The Ancients still deserved better, after everything

[redheadturk]

I will be forever convinced that another way could have been found if they had had the relevant information on hand. Screw Venat's "one shot". She had every opportunity to take Emet and Hythlodaeus to one side and divulge said information to them and spare both of them twelve thousand years of suffering. Would it have erased our existence? Yes. Does my WoL think it would have been worth it? Again, hells yes.

[gotaname1]

snip

Weren't the ancients capable of time manipulation? They would have had vast amounts of time figuring something out using time chambers outside of the fact that twitter had litterally only just left the planet. But I suppose the writers could not make the story 'good' if the characters in it were capable of logic xD

[Absimiliard]

Weren't the ancients capable of time manipulation? They would have had vast amounts of time figuring something out using time chambers outside of the fact that twitter had litterally only just left the planet. But I suppose the writers could not make the story 'good' if the characters in it were capable of logic xD

It's one of very few things they couldn't do that well.

[jameseoakes]

We had the ability to influence dynamis, something the ancients were literally incapable of. Their vaste amounts of aether would not have helped them in the vortex of pure dynamis. Meteion is by design exceptionally slippery, you'll only manage to defeat the endsinger if you manage to break the despair that infests the sister network. Meteion had no reason to hurry, she could instigate mankind's demise as slow as she needed to while hiding in her stronghold. Given more time her ever increasing song of oblivion would have broken through zodiark's shroud.

We know they can make things that can interact with dynamis and that they have at least 12000 years to work on the problem, it seems very easy to deal with her as she was a complete pushover as we defeated her with almost no effort or cost.

[Larirawiel]

Not sure what this has to do with anything? Hydaelyn's entire plan relies on him.

It has something to do with sustainability. Zodiark as a shield against the Endsinger's song will not last forever. It is a mitigation and does not solve the problem from the ground. And the ancients would have spend fresh life to Zodiark permanently. Until all life on Aetheris is spent. Zodiark has not the ability to create new life without a sacrifice.

It is like the ozone hole. It is better, that the ozone can restore instead of using sunblockers permanently. The second method is a mitigation and not a solution. The ancients chose the second method.





Cheers

[Absimiliard]

Yes. But Zodiark was a primal. He needed an external aether source to exist. So the ancients would have to sacrifice living beeings permanently to feed him. And since he tempered the Convocation of 14, they would not have any problems to sacrifice other life.

Cheers

Zodiark and Hydaelyn adhere to a different set of rules than modern primals. Zodiark, with the wealth of Ancient souls within him, had a virtually infinite wellspring of aether from which to draw. Hydaelyn, though functionally similar, had far fewer souls and thus drained all of them to non-existence. She continued to exist even without the extra souls/aether right up until she depleted her own soul in battle with the WoL and Scions.

It has something to do with sustainability. Zodiark as a shield against the Endsinger's song will not last forever. It is a mitigation and does not solve the problem from the ground. And the ancients would have spend fresh life to Zodiark permanently. Until all life on Aetheris is spent. Zodiark has not the ability to create new life without a sacrifice.

It is like the ozone hole. It is better, that the ozone can restore instead of using sunblockers permanently. The second method is a mitigation and not a solution. The ancients chose the second method.

The game has established that Zodiark did not require any outside assistance or aether to maintain his protection of Etheirys. Furthermore, Zodiark utilized creation magick several times throughout his fight with the WoL with absolutely no consequences or need for an external aether supply. What Zodiark needed the second set of sacrifices for was to create on a global scale (and restore the world's ability to sustain life, which was lost because of the Final Days) without having to completely deplete the Ancient souls within him. One of his purposes was to protect those souls until they could be resurrected, and using them up would've been anything but. The third set of sacrifices were to come from the descendants of the new life Zodiark seeded, that the Ancients might live again without harm coming to Etheirys or more sapient life needing to end.

[Theodric]

A Sundered Zodiark lasted for twelve thousand years and that's without needing to draw upon any of the Ancient souls dwelling inside of him. We can only imagine what an Unsundered Zodiark would have been capable of achieving.

Criticising the Ancients for 'mitigation' is also strange to me. They were unaware of Meteion's existence because Venat refused to inform them of the situation. Had she spoken up - especially before the Final Days hit - then there would be a great many more Ancients who could have banded together in an effort to find an alternative solution.

[SentioftheHoukai]

The attempted justification of the genocide inflicted upon the Ancients is most certainly this game's 'Burning of Teldrassil' moment. I'm not convinced that the game's story will ever be able to come back from that, since much like how World of Warcraft decided to compromise so many characters and organisations within its story in order to prop up Sylvanas, FFXIV takes a similarly contrived route to do the same thing with Venat. The only difference is that unlike with Sylvanas, Venat was actually killed off. I suppose it remains to be seen as to whether or not that sticks given the game's habit of just casually bringing back dead characters on a whim.

The strange glorification of 'suffering' is also pretty bizarre. Especially when the protagonists are clad in such heavy plot armour that they never go through even ten percent of what the antagonists are forced to endure.

Hard agree. But to address something specific, I don't doubt they may very well bring Venat back some time in the future. Since most on here don't even seem to believe that what was established in the recent Q&A is even accurate (the same Q&A Yoshi-P was so disinterested in he was falling asleep in it, it's that Square was forced to address the moral implications of the expansion they didn't see the negative reception of coming), that Venat "burned through the candle of her soul" I don't doubt Yoshi-P and Square might use that to their advantage to bring her back. That it was established in a Q&A just makes this easier. In any case, it depresses me because I don't know if I can accept interacting with someone I see as morally deficient after all that happened in EW.

A Sundered Zodiark lasted for twelve thousand years and that's without needing to draw upon any of the Ancient souls dwelling inside of him. We can only imagine what an Unsundered Zodiark would have been capable of achieving.

Criticising the Ancients for 'mitigation' is also strange to me. They were unaware of Meteion's existence because Venat refused to inform them of the situation. Had she spoken up - especially before the Final Days hit - then there would be a great many more Ancients who could have banded together in an effort to find an alternative solution.

I'm glad you brought this up, because it helps me to bounce off of to draw attention to something. The walk cutscene where Venat initiates the Sundering? Zodiark already exists at this point, so it stands to reason if the Convocation knew the source of the Final Days then due to Zodiark they likely wouldn't even be happening in that cutscene. So instead of being "utterly abominable" and wishing for salvation, the Ancients therein could be beseeching Zodiark to magick up a Dynamis-wielding creation to deal with Meteion (or any number of other plans, really. I daresay all they needed was time and the knowledge Venat oh so wisely withheld from them). If the Sundered lived in peace in absentia of Meteion despite her face pressed to the proverbial glass window looking in, then I rather suspect that the Ancients would have comparable time to come up with a solution.

[Lauront]

It has something to do with sustainability. Zodiark as a shield against the Endsinger's song will not last forever. It is a mitigation and does not solve the problem from the ground. And the ancients would have spend fresh life to Zodiark permanently. Until all life on Aetheris is spent. Zodiark has not the ability to create new life without a sacrifice.

It is like the ozone hole. It is better, that the ozone can restore instead of using sunblockers permanently. The second method is a mitigation and not a solution. The ancients chose the second method.

Well sure, give them a full account of what's happening, and maybe they would, but I still would like evidence on all this if we're going to take it as established fact. We know regular primals do drain aether, but Zodiark and Hydaelyn were both constructed using ancient creation magicks, and we already know of one flaw the Ascians inserted into the beast tribe summoning methods, i.e. the desire in the summoners to spread their zeal through tempering. It is not at all clear to me that either Zodiark or Hydaelyn drain aether in this manner, particularly since they are/were hooked up to the very centre of the star. But given that Zodiark, even bound on the moon, did not require surplus sacrifices to continue working as before, I am going to need evidence of this that is much stronger than "regular primals do".

[Saraide]

Weren't the ancients capable of time manipulation? They would have had vast amounts of time figuring something out using time chambers outside of the fact that twitter had litterally only just left the planet. But I suppose the writers could not make the story 'good' if the characters in it were capable of logic xD

Utopias never hold up under scrutiny. This is an extremely well explored concept. Holding everyone in a single moment in time is functionally not different from oblivion and also, as we've learned from alexander, takes insane amounts of aether to sustain. Which is the same problem zodiark has, it's not sustainable to just shield the planet from the song of oblivion because it will increase in strength, while zodiark's shroud does not.