[ENDWALKER MSQ SPOILERS] Timeline weirdness

[Lurina]

We do play god too much in our own world don't we, I guess I went and got a bit too emotional in the way I was responding to what was being said and didn't quite articulate myself properly. I see a difference in creating a new breed of a species and developing a whole new species entirely, maybe I shouldn't, and I do see your point about making and then getting rid of need breeds of animals, it is wrong. I guess part of my problem is the sort of technological difference we see between our societies and the ancients. Obviously they used magic and we don't but they come across as a sort of future society that is supposed to be beyond that sort of stuff while we are still in a period of working out our relationship to the world around us in a healthy way whilst retaining our advancements. It just feels that from what we know they should be beyond that and aren't, I prefer my futuristic advanced societies to be better, not simply appearing better but just being the same.

I guess I don't like the "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones" idea because it limits you to only calling out your own society and not calling out both societies for doing the wrong thing.

I don't think there's anything wrong for judging the Ancients for their treatment of other living beings, so long as you're also willing to extend those arguments to contemporary humanity. For me, what puts me off in these conversations is the dissonant hypocrisy of hearing people talk about how the Ancients were perverse and deserved to die for that stuff, while drawing a line between themselves as us. To bring it around to the sacrifices, we slaughter an unthinkable amount of relatively intelligent beings just to keep the wheels of our civilization turning. We're crushing entire biospheres for our convenience. The Anthropocene has driven more species into extinction than any other event in 60 million years.

If they deserved to get sundered, we deserve to get sundered.

[Kordarion]

I don't think there's anything wrong for judging the Ancients for their treatment of other living beings, so long as you're also willing to extend those arguments to contemporary humanity. For me, what puts me off in these conversations is the dissonant hypocrisy of hearing people talk about how the Ancients were perverse and deserved to die for that stuff, while drawing a line between themselves as us.

If they deserved to get sundered, we deserve to get sundered.

I think my original point in this conversation in this thread was that I would simply rather spend my time in the "present" rather than the ancient world if given a choice. And then that lead to me commenting on how I don't like either what the ancients did in Elpis or the concept of "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones". I don't think they should have been sundered for what they were doing in Elpis either, although it does play into why I don't think they would have been able to permanently defeat Meteion but that is another can of worms I'd rather not open right now.

[Lurina]

I think my original point in this conversation in this thread was that I would simply rather spend my time in the "present" rather than the ancient world if given a choice. And then that lead to me commenting on how I don't like either what the ancients did in Elpis or the concept of "those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones". I don't think they should have been sundered for what they were doing in Elpis either, although it does play into why I don't think they would have been able to permanently defeat Meteion but that is another can of worms I'd rather not open right now.

That's fair. This part of the conversation started because of Yuella asserting that the Ancient's deserved to be sundered for their "lifestyle", though, and drawing an explicit distinction between us and them by saying:

I don't know why people are so enamored by the ancient lifestyle anyway. It's not a good lifestyle. They wantonly create living beings and then kill them off cold-heartedly if they're "not suitable" even though these creatures feel pain.

I think Rulakir was pointing out their hypocrisy - since this statement could just as easily describe modern human culture - rather than saying that it was wrong to criticize the Ancients at all, which is the way you seemed to interpret it in your reply.

As modern humans, we are all complicit in extra-species violence and manipulation on a scale so spectacular that it boggles the mind. In the time it took me to type this message, we have cold-bloodedly slaughtered roughly 400,000 chickens, creatures proven to experience complex emotional states and capable of solving simple math problems (as well as being, by the way, a subspecies of our own creation), despite the fact that we've advanced to the point we don't even need meat to survive. And that's just chickens. To condemn a fictional culture as deserving of death on that basis is goofy, unless you'd also extend that judgement to yourself.