "life" - in fact they refer explicitly to being in a coma and being straight up dead. Yet Mithos refuses to regard life that way; as long as there is a spirit or a body, to him, it seems that is enough to constitute life, or at least to cling to.

Very interesting.

[Cravdraa]

That's a good point. And furthermore, wasn't there actually a throwaway line in there about the chief and "exspheres making it easier for the body and soul to separate?" I swear somebody said something to that effect in that sidequest. That would also really back up your theory.

[Apollo the Just]

Iirc yes. It was that side quest that got me interested in the topic in the first place actually. Can't believe I ended up not mentioning that tidbit until now tho