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

[KizuyaKatogami]

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?

Considering leaving the sundering as it is is causing far more death and suffering in the long run than the rejoinings ever would, i don’t think they could really truthfully show this. Especially when they had said awhile back that the sundering was objectively not a good thing and that it left the world unstable. It’s either leave the sundering as is and allow things like war,illness,rape etc to thrive still across the shards and let those deaths pile up or reset those lives now and prevent that death from continuing.

[Teraq]

I can understand feeling that way if you came into the game during Shadowbringers but it's different if you've been playing the game since the very beginning where it was much more black and white and the writers even said the Ascians had no further backstory other than "they do bad things and want to resurrect their bad god". Players from the beginning had years of "Hydaelyn good, Zodiark bad" sink in with nothing to make us think otherwise. Having a twist for the sake of a twist doesn't automatically make a story better or else people would still be watching M. Night Shyamalan movies.

The reason the Ascians are written as the bad guys is because they specifically are an existential threat to our character in a video game. The game cannot continue if the Ascians win. All the way from 1.0 they have been bad guys who were specifically created with skeletal imagery, wreathed in dark aether, and laughed maniacally while they caused chaos as narrative shorthand for "these are the bad guys". Starting from ARR, Hydaelyn was portrayed as the opposite and supported us with a calm voice against the people who tried to kill us over and over. You can't exactly walk that back after a decade.

Speak for yourself, please. Granted, I haven't been playing the game from the very beginning, but as someone who finds the vast majority of good guys boring as sin, I never cared for Hydaelyn, and thought the Ascians obviously were going to be developed more. It doesn't matter how long I've heard Hydaelyn repeat at me the same damn words, because she had always been a non-entity to me before Shadowbringers dropped a nugget of information that finally piqued my interest: the possibility of her being not that good.

I would posit Shadowbringers was critically acclaimed exactly because it brought much needed nuance to the boring "Hydaelyn good, Zodiark bad".

But as Endwalker went on to prove, the story becoming morally grey was a fluke at best.

To me, there is no chance at all that Ancient society would resume as normal in the presence of a physical god of their own creation who the leaders openly admit to being tempered by, even if just a nudge.

Debatable, but they could have very well left him in some sort of sleep mode to ward off the Dynamis waves until they found a way to deal with them.

Culling the planet's life would not have returned the souls of those who had died. While we don't know how many people were killed in the Final Days, it could be assumed that it was a fairly high number.

Correct. This implies that Ancients would have had to forge ahead anyway, had they been afforded the chance to.

but Elidibus, leader of the Ancients,

um

did say that we shouldn't and couldn't change anything. If he specifically says before we even leave that we can't save them, then I'm inclined to take his word for it.

look I'm an Eli simp but he, like everyone else in the FFXIV universe, was unaware the 8th UC timeline did, in fact, continue. And as you pointed out, they didn't seem to have any practical knowledge of time travel, only theories of what might happen.

The fact remains that an AU was possible.

[Lauront]

I still think one of the biggest missed opportunities with the Zodiark fight was for them not to have the ancient souls in Zodiark rise up to undermine Fandaniel's control over him and oust him. Besides being visually cool, they'd get some form of revenge against him and it'd make sense as a collective effort of sundered and unsundered to safeguard the star.

[Rulakir]

I can understand feeling that way if you came into the game during Shadowbringers but it's different if you've been playing the game since the very beginning where it was much more black and white and the writers even said the Ascians had no further backstory other than "they do bad things and want to resurrect their bad god". Players from the beginning had years of "Hydaelyn good, Zodiark bad" sink in with nothing to make us think otherwise.

It's the same story regardless of whether it took you 10 years and me 3 months. I could say, if anything, I should be more willing to accept Venat as the 'good guy' because I didn't have as much time to sit with ShB as others did. I got 'her side of the story' rather quickly after completing ShB.

Starting from ARR, Hydaelyn was portrayed as the opposite and supported us with a calm voice against the people who tried to kill us over and over. You can't exactly walk that back after a decade.

I never had a good feeling about Hydaelyn in the same way as I'd feel about VIKI from I, Robot. A soft, feminine voice doesn't automatically equate to 'good guy' in my head. As I went through the story, I didn't see anything that changed my perception of her. She tells Minfilia to stay behind, who yells "No!", but ultimately ends up pressured into it anyway. Next time I see her she's been turned into a puppet and tells me that she'd been abandoned in the aetherial sea until she offered her body to Hydaelyn. The next time I see her after that, Urianger has to force her hand to save the First and Ardbert is (rightfully) angry at her for having abandoned their world. This is all still in HW, long before ShB, and directly coming from her and her biggest fan Minfilia without the supposed Ascian bias of ShB.

While I did view the Ascians as generic villians up until ShB, I figured there was still some element of truth in what they were saying and we'd learn about it eventually.

Ultimately, it sounds like we had very different subjective interpretations of the story the game was presenting. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop, especially as I do not like black & white, protagonist centered morality. I prefer and wanted nuance, which I thought I was going to get until 6.0 happened. I didn't see it as a "twist for the sake of a twist" at all, in fact, I consider that EW tried to subvert expectations and that's one of the many reasons the narrative didn't work.

Edit: Does Hydaelyn intervene on the WoL's behalf outside of Lahabrea and the Ultima Weapon? I'm blanking on her assisting us any further than that.

[Lauront]

Every decision they made while the sky was falling was made in the context of a dying world. Zodiark's first two acts did save the world, but at a cost of a lot of the surviving population and the creation of a new god. To me, there is no chance at all that Ancient society would resume as normal in the presence of a physical god of their own creation who the leaders openly admit to being tempered by, even if just a nudge. Culling the planet's life would not have returned the souls of those who had died. While we don't know how many people were killed in the Final Days, it could be assumed that it was a fairly high number. Venat made her arrogant decision in the face of her opposition deciding to cull the life of the planet just for those who had already sacrificed their lives to save it.

Are we forgetting that those souls were inside Zodiark this whole time, in a state of purgatory? And it was never framed as "the life of the planet", so much as a portion of the life Zodiark would seed. At this point I'm afraid I fail to see the relevance of tempering, either. Particularly when Emet-Selch could simply change course. It never is implied to have warped their decision making at the time.

The Ascians didn't have the ability to time travel. In order to get back what was lost, they committed themselves to destroying multiple worlds and decimating the main world 13 times. At a certain point you have to wonder how someone like Hythlodeus would feel about Emet-Selch slaughtering billions in order to undo the sacrifice he made to save the world. The Sundered aren't any less of people than the Unsundered are. Elpis showed us that they are just as prone to self-doubt, mistakes, and violence. They just happened to be a more evolved society and had an insane amount of aether. The Sundered have had 15,000 years since then.

I think if anything, Emet was more horrified by it than Hyth, but just because the sundered are a people in their own right, it does not mean that they are seen as equivalent to the ancients from their vantage point; they are materially different life forms, with their own foibles. The fact that the ancients share in some of these does not negate that they differ in traits. Even Emet-Selch, after 12k years of encounters with them, at best comes to see them as child-like beings. This is not how you see members of your own people. Of course because they are living, thinking creatures, this causes him some anguish and makes it harder for him, but as a member of the Convocation, he had a duty to his people and the star - it just comes at a great expense to the sundered. To me, a big part of the blame here goes to the lady that caused this unfortunate mess, no matter how much she may call the sundered her 'children'. While what the Ascians did to the sundered is obviously a bloodbath, she knew enough to know how he would react and most likely, what his sense of duty to his own people and the star itself would result in. The Ascians certainly knew of time travel, and it is clear the ancients had at the least a good theoretical understanding of it, but as we saw with G'raha, it is fraught with risk, because it carried with it the risk that changing time could erase their entire timeline. That alone would've dissuaded them from it. Now we know it can result in AUs, but hindsight is 20/20.

Who knows what they could have gotten up to if they didn't have the reset button hit on them every 1500 years or so? The Ascians could have even helped them get to a more enlightened point, but instead saw them as nothing but Rejoining fuel.

Dead Ends one, two or three according to the story - probably three. Maybe another. Take your pick.

It would have been more interesting if the Ascians and Zodiark played the role of Prometheus and helped the Sundered, but that would have been basically repeating the story of FFXI.

With their star inexplicably shattered (really, what was stopping Venat from explaining the situation and ending it all if she really did not see this as part of her plan?), and their people degraded into forms they could barely recognise as their own kind (Emet could even see this at the level of the soul), I can't say I entirely blame them for not doing this and instead focusing on restoring their own kind. Emet-Selch is implied to have tried to judge the worth of man repeatedly and found it wanting, and given his burden of duty to the star and his people as Emet-Selch, it is understandable why he would not relinquish his fight until he was certain enough of this to do so in SHB.

All that said, I hope we get one or more Tales from the Dawn or whatever it will be called that goes over the period of time around the time when the Convocation were going to use Zodiark a third time so that we have more context for what was going on in a spot of the lore that deserves more explanation and ties everything together better than the MSQ did.

Sure, it would be beneficial for them to fill in the gaps there, but if it turns into more attempts at "ancients bad" and "mommy loves you", I'm afraid I'm just going to wave bye bye.

[Rulakir]

Friendly reminder Xirean set up a discord for this thread. :P

https://discord.gg/htS5TTP2

[aveyond-dreams]

There are times when I feel like going back to finish some of the drafts I've written regarding the events of the sundering instead of waiting for a Tales of the Dawn to expand on them but there's something so fundamentally flawed in the writing revolving around Meteion and Hermes' involvement in the plot that I lose confidence no matter what direction I take things in.

A lose/lose situation because on one hand I'd have that roadblock to deal with and other I'd probably be attacked by the Venat stans if I dared to portray her as the fallen angel she literally is regardless of wherever I share my work. Trying to write her as a sympathetic character is also impossible without me adding in my own plot devices and just making things even messier than they already are.

Good luck to whoever is actually tasked with disentangling this mess in order to produce the upcoming Tales of the Dawn chapter, if SE is even willing to go into any further depth with these events in the first place.

[CrownySuccubus]

Particularly when Emet-Selch could simply change course. It never is implied to have warped their decision making at the time.

In ShB, Emet-Selch directly makes the case that since Zodiark tempered him, he cannot change course. He specifically used it in the context of the Ascians existing solely to obey Zodiark's will.



Like many things, EW changed or ignored this, and we're told Tempering was something that the Ascians deliberately created AFTER the Sundering.

We know that Emet tried to change course, but couldn't for what he felt were justified reasons. But did he come to that conclusion because (according to himself) he was tempered, or were those attempts to fight off the tempering that failed, and he simply justified them later?

It's a chicken-or-egg dilemma.

[Rulakir]

Good luck to whoever is actually tasked with disentangling this mess in order to produce the upcoming Tales of the Dawn chapter, if SE is even willing to go into any further depth with these events in the first place.

I'm half expecting whatever is written for Venat to just be about her and the Watcher, especially after the Omega chain. As much as I'd like to know more about the Final Days, the Sundering, and everything in between I just don't see how they can do it and and portray her as sympathetic. They made it so the sundering was intentional, with knowledge of the future, and based on her beliefs rather than facts so there's no going back now.

It's frustrating because I fear it means we'll never know the full details of events foundational to the lore because they can't risk making Venat look bad. Honestly, I feel like her characterization has singularly destroyed the story because for whatever reason they refused to take a nuanced approach to her.

[Lunaxia]

I can understand feeling that way... [...]

I really wish they would stop openly admitting how much they make up and retcon things on the fly, as much I admire their honesty it doesn't really do much in terms of giving me faith in their writing.

But I disagree with your premise they couldn't "walk back on" the direction they've taken or that it would have had a negative impact, because they blatantly can and did to rapturous applause in Shadowbringers with the Ascians already. There, they planted the seed that Hydaelyn is a possibly unreliable narrator, and whichever avenue they might have taken with it, be it good, bad, or well-intentioned but misguided, they allowed adequate space for it without necessarily seeming like a last minute plot twist. Unless you think Shadowbringers itself felt that way, in which case that's fair enough, but you can't deny it certainly worked for them. Personally, though I enjoyed what Shadowbringers added to the story, and thought his final scene was beautifully done, I didn't take as readily to Elidibus' sudden transformation into a sympathetic hero. Two or so poorly paced patches didn't feel like enough breathing room for me to suddenly buy into it after the passive role he had taken since ARR, and though I didn't dislike it, I felt almost an expectation to feel similar emotions to what Emet invoked (where he had the benefit of being a much newer character) that I just didn't have. It made me glad we met him again in Endwalker and they subtly reinforced some of the defiance that always underlined the Ascians, particularly after making Emet suddenly rather at peace with the person who was the source of all the suffering inflicted upon him.

On the topic of Zodiark, I don't think it's said anywhere that the souls wouldn't have been returned to them. It doesn't change the fact that no, they could never have returned exactly to the world and the lives they once had, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve as much a chance as anyone else. I agree on the need for more details surrounding Zodiark and what happened post-Final Days, though, it's all very vague at the moment, and a lot of the for-and-against on this subject relies heavily on things we just don't know.

In ShB, Emet-Selch directly makes the case that since Zodiark tempered him, he cannot change course. He specifically used it in the context of the Ascians existing solely to obey Zodiark's will.

I wanted to talk about this, actually. At one point, I definitely believed this was what they were trying to imply, but it seems as if they discarded that thread and ended up handwaving tempering as a "minor tug" that would not have affected their actions and choices to any great degee and made it a matter of personal devotion to their world? I noticed a few potential plot points seem to have been set up and then later abandoned, perhaps when they decided to make one expansion over two.