*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[MikkoAkure]

Again. There are more Ancients than just Hermes who know and understand Dynamis. Explicitly. They just aren't named.

If there were other researchers who knew about Dynamis, the story doesn’t care for them as it only established Fandaniel’s importance and not any other’s. It could be that the role he specifically plays in figuring out enough of the mechanisms behind the Final Days to see how to fix it with summoning is crucial. Or that this is a piece of writing and condensing the actions that would realistically be part of a group to an individual is a writing tool in order to prevent the narrative from becoming bloated and confusing.

Still, Venat is more in tune with Elpis and Hermes than Emet-Selch is and she was on the Convocation prior to Emet-Selch so it stands to reason that her saying that Hermes needs to become Fandaniel carries some weight.

Regardless of what Venat could have told people about Meteion or Dynamis, it wouldn’t change the point that they had nothing they could have done except summon Zodiark to delay the Final Days. Zodiark being summoned is still vital to the safety of the star. It’s what comes after that was the sticking point.

And to stop Meteion as we did required convincing the leadership of a nation, 12,000 years worth of crystallized aether from atop the Lifestream, the ability to manipulate Dynamis, and empathy/emotional intelligence. The Ancients might have been able to get 1 or 2 of those at best, but not all of them.

[YianKutku]

Given that the Bureau of the Architect is constantly dealing with new creations, it's not unreasonable to think that older creations would be left unexamined by newcomers due to time constraints. It's not like a bureaucrat who signs on at a large depot or storehouse is going to be able to suddenly be able to account for everything that's ever been stored on the shelves there. They're too busy signing in triplicate the 800 concepts for new sharks and what not.

Hythlodaeus is not a simple new recruit to the Bureau of the Architect. He is literally the chief of the Bureau of the Architect. If the bureau has no on-boarding process for the new head of the entire department, and there is no way to easily look up past records, then the bureau is a terribly-organized place that has even more unfortunate implications for the systems the Amaurotines have put into place to play god for the planet.

I'm actually being generous to Hythlodaeus here, in that I'm attributing his ignorance of Elpis flowers due to systemic issues, rather than because Hythlodaeus is a bad leader. If the only records anyone can conceivably find about the people who know about Elpis flowers and dynamis are buried deep within the Bureau of the Architect records, that Hythlodaeus never even considered looking through, then they might as well not be there at all.

Through the course of this questline we also learn that the Convocation members are all specialists in different fields, so it's no surprise that an Emet-selch specialist doesn't know about a mysterious energy that almost no one has the means or desire to manipulate. Though it is a narrative surprise because he's a big deal to us, but it's ultimately an emotional conflation.

Emet-Selch sounded very affronted that not only did he know nothing about dynamis, but nobody told him about it. If this is supposed to be Emet-Selch being rational, then that means he should have been told about it, either as a general member of the Convocation or in his capacity as Emet-Selch. And since he hasn't been told, that means there is nobody capable of telling him up until Hermes.

If this is supposed to be Emet-Selch being irrational, well, that answers the question in the OP as well, since this is not a person I would be willing to join, lest his petty grumpiness lead to even more dangerous situations.

As for there being no way to contact the others who know about Dynamis... it's an idea that has no strength to stand under scrutiny. Elpis is a facility with rules and records. The Flower was created there, recorded there, and researched there. The names of the researchers would be in their records. The data on the flower would also be in their records.

I'd like to mention that this is the same Elpis where the head of the facility created a familiar utilizing a little-known and heretofore non-useful aspect of the universe, made several copies of that familiar and networked them together, then sent those copies out into the universe, and told nobody about it until we confronted him after we managed to find a witness. There are no records about Meteion; Hermes declined to submit the concept to the Bureau of the Architect because Meteion is allegedly "still in testing" (which is fine), while also sending Meteia into the greater universe (which is not fine). This contravenes the stated rules of Elpis, and yet nobody really cared about Hermes doing this stuff until it all went pear-shaped.

Well, not precisely the stated Rules As Written, which limits the scope of new creations regarding Etheirys. But I feel that it's certainly contravening Rules As Intended, since if a creation has not gone through enough testing to be let loose onto Etheirys, it should follow that it has also not gone through enough testing to be let loose onto the universe in which Etheirys resides.

The statement that Ancient Amaurotine society has enough rules and records that being able to find obscure former researchers or their recorded notes is possible, much less simple, is the one that does not stand under scrutiny, if taken in context with what we're also shown in the course of the narrative. Clearly to the Amaurotines, the rules are enforced through decorum, and if someone were to break the rules, they'd just get a disapproving glance and snide comment at most. This does not strike me as a system that would be conscientious enough to have meticulous and easily accessible records.

[Kozh]

2. "To an extent" is carrying this line of logic, and I'll be frank not very far. The Elpis flower, as was stated in the cutscene you posted, was an accident. The underlying mechanisms that govern Dynamis were not understood by its creator as far as we know. As it stands, one, and only one, person has shown understanding of how to manipulate and utilize Dynamis, as well as create Entelechies with wills of their own, that being Hermes. And he only did so by his own admission out of necessity to create a being that could traverse the great expanse. There is no evidence that beyond the flower and the Meteions, entelechies can be found or even existed. The head of the Bureau of Concepts and a member of the Convocation needed to be explained the concept as well as the very idea of Entelechies, and there are no existing species with the ability to manipulate Dynamis. The only ones known are the Elpis flower and Meteion.

And frankly it's quite a ludicrous idea that out of the current Ancients, only Hermes know about it. You mean to tell us that a research-based nation such as the Amaurotine doesn't do anything about dynamis once Elpis flower was created? I mean, yeah it's probably not as studied as aether considering the impractical application of it (like how most researches are in real life), but to see how nobody in Elpis facility know about dynamis is painful to read.


Speaking of dynamis, it's funy some people say that "the ancients doesn't understand how dynamis works, the sundered do", while the game never show us how the sundered able to control it besides "pray hard enough" and hope for the best. Being sensitive to dynamis is a double aged-sword. On one hand, sundered being can manipulate it to some extent. Yet on the other hand, it also made them easier to turn into blasphemies (or being unmade, in ultima thule case). Using this rule, I find it real cheap that the WoL and Scions don't immediately turn into nothing once they set foot into Ultima Thule, a domain purely made of despair-dynamis that Meteion amassed from several stars for more than 12k years. Oh well, I guess that's the benefit of being a protagonist.

[Rulakir]

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. Since that was the case for several of the worlds, I'm far more inclined to believe Meteion was the problem rather than their way of life. I disagree that the Ancients couldn't have come together in a crisis because they did. Whether or not you agree with Zodiark*, it was still an overwhelming collective effort on their part to stop an apocalypse, one which the sundered were unlikely to achieve.

* Speaking of which, I think the fact that the Final Days were warping their creation magics to conjure monstrosities that were killing them has been too easily brushed aside. I'm not comfortable judging anyone on their reaction to what could be the plot to a horror film. You do what you have to do to survive and anyone would jump at the first solution to making that situation stop.

So, what does that leave us with? Dynamis. This, in my opinion, is the true point of contention. Whether or not the Ancients could have ever found a way to deal with it. Ironically, Venat says, "Nothing is impossible. This, I have always believed." Yet, that seemingly didn't carry over into her feelings towards her own people's ability to change or figure out a way to defeat Meteion.

The rest is just pure speculation. We don't know that there were no blueprints of Meteion anywhere because nobody ever investigated Hermes and nobody knew to even look for such a thing. Incidentally, I suspect that Hythlodaeus was being very generous with Hermes about him not having submitted a concept yet because they were friends and he thought him trustworthy. We don't know that the Ancients themselves needed to face Meteion. Given that 75% of them were willing to sacrifice themselves to save the star, if asked some may have been willing to be sundered and trained to defeat her assuming that no one but Hermes was capable of creating a dynamis-based construct to do it. Plus, if Shinryu can make it to her, then so could another primal and Etheirys had plenty of aether to spare to work towards making that happen.

I could go on and on and I'm not looking for my ideas to be individually critiqued, that doesn't matter. What matters is that there were infinite possibilities and we only got to see the one that not only resulted in the Ancient civilization being destroyed, but 8 reflections of Etheirys in the process to get to where we are now. Personally, that's not a choice I would have or could have made. It doesn't make Venat compelling in a "she did what others could not" sort of way either, it makes me thoroughly dislike her because she never gave anyone a chance and her reasons for not doing so were just not good enough. Frankly, I don't think they ever could be when we're discussing the lives of billions of innocent people.

Lastly, I think allowing the WoL to express displeasure would've gone a long way. One of my biggest gripes is that after all this our characters are strong-armed into a 12k year 'full circle' bond with her, complete with emotional cutscenes and only positive, reaffirming dialog options, which did not sit well with me at all.

[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.

[Kozh]

What other people? I thought it was established that unlike the partially aborted 7th calamity, the 8th was a full calamity and all of society crumbled. A large chunk if not the majority of people left are wandering bandits and it's a true apocalyptic scenario that hasn't changed for the better in hundreds of years and will take many hundreds more yet for the world to get back up on its feet again to a semblance of where it was before.

UH, the people at the New World? Meracydia? Other smaller continent? During the flashback, they never say that it spreads outside of the three great continent (eorzea, ilsabard, far east).

In the end though, what the Ironworks did was pretty much the same as what the game keep opposing: An individual/a group of people decide the fate of the star by themselves. Imagine you were born and live in a post apocalypse world. You struggle to live everyday but keep (as EW love to put it) to 'forge ahead'. Then one day someone came and said "hey, we do have a plan to save the world, but by erasing it from existence. I hope you're cool with that."

Additionally, there's nothing that could be done about Black Rose by this point. The Calamity had already come and gone and since the end of the story says they're in a new Astral Era, I'm sure it's assumed that Black Rose has already dissipated. Black Rose was already stated to have destroyed the Garlean Empire 200 years ago during the Calamity so who is going to be continuously producing and releasing it? And in a world with no more countries and severely limited communications, how much of the world even knows who the Ironworks are?

They never said it dissipated, nor do we know if it's possible to considering that it's light aspected (stagnancy).

In all of the scenes of Amaurot and Elpis, we never see the Ancients gather together in darkness and raise their hands up in prayer to the "one true god", yet we see them do that in ARR. The lopporits may have said it causes a "tug", but Emet-Selch outright states he is tempered and the dialogue of the others does not sound like sane individuals possessed of their complete will.
Nabriales: "Witness the terrible might of a true servant of Zodiark!" "Insatiable hunger of the void! Devour all light and return this world to perfect darkness!" "Writhing powers of ruination! From the deepest pits of the abyss I summon thee!"

Ah yes, ARR, where nearly all the villains are morning saturday cartoon level of evil.

[HappyHubris]

No, Emet-Selch was a terrible person with a bad plan. Not only would you have ended up with a worse world, you would've ended up with one that had no hope of stopping the End of Days.

Emet's plans was still better than Venat's, which was too give up and evacuate only one sundered shard.

[MikkoAkure]

UH, the people at the New World? Meracydia? Other smaller continent? During the flashback, they never say that it spreads outside of the three great continent (eorzea, ilsabard, far east).

In the end though, what the Ironworks did was pretty much the same as what the game keep opposing: An individual/a group of people decide the fate of the star by themselves. Imagine you were born and live in a post apocalypse world. You struggle to live everyday but keep (as EW love to put it) to 'forge ahead'. Then one day someone came and said "hey, we do have a plan to save the world, but by erasing it from existence. I hope you're cool with that."

The people of the New World and Meracydia may not have been effected, but they're also not very high-density populated areas. We don't know much about the Far West, but we know that Meracydia has already been in a post-apocalyptic situation for 6,000 years. In the end, their timeline wasn't deleted, it was just a possibility. Also, I don't remember anywhere saying that the original summonings of Zodiark were a bad thing. If Zodiark wasn't summoned in the first place, then the world would have ended.

They never said it dissipated, nor do we know if it's possible to considering that it's light aspected (stagnancy).

You're answering my assumption with another assumption. The scene where we learn all this shows people walking around and mourning amongst the dead so I was of the mind that it still works as a normal gas. I'm not sure why you would be against the idea of the Ironworks doing something to fix the past if they lived in a world where the Calamity was still happening and continuing to happen and Black Rose will never fade so I don't know how that helps your argument.

Ah yes, ARR, where nearly all the villains are morning saturday cartoon level of evil.

It's still a part of the canon of the story and most importantly, the beginning where everyone is introduced to these characters. It's one thing for the story to evolve and to add nuance, but it's another to introduce inconsistencies and altogether pretend that the whole beginning of the story never happened.

In this case, we know why Zodiark was summoned and we know the Ascians had a good reason for doing so. At the same time, we know that they were tempered, are told specifically by one of their leaders that they were tempered, and that it has turned the previous logic-minded "protectors of the star" into zealous ghosts who twirl their mustaches and laugh as they wreak destruction and cause genocides. That makes the whole thing more tragic and the writing better than the alternative.

[Vyrerus]

easily accessible

At the time we are sent to Elpis, within that trip to the past, we were sent to a precise day by the auspices of the scriptwriter fate. While we meet Emet-selch and Hythlodaeus, and we know the offices they hold, we know no big details about the duties of said offices nor how long either of them have held those offices. If you've ever been elected, promoted, or placed into a leadership position to fill someone else's shoes, then you would realize that you don't get the 4-1-1 on everything in your domain on day 1. Sometimes not even year 1, depending on the gravity of the office. Then there's also the fact that in a lot of jobs, leadership position or otherwise, there's a lot to the job but there are operations and necessities that are so infrequent as to be forgotten. Even by veterans. Compare and contrast with a submarine captain. The captain has to know every system of the boat in a general sense, but has to delegate specific responsibilities to lower officers who then carry out actually working everything with their different divisions. Hythlodaeus could be the most competent Chief of the Bureau of the Architect that the Amaurotines ever had, and he probably still wouldn't know the skinny on each every creation ever submitted. It's a huge operation.

Mmm, don't misunderstand me. I do not mean it is an emotional conflation for Emet-selch. I meant it is one for the player. "Wow he doesn't know, I'm shocked! This must be a really mysterious force." Something in that vein. But as we see in this portion of the MSQ, the Convocation don't even work together. Later on in Pandaemonium we get even more of a suggestion that they are akin to the Sharlayan Forum, and they don't work together till they call a meeting to do just that. It still makes sense that no one told Emet, because Dynamis does not pertain to any of the Convocation's jobs at this point in time. Serves him right too, just standing there not calling up Grani or anything, monologuing into memory erasure. SMH

I'll point out, as you have pointed out, Hermes is the leader of Elpis. Leaders often abuse positions of authority to bend and break rules. Subordinates do not call them out for fear of loss of position or loss of potential increase in rank or pay. It's not really a commentary on how lax rules are in Elpis, but moreso that Hermes is beholden to no one there. There is no one who can, or wishes to, enforce the rules on him.


Also, I'll state that it is merely plot contrivance that the researchers are kept obscure. Like I said earlier, it would have been better if the lines were written to be that Dynamis was Hermes' personal discovery without mentioning anyone else. However vaguely they were mentioned. If I'm supposed to embrace the vagaries of Venat/Hydaelyn retroactively, then I am going to embrace the vagaries about other segments of the plot too. And if they are spiny and shifty and questionable, then I will question them and point them out. This is the case here. Hermes is not the only Ancient well versed in Dynamis.

[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?