what if sylvari were like khajit and there were fully houseplant sylvari that could still communicate just like anyone else, otherwise fully indistinguishable from a completely regular fern
people side-eyeing your sylvari commander when they walk into a restaurant and say hey to a potted lily on the way to the table
"Oh, but our RPG protagonist has to be a teenager, or else they won't appeal to our core 16-to-19-year-old player demographic" literally just make them a DILF.
So like my basic initial understanding of the sylvari empathy thing was that all sylvari can kind of sense how any other is feeling, which then prompted me to imagine sylvari commander coming back to the Grove a few years into their journeys and every other sylvari just gets hit by this wave of absolute depression.
The commander is asked, respectfully, never to come back.