Who knew the 6.15 Omega Quests… (Spoilers)

[thegreatonemal]

Which was then confirmed by Metion later about her actual plans and given Venat, at the very least knows whats going on in the present believing that doing nothing would lead to death is pretty reasonable conclusion to come to. Besides we don't have a time table from when Metion fled to when she started singing. If I had to guess a few days, maybe a week at most. What we do know is that the Convocation were debating and working on their solution as other parts of the world burned What could have been done on such short notice?


Hermes is the world expert on the subject. He knows the subject better I'm not sure how Venat saying to the 14 that dyanmis is the cause is going to help with anything. I doubt they even know it exists either, Emet didn't. Tipping Hermes off to the truth might cause him to lie or sabotage the creating of Zodiark.

@Awesome No no, I even marked it on your map...how even? You went the wrong way. Oatmeal lives passed Miss Omelet. You really can't miss it he has a sign out and everything. I'll give him a call and he'll be on the pouch and he'll wave at you.

[EaraGrace]

If you're waiting on a "definitive statement" on what it's like from an individual human perspective in response to an environmental condition, then, conveniently, you'll be waiting forever and can draw upon the "who can saaaaay" angle for eternity. Drawing on some personal experience so I can speak more confidently on it, if you'll forgive me - without a constant supply of insulin, I would die a painful death. But one of the first things you learn in managing this condition is that there is no definitive or universal experience you can absolutely cite or draw upon. It is different for every single person who has it. In other words, you all now get to enjoy type one diabetes and have to manage the constant fatigue and giving yourself multiple daily injections or die, along with the associated financial burden, but don't worry, you should all be totally okay with it, because some people manage fine!

With sources please explain what the conditions in Zodiark are to justify human sacrifice. I see a collection of despondent souls desperately repeating their devotion to the god they became. And if that experience is so horrible then maybe they should sealed Zodiark away and put the souls into a state of sleep and not, yknow, use them as their own personal god? Maybe not subject new souls that to “torture?” I think we can find a middle ground between “fate worse than death” and “not great.”

"Some people manage fine" and there not being a "statement of definitive experience" does not mean that does not mean we cannot confidently say that, as a whole, it is a shit condition to live with, that we should not expect people to have to live with it if there's any alternative, and if there some kind of cure ever exists in the future, it is absolutely positively the moral choice to apply it to those who need it.

If that cure required grinding living breathing human beings into paste I’d say that’s not ok.

Also, we're talking about different things in your second statement. "Death" to the Ancients is "returning to the Star and entering the cycle of reincarnation." I never suggested being trapped in Zodiark is worse than what happened to the Hydaelyn followers. Both of those outcomes, from an Ancient perspective, construes a fate worse than death. Would you like me to agree that the fate of what happened to the souls fueling Hydaelyn was worse than Zodiark? I can certainly agree to that! It's quite messed up, and I feel extremely bad for the ones sacrificed to Hydaelyn!

Great! Wonder why they felt they needed to do that then!

Uh, yes. It's canon that you can use other sources.

Cool we’ve established they could break down other sources.

That's the entire basis of the Ancients' plan to get their loved ones back. That is not the same as saying that at the time Zodiark needed to be summoned the alternative resources were available in the quality or quantities needed - once again, it is stated those resources needed to be "nurtured" until the planet was "bursting with vitality." Zodiark is a Primal of darkness, of moving, active dynamic energy - so, likely, yes, dark-aspected aether - living energies - as Hythlodaeus's shade put forth.

Ok so now we’re establishing that any living energy is an acceptable alternative. In which case, why did the Ascians work towards sacrificing the denizens of the Source, given the wealth of living beings that aren’t sentient?

It's also impressed upon us the massive amounts of aether contained within an Ancient's body and soul. Hydaelyn powered herself on the souls of very few individuals to Sunder the entire world, stay operable for the next twelve thousand years, and continue to empower Warriors of Light and intervene on their behalves to make sure things were proceeding smoothly. It's a bit hard to take the suggestion of "why didn't they just use some ruined buildings instead lol" in good faith, I'm sorry.

Oh so now we’re saying that Ancient souls are special. So you agree that Ancient souls are special, and thus are a better option than other living alternatives. In which case we suddenly have another reason to believe the Ancients were not sacrificing chickens right?

My response was not "maybe he did." My response was "we do not know," or to put it another way, "you can't reasonably cite something as evidence for your argument that has never been concretely established in any way, shape, or form." We have no context as to the debates that took place among the Ancients, only that they happened. Perhaps some people felt that the urgency of getting their loved ones out meant taking the fastest route possible, versus a slower, more humane approach; perhaps people were still so stressed out and traumatized not all options that seemed "obvious" were apparent to them. We have no idea. I'd love to have a better understanding of it, don't get me wrong!

You’re justifying human sacrifice by saying they were stressed out.

Hydaelyn was explicitly relying on Zodiark to protect the planet to make her plan work, and the Watcher clarified that "opposing Zodiark" never meant wanting him gone.

This is the exact quote in English.



Notice this is a bit more nuanced that your quote. They opposed his creation, yet never wished to unmake him. If what you say is true then this would be a lie. The alternative is this isn’t a lie, and Hydaelyns group rightfully recognized that once Zodiark was summoned no alternative form of protection was feasible and thus did not wish to unmake him. By itself, one could I think handwave this away as another gap purposefully left in his memory. That is if we didn’t have another who disagreed with Zodiarks summoning. A noted defector specifically.

I'm dizzy from the spin that the Ancients had other options besides sacrificing themselves and that even the stated "purgatory" coming from apparently the gold standard of those sacrificed meant that existence within Zodiark wasn't that bad. I can't say I'm surprised that the supposedly "empathetic" ones are actually just full of false virtue.

The term has been co-opted, but I believe this is what they call “virtue signaling.”

[LordGiggles]

You realize that after the sundering the sundered are now susceptible to becoming like both the first and second areas of the dead ends right? Those two would’ve been an impossibility for the ancients but they are now a major possibility for the sundered. 2 is worse than 1.

Agreed, I think EW is fairly clear on communicating that there is just an inevitable end to any given civilisation. Like even if you successfully dodge all of the problems we see mentioned in the report or dead ends, you're still susceptible to stuff we see in UT. The dragons didn't actually do anything to bring about their fate, and the Ea both solved all of their material concerns and clearly had a strong drive towards understanding and learning as much as they could, but reality is just a hard barrier sometimes.

I don't think the expac was intending to say that the sundered are somehow immune to bad endings, ignoring some of the weird takes the scions give while turning into the floor (Yshtola was particularly weird). Venats motivation seems to just be entirely focused on the sadness bird blues, not on ensuring society will continue on forever. If she was focused on the latter I think you're 100% correct that the ancients would last much longer, just because they're so much harder to kill. the only real external threat to them would be the omicron.

Also ngl, I think the plenty are by far the best fate we're shown, like they all seem perfectly happy to just stop existing. As far as apocalypses go I'd pick that over basically anything else.

[Brinne]

snip

You know, at this point, rather than going line by line, I think it's probably going to be more productive to suggest taking a step back so as to cool our jets enough to not strip all context out of the ongoing conversation so we can keep yelling "human sacrifice!" "justifying human sacrifice!" and "grinding humans into paste!" whenever possible when nobody ever said that, ever, including, you know, the game itself.

The original point of this conversation was indicating it is completely understandable - and to me, yes, moral - to see it as an imperative to save the souls trapped within Zodiark instead of just abandoning them to their fates, and if the third sacrifices (that we don't know any of the specifics of) aren't okay, then rather than killing everyone who still wanted to save their loved ones, the reasonable thing to do is to lend your talents and intelligence to finding a better alternative. Maybe it would be hard, but to quote a certain character, surely, "nothing is impossible." It is flat out not reasonable to me to say that it's okay to expect people to just leave their loved ones in there.

If the response is to: aggressively shoot down the idea that any possible alternatives could have possibly existed beyond demanding "just give up on your loved ones and let them be trapped in purgatory forever", put forth something like "lol why didn't they just make Zodiark out of destroyed buildings," argue "they probably didn't have it so bad in purgatory they were fine, ignore the ones explicitly tagged as being in anguish and lashing out blindly in grief and torment," and to attempt to cynically tie the suggestion that "no, abandoning the people in there is not an okay thing to do or ask others to accept" with "JUSTIFYING HUMAN SACRIFICE! HUMAN PASTE!" then there's not much point in me continuing to attempt to engage, sorry. The immediate response to floating "maybe they could have compromised and found perhaps a slower or less efficient, but more humane way to help those people?" being as such tells me that the point of contention here is not exploring empathy for those suffering, nor a good faith desire to understand the situation, actions and feelings of those involved, or the desire for thinking of a way less people would have had to suffer, but rather - a fundamental aim to justify certain characters' ultimate choices to force people to do nothing, to flat out just not help them, and then violently punish those who refused to go along with it.

And that is not a conversation I have the time or energy to have or pretend is worth having.

As I've mentioned, "but there was definitely no other way" is the supreme cliche of cliches amongst apologism techniques for committing atrocities.

[KariTheFox]

Zodiark's initial summoning: Human Sacrifice.
Second Sacrifice: Human Sacrifice.
Third Sacrifice: "oh it could be anything. It could just be a big pile of chickens or something. There's no way of knowing."
Emet-Selch's intended plan for the inhabitants of the source after reversing the sundering: Human Sacrifice.

I don't think it's ambigious at all. I think the writers want us to engage the parts of our brains that do pattern recognition.

[Cleretic]

Also ngl, I think the plenty are by far the best fate we're shown, like they all seem perfectly happy to just stop existing. As far as apocalypses go I'd pick that over basically anything else.

I mostly agree with you, but I'm not sure I'd call the Plenty 'happy'. They seemed to be freaking out... pretty bad, actually. And it's a weird subjective, almost philosophical call on if the Plenty were 'happy' before Meteion turned up; they were fulfilled in the sense that they didn't have to struggle with things like hunger or disease, but they didn't really have anything to live for, which is kinda what brought the breakdown. If you look below the actual play space (but only during the dungeon, not after it, which I hate) you can see that they've essentially left their planet a lifeless mass of rocks, which kinda speaks to it; they can live forever, but there's nothing left to spend that life enjoying. And after they're gone, nothing left to build from.

Endwalker (and a lot of FFXIV in general) generally has an outlook of 'everything ends, eventually'. It's just the nature of things, tragic as it is, what's important is how you respond to that. And I would say that the Sundered aren't painted as better because they won't end--rather the contrary, by my count the amount of dead civilizations we've found is nearly equal to the amount of living ones we've met--but rather because when sundered societies fall, others can be build. Not only is this true in a literal sense--Mhach and Amdapor gave way to Belah'diah and Gelmorra gave way to Ul'dah and Gridania--but also because the sundered, as people who have lived through and seen the inevitabilities of death and suffering, have the emotional resilience to keep going. One of Endwalker's most important scenes, I think, is Matsya reciting Thavnairian teachings to give those around him the strength to move on; they lean on cultural teachings of how to deal with loss that Amaurot just didn't have, and through that manage to keep standing when Amaurot faltered.

Yeah, the sundered could fall victim to the same crises as anything else. In fact, they have--they've been whacked with seven different Calamities, not to mention all the other disasters. But every single time, they could get back up.

[tokinokanatae]

The Calamities were engineered with the idea of rebuilding being possible. The Ascians do not induce them and then grind the survivors to paste, because they want the world to recover (so that another Rejoining can occur).

We have no idea if the Unsundered could have recovered, because they weren’t given that option. It’s well and good to speak of resilience, but no one was trying to wipe the Sundered out completely either.

[Cleretic]

The Calamities were engineered with the idea of rebuilding being possible. The Ascians do not induce them and then grind the survivors to paste, because they want the world to recover (so that another Rejoining can occur).

We have no idea if the Unsundered could have recovered, because they weren’t given that option. It’s well and good to speak of resilience, but no one was trying to wipe the Sundered out completely either.

I brought up the scene in Thavnair because I believe it's directly intended as a compare and contrast. Thavnair faced the literal exact same disaster as Amaurot, but Thavnair were the ones that were able to work through it by themselves, while Amaurot fell into hysteria and desperation.

[Lyth]

I wouldn't use the term 'engineered', given the trial and error involved. About 10000 years ago, Igeyorhm tried to brute force a rejoining on the Thirteenth by attacking and killing its heroes. Not only did she successfully eradicate life on the Thirteenth, she also rendered it uninhabitable, turned its denizens into Voidsent, and made a rejoining impossible. The Ascians learnt from that mistake, but each subsequent rejoining involves the destruction of all life on the reflection in question and a massive catastrophe on the Source. By the time our journey started, they had killed off eight worlds including the Void, and rendered one mostly uninhabitable, with the intention of using chemical warfare on the Source to expedite the associated rejoining. Their ultimate goal was to kill off all sundered life across the fourteen worlds so that they could perform more soul microtransactions with Lord Zodiark to rebuild Amaurot again.

It was a pretty bad plan from the outset.

[Theodric]

I brought up the scene in Thavnair because I believe it's directly intended as a compare and contrast. Thavnair faced the literal exact same disaster as Amaurot, but Thavnair were the ones that were able to work through it by themselves, while Amaurot fell into hysteria and desperation.

No, it wasn't intended as 'contrast' on the basis of social darwinism. You're overlooking the simple fact that the Ancients were dealing with a saboteur within their midst in the form of Venat who went on to engage in the genocide of her people but before that point, deliberately held back knowledge of what, exactly, would help mitigate the Final Days.

Much of Endwalker was spent developing methods to mitigate the disaster due to the protagonists speaking directly with leader figures and regular people alike as well as researching ways to prevent Tempering. Even then, many people throughout Thavnair succumbed to despair - but as the Omega side quests revealed, it was never about a 'pattern' or some people being weaker than others. It was entirely circumstantial.

Had Venat actually bothered to try and empower her own people with special perks, brought them back from the dead when they fell in battle and actively had her 'champion' negotiate with leader figures then I daresay things would have played out much differently.

The only difference between the Sundered and Unsundered on that front is that the former were actively aided by Venat whilst the latter were actively sabotaged.