The Ancients still deserved better, after everything

[Kolsykol]

I dunno if I'm like.... Out here playing a different game or what, but I definitely didn't see any takeaway that the Ancients deserved to be destroyed, and we as the wol certainly weren't responsible for their ultimate destruction. Venat's blanket painting as a hero is rather odd considering she plainly admits to having her own hand in causing untold amounts of death and suffering for the sake of some kind of nebulous better future (the implications as I understood them being that the only way to actually defeat Meteion's hopelessness was to understand and accept suffering in a way the Ancients as a whole never could have, at least in Venat's mind), but. I mean the entire story of the end of their people is a tragedy start to finish and I don't remember anyone in universe being like "man those guys totally got what was coming to them." Unless I missed something pretty big somewhere.

I didn't either...
Per usual there just seems to be a whole lot of reading things and intent into it.
I never got the impression either that we were being told that the Ancients deserved it.

The WoL is also a set character with a defined personality and views on things, it doesn't rly matter what the player thinks and players will have different views it's literally impossible to line it up with everyone.
There's still people who hate Emet to the very core and don't view him as sympathetic at all.

The problem is that the devs can't make any comments on this either because as people have proven time and time again both on this forum ( especially so ) and on other sites too.
People are totally incapable of hearing what they say without going completely ballistic and insane about it and taking it out of context and having the most bad faith interpretation of it and act like it's some personal insult directed at them.

There's just a lot of '' shoulds '' and '' maybes '' here, and there's a lot inbetween Elpis and the cutscene we simply didn't see.
The Ancients were clearly flawed and more '' human '' than they might've wanted to admit, and we can't freaking agree that climate change is real irl...
How tf would one person be able to convince everyone that there was an evil space satan causing everything?
Even if she managed to convince some people it'd still be the same situation I think with split factions and the end result would still have been the same.

It's like the Reapers in Mass Effect, Venat would've shown up to the council and they'd be all like '' ah yes, Meteion ''.
Dynamis wasn't even commonly understood or known about either, they didn't seem to have any real interest in it.
It'd be pretty crazy to believe that something that basically no one knew about would be able to do all that.

You sum up a lot of how I feel about the story. I'll share my issues with the story.

During Shadowbringers, I kept hoping for some way to restore the unsundered without having a rejoining. People give Emet flak for not seeing the people of the 12 as living as Yshtola points out, but imo, forget the following if the ancients were human: emmet has pointed out he tried to reconcile with having everyone he cared for split up into 12 pieces. Not only that, >with the ability to see souls<, see those 12 pieces end up fighting and killing eachother endlessly because they don't recall being part of a whole. If you were practically unable to die and forced to endure that because you were powerless to prevent it from happening outside of a Rejoining, how would you not go insane? I'm still amazed that emmet is so calm and collected after millenia of enduring this, and taking a slow approach to the rejoining.

Hermes seems unusually emotionally immature. While I do think some part of his heart was in the right place by wanting to honor the dead by wanting to hear them out through his twitterfeed, his friends absolutely sucked in trying to get their point across that he just cannot handle the weight of what that would entail, and actually pushing Hermes over the edge with everything that happens as a result.

Things happened rather quickly, it's possible Hermes would've acted differently if he had more time to think about it he was essentially being very impulsive there was never really a real discussion about it.
There simply wasn't any time for it and there wouldn't either if he had let Emet take Meteion it'd just be over.
And from his pov I think he kinda had to because Emet was taking Meteion away and the choice would've been made for him.
In the cutscene after you leave Elpis he looks pretty distraught and maybe disappointed I dunno it's hard to know for sure without dialogue, but it's not like he was happy.

Edit: I suppose a comparison would be Anakin in Star Wars when he kills Windu to save Palpatine.
That was impulsive and him being very emotional too and he might've acted differently with more time to think about it.
People at large seem to have no issues accepting that Anakin was good at the core and deserved to be redeemed too regardless of him being a mass murderer ( of children included ) and having fairly similar problems as Hermes.

Much like what Hermes did lead to what we got, Anakin being impulsive and emotional in a fairly similar situation lead to the Empire and Sidious and himself becoming Vader.

[Skyborne]

Six months later and their treatment still the most bizarre and tonedeaf things in the game to me. Total turnoff.

Imagine if in StB, we had some weird cutscene where Zenos/Yotsuyu talk down some squealing Bitter Domans in their city as it's being razed, and the former two are covered in black blood and treated as if they were the victims simply wanting to see the Domans 'grow and flourish' by 'standing up for themselves' and 'being strong'. Before Zenos looks sad and slices the screen in half as Revolutions blares, of course.

It's stranger still, since no other material paints them this way, and I was actually interested enough to do the Elpis sidequests. Even the totally-not-Yoshida bard compliments them on their resolve to save their planet when you unlock Spinny Platform EX.

I dunno if I'm like.... Out here playing a different game or what, but I definitely didn't see any takeaway that the Ancients deserved to be destroyed, and we as the wol certainly weren't responsible for their ultimate destruction.

You'd be surprised how many people did, and it's why I don't really go to say, the Lore forum lest I start dribbling black pitch from my eye sockets. Well, that and being in a limbo where 90% of the things I liked or thought added spice to the game world have been done away with.

Sympathize with your feels, OP.

[Lauront]

From another thread but totally relevant here:

If the devs put resources towards a proper cutscene showing the sundering instead of 10 minutes of Venat on a political tirade there'd probably be only 300 pages in that msq criticism thread instead of the 500 it's at now

Indeed, and it'd help if it brought to life and stuck to the SHB sources on this topic, and clarified ambiguities in them. As it stands, we have to rely on a post-EW Q&A and a retelling of the sundering in some crossover with a Nier mobile game... and it's still a muddled mess. Hard to believe Yoshi even spent extra time tying up loose ends on this, which is why they had to push final QA out by another 2 weeks...

[Raoabolic]

Six months later and their treatment still the most bizarre and tonedeaf things in the game to me. Total turnoff.

Imagine if in StB, we had some weird cutscene where Zenos/Yotsuyu talk down some squealing Bitter Domans in their city as it's being razed, and the former two are covered in black blood and treated as if they were the victims simply wanting to see the Domans 'grow and flourish' by 'standing up for themselves' and 'being strong'. Before Zenos looks sad and slices the screen in half as Revolutions blares, of course.

It's stranger still, since no other material paints them this way, and I was actually interested enough to do the Elpis sidequests. Even the totally-not-Yoshida bard compliments them on their resolve to save their planet when you unlock Spinny Platform EX.

No no no, the garleans are 100% evil unless they denounce their homeland, thems the rules. Yotsuyu would be the one to sympathize with, evil goku is who you should hate but in a "fun" way so he can show up in case they need a deus ex machina!

[DPZ2]

[B]Then there's the time travel plot point, which feels like a betrayal in and of itself. For all time travels faults, I personally felt that the whole point of time travel was to try and save people, but then they made it a closed loop unlike G'raha's old timeline and the entire time in Elpis's purpose seems to be serve no purpose but to build up Venat's positive character even more.

So I went in thinking maybe Elidibus was wrong and I could save the Ancients but all I accomplished in the World Unsundered was taking active part in their assured annihilation? Not enough was it that they are gone, but now Square says that it always meant to happen and of course I have to be a direct part of it now.

That's a step way too far, it goes beyond forced characterization at that point. Now my character is being forced to destroy her own people and of course she totally agrees with it? No, she wouldn't.

So, yeah.

Tldr; the Ancients are my true people, not the Sundered and Endwalker was one big nightmare for me that forced me to commit virtual genocide, be okay with it, offend my moral values, wank the other person responsible the whole ride, and generally commit numerous crimes on my person at the hands of Square Enix.

The time travel conundrum ... it is necessarily a closed loop, providing insight into the "how and why" of the Final Days we were exposed to in Shadowbringers. We are in Elpis for two reasons ... discovery and consequence. Nobody knew about Meteion except their Creator, and we know the soon-to-be Fandaniel did not register them, nor were they willing to allow harm come to them. Without us as catalyst, there would have been nobody except Hermes aware of what happened. Face it, Hermes was a bad meta-Programmer.

If we were not there, there would have been no story of us in the future. One cannot fight that which one cannot see or understand. Death of your "True People" was inevitable, in much the same way as all of the other worlds. I suspect that Venat would have still Sundered the world, without understanding or planning for the Future She Does Not Know, simply because the sacrifice of living beings was not sustainable in the long run.

The Warrior of Light does not commit virtual genocide, regardless of who your True People are. Meteion does that quite nicely by themselves.

You may very well agree that the Rejoining is necessary, at the expense of everything and everyone you've ever known, including yourself. Such self-loathing is beyond my comprehension.

[Saraide]

Six months later and their treatment still the most bizarre and tonedeaf things in the game to me. Total turnoff.

Imagine if in StB, we had some weird cutscene where Zenos/Yotsuyu talk down some squealing Bitter Domans in their city as it's being razed, and the former two are covered in black blood and treated as if they were the victims simply wanting to see the Domans 'grow and flourish' by 'standing up for themselves' and 'being strong'. Before Zenos looks sad and slices the screen in half as Revolutions blares, of course.

It's stranger still, since no other material paints them this way, and I was actually interested enough to do the Elpis sidequests. Even the totally-not-Yoshida bard compliments them on their resolve to save their planet when you unlock Spinny Platform EX.


You'd be surprised how many people did, and it's why I don't really go to say, the Lore forum lest I start dribbling black pitch from my eye sockets. Well, that and being in a limbo where 90% of the things I liked or thought added spice to the game world have been done away with.

Sympathize with your feels, OP.

I dont think this comparison works very well. Venat's back was against the wall, any decision she makes there is a decision between the world of the ancients and the wol's world. Both carry enormous risks of failure. Meanwhile garlemald realistically doesnt have its back against the wall anymore. They had at one point but that point has long since passed (from a pre-shadowbringers perspective of course). Zenos had every oppurtunity to right the wrongs committed if he wanted to.

You are asking to imagine Zenos and Yotsuyo if they had been completely different characters. Yes, they would have acted differently and their actions would have been in a different light. So what? If key players in the story would have been completely different people, the story would have taken a different turn. Truly a revelation we have here.

[KizuyaKatogami]

snip

As has already been explained to you, it’s not a matter of showing up and going “oh yeah space flea.” It’s a matter of showing up with Emet,Hythlo, and various ancient witnesses that we know watched them enter Ktisis, and using the echo to show everyone her memories.

[Skyborne]

...

The point of the comparision is 'let's take this terrible action and then soften it by portraying the victims as strawman crazies and its perpetrator(s) as sad and somber about it'. Also, as of EW, her back is not really against the wall, not anymore, because... time loop, she knew everything.

[AnaviAnael]

Regarding Dynamis and Meteion: I see no reason why the Ancients couldn't have figured out a way to deal with her if they had the knowledge. It can be inferred from the story that Meteion was the first concept of her type (or one of the first). You can't tell me that other researchers wouldn't be able to find a way to improve upon her base concept and create an entelechy capable of withstanding emotions and counter her. After all, in Ultima Thule, it takes one cutscene of her and the WoL to turn her blue again. The sundering did NOT need to happen as it is currently written.

[Raoabolic]

Also, as of EW, her back is not really against the wall, not anymore, because... time loop, she knew everything.

She knew everything. She knew her plan would work. Make her the 8.0 antagonist! I would take back a lot of what I said about the story if that was the writer's master plan all along.