Tales from the Dawn #3: "A Question of Life" (Hermes)

[Rannie]

I get too many Camazotz vibes from Amaurot most of the time... when is the Happiest Sadist going to show up to keep everyone in line and make them zombies..

[Lurina]

I'd say that the reactions around Hermes' actions are actually surprisingly unified, on a point, in that everyone seems to acknowledge that what he did was wrong irrespective of whether they enjoy his character or not. It's just a question of whether you want to acknowledge that he actually belongs to Amaurot or whether you choose to other him. And this largely comes down to whether his behavior fits in with your narrative of them collectively being superior beings that were justified in mass slaughtering our people to get what they wanted.

I don't think there's a need to be so binary. You can think Amaurotine society was broadly good but still not believe it was perfect enough to justify the Rejoinings (if it's even possible to have a society perfect enough to justify the mass murder of sapient beings for), just like you can believe it was broadly bad and still not think it deserved to be exterminated. They're not superior, they're just a group of people. No more or less.

As for Hermes, like all renegades, he both is and is not a product and an indictment of his culture. Because human nature is self-contradictory, even the best societies will have a marginalized population at the periphery who are nevertheless products of the cultural core in their own way. Hermes is a shadow of Amaurot at large, possessing a nature that is unsatisfied by and rebellious of its values while still unconsciously replicating them at their worst. Amaurot encourages a unique (if not fundamentally remarkable) sort of conceit towards non-human life, one which Hermes indulges in constantly, until it becomes warped by his nihilism into conceit towards life in general.

Is he 'Amaurot's fault'? It depends on how you look at it, but in my (unhappily-held) opinion, it's idealism to think that a world where everyone is happy can be achieved just by balancing everyone's needs carefully. Whether by choice or sheer inertia, social resources are allocated based on general necessity. The empathetic muscles of Amaurot that could have helped Hermes (or people like Blaste, or hell, Athena) atrophied because the overwhelming majority of people were content. Could they have been made stronger without the rest of the population having to suffer proportionally? The story offers no suggestion that they could - the Final Days and the Sundering 'improve' the world for people like Hermes by spreading misery to everyone, and though a more subdued change would probably have also done the job, it would have still required a shift in collective experience - towards grief and loss.

Society can be optimized to marginalize and hurt the least amount of people, but once you get past that, it's a zero sum game. Again: Human nature is self-contradictory. Unless you control the natural variance of the human mind itself, some types of human minds will be unhappy. The individualist will chafe in a conformist world no matter how nice it is, while the conformist will feel aimless and lost in a individualist one, and this is true for countless other situations.

When it comes to forging the world we all have to live in, it's 'kill' or 'be killed'. In this one sense, at least, Hermes cannot be blamed.

Personally I think that Amaurot is the place we've visited that I'd least want to live (excepting, you know, legit uninhabitable regions). Mostly because it's way TOO conformist; I'm quite happy in my own niche, but I want to define it myself, not to have society declare it for me.

My own experience with autism (both my own and in knowing others with it) actually says that the most friendly nation to that experience we've visited is probably either Thavnair or Sharlayan. Weirdly, the deciding factor is probably more where your comfort zone for food is than anything else; they both have very... distinct culinary identities, for better or worse.

This feels a bit silly, but as another autistic person, I have to agree I'd prefer to live in Amaurot than anywhere else in the setting. It's not even that I'm conformist - it just obviously has a much higher quality of life than all the other places. Amaurot is a society that is built contrary to what I'd personally want, but is nevertheless optimized way better than the alternative, in the same way than I'd much rather live under a modern dictatorship than in a free society in the middle ages. Even taking the most cynical approach to the setting, I'd much rather sulk at the fringes of the Unsundered World with my one or two other deviant friends where they probably have computers and I could conjure a really nice house and good food for myself every day than, I dunno, die of dysentery in Ul'Dah.

Anyway, putting that aside, I have to say I'm pretty surprised you listed Sharlayan as the alternative, since it's basically Amaurot but in the Sundered World, minus the robes (though there are still a lot of robes). It's a pretty conformist, conceited culture that sees itself as having a special role in terms of the rest of the planet, and has a lot of firmly-held ideas about how its people ought to live. All wrapped around a culture of scholarship and resolving everything through civilized debate. It even has the Greek! And the creepy giant magic science zoo!

You just don't get to be hot for 10,000 years.

[Cleretic]

This feels a bit silly, but as another autistic person, I have to agree I'd prefer to live in Amaurot than anywhere else in the setting. It's not even that I'm conformist - it just obviously has a much higher quality of life than all the other places. Amaurot is a society that is built contrary to what I'd personally want, but is nevertheless optimized way better than the alternative, in the same way than I'd much rather live under a modern dictatorship than in a free society in the middle ages.

I should say first off that my personal pick out of those two would be Thavnair. As I said, the big weight-puller there between the two is actually the food: I have it in me to gain a taste for the kind of food we know Thavnair makes, while I would only grow to loathe something like Archon Loaf more and more as I ate it. There's a lot more factors in both nations' favor, but that's actually a pretty big one.

We learn a lot about Sharlayan from the Studium quests, and through that we see that they're not actually enormously conformist; they all broadly care about the pursuit of knowledge, sure, but there's a lot of breadth in that, a lot of care about different needs. They're not perfect, but there is very clearly a lot of willingness to let people find their thing and excel at it; hell, Thancred got a PhD in espionage, if a society gives someone that it's clearly one that's got an interest in nurturing all kinds of expertise.

There's also the fact that we do see that when problems actually hit Sharlayan, they can handle it pretty well. Amaurot's admittedly got a kinda broken sample pick here, because we've only really seen Amaurot when something's going cataclysmically wrong, but it really does seem even from off-handed comments in stories and text that Amaurotian life can just turn lethal at the drop of a goddamn hat (mostly thanks to that whole 'every single person has the power to create whatever their mind can imagine even if they don't want it to' thing). Combine that with the fact my overall feeling is that they're not good at all at registering or helping when someone's not well mentally (it's not just Hermes as evidence now, but also Lahabrea) and yeah, I don't think I'd feel very safe, comfortable or welcome in Amaurot. Sharlayan at least seems to get it, and there's a fairly low chance of someone suddenly summoning a nightmare-beast in the middle of the street.

And then there's the government. (Which I have too many thoughts on for 3k characters.)

I've previously felt like this is a bit of a bad faith argument on my part, because we're not really supposed to look at Amaurot as a real society with real societal problems and more just as a parable, so as mentioned the time I did flesh this out, throwing stones at their political status feels akin to criticizing Mayor Quimby for not being good for Springfield. But if I am treating it as a real society, which I'd have to if asking 'where in the game world would I want to live', I have to point out that everything we learned about the Convocation as a government is a problem for me on some level. It's essentially a council of unquestionable god-kings who only have to answer to themselves, can only be removed from office by their own decision to leave, and who select their own new members. That's a recipe for what I see as inevitable corruption; it's only a matter of time until someone's going to get into a seat with ill intentions, nobody's going to be able to remove them, and they're not going to leave until they've done whatever their secret goal was, at which point they've appointed who-knows-how-many similarly bad actors in their wake. When I started working through that overall approach in 6.0 it felt like a completely isolated just-for-fun hypothetical of 'what if this was real', but 6.2 Pandaemonium has actually shown that... uhm, yeah, corruption both can and has happened already, got REALLY BAD, and the only reason it stopped was because the culprit wasn't one of the god-kings while the one who found it was. (And hell, it didn't exactly end there or end well either...) Sharlayan may be a democracy with a conservative majority and disappointing decisions, but at least it's a democracy, I as a random-ass citizen would have some power to change it, which I would not in Amaurot (or most other nations in FFXIV, but this isn't about them).

Also I'm pretty sure I don't get to be hot for ten thousand years. Maybe this is just pessimism about my looks, but I'm pretty sure you just get what you get for your whole life, and that's not necessarily 'hot' just because we happen to be surrounded by pretty people. Add to that that I can't tell exactly what Amaurot would feel about wanting to change your own appearance, but that as a trans woman I'd kind of need whatever society I'm living in to be cool with that, and... yeah, I'm not taking 'everyone is hot' as a given, that might just be a result of the fact you have to try pretty hard to get the character creator to produce someone who isn't hot.


EDIT: Ugh, I wish we could remove tags on threads, because I noticed when writing this that someone out there decided to be boring and edgy. The worst combo.

[Brinne]

I don't really have the coherency of thought or the energy to put together a proper effortpost at the moment, but I did want to say I'm also a Neurodivergent (tm) person - and also a Lifelong Clinical Depression person (double tm?) - who found Amaurot and its society very appealing and even comforting. Specifically approaching it from those particular angles, even. So I don't think it's something that probably can be, or would be very useful to try to be, broadly generalized on that front, as obviously there's far from a monolith of opinion in that regard.

[Lurina]

Also I'm pretty sure I don't get to be hot for ten thousand years. Maybe this is just pessimism about my looks, but I'm pretty sure you just get what you get for your whole life, and that's not necessarily 'hot' just because we happen to be surrounded by pretty people. Add to that that I can't tell exactly what Amaurot would feel about wanting to change your own appearance, but that as a trans woman I'd kind of need whatever society I'm living in to be cool with that, and... yeah, I'm not taking 'everyone is hot' as a given, that might just be a result of the fact you have to try pretty hard to get the character creator to produce someone who isn't hot.

I don't have time to reply to all of this right now and the topic will probably have moved on by the time I do (summary of what I'd say: the stuff about freedom to research/work on whatever you like also applies to amaurot based on what we see in akadaemia anyder and with stuff like the cthonic horns, most amaurotines having no experience with non-consensual death means dangerous stuff probably rarely happens and we probably only hear about those examples because they're the few times action happens in such a generally peaceful world, and yeah the government is pretty dubious but the post-scarcity nature of the unsundered world probably leaves few incentives for power grabs, and we don't really hear enough detail to know if there are checks and balances) but to respond to this real quick, there's a line in Pandaemonium where Lahabrea says they can "alter their physical vessels" at will.

That's probably the origin of the hotness, and also the robes, since even how you look in their world is a display of creative vanity. Also, there's quite a few Ancients with opposite gender names both in the plot and hanging around Elpis, though I guess you can interpret that in different ways.

[AwesomeJr44]

This feels a bit silly, but as another autistic person, I have to agree I'd prefer to live in Amaurot than anywhere else in the setting. It's not even that I'm conformist - it just obviously has a much higher quality of life than all the other places. Amaurot is a society that is built contrary to what I'd personally want, but is nevertheless optimized way better than the alternative, in the same way than I'd much rather live under a modern dictatorship than in a free society in the middle ages. Even taking the most cynical approach to the setting, I'd much rather sulk at the fringes of the Unsundered World with my one or two other deviant friends where they probably have computers and I could conjure a really nice house and good food for myself every day than, I dunno, die of dysentery in Ul'Dah.

I'm also autistic (I usually don't bring it up as I don't really feel like its relevant most of the time) and I agree with your points. Out of any of the civilizations in the game, Amaurot is easily the best one to live in in nearly every way, if not literally every way. Even living on the fringes of Amaurot's society would be preferable to living in a sundered one. In fact, if you gave me the choice to either live in Amaurot or our irl planet Earth, I'd probably choose Amaurot, and I'm not sure I can really say that for any of the sundered civilizations.

Anyway, putting that aside, I have to say I'm pretty surprised you listed Sharlayan as the alternative, since it's basically Amaurot but in the Sundered World, minus the robes (though there are still a lot of robes). It's a pretty conformist, conceited culture that sees itself as having a special role in terms of the rest of the planet, and has a lot of firmly-held ideas about how its people ought to live. All wrapped around a culture of scholarship and resolving everything through civilized debate. It even has the Greek! And the creepy giant magic science zoo!

Sharlyan is just Amaurot with added problems and none of the upsides. Although to be fair, that's the entirety of the sundered in general.

I have to point out that everything we learned about the Convocation as a government is a problem for me on some level. It's essentially a council of unquestionable god-kings who only have to answer to themselves

And yet the system seems to work, at least in-game. The two most stable nations in the game (Sharlyan and Amaurot) are both run by councils of unquestionable god-kings who only have to answer to themselves. Every other nation is either crumbling, has serious problems with corruption, or has inept leaders. Thankfully for those nations, they have the scions to show up and fix all of their problems, but Sharlyan was the only major modern nation we've encountered to not be in a state of major disarray when we arrived.

[Brinne]

That's probably the origin of the hotness, and also the robes, since even how you look in their world is a display of creative vanity. Also, there's quite a few Ancients with opposite gender names both in the plot and hanging around Elpis, though I guess you can interpret that in different ways.

As far as the Ancients and the question of their approach to sexuality and gender fluidity goes, there's also the implications with Artemis, too!

[Lauront]

I don't have time to reply to all of this right now and the topic will probably have moved on by the time I do (summary of what I'd say: the stuff about freedom to research/work on whatever you like also applies to amaurot based on what we see in akadaemia anyder and with stuff like the cthonic horns, most amaurotines having no experience with non-consensual death means dangerous stuff probably rarely happens and we probably only hear about those examples because they're the few times action happens in such a generally peaceful world, and yeah the government is pretty dubious but the post-scarcity nature of the unsundered world probably leaves few incentives for power grabs, and we don't really hear enough detail to know if there are checks and balances) but to respond to this real quick, there's a line in Pandaemonium where Lahabrea says they can "alter their physical vessels" at will.

That's probably the origin of the hotness, and also the robes, since even how you look in their world is a display of creative vanity. Also, there's quite a few Ancients with opposite gender names both in the plot and hanging around Elpis, though I guess you can interpret that in different ways.

There's a few mentioned at least in passing, like those detailed here and here. Insofar as certain behaviours deviate from this, it is contrary to expectations. Generally speaking, their checks and balances only seem to come under strain when their general assumption of benevolence and altruistic impulses doesn't hold - but as with certain types of mental illness likely being rare in their world (hence more difficult to relate to/comprehend for the masses - and even so they made the effort to sympathise), so too would that be a rarity. The parental bond is implied to be one of gratitude rather than very close attachment generally, so even concerns like nepotism are unlikely to have been significantly present. More here:

Words of Lahabrea Speaker: I know not what you're suggesting, but the keywards also hold some sway within the facility. Not even Master Lahabrea would be free from their scrutiny.
Words of Lahabrea Speaker: They are duty-bound to report any irregularities as soon as possible.

Even Lahabrea's decision for Athena to assume the role of chief keyward is motivated by her being a brilliant researcher; he had been unaware of and shocked by her moral bankruptcy. It is with that in mind that he gave her free rein to experiment as she pleased.

At the end of the day, theirs is a society structured around the particular traits they had as a species - such as immortality, creation magicks and the echo, and general prevalence of altruistic impulses. All powers so natural to them that even children wielded them. I generally agree with your commentary on how a society can only optimise its positive traits subject to certain constraints, which means it's impossible to please everybody and retain individualised mental traits, but as far as a society could go about doing so, theirs seems idyllic to my eyes, and certainly, what flaws they had (and share largely with the sundered in kind, if not degree) certainly don't rise to the level, IMO, of warranting their annihilation.

[RyuDragnier]

The thoughts here are very interesting, on where you'd want to live in Eorzea. Looking on it, you can sort of see Amaurot and Sharlayan somewhat of the same city/civilization. Both push for learning about and bettering the world, both push for letting you enter the field you want, both openly encourage you to expand your mind and knowledge. The only differences I see are that Amaurot tries to lessen differences enough so there isn't much fighting between people, while Sharlayan lets you be yourself for good or ill. Both are ruled by councils, but one has its members chosen by previous ones, while the other has them seemingly elected into their positions. One is content with mostly ignoring what happens in the other parts of the world, while the other openly watches and keeps tabs on the rest of the world.

Two cities, the same yet completely different. Regardless of which one you go for, you want a place where you can learn, expand your horizons, study that which you want to study, and make the world a better place. The only difference seems to be how you want that city to function on a governmental level and how you want it to interact with the rest of the world.

[PawPaw]

The thoughts here are very interesting, on where you'd want to live in Eorzea. Looking on it, you can sort of see Amaurot and Sharlayan somewhat of the same city/civilization. Both push for learning about and bettering the world, both push for letting you enter the field you want, both openly encourage you to expand your mind and knowledge. The only differences I see are that Amaurot tries to lessen differences enough so there isn't much fighting between people, while Sharlayan lets you be yourself for good or ill. Both are ruled by councils, but one has its members chosen by previous ones, while the other has them seemingly elected into their positions. One is content with mostly ignoring what happens in the other parts of the world, while the other openly watches and keeps tabs on the rest of the world.

Two cities, the same yet completely different. Regardless of which one you go for, you want a place where you can learn, expand your horizons, study that which you want to study, and make the world a better place. The only difference seems to be how you want that city to function on a governmental level and how you want it to interact with the rest of the world.

Yes, I find this discussion to be very interesting. I'd never really thought about it before but there really are many similarities between the two cities and their philosophies. I suppose this would explain why, of all the cities on the Source, I would choose Sharlayan as my preferred place of residence if, y'know, I had to live there in real life. I find it very appealing and I probably was subconsciously seeing the similarities between it and Amaurot which I also treasure for its love of learning.