Quote Originally Posted by Vyrerus View Post
Really, though, it's just that you won't confront the truth. The shards don't count as saving the world, because they are merely 1/14th of the world, and if they are Rejoined, then they are still part of and restore the world.
I hope you're either doing an extended bit, or playing devil's advocate far too forcefully, because... well, this is Ascian rhetoric. And I don't even mean the Convocation before the Sundering, I mean 'this is the outlook that the present-day Ascians have, after causing incalculable amounts of loss of life'. We kill Emet-Selch after he says this, because he is an awful dictator and we are among the people he wants to kill with no regard. (Also because he kidnaps a catboy; honestly I feel like on the whole we weigh his crimes differently than we should in those final hours.)

The entire of Shadowbringers outside of him exists to speak against him on this point: everyone on the First is a real person, worthy of respect, life, and love. We fight to let them live, because their lives matter. If Emet-Selch were morally right and of a view we should agree with, Shadowbringers would not have ended in nearly the way it does.

In fact, you can tell he's supposed to be wrong, because trying to take this outlook completely robs all of the game story of... well, everything, actually. By this outlook, nothing has happened since Dalamud exploded. Hell, even before that. It robs the Zodiark-Hydaelyn story of not just any nuance, but any weight or structure.
Hydaelyn's crew? Smashed some stuff, then nothing has happened.
Zodiark's crew? Done no wrong, because they've done nothing. The only casualties have been ants, who don't matter.
ARR's story? Something almost happened, and then it didn't.
HW's story? Something almost happened, and then it didn't. Some guy died to an ant.
SB's story? Nothing happened, at all
ShB's story? Something almost happened, and then it didn't. Two guys died to the same few ants.

That sounds like a pretty bad story if read like that. So that reading's probably wrong!

And... you haven't actually finished the Eureka story, I can tell. There's an ending after you complete the BArsenal. I'll spoiler-tag that, because I don't like spoiling people on stories they haven't read.

After the BArsenal, the WoL and Krile use the now set free but still lingering aether from the weapon-primals to essentially also complete the 'good result' of the choice that wasn't made. If you side with Ejika and let him sacrifice himself to destroy Eureka, then you use that aether to bring him back. If you side with Krile and instead seal it away, you use that aether to destroy Eureka, since the problem was you didn't have enough power to do that safely the first time.

And at the end of all that, we still don't know who made Eureka, where, or when. We've still got nothing but a trail; that Odin was summoned in the time of the Allagans, and that it seemed to somehow end up either in Mhach's hands, or in their general sphere of knowledge. But, given it's a primal (and a primal of pure creation magic, at that), my money would be less on 'the hubris of man' and more on 'Ascian shenaniganery'.

...hell, even in the events of the game, the threat about Eureka wasn't a human using it; it was an Ascian, Emmerololth. Who the Students of Baldesion killed, because she was awful and trying to destroy the planet, full of life that they care about.