When are we supposed to stop fighting?

[Lyth]

If Zodiark was able to be powered through assorted organic matter, why didn't the Amaurotians feed Him an equivalent amount of shrubbery and small animals in the first place to achieve their goals, rather than sacrificing themselves to do it? It also raises some interesting philosophical questions with the Ea and their discovery of the second law of thermodynamics. If Zodiark doesn't operate on a law of equivalent exchange, then the Ancients have effectively created a perpetual motion machine and proven the Ea wrong. Sacrifice 5 Amaurotian souls for energy, activate miracle of your choosing, and then sacrifice 5 shrubs to return the Amaurotian souls from the graveyard back to your hand. Wish for more shrubs when you run out. Repeat endlessly until all your wishes are fulfilled and you win the game. Sounds like an idea for a blue/black deck design. I'd be on board with that plan if it were so simple, except that it would make for a boring story.

I remember an interesting discussion with Veloran a couple of months ago about Sanderson's laws as they relate to magic systems. A lot of what the Ancients do with Creation magic is, at present, soft magic. One of the critical insights from the lecture was that it's important to have a victory condition established in advance. Even with soft systems, you can't just snap your fingers and solve the problem for free, or else you've simply sidestepped the conflict.

This is also part of the reason why Shadowbringers outlines the centuries of hard work, cooperation, and sacrifice involved in allowing G'raha to alter the past, and even then it was off by a few centuries. That's also presumably why the Alexander storyline emphasized that Alexander consumed large amounts of energy with every time leap and would have drained the planet dry had it not sealed itself off into a single timeless instant. If time travel ever becomes so simple and trivial that you can alter past events without effort and consequence, then we can arbitrarily go back at our leisure and undo any event that we don't like. Character deaths are meaningless because we know that we can always go back in time and resurrect them at will. As attached as you may be to the people on Elpis, it's really not good for the future direction of the story, and the writers would do well to not cave into that.

[redheadturk]

Since the language surrounding the "new life" implies it was in its infancy, could the issue have been that the Ancients were essentially going to have to raise the new life themselves before it could be sacrificed? I mean, if someone handed me a box of kittens and said care for them until they're adults and then they'll be offered to Zodiark I couldn't do it.

If it meant I could have my loved ones back? I damn well could. My family ranks higher to me than a box of kittens.

[SannaR]

I still am of the mindset that Azem went to seek a third option that would eliminate the need both for Zodiark's summoning and the Sundering. Which would very much imply Venat did not tell them either, as the recordings in Anyder suggest.

That is what I've wanted to believe ever since we learned that Azem didn't want to be part of either summoning. Yet the stuff with what Elidibus says to us at the start of Pandaemonium makes it come off that either they had future sight like Mikoto does or a former Azem told an Azem something along the lines of "Hey, you're going to have to say no to the Zodiark plan and to my Hydelean plan. Don't ask me why." Maybe they went to try and find out why the aether was drying up in places as even though we know that's not exactly what caused the Final Days that's what everyone else thought. I'm still confused about the sound that came from the earth since why would that happen if the song is coming from the outside? Unless the song targets a planet's core/sea and works from the inside out. Cause right now Azem's actions or lack of action comes off as the worst.

[SannaR]

If it meant I could have my loved ones back? I damn well could. My family ranks higher to me than a box of kittens.

Kittens that you spent time raising though? Could you say for certain that you wouldn't develop an attachment to them? Even kids raised on farms where the animals they raise end up becoming breakfast occasionally end up becoming too attached to the pig they watched grow. Even if said child knows what happens or has been fine with it in the past.

[redheadturk]

Kittens that you spent time raising though? Could you say for certain that you wouldn't develop an attachment to them? Even kids raised on farms where the animals they raise end up becoming breakfast occasionally end up becoming too attached to the pig they watched grow. Even if said child knows what happens or has been fine with it in the past.

Even then, My family is my family.

[Veloran]

If Zodiark was able to be powered through assorted organic matter, why didn't the Amaurotians feed Him an equivalent amount of shrubbery and small animals in the first place to achieve their goals, rather than sacrificing themselves to do it?

All life on the planet was 99% wiped out by then. This was the point of the second sacrifice. Maybe if they knew about it in advance this could have been avoided.

If time travel ever becomes so simple and trivial that you can alter past events without effort and consequence, then we can arbitrarily go back at our leisure and undo any event that we don't like. Character deaths are meaningless because we know that we can always go back in time and resurrect them at will. As attached as you may be to the people on Elpis, it's really not good for the future direction of the story, and the writers would do well to not cave into that.

That is currently what we're doing with Pandemonium though. Except rather than time traveling to save people, we're time traveling to solve a problem that either they could have solved then or we could have solved now, all while working alongside people that are living with a guillotine above their heads that we're basically just ignoring.

Surely I can't be the only one extremely uncomfortable with the fact that we're still doing side content in Elpis despite knowing everyone and everything there is going to get dunked soon anyway, right? It's like if you were doing the Nier raids before even starting the Shadowbringers MSQ.

[KageTokage]

they had future sight like Mikoto does

I'm inclined to believe that the former manifestation of the Echo was just a Matsuno-created plot device (And an extremely inconsequential and useless one at that) they'd rather pretend never existed because if there were people who had absolute premonitions that were certain to happen back in the time of the Ancients, it feels extremely unlikely the Final Days would've caught them off guard as badly as it did even without Venat telling them anything; moreso with the implication that the Ancients could actively control the Echo as opposed to it just happening spontaneously.

When I think about it though, even the vague premonitions of the world's end we were getting in Endwalker are not in line what we've experienced prior and makes me question if the Echo is perhaps linked to the Lifestream and/or Etheriys itself somehow given that we never experienced those visions until an existential threat was looming on the horizon. The implications of a coming Lifestream-related disaster as per the Golden Dhyata's prophecy makes me feel like unraveling deeper secrets of the world is going to be a huge factor in the next story arc.

[Jandor]

Also we're not talking about the Garleans or Emet-Selch right now, why does the fact that in unrelated conversations some third parties said things about Garleans/Emet-Selch have any bearing on how this conversation is conducted?

It wasn't even that prevalent. You'd think every other thread was derailed with it with how often it's brought up these days.

[SannaR]

If you read what i said, based on Hythlo's dialogue, after the 3rd sacrifice they would return to their duties of stewarding the star. Yes we know both the 1st and 2nd set were done voluntarily. My point isnt so much post zodiark as it is prior. She had the knowledge of everything prior to the final days. Emer has to do his duty whether he believes her or not, we see this with our claim, he thinks its crazy but he still has to investigate. He also knows though, that he was mind wiped. Its as simple as her saying hey, this is why you were mind wiped, this is what happened etc.

My point about ironworks was its the same situation as the ancients. They didnt know if their plan would succeed, however they did understand that messing with time could have the side effect of erasing them all and killing everyone in that timeline, but they went along with it anyway. They were willing to sacrifice every single person in that timeline to bring back the wol and reverse the calamity brought unto them. Thats my point.

What does going back to being the stewards of the star mean though? Does it mean going OK folks we've been saved from w/e that was by Zodiark time to just pretend it didn't happen. Let's ignore that we found out that a few of the currents that are needed for life to do its thing had thinned out. Or do they go huh maybe we should make sure we're safe. Cause even if Azem wasn't on board we still should take a look at that and make sure our math was correct.

Emet still could have listened and still went so why did you decide to say screw the test? He didn't exactly deal with the loss of either friend. Heck even after the sundering I wonder why they didn't try and get some form of answer. As that would have been the best next time. From the Watcher's records at least the ones we were able to read they never asked them or try to understand why she kept Zodiark whole. Yes, it would have been great pre-sundering if more people could have been told what was really going down. Or that she thought saying screw Herme's and his test even post Zodiark was an option. Running away seems to have always been plan B, but the gain enough resolve and the know how to fight Meteion was always plan A.

Just because she didn't tell anyone there's a collective of murdery through despair birds that need to be dealt with doesn't mean people wouldn't have chosen the run away option. It's like how Le' Cie work in XIII. They get told oh hey this is your mission so go do that. If you don't you'll turn into a mindless monster that goes around killing everything. Only on a rare occasion did a Le'Cie say screw my mission I'm not going to do it cause it goes against my principles and not end up being a mindless monster killing everything.

[Lyth]

...

That doesn't address the underlying problem that I posed. If Zodiark doesn't obey a law of equivalent exchange, then there is no 'sacrifice'. We can endlessly generate wishes for free in a recursive loop. The Ea were wrong. Zodiark is a perpetual motion machine of the first kind. And as you so kindly pointed out previously, that type of magic system where you can just snap your fingers and wish your problems away without a net consequence makes for very unsatisfying storytelling. You sidestep the conflict.

I'll judge Pandaemonium as a whole when it's complete. At this point, all we have are character introductions, and we really don't know what's at stake if we 'fail'. We don't even know what Lahabrea's motivations at this point are. Is he a workaholic scientist with no regard for his wife's death? Is he deeply sentimental and trying to bring his wife back from the dead by fusing her soul with his creations? How does any of this relate to the Final Days? What exactly does Themis intend to accomplish, and why was he and Azem expecting your arrival? Writing about time travel is always a risky move in storytelling, but you can't judge its execution without having any indication on how it will play out.