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

[Vyrerus]

The desire to depict

No. What we perceive as a villainous act was crafted by people from our world. Our storytellers.


The goal of Venat was to beat Hermes's judgment. She did not give a flying rip about the means or ends to do that. Sacrifices to Zodiark was the scapegoat lie she told her followers, and what would make sense to the general populace without giving away the secret she wanted to needlessly keep.

The Sundering was an act of Genocide in every way. It destroyed the entirety of the Ancients' nations. It destroyed all of their culture. It destroyed all of the identities. It also destroyed all of their lives. It also split souls yet to be vested in flesh by the planet. They have Sundered descendants, yes, but those descendants choose to deny that heritage (or are entirely ignorant of it, or don't have it due to being sundered souls living for the first time). Look at Amon. He knows of and acknowledges his life as Hermes, but he also resents it. He says, "I have those memories, but that's not who I am!"

By your logic there's no genocide in the real world. By your logic there are also no stories with morals (which is actually a large impetus for tons of stories).

There need not be a desire to depict Venat as a villain. The issue lies in the storytellers writing her to do villainous deeds, but then trying to say they weren't villainous by using the game's narrative cast as a mouthpiece.

But if you really wanna throw down the, "social construct" gauntlet, then look at the societies constructed by our storytellers within the story. They largely hold similar values to societies in the real world. Then look at Venat's actions. Even within her own society, she enacted civil war, and broke a lot of their customs before that, to boot. In other words, Venat did things that many people within our story world should take issue with, but don't, because the scriptwriters wrote them to not. She destroyed her own society, violating what you have specified is the reason to have social constructs in the first place.

The Ancients were sundered, and afterwards their sundered souls and flesh allowed life to continue. Not Ancient life. Sundered life, with all of the differences, disadvantages, and singular advantage that comes with it. Most of which caused most of that life to immediately die. Leaving all life vulnerable to other ends of which Venat was not aware of or afraid.

[Lauront]

But if you really wanna throw down the, "social construct" gauntlet, then look at the societies constructed by our storytellers within the story. They largely hold similar values to societies in the real world. Then look at Venat's actions. Even within her own society, she enacted civil war, and broke a lot of their customs before that, to boot. In other words, Venat did things that many people within our story world should take issue with, but don't, because the scriptwriters wrote them to not. She destroyed her own society, violating what you have specified is the reason to have social constructs in the first place.

After all, we can just refer to the cast's mouthpieces and their own pronouncements...



...and...

“To ignore the plight of those one might conceivably save is not wisdom─it is indolence.”

Guess they just need to be confronted with a supreme deity ready to sunder them, for their memories to be jogged a little.

Excellent post.

[Rulakir]

After all, we can just refer to the cast's mouthpieces and their own pronouncements...

Don't forget:



At any rate, wow, looks like I missed a lot of fun! I just want to add, Hermes read like he was written by someone who is blissfully unaware of what animal testing is actually like. Elpis was a dream scenario as far as that is concerned. It was impossible to take any of it seriously as being 'scary' or 'wrong' when humans are guilty of far, far worse. (The message is Hermes was in the wrong line of work.) If you want me to morally condemn an entire civilization you're going to have to make them beyond salvation, not actually better people than both the sundered and RL mankind.

You're also going to have to not have one of the Scions do the exact same thing one patch later to humorous effect.

[Striker44]

snip

The part that precedes your post is huge here, I believe. The Ancients' plan after the summoning of Zodiark was to create a huge amount of life purely to sacrifice it to Zodiark in order to bring back their initially sacrificed brethren. THAT would be genocide, and on a scale that makes the remaining half of the population post-Zodiark-summoning look like a grain of sand in comparison. The simple reality is that a lot of people were going to die no matter what happened. Venat chose to sacrifice the smaller number in order to save the significantly greater amount of life that would have been killed had she not done what she did.

It's the famous mine shaft philosophy question. A boulder is falling down a mine shaft about to crush 4 people. With the press of a button, you can send it down a different shaft where it will kill only 1 person. Do you press the button or not? Yes, technically pressing the button directly causes the death of 1 person, but not pressing the button likewise directly guarantees the death of 4 people. Do you call the person who presses the button a murderer because they moved the boulder to kill 1 person instead of 4? Or do you recognize that in doing so a greater number of lives were saved? Venat pressed the button. That's all.

By your logic there's no genocide in the real world. By your logic there are also no stories with morals (which is actually a large impetus for tons of stories).

And absolutist comments like this serve no useful purpose and reek of desperation by someone who realizes their arguments have been torn, dare I say, asunder.

[Teraq]

Oh boy, it's the famous mine shaft philosophy question in which Hermes sees a boulder fall down a mine shaft and goes "you know what? this boulder is EXACTLY what we deserve because we crush ants under rocks ALL THE TIME" and Venat, armed with all the knowledge to deviate the boulder entirely, replies "oh wow ur valid as heck, challenge accepted lmao" – like any sane person would. She was, after all, a wacky Ancient, who routinely carried out judgment on vast swathes of people with no prior concert or debate.

The part that precedes your post is huge here, I believe. The Ancients' plan after the summoning of Zodiark was to create a huge amount of life purely to sacrifice it to Zodiark in order to bring back their initially sacrificed brethren. THAT would be genocide, and on a scale that makes the remaining half of the population post-Zodiark-summoning look like a grain of sand in comparison.

What a very interesting claim. Can we see the source for the amount of sacrifices required and how it would "make the remaining half of the population post-Zodiark-summoning look like a grain of sand in comparison"?

In case you are going with "well Ancients obviously had a lot more aether than other animals and plants so they would have needed a lot!!!!!": as far as we know, beings in FFXIV are made of corporeal aether, soul aether and memory aether. As we now know as of Endwalker, Zodiark never consumed the souls and memories of the people inside him, else we wouldn't be having a little chat with Hythlodaeus, among others. This implies the aether that needs to be replaced here by the third sacrifice is just corporeal aether, to remake their bodies.

What proportion would corporeal aether be in an Ancient's total aether? How much would that equal in chicken and tree aether? I don't know. You don't know. None of us do.

The simple reality is that a lot of people were going to die no matter what happened.

People? In the third sacrifice? {Hmmm.}

I don't really understand in what way some people were expecting a better end for the Ancients.

Personally, I've never minded the fact that Ancients were dead. I do love my tragic villains. What I do resent though is the massive victim blaming going on in Endwalker, painting the Ancients as Honestly Kinda Dodgy Because What About Hermes's Little Hedgehogs? and kiiiiinnnda sorta deserving of their probably-avoidable fate because they would have totally wound up, in an indeterminate amount of years, centuries or millenia, like this distant alien civilisation we have zero context about (and neither did Venat as far as we know).

Meanwhile, Shadowbringers had a lot more nuance by not telling us what the source of the Final Days were, and making its antagonists relatable: i.e. wanting to bring their loved ones and society back, rather than lofty ideals about suffering and fauxlosophical musings about life and death.

Endwalker went and undid a lot of that: the Final Days couldn't merely have been an unspeakable, random tragedy that hit a perfectly good and normal people and drove them to desperate measures to cope, no – they low-key deserved it because muh playing god and dealing with grief the wrong way. Ascians, meanwhile, also took a big hit: their plea is no longer equivalent to the Sundered wanting to survive, because we now know their people was totally hubristic and wrong anyway because the plot outright tells you they couldn't have dealt with Meteion, or loss, or feelings. They can now safely be dismissed and we can all sleep soundly at night because their lost paradise totally wasn't worth it. The Sundered, though? Absolutely gucci! Only they could wield the Power Of Friendship required to resolve this convoluted scenario – but it turns out they needed assistance from at least three Ancients to result in the chain of events that brought them to the Endsinger, and without that timely assistance and information on the Final Days they would have succumbed to the apocalypse in even more horrifying circumstances than the Ancients did... so... I'm not sure what the point of it all is supposed to be about anymore, frankly.

The sundering had to have happened or the game just.. undoes itself?

Shadowbringers and its last Tales From The Shadow short story showed us changing the past is fully possible and would result in an alternate timeline.

[leanansi]

-snipped-

I think where we disagree is just how hard we read the narrative as pushing one ideology as correct. I just viewed Venat's version of what needed to happen as her opinion. They offered the background as to why she came to that conclusion, but I didn't feel like the story was trying to force me to agree with her. Your character has to amicably work with her and also with Emet and the others at different times, so it didn't really feel to me like that implied you absolutely had to agree with just her. You're even given the dialogue option in another quest to say you agreed more with Emet (or Hermes). Maybe they could have allowed you to openly show more disdain for either of your choosing through dialogue options with them. I wouldn't be against it as an option. I read the reaction of the main character to both Venat and Emet as pretty friendly by default, though. It seems like you liked all these people, even Hermes, and are sad to see what became of all of them. That's the only angle that seemed pushed, to me.

I think being an MMO and not a story/character centered game, like a Bioware RPG, does limit what they can do a bit. They can't really design working branching paths where some people can heavily work towards helping different causes towards different ends, which is probably why they took a pretty neutral stance towards everyone as the default. I think that what the writers probably actually believe is the "they were all justified in their own way" option you can choose to express. I think that's how the Ancients were meant to be written. This is all pretty subjective, though, and I can see a lot of people didn't get the same read.

[Brinne]

The part that precedes your post is huge here, I believe. The Ancients' plan after the summoning of Zodiark was to create a huge amount of life purely to sacrifice it to Zodiark in order to bring back their initially sacrificed brethren. THAT would be genocide, and on a scale that makes the remaining half of the population post-Zodiark-summoning look like a grain of sand in comparison. The simple reality is that a lot of people were going to die no matter what happened. Venat chose to sacrifice the smaller number in order to save the significantly greater amount of life that would have been killed had she not done what she did.

Venat sundered everything, including the would-be sacrifices. "That light split the world, and every life upon it." The argument she had to sacrifice the Ancients to save the "new life" doesn't work because she condemned the new life in the exact same way that she did to the Ancients.

Her goal was never to defend or protect the sacrifices. It was pressing an ideological point, preventing her fellow Ancients whom she loved so much from going down the "path of weakness," and, being generous, her chosen strategy to hope that some form of life would exist in the future. Not anything living in the world at the moment of the Sundering. She killed them all. In this way, she certainly was "the light of the future."

To put it bluntly: quoting the game, the Ancients were willing to sacrifice "a portion of the new life" if it meant they could save their people trapped within Zodiark. Meanwhile, Venat was willing to sacrifice every single life on the planet if it meant she could kill the Ancients, too.

[Vyrerus]

Venat chose to sacrifice the smaller number in order to save the significantly greater amount of life that would have been killed had she not done what she did.

Venat lowered the life expectancy of everything on Etheirys, including the Souls not yet vested in flesh, by several orders of magnitude. She then split it all into 14 distinct lives, introducing death at 14 times the new life expectancy for everything, down to the smallest insect. In your inane reinvention of the trolley problem, she kept her finger off the button.

As for what you refer to as an absolutist comment that serves no purpose, the entire post I responded to was an absolutist take with regards to social constructs. It pointed out the absolute absurdity inherent in that take. You might want to get your nose checked out.

[Lauront]

Venat lowered the life expectancy of everything on Etheirys, including the Souls not yet vested in flesh, by several orders of magnitude. She then split it all into 14 distinct lives, introducing death at 14 times the new life expectancy for everything, down to the smallest insect. In your inane reinvention of the trolley problem, she kept her finger off the button.

As for what you refer to as an absolutist comment that serves no purpose, the entire post I responded to was an absolutist take with regards to social constructs. It pointed out the absolute absurdity inherent in that take. You might want to get your nose checked out.

On top of this, she deliberately attempts to spare Emet, knowing how that will go - and if she thought that might turn out differently, observed reality would inform her otherwise in short order. That, plus all the worlds lost in the time it took to eventually reach the WoL's era, is an immeasurable loss of life and infliction of suffering, and it's not like the sundered (generally) have some deep, abiding respect for other lives - definitely not even the kind the ancients (generally) had for their living creations; they are more prone to vices like war, which even involves life forms similar to themselves, and will use beings such as animals, arcane entities etc. as and when they please, to meet their ends. Certainly, as far as Hermes's "test" was concerned, he considered them to have failed it as well - to the extent that that "test" was worth anything. The best defence Yoshi could advance of her is a desire to try keep the timeline consistent, because it is far from clear that all she did was 'necessary' in any absolute sense, as opposed to necessitated by the pathway she committed herself to. How would things have ended, had she been candid with her people, which is the least she owed them?

Instead, we get lukewarm defences comparing her to SHB Emet-Selch and "I guess she's an ancient huh".

[Striker44]

Venat lowered the life expectancy of everything on Etheirys, including the Souls not yet vested in flesh, by several orders of magnitude. She then split it all into 14 distinct lives, introducing death at 14 times the new life expectancy for everything, down to the smallest insect. In your inane reinvention of the trolley problem, she kept her finger off the button.

As for what you refer to as an absolutist comment that serves no purpose, the entire post I responded to was an absolutist take with regards to social constructs. It pointed out the absolute absurdity inherent in that take. You might want to get your nose checked out.

And a "reduced" lifespan is still much better than an enormous number of people with no lifespan at all because they were murdered as a sacrifice. I'm guessing you ignored my actual point because you realize you can't refute it. Thanks for playing