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

[EaraGrace]

I'm not sure the Ancients really had a 'class' of genuinely sapient familiars. Having done all the quests in Elpis, many of the researchers seem shocked that you're capable of understanding complex ideas and especially that you have a soul. One of them even gets kind of uncomfortable about the implications.

The vibe I got was that cases like Meteion are still very fringe, and people didn't really know what to do with them. There was probably a cultural conversation to be hard there.

See I actually have to hard disagree. The example of the Lyssa in Ktisis suggests they played fast and loose with sentience.

Let me use an example because I'm playing through Mass Effect again atm. Long story short, a group called the Quarians created synthetic helpers to handle their labor needs and gave them a very limited level of intelligence that was nowhere near sentience. Unintentionally however, they eventually did develop sentience. The Quarians, realizing what happened, went "oh no, we basically have slaves now," and quickly panicked thinking the Geth would rise up. This led to them trying to destroy the Geth and losing their homeworld.

Now the game rightfully points out how badly the Quarians fucked up, but I think the initial reaction is interesting to compare. The Quarians overreact and believe their slaves would destroy them because of their sentience, the Ancients go "wow neat! we should remake it with vocal cords for more experiments!" It kind of highlights what makes me squick at the Ancients handling of these things. They have the knowledge to know what is sentient and what isn't, the power to protect and coexist with that sentience without much cost, and yet they don't seem to care. I compare that to the Sundered, who yes struggle with this as well and deserve to be called out when aren't in the right, but still have many who try their best like with city states and the Allied tribes. In the Ancient world its just really Hermes who seems to care.

And on the question of queer representation, if were going to have Artemis as an example we would be remiss to not include Ryne and Gaia, who have a lot of evidence pointing to a queer reading of their relationship.

I also just love my gay daughters and wish them happiness so I will take every opportunity to mention them like a mom who constantly shows family photos.

[KariTheFox]

Really, asking if the Ancient society was perfect is doubly useless because for one, even if it was perfect, that doesn't justify the acts of genocide the ascians enacted in order to try and restore it.

And two, by the time of the sundering, the collapse of thier society was already a foregone conclusion. Even if the third sacrifice had restored everyone who intially sacrificed themselves to Zodiark, there would still be some form of ensouled life stuck in Zodiark now.

In that sense, Venat and her followers were not only Walking Away From Omelas, but making the city uninhabitable on thier way out too.

[Brinne]

I mean, that goes both ways. How we place Amaurot on the "perfection" spectrum doesn't matter when it comes to either justifying acts of violence on masses of innocent people on their behalf, or justifying acts of violence against them - along with the weird victim-blamey suggestions that they had it coming, brought it on themselves, and aren't worth mourning and trying to save if possible, either.

The Ancients were people. Generally well-intentioned people who yes, were sometimes flawed and made mistakes, but well-intentioned overall - with a well-intentioned society that seems to have done its best to accommodate as many people as possible while working for the greater good, in a way that I personally found touching and affecting. The fundamental conflict in Shadowbringers is that both groups of people, Sundered and Unsundered, were people worthy of being saved, but the situation was such that only one was going to be able to be.

I'm pretty sure I've made it obvious at this point that I fundamentally disagree with it being a "foregone conclusion" that they were doomed, and furthermore reject the premise that "if they are walking a path that will end in doom at some point, annihilating them immediately is acceptable", but that's ground that's been tread a million times over, and I don't really want to derail from the much more interesting points of discussion Lurina has been bringing up. Fundamentally, I'm happy to accept the general reading that the Rejoinings and the Sundering were roughly as morally terrible and unacceptable to inflict upon their mass amounts of respective victims, equally worthy living people, as each other - with an individual's mileage varying as far as further nuance into it goes.

[KariTheFox]

I mean, the only violence we commit against the ascians are that of self-defense. I don't think the ascians can say the same.

And I say it was a foregone conclusion because by the time of the sundering and the third sacrifice, the final days and creation of Zodiark had already occured, fundamentally changing the society of the ancients into one with blood sacrifice at the center of it.

And if Venat had say, done something to alter the future that she knew was to pass, that would just be abadoning our future and lives to our fate, since our existance is contigent on at least one timeline going the way we described to Venat.

[Brinne]

I mean, the only violence we commit against the ascians are that of self-defense. I don't think the ascians can say the same.

You'll notice I'm talking wholly about the Ancients/Amaurot, not the Ascians.

[Lyth]

The funny thing about this discussion is that regardless of which viewpoint you support around the fall of Amaurot, you're going to find yourself at odds with at least one former Convocation member. A nation will always be a reflection of its leadership, and Venat, Emet, and Hermes all had their turn as the pinnacle of their society. If you want to live inside that glass house, you can ill afford to throw stones at any of them, as they're all products of it. Of course, if you live outside of it, you needn't have any such reservations.

Out of the last set of Convocation members, Loghrif seems to be the only one that we've met who wasn't deeply twisted on a personal level, and she ended up choosing to live out her life as a sundered, for what it's worth. The rest of them were just all talk and no dynamis.

[SentioftheHoukai]

And still, y'all don't get it. Oh well, let nobody say I didn't try. Just more of the usual, blaming a people one knows nothing concrete of of nebulous flaws and using it to condemn then wholesale. Ignoring the individual, I was under the impression this is the kind of behaviour we as a people were supposed to oppose, not continue to propagate. But 'tis fine, I've fought my fight and did my part.

[Iscah]

I feel like the thing is that, for us, the Sundering isn't even a foregone conclusion (ie. a future event assumed to be inevitable) but simply the known outcome. We can feel sad about it but we can't undo it, and changing the past was never really compatible with what we were trying to achieve in Elpis – that is, seeing what happened in the past of our timeline to bring new information back to the present. If it was even possible to alter things and set it on a new path, we might not learn anything useful out of it, and would be saving an unfamiliar world at the expense of leaving our own to burn, or at best returning empty-handed.

We were warned before we went there that we must not change things and can only steel our hearts against what we would witness there, because it was already history for us.

And if Venat had say, done something to alter the future that she knew was to pass, that would just be abadoning our future and lives to our fate, since our existance is contigent on at least one timeline going the way we described to Venat.

I do keep coming back to speculating on how split timelines would work, but if it perhaps comes down to a key moment of chance or decision – because somehow time needs to both go in its new path and the old one as well, with a copy of everything in each. So even if Venat did change her future based on our warning, by necessity a version of her still has to end up in our timeline carrying out the tragedy we warned her she would fulfil.

If she succeeded, then we would never know, any more than G'raha's friends from the other future will know he succeeded. (Short of upgrading Alexander to jump timelines, anyway.)


Just wait for 11.0 where a time portal opens up and Biggs III, Mide and Dayan come barging through on Super Alexander, making a surprise stop on their way back to 100 years ago to found the Hotgo tribe. Turns out a world full of umbrally charged aether is great for powering up your umbrally aspected time machine and Alexander's presence is now helping to restore aetherial balance rather than disrupt it, so they're off on a temporal joyride to use up some battery. Please look forward to it.

[tokinokanatae]

I think the idea that the Sundering is an inevitable, indelible part of the past would work better if we hadn't actually visited (and continue to visit) the world prior to the Sundering. Part of the reason Amaurot was so powerful was the fact that it was an illusion created by someone who loved it--a love and memory that had lasted far beyond our human limits of recollection and life. As the narration in the Shadowbringers ending states, eventually that illusion will fade now that Emet-Selch is no longer around to maintain it.

Elpis, on the other hand, is the world as it literally was. We are interacting with people that don't know they're doomed. It feels terrible to me to make friends with Themis, to get involved with Erichthonios and Lahabrea's complicated family situation, while certain death is hanging above their heads like the sword of Damocles.

[SannaR]

For me it would be similar to people getting upset that others aren't upset about the Titanic sinking at the end of watching any movie or mini series about the boat. We know it has to happen or it becomes an AU. Just because we accept that the boat needing to sink doesn’t mean we aren't capable of being sad that it sunk. It just means we can't do anything about it.

Even if we did entertain the idea of going full gung-ho on trying to change the fate of the Unsundered world a world is still getting screwed over. You the player might be fine with sacrificing the world the WoL came from, but that doesn't mean the WoL would be.

I am interested in what happens at the end of Pandeamonium as Elidibus did mention a few times a promise they made to someone about something.