Quote Originally Posted by Kordarion View Post
I've yet to see you respond to the fact that multiple people are telling you that there is no concrete proof that the ancients had an indefinite lifespan, in fact I've seen you ignoring that multiple times to instead focus on weaker parts of the argument. I've at least tried to provide evidence based reasoning for why they would have limited lifespans and yet you have simply said they have indefinite lifespans and provided no examples of where this belief might come from. You have also failed to respond to the multiple rebuttals of your assertion that Venat and Emet-Selch's respectively long lives have non-ancient sources. To be fair that could be that you've hit the posting limit especially with the Venat and Emet-Selch lifespans.
The question of the Ancients' lifespan is a difficult one, because we don't know that they could live forever, all we know is that they died voluntarily. You're absolutely right that the longest-lived Ancients were very clearly shirking their natural rules anyway; Venat and Elidibus by becoming primals, Emet-Selch and Lahabrea by just constantly possessing new bodies. So nobody can really say that a normal Ancient could have lived forever if they wanted to.

But what we can say is that while we don't know if their deaths are biologically natural, we do know that their deaths are societally natural. The event of an Ancient's death is so inevitable that it's treated almost like how we'd treat someone leaving their job; which is why Hermes was seen as so odd for instead mourning the previous Fandaniel. So if an Ancient could live forever, people would look down on someone who actually was, either as something pitiful ('wow, you still aren't done?') or possibly something loathsome ('you're supposed to be GONE').

So Venat can't be vilified for the Sundered having finite natural lifespans. Because not only do we not have proof that the Ancients didn't have an indefinite lifespan, but Ancient society itself valued the concept of a finite life.