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

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Originally Posted by jameseoakes

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

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Oh my dear god.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

Oh my dear god.

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?
There culture was completely erased, the individual rent down to at best there souls and forced to form new bodies if that's not genocide what is it?

The concepts of Buddhism stem from escaping suffering through meditation, spiritual focus and doing good deeds to achieve Nirvana through a cycle of rebirth. Not genocide which is what Venat inflicted upon her own kind. There was no hope for them. She created a future on the bones of her own kind to create a new world which was then split into multiple pieces and named the world after herself and condemns everyone to suffer forever. But she loves you. Right.

Good does not equal nice.

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Originally Posted by Saraide

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.

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It’s intentional on the part of the writers. Amaurot, Anyder, and Hythlodeus all come the 500-year old book “Utopia” which invented the modern concept of the word using Greek “no place” and a pun on the Greek “eu-topos” for “good place”.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

It’s intentional on the part of the writers. Amaurot, Anyder, and Hythlodeus all come the 500-year old book “Utopia” which invented the modern concept of the word using Greek “no place” and a pun on the Greek “eu-topos” for “good place”.

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Hah. Classic. All put together. No good place.

Always fun to see us circle back to how the Ancients were biologically unfit.

It comes back down to the disconnect. If Venat cast down a bunch of mere thematic symbols, not truly people but just symbolic representations of a part of the human psyche, that she is merely defeating the stand-in for the "temptation for weakness" within the Human Spirit as a whole, then there's no big deal, just coast on the vibes and the theme. However, if you take the perspective that Venat did what she did to people - keeping in mind that the previous expansion's emotional impact depending on the fact that you understand her victims were people, and asking you to empathize with them as such - everything instantly flips and becomes an absolute horror show.

And frankly, even if you try to point out that Endwalker is an expression of Buddhist ideals, the medium it goes about doing it entails the eradication of an entire race of people. It involves the conscious decision of someone who is celebrated as a hero to force people into a world where war, sickness, torture, and death exist where none did before. It portrays suffering as so necessary that it must be actively inflicted upon others if someone decides on some unspecified criteria that they're not experiencing enough. Criticizing how Endwalker conveys themes that may overlap with Buddhism is not the same thing as criticizing Buddhism.

Endwalker isn't subtle about what it's trying to say. At all. Trust me, I get it, and it's even a message I've basically enjoyed and appreciated when explored in other stories and other mediums. Those other stories usually don't underline the theme with "and that is why billions of people had to die in agony to pave the way for You, The One True Sufferer Who Suffers In The Correct Way."

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Originally Posted by Saraide

The unsundered werent free of suffering, they just swept it under the rug.

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What does this even mean...?

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That's why it's a fake utopia like pretty every other utopia in fiction.

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"I automatically know what this story is doing with a concept because I've seen how completely different stories do it" is kind of a weird way to engage with a text.

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The thing that this game celebrates isnt suffering, it's overcoming it.

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w-what does this even mean. what does it even meannnnnn

In seriousness, this is the problem when we, Endwalker-style, engage in these ideas via vague platitudes, generalized discussions of "suffering." What kind of suffering? Illustrate exactly what kind of suffering, what scenarios that teach this suffering, that you're (general you) suggesting is absolutely necessary for one to have a fulfilling life? What does it look like, actualized and concrete? Is it the kids freezing to death in the snow? Is it the wars? Is it the disease? Going to bed hungry? Stubbing your toe? What specifically is the adjustment to the environment that Venat inflicted that was so necessary that lacking it sufficed as reason to destroy an entire world and everything living on it?

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Originally Posted by jameseoakes

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There culture was completely erased, the individual rent down to a best there souls and forced to form new bodies if that's not genocide what is it?

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For one, you're taking things too literally.
A literary justification is not the same as justifying the act of a character within the piece of literature.

But additionally, more literal to the story, the Unsundered by their committal to the Zodiark route, were consigning themselves to death, dooming their entire civilisation and the whole planet of Etheirys, by relying on a deity to solve their problems and give them a free win. Their incapability to face their own hardships was dooming them to certain destruction.

The only hope of survival, was an action that, through way of a causal time loop, was given to Venat as a sure-fire way to survive for at least another 18,000 years, and the only way to potentially survive past that.

The fact that it required ending life currently and starting it anew is a failing of the set up that was started 10 years ago without a set conclusion.

All I know is that as of today I can safely say the following. Forspoken is a better story than EW. Straight to the point Marvel-tier writing that did not reach for the stars and fell all the way down to the bottom of the Marina Trench with its themes like EW did. I think I much prefer that to the grandiose philosophical trashfire that this expansion wound up as.

Also, Cuff. A discount Grimoire Weiss, but I feel for him more than the Scions all the same.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

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

I come back to this:


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.

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So there is nothing the Ancients could have said or done that would have stopped Venat from murdering all of them? Why did she even confront them in that cutscene then? Why wasn't she shown from a tower of light muttering "I do this for the sake of all life" with a tear running down her face?
They show her passing judgement. She talks about how man must walk.

Did she want to see their faces as she sundered their souls? To pretend like they had a chance to prove they could move forwaed even though she was going to kill them all anyway? How psychotic is this woman?

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

So there is nothing the Ancients could have said or done that would have stopped Venat from murdering all of them? Why did she even confront them in that cutscene then? Why wasn't she shown from a tower of light muttering "I do this for the sake of all life" with a tear running down her face?
They show her passing judgement. She talks about how man must walk.

Did she want to see their faces as she sundered their souls? To pretend like they had a chance to prove they could move forwaed even though she was going to kill them all anyway? How psychotic is this woman?

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Poor story telling, that scene isn't literal. She didn't sunder the world on a whim after a conversation with half a dozen snivelling scared old men. We know she had at least 12 other companions, and it certainly took more than raising her sword in the air to sunder an entire world into 14 reflections.
The whole scene is metaphorical, due to time constraints because they crammed two expansions worth of story into one.