Quote Originally Posted by Lauront View Post
This has come up and has been remarked upon. It's more that said premises are considered to be irrelevant or side considerations by some of us, particularly to the sundering. If their world is less than perfect (but in relative terms I find them to be quite remarkable beings compared both to RL humans and the sundered), should they not strive to regain what they lost, even if that exact thing cannot be regained? After their star had nearly been desiccated and most of their people sacrificed to staunch it? As if many of the sundered would not desire and act towards the precise same thing? Note that the dispute between Venat and her faction and the remaining ancients was less to do with any of their imperfections, real or imagined, but more to do with the attitude she thought they should have to suffering, based on context she had and which they were not given and thus lacked.



Yes, much as ideology focused on discarding the past (except when it comes to using it caricatures of it to ideologically browbeat opponents), fixating on "brighter tomorrows", destroying all opposition to withering away the status quo and ushering in their own new glorious revolution, thriving on crises as pretexts for doing so, has very bad echoes to certain movements.
Considering the Final Days ended up being a self-inflicted problem in the end, we can surmise that if this case, then eventually some other future problem would had destroyed their civilization. Now there is no real way to debate this, this is question of outlook at this point, there is no evidence for it really.

In same matter, in our real world could we actually ever go back 3 years? 10 years? 20 years? No, because usually the conditions that created benefits in the past were built on conditions that no longer apply or were inherently temporary. Great Recession of 2007-2009 was result of insane shadowbanking (and so many other factors), which probably gave us before its crash great prosperity and happiness. Hell, it is not really controversial to say that our current modern world is unsustainable and will crash in one way or another in the future, and there is no going back to a world where we just had not used the carbon.

In FFXIV they deal with fantastical elements like aether and dynamis and souls and stuff, but they are still forced to deal with the same basic moral principle that you reap what you sow. They created a society that created a Hermes who then doomed them all, same way we humankind might had doomed ourselves to a slow death by the invention of combustion engine. Give another timespan and some other amaurotine would had created a different crisis with same results. I wager the Pandaemonium raid series explores that possibility.