*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[KizuyaKatogami]

No it didn't. All she knew is that they did, that doesn't mean she didn't try to stop them The whole making warriors of light to fight against the forces of darkness throughout the ages is more than enough proof. She explained why she didn't speak to the 14, you also have zero proof that she didn't do anything during the final days. You can just say you don't like the character, making stuff up to justify your dislike ain't it.

Lmao. We literally have a montage of her walking and doing nothing during the final days. Yes, she mad warriors, because we told her thats what happened. Again, everything needed to happen exactly how it did. Im not making anything up you are, go back and replay Ew instead of spouting nonsense and headcanon.

[Rulakir]

He's claiming that his way will cause the greatest amount of happiness and the least amount of suffering in the long run.

I don't know what to tell you if your takeaway from Elpis was that the unsundered were significantly worse off than the sundered. Matter of fact, we're rather explicitly shown that their primary issue is lack of inspiration, which certainly seems the preferable existence to one that still involves war, homelessness, sex trafficking, etc.

Emet also never said they didn't have problems, only that their differences were insignificant next to all they had in common. Were they as perfect as you claim he presented them as there would be no need for the seat of Elidibus. Plus, he's not wrong. As said in the NieR crossover, "Their pitiable lives are fleeting. In the simplest of ways, they die and die." The Ancients "lived nigh for eternity", so from that perspective it is providing "the greatest amount of happiness and the least amount of suffering in the long run".

[Alleo]

You're laboring under the assumption that she just stood by and let the aciasns run wild. Pretty sure there have been warriors of light throughout the ages. That very fact goes against your assumption. She tried and failed to stop them.

Especially since we probably did not tell her every little detail when we told them our story. (After all we dont have all the information ourselves) So the most she might have known would be the amount of calamites but not necessarily when they happened.

Which means that she could not sit by because she does not know if that would be a calamity that did happen or if it would change the future.

Lmao. We literally have a montage of her walking and doing nothing during the final days. Yes, she mad warriors, because we told her thats what happened. Again, everything needed to happen exactly how it did. Im not making anything up you are, go back and replay Ew instead of spouting nonsense and headcanon.

And in that very same montage Hythlodaeus casually walked away from Emet while people got eaten left and right. Hermes stands around looking at the sky too while everything burns around him. We know from the story that Zodiark stopped the final days with the first sacrifices and then after getting another round of Ancients he restored the planet. Yet in that very montage we have Venat talking to the Ancients while the world is not only still burning around them but you can even see the final boss of the Amaurot dungeon still flying around. And we know from Shadowbringer that Zodiark and Hydealyn fought before she bascially sundered him and thus the star.

What she talked about was important. Showing that she had tried to talk them out of it but failed to do so.

So tell me then: How did we know every detail necessary to exactly tell her about every single calamity that happened? After all for her to let everything happen as you said she would need to know every bit of information.

[NekoMataMata]

I don't know what to tell you if your takeaway from Elpis was that the unsundered were significantly worse off than the sundered. Matter of fact, we're rather explicitly shown that their primary issue is lack of inspiration, which certainly seems the preferable existence to one that still involves war, homelessness, sex trafficking, etc.

Emet also never said they didn't have problems, only that their differences were insignificant next to all they had in common. Were they as perfect as you claim he presented them as there would be no need for the seat of Elidibus. Plus, he's not wrong. As said in the NieR crossover, "Their pitiable lives are fleeting. In the simplest of ways, they die and die." The Ancients "lived nigh for eternity", so from that perspective it is providing "the greatest amount of happiness and the least amount of suffering in the long run".

That definitely wasn't my take away and I wish you wouldn't be so rude and assuming.

And while it's unfortunate, you clearly need reminding that Elpis is only a portion of the ancient's civilization. My take away from watching Hermes wasn't that they were worse off. It was that they too had problems, that they too had issues to deal with. Watching Hermes struggle with grasping the meaning of life, with him struggling at the thought of his predecessor choosing to pass on to the star made me wonder how many other ancients were struggling in their own ways. It might not have been quite as awful as the struggles that exist in the sundered shards and source, but to me it's significant because that's his claim for denying the sundered peoples their existence.

If even the tiniest of flaws was enough to deny someone life, then no one sundered or unsundered would be deserving. The ancients did not deserve what happened to them but that did not give them any right to take it out on the new life that had taken hold after the sundering.

[Absimiliard]

So tell me then: How did we know every detail necessary to exactly tell her about every single calamity that happened? After all for her to let everything happen as you said she would need to know every bit of information.

The Warrior of Light is explicitly shown to be an exceptionally well-learned and traveled individual, and an excellent storyteller to boot. While it is impossible for the WoL to have known everything, there is a significant amount of information they come across over the course of the game's story. The WoL does understand the mechanics and requirements behind Calamities and Rejoinings by the time you go to Elpis. While you are correct in assuming they wouldn't know every Calamity down to the detail, they would have a very good general idea of when the (by their perception) most recent ones took place as well as which element each required the scales tip toward.

Factor in everything else the WoL knew by that point, and Venat is suddenly rather well forewarned as to things to come. If nothing else, it's plenty enough information for her to recognize signs of Ascian BS and thus be able to take action preemptively when they're setting the stage for a Calamity.

What I wonder isn't even about Calamities and the like. What I'm curious about is if the WoL bothered to tell her about all the non-Ascian-related suffering, sorrow, and death people from their time endure on the regular. Her seeming hard lean into "suffering is good" leads me to rather strongly suspect this was indeed amongst the information passed along, though I don't think Venat knew just how bad it was going to be until she saw it with her own eyes. Even the best of storytellers cannot convey such misery with words, after all. Only by seeing, if not experiencing, can one truly grasp the scope of sorrows inflicted by mortality and its frailties.

[Lauront]

Regarding Venat, she does not need to know every specific detail. She just needs to know that the Ascians need to complete a total of seven rejoinings (+1 failed, and 1 nearly there) for the present timeline, and that this is what she needs to work towards, assuming there was any doubt that the timelines would not converge - she does not take that for granted. I think this aspect requires a lot of suspension of disbelief, and the mechanism of time travel in 14 is very vague and I doubt even the writers have a clear view of it at this point - I'm reminded of the answer Yoshi gave to another question during the Q&A: "like I don’t know I don’t wanna think about it. It’s better not to think about it. So just feel, or vibe. Hear, feel, think…perhaps?"

I don't know what to tell you if your takeaway from Elpis was that the unsundered were significantly worse off than the sundered. Matter of fact, we're rather explicitly shown that their primary issue is lack of inspiration, which certainly seems the preferable existence to one that still involves war, homelessness, sex trafficking, etc.

Emet also never said they didn't have problems, only that their differences were insignificant next to all they had in common. Were they as perfect as you claim he presented them as there would be no need for the seat of Elidibus. Plus, he's not wrong. As said in the NieR crossover, "Their pitiable lives are fleeting. In the simplest of ways, they die and die." The Ancients "lived nigh for eternity", so from that perspective it is providing "the greatest amount of happiness and the least amount of suffering in the long run".

This is part of my dissatisfaction with this fixation with the writers' constant invocation of "perfection" as a term, as it invites rather either/or thinking (and I suspect they know as much), and it seems as though some would like for the ancients to fall into the "perfect" category so they can point at the Plenty and say "See! That's where they were headed!", even though as it's been pointed out, it is not a very good depiction of "perfection" so much as a bizarre caricature of it, with little but shallow visual parallels to the ancients; on the other hand, there is the strain of thinking that if they're imperfect in any sense, why even desire their return? For one, this isn't some 0 or 1 situation, but closer to a spectrum like 1-100, where in the eyes of an ancient who lived in their world, they might say sundered societies vary but generally fall somewhere on the 40-50 of the scale, while the world they knew was say at 80-90 - made up numbers to illustrate a point. I'm not even sure what the argument about this is really - the Elpis and Pandaemonium side quests, so far, paint them as near to idyllic, if not 100% there, with their own troubles - just not of the sort you'd find pervading the sundered world. They're not a bunch of unfeeling robots with infallible judgement, but that has little bearing on whether they're closer, relatively, to "perfection" than the sundered world.

Moreover, Alisaie claimed that the sundered would do the same in Emet's position, and alongside her brother and the others, even asserted the right of the sundered to exist in spite of their flaws, and against Emet's insistence to the contrary - granted, a big part of why he fights is because this was positioned as the ancients' existence being mutually incompatible with that of the sundered persisting. Even if one were to take the counterfactual position that Emet's nostalgia is completely the result of rose-tinted glasses (nevermind that Ishikawa has described their world as a paradise), they were his people and while they shared commonalities in some regards with the sundered, they're not the same - the fact that at the most the ancients see them as child-like beings should underscore this. No, they weren't "perfect" in the sense of unerring robots - so what? I can't say I'll ever understand the views of some in this community on the ancients, nor the strange fixation on themes of "hubris", or "sins" which also exist in sundered society (often to even greater degrees), which lapses into "rules for thee but not for me" or "it's okay when we do it" excuses as to why it isn't a problem if the sundered do it. They just don't make much sense to me and seem to stem from an unwillingness to realise that a somewhat alien race of beings will have different ways of thinking and feeling that do not thereby require that they're somehow constitutionally unfit to exist because of some vague concept of will to exist/the "right" attitude to despair, which is the worst possible message EW could try aim for, and repugnant to me on some level, especially insofar as some very long-lived, sophisticated species showcased in UT are concerned, which it just brushed over with the level of depth you might expect of caricatured beast tribes. The ancients are both somewhat alien, and yet not "scary" to me.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Especially since we probably did not tell her every little detail when we told them our story. (After all we dont have all the information ourselves) So the most she might have known would be the amount of calamites but not necessarily when they happened.

Which means that she could not sit by because she does not know if that would be a calamity that did happen or if it would change the future.



And in that very same montage Hythlodaeus casually walked away from Emet while people got eaten left and right. Hermes stands around looking at the sky too while everything burns around him. We know from the story that Zodiark stopped the final days with the first sacrifices and then after getting another round of Ancients he restored the planet. Yet in that very montage we have Venat talking to the Ancients while the world is not only still burning around them but you can even see the final boss of the Amaurot dungeon still flying around. And we know from Shadowbringer that Zodiark and Hydealyn fought before she bascially sundered him and thus the star.

What she talked about was important. Showing that she had tried to talk them out of it but failed to do so.

So tell me then: How did we know every detail necessary to exactly tell her about every single calamity that happened? After all for her to let everything happen as you said she would need to know every bit of information.

Okay so we at least agree her pity walk was complete and utter rubbish? That’s at least some common ground. As for it showing her trying to talk people out of it….yeah….after the final days had already hit. My point is she did nothing to tell her people beforehand of what was to come which could have saved countless lives and might have even prevented the final days entirely. We know for a fact she didn’t tell the convocation, so at the most she told her followers, of whom she seemed to have again, withheld info from considering they talk about missing her after she turns into hydaelyn but we just found out in the QnA she consumed their souls….

[thegreatonemal]

The Warrior of Light is explicitly shown to be an exceptionally well-learned and traveled individual, and an excellent storyteller to boot. While it is impossible for the WoL to have known everything, there is a significant amount of information they come across over the course of the game's story. The WoL does understand the mechanics and requirements behind Calamities and Rejoinings by the time you go to Elpis. While you are correct in assuming they wouldn't know every Calamity down to the detail, they would have a very good general idea of when the (by their perception) most recent ones took place as well as which element each required the scales tip toward.

Factor in everything else the WoL knew by that point, and Venat is suddenly rather well forewarned as to things to come. If nothing else, it's plenty enough information for her to recognize signs of Ascian BS and thus be able to take action preemptively when they're setting the stage for a Calamity.

What I wonder isn't even about Calamities and the like. What I'm curious about is if the WoL bothered to tell her about all the non-Ascian-related suffering, sorrow, and death people from their time endure on the regular. Her seeming hard lean into "suffering is good" leads me to rather strongly suspect this was indeed amongst the information passed along, though I don't think Venat knew just how bad it was going to be until she saw it with her own eyes. Even the best of storytellers cannot convey such misery with words, after all. Only by seeing, if not experiencing, can one truly grasp the scope of sorrows inflicted by mortality and its frailties.

The current WoL is only alive and present for the latest calamity. The sixth happened Hundreds of years before their life even began. You seem to forget that the calamities are centuries apart or even longer and each one basically resets humanity back to square one. We woulnd't be able to give her any kind of detail.

[Rulakir]

That definitely wasn't my take away and I wish you wouldn't be so rude and assuming.

Coming from the person who's said I'm "missing the point" and "clearly need reminding"? Honestly, if you thought my response was rude, I think you're going to find online discourse challenging, to put it mildly.

My take away from watching Hermes wasn't that they were worse off.

My takeaway from watching Hermes was he was mentally unstable and in the wrong line of work. I didn't have an issue with the 'return to the star' belief system, I thought it was a refreshing perspective. I also found several of his comments ridiculous, especially coming from my own experiences volunteering for animal rescues where I accept that all creatures can't be saved and many times the most kindness you can offer is to end their suffering.

I don't know who the target audience for Hermes was considering Ishikawa herself said she thought 80% of players would hate him, but it certainly wasn't me. I did not find him sympathetic or his concerns to have merit and, according to the fandom, I'm exactly the type of person with whom he should have resonated. Rather, he came across as someone emotionally immature who decided because he was miserable then everyone else should be too and I have no respect for that.

It would appear we fundamentally disagree on the Elpis experience, so there's no point in me addressing the rest.

[thegreatonemal]

Coming from the person who's said I'm "missing the point" and "clearly need reminding"? Honestly, if you thought my response was rude, I think you're going to find online discourse challenging, to put it mildly.



My takeaway from watching Hermes was he was mentally unstable and in the wrong line of work. I didn't have an issue with the 'return to the star' belief system, I thought it was a refreshing perspective. I also found several of his comments ridiculous, especially coming from my own experiences volunteering for animal rescues where I accept that all creatures can't be saved and many times the most kindness you can offer is to end their suffering.

I don't know who the target audience for Hermes was considering Ishikawa herself said she thought 80% of players would hate him, but it certainly wasn't me. I did not find him sympathetic or his concerns to have merit and, according to the fandom, I'm exactly the type of person with whom he should have resonated. Rather, he came across as someone emotionally immature who decided because he was miserable then everyone else should be too and I have no respect for that.

It would appear we fundamentally disagree on the Elpis experience, so there's no point in me addressing the rest.

When was the last time an animal shelter put down a dog for not barking? That's what was about to happen until Hermes urged some of his collages to give one of their creations a chance to fly it was having trouble for some reason and got over it with some effort.