*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[Lurina]

This is probably beyond the scope of this discussion and straying into real life politics, but I do want large aspects of our modern society to change for the sake perserving the enviroment.

But I don't think the ancients should be condemned or called twisted. Thier society certainly had flaws, but - the third sacrifice is when it goes too far. Though I don't think being sundered and being sacrificed are equivalent. After one you are dead, after the other there's just more of you and you don't have godlike superpowers anymore.

It's a whole other discussion that's been hashed out several times already, but suffice it to say, I don't think it's that clear cut. FFXIV is a setting in which identity is treated as personhood regularly, and the Sundering, as we hear in ShB, destroyed most of the Ancient's memories and culture. And situation where someone's natural lifespan is decimated is also an indirect sort of killing akin to giving someone radiation poisoning. When you consider the impact across the generations, it feels like an even greater atrocity to me personally.

[Rannie]

But I don't think the ancients should be condemned or called twisted. Thier society certainly had flaws, but - the third sacrifice is when it goes too far. Though I don't think being sundered and being sacrificed are equivalent. After one you are dead, after the other there's just more of you and you don't have godlike superpowers anymore.

This is something I most certainly agree with. No matter if the third sacrifice would have been consentual or not, the Ancients even contemplating it is basically saying that even though these people gave their life to create brand new life, that their sacrifice was not good enough nor was the life they created not good enough and quite honestly makes them or atleast Emet-Selch look hypocritical. It's a huge slap in the face and a big (pardon the language) fuck you to both sides. The ones who sacrificed and the lives that were created.

[MikkoAkure]

Regardless what kind of life would be sacrificed in order to bring the Ancient sacrifices back, do you all really think their civilization would be the same again after a world-shattering event and the summoning of a living god who is aetherically influencing the government and who revived 3/4 of the population who survived the Final Days? Zodiark is required to stick around in order for his shtick to work so they're not going to poof him away. It's just conjecture but it's reasonable to think that a post-Final Days Amaurot would revolve around their new god and that their society wouldn't be the same anymore. It's crazier to think that everything would go back the same as it was before.

And would those people who sacrificed themselves even be the same after their souls had been run through Zodiark's washing machine? Are they going to be brought back to life tempered like the Convocation? And if they're not and the Ascians' plan eventually worked and they destroyed the world after 13,000+ years to bring back the sacrificed people, how do you think they would feel? You sacrifice yourself to prevent the end of the world and then suddenly wake up millennia later to find that your countries leaders fought a rebel faction, lost, and then killed billions of sentient lives just to bring you back. It was already shown in the Elpis questline that giving yourself back to the planet is a noble sentiment as you return your life force back to the planet, as I'm sure the people who sacrificed themselves thought too in a way, since their life force was going to protecting the planet. Whether or not it happened right after the Final Days or after the Sundering and Rejoinings, to bring them back afterwards feels like a slap in the face of that part of their culture since it comes at the ruin of a recovered world and makes me believe that the Convocation weren't in their right mind when the decision was made for Zodiark's Third Act.

It could be for all of these reasons that Venat decided to sunder the world in addition to the ones she mentioned before. Ultimately though, she did what she did with the idea to her that it was the right thing to do, and the writers of the game have also seemingly pushed forward the notion that it was the right thing to do according to how the narrative treats it. We can argue for another 100 pages about whether or not she was a good bean or if she was an evil villain with bad intentions, but that won't change the outcome nor the story the writers wanted to tell. I'm just hoping that more story comes out to justify her reasons or give more background.

[Veloran]

I don’t believe they were created for that purpose. I don’t think they were “created” at all. Life existed before the Ancients began controlling the star, and I see no reason to believe that life didn’t spring up naturally afterward.

We have no idea what the ancient history of the star before the Ancients was like, if there even was one. But yes, the Ancients did restart the cycle of life which the Final Days had destroyed - And if they themselves didn't create any new lifeforms at this time to repopulate the world, why would the planet suddenly poof a bunch of sapient species out of nowhere, when before everyone was an Ancient?

Existentialism has no bearing on moral realism. It’s not a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

Why? If the conclusion is that life only has meaning insofar as the one you prescribe, is it not the case that someone like Zenos, who tortures and destroys entire civilizations for his own amusement, is just as justified in his actions as anyone else? That's his given purpose in life.

A willing sacrifice was never the issue at play here, and this one seems quite willing.

When they revealed the plan to the rest of the Ironworks in the short story, most of them just abandoned the effort. Many individual people or small groups helped out with their cause over time, but 99% of the world had no interest in joining them, nevermind any races and species existing outside Etheirys itself. So no, it was not consensual, it was a tiny conclave of technicians undertaking a venture which they full well believed would erase their entire timeline.

[Lyth]

Legitimate self defense changes the moral calculus. Azem did nothing wrong because what they did harmed none. I do not consider Venat's actions to be self defense, as the Ancients who were acting out of their grief and trauma were not harming anyone. Emet was trying to kill the Scions, and us, that was legitamate self defense.

I'm fairly sure that we've harmed more than a few people over the course of the storyline, and not all of it was in self-defense. We literally just finished up invading Garlemald.

It is something you claimed was not relevant when discussing the third stage of sacrifices, and yet both someone close to the Convocation (Hyth) and Venat mention it. As far as they were concerned in the SHB scenes, the Final Days were forestalled. It is only with EW that we learn that they were not, and this is concerning knowledge solely privy to her. And of course that stage of sacrifice in and of itself is not directly relevant to Meteion's report - the motivation behind it is, i.e. doing what they believed was best for the star, again, as per Venat and Hyth. Why is it relevant? Because given this motivation, which Hades himself reaffirms at the end of KH, if their plan would in fact harm the star (but also themselves) and they were given some good evidence of this that they could at the very least probe further, there is a possibility that they'd reconsider it.

There are two separate problems here.
1) The underlying cause of the Final Days still remains unresolved. Moving the celestial currents prevents the phenomena from occurring, but doesn't offer an explanation for the underlying cause. It would be reasonable to expect a society of scientists to want to probe deeper and solve the root cause.
2) The Convocation wanted to sacrifice the souls of non-Amaurotians on the star to Zodiark in exchange for their lost brethren. This is an unethical decision that needs to be stopped.

These two issues are independent of each other. Let's say Venat's faction is very persuasive and the Convocation is now extremely motivated to find out the cause of the Final Days. That's great, but it still does nothing to stop them from sacrificing non-Amaurotian souls to release their brethren. They can hunt for Meteion and perform the sacrifices at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive.

[Cilia]

Arguing the ethics of Venat's actions is completely beside the point. Everyone acknowledges it was a terrible thing to do.

The question Venat asks is existential in nature, not moral. "Is it better to suffer in the pursuit of fleeting happiness, or live in eternal yet ignorant bliss?" Ultimately this isn't even a question though; nothing lasts forever, and you can't unring the bell. Now knowing the world isn't just sugar and rainbows, the Ancients could never go back to their "paradise" no matter what they sacrificed or whether or not Meteion was stopped.

Never mind the fact their "paradise" never existed to begin with. Suffering was always there, they were just largely ignorant of it... Erichthonios appears to be in a great deal of emotional pain over his mother's death and his father's indifferent attitude toward both him and his mother's passing, for example.

... and raising creatures for the sole purpose of sacking them to Zodiark for their selfish desire betrays the Ancients' (self-appointed) mission as stewards of the star, does it not?

[Erendis]

all the sacrificed souls trapped in Zodiark have been freed to return to the star.

Speaking of which. Are we to expect a surge of babies with incredibly strong souls?

[EaraGrace]

We have no idea what the ancient history of the star before the Ancients was like, if there even was one. But yes, the Ancients did restart the cycle of life which the Final Days had destroyed - And if they themselves didn't create any new lifeforms at this time to repopulate the world, why would the planet suddenly poof a bunch of sapient species out of nowhere, when before everyone was an Ancient?

Because that’s what the planet does? The Ancients only used that process to improve on the planet as they saw fit, they weren’t it’s creators. Life would, as it always has, grow and spread in areas conducive to its existence, and those lives would be ensouled by the planet in the same natural process it always has. And we do know that, quest text mentions outright that the world had unconstrained wilds before the Ancients rose to prominence.

Why? If the conclusion is that life only has meaning insofar as the one you prescribe, is it not the case that someone like Zenos, who tortures and destroys entire civilizations for his own amusement, is just as justified in his actions as anyone else? That's his given purpose in life.

Because one’s meaning can have no bearing on the morals of said universe. If you believe morals aren’t relative, that they are capable of being reasoned and discovered much in the same way math is, then it exists without any input from us. It’s a set of natural principles that exists independently of life. If you believe it’s relative, then it doesn’t matter what one’s meaning is, but what one subjectively views as right or wrong. Meaning doesn’t change either of those necessarily.

When they revealed the plan to the rest of the Ironworks in the short story, most of them just abandoned the effort. Many individual people or small groups helped out with their cause over time, but 99% of the world had no interest in joining them, nevermind any races and species existing outside Etheirys itself. So no, it was not consensual, it was a tiny conclave of technicians undertaking a venture which they full well believed would erase their entire timeline.

Many left, for sure, but not because they didn’t want to be sacrificed. From the short story:

Their aim was to change the past to create an alternate reality in which the Calamity never occurred─a feat rendered conceivable by their knowledge of the advanced technologies of fallen civilizations. However, many of those who would bear the burden of continued existence in a world ravaged by Black Rose failed to see this as a viable stratagem. Such responses were consistent with my projections, as it is generally the primary objective of all life-forms to secure their own survival in the here and now.

Many of Master Cid’s followers either refused to cooperate or expressed a desire to leave the Ironworks altogether. Certain former employees went as far as to appropriate equipment and supplies by force before heading into the wilderness to fend for themselves.

They saw the endeavor, not as a mortal threat, but a waste of time as it was understood that doing so would have no impact on their situation. The exact opposite of what you’re claiming they would not be consenting to.

The question Venat asks is existential in nature, not moral. "Is it better to suffer in the pursuit of fleeting happiness, or live in eternal yet ignorant bliss?" Ultimately this isn't even a question though; nothing lasts forever, and you can't unring the bell. Now knowing the world isn't just sugar and rainbows, the Ancients could never go back to their "paradise" no matter what they sacrificed or whether or not Meteion was stopped.

Never mind the fact their "paradise" never existed to begin with. Suffering was always there, they were just largely ignorant of it... Erichthonios appears to be in a great deal of emotional pain over his mother's death and his father's indifferent attitude toward both him and his mother's passing, for example.

... and raising creatures for the sole purpose of sacking them to Zodiark for their selfish desire betrays the Ancients' (self-appointed) mission as stewards of the star, does it not?

Largely agree with this. Many of the Ancients never conceived of suffering as an inevitability. Take a soul sacrificed to Zodiark for example.

Temperamental Spirit: We and the star were fulfilled...
Wanted for naught, mourned for naught...
So why... Why did it have to end!?

Temperamental Spirit: The Final Days taught us to fear a death forced upon us.
The injustice of duties and dreams left unfulfilled. The grief of unexpected partings...
Swift as darkness, cold as ash.
Such tragedy, yet no catharsis! Such truth, yet no consolation...

Adds a whole new layer to the Shadowbringers theme as well.

[Lauront]

Which I guess brings us to this (since I ran out of characters, lol):



A lot of people's arguments here seem to frame the situation as binary. Either the Ancients weren't doing a sufficiently bad thing and so Venat wasn't justified, or that they were and she was.

I think you're missing what actually predicates redheadturk's opinion, which is the idea that both can be wrong at the same time. Even if the Ancients were about to overrule the agency of a bunch of innocent beings, that doesn't per-se make an action to prevent this morally justifiable if it also involves the same evil, which it implicitly does - obviously not every Ancient on the planet would have had a say in the conflict at all. What about the children? What about the ones living far away in the New World, who are referenced in Amaurot? Or hell, even for the ones who did want to do the sacrifice, is it acceptable match violence with violence at such a scale?

To bring it back to the real world, very few people would find destroying modern society an acceptable answer to its inherent evils. Overturning an established order, even for the better, often has a cost in suffering even greater than the problem it hopes to resolve. You can't boil it down to just saying, 'it's doing something wrong, so it must be stopped'.

My point in making the post wasn't that the Ancient's sacrifices were morally good or acceptable, but rather that they were morally banal in a manner that's a far cry from Lyth's assessment of them as a culture anyone should understand as twisted. It is extremely normal for humans to prioritize human life at the expense of all other forms, sapient (dolphins, great apes, elephants, some birds) or otherwise. While they might be correct that not many people would directly slit the throat of a dolphin, my guess is that most would press an abstracted dolphin-killing button to cure their child of cancer.

That you bring up the Amazon is interesting because, well, we are 'burning it down', and not even to save lives, but just because it's useful in keeping the wheels of our industrial complex turning and preserving our current lifestyles. All over the world, real-world mankind is essentially doing the most extreme interpretation of what the Ancient's planned - killing the entire biosphere, intelligent and unintelligent life alike - for a much more flippant reason.

I think we can probably agree this is not a good thing, but with that said, would you be comfortable with having our whole civilization destroyed to put a stop to it? In the real world, how much effort and sacrifice do you, personally, put into trying to put a stop to it?

I think people are very hasty to judge the Ancients as an entire people for an action that is ultimately pretty unexceptional, wrong or otherwise.

Well put, I would say this is more or less my take on it as well. Both in terms of "what was it" (because even we as humans do not rank all living beings as equal to us, with arguments to do so only convincing a few and requiring the acceptance of particular moral frameworks, themselves contentious) and "still not good enough to justify wiping them and everything else on the star out". IMO the sentiments of the ancients inside Zodiark were probably a factor in why this was initially divisive (i.e. would they approve of this), but bearing in mind that being inside Zodiark was like a limbo that did not allow for return to the star, that could explain the emotional push to do it. Elidibus emerged from Zodiark to mediate the dispute so it's entirely possible he could've given an account of this. I'm of the view that if they had been given a full account of what could happen to them, with actual evidence to probe, they could've re-evaluated this stage, and either left release of the ancients until Zodiark was longer needed, or at least adapted their plans in other ways to avoid the fate of the Plenty. For the time being it is all very vague and EW did not really touch on the topic of these sacrifices.

Also you can circumvent character limits by posting an initial post and then editing it.

[Cleretic]

Speaking of which. Are we to expect a surge of babies with incredibly strong souls?

Probably, but... also it's not really clear what that would do for a regular person. Emet-Selch had a near limitless reserve of aether, enough to make all of Fake Amaurot, but he could do that because he knew the skillset that would allow that.

For modern people, that might be akin to giving a random selection of modern cars infinite fuel. While it would certainly have some bonuses, cars just aren't designed to make the most of what infinite fuel could mean, so it wouldn't amount to much more than making gas prices weird. The 'hypersouled' people would be similar; they lack some constraints that various techniques in their world were designed around, but because those techniques were designed around those constraints they can't exactly just immediately strike out as superheroes.