Who knew the 6.15 Omega Quests… (Spoilers)

[Rulakir]

As I noted, the Ancients were basically walking down that same path. They had a culture of racial supremacy, were embarking on a program of mass slavery, Human and ecological sacrifice, and were raving religious zealots with near-absolute devotion to their god.

This is why you don't understand the Hydaelyn hate. This is so wildly different than frankly any interpretation I've seen I'm kind of fascinated how you arrived at it. (Not to mention full on veering into headcanon, but that's par for the course around here.)

[Renathras]

This is why you don't understand the Hydaelyn hate. This is so wildly different than frankly any interpretation I've seen I'm kind of fascinated how you arrived at it. (Not to mention full on veering into headcanon, but that's par for the course around here.)

What do you mean?

They VERY CLEARLY had a culture of racial supremacy. This is shown outright in the Elpis quests and was shown in ShB with Emet's conversations about us not really being alive and being lesser beings.

They were literally growing what WE would consider sentient life forms to use as chattel sacrifices to Zodiark. Mass slavery, Human sacrifice, and ecological sacrifice (they were also going to do this with plant life) was 100% part of their objective to generate enough energy to give Zodiark to restore the Ancients that were sacrificed to summon him.

They were Tempered. That's been made crystal clear. Emet even mentions it as just being par for the course with Summoning such a powerful being, as if it was totally to be expected. While they have freedom in how they carry out the will of their god (unlike Tempered lesser beings), they are still absolutely devoted to Zodiark and his restoration - unless they happen to be bat-shite insane (Amon). Them being what we would define irl as religious zealots is clearly laid out in the MSQ.

.

For you NOT to see any of this - and, indeed, to question how I arrived at it - makes me wonder if you skip cutscenes or something. Each of those points was made very clear in the MSQ.

[Iscah]

What do you mean?

They VERY CLEARLY had a culture of racial supremacy. This is shown outright in the Elpis quests and was shown in ShB with Emet's conversations about us not really being alive and being lesser beings.

They were literally growing what WE would consider sentient life forms to use as chattel sacrifices to Zodiark.

Emet considers us "not alive" because we are sundered. A fraction of what we should be. That wasn't a thing that existed in the time of the Ancients.

There is no sign that they are deliberately developing anything like modern sundered humans to use as sacrifices.

What we do have are vague and conflicting statements that the writers did a poor job of fleshing out. Somehow despite being close together in the narrative, there was no logical step from Shadowbringers' loose statements to Endwalker revealing them in more detail – somehow it veered off into different territory altogether and never addressed the nature of the sacrifices.

All we know, unless I have forgotten something key, is that "new life" flourished on the planet following the second round of Ancient sacrifices, and the remaining Ancients intended to trade it for the others' souls. Emet's story in Tales from the Shadows adds that this new life has souls itself, but as far as we know in this setting, all beings and not just human-like ones have souls.

The writers avoided answering our questions on whether this new life meant human life or not, and by the time we reach Endwalker, it goes completely unmentioned.

From what we currently know, the modern races were born from the Ancients themselves, not created by them.

[Enkidoh]

From what we currently know, the modern races were born from the Ancients themselves, not created by them.

The playable races at least came about after the Sundering as genetic offshoots of the Ancients, yes, but several other races were originally Ancient creations (or at least strongly hinted to be) - a quest in Elpis called 'Terror on Two Legs' revealed the matanga/arksardora appear to have been created by the Ancients (the quest involves a tiny matanga running around crazily, and you have to capture it so the researcher assigned to study it's concept can do his work), and Lyssa, the first boss of Ktsis Hyperboriea, was strongly hinted to be the progeneitor of the lupin (based on the comments of the Trust npcs and a research document found later in the dungeon).

Even the lumbering, brutish, vaguely intelligent minotaurs were Ancient creations (created, as I recall a NPC stating in Elpis, to serve as security guards at restricted facilities).

Considering we know in the present day that the ixal were created by the Allag, this would ring true.

[Renathras]

...

In the Tales short story about the Phoenix, it mentions the concept of a Soul, and that Souls CAN interact with Creation Magic constructs ( https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes.../#sidestory_04 ). Further, we learned in Elpis that the various experiments created were actually living beings, and many get souls. I don't remember the exact quote, but one of the times Hermies is complaining about the stuff they do, Hades mentions that they discard the experiments that don't turn out well. Hermes asks "And what about the ones with the souls?", and if I recall correctly, Emet is entirely dismissive, basically saying that the created beings AND THE SOULS were basically theirs to do with as they pleased. There's even an island that is basically "evolution island" (one of the ones in the south/southwest of the map, I believe) where you can talk to an NPC that says that facility is specifically for letting things breed naturally (instead of making exact copies) because sometimes this results in interesting outcomes that an Ancient would not necessarily have ever come up with on their own. In other words, these are very clearly living beings capable of reproduction and evolution that they're using as lab experiments and terminating - sometimes terminating entire species (e.g. genocide) if they don't like the results of their tests on them.

And while Sundered fractions were not a thing in the time of the Ancients, there are NPCs in Amaraut that talk about how other cities have been damaged or destroyed by (what we learn is the early part of the Final Days), and their response is largely a dismissive "Sucks to be them". There's an entire story about Azem saving a population from a volcano while the Convocation was perfectly content to let them all die. While the Sundered "I don't see you as alive, ergo it is not murder if I kill you" argument doesn't apply, they were equally as dismissive in that era to non-Ancient beings. And potentially even Ancients who were not part of Amaurot (as someone else said, we know nothing of the other cities or civilizations beside Amaurot, but know there WERE other cities and likely some variety of civilizations)


Even if you discount "modern sundered humans to use as sacrifices", they're still very much engineering entire species of flora and fauna with the express intent to sacrifice them. And we have no evidence they WEREN'T creating sentient ones. In Elpis, the WoL is mistaken as a familiar, and Metion was also clearly a sentient and intelligent being. So the Ancients WERE capable of creating such - or at least capable enough that the WoL being seen as a familiar seemed entirely plausible to them (and many of them talking about how they hope Azem shares your designs so they can have their own familiar like you to experiment on) - collectively indicating it was not beyond them, nor would they have balked at using such if they felt it was good for sacrifice.

I may not be remembering THIS right, but as I understand it, not everything that lives has souls. I think it was in Elpis, again, where they talked about how some of the created things did have souls and some did not. Hermes felt that the ones that did were not theirs to do with as they will, while Hades pointed out that's not how their society sees it, and was outright dismissive of Hermes feeling there was a distinction. I don't remember the exact line, but I think, of souls, Emet said "And these, too, we will return from whence they came" or something to that general effect (the "too" referencing him saying the physical form of the construct they just undo the magic that formed it to cause it to revert to aether)

We also don't know that modern races were born from the Ancients. The closest we have to canonicity on that was Zenos' father (the scene where he meets with the Eorzian Alliance) talking about how Man was broken up and his goal was to reunify them. Though it's hard to say if he knew the truth of it at all, and his own father WAS Emet, not to mention Ascian dealings with Garlemald were extensive, and if I remember right, he did say he gleaned that information from his Ascian accomplices. For all we know, our races came from the various species the Ancients were going to sacrifice. It's also possible modern species are a combination of both Sundered Ancients AND "new life", as noted that this "new life" had souls and there might have been some cross breeding in there. We also have no idea if the Wind-Up Mithra/etc (FF11 races) has any truth in FFXIV's world - that is, if there were proto-races of them.

What we do know is that SOME of our various races have Ancient Sundered shards of souls in them. But beyond that, it's not 100% clear either way.

.

But none of this really counters what I said before about them being genocidal, racial (and even cultural) supremacist, extremist religious zealots.

As that other guy said, people have this idyllic vision of Amaurot/the Ancients' society as being a utopia, but it very clearly was NOT.