The Ancients still deserved better, after everything

[Larirawiel]

7) Regardless of Venat's reasoning, how were 12 Ancients able to create a second primal that was more powerful than one created using the aether of 1/2 of the population?

Zodiark was not build to fight. He was created to restore the world as it was. Hydaelyn otoh got this one specific ability to sunder the reality. Because we told her, that she will do it in the future. And we have another causal loop here ...

8) Why didn't either Emet-Selch or Hythlodaeus (with their restored memories) condemn us for the destruction of the Ancients?

Maybe there is still hope for the ancients.


Cheers

[Avidria]

Well, a sundered Zodiark bought 12,000 years before he was killed, so they'd have had a LONG time.

Who is this one person you mention? There'd be no reason they'd only send one. Also Dynamis wasn't unheard of, just understudied but again, they'd have plenty of time (and now incentive) to do so.

The one person is Hermes who is the only person to have actually made an entelechy and who did not actually submit her "design" for the records the other ancients used to recreate creations. And Zodiark was only created after an untold number of their people had already died, one of the 14 had apparently up and vanished, and another full half of whoever was left was dead. So they'd need to convince whoever was still alive and still capable of figuring out another solution to do so and also to NOT push for their plan to sacrifice all the new life for the sake of effectively resurrecting everyone who sacrificed themselves to Zodiark.

So they'd need to create entelechy(s) to counter Meteion, find her, defeat her, and THEN sort out their internal conflict on whether to kill a bunch of unspecified life forms for the sake of reviving the dead.

I mean they could've. But they also could've failed anyway. So. This is all pure speculation.

[Absimiliard]

"Feed me" was a joke, given the Nature of Primals as explained over and over (and over) again.

7) Regardless of Venat's reasoning, how were 12 Ancients able to create a second primal that was more powerful than one created using the aether of 1/2 of the population?

8) Why didn't either Emet-Selch or Hythlodaeus (with their restored memories) condemn us for the destruction of the Ancients?

"Feed me" doesn't really work as a joke since the game explained the differences already. Zodiark and Hydaelyn are primals, yes, but they lack many of the imperfections of their modern knockoffs. They in fact do not drain aether from the land. Zodiark has an unfathomable amount of aether due to all the souls within him, while Hydaelyn drained every soul used to create her to the point of erasure. Barring the sacrifices needed for Zodiark's restoring of the planet and subsequent reseeding of life, the closest either of them has come to taking in outside power was Hydaelyn's use of Minfilia to absorb a bunch of excess light-aspected aether on the First.

Zodiark was, by Hydaelyn's own admission, infinitely more powerful than her even after losing his heart. Her ability to sunder the world relates more to her nature as a primal than it does a contest of raw power.

Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus accepted that their world will never be restored. Additionally, Emet-Selch never really saw the sundered races as worthless or not truly alive; that was copium. Bearing these two things in mind, why should they? What's done is done. Instead, they chose to focus on consoling their new-old friend, who was rather upset when they chose to return to the lifestream.

[WlyemR]

The argument that the Ancients deserved better is predicated on the assumption that the Ancients would have been better. In my opinion, they would not.

Let's assume the Final Days happened as hey did, they sacrificed half their population to summon Zodiark, then half again to seed new life. There was no intervention by Venat, their civilization continues. But there is a problem. The majority want to sacrifice this new life to bring back all who were lost, but a vocal minority believe this new life should be allowed to grow. Here we have the seeds on dissent and conflict.

The Ancients civilization only worked because it was a "one-mind" civilization. Everyone worked toward more or less the same goal: perfection. But the Final Days and Zodiark's creation has changed their reality. A line has been crossed. What is perfection? What is the goal now? Do we continue as we did or do we change? They are no longer "one-mind."

Conflict would be inevitable, on a scale that would make the Allagan conquests look like a slap fight. If gods can be made manifest, who's to say one side wouldn't try doing it again, only for the other to respond in kind? The Dead Ends is actually a perfect metaphor for the outcome of such a conflict: destruction of the planet, destruction of all civilization, or complete stagnation. This is the cycle they were locked into. Sacrifice, disagreement, conflict.

All this to not even mention that the Final Days is still very much a looming threat, that any weakening of Zodiark's power due to any such conflict would start the whole thing over again.

Venat saw there was no going back. So she played the ultimate gamble: clear the board, and reset the pieces. And it was a hell of a gamble, but she did everything in her power to stack the odds in our favor. It payed off because we did not have any existing bias. Yes, compared to the old world, the sundered worlds are no paradise. But they had what the Ancients lacked, the drive to do better, to be better. To fight and push and rage against the injustice of life. And that is exactly what it took the beat the Final Days.

[KizuyaKatogami]

snip.

They did have the drive to do better though, that’s literally their whole thing. You’re acting as if they’re nothing but a hive mind when there’s nothing at all that suggests that. We’re literally shown how much of a debate oriented society they are. That’s exactly what Elidibus left Zodiark to do, mediate both sides of the conflict. Presumably he had no chance to as Venat decided to take agency over the lives of millions if not billions without their consent and shatter them. Imo a better gamble would’ve been….idk….trusting in her own people for once, telling them the truth, and working with them to find a better way. The sundered world had what….6 people that were the only reason they made it out? Every other sundered was either giving in to despair or fighting each other lol.Not to mention how much outside help they needed, i’m not exactly sure the drive to do better was entirely….fair. Also, what injustice of life are you talking about exactly?

[redheadturk]

The argument that the Ancients deserved better is predicated on the assumption that the Ancients would have been better. In my opinion, they would not.

Let's assume the Final Days happened as hey did, they sacrificed half their population to summon Zodiark, then half again to seed new life. There was no intervention by Venat, their civilization continues. But there is a problem. The majority want to sacrifice this new life to bring back all who were lost, but a vocal minority believe this new life should be allowed to grow. Here we have the seeds on dissent and conflict.

The Ancients civilization only worked because it was a "one-mind" civilization. Everyone worked toward more or less the same goal: perfection. But the Final Days and Zodiark's creation has changed their reality. A line has been crossed. What is perfection? What is the goal now? Do we continue as we did or do we change? They are no longer "one-mind."

Conflict would be inevitable, on a scale that would make the Allagan conquests look like a slap fight. If gods can be made manifest, who's to say one side wouldn't try doing it again, only for the other to respond in kind? The Dead Ends is actually a perfect metaphor for the outcome of such a conflict: destruction of the planet, destruction of all civilization, or complete stagnation. This is the cycle they were locked into. Sacrifice, disagreement, conflict.

All this to not even mention that the Final Days is still very much a looming threat, that any weakening of Zodiark's power due to any such conflict would start the whole thing over again.

Venat saw there was no going back. So she played the ultimate gamble: clear the board, and reset the pieces. And it was a hell of a gamble, but she did everything in her power to stack the odds in our favor. It payed off because we did not have any existing bias. Yes, compared to the old world, the sundered worlds are no paradise. But they had what the Ancients lacked, the drive to do better, to be better. To fight and push and rage against the injustice of life. And that is exactly what it took the beat the Final Days.

The Unsundered world was objectively better than the Sundered world. People didn't starve, weren't homeless, they debated instead of fought wars when they disagreed with each other. It was simply an objectively better world in every single aspect. Venat may have made a calculated gamble, but boy is she bad at math.

[OhNooo]

Be better! Fight against all odds! Forge Ahead ™! Stand against fate! Uh be better but not TOO good because then there won't be anything to work towards since you did it all and then you'll want to die. So...strive to become...mediocre! Gotta have balance amirite. Uh and stand against fate but...SOMETIMES you have to accept your fate - accept that you're suffering and maybe even EMBRACE it so that you can become STRONGER. So that you can...be better! But not TOO GOOD because then there won't be anything to work tow-well you get what I mean.

You guys don't understand that Venat really did mankind a favor. You go Venat! Clip those wings gurl! Only then could they learn what struggle truly means! What life truly means which is to struggle, fight, crawl your way through all the hardships until you finally...become better and better and bet-but not TOO good! So struggle, crawl, fight, live die and know...that sometimes when you're not a protagonist and you've stood against as much fate as you could, sometimes you gotta just let nature take it's course and surrender and accept that it just be like that sometimes. But at least you went out smiling...

[Skyborne]

forge ahead brudda DDDD

Yeah, pretty much sums up the weird way that Endwalker ties itself in knots with its own message. Death is inevitable and we must find our own meaning and take joy in the little things, so why exactly is the narrative judging the Ancients as being doomed and bad and unworthy for the crime of... ending, after doing everything they could to preserve themselves (without knowledge of what was actually happening)? Ditto with the various alien races we are introduced to.

Feels like overcompensation, like people are working overtime to "justify" the existence of the sundered who need no justification to live -- who are all vulnerable to any of the three "ends" in the Dead Ends (the name in itself feels kind of judgy). In ShB the Final Days just seemed like a senseless tragedy and unknown phenomenom. Bad things happen to good people all the time. Why take a dump on that?

[geekgirl101]

I get what you mean. It's sad that the Ancients were wiped out by events they didn't even see were going to happen and couldn't understand why. We are the survivors, we are what's left of the Ancients with our souls sundered and our aether weakened that we cannot use creation magicks in the same way they did. The likes of Venat and Elidibus are lost to us forever. Emet-Selch could come back reborn as one of us if he wanted since his soul wasn't obliterated like the other Ascians we've encountered, but he explicitly expressed his desires not to.

Venat made the decision not to tell her people about Meteion because if they had succeeded in changing the past it would've created a paradox where we never would've existed to warn her about the Final Days in the first place. Elidibus warned us for that very reason before he gave up his last remnants of his soul to open a gate to the past that we were not to try to alter the past nor prevent the Final Days from happening. In fact just before his soul was obliterated he recalled us visiting him in the past stating that it was a warming memory that he had forgotten, so even before we learned we could go there a version of ourselves had already been into the past and set in motion the cycle of events that would lead to us needing to go back to the world unsundered. Also Venat recognised that up until the Final Days they had been living in a utopia that risked becoming stagnated and that true peace shouldn't just be a given but something that's earned through overcoming hardships.

As for Hermes he believed all life had the rights to live even if it meant destroying everything else and developed an emotional attachment to everything. He could not accept the standard ways of his people who would create and unmake creations without remorse or regrets and once they believed their work was done would give up their own lives for someone else to fill in their place. The other Ancients were far too occupied with duty and acceptance of their ways to notice how unstable he was becoming and put their bets on him becoming the next Fandaniel would occupy him enough to forget his troubles. He secretly created Meteion to question what does it mean to live on other worlds but when his answer was that there was no other significant reason for living it pushed him over the edge and he sided with Meteion's judgement that to exist was to suffer. Even though he was reborn as a sundered Ascian the question still haunted him and with each rebirth he felt even less about life and longed for the cycle of death and rebirth to come to an end.

[redheadturk]

I get what you mean. It's sad that the Ancients were wiped out by events they didn't even see were going to happen and couldn't understand why. We are the survivors, we are what's left of the Ancients with our souls sundered and our aether weakened that we cannot use creation magicks in the same way they did. The likes of Venat and Elidibus are lost to us forever. Emet-Selch could come back reborn as one of us if he wanted since his soul wasn't obliterated, but he explicitly expressed his desires not to.

Venat made the decision not to tell her people about Meteion because if they had succeeded in changing the past it would've created a paradox where we never would've existed to warn her about the Final Days in the first place. Elidibus warned us for that very reason before he gave up his last remnants of his soul to open a gate to the past that we were not to try to alter the past nor prevent the Final Days from happening. In fact just before his soul was obliterated he recalled us visiting him in the past stating that it was a warming memory that he had forgotten, so even before we existed a version of ourselves had already been into the past and intervened. As of yet we've still not met with Elidibus of the past...or have we?

As for Hermes he believed all life had the rights to live even if it meant destroying everything else and developed an emotional attachment to everything. He could not accept the standard ways of his people who would create and unmake creations without remorse or regrets and once they believed their work was done would give up their own lives for someone else to fill in their place. The other Ancients were far too occupied with duty and acceptance of their ways to notice how unstable he was becoming and put their bets on him becoming the next Fandaniel would occupy him enough to forget his troubles. He secretly created Meteion to question what does it mean to live on other worlds but when his answer was that there was no other significant reason for living it pushed him over the edge and he sided with Meteion's judgement that to exist was to suffer. Even though he was reborn as a sundered Ascian the question still haunted him and with each rebirth he felt even less about life and longed for the cycle of death and rebirth to come to an end.

If the WoL would have spread the tale and prevented the final days would it have created a paradox? Yes. But if it meant saving the Ancients and preventing the Final Days, even if meant that either he was erased from existence or could not go back to his own reality should he do so, he would do it in a heartbeat. He is selfless, his primary goal would be to prevent the tragedy that befell the race that were his first self's friends, lover, and brothers. He would also know that if the Scions had the information he did they would *gladly* sacrifice their existence to prevent it.