Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
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.
I'd actually argue that to some degree we do have proof that the ancients had an upper age limit. During Meteion's report to Hermes at the top of Ktisis Hyperborea, we hear her talk of a species that tried to find a scientific way to cheat both death and ageing and that said civilization discovered that death and time were both immutable constants that could not be avoided and were inevitable. So while it doesn't directly state that the ancients weren't immortal, for me at least it does tell us that no species in FF14 can be immortal and I can't see them writing this and then turning around and saying the ancients were the exception to this rule.

I'd also argue that the reason we don't know the age limit of the ancients is because of their habit of choosing to die, which means that they are rarely if ever able to reach that upper limit on their age.