Quote Originally Posted by PawPaw View Post
Nothing of the sort was made clear by the summoning of Zodiark. The world was saved after the first sacrifice, the second sacrifice was to restore the world to some semblance of health again and the third sacrifice would restore the souls of everyone who had given up their lives to stop the Final Days. That would have been it and no, contrary to what you might read on these forums and Reddit, Zodiark is not and never was a Blood God. He doesn't require human souls in order to keep going. In fact, he had not needed a single additional soul since Hydaelyn destroyed the world and decimated all the souls upon it and had been going strong for the past 12k years. He was the one who had been keeping the Source and all of the shards safe all of this time, not Hydaelyn, no matter how much credit the game would like to bestow upon her.
I don't get why people think it would stop at three sacrifices. That goes against two pieces of information, the first of which is that primals constantly need aether to sustain themselves. The second is that the plan was ultimately to rejoin all the shards and then sacrifice everyone to Zodiark to remake the world as it once was. People seem determined to paint Hydaelyn as some villain and Zodiark as some savior. In Zodiark's name, the Ascians destroyed six worlds of life, whereas Hydaelyn attempted to stop them. This is a jrpg and a Final Fantasy game, the heroes are the heroes, and the villains are the villains. They may be flawed with mitigating circumstances, but the claim that Hydaelyn is the villain goes against the entire narrative.

Was there a third option? Who knows? Because the one and only person who actually knew what was causing the Final Days and who knew of the existence of Meteion and the importance of Dynamis didn't feel the need to share that information with absolutely anyone who could have possibly helped find a way to stop it. She didn't even share the knowledge with her loyal followers. And we know that the excuse for Venat's genocide of her people was not because of the sacrifices, but because she, herself thought that they wouldn't be able to change as a people and so she, herself made the decision that they should all be destroyed instead. I'm not listing the definition of genocide here, you are free to go and look it up, but what she did was most certainly genocide.
I distinctly recall them explaining that should Venat have told them, it wouldn't have changed many minds. The sheer destruction the flood of dynamis was causing, the reaction of the ancients, etc. Faced with the absolute destruction, people aren't going to calmly sit down and listen, they're going to grab onto the first plan and go with it, which is to summon Zodiark.

Meteion was created by an Ancient, no idea why someone would logically deduce that a race of super-scholars would be stumped as to how to come up with a way to combat a creation made by another researcher had they, perhaps, known that this threat existed at all. They weren't all completely ignorant to the existence of Dynamis, they just didn't have a chance to find another way because Venat purposely didn't give it to them. She allowed the sacrifices to be made, knowing that she would need to use Zodiark to enact her plan and then decided that enough was enough and that her utterly traumatized and confused people weren't reacting the way she thought they should, so they all had to go.
Only Hermes was barely capable of using dynamis. The other ancients were completely unaware of its existence, unable to sense it, unable to use it. We spent a good chunk of time hunting down Meteion because we were the only ones able. The ancients could not have fought Meteion because for most of them, it caused their magic to go out of control. A few ancients were capable of resisting fear, but most of them were susceptible to it. And I bet in a sustained fight, even Hades would succumb to fear.

And the Ancient's "callous disregard for life"? Really? We must not be playing the same game because my character seems to have no issues whatsoever with taking down man or beast at any time for fun and profit. But turning a butterfly into a robe or destroying rabid beasts who are decimating an ecosystem is obviously where we should all draw the line.
Most men you fight are trying to kill you or your friends. Killing someone determined to kill you is not a "callous disregard for life" but self-defense. And killing animals that are destroying an ecosystem or hunting them for materials has been done since the dawn of time. You do realize other animals kill for food and sport? It's not some evil thing, it's a part of existence.