Tales from the Dawn

[Theodric]

I think that it's also perfectly fine to hold a female villain accountable for horrific actions such as child abuse and spousal abuse. Athena is very much the female equivalent of Valens van Varo - an equally detestable hate sink.

I thought it was rather refreshing to see the game highlight that parental and spousal abuse can be inflicted by a woman. Many other games, if they touch on such heavy issues, usually take the 'lazy' route and almost always make the culprit of such things the father - so it was a nice subversion that doubled as giving players a very important message.

I'm in the camp where I don't see much benefit in blaming the victims of spousal or parental abuse for not behaving perfectly in the face of such. Though that's just me, so each to their own.

[Lurina]

Partially. Your actions and achievements influence how others perceive you, but they doesn't define who you are. There's a lot that we don't know about the Plenty. It's unlikely that they started out as the society that Meteion encountered. They likely had their own journey, its ups and downs, and eventually it all ended, as things are wont to do. You can't say that they're the lesser for it, but you should still try to learn from their experiences and missteps. The same is true for Amaurot. You can appreciate something and yet find reasons why you wouldn't want to follow in those exact same footsteps. It's nothing to do with being 'intrinsically' good or bad. I wouldn't have thought it would require so much reiteration, personally. But thank you for taking the time to explain it to them, I was getting bored of all the repetition.

Again, I don't parse how this relates to my post.

I'm not saying that the viewpoint on the Plenty you're expressing now is an invalid reading, I'm saying that it's not consistent with the one you expressed earlier. Regardless of whether the message is specific (the Plenty was wiped out due to X cause) or general (the Plenty was wiped out due to a range of factors abstractly expressed in their segment of the game), the crux is whether or not we, the player, are meant to take something away from it pertinent to Endwalker's broader themes and subject matter. Right now, you're arguing that we are - even if it's not specific, we are meant to learn something, and understand that as connected to Amaurot's fate.

But again, back then, you said, "the only point that's really being made through these examples is that all things come to an end" as a basis to dismiss what I was saying about the way Endwalker constructs its arguments. If the Plenty is making a point beyond that, then it was valid of me - if not nessecerily correct - to criticize how it makes that point. Especially considering the ennui stuff specifically wasn't even the thrust of that conversation; it was how the Plenty is used as a device, regardless of what it's actually saying.

What I'm saying is that, whether you're doing it consciously or not, you're changing what you assert to be true based on the conversation to dismiss people as misunderstanding the story rather than actually engaging with the substance of their argument, and it's kinda bad faith. (So is only quoting the people who agree with you and refusing to have a direct dialogue with anyone else.)

[Lyth]

No, it's consistent.

You're fixated on the idea that one faction must be 'superior' or 'inferior' to the others in a binary sense. That's why your friends oscillate wildly between looking down on the Sundered as an 'inferior race' while getting angry at the writers whenever the Amaurotines are laid low by their circumstances. No such point is being made here. In fact, if you've played through the Omega questline, the conclusion that they draw is that there's no 'special factor' that defines the survivors which makes them more robust than all the others. Being 'superior' is not an intrinsic quality of anyone, and it's not really worth indulging in that sort of vanity.

That doesn't mean that we can't learn from other people's missteps. Eara seems to relate the fall of the Plenty to ennui. And perhaps that's correct. My own takeaway from the Plenty is that you can't remove emotions from the table, and you have to learn to acknowledge and live with them. Neither reading is intrinsically right or wrong; it's just a mirror that reflects our respective value systems. But you can't then turn around and attribute whatever meaning you derive from their story to the writing team as a prescriptive fable. That's not them, that's you. It simply reflects what's already in your heart.

Either way, there's not much point going in circles with this. If you don't want to get it, then you probably still won't if it's repeated to you.

[WellGramarye]

Everyone is so fixated on the Pleanty, as the one reason or another that things went wrong, but also forget about the Ea whom reached a state like the Pleanty but found out that the universe was finite, so succumbed to despair. Many of the other civilizations imploded for different reasons; the water planet to disease, the political planet to war, the dragonstar to invasion, the omicrons to evolutionary conflict.



Regardless of how these places destroyed themselves, its the fact that they did that affected Metion. She despaired because she saw that no matter how hard these places tried to progress, they all came to an end. The hive said then, that if everything comes to an end; why bother trying at all, and end it now, since from her point of view its easier and kinder than work towards what seems to be an inevitable end. Metion's despair embodies nihilism.

[SentioftheHoukai]

No, it's consistent.

You're fixated on the idea that one faction must be 'superior' or 'inferior' to the others in a binary sense. That's why your friends oscillate wildly between looking down on the Sundered as an 'inferior race' while getting angry at the writers whenever the Amaurotines are laid low by their circumstances. No such point is being made here. In fact, if you've played through the Omega questline, the conclusion that they draw is that there's no 'special factor' that defines the survivors which makes them more robust than all the others. Being 'superior' is not an intrinsic quality of anyone, and it's not really worth indulging in that sort of vanity.

That doesn't mean that we can't learn from other people's missteps. Eara seems to relate the fall of the Plenty to ennui. And perhaps that's correct. My own takeaway from the Plenty is that you can't remove emotions from the table, and you have to learn to acknowledge and live with them. Neither reading is intrinsically right or wrong; it's just a mirror that reflects our respective value systems. But you can't then turn around and attribute whatever meaning you derive from their story to the writing team as a prescriptive fable. That's not them, that's you. It simply reflects what's already in your heart.

Either way, there's not much point going in circles with this. If you don't want to get it, then you probably still won't if it's repeated to you.

Never have I ever heard so much wishy-washy hypocrisy in a single post. Good job~ All these things can also be applied to what you and yours have said for millennia, and many of these points openly contradict the views you've espoused in the past or willfully misinterpret or twist the meaning of points others have made to use it against them. Truly, you are astonishing my Queen.

claps wildly

[Veloran]

With all due respect, I’m going to say we should drop this direction for the topic right now. It is unhelpful and given the current real life connections it does nothing but raise the conversations temperature. Lets not do this.

It's true, and you know it's true. You yourself have stated that you think the potentiality of life is worth sacrificing lives, even innocent lives, for. Don't get squeamish just because it's uncomfortable. Again this isn't an indictment (on the topic I broached in specific anyway), I'd just like people to be more thoughtful and, preferably, consistent with the ideas they're talking about here.

The central conceit of the Ancients is that they were special. They were not.

[Enkidoh]

The only special aspects of the Ancients was they were ageless (but not immortal, they could still die, just not from old age), and had the power of creation magic which, really, was simply due to having enormous natural reserves of aether in their bodies. That was the sum of their 'special' nature. They however still had a tendency to all too mortal human failings of pettiness, jealousy, depression and anger.

Also, their civilization was already showing the first cracks of turning into staid decadence even before Hermes had his emotional breakdown and created the Metia to send his cursed question to the cosmos - many of the researchers in Elpis lamented at a general waning of creativity in both the concepts they were testing and even their own ideas for things like concept names - leading to people just copying each other's ideas and passing it off as 'new' with little change, shown with the 'fad' for shark concepts that Hythlodaeus mentioned (even though it was done for a quick joke, it actually hinted at something far more rotten in Ancient society that led back to the core of the expansion's theme). And even Hermes himself stated outright that they were frustratingly reaching the limit of what could be achieved with aether manipulation and Creation Magic - which is why he studied Dynamis in the first place.

And there were hints that ancient Etheriys wasn't actually the paradise it was made out to be, that things like war and disease did exist, it was just shoved under the rug with the use of Creation Magic relied on to solve such problems. All Venat did was take mankind's blinders off, in the most harshest way, but I digress.

[Veloran]

Also, their civilization was already showing the first cracks of turning into staid decadence even before Hermes had his emotional breakdown and created the Metia to send his cursed question to the cosmos - many of the researchers in Elpis lamented at a general waning of creativity in both the concepts they were testing and even their own ideas for things like concept names - leading to people just copying each other's ideas and passing it off as 'new' with little change, shown with the 'fad' for shark concepts that Hythlodaeus mentioned (even though it was done for a quick joke, it actually hinted at something far more rotten in Ancient society that led back to the core of the expansion's theme).

This is a forum for Final Fantasy 14.

that things like war and disease did exist,

What war and disease? The most we've seen is individual problems like Hermes or Athena. Did I miss a war somewhere?

[Enkidoh]

Not outright, but there was some very interesting dialogue Eric mentioned in the cutscene after P2 - where he initially thought the WoL and Themis "didn't look like mercenaries", then stated "you don't look like fighters training here either" (paraphrased). Now, why would a paradiscal civilization need mercenaries unless they were fighting wars? (this also brings me to another question as to why Emet and Hythlodaeus were clearly trained in combat - what purpose for fighting would they need? - Venat gets a pass by being formerly Azem whose hat that was, but the other two are meant to be more academic/bureacratic sorts usually stuck behind a desk or debating on the floor of a council chamber, and yet perfectly were able to fight. Even Hermes was able to hold his own against them in combat. Being trained in combat "to deal with dangerous creations" seems a bit of a stretch.

And then we're shown creations that wield weapons like the minotaurs (who were specifically mentioned as being "guards") - could they therefore use creations specifically set up for combat to wage war against each other (after all, any damage could easily be repaired quickly, and if it's creations doing the fighting, overseen by a few select combat-trained Ancient specialists, then a war would not have the same impact as it does in our world, or after the Sundering, as death would be kept to a minimum and any damage to the environment or infrastructure would be easily and quickly repaired.

There is actually precedent for this post Sundering too - past Astral Eras had automata doing most of the fighting in wars like golems in the War of the Magi, or mammets like the Onion Knights in Allag, so the Ancients doing the same thing wouldn't be too unbelivable. Of course this is all speculation based on a few ambigious lines, but it does go some way to explaining why things ended up how they did. And that was despite the warm glow of paradise ancient Etheirys appeared to be, there was very much a dark side to the ancient Unsundered world that ultimately festered and rotted through once the flaking 'perfection' broke away. So really all Venat did was force the blinders off. After all, Venat herself stated "that there has always been sorrow", all the Ancients did was shove it under the rug and pretended it didn't exist.

[Veloran]

Now, why would a paradiscal civilization need mercenaries unless they were fighting wars? (this also brings me to another question as to why Emet and Hythlodaeus were clearly trained in combat - what purpose for fighting would they need?

I can no more disprove your speculation than you can prove it. However,

So really all Venat did was force the blinders off.

past Astral Eras had automata doing most of the fighting in wars like golems in the War of the Magi, or mammets like the Onion Knights in Allag, so the Ancients doing the same thing

by the logic you use to theorize such a situation, you're inadvertently making the argument that actually the blinders aren't off and sundered people are openly guilty of the same things you're surmising about the Ancients.