Quote Originally Posted by KizuyaKatogami View Post
People bash the ancients for them treating us like a kid, meanwhile yshtola is in her little baby voice treating the nixies like children, many players treat their carbuncles like babies.
People bashed the Ancients for treating us like children because the fact remains that we aren't a child and we aren't a familiar. Familiars to both the Ancients and Sharlayans are nothing more than magical tools and the Ancients are shocked that we want to learn things. Before the revelation of our origin, Hythlodeus knows better to a small extent since he can at least see our soul, has interactions with us, and so has nothing but respect for us, but the other researchers in Elpis don't know any better. Personally, I didn't mind how the Ancients treated me at all since they didn't know better and it doesn't mean anything to me. I can see how that would make some people upset but I just treated it like a weird quirky thing that comes with going to the realm of the Ancients as a Sundered being and 99.9% of the Ancients having no concept of a Sundered being at all for obvious reasons. That way the writers could also introduce a lot of information via exposition in a more natural way since our character is "just some dumb familiar that doesn't know anything".

The nixies meanwhile are literally birthed into creation by Y'shtola and have child-like manner of speech and she also first made them when she was a child so I don't see why she wouldn't baby them. It's funny you bring up carbuncles because they are also familiars like the nixies. Carbuncles are aether in gemstones given form, the form being a cute little pet thing. How is Y'shtola creating nixies, sending them into the Void, and then dismissing them any different than when every arcanist in the game summons a carbuncle, sends them into combat, and then dismisses them? The text of the game specifically describes the carbuncles as familiars.


A lot of the people of the Source are terrible people and don't know about souls in animals/monsters or just don't care. No one said they were OK to do that. But there's no big to do about it either because the whole thing about Halitali happened back in ARR when this game was just a bunch of JRPG nonsense and wasn't any deeper than that.


The Eden Primals also are primals, beings made up of aether who crave power. It doesn't matter if they consented to be destroyed or not, but they were still created on purpose to be destroyed and have their aether dispersed out into the land to heal it. The developers obviously wanted an excuse to have redone primal fights, and this is a game about fighting things and it's not Undertale where we have any sort of option to befriend our enemies and neither was it made as a morality tale. The lore exists as a setting for the story and a backdrop for us doing scripted fights ad nauseam. So the story was probably written there as an excuse for the fights they had designed and they didn't think about the morality of it because it didn't matter at the time and they didn't think people would come back two years later and call it problematic.

There is also that researcher in Elpis who summons creations to have us kill them so he can study how they fight. Is that any better? Is that any worse? The game doesn't tell us. We're presented the facts but the only character in the whole game who treats any of this as being bad is Hermes, who also happens to be the worst character in the game.

Some people probably think the Ancients were 100% horrible terrible people and Y'shtola is 100% a pure princess and while I think they're wrong and there's more nuance to that (except maybe for Y'shtola, who as a character doesn't have the same presence as most of the rest of the cast), that's their own weird opinion and I won't say anything about it unless they come to the forums presenting their bias as objective truth. Just like how I think the idea that people's opinions of the Ancients are somehow the writers' problems is goofy. You already failed to prove that the WoL themself is shocked at butterflies and that no one cared for the nixies in the game and now you're trying to move the goalposts. It feels like you and a bunch of other people have this really weird thing about the Ancients and that everyone else who doesn't believe they are the best thing in the game are bad people.

To me, this doesn't matter because the game itself doesn't present the Ancients outright as bad people and even if they were, the game has put familiars including carbuncles, nixies, and porxies in a wholly separate category than the intent for the creations at Elpis. Anyone who made the connection between what the Ancients were doing at Elpis to Y'shtola sending familiars to the Void and then from there thinks there was a double-standard in how they were presented is either specifically trying to make themselves upset at the game or is just looking for a fight.