Some other things to note is that the top of her head looks like that of a spider's mandibles. An animal that dooms others with it's webs. There's also the butterfly iconography. Butterflies in dreams often mean a positive change will come to the dreamer, but considering how things turned out it seems she views herself as the complete opposite. Like a dark butterfly you could say.
@@yeedog6145 Ohhhh I'll add more to this just for fun because I LOVE this boss, just forgive me over how long it is: From my perspective there's two ways to interpret Lady Ethereal's boss fight 1) Going off of your logic, Lady Ethereal is convinced that she is a spider that slaughtered innocent lives by trapping them in her web of lies in the form of the Vital Sanctums. As @CrispyGFX said her hands are the trees dangling the cocoons of the victims corpses on her fingers. She LITERALLY held their lives in the palm of her hands and continues to "play" with them long after they've died. The fact that this takes place on a theater stage with fake waves going side to side also reinforce the idea that she's done nothing but lie to everyone with a fake persona of benevolence. It's as if everything she's shown, INCLUDING her own guilt and pain, was nothing more than a beautiful display for us to be captivated by. NOTHING is real to her -- not even her own suffering -- and why should it be? She's a spider who convinced everyone she's a butterfly like everyone else after all, and spiders won't feel guilty over killing their victims, right? 2) This one's more disturbing so bear with me. What if those aren't butterflies, but *moths* instead? I say this because you can tell the difference by how they rest their wings -- butterflies rest with their wings closed, moths rest with their wings open (which is what they do on stage and when they emerge from her head). You could argue the ones on stage are butterflies with their wings pinned to the stage, but the thing that pops out of the back of Lady Ethereal's head is definitely a moth dotted with eyes (a defense mechanism most moths have to look intimidating). Which either means Lady Ethereal's head is its cocoon, or if we follow your logic again... A spider's carcass being used to incubate Lady Ethereal's disturbing thoughts. Meaning that Lady Ethereal's guilt was so bad that it became PARASITIC, eating her from the inside out and convincing her that she's a murderer who ensnared innocent people into her web of lies when the reality was far more complicated. It's even worse when you think about how back then in Asia, silk was made using the cocoons of moths, but in the process the moth inside the cocoon would perish and die. Lady Ethereal's sanctums did work as intended, but it worked so well that it led to the death of her friends by keeping them trapped in a never ending dream -- a cocoon of the finest silk. And to top it off, both moths and butterflies are associated with souls of those who pass on and are considered messengers of the dead. Lady Ethereal said so herself that she cut off her support systems so she could die and you could argue we're technically fighting her ghost. She wanted to send one final message to anyone who'd listen. A confession. Seems fitting that the one who hears her call and relieves her from her suffering also possesses a butterfly-like creature as well.
What happened to Lady Ethereal’s colleagues? I haven’t played Nine-Souls, but I do listen to the soundtrack. Reading the comments has made me curious about the context behind this boss fight.
Spoiler Warning: Lady Ethereal is one of the ten Sols, a council of an advanced race. They discovered that the people were infected with a deadly virus, and needed to come up with a plan. The short version is that they wanted to put the people in a dream-like hibernation while they worked on a cure. Her job was to develop this "Matrix" like system. It half-worked; some people it worked for, but others were subjected to extreme torment in their dreams and she felt responsible for it. Moreover, hoping for the greater good, she pushed out her project anyway, and feels responsible for the suffering it caused. This is all the more sad for the protagonist, because Lady Ethereal is one of the only Sols he actually doesn't bear any ill-will towards, yet her own sense of guilt drove her insane.
@@ResonantChemisthey sorry for that but it’s not entirely correct. The initial soulscape system in Lady Ethereals words was working “way too well”, meaning that the dreams that solarians were seeing while being in the soulscape simulation were so much better than reality that people simply did not want to wake up from it and her first test subjects who were her colleagues simply lost their mind and ended themselves right after the first experiment. She felt responsible for not seeing it through and the reason why she was seeing nightmares was the feeling of guilt and responsibility for what happened. Instead of saying to the council of what happened she decided to lie and say that development was going smoothly because the soulscape system was a big part of the entire Eternal Cauldron project and she felt it was her duty to deliver this project, although she regretted hiding the failure later. Eventually they fixed the system though and it was put in use.
