Tales from the Dawn

[Tehmon]

We can't infer anything about anyone whom isn't mentioned. What we do know is that Azem (player insert) was a better person than everyone who is mentioned that existed post sundering. Yes, even Hythlodeus, who is an enabler and to be honest should have been named Loki.

I always found it weird how stable and down-to-earth he was (compared to other ancients), and how consistent that trait was in his several incarnations we meet throughout the game. Even being trapped inside Zodiark for thousands of years didn't shake him. One would think he had some foreknowledge of what was going to unfold, but I digress.

Ultimately, Hythlodaeus had only one goal: his and his friends' return to the star. He just wanted to die and help Azem and Emet in their own goals so they can die with him. In the context of ancient society, I'm sure that's beautiful and everything, but it does sounds very grim and scary in the context of the sundered mortal world. And in the end, he did get his wish. That's why I kind of side-eye Hythlo a bit and find him suspicious, because everything essentially worked out pretty well for him.

[SentioftheHoukai]

I literally had coffee with the person who did the Sundering. All that separates her presentationally from a character like Merlwyb is a thin layer of time travel technobabble that Pandaemonium treats more flippantly with each successive patch. I cannot help but come at her - and everything - from the same place as any other character. If the writers meant the whole situation to be processed in the same way that you apparently have, this was a huge mistake.

Mmm, well nothing makes it easier for one to condemn an entire civilization's worth of actual, real bloody people more than Othering them and inventing flaws that aren't there. Or interpreting virtues as irredeemable and unrepentant vices to better serve a dogma. Sound familiar? It does, doesn't it? For all that people like to compare Garlemald and Emperor Solus to certain tyrannical and murderous regimes in our great reality outside the screen, seems to me Endwalker is rather intent on practicing one of those selfsame regimes' most vile and heinous schemes.

The Ancients weren't all parts of the Matrix, they weren't the bloody Borg and they certainly weren't Skynet. They HAD emotions and they had feelings, family and loved ones. They just didn't prioritize them as much as our real life modern day society does, and I'd say by all evidence they were better off FOR IT. Way I see it, the masks and the robes? They were just societal set dressing. You WERE allowed to be expressive in Ancient society, but to me the whole "flaunt thyself in public" was perceived as acting as though you were better or more grand than everyone around you. Emet-Selch implies as much to Hermes, and you the WoL when speaking of the Ancients and explaining their Mighty Morphin' Transformations. The Ancients to me were simply very private people, and that's okay. Frankly, all this painting of the Ancients as some form of inhuman, alien monsters with boatloads of logic and near to no emotion is just plain OFFENSIVE to me as an introvert and autist. Do you have any idea at all how many times in my life I've been told I'm a sociopath because my autism mutes my emotions? Yeah.

To me, the Warrior of Light is a morally terrible person for following through with Venat's sick and insane Illuminati plot to murder good, innocent people just because they were different. Nobody is changing my mind on this, not ever. I'd sooner die, or kill as many as Emet-Selch and I'd NEVER stoop that low.

[Cilia]

The problem isn't that the Ancients weren't doing something misguided, it's the scope of the punishment. Modern society is constantly doing awful and hypocritical things that should be held to account. But only a crazy person who advocate for it being burned to the ground with everyone in it.

Well no, but modern people don't have creation magicks. If there's one thing that the Ancients share in common regardless of ideology it's that they do nothing in half-measures. Kind of the danger of creation magicks and people who for all their claims to the contrary aren't so different from us.

Modern civilization won't last forever. However it meets its end nobody can say, but one day it will end.

snip

Snipped for space.

The age of a given soul is immaterial. The point is a soul is a soul, and plugging more souls into Zodiark so you can unplug the ones you want isn't an ideal solution. Not only that it denies newly forged souls the opportunity for self-determination - or even older souls reincarnated, since death washes away all conscious memory. Do as you will with your life, but do not look to take the lives of others for selfish desire. (And for the 10,000,000th time, killing for nourishment is far removed from killing for necromantic fuel.)

So the Ancients respected natural law, but only so far as it was convenient for them to do so. Yes, what we know of the Ancients suggests they could live eternally; see what they became as the Ascians, with the two unsundered living for ~12,500 years. They still aged though as evidenced by Lahabrea in Abyssos, so they must have had some finite natural lifespan even if they were able to extend it indefinitely via magic.

Anyway, what seems to really be conveniently forgotten is that while the Ancients did live in a "paradise" it was propped up by several fragile tenets; namely near-absolute conformity and everything proceeding as planned. Everybody in Ancient society (or at least Amaurotine, the one put up on a pedestal) was expected to conform to their ideals or be looked down on as immoral, even such things as wearing unique or distinctive clothing, because it could instill envy in others (when you can just make one yourself from raw aether I don't know why, but ok). Everything had to proceed exactly as planned, since even one person questioning the system could send it tumbling down thanks to their godlike powers. (What really happened with Hermes.)

Fear that the future will not be easy or pleasant is understandable, but the only world where these things do not exist is a world that never changes (re: Pleasantville). Even if Meteion was somehow defeated without the Sundering (not via more entelechies, those would just make things worse), Zodiark unsummoned, and the paradisiacal ways before the Final Days returned, the Final Days still happened and would forever leave their mark on Amaurotine civilization. What the ultimate consequences in such a case would be we can only speculate, but the point is the halcyon days of Amaruot were gone forever no matter who did what. Even if Hydaelyn weren't created and the world sundered, those "glory days" would never return.

Hermes' big issue with his mentor was his inability to understand why they would want to die given how much he cherishes life, wrestling with the fact that to take the Fandaniel appointment is effectively executing said mentor at the same time, and how one day he would be expected to do the same. That led to him questioning their society's values and then the meaning of life. People realize he's not entirely well, but can't quite grasp why because of their own adherence to Amaurotine standards and values; the idea that someone would want something more out of life than simply serving the planet and then killing themselves is completely alien to them.

[Brinne]

Ah, we've circled back around to "having a social dress code means they were terrifyingly conformist and oppressive, ignoring that free debate, exploring different perspectives, and creativity are upheld as some of their strongest cultural ideals" along with a helping of "some people are simply naturally 'born wrong' and this provides justification for their wholesale eradication or forceful 'fixing' at the behest of someone else's judgment." Always fun to see.

[SannaR]

I always found it weird how stable and down-to-earth he was (compared to other ancients), and how consistent that trait was in his several incarnations we meet throughout the game. Even being trapped inside Zodiark for thousands of years didn't shake him. One would think he had some foreknowledge of what was going to unfold, but I digress.

Ultimately, Hythlodaeus had only one goal: his and his friends' return to the star. He just wanted to die and help Azem and Emet in their own goals so they can die with him. In the context of ancient society, I'm sure that's beautiful and everything, but it does sounds very grim and scary in the context of the sundered mortal world. And in the end, he did get his wish. That's why I kind of side-eye Hythlo a bit and find him suspicious, because everything essentially worked out pretty well for him.

You're making me think awful things about Hythlodaeus. What if he also got (re)told about us post Elpis by Venat since he did say he was going to do so. Even though I love his character he is definitely way to chill about things. I wonder if the few people that got told about the WoL just went "Oh yeah that sounds like something Azem would do." and Azem just owned it.

[RyuDragnier]

Ah, we've circled back around to "having a social dress code means they were terrifyingly conformist and oppressive, ignoring that free debate, exploring different perspectives, and creativity are upheld as some of their strongest cultural ideals" along with a helping of "some people are simply naturally 'born wrong' and this provides justification for their wholesale eradication or forceful 'fixing' at the behest of someone else's judgment." Always fun to see.

Now that was a complete rewriting of what Cilia wrote and you know it. He's stating that based on how their society worked and their societal norms, they required conformity because anything could twist their creation magicks into something different, something more dangerous, even a stray thought. Due to that reason they had to keep their emotions under control, bottled up, and had to conform for everybody's sake. However, due to that same reason, they did not know how to deal with intense emotions well, and letting their emotions go out of control could deeply effect society, something we witnessed with Hermes.

And since The Final Days occurred, they were ALL going to be essentially "tainted" by that event, and there was going to be a lot of emotional and mental scars from it, something that would effect their creation magicks. This would make it near impossible for them to return to those days of peace, because all anybody needed to have was a single nightmare about it and things would escalate again.

[SannaR]

Sanitariums and police forces.

Even if there were Sanitariums I'd bet they'd be secret. Or re-education centers. I know we don't really know what they did to any rule breakers, but they had to have some kind of punishment since there is a Convocation seat that's whole thing is keeping order. We also know from our own history how easy it is to send someone to a Sanitarium or other similar facilities with little to no questions asked. I still am not sure why they would use Minotaurs as guards though. Sure, we are talking about people who can create things out of thin air. But I feel as though that's a bit extreme and for the places you would want to be kept guarded those places seem to come off as you'd be dumb enough to try and infiltrate it. Like Pandeamonium. I wouldn't want to tussle with a warden any normal day and I definitely wouldn't want to risk having to fight a creation that's been labeled as too dangerous to have out in the world.

[Vyrerus]

The age of a given soul is immaterial.

I'ma stop you right there. It's clearly not immaterial. There are several plot hooks and lines in the game revolving around aged souls. Namely all the ones with the Echo, but further still, things like the Auspices. Which for all intents and purposes appear to be near immortal animals who grow more powerful as they age. Changes in a life leading to the knowledge of body hopping / body morphing. Hell, eventually the Ascians figure out how to inhabit and reanimate dead bodies to serve as hosts, too.

Soul Age should be the main consideration for the third sacrifice. If they're truly new, and in animals, then nothing extraordinary is going to be lost while discernible people are going to be brought back. You know, folks' lovers, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and friends. In this world, a soul may be a soul, but it doesn't carry anymore of an intrinsic value to it than regular lives do in our own. If you could pull someone you love out of purgatory for the life of a pig, you're telling me you wouldn't.

All peaceful civilization is built on fragile tenets. As for you not knowing why, it's because not everyone in Ancient times had the same capacity to create. Some couldn't do it without crystals. Some could make things no other person could. Adults could create things that children could not, and it would be dangerous for the children to attempt the same, for instance.

Also, no, not just any Ancient could bring the whole society down. Only truly exceptional individuals could do that. And in both cases, they needed not only to be exceptional, but to have some sort of power, knowledge, or following that trumped all of the best minds of the time. In Hermes' case, he had Meteion and Dynamis, more or less the scriptwriter's blank check to be all powerful. Venat had future knowledge, devoted fanatics, and was one of the most powerful Ancients in existence before having those things.

As far as Pandaemonium goes, while still unfinished, it's not that it couldn't have been handled. It's that it couldn't have been handled in a way that satisfies the emotional desires of our NPC raid crew. If Elidibus were truly impartial and cold, he could have erased the facility wholesale and been done with it on day 1.

We don't actually know 100% what the motivations for wanting the sacrificed people back were, nor do we truly know if Venat's memory sequence straw-ancient was truly representative of how people felt. We take that scene on faith and faith alone. Though of course, clearly it has to at least be partially true, or Emet-selch wouldn't have worked for 12000 years in vain.

Also regarding your last bit on Hermes, it can't be completely alien to them. Venat exists, after all, and existed prior to Hermes and was white robed prior to Hermes. So I think you're off kilter here. They likely grasp it completely, they just don't realize how far gone he has become.

[Theodric]

I think that the attempts to try and claim that the Ancients 'needed' or 'deserved' to go the way of the dodo due to their grasp of creation magics is just eugenics by another name. If the claim is that powerful beings are somehow deserving of genocide then that strikes me as very strange. Not in the least because it could easily be applied to many other powerful beings in the setting if the precedent is established but also because this is a fantasy setting and eradicating the fantasy elements strikes me as...counterproductive?

If we replace 'creation magics' with any other trait such as hair or skin colour then perhaps that will enlighten others here to what, exactly, they are arguing in favour of?

At any rate, it also ignores the simple fact that Venat stood by with knowledge of the Final Days and yet chose to allow it to happen. This is often strangely ignored when trying to lean on the trauma and mental scars angle as a justification for why the Ancients were supposedly a lost cause.

We see during the Garlemald segment a very difference stance, where even those defiantly resistant to the destruction going on all around them are treated with dignity and respect. As well as not simply being wiped out in order to prevent further problems in the future.

Which is the heart of the matter for many, it seems. The protagonists would not accept being wiped out no matter the reasoning - so there's really no viable reason for any other race to accept such a fate for either themselves, their civilisation or especially their loved ones.

[thegreatonemal]

I think that the attempts to try and claim that the Ancients 'needed' or 'deserved' to go the way of the dodo due to their grasp of creation magics is just eugenics by another name. If the claim is that powerful beings are somehow deserving of genocide then that strikes me as very strange. Not in the least because it could easily be applied to many other powerful beings in the setting if the precedent is established but also because this is a fantasy setting and eradicating the fantasy elements strikes me as...counterproductive?

If we replace 'creation magics' with any other trait such as hair or skin colour then perhaps that will enlighten others here to what, exactly, they are arguing in favour of?

At any rate, it also ignores the simple fact that Venat stood by with knowledge of the Final Days and yet chose to allow it to happen. This is often strangely ignored when trying to lean on the trauma and mental scars angle as a justification for why the Ancients were supposedly a lost cause.

We see during the Garlemald segment a very difference stance, where even those defiantly resistant to the destruction going on all around them are treated with dignity and respect. As well as not simply being wiped out in order to prevent further problems in the future.

Which is the heart of the matter for many, it seems. The protagonists would not accept being wiped out no matter the reasoning - so there's really no viable reason for any other race to accept such a fate for either themselves, their civilisation or especially their loved ones.

No one is saying this. The vast majority of the ancients were on a course that would have ensure their world's, their own lives, and the universe's(no one knew at the time) death with no rebirth. In order to stop them the sundering was used. This has nothing to do with them deserving to go. This is they have to be stopped from their present course before they kill us all.

The moment Meteion escaped was the moment the final days were set to happen. They had no way of getting to her and Zodiark is their only real solution, to stop their world from dying right on the spot. I think you misremembered the order of events.

The Garleans are a different matter, had it not been for Zenos and Fandaniel the original plan was to invade from the east and west liberating the nations the empire has conquered. Wouldn't have been a kill them all type deal but the humanitarian aid mission that we ended up doing would most likely be for the nations liberated, not for the Garleans.

Again, no one is saying that they had to accept it, there was a fight and they lost. Had they won, we all die.