I don't think the Traveler will kill Dottore (looking at past game history)
tl;dr - Traveler has never outright killed a big boss and when they have been actually destroyed, someone else did it so I see no reason for Traveler to start now.
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This has nothing to do with anybody's relative power levels, how villainous Dottore is (whether he "deserves it"), or anything like that. It's simply my thinking about our history with big bosses (the weekly bosses, basically) from the very beginning of the game.
1. Andrius is our sparring buddy.
2. We defeated Dvalin, purging him of his corruption, and now he's just a bro.
3. We defeated Childe, he still calls us comrade and wants us to spar with him.
1. bonus: We proceeded to defeat Osial but he was just imprisoned again, not destroyed.
2. extra bonus even if not related to a weekly boss: we defeated Beisht and she ran away
4. We defeated Azhdaha but as with Osial...he wasn't actually destroyed, just imprisoned again.
5. We defeated Signora but a greater power than us (the Shogun) came along and actually killed her
1. When we proceeded to fight Ei, she wasn't defeated by us so much as she conceded and...obviously...she wasn't killed.
6. For the puppet Shogun's boss battle, it was only ever Ei that fought her and again...she conceded defeat and now she's a sparring buddy
7. Shouki no Kami (Scaramech) was defeated but Scara was more or less reformed afterward
8. "Guardian of Apep's Oasis" was purified but not exactly killed. Or at least...Apep wasn't killed.
9. The space whale wasn't killed, just defeated, and then Skirk came along to box it up and toss it back out of Fontaine.
10. Arlecchino defeated *us*.
11. Gosoythoth was defeated and arguably destroyed but it was a manifestation of the Abyss and obviously the Abyss itself is still here.
12. The chess boss is included for completeness but it feels like even more of an outlier than our other "friendly" boss battles. Still...nothing was really killed.
So anyway, my prediction for Dottore based on the above comes down to a couple of thoughts:
While we might manage to "defeat" him, we (the Traveler) will not destroy him. If he *is* destroyed, it will be because of the intervention of someone else like...Columbina comes back with a big moon goddess powerup maybe with a tenuous alliance with Rerir as backup or....the Shades finally intervene (presumably they don't do it sooner in the fight since with Dottore's moon power he grows to be able to counter them and its only once he's weakened by us that they can do the final knockout or something like that).
Even if the Dottore we defeat is destroyed....there's at least one other version of him out there so "Dottore" as an entity still exists (like how despite what happened to Gosoythoth, the Abyss still exists). Sure, Nahida bargained with him to destroy his other segments (though I kind of thought he'd managed that feat too easily but oh well, that's not what this is about) but he said even then that there was nothing to keep him from making more. It's entirely possible (nay, *probable*) that he has in fact done that. Or assuming that the Dottore we fight isn't the "original" Dottore, it may simply be that "original" Dottore isn't considered a segment so is still around watching events from somewhere else.
\------
This has nothing to do with anybody's relative power levels, how villainous Dottore is (whether he "deserves it"), or anything like that. It's simply my thinking about our history with big bosses (the weekly bosses, basically) from the very beginning of the game.
1. Andrius is our sparring buddy.
2. We defeated Dvalin, purging him of his corruption, and now he's just a bro.
3. We defeated Childe, he still calls us comrade and wants us to spar with him.
1. bonus: We proceeded to defeat Osial but he was just imprisoned again, not destroyed.
2. extra bonus even if not related to a weekly boss: we defeated Beisht and she ran away
4. We defeated Azhdaha but as with Osial...he wasn't actually destroyed, just imprisoned again.
5. We defeated Signora but a greater power than us (the Shogun) came along and actually killed her
1. When we proceeded to fight Ei, she wasn't defeated by us so much as she conceded and...obviously...she wasn't killed.
6. For the puppet Shogun's boss battle, it was only ever Ei that fought her and again...she conceded defeat and now she's a sparring buddy
7. Shouki no Kami (Scaramech) was defeated but Scara was more or less reformed afterward
8. "Guardian of Apep's Oasis" was purified but not exactly killed. Or at least...Apep wasn't killed.
9. The space whale wasn't killed, just defeated, and then Skirk came along to box it up and toss it back out of Fontaine.
10. Arlecchino defeated *us*.
11. Gosoythoth was defeated and arguably destroyed but it was a manifestation of the Abyss and obviously the Abyss itself is still here.
12. The chess boss is included for completeness but it feels like even more of an outlier than our other "friendly" boss battles. Still...nothing was really killed.
So anyway, my prediction for Dottore based on the above comes down to a couple of thoughts:
While we might manage to "defeat" him, we (the Traveler) will not destroy him. If he *is* destroyed, it will be because of the intervention of someone else like...Columbina comes back with a big moon goddess powerup maybe with a tenuous alliance with Rerir as backup or....the Shades finally intervene (presumably they don't do it sooner in the fight since with Dottore's moon power he grows to be able to counter them and its only once he's weakened by us that they can do the final knockout or something like that).
Even if the Dottore we defeat is destroyed....there's at least one other version of him out there so "Dottore" as an entity still exists (like how despite what happened to Gosoythoth, the Abyss still exists). Sure, Nahida bargained with him to destroy his other segments (though I kind of thought he'd managed that feat too easily but oh well, that's not what this is about) but he said even then that there was nothing to keep him from making more. It's entirely possible (nay, *probable*) that he has in fact done that. Or assuming that the Dottore we fight isn't the "original" Dottore, it may simply be that "original" Dottore isn't considered a segment so is still around watching events from somewhere else.
Commentaires
I wouldn't be surprised if someone else killed him at some point though
That said, there's plenty of ways Dottore could be defeated or even killed, and still remain a threat - the simplest, of course, being that he may have created a new Segment in the time between his encounter with Nahida and the present. Probably not many new Segments, since, as he put it, they are very costly to make, but one or two seems reasonable.
Though it does make me wonder whether the process of Segment-making is a lossy one or not. Like, if you make new Segments are you making them as copies off the previous one? Have they been making copy after copy after copy? Because if that's the case...are they JPEGs or PNGs, you get me? :) Is the most recent Segment, whoever that is (Omega?) still exactly the same as the original Dottore (excluding the differences in experience since that's the whole point) or is he somehow changed because he's been copied from another Segment?
I mean, don't read too much into that last paragraph, I mostly just wanted to make the joke about image formats. 😅 But I do wonder how Segments are made.
If this extraction completely removes the memories from Irminsul, then he might be limited by how many segments of his lifetime he can snapshot from before they're all gone. If he just copies them without removing them, then essentially there's no limit (apart from the costliness of the body he creates to house them).
And we shouldn't just kill him. We should rip out his soul and shred it to pieces. There is no coming back from that.