*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[MikkoAkure]

Shards, yes. Calamities destroy shards and end all life on them. They do not do that on the Source, which is where the Ascians would've benefitted most from willing participants. Furthermore, Calamities do not in fact cause damage to everything on the Source. Every Calamity we possess a substantial amount of knowledge about is shown to have caused comparatively little damage in the grand scheme of things. Calamities do tend to come with a large loss of life, but they are not shown to constitute global catastrophes of a nature that poses anything resembling an existential threat.

All that aside, I would note that individuals living on the Source during a Rejoining reap a great boon in the form of increased aetheric density. Most people, regardless of the era, would leap at the chance to grow more powerful.

Gonna need a source on that because I don't remember anything about people on the Source suddenly becoming stronger after the most recent calamity 5 years ago. If we did get stronger every Rejoining, then the people on the First or the other Shards we fight in that one dungeon would be a fraction of our power and prestige and wouldn't have been as much trouble as they were with us at roughly "half an Ancient" and them at "1/14th an Ancient". Considering we're the same size, general health, ages seem the same relatively, etc. as those on the First, I don't believe that our soul becoming a little denser necessarily leads to us getting stronger.

Would people who don't have the Echo even get stronger? Echo bearers have the Echo only because their reincarnated souls were alive at the time of the Sundering. And Echo users make up a VERY small portion of the world. As strong as Y'shtola and gang are, none of them had any reaction at all to the Starfall. Pre-ARR Echo users also operated in a small secret society that barely anyone knew about, so there can't be too many of them.

Then it's all moot in the end anyway because after all the Rejoinings are done, Elidibus hops into his Zodiark robot and Third Impact's the world, killing everyone to revive the souls that were sacrificed 12000 years ago. Unless there's a special development, I don't believe that getting your soul filled up to 14/14 automatically turns you into the exact person you were back then, and as I said before, the vast majority of people alive today are probably not reincarnations from people who were alive back then. The people who died as a result of the Final Days and the people who did not get sacrificed to Zodiark are probably lost forever, and that's a very large chunk of the Ancient population.


Calamities are also historically very destructive. The most recent one was partially aborted mid-Calamity by Louisoix doing his Phoenix thing before Bahamut could have caused more damage and that still changed the topography and climate of Eorzea.

The 2nd Calamity involved ash clouds covering the skies in darkness, endless lightning destroying fields, boiling lakes, destroying fortifications and the storms lasted for a full year. The people went into hiding in caves where diseases spread.
In the 3rd Calamity, the sun grew larger and fields and forests turned to dusty wastelands.
The 4th Calamity affected "the entire realm" which for the Allagans was from Meracydia to Othard and everything in between, and mountains toppled and the land ripped apart which destroyed the entire empire.
The 5th Calamity was an ice age where everything in the northern areas was covered in ice to the point where the seas in southern Ilsabard froze over and the Miqo'te were able to return to Eorzea and skip the Gyr Abanian mountains. Survivors had to migrate towards the equator.
The 6th Calamity flooded the world. Tidal waves hit the coasts and rivers overran their banks. The area around Mhach turned into a salty swamp from the floods, Nymians had to flee to the mountains of Vylbrand while their coastal homes were reduced to reefs. The floods also initially put Amdapor (very inland) underwater and the survivors from there and Mhach had ended up becoming refugees in a flooded world and made for the Highlands in Gyr Abania. According to a sightseeing entry Eorzea "was transformed into a sea".

The Calamities are enough that Y'shtola herself says that nothing left from Amaurot would exist on the Source. And to me, all of the Calamities I mentioned above count as "global catastrophes", they certainly would have to the people who lived through them. It took 400 years for society to recover after the 6th Calamity. That's not something small.