Quote Originally Posted by Balipu View Post
Who said anything about siding with the Ascians?
Sorry, I didn't mean here on these forums. I was referring mostly to comments on Reddit and immediate reactions on Discord. (In my defense, I was kind of loopy when I made that post, since the Fanfest keynote was 2:30am my time and the Lore panel was 6:30am my time, so my sleep schedule was out of whack.)

The thread of logic of those comments was that the threat is of a Flood of Light, hence the Light is Bad. Hydaelyn is of the Light, hence Hydaelyn is Bad (with a side of "I knew it"). And so we have to go against Hydaelyn, and since the immediate current antagonists to Hydaelyn are the Ascians in service to Zodiark, we have to side with them.

My issue stems from my disbelief that our actions would have caused a Flood of Light in the first place, rather than it being a plot device created by writer fiat. And even if it did, the major question remains: what should we have done differently?

After all, what we've done for the most part (ie putting aside more personal questlines) is helping people, whether in small or large scale. We set ourselves against the Ascians because the Ascians have, almost exclusively (again, with the exception of Unukalhai), been spreading misery and death, or the means to do so.

So there is this uncomfortable implication that if our actions are responsible for the possibility of this hypothetical Flood of Light, that means we have been helping people too much. Which in turn means we should have stood by in some cases and let horrible things happen in the name of "balance", which is kind of, well, "kill your abusive mother and then yourself" Sophia-level.

(Not quite at "as all things must be" level, though.)

The other way I can see the writers spinning this is that if we've helped people in this specific way instead of the way we did, then we could have avoided the Flood of Light, but that just makes it based on unfairly arbitrary rules that we could not have known.