What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

If these concepts are too high brow

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Honestly I have really had it with your mocking of me, it nasty and petty.

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Originally Posted by jameseoakes

Honestly I have really had it with your mocking of me, it nasty and petty.

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And calling me evil isn't?

You said "if it can't make it's themes work with out that level of specific media literacy then..." that's what I was referring to.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

And calling me evil isn't?

You said "if it can't make it's themes work with out that level of specific media literacy then..." that's what I was referring to.

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I didn't call you evil I said the themes you are pushing are

Your choice of words was very insulting

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Originally Posted by jameseoakes

I didn't call you evil I said the themes you are pushing are

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Oh thanks that makes all the difference...

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

Oh thanks that makes all the difference...

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Good I am glad we agree

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

Ok.
I want you to go away and read the Tipitaka or the Zen Sutra's, and then come back and explain to me why Buddhism is evil.
Then go away and read Thomas Moore's Utopia, and tell me why his critique is wrong and why absolute perfection is both attainable and the only thing that matters.

If you can't do that, you're not disagreeing, you're missing the point.
I look forward to you calling an entire religion evil.

No one is glorifying freezing children or fetishizing suffering, and you are missing. the. point. No actually you're wilfully misrepresenting it, if you're claiming that's what is happening here.

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I could call quite a few religions evil. Lot of pagan tribes that practiced human sacrifice and what not.

But to address the problem with how this game fetishizes suffering, it does not define the end point. Venat does not want the Ancients to rebuild their society and save those trapped within Zodiark and unable to re-enter the aetherial sea. She sees these acts as a rejection of suffering and believes Ancient society should move forward as is. They are not allowed to rebuild, they are not allowed to save their loved ones. They must suffer because to her that has moral value. They are supposed to accept and overcome the bad that happens.

Except post sundering she empowers heros to stop suffering. There was too much.

We are now left with the question of how much suffering is the correct amount according to the Supreme Goddess. She never tells us. Because she doesn't know. Because the whole premise is stupid.

"To ignore the plight of those one might conceivably save is not wisdom─it is indolence."

The game pushed this phrase during the patch content leading up to Endwalker. Venat did not save the Ancients. She killed them. She did not teach them. She did not show them a way to build new that did not require sacrificing others. Her perfect vegan Utopia that also somehow never killed any other life to include plants was never shown. Instead she created a world where countless more die constantly.

If Venat wanted to go suffer alone in a hut, fine. She can do her own thing. The problem came when she forced her beliefs on others in a bloody crusade.

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

Venat does not want the Ancients to rebuild their society and save those trapped within Zodiark and unable to re-enter the aetherial sea. She sees these acts as a rejection of suffering and believes Ancient society should move forward as is.

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Citation needed. You're inferring an intent that isn't stated in the content.

I come back to this:

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

On a funamental level, the Unsundered are incapable of resisting the final days, due to their aetheric density and lack of ability to control Dynamis.
Only fragmented beings have the potential to develop the resistance to the effects of Dynamis, by virtue of learning to cope with suffering.
Unsundered = doomed to die, no alternatives. Sundered = potential to survive.

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Period. Anything more than this is conjecture and whataboutism. This is what the story (maybe poorly) tries to communicate.

This is the basis of all the events that led up to and followed the Sundering. It's survival.

The concepts from Buddhism and Utopia serve a philosophical and literary justification for it.

You're all looking at it backwards.

The unsundered werent free of suffering, they just swept it under the rug. That's why it's a fake utopia like pretty every other utopia in fiction. This is a recurring theme in fiction: look under the rug of any utopia and you will see its rotten core, the ancient's society is no different. The thing that this game celebrates isnt suffering, it's overcoming it. A real utopia is unachieveable but that doesnt mean we shouldnt strive to improve the lives of ourselves and others. Suffering doesnt stop existing just because we refuse to acknowledge it, this is why the ancients were doomed to fail and why hydaelyn took away their flawed perfection.

For me I get that the story pushes the idea that suffering and hardship are just the necessities of life and that what makes life worth living is ultimately just being alive so you can experience both the sorrow and the joy in existence no matter how fleeting or pointless it may be, however it kind of ruins that same narrative by the way of literally every scion being so wealthy and powerful that even Gods are no match for them. Like, the biggest villain in Endwalker is a nihilistic immortal bird hive-mind that came to the conclusion that living in any form is suffering because life has no meaning and only true death is salvation, the second biggest is a genocidal sociopath so starved for any kind of joy in life that the only thing worth living for is the euphoric rush of clashing against a foe that can stand against his ungodly soul power, one of them is pretty bland and boring and it's kind of obvious which one.

More to the point there is the sense that a true utopia is in itself a kind of hellish existence because nothing bad ever happens so even joy and happiness lose all meaning, which I have to say is pretty stupid, your brain literally doesn't care if it's constantly being pumped with feel good juices, in fact it's actually really addicting and so the brain is almost hardwired to find joy from just the sheer experience of good feelings. Starving orphans freezing to death in the snow aside the contrast doesn't really give you anything and rather we argue that it does because the alternative is facing the grim reality that we live in an imperfect world and that life is quite literally meaningless in the grand scheme of existence as even that is fleeting and will one day end in a bleak frozen black void of nothingness regardless of anything we achieve. Salt may enhance sweetness and suffering might make mundane pleasures feel amazing in contrast but it's not like we actually need to experience suffering for our brain to pump feel good juices, it'll just do that, you could lay on the grass staring at birds all day and probably feel totally fine regardless of if you saw a homeless man bite off his frostbitten fingertips because he can't afford to go to a hospital. Every living human being could realistically be provided with a safe comfortable space to live with lab-grown robot-tended food to eat and given a base living wage regardless of career and I can almost literally guarantee you it won't make people suicidal because they don't have to struggle, it might utterly destroy our current societal standards and lead to eventual declines in birth rates and social interactions but that's not the same thing.

So while the narrative is comforting it's not really true, but that's the fantasy we all buy into to justify why we have to experience undue suffering.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

This is the basis of all the events that led up to and followed the Sundering. It's survival.

The concepts from Buddhism and Utopia serve a philosophical and literary justification for it.

You're all looking at it backwards.

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Given the the ancients were exterminated, I don't see how any justication can be put forward that isn't evil.