What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[PawPaw]

PawPaw, I thought your post was great and I completely agreed with it. ;_;

OK, as long it's not getting too dark, I managed to find it again by hitting "Back" a couple of times, lol, so I'll repost it.

Count me in for not being interested in 'the Ancients were doomed no matter what' narrative.

At the risk of sounding emo, of course the Ancients were doomed, in the same way that we are all doomed. Everything comes to an end eventually and fighting against that inevitability is folly. I mean, the sundered of Eitherys are much more likely to self-destruct than the Ancients were. Which is why building this entire narrative around "But, the Ancients could eventually have gone the way of the PLENTY (!!!) and that's why she had to kill them!!" is such a bad argument. So? Of course their world would end one day. Nothing lasts forever and who knows, maybe at some point hundreds of thousands of years into the future, that would indeed be their fate. But that would be their collective fate to make. No one person should have the power to dictate the hows and whys of that end. They should not have been doomed to die in confusion because they simply didn't know what was killing them while the one person who did stayed quiet.

This whole spot of genocide has only delayed the inevitable anyway. History has shown us that if there's one thing the sundered of Eitherys love doing it's finding new ways of blowing each other up; and just think, when they inevitably manage it, they can take out 6 other worlds with them all at once! the Ancients only had the one, the lightweights.

[PawPaw]

The idea that Venat was so petrified of a distant possibility for a stagnant future to the point of annihilating the planet feels so strange when in conjunction with the rest of the messaging of the expansion, which usually comes down to "we know that we're ultimately doomed, but we will do our best to live and find small joys, offering what kindness we can to others, anyway." "Avoiding the Plenty" is not and never will be something that can be done permanently, or with a huge, dramatic, terrible step like the Sundering. It's something you deal with day by day, every day, as a perpetual grind, talking and caring for individual people.

I always thought that Yshtola facing down the Ea was sort of hilariously easily transplanted onto Venat's problem with the Ancients: the Ea point out that everything is doomed, and that by reaching for "too much" knowledge will reach the inevitable end point of nihilism and apathy. Y'shtola's reply is that she doesn't care, will keep pursuing knowledge anyway, and besides just because it happened to them doesn't mean she agrees with it. Just replace "knowledge" with "happiness" and "better standard of living", and, uh.

EXACTLY. I want to say more but I need sleep and I just wanted to chime in with how much I agree with this. The Ea were the first thing to come to my mind as well. It's all going to end someday but that doesn't mean that you lay down and die because that end is inevitable and possibly unpleasant. You don't give up on everyone and claim there couldn't possibly be a way forward.

[Rulakir]

I meant doomed in terms of if it hadn't been Hermes or Venat it would've been someone. Ironically, between the two of them (and depending on where Pandemonium goes) The Plenty is seeming like the best case scenario. :P

Venat merely kicked the can down the road and in the 8UC timeline her plan abysmally failed. The narrative tries to insist that the sundering was beneficial and the sundered are superior to the unsundered, yet never sufficiently makes that case. This is the problem with making everything revolve around the WoL. Had the WoL tripped and fallen off the edge of Ishgard it'd be game over for everyone, which is ridiculous.

[Skyborne]

I meant doomed in terms of if it hadn't been Hermes or Venat it would've been someone. Ironically, between the two of them (and depending on where Pandemonium goes) The Plenty is seeming like the best case scenario. :P

Venat merely kicked the can down the road and in the 8UC timeline her plan abysmally failed. The narrative tries to insist that the sundering was beneficial and the sundered are superior to the unsundered, yet never sufficiently makes that case. This is the problem with making everything revolve around the WoL. Had the WoL tripped and fallen off the edge of Ishgard it'd be game over for everyone, which is ridiculous.

The can got kicked, the reset button was hit, and they made sure to pile on the reasons (causal loop that Yoshi emphasized would never be broken ever; muh dynamis). I was doing a couple of the role quests and it was kind of funny how Aymeric made that speech about how the past should not be buried, and how Hien spoke about how the Domans could not move on past their grief without closure. The Ancients got denied on those fronts as well... in the end it was the WoL who gave them closure via freeing their souls from Zodiark to return to the star as they would've wanted.

And yeah... just par for the course for a story that revolves around The Chosen One. That's one thing I'm glad is over for now.

[andrealfus]

As a side note, going back to Hermes - when I, at least, say he seems "very human" to me and that I therefore I love him as a character, it's not a direct link from the source of his sadness and depression to "wanting to destroy the world." It's more of seeing a gradual, self-destructive pipeline, eroding gradually like poison, that I can connect with - the original valid starting point of sadness and concern, reinforcing those feelings by isolating himself and primarily interacting with someone who has no power to disagree with his perspective, the isolation leading to poisonous bitterness and contempt for the people around him, feeling like he has no freedom of expression for that bitter hatred that continues to grow within him (because he originally was too afraid to openly express his depression), and all of that leading to that messed up moment where, largely on impulse, he looked at the apocalypse bomb he accidentally created and in the heat of the moment said: "You know what? Go ahead."

It's less the direct motive, and more the psychological process that led him to an ugly, ugly place, that I enjoy in him as a character. I have also been to ugly places that aren't completely dissimilar while in the throes of depression, but I would like to think I do my best to avoid spiraling as badly as Hermes does.

i don't really agree with the angle that hermes (not amon) at any point wanted the destruction of the world. he was issuing a challenge to mankind where failure would result in their destruction, sure, but if the end of the world was his goal, he would've just bailed with meteion when she offered to take him, leaving the ancients with nobody who understood dynamis well enough to notice what was wrong and how to at least stall the inevitable by summoning zodiark. he didn't do that because he wanted mankind to successfully prove its worth in the face of impending doom, and he wanted to be a part of that effort himself

[Lauront]

Depending on whether Zodiark's shield lasted indefinitely or not, it would've been an effective death sentence. The only reason it didn't end up being one is Venat escaped the memory wipe - had his test been administered the way he wanted, no one would have. We know from the Watcher that even with his "expertise", they did not determine the cause of it to be dynamis-related. And he knew all of this would materialise because you had come to them from the future for aid, implying it was not known. Instead, they devised a solution that detected deficiencies in the celestial currents and reinforced them. A good solution, but not one based on the root cause. A good chunk of the WoL's success is down to strokes of luck, at the end of the day. Hermes's perspective is still a pretty demented one, IMO, whether he aimed for destruction or not.

EXACTLY. I want to say more but I need sleep and I just wanted to chime in with how much I agree with this. The Ea were the first thing to come to my mind as well. It's all going to end someday but that doesn't mean that you lay down and die because that end is inevitable and possibly unpleasant. You don't give up on everyone and claim there couldn't possibly be a way forward.

They have choices, as well. Either they can go down the routes of the first or second worlds, or down the route of the Plenty, given that they share many of the same ideals as the ancients. It all depends on which part of their natures prevails in the end.

(...or we could just admit these are caricature worlds in the end to force a point, and realistically they can think through the whole issue before committing to such a path... much as the ancients could have given the full account of what happened.)

And yeah... just par for the course for a story that revolves around The Chosen One. That's one thing I'm glad is over for now.

We're spared that fate, for a time at least, even as the Alphirant is still with us. We'll see how long this "adventurer" thing ends up lasting in practice.

[Erendis]

The Ancients got denied on those fronts as well... in the end it was the WoL who gave them closure via freeing their souls from Zodiark to return to the star as they would've wanted.

Fandaniel was the one who did it. More than likely WoL's side would've imprisoned Zodiark again.

[EaraGrace]

Yet, he clearly did manipulate dynamis as he is the one that created Metion so that is an obvious falsehood.

That also brings up a new question however...

If we were the only ones to be able to hear Metion and ancients can not readily be manipulated by dynamis... How then does her song of despair cause them any issue?

Seems to me like Hermes is not only an unreliable narrator, he hadn't fully thought things through and therefore is misunderstanding the power of dynamis. Though his entire plan wasn't thought out well, so I lean towards that theory as opposed to him knowingly lying in that scene.

I’m sorry but creating a being that can manipulate dynamis does not mean you can manipulate it. Venat couldn't manipulate dynamis because she Sundered the world and gave rise to beings that could after all.

For why it’s a problem here’s Hermes again.

I meant doomed in terms of if it hadn't been Hermes or Venat it would've been someone. Ironically, between the two of them (and depending on where Pandemonium goes) The Plenty is seeming like the best case scenario. :P

Venat merely kicked the can down the road and in the 8UC timeline her plan abysmally failed. The narrative tries to insist that the sundering was beneficial and the sundered are superior to the unsundered, yet never sufficiently makes that case. This is the problem with making everything revolve around the WoL. Had the WoL tripped and fallen off the edge of Ishgard it'd be game over for everyone, which is ridiculous.

She wasn’t just relying on the WoL though.

Hydaelyn: Long have I searched for a means to safeguard this star.

Hydaelyn: Though I knew failure after failure, by recalling thy tales - and my promise to thee - I found the strength to carry on.

While making everything about the WoL was clearly a writing decision, in universe there’s no reason to believe that any alternative plan would yield victory.

[Theodric]

I'd say there's plenty of in universe reasons to believe that an alternative plan would have been viable by virtue of Venat deliberately going out of her way to avoid informing the Ancients of what was coming. Had they been made aware of the impending arrival of the Final Days as well as Meteion's existence then there's ample reason to believe that they would have fought tooth and nail in order to survive.

The game also makes it pretty clear that the Sundered aren't going to just roll over and die whenever they're faced with a seemingly unstoppable force so there's no reason to assume that the Ancients 'needed' to just allow themselves to be subjected to genocide at the behest of a pair of deluded nutters in the form of Hermes and Venat.

To say nothing of the simple fact that the writers themselves have remained cautious to word things in such a way as for Venat's belief of the Ancient's supposed 'dead end' to be just that - a belief rather than a certainty.

All of which has, of course, been outlined and pointed out a great many times throughout this thread by this point.

[KageTokage]

We're spared that fate, for a time at least, even as the Alphirant is still with us. We'll see how long this "adventurer" thing ends up lasting in practice.

I'm leaning towards 6.1 being "confusing" by Yoshi's definition in that literally nothing bad is going to happen and we'll actually get to go do some casual adventuring without some kind of problem big or small warranting our presence...though it's probably going to end on an ominous cliffhanger regardless given suggestions that 6.x is going to have a proper Endwalker-related story arc of some sort, which I further suspect is going to involve a certain clingy individual who can't seem to stay out of our hair whether just in body alone or soul as well.

I am a little curious who our trusts are going to be if all the Scions are off doing their own thing, too.