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

[anhaato]

(1/2)

I know the answer is "because they were gonna die anyway," but in the writers' quest to make the Ancients jUsT LiKe uS in order to make us sympathize with the Ascians, they failed to give us the impression that they were a doomed society. They drove it in so hard that they made them look like a people who deserved and were denied a chance to survive. Listen, I spent several posts talking about how I know what the devs intended, so I'm not going to go as far as calling this purposeful genocide apologism, but by god, they're just SO BAD at writing gray morality. Everything has to be GOOD or BAD, and they're so stuck in this mindset that when it came time to actually flesh out Ancient society they had no idea how to make them look both good and bad. What we got was a society that just looked and interacted a lot like ours but with each person being more magically powerful, and some dude and his bird who got angsty and went school shooter on them. And then, when Venat made her decision, they had no idea how to portray it as the morally objectionable action it really was. Instead of focusing on the lives and societies SHE sacrificed in doing so, they made it look like all of the repercussions were solely on her own being. And let's not forget how many years they spent trying to set Hydaelyn up as a shady figure! Everything she had been doing up through Heavensward was starting to get darker and darker, down to literally stealing Minfilia from us and turning her into a mouthpiece. But when it came time to make Hydaelyn her own character, what did the devs do? Retcon EVERYTHING that had been setup and make her pure good. It just doesn't work.

Until we see how things actually happen, WITHOUT us being present, maybe then they'll be able to justify the sundering, but I highly doubt we'll ever get now that they're keen to move on from this storyline entirely. And you know what? I'm actually ok with that. I hope they never again approach this level of moral dilemma and this many lives hanging in the balance of whatever is going on. They've proven extensively that they can't handle it.