Who knew the 6.15 Omega Quests… (Spoilers)

[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.