Not a fan of Paenaemonium part 2

Bad soap opera plot.

That forced me to side with Lahabrea.

That condemns a scientist for breaking Ancient's version of religious dogma.

God forbid someone show an interest in something other than THE STAR!!!!

ALL MUST SERVE THE HOLY STAR!

I still have no clue what Athena did wrong. She experimented on her son. How? Was there torture? Just some aether samples?

This plot is going straight down the toilet.

I definitely didn’t hate it as much as you do but I’m certainly getting sick of the whole ancients dogma around everything is for the star, that preaching is getting really old at this point

But then again part 2’s of a raid series subverting story expectations in what seems like a garbage way only for them to throw a curveball in part 3 is nothing new

The Ancients' dogmatic devotion to the planet is a little grating, but I don't find it nearly as annoying as the dragons' "Our perception of time is different and that justifies what we're doing!" in Heavensward.

Problem was Athena trying to transcend humanity to godhood is hubristic as all get out. Hephaistos fusing people with their creations and calling themselves "hemitheos" (demigods) makes this pretty apparent, and given he's an incarnation of Lahabrea's "Athena-infected" psyche their goals were one and the same. When you decide your hubristic ambitions take precedence over the good of the people... well.

We still don't know why Erichthonios was so important to her plans, it's one of the lingering mysteries that need to be answered in what's all but certain to be the Tartaros tier.

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

God forbid someone show an interest in something other than THE STAR!!!!

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I think it was less "I'm researching for my personal gains that will disturb no one life" and more of "I'm researching and about to experiment on sacrificing too many people to advance my personal gains"

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Originally Posted by Kranel_San

I think it was less "I'm researching for my personal gains that will disturb no one life" and more of "I'm researching and about to experiment on sacrificing too many people to advance my personal gains"

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honestly she reminded me of orochimaru. an amoral researcher who'll do literally anything to learn more.

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Originally Posted by Kranel_San

I think it was less "I'm researching for my personal gains that will disturb no one life" and more of "I'm researching and about to experiment on sacrificing too many people to advance my personal gains"

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Also what she was researching is considered outright morally reprehensible, by a society that thinks things like 'inventing apex predators' is a moral good. We don't know what that something is, but we've got some clues.


Honestly, my main objection is that while we were given pretty much every available chance to glower at Lahabrea for... you know, being Lahabrea, we weren't given the same for Elidibus. Something I like the game doing with the more shady characters given atonement/redemption/sympathy arcs is the game giving the chance for us not to buy it; Gaius in Werlyt is a good example, he's atoning on a personal level but the game never demands you forgive him or treat him nice. Lahabrea gets that sort of treatment in a non-linear way, you're allowed to treat him like crap for the things he'll go on to do, and none of the dialog choices outright force you to be kind to/about him if you don't want to. And yet, I am never allowed to drag Elidibus for the things he will do in the future, despite him being just as bad.

Otherwise, Abyssos is great, but it's great in a way that just makes me ask 'where the hell was all of this in Asphodelos'. I didn't leave the first four raids knowing why we were bothering with this whole story on much of any level; moving the Abyssos-end stinger and the reveal of Hephaistos to somewhere in those first four raids would've fixed every problem I have with the series that isn't 'stop forcing me to be nice to Elidibus'.

Luckily the WoL isn't enough of an asshole to continually dunk on some kid that's done nothing but be kind and helpful to us. (Gee, why didn't get get an option to tell Ga Bu to piss off?)

The reason we're given a variety of responses to Lahabrea and not Themis is that Lahabrea is part of what we're investigating. The location is under his purview and Themis is asking our opinion of him like you might interview another person that's had interactions with a suspect. (Him being Themis's coworker means that Themis would like him to be innocent, but he's trying to get a fuller picture of the problem.)

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Originally Posted by tokinokanatae

Luckily the WoL isn't enough of an asshole to continually dunk on some kid that's done nothing but be kind and helpful to us. (Gee, why didn't get get an option to tell Ga Bu to piss off?)

The reason we're given a variety of responses to Lahabrea and not Themis is that Lahabrea is part of what we're investigating. The location is under his purview and Themis is asking our opinion of him like you might interview another person that's had interactions with a suspect. (Him being Themis's coworker means that Themis would like him to be innocent, but he's trying to get a fuller picture of the problem.)

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Oh, I know. But I'd like the chance to throw some stones at Elidibus once we'd confirmed that was who we were talking to. The fact he hasn't committed horrible crimes yet doesn't mean I don't hate him for doing them in my past which is his future. (Time travel's funky like that.) Let me hold a grudge!

Spin it as being mad that he was dishonest if you need, people seem to really get up in arms about that for some reason.

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

I still have no clue what Athena did wrong. She experimented on her son. How? Was there torture? Just some aether samples?

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https://i.imgur.com/8EjeYzK.jpg

(Spoilered for size)

Young Erichthonios being in that position implies being restrained in some way, and rather uncomfortably at that.

Adult Eriththonios has no recollection of this, or indeed any experimentation that Athena allegedly did to him. He didn't even know Athena wanted to do anything to him. Therefore, Erichthonios must have been unconscious or unaware during this scene.

The conclusion is Athena was attempting to experiment on Erichthonios without his knowledge. Which violates scientific ethics.

Just when I thought lore forum can't be more braindead, threads like this proves me wrong...

"can't see Athena is wrong!!"
*Woman literally experimenting with her son and doesn't care about his well being at all*

You do you buddy

There are a lot of missing pieces at the moment.

If Lahabrea's primary concern was the wellbeing of his son, then his decision to kill Athena would have simply followed from that. And yet he decided to merge his soul with Athena in front of the boy, the main question on his mind being 'Did Athena truly love me?' So the murder of his wife wasn't really predicated on concern for his son's well-being, but rather the fact that she simply didn't love him. Otherwise the question itself would be irrelevant to the action that he took. Lahabrea spends a lot of time talking about Athena's 'influence' on Eric, without actually outlining how she did it.

Likewise, why seal away his own memories of the act? Emet and Igeyorhm had suspicions, but they would have no way of reading his memories since they were excised and safely stored in crystal. He deliberately withheld information from the rest of the Convocation and the people of Amaurot. And not only that, he tried to have Pandaemonium destroyed with his followers still inside only when there was a risk of the truth coming out. There's also the question of what he did with the red crystal with his sealed memories. Why not turn it in to the Convocation and be honest about the truth? It just seems a bit convenient to blame Athena as the source of all the evil in Lahabrea's pure, pure heart when the only thing that we can go off of is his word. Every story has another side to it, and we'll need to hear Athena's to judge for ourselves.

Sweet we are back to everyone who doesn't agree with me is a troll.

WHAT DID ATHENA DO?

Experiment on her son. Influence her son. How? With what methods?

"Well we saw..."

Oh that magical vision conjured by Lahabrea. Clearly we can trust him.

I am amazed at how trusting you all are. That was not us using the echo to see the truth. That was a magical retelling of events created by a VERY questionable source.

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

Sweet we are back to everyone who doesn't agree with me is a troll.

WHAT DID ATHENA DO?

Experiment on her son. Influence her son. How? With what methods?

"Well we saw..."

Oh that magical vision conjured by Lahabrea. Clearly we can trust him.

I am amazed at how trusting you all are. That was not us using the echo to see the truth. That was a magical retelling of events created by a VERY questionable source.

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theyre memories projected by two different people, one of who did it against his wishes.

Since some souls in the lifestream can observe whats going on in the surface, I wonder if that's what our Lahabrea was doing when he died?

Could he have set up events so that the memory crystal to be discovered, knowing that WoL will investigate and travel back in time? Maybe Lahabrea plans on uniting both crystal to be whole again?

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Originally Posted by myahele

Since some souls in the lifestream can observe whats going on in the surface, I wonder if that's what our Lahabrea was doing when he died?

Could he have set up events so that the memory crystal to be discovered, knowing that WoL will investigate and travel back in time? Maybe Lahabrea plans on uniting both crystal to be whole again?

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it is possible. though my money is on athena setting up a long game in a bid to return.

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

Sweet we are back to everyone who doesn't agree with me is a troll.

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I do not understand the "sweet" part of this sentence.

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

Sweet we are back to everyone who doesn't agree with me is a troll.

WHAT DID ATHENA DO?

Experiment on her son. Influence her son. How? With what methods?

"Well we saw..."

Oh that magical vision conjured by Lahabrea. Clearly we can trust him.

I am amazed at how trusting you all are. That was not us using the echo to see the truth. That was a magical retelling of events created by a VERY questionable source.

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At this point I do not see why we should not trust him. This is not the Lahabrea we know. This is him before he and his kin had to endure the horror of the Sundering and the centuries of loneliness that came after. Just like with Emet and Elidibus, they are yet to be the monsters they will become. Sure, what we saw was via magic and not the Echo (Anyone else think we are a bit too reliant on that?) but we spend the story chipping away at his stubbornness before we finally get told the story of what happened between him and Athena, and to throw that away just to have him be the maniaca "I lied mwahaha!" villain we expected… would be a waste. It also goes against the trend of recent expansions as humanising the Ascians.

As for Athena, she broke a major taboo in Ancient society, in that she put herself before the star. In doing so she manipulated Lahabrea into giving her control of the facility so she could conduct inhumane experiments and it seemed very clear to me that she was gonna torture or kill her child. Why did she do all this? We do not know the full story yet, but we will in time. I am 99% sure she will appear in the final act of this story and perhaps even be the final boss. My hope is its not simple “Yeah I am evil haha” and that they manage to bring her down to a more sympathetic level. The idea of defying the star and seeing an Ancient wishing to instead concentrate in ones own endeavours is one worth exploring, though perhaps not in a case where said person is also torturing their child, but we shall see.

It was a whole lot of telling and not enough showing.

All we really get are Athena saying she would watch the world burn to make herself a new one, which is a pretty extreme sentiment but without the means to back it up means nothing.
Plus Lahabrea sharing her mind and deciding whatever it was she was planning was abhorrent, though we don't know what that is.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

Oh, I know. But I'd like the chance to throw some stones at Elidibus once we'd confirmed that was who we were talking to. The fact he hasn't committed horrible crimes yet doesn't mean I don't hate him for doing them in my past which is his future. (Time travel's funky like that.) Let me hold a grudge!

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Seriously, why? He's innocent at this point. You can't harass someone for something they're going to do but haven't yet.

If anything, you're going to cause a time-looping start to him being a nastier person.

On the one hand merging souls has to be very intimate experience, leaving those involved with feelings and desires that could irrevocably change a person. This would in theory necessitate extreme action if one really wanted to isolate and remove those influences, justifying Lahabreas decision.

On the other hand, the Eden raids showed a similar event happening with Gaia and Mitron, which was resolved without said splitting. While one could argue that Gaias memory problems protected her, she would in theory have the memories of the merger and thus still would have been impacted by Mitrons desires right? Yet her rejection of him, and embracing of Ryne, was enough to completely undue that, suggesting it isn’t as clear cut as Lahabrea made it seem. I think this suggests that there’s a more complicated picture unfolding here than simply Lahabrea vs Athena and he was a lot closer to becoming Hephaistos than he’d like to admit.

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Originally Posted by EaraGrace

On the one hand merging souls has to be very intimate experience, leaving those involved with feelings and desires that could irrevocably change a person. This would in theory necessitate extreme action if one really wanted to isolate and remove those influences, justifying Lahabreas decision.

On the other hand, the Eden raids showed a similar event happening with Gaia and Mitron, which was resolved without said splitting. While one could argue that Gaias memory problems protected her, she would in theory have the memories of the merger and thus still would have been impacted by Mitrons desires right? Yet her rejection of him, and embracing of Ryne, was enough to completely undue that, suggesting it isn’t as clear cut as Lahabrea made it seem. I think this suggests that there’s a more complicated picture unfolding here than simply Lahabrea vs Athena and he was a lot closer to becoming Hephaistos than he’d like to admit.

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That's a lot murkier. For one thing, it was a very Sundered and highly damaged Mitron attempting to do that, and not long into the merger, we try to stop it. We don't succeed from him trying to delete some of her memories of Ryne, but we do stop the total destruction of Gaia's modern memory.

And in the end, she only rejected the present version of Mitron. She did not reject Mitron in total, because she is still in love with him. Promising once her life with Ryne is over, she'll come find him again.

Compared with Lahabrea, no one is there to assist him in breaking the merge. He had to break out of it completely alone. There is also no second love there for him, either.

I was given the lore that Ancients can be genuinely terrible people, batty and where babies come from. I'm more than satisfied personally.

It's hard to say how this 'merging of souls' relates to the Ascian Prime form. For example, what happened when Lahabrea and Igeyorhm merged? In Gaia's case there was a power difference between the individuals involved and Mitron merged with her soul against her will. You would have expected Igeyorhm to react in some way if she had been harboring suspicions about Athena's death, but perhaps it's possible to maintain the boundaries between the two souls in that form.

Perhaps there are differences in technique? We do know that when Elidibus left Zodiark, his memories started to fray and become fragmented, perhaps as a function of being merged with so many other souls. Likewise, the hemitheos that we encounter have all been altered from their former selves. Hesperos was reportedly gentle and kind before he merged souls.

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Originally Posted by Iscah

Seriously, why? He's innocent at this point. You can't harass someone for something they're going to do but haven't yet.

If anything, you're going to cause a time-looping start to him being a nastier person.

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I'm not gonna claim this is a positive desire, or even a big one. But the game's let us be snippy and mean to plenty of NPCs for far less reasons than 'we know that they do extremely terrible things in the future'.

If we were allowed to suggest to an innocent Ananta that we might just kill her god because we can, I see no reason why we can't at least scowl at Elidibus. But honestly, the fact that this mostly-joking demand is the only complaint I have about Abyssos (beyond 'these events should've happened earlier) is a good thing!

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

That's a lot murkier. For one thing, it was a very Sundered and highly damaged Mitron attempting to do that, and not long into the merger, we try to stop it. We don't succeed from him trying to delete some of her memories of Ryne, but we do stop the total destruction of Gaia's modern memory.

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And Gaia was even more Sundered given where she came from. The fact that Mitron needed to destroy her memory is even more evidence that merging isn’t the end all be all. Despite being just as strong as Athena, Lahabrea succumbed to her influence without any memories tampered with, suggesting that more effort was needed for Gaias merger.

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

And in the end, she only rejected the present version of Mitron. She did not reject Mitron in total, because she is still in love with him. Promising once her life with Ryne is over, she'll come find him again.

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It was the reawakened memories of Loghrif that said that they may be reborn and find each other again. Gaia meanwhile immediately forgets his name and goes off stumbling in the dark until Ryne awakens her. Strip Gaia of those memories and suddenly the merger has no lasting effects.

To be more clear, merging seems a lot like hypnosis. It can’t convince you to do something that you don’t already somewhat want to do.

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

Compared with Lahabrea, no one is there to assist him in breaking the merge. He had to break out of it completely alone. There is also no second love there for him, either.

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His son is right there. That’s a love worthy of breaking out for, and I’m sure Lahabrea would agree. He did after all kill his wife to protect him. Or maybe I’m giving him to much credit.

Definitely giving him too much credit.

Lahabrea was concerned about whether she loved Lahabrea. Kid did not matter. Him loving her did not matter. All that mattered was if she loved him.

Man is a psychopath.

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Originally Posted by Necrotica

Definitely giving him too much credit.

Lahabrea was concerned about whether she loved Lahabrea. Kid did not matter. Him loving her did not matter. All that mattered was if she loved him.

Man is a psychopath.

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I think it's totally fair to ask if your wife loves you in a shaky relationship.

I take it you came from a nuclear family.

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Originally Posted by TheSuperior

I think it's totally fair to ask if your wife loves you in a shaky relationship.

I take it you came from a nuclear family.

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that scene was just sad. he spent hundreds of years building a life, both personally and academically, with athena only to find out he was just another tool for her.

I don't think Old Lahabrea sundering himself had any sinister intention, the fact that his personality is pretty much the ideal ancient philosphy, all duty and reason, and that he is shown to be a very no-nonsense guy with a tendency to go for extreme solutions first make it very on character for him to take such a drastic action right after letting his emotions take precedence, probably for the first time in his life, just to be betrayed and corrupted...

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Originally Posted by sidurgu-12

that scene was just sad. he spent hundreds of years building a life, both personally and academically, with athena only to find out he was just another tool for her.

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Great point. It's easy to forget that hundreds to thousands of years could be passing between anything. They could have been together for centuries on the small scale for all we knew.

We have completely no idea what Ancient timeframes are like or what 'long' would be for them, but it's pretty clear they were together for a while. They have a child! Who is at least be fairly grown by the time of that scene; my best guess says maybe he's the Ancient equivalent of, like, eight years old. Even on normal human scales... holy crap, imagine learning eight years after your son was born that your partner's only been using both you and him as tools and test subjects.

And if you still think she could be totally cool... I assume you're picturing yourself as Athena in this situation, and not as Lahabrea or, even worse, Erich.