*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[Duskane]

felt bad for emet but his plan was stupid
I feel worse for EW emet since he was incredibly confused and upset when you told him about his future,even his past self thought it was ridiculous.

[Lium]

We are explicitly shown what the end result of the Ancient society would be in the third segment of the final dungeon, the society there is supposed to be the end result of what the Ancients had. A perfect world, with no meaning left, seeking an end to their own existance.
Even if the Ancients survived the final days, Venat was STILL in the right to "cut their wings" and proclaim that "mankind shall walk". It was the only solution, they have to suffer to live.

Okay, this post should be stickied at the top. I love having a good debate about the story and the characters and I’ve enjoyed reading all the different opinions and takes on the events of the entire story arc, going back to ARR.

But I really do believe some people completely missed the point of the story very badly.

The person I quoted spelled out the story very succinctly.

As shown both in Ultima Thule and the final dungeon- specifically the third species who were wiped out by Ra La, perfection is what led to their downfall.

In the cutscene in Amaurot where we see Venat walking through the streets, she comes upon those who are summoning Zodiark. She tries to reason with them, but they explicitly tell her they want to go back to their perfect world. To the way things were. One of Venat’s reasons for the sundering is to introduce sorrow and suffering, because without it, you reach stagnation and apathy. And with apathy comes the Final Days.

[Loggos]

Not all of them may miss the point, some may simply disagree with SE's conclusion.
I disagree with OP on joining Emet-Selch because as it was pointed out the Ascians' plan was genocide and that is absolutely insane and beyond cruel. There is no way to justify this.

But I also really disagree with SE's broader insistence that any "perfect world" (or any world striving for perfection) can only fail and nothing else, no matter how hard they try to hammer that point home.
As beautiful as the third part of the last dungeon is visually, the message it tries to tell feels so simplified, pseudo-deep and clichéed to me that it does nothing to convince me of their point. It feels like "brute-force" philosophy in the sense that they really want to make a "smart" point about life, death and immortality but all nuance, far-sightedness and reason get lost.

So whereas I completely agree with everyone regarding the actual topic of this thread, saying joining Emet would be really, really bad, I also really disagree with the overarching message SE tries to convey regarding the very idea of a "perfect" society or a society approaching "perfection".

[MikkoAkure]

But I also really disagree with SE's broader insistence that any "perfect world" (or any world striving for perfection) can only fail and nothing else, no matter how hard they try to hammer that point home.
As beautiful as the third part of the last dungeon is visually, the message it tries to tell feels so simplified, pseudo-deep and clichéed to me that it does nothing to convince me of their point. It feels like "brute-force" philosophy in the sense that they really want to make a "smart" point about life, death and immortality but all nuance, far-sightedness and reason get lost.

So whereas I completely agree with everyone saying joining Emet would be really, really bad, I also really disagree with the overarching message SE tries to tell here.

At least to me, the whole point is that Amaurot wasn’t a perfect society, and neither were the other ones. I was under the impression that Amaurot and some of the other cultures we’re shown sought perfection but lost their way and went too far to turn back.

Amaurot ended up the same way. A member of their society used their god-like powers of creation to create something he barely understood and gave it vague orders that went completely out of his control. When he realized he screwed up, he wiped the memories of himself and those in power who could do something about it. Then when the problem came back to bite them, they couldn’t comprehend it and decided to cull half of their population and half again to cover up the problem and to re-seed life on the planet and were about to cull that too in order to bring back everyone sacrificed and then continue their society like nothing bad happened while their can of worms wreaked havoc across the stars.

Edit:

Before you pin this all on Hermes, he was broken by the fact that his people pop souls into monsters that they want to add to the ecosystem for no good reason except for the fact that they can. And these monsters are routinely tested in a lab and destroyed if they have undesirable and unforeseen problems. He let his own creation go to test whether or not his people even have a right to continue on, and it wasn’t until after we were depowered and humbled that we were able to prove ourselves and pass the test without sweeping the problem under the wrong and Emet-Selch admitted it.

What part of that sounds like a perfect world?

[Nothv13]

But I also really disagree with SE's broader insistence that any "perfect world" (or any world striving for perfection) can only fail and nothing else, no matter how hard they try to hammer that point home.
As beautiful as the third part of the last dungeon is visually, the message it tries to tell feels so simplified, pseudo-deep and clichéed to me that it does nothing to convince me of their point. It feels like "brute-force" philosophy in the sense that they really want to make a "smart" point about life, death and immortality but all nuance, far-sightedness and reason get lost.

It can come back to the nature of life. All life struggles, it is intrinsic to life, from bacteria all the way to humans. In a way we need it. In our society now, on a whole, we are so comfy and lack struggles like far in the past (or other societies no nearly as well off as we are) that we will look for even minor issues and make them so divisive that the entire society suffers from it. Taking this to the extreme if we reached a point where we fundamentally become immortal, no longer have the lows to compare to the highs this can lead to massive amounts of depression as you get numb to the stimulation and thus seek more and more of it. The extreme that the last part of the dungeon shows is that they've gone so far, death is the only thing that can release them from it.

[Rulakir]

But I also really disagree with SE's broader insistence that any "perfect world" (or any world striving for perfection) can only fail and nothing else, no matter how hard they try to hammer that point home.

Agreed 100%. The last part of the Dead Ends was just weird. Their society was fine before Meteion. Whether we want to theorize that she warped the dynamis of their world with her presence or literally pestered them to death, their civilization didn't begin to collapse until after she'd arrived. I found the premise ridiculous and straight out of a "guess I'll die" meme.

[Lium]

Agreed 100%. The last part of the Dead Ends was just weird. Their society was fine before Meteion. Whether we want to theorize that she warped the dynamis of their world with her presence or literally pestered them to death, their civilization didn't begin to collapse until after she'd arrived. I found the premise ridiculous and straight out of a "guess I'll die" meme.

I don’t think that’s how it works. Meteion manifests the despair that’s already present. We saw this with the Ea. And we saw it in Thavnair as well. Blasphemies manifested where there was hopelessness. Like with the merchant Kahlzahl(sp).

So, that third civilization in the last dungeon likely already were seeking death. Meteion, being able to manipulate dynamis the way she can, simply brought it about.

[Loggos]

At least to me, the whole point is that Amaurot wasn’t a perfect society, and neither were the other ones. I was under the impression that Amaurot and some of the other cultures we’re shown sought perfection but lost their way and went too far to turn back.

Amaurot ended up the same way. A member of their society used their god-like powers of creation to create something he barely understood and gave it vague orders that went completely out of his control. When he realized he screwed up, he wiped the memories of himself and those in power who could do something about it. Then when the problem came back to bite them, they couldn’t comprehend it and decided to cull half of their population and half again to cover up the problem and to re-seed life on the planet and were about to cull that too in order to bring back everyone sacrificed and then continue their society like nothing bad happened while their can of worms wreaked havoc across the stars.

Edit:

Before you pin this all on Hermes, he was broken by the fact that his people pop souls into monsters that they want to add to the ecosystem for no good reason except for the fact that they can. And these monsters are routinely tested in a lab and destroyed if they have undesirable and unforeseen problems. He let his own creation go to test whether or not his people even have a right to continue on, and it wasn’t until after we were depowered and humbled that we were able to prove ourselves and pass the test without sweeping the problem under the wrong and Emet-Selch admitted it.

What part of that sounds like a perfect world?

tl,dr I never said they were perfect, which is why I always wrote it in airquotes as "perfect". I am not arguing that societies were objectively perfect within the stories but what kind of message SE is trying to send on a level of story-telling. It's not about lore.

It's about the meta-narrative.

---

None of the "perfect" societies in the game were truly presented as perfect. The golden people stagnated and lost all incentive to live, the Ea discovered knowledge so horrible that it made them want to go back to being mortal and as you said, the Ascians come with their own set of problems.

Considering that Meteion said that pretty much the whole universe is dead now except for our planet, it is reasonable to believe that these three examples of societies are representative of what happened to any other society that sought "perfection". (Unless we have reason to believe that what Meteion said is wrong. But to me the whole story-telling pretty much felt like "every pursuit of perfection will end in suffering and such societies are destined to go down".)

These are tools of story-telling used by SE to convey a certain point. Of course, within the story it makes sense that these societies end like this.
But I'm not arguing lore here.
I'm arguing against the point I believe SE tries to make by choosing to depict said societies the way they did in the story. It's more of a "philosophical" disagreement.


I'm not saying, that on the other hand every society striving for perfection would just end up there and that's the happy ending of the story.
But I think that this concept of a "perfect" society is a lot more complex than "a perfect world free of sorrow would eventually fall apart, be it because of stagnation/revelation of damning knowledge/etc. because we absolutely, fundamentally and without any alternative need suffering to contextualise happiness, otherwise happiness will inevitably lose any meaning".
As stated above I think SE's framing of these three examples of "fake perfect" societies is meant to be representative of the concept of "the perfect society", esp. given that one important theme of EW and FF14 in general is "to live is to suffer" (see the Answers lyrics).

Just to be clear, I am not saying that suffering cannot be a good teacher or has no value either. It's the one-sidedness, this insistence, of this approach that bothers me.
Like I said, it seems "philosophically" lazy to me because it feels like an attempt to make a seemingly deep point about life, death and immortality without really analysing it with nuance.

The endings of the Ascians, the Ea and the golden people are certainly good and thought-provoking ideas for individual societies striving for perfection. But I don't think theirs are the only ways the pursuit of perfection could play out. We are talking about a fantasy world after all. Sure, in reality we will never have a perfect world, but the Ascians, the Ea and the golden people all used fictional "magical" means to (successfully) strive for "perfection". These completely unrealistic means and powers are narrative tools to make a point. So you could use the same unrealistic means as a way of story-telling to make another point, as well.

[Alenore]

Okay, this post should be stickied at the top. I love having a good debate about the story and the characters and I’ve enjoyed reading all the different opinions and takes on the events of the entire story arc, going back to ARR.

But I really do believe some people completely missed the point of the story very badly.

The person I quoted spelled out the story very succinctly.

As shown both in Ultima Thule and the final dungeon- specifically the third species who were wiped out by Ra La, perfection is what led to their downfall.

In the cutscene in Amaurot where we see Venat walking through the streets, she comes upon those who are summoning Zodiark. She tries to reason with them, but they explicitly tell her they want to go back to their perfect world. To the way things were. One of Venat’s reasons for the sundering is to introduce sorrow and suffering, because without it, you reach stagnation and apathy. And with apathy comes the Final Days.

And with sorrow and suffering, you create envy and jealousy, and wars, and famines, and calamities, and global destruction at your own hand.

Is the solution to "potentially going to our downfall", triggering said downfall yourself in another way? What exactly would be different if say, the Ancients went to make the star perfect in their eye, and populated it with other intelligent beings, which we know happened: Lupins and Matanga for instance, and then went "poof"? The same souls they had would then go to the created beings they made, which would be less aether dense, and the situation could be the same as we are now, had Meteion not interfered. These people could know pain and suffering if they evolve a way of thinking different from the Ancient. What then?

Besides, it's not like the Ancients were unanimous about Zodiark, hence Elidibus splitting from it, hence Venat faction, hence Azem. Venat said herself she was taking their possibility to paradise, but what's to say the sundered people won't be lead to the same issue?
Just see how many stars were destroyed by the Omicrons, don't you think they suffered? Or the fish people affected by a plague? We almost got attacked by the Omicrons in the moments before the level 90 expert dungeon, how do you think we would have fared? Probably would have much bigger chances were we unsundered.
The Dragons, the fish people, and the human-looking world were not led to their demise by their perfection:
- The dragons were wiped out, by the Omicrons, and gave in to despair due to this defeat and the despoiling of their star ;
- The fish people killed themselves through poor management of their resources and a bad handling of their star, what the ancients prevent. We almost had a calamity due to black rose. War of the magi was an overuse of the aether. Just because Venat sundered us , we're clearly not safe from these ;
- The human world tried to bring peace through conflict. How about the war between dragons and Ishgard? The Autumn War?

The point of the last zone and dungeon is showing that no matter what you do, no matter what choice, you end up dead, dead, dead. Be it mass suicide or external threat. The only common idea is *despair*. Despair for your future, for being in an eternal war, for the end of the universe and the meaningless of life, etc.

Besides, Meteion saw only a few people from each world, or their souls at the moment they were already almost dead. Obviously it's grim, but even then, the Elpis flowers showed there was still hope among all this despair. What if she met someone as awesome as the WoL, on that Ra La world? What if it was Azem and not Emet-Selch who went to Elpis to recruit Hermes, and she met pretty much us, but unsundered?
Meteion literally only saw dead worlds, but what if the Ea lived for billions of years? Is that still a failure? What if, instead of asking "what the point if we're all going to die anyway", they just lived for the small things instead?

Etheirys was and is, during Elpis and at this point in time, not yet lost to despair and had/has a future, their people purpose and hope.
If that last zone taught me anything, it's that nothing lasts forever, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy it.

[BetaKeja]

I don't agree that joining the Ascians in genocide would have been better. But I think there's a lot they and Hydaelyn could have done better.

Still, I do feel the problem itself could have been avoided had Venat reminded Emet Selch of what happened, just imagine that situation.
They knew what caused the final days, not only a more specific solution could have been created by finding a way to quicken the celestial currents (Since zodiarc was summoned to fix a problem they couldnt figure out) but even with Zodiarc, his existence would allow for many many years to figure out a solution, and with the very power of creation and a huge list of creative concepts it is more than likely that a solution would have been figured out.

Agreed, it's honestly baffling why Venat chose to do that. Is it irony that this maverick ancient whose future champions would defy fate time and time again was unwilling to do the same? Perhaps that shows they never could have succeeded if sundering the world was the only solution she was capable of.

It would have made a lot more sense to me if the time travel created another split branch in the timeline instead of adding in a potential predestination paradox.