*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[Slatersev]

I don't think we're ever going to arrive at a consensus on Hermes. Even if we collectively agreed that he was the one and only dynamis expert in all of Ancient society, there still isn't sufficient evidence his expertise played a part in the Final Days.

The post-Elpis 'Cliff Notes' version of the Final Days also left out a lot of crucial details. It doesn't help that it's from Venat's POV either, who is the character whose choices we're debating. It's an unfaithful retelling of events from a biased POV.

The Anyder cutscene in ShB makes little sense given the context of EW. Venat->Hydaelyn is more akin to Ysayle->Shiva than Elidibus->Zodiark. The person addressing her at the end made it sound like once she became the heart that would be the end of her, she also spoke as someone who was completely unaware of the sundering. The problem with that (aside from the implication Venat never confided her plans even to those she brought 'into the fold' to help create Hydaelyn) is either you believe Venat never intended to sunder the Ancients (which is a hard sell given that she would've been created with that ability) or she always intended to because if she didn't then the WoL's future wouldn't exist. One of the arguments I've seen presented here is that she couldn't do anything differently because she believed the WoL the best chance to defeat Meteion.

As for the rest, I just fundamentally disagree. I disagree with the premise that the Ancients were always doomed no matter what, I did not find the Ra-la world as 'proof' of that given they were fine until Meteion's meddling.

That's not really accurate, the first note explicitly says they had long stopped finding meaning in anything and didn't know what to do well before she arrived. Her question caused the cascade, but they weren't doing "fine" at all.

Which goes back to what Urianger says himself, NONE of the places she found were doing well, her arrival had negative effects and helped push them over, but the ones that hadn't already wiped themselves out were for one reason or another already on the edge.

[Veloran]

That's not really accurate, the first note explicitly says they had long stopped finding meaning in anything and didn't know what to do well before she arrived. Her question caused the cascade, but they weren't doing "fine" at all.

I have to agree with Rulakir that the Amaurotines and the Ralaians aren't well comparable to each other. The Ralaians were seemingly all about personal comfort and perfection, making their lives as easy and idyllic as possible. Meanwhile Amaurot is all about research, discovery, learning and creation. The mysteries and challenges of the universe are undoubtedly vast, and as we see they themselves were still confined to their homeworld, ignorant even of energies that made up the majority of reality. They could have spent uncountable eons learning about the wider world, incorporating elements of it into their creations, or even fixing universal problems like the idea of heat-death. Frankly, even if we assume that a descent into self-destruction was inevitable, I'm not so sure that denying them that choice in the future by destroying them in the present is all that reasonable.

Moreover, we should probably remember here that the Amaurotines weren't alone on Etheirys. There were other peoples (presumably Ancients) living separately from them, in their own civilizations and cultures. Can we really assume these people were all heading towards the same end?