Who knew the 6.15 Omega Quests… (Spoilers)

[Cleretic]

You don't get to have your cake and eat it too, demanding the hard evidence for any kind of alternative to the Sundering, and then base the entirety of your previous post decrying their society as "there probably was agony and strife around, we just didn't see it!" Obviously their society was not perfect, they have struggles in their lives, but I say more power to them then, it humanizes them more and we've just recently learned that being actually perfect is bad. Come on, even Hermes, the #1 Ancient hater says they go out of their way to make sure their creations do not suffer unduly. It's just that wasn't enough for him, because he knew they sensed their impending demise. I get you're searching for ammo where there is largely none to suit your narrative, but there has to be something better to use than that.

You've misunderstood what I was pointing out.

I was not saying 'there probably was homelessness and starvation that we didn't see then'. I was saying that our windows into Ancient life are all areas of extreme privilege where homelessness and starvation wouldn't have been present anyway, so we can't take absence of evidence to be evidence of absence on this. However, so far the existence (or lack thereof) of these problems has never been a relevant part of the story of the Ancients, so until it comes up (which at this point could only appear in Pandaemonium or Tales short stories), the notion doesn't really impact either way.

However, it is a CENTRAL element of the story of the Ancients that Venat had no other options for the goal of 'stop the End of Days and also constant Zodiark summonings'. It is stated from several angles--from her noting that her options are limited, to her allies mentioning they've exhausted their other avenues, to even Emet-Selch freed from duty, tempering and memory loss saying that her plan got them further than any other could have. It is an open and subjective question if she was morally right to do it, and that's a question that we have now been directly asked, so this was clearly the intention of the story.

If Venat was not taking the best option, then the story no longer functions as intended. It is no longer people making different but valid and internally justifiable moral decisions, and frankly, I don't even know what the story IS anymore if not that. So you can't throw 'she had better options' without significant proof that said better options existed, not just to overcome the story's own evidence and testimonies, but also to provide an alternative definition for what this story is.

If you don't have that evidence, then any alternatives you draw up are fanfiction. I can appreciate some good fanfiction, but we should recognize it for what it is.