What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Thaciscokidd]

Where I see the difference is the means and the result. You can go back in time and stop any one of those things and the world would be a better place but it would also still be our world. The Ascians want to delete 15,000 years of history and in order to do so, they need to cause untold death and destruction time and time again and each time, a whole world is destroyed and along with it all of that whole world's history and every life upon it.

I couldn't sacrifice billions of people over tens of thousands of years just for the sake of what once was.

Super off topic but.

This is the danger of linear Closed Loop variety and the branching Open Loop time travel well time travel in general. You are right. For the story to go forward with the world as is the loop needed to be closed(strangely unlike the black rose death timeline that was averted in ShB).

But as cool as it would be to stop one of those real world events there is no telling the repercussions that would happen because that had changed. Heck if you changed the Transatlantic Slave Trade there's a good chance I wouldn't exist and more importantly what atrocities would(or wouldn't) occur because who exist or who doesn't exist. Fundamental butterfly effect theory.

If you want a good example in gaming Chrono Triggers 12 different endings depending on what you do or don't do.

[Brinne]

But as cool as it would be to stop one of those real world events there is no telling the repercussions that would happen because that had changed. Heck if you changed the Transatlantic Slave Trade there's a good chance I wouldn't exist and more importantly what atrocities would(or wouldn't) occur because who exist or who doesn't exist. Fundamental butterfly effect theory.

Oh, I'm absolutely certain that if not for a number of horrific atrocities I wouldn't exist.

I still believe it's the right thing to in no uncertain terms condemn those atrocities and the people who committed them. I don't think you give slavers in the past a pass, or qualify your condemnation of what they did, because "well without them our world wouldn't exist as it does today." Shadowbringers had a good line about this when Alphinaud was talking to Emet-Selch - "we define our worth, not the circumstances of our creation." Whether or not it would be "okay" or "better" to go back and unwrite history, potentially erase timelines full of people, is a more complex question - we should probably ask for G'raha's thoughts about this! But asserting our right to live, while also acknowledging the 'circumstances of our creation' sucked and was wrong, and that the people who were wronged deserve justice, are not mutually exclusive ideas.

I had hoped that the narrative word on the Sundering would be along the lines of: "an absolutely horrific thing that should never have happened, but now that it has, probably not worth the human cost to undo at this point." Instead, we got, um, something else?

[Thaciscokidd]

Snip

Yep, its the blessing of helping the protagonist. Just like it was ok for us to stop others for being oppressed but we've put down the Gigas race twice. I held out hope that it would get settled out when we were making peace with the other beast tribes but nope. No primal no dice.