Quote Originally Posted by hydralus View Post
Forget all the time travel stuff. Can anyone explain to me what Vanet's plan would've been if the ancients agreed and didn't offer more souls to Zodiark to bring life back to the planet? Like the ancients can't interact with dynamis to a meaningful degree so aside from sundering and splitting everyone up to make their aether thinner and thus easier to interact with dynamis, what was the plan? Could the ancients have learned to accept suffering enough to defeat dynamis? Seems to me that there was no reason to try and talk them down because there was always going to be the threat of emo bird lingering on the edge of space. Are they just going to live with it? Because present-time sundered people can't live with it. They went to the edge of the universe and beat Meteion to stop it. How were the ancients going to do that? COULD they have done that? If so, why would Vanet not offer that information rather than going on about how they have to live with suffering and then slice them up when they didn't agree?

To me it doesn't make much sense. Maybe I missed something. Their sacrificing seemed to have little to do with the threat at hand. Personally I think it would've made more sense if the aether/stream of the planet itself became damaged by all the God-playing the Ancients were doing and eventually it led to a breaking point that resulted in the end-days. Then the themes they set up in the story would've made a bit more sense for me.
That part of the story has less to do with whether everyone can live with the final days or not. Venat saw that her people were incredibly eager to pony up and sell their souls for anything that would make their lives comfortable again. Now, showing that alongside a literal apocalypse is a harder sell (since that's hardly "seeking easy lives") but that's what the story was going for. The Ancients were willing to create a monster to run away from their problem. Venat saw knee-jerking and shortsightedness and knew that the next time something horrible happened -and it would eventually- she might not be there to make running away no longer an option.

There's a message in there about growing up and facing your issues like an adult instead of putting them off in unhealthy ways like a child.