In regards to something involving the main cast

[KizuyaKatogami]

So there’s been a lot of mention recently and just overall with certain story elements in ShB and EW where there seems to be a lot of examples where, something is okay for the protagonists to do, but when the antagonists or anyone else does it, it’s deemed as scary or bad or evil. This became especially prevalent in Endwalker with the Elpis quests and main story quest, where you have things like the WoL being shocked at killing some butterflies.

Now i’m curious, why is this the case, and why is our character shown to be so adamant and shocked over this, and people are quick to bash the Ancients for being “reckless” with creations etc, meanwhile in this very patch Yshtola summons some familiars to send to the void that will be killed. Yet afaik our character says nothing, expresses no shock or concern. Is this yet another example of it’s okay when “we” do it but not anyone else? What does everyone else thing about this?

[aveyond-dreams]

Because Y'shtola is the game's poster girl. Remember, there are people who remained fans of WoW's "dark ranger" even when she burnt the Night Elf treehouse to the ground. Y'shtola and Sylvanas are both beyond criticism.

[MikkoAkure]

I don’t think it matters and I’m not sure why you’re trying to stir the pot. As a leathercrafter, you can make pants out of a bunch of sheep you personally slaughtered.

For that same reason, I didn’t see the killing of butterflies to make a cloak being framed as “evil”, it’s just that they were pretty little things fluttering around and the idea of harvesting them for their aether to make clothes wasn’t something our character had any sort of context for. Typically the things we’re told to put down are ugly, dangerous beasts and this whole scene was probably created to show us that the frame of mind of the Ancients is that they’re more analytical and pragmatic and that set the stage for Hermes.

The whole thing with the Ancient creations being “bad” is because some would get souls and some of the Ancients were just making things that they felt like and killing them and starting over if there were flaws and only cared about perfection. Hermes got upset at that and like all fictional worlds, no one talks to each other about things and there are no therapists, so he decided to end the world.

I felt bad for the familiars that got sent to the Void, but we also witnessed them being formed into existence out of nothingness and they have no actual souls. It’s not like Y’shtola dismisses them as simple tools either, she softly says “rest now, little ones”, as she disperses their aether.

[Tehmon]

What I don't get is that why such a powerful race of creation magic experts would need to unmake creations to create their garments. That... seems kind of unnecessary.

[MikkoAkure]

What I don't get is that why such a powerful race of creation magic experts would need to unmake creations to create their garments. That... seems kind of unnecessary.

IIRC, the idea was that you still can’t make something from nothing and they needed their aether. The butterflies just happened to be plentiful and close by. Y’shtola likewise has you gather materials for the Nixies. I’m sure as powerful beings, the Ancients could have used ambient aether just to make some clothes but then we would lose the narrative point for that scene to have happened.

This is still a story and just like the law of conservation of energy, there is the law of the conservation of detail and you don’t generally have stuff happen in a story unless it serves a narrative purpose.

[Tehmon]

IIRC, the idea was that you still can’t make something from nothing and they needed their aether. The butterflies just happened to be plentiful and close by. Y’shtola likewise has you gather materials for the Nixies. I’m sure as powerful beings, the Ancients could have used ambient aether just to make some clothes but then we would lose the narrative point for that scene to have happened.

This is still a story and just like the law of conservation of energy, there is the law of the conservation of detail and you don’t generally have stuff happen in a story unless it serves a narrative purpose.

I know, it just wasn't perhaps the best way to showcase the narrative they were going for, as people don't generally give a damn about bugs. Now, if they had us kill cats and dogs...

[KizuyaKatogami]

I don’t think it matters and I’m not sure why you’re trying to stir the pot. As a leathercrafter, you can make pants out of a bunch of sheep you personally slaughtered.

For that same reason, I didn’t see the killing of butterflies to make a cloak being framed as “evil”, it’s just that they were pretty little things fluttering around and the idea of harvesting them for their aether to make clothes wasn’t something our character had any sort of context for. Typically the things we’re told to put down are ugly, dangerous beasts and this whole scene was probably created to show us that the frame of mind of the Ancients is that they’re more analytical and pragmatic and that set the stage for Hermes.

The whole thing with the Ancient creations being “bad” is because some would get souls and some of the Ancients were just making things that they felt like and killing them and starting over if there were flaws and only cared about perfection. Hermes got upset at that and like all fictional worlds, no one talks to each other about things and there are no therapists, so he decided to end the world.

I felt bad for the familiars that got sent to the Void, but we also witnessed them being formed into existence out of nothingness and they have no actual souls. It’s not like Y’shtola dismisses them as simple tools either, she softly says “rest now, little ones”, as she disperses their aether.

Trying to stir the pot? So what i’m not allowed to ask questions now? Way to try and gatekeep conversation Mikko, extremely disappointing.Just because it doesn’t matter to you doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter to others. It matters to me because it affects the story being told, if something is painted as bad or wrong but then it’s depicted that it’s okay for the main cast to do it, that’s a contradiction and a double standard that affects the story for some people, myself included. So i’d really rather you not try and denote my post to “why does it matter” or “attempting to stir the pot.” If it bothers you ignore the thread. I’m tired of you coming into my threads just to be passive aggressive and try and halt my ideas. As for yshtola’s comment, i don’t see how that’s any different from the literal funeral rites the ancients held for unmade creations.


The animal thing was just one example, but there’s numerous other ones, mainly revolved around the whole “move on” theme and aspect of the story. How do we know the familiars we summon don’t get souls? Since it’s the planet/lifestream that dictates that. Look at Alpha in the omega questline for example. Any of the creations we summon could gain a soul and we may not even know it, and kill them regardless. Look at the eden primals. Summoned purely so we could kill them.

[MikkoAkure]

Snip.

I dismissed the premise of your thread because in my view, the scene you’re referencing with the cloak wasn’t framed as “scary, bad, or evil” to begin with and it felt like a weak excuse to complain about the Scions again and insinuate that the writers hate the Ancients. The current writers are the ones who created the Ancients and most of the Garleans so I don’t think they have any sort of agenda against their own characters. They might suck at explaining stuff a lot of the time and often connect the dots in clumsy ways, but I don’t think there’s a nefarious double-standard going on and I don’t feel like they were trying to demonize the Ancients while making Y’shtola get away with murder.

As I said in my reply, the context of the Elpis scene to me was to establish the Ancients as pragmatic since they viewed the butterflies as a simple source of aether they can use for an example of creation magic. This is meant to contrast with Hermes’ behavior later on so we have a reference for his actions. There’s nothing inherently “bad” about it, it’s just that they have a different point of view of things than we do. If the writers really wanted you to think the Ancients are bad for turning butterflies into clothing then we would have sided with Hermes and he wouldn’t have become the source of everything bad that ever happens in the game.

As for your other points, literally everyone in Elpis treats your WoL as a “familiar with a soul” as a novelty, so it can be assumed that familiars generally don’t possess souls. The creations at Elpis are not made to be familiars, they were created to be genuine life that becomes part of the Star’s cycle and that is part of why they are being tested so throughly at Elpis since those who succeed are expected to breed naturally, live life, and possess souls.

[Iscah]

What I don't get is that why such a powerful race of creation magic experts would need to unmake creations to create their garments. That... seems kind of unnecessary.

If it needs a justification, Hyth says a few times that he struggles with magic, so maybe he needs to draw the extra aether from the butterflies while Emet could conjure it spontaneously (but wants nothing to do with us at that point).

If you read through the dialogue for the relevant quest, there isn't really any concern for the lives of the butterflies. Our two reactions are an ambiguous "you can turn them into clothing just like that?" which might be read as being concerned for them but also sheer surprise at being able to create something from an unrelated substance. The other response is "won't someone be angry with us for taking them?" which suggests we view the act on par with ripping plants out of the garden or, at worst, taking animals from a zoo. The concern is for the people who might "own" the butterflies rather than the creatures themselves.

[Cleretic]

From my perspective, it's less about what you did and more the approach to how you did it.

Hythlodaeus making the robes out of butterflies is a great example, because Leatherworker's story actually makes it pretty clear that they teach a deep respect for the animals you're getting the leather from; this is both in the actual teaching from the guildmaster, and later becomes a huge tentpole of the Stormblood storyline where you're doing taxidermy. Meanwhile, Hythlodaeus' response when you ask about that is, as others said, purely pragmatic; he doesn't really pay any mind to the life he asked you to snuff out for clothes, he thinks that there's no issues whatsoever with it. And this is Hythlodaeus we're talking about, perhaps the nicest and most considerate person in the Ancient world. If even he doesn't give a damn about the lives of animals, what does that say about the overall population's outlook on the same?

For the other example the OP gave with Y'shtola's familiars, I think the importance is more in how she reacts afterwards than how she acts at the time; she clearly actually does care about the nixies and feels terrible about the one she had to put in harm's way, even if she does put up her usual unflappable facade. It's completely different to the Ancients just watching their creations die and going 'welp, that didn't work, lesson learned'. Also I think the familiars might actually be extensions of her aether in the same way carbuncles are, going by how she dismissed them, so it might be less of a 'test these with animals' and more akin to 'I'm gonna stick my hand in there'.

I think boiling down deeds into purely 'heroic character did X, villainous character did X too, these are equal' is completely dismissing context, that the heroic characters both treat those around them better and typically have a benevolent (or at least neutral) end goal in mind. I've seen the same thing from people trying to argue that the WoL is an indiscriminate murderer because they killed members of beast tribes, in which they usually completely ignore the context of ongoing conflicts, imposing primal threats, or the at-the-time impossibility of curing tempering. 'A lost life is always a lost life' is a perfectly noble blanket thing to claim, but saying that the WoL killing a violent, tempered sahagin is cold-blooded murder on the level of the Ascians sacrificing planets' worth of people is disingenuous.