Do you feel empathy towards the Warriors of Darkness?

[RopeDrink]

A simple sentence of "We tried everything we could to stop the Flood, but nothing worked so we had to follow an Ascian's orders and renounce our flesh to come here to try and cause a rejoining of our world"

Let's get this straight. The story has undeniably highlighted that should either of the sides dominate a shard, that shard is essentially going to be utterly blanketed in total destruction. Light, Dark, doesn't matter which - you either get all-consuming light or swallowed by void.

Pray tell, what would a band of 5 adventurers do in terms of 'looking for other options' when the entire world is pretty much white-washed by all-consuming power that is well and truly beyond them? All you have to do is think of the very first ARR cinematic with all the people of Eorzea having no option but to just watch as the world burned to get some sort of idea. Ironic, isn't it, that those characters in said cinematic are also practically identical to the WoD's? The Warrior, Paladin, Bard, White Mage and Black Mage. We know they're not the same people, but if you need help imagining the WoD's witnessing utter annihilation and feeling powerless, just watch the Flames of Truth again for an idea.

It was clear Hydealyn didn't heed them (as evidenced by the WoD conclusion with Minfilia), so now you can imagine that the force they championed pretty much shunned them after doing her dirty work, leaving them powerless. There are obviously no conventional answers to this sort of problem. Even in the ShB trailer, we (former dedicated representative of Hyde) are being attacked by beings of light (and getting soundly beaten until resorting to dark). All the hints and information to see how powerless the WoD's were in their plight on their shard is all there for you to enjoy.

As such, the solution was nothing to do with their actual shard, it was to do with bringing Dark back into some semblance of power to try and restore balance to their world - a goal we know Elidibus also seeks in his own way at the source - and something we all know is the ONLY thing keeping our own world from having a similar fate. They could never achieve this on their own world as it was blanketed in utter light. The sad reality is, the way our world is in-game is about as close to normal as it'll get, with both Light & Dark still active and constantly at each others throats to keep each other in check, except we as WoL's have been tipping the balance in favour of Hyde and now need to address the problem. Arbert and Co, however, didn't have that luxury - they won outright and netted themselves a dead world as compensation for doing everything for Hyde.

There are NO other options. It has been drilled into us multiple times. It is the very REASON ShB is happening and why we're becoming WoD's ourselves.

The severity was clear to me - and I'm of the opinion that we don't always need to have every minute detail forced down our necks, like how Elidibus and the WoD's met or what they had for supper when discussing how to best employ dark shenanigans on Eorzea, though I have a sneaky feeling that we actually WILL learn more about that in ShB down the road. Now that Elidibus has less need to kill us to restore balance (seeing as we're going WoD), I have a hunch he himself will explain things from his PoV now that our goals are (somewhat) the same. He may be an Ascian, but unlike his staunch followers of Zodiark, his concern is the balance, not Dark winning. As such, him helping the WoD's makes total sense for both them and himself. We view him as bad because his goals involve routes that go against us, but in essence, he is to Zodiark what we will become for Hyde - the middle-ground.