u/ten_tabs_

My boy Thops is truly the goat.

What else does this work on that Carian Retaliation doesn’t? (edit: CR does actually work here)

After we’ve given Thops his key, we return to Raya Lucaria to find him dead alongside his Thops’s Barrier spell and an Academy Glintstone Staff. The spell description states:

Future generations will learn. They will know the foolishness of the sneering sorcerers who ridiculed this theory, little realizing that it was in fact a discovery worthy of a new conspectus of the academy.

We know Thops was stuck outside of the academy and that his only way in was for us to bring him a key, and we know that he was ridiculed based on the spell description. We also know that he must have been a highly talented sorcerer.

My question is why we find him dead in his chair. Surely they could have left him alive as a spell vender, similar to Sellen. Is this implying that he was ridiculed to death in a hazing ritual? Did he collapse out of exhaustion after inventing the spell? Did FromSoft just arbitrarily decide that he must die at the end of the questline?