Endwalker Story sucked and it's time to admit it

[Rannie]

Elpis is shared history, we set off from after the split, but we travel to a point before the split. It doesn't matter that the 8UC WoL died, because our WoL was alive and able to go.

I drew a (very basic) picture.

Pretty handwriting but I question the WoL though =P

[Alleo]

They're two different events, yes the ascians plan was to sacrifice the peoples of the rejoined world but the Amarotines were not planning to do that just funnel aether from the rekindled plant and animal life to him

And why would they not use animals and plants in the very first act of summoning Zodiark if its that simple to exchange an Ancient with that? Or at least after the first sacrifice when their creation magic was not running amok anymore? Why were it somehow two times people and the third time which would exchange all these Ancients with their huuuuuge aether reserves would simply be animals and plants?

Also why would the Ascians then somehow change this whole plan and instead of using plants and animals they planned to sacrifice the remaining people on the source after all the rejoinings? These people would be whole again thus "truly alive" in the eyes of them.

The issue here is that sundered beings are, at least some of them, reincarnations of those very same Ancients the Ascians wanted to bring back. Don't need to spoiler tag it here, but the PC is a sundered reincarnation of Azem; in order to get the Ancient "Azem" back, the PC would have to be killed and their soul returned to an Ancient's body. Then of course there's the matter of people whose souls aren't reincarnations of Ancients... if the working theory of the cycle of souls has any weight to it, they'd all need to be killed and their souls filtered back into the aether of an Ancient's soul; whatever's left can go back to the Lifestream to be used in the Aether Farm plan.

The sacrifice of ensouled life was always part of the plan. What form that life took is open to interpretation, but various sources have made it rather clear that new souls were going to be "plugged in to" Zodiark in order to get the Ancients' out. Unfortunately you can just go "Lol so you value cows' lives more than people's?" when arguing this point to ridicule and shut down the opposition, even though the metaphysics of XIV make it rather a bit more complex than that.

We know from Ardbert that a rejoining of the souls does not need both people death. At the same time we also dont see any changes in our bodies after such rejonings, so maybe the new "Ancients" would not even need a new body at all or they are simply powerful enough to change it. After all we have learned that they are somehow able to change their looks.

Also it does show that it was never about us being alive or not. Because if they kill unsundered people to get their "ancient" friends back (which would not be these people anyway because their memories would be gone and I have no idea how that filtering you described would even happen) to then sacrifice them, to get those in Zodiark back, they would still just murder"real people".

Anyways its true that the game leaves it open for interpretation by calling it new life. But with the knowledge that the Ascians would have sacrificed real unsundered people after the rejoinings and that Ancients did not feel that badly about creating and unmaking living creatures, I have my doubts that the third sacrifice was simply about plants and animals.

[Cilia]

That doesn't seem to add up, I thought the point of the sacrifices was to bring back the souls of those trapped in Zodiark. Why would thier souls have reentered the lifestream and be all mixed up among the sundered if they're supposed to be trapped inside Zodiark for 12,000 years.

Wouldn't the sundered just be the Ancients who died to the Final Days, or those who chose not to sacrifice themselves for whatever reason, (Azem, Fandaniel, at least) Like, the thing that makes being trapped in Zodiark so horrific is that your soul is cut off from the cycle of death and rebirth.

Not all the Ancients were sacrificed to Zodiark ("only" 75% of them) and the Ascians' desire was to return things to exactly how they were pre-Final Days. In order to do that they need to bring back all the Ancients who perished in the Final Days and their aftermath. Fully rejoining the reflections to the Source would not bring back Hermes, f'ex; he'd just be a fully rejoined Amon. You'd need to go another step to truly resurrect Hermes (kill Amon and transfer his soul to an Ancient's body, and somehow make his soul identify more with Hermes than Amon). Whether or not this would happen is uncertain, but.

Fresh new souls that aren't reincarnations of an Ancient could still be sacrificed to Zodiark for an Ancient's in return. That still wouldn't bring all of them back - the ones that died in the Final Days probably got sent to Meteion's nest, and the ones that were part of the second sacrifice to Zodiark may have simply sublimated into aether - but that's part of the tragedy of the Ascians: no matter how much death and destruction they cause, the world that was will never return.

And why would they not use animals and plants in the very first act of summoning Zodiark if its that simple to exchange an Ancient with that? Or at least after the first sacrifice when their creation magic was not running amok anymore? Why were it somehow two times people and the third time which would exchange all these people with their huuuuuge aether reserves would simply be animals and plants?

Also why would the Ascians then somehow change this whole plan and instead of using plants and animals they planned to sacrifice the remaining people on the source after all the rejoinings? These people would be whole again thus "truly alive" in the eyes of them.

The planet was pretty devastated before Zodiark was summoned; it's uncertain as to whether or not there was enough life left other than the Ancients to do something like summon Zodiark.

Fully rejoining a soul wouldn't return its vessel (body) to that of an Ancient, and as should be pretty apparent the Ascians do not have a high opinion of contemporary mortals. If a fully rejoined soul makes one equal to an Ancient, and the Ascians still planned on sacrificing these fully rejoined souls, it would become murder in their eyes (maybe) but they'd still find some way to rationalize it as "good" or "right." ("I'm improving your life by making you near-immune to disease and death by old age.") People will always find ways to justify their actions to themselves... unless they're a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain.

[WellGramarye]

Trimmed for space

Additionally, it is indicated that our trip to Elpis has already happened before we personally travel there to experience it. Hydaelyn is already aware of the time loop and its looming resolution, and Argos already trusts us.

Bolded needs in game corroboration and proof. She only asks about time travel because she uses the logic of "1, you have a spell on you only I can cast, 2 I've never met you, thus you must come from my future." Until we tell her information, she has no prior knowledge of us individually.

As for the rest:
IMO, this time travel logic doesn't hold up and becomes a large grandfather paradox, which doesn't work with the few established time travel consequences we've seen so far.

So far the Time Travel Logic has been thus:

A. Graha proves that you CAN change the past, and significantly so. It proves that actions in the past, change the future. This is fact.

B. The side story and Elidibus' warning prove that IF you change that past at crucial junctions and/or significant ways, then the future you return to will not be the same one you left from. This is fact.

C. Venat tells us this:

This tells us that, while we can avoid making grand sweeping changes in time, that small actions will still change the future. We see this with Venat making decisions based on what we told her and the information she learns from us.

I have more I wanna say but at the moment, I'm quite tired. I'll catch back up later.

Trimmed

Thank you for taking the time to make the image. I'm not ignoring your contributions, to this discussion, but you are making the same case as Iscah, so I will mostly be replying in that direction.

[Alleo]

The planet was pretty devastated before Zodiark was summoned; it's uncertain as to whether or not there was enough life left other than the Ancients to do something like summon Zodiark.

Yes I guess for the first summon the Ancients were necessary (since creation magic was still running amok) but for the second? The planet was devastated but the creation magic was back under control since Zodiark shielded the planet from Meteions influence. So either it was so bad that they needed to react on the spot or they could have taken their time without dieing and still choose to sacrifice themselves instead of others.

And the question of course is: Everything is made out of aether. If they did not need other people or beings equal to the Ancients for the exchange, why use beings with souls at all? Why not just simply have everyone give up part of their aether and exchange that? Then let them regenerate and on and on its goes. Is this a sign of their tempering? Or maybe a sign that plants and animals would not be enough?

Would these people even just come back at all? Or would this be another Lakshmi situation? We will probably never get those answers.

Fully rejoining a soul wouldn't return its vessel (body) to that of an Ancient, and as should be pretty apparent the Ascians do not have a high opinion of contemporary mortals. If a fully rejoined soul makes one equal to an Ancient, and the Ascians still planned on sacrificing these fully rejoined souls, it would become murder in their eyes (maybe) but they'd still find some way to rationalize it as "good" or "right." ("I'm improving your life by making you near-immune to disease and death by old age.") People will always find ways to justify their actions to themselves... unless they're a Saturday Morning Cartoon villain.

Would they still be mortals though if the souls are complete? I always thought that its the state of the soul and the amount of aether that made them "ageless" and not the body. Also Emet Selch gave us a big body in Elpis. That should theoretically be possible for the fully rejoined ones too.

And I agree with your view: Just like how Emet moved the goal post constantly so that he could declare us not worthy (we did beat his dungeon after all), they would find their reasons to still sacrifice "real people". Maybe its because the survivors would not be true Amaurotines, since those of the good old days are all in Zodiark.

Honestly though I wonder if the Ascians would have even managed to sacrifice those people if they were successful. After all they did lose against sundered beings.

[KariTheFox]

Not all the Ancients were sacrificed to Zodiark ("only" 75% of them) and the Ascians' desire was to return things to exactly how they were pre-Final Days. In order to do that they need to bring back all the Ancients who perished in the Final Days and their aftermath. Fully rejoining the reflections to the Source would not bring back Hermes, f'ex; he'd just be a fully rejoined Amon. You'd need to go another step to truly resurrect Hermes (kill Amon and transfer his soul to an Ancient's body, and somehow make his soul identify more with Hermes than Amon). Whether or not this would happen is uncertain, but.

But Emet-Selch says that the plan after the rejoinings is to sacrifice the inhabitants of the world in order to bring back those that were sacrificed to bring about Zodiark.

There's nothing about bringing back those that died in the Final Days, or the ancients lost in the sundering (although I would imagine that bringing them back would be another goal of the ascians at this point), it seems like ensouled being sacrifice has always been a necessary component of getting the people trapped in Zodiark out of him.

The ascians actually seem perfectly capable of restoring a sundered soul through memory crystals and whatever Mitron did to Gaia, and to be honest I kind of feel like the body hopping ascians wouldn't particuarly care about any of the restored ancients being in thier original bodies as long as thier memories and souls were restored.

[Cilia]

But Emet-Selch says that the plan after the rejoinings is to sacrifice the inhabitants of the world in order to bring back those that were sacrificed to bring about Zodiark.

There's nothing about bringing back those that died in the Final Days, or the ancients lost in the sundering (although I would imagine that bringing them back would be another goal of the ascians at this point), it seems like ensouled being sacrifice has always been a necessary component of getting the people trapped in Zodiark out of him.

The ascians actually seem perfectly capable of restoring a sundered soul through memory crystals and whatever Mitron did to Gaia, and to be honest I kind of feel like the body hopping ascians wouldn't particuarly care about any of the restored ancients being in thier original bodies as long as thier memories and souls were restored.

To reiterate: it's vague in Shadowbringers but material released since has made it clear enough that sacrifice of ensouled life was always part of the plan.

While it's possible to restore memories via crystals (though this isn't a perfect process; the memories on the crystals are only "as remembered by the [Paragons]" and limited to Convocation seat holders) the body is still important. The soul is part of it, but another part of why Emet-Selch feels contemporary mortals are so inferior to the Ancients is their susceptibility to disease and old age. ("Through His Eyes") Making the soul complete won't mean much if the plan is to return the world to how it was prior to the Final Days.

And yeah, it might be that all these now-complete people will be used as blood sacrifices to Zodiark if the plan is just to release those souls in Him by way of blood sacrificing other souls. They wouldn't be Ancients though, and the Ascians consider non-Ancient lives inferior for reasons beyond their aetherial thinness (not as physically hardy, susceptible to death by old age, more easily bent toward violence, more openly selfish, etc). A fully recompiled soul wouldn't be enough to save you.

At the end of the day everybody's going to die except for the Ascians, either in the rejoinings, as part of a process to restore sundered Ancients, or as part of a blood sacrifice to Zodiark to get the Ancient souls in him out. The particulars of it don't seem all that important to me.

[Iscah]

Bolded needs in game corroboration and proof. She only asks about time travel because she uses the logic of "1, you have a spell on you only I can cast, 2 I've never met you, thus you must come from my future." Until we tell her information, she has no prior knowledge of us individually.

You're not thinking of what I'm thinking of.

You're talking about how Venat deduced we are from the future. I'm talking about Hydaelyn as we meet her on the ship at the beginning of Endwalker, before we travel to Elpis. It is here that she talks about approaching the time where our parts in the time loop will converge, therefore she is already aware of and influenced by us in Elpis.

And again, her dog likes us already when we encounter him on the moon – whereas in Elpis we need to earn his trust. That implies that the moon is the second time he has seen us; Elpis is the first.

So far the Time Travel Logic has been thus:

A. Graha proves that you CAN change the past, and significantly so. It proves that actions in the past, change the future. This is fact.

B. The side story and Elidibus' warning prove that IF you change that past at crucial junctions and/or significant ways, then the future you return to will not be the same one you left from. This is fact.

Two parts of the same fact. G'raha demonstrates that you can change the past; Elidibus warns you that you could change the past if you alter something.

I see this as fitting in with my theory that the difference between creating a time loop or a split timeline is changing something that you know has happened in the past of the timeline that you came from.

If we tried to save someone we know will die, or convince Venat not to sunder the world, or kill Hermes or something like that, it would cause a grandfather paradox in a single timeline – and so (I imagine, as suggested by Shadowbringers) the timeline splits at that point to hold the original version of events in one timeline and the altered events in another. The person responsible for the paradox is directed into the timeline holding the events they have altered, which will not lead back to the past they came from.

G'raha exploited this. He deliberately made a change to the world that made his future impossible – not killing an ancestor but preventing the calamity that had such a vast impact on the world he came from. He is now stuck in the changed timeline, although in this case he is perfectly happy for that to be the case.

In Endwalker – at least by the authors' intent – the WoL needs get back to the same timeline they started from so they can bring back news of how the Final Days began and how they can avert it. Thus Elidibus's warning, which we forget and very nearly mess up by telling everything to Venat instead of keeping to ourselves, although we never successfully changed anything and the world ended up in the same state it was always doomed to end up in.

C. Venat tells us this:

This tells us that, while we can avoid making grand sweeping changes in time, that small actions will still change the future. We see this with Venat making decisions based on what we told her and the information she learns from us.

That's not what I read from those statements. It's not about "big actions versus little actions" but actions that alter things versus actions that can be incorporated into the timeline as it always was, though you hadn't previously known it.

As for Venat's hopes that it can still impact events in her time? All we can get from that is that right now she is hopeful that she can still change things for the better and create a path that doesn't lead to the things we've warned her are coming.

Perhaps she will try and try to find other routes, but every development leads her closer to thinking there is no other option than things turning out "as prophesised".

Or maybe in some other branch of time, she found a solution, but we won't see that play out any more than G'raha's friends in the Eighth Umbral Era will have any awareness that he succeeded in that mission. In that case, our knowledge given to her plays the equivalent role to the Exarch in the Shadowbringers time-breaking, but there still has to be this timeline alongside it where our warning changed nothing that we already knew would happen.

There's no guarantee that everyone within the story will fully grasp how time travel works, either. She's not a researcher on the subject; she's just caught up in events involving a time traveller and might make her own assumptions.

Her statement doesn't really make sense to me, outside of that possibility of having created another timeline beyond our knowledge, because her future is our past. If our actions do not change our history, then they cannot have changed what she did in our history.

[KariTheFox]

The particulars of it don't seem all that important to me.

True, really the only particular here is disputing the tissue-paper thin theory that the third sacrifice never involved ensouled beings, and was just putting ancient cows and chickens into a woodchipper, a theory that as of Tales Of The Dawn, has been doused in water.

Seems to me that the ancients crossed a moral event horizon as soon as they started trying to use the lives of future generations to bring back those that they had lost.

[Cilia]

True, really the only particular here is disputing the tissue-paper thin theory that the third sacrifice never involved ensouled beings, and was just putting ancient cows and chickens into a woodchipper, a theory that as of Tales Of The Dawn, has been doused in water.

Seems to me that the ancients crossed a moral event horizon as soon as they started trying to use the lives of future generations to bring back those that they had lost.

Well the thing is those chickens and cows (etc.) are also ensouled beings. To be considered "alive" something just has to be born in accordance with the laws of creation (nature) and given a soul by the planet. This was even verified before Shadowbringers by way of Krile's Echo letting her speak with beasts and Alpha starting off as a soulless familiar (for want of a better term) before he develops / is gifted a soul by the planet (letting us understand what he's trying to say via the Echo).

So still you can just go "Lol so you value cows' lives more than those of people's?" when arguing this point to ridicule and shut down the opposition to thunderous applause, even though the metaphysics of XIV make it rather more complicated than that.