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

[Brinne]

I've seen many quote Alphinauds line, but what of the rest of it? Its clear that the Scions are concluding that the humans on the Source will be sacrificed, based solely on what fake Hyth told us. Concluding that this is an incorrect reading of that conversation, that they were intending to sacrifice anything but human beings, is to say the Scions are also wrong, which is nonsensical writing. So we are left with two choices. Either the writers were telling us the initial sacrifice were intended to be humans, or the writers of ShB and EW lost the plot several years ago.

Sorry, I know I was a bit slow in my reply. It turns out my brain was only capable of producing a series of whistles and clicks until I fell asleep for approximately fifteen hours. It has been known to happen.

The Scions are qualifying clearly in that conversation that they're working on assumptions and speculations, because they're operating primarily from context of the Ascians' current behavior, which obviously has no problem doing harm to other human beings in the name of their mission. They don't know for certain what Hythlo's words mean in the present - the Scions are also clearly speaking purely in context of the Ascians in the present ("their plan doesn't stop with just the Rejoinings...") until Emet-Selch confirms his intentions directly later on in Amaurot. And even then, their initial speculation involves the additional assumption that the Ascians would be able to make distinctions, logistically and specifically, of who and what would be sacrificed and what wouldn't.

I know you have asked in the past: "so, were the Ascians then planning on sacrificing the sapient beings of the Source out of spite?" And I actually have little problem saying that yes, probably, in largely part. Emet-Selch is lashing out and saying and doing a lot of things out of raw spite and resentment in that sequence already, and using the Scions' speculation that you've quoted, already put forth that people who would continue to doggedly oppose them and refuse to cooperate with them were on the chopping block in the post-Innocence cutscene.

Overall, this is what I would say/speculate/interpret: I think the most likely situation for the Ancients is, again, the contents of the third sacrifice is forever unknowable because the plan didn't proceed far enough for them to even come into existence. The Ancients were not able to "nurture the planet until it was bursting with vitality" to be able to evaluate what that vitality looked like and refine their plans from there.

Things are different for the Ascians. Enough time has passed that the "bursting with vitality" stage has been reached, for better or worse. And the Ascians have reached a point psychologically where, yeah, they don't care anymore, anything that doesn't suit them or they suspect would continue to oppose them is getting fed to Zodiark because screw you. I would interpret, actually, the distinction being made that the Ascians can be selective about who and what gets sacrificed - to the extent of judging a potential sacrifice based on "do you hate Zodiark and the Ascians y/n" - makes it harder to believe the initial plan, free of twelve thousand years of malice, would have revolved around unilaterally throwing waves of babies into the grinding machine.

[KariTheFox]

Overall, this is what I would say/speculate/interpret: I think the most likely situation for the Ancients is, again, the contents of the third sacrifice is forever unknowable because the plan didn't proceed far enough for them to even come into existence. The Ancients were not able to "nurture the planet until it was bursting with vitality" to be able to evaluate what that vitality looked like and refine their plans from there.

But we are not historians, trying to piece together the truth of what really happened based on the evidence in front of us. If we were, this level of skepticism would be justified. We are analyzing a piece of literature, and when presented with a factual ambiguity like that, it's important to look at the story from a thematic and metaphorical level too.

Two of the big themes of FFXIV has always been, one, that it is understandable, but wrong to value your own kind over others, and two, it is important to place faith and hope in the future, and not cling to the ways of the past.

The choice between the third sacrifice and the sundering represents the ultimate expression of that conflict, with Venat being the ultimate expression of the "light" aspect. 'I value people outside my own ingroup that will sacrifice my own people for thier sake, I trust and value the future so much that I am willing to erase the past for the sake of the future.'

Many of the characters involved talk about the targets of the third sacrifice being capable of inheriting the will of the star, becoming stewards like the ancients were, or just being allowed to decide thier own future. Rhetoric that resonates if they are indeed people, will the potential to have a future. Which is why on a thematic level, it makes the most sense for them to be some form of people.

If the targets of the third sacrifice were instead trees and livestock, what would that mean on a thematic level? Suddenly one of the central conflicts is stripped of any weight, and Venat looks like a rabid enviromentalist - which would be fine, if the theme of nature versus technology has ever been a central plank of the conflict between Zodiark and Hydaelyn, but that really is not the case.

[Brinne]

If the targets of the third sacrifice were instead trees and livestock, what would that mean on a thematic level? Suddenly one of the central conflicts is stripped of any weight, and Venat looks like a rabid enviromentalist - which would be fine, if the theme of nature versus technology has ever been a central plank of the conflict between Zodiark and Hydaelyn, but that really is not the case.

Just a quick reply, because Dipping Energy Levels again: this is speaking back to the old misperception that Venat was acting "on behalf" of the sacrifices, in order to protect them in some way, when she never was. This is not actually a matter of "my kind versus another's kind" to her. That never comes up in her motivations after she is introduced properly as a character, is never named as a motivation versus other things, is undermined by the fact that everything was destroyed in the Sundering, and her speech just before the Sundering makes clear that from her perspective, she was cutting down her people for the sake of her people, according to her values. She is keeping them from walking down the wrong path, pre-emptively, in her eyes. She is a person who is taking the step of putting down a beloved family member (in tears) because she is convinced they will go on to lead a destructive lifestyle where they can't be happy.

Venat is not a crazy environmentalist acting on behalf of trees and livestock. To Venat, it is simply irrelevant whether or not the sacrifices were people, or trees or livestock, because her primary concern is her people becoming "stagnant" and "not growing" through any possible means of "clinging to the past." Because what she is afraid of is the future of the Plenty.

Going back to the logistical side of things - and ideas that are more actively speculative on my part - Hythlodaeus's speech suggests to me that the initial life that reappeared after the second sacrifice was, on some level, kind of primordial. "Tiny lives sprouting." Ancients generally have no control over souls and what becomes recognized as authentic life, but the Ancients do have the capacity to shape and guide life force into vehicles that may be more likely to gain those things, based on patterns and research - do you use your creation magicks to form an elemental sprite, or a goobbue, or something like Meteion?

In that sense, even without there being already-existing people, the debate over "do we use the new life to restore our brethren, or to pave the path to a future potentially without us" still makes sense. The second sacrifice provided the star back with the spark and energy for life, and now the Ancients are in the position of deciding how they will raise that life - on a path to evolve to basically livestock, or a path to become sapient beings. Because once again, Venat is a character whose motivations are rooted in ideology, not materialism. She would be arguing for a future where saving their people trapped in Zodiark is sub-optimal versus preparing and nurturing the form of a future generation that could inherit the star from them altogether, because she values the process of "passing on one's legacy to the future" as a self-justifying and morally correct principle.

That ended up less truncated than I intended. Oops.

[Lurina]

But we are not historians, trying to piece together the truth of what really happened based on the evidence in front of us. If we were, this level of skepticism would be justified. We are analyzing a piece of literature, and when presented with a factual ambiguity like that, it's important to look at the story from a thematic and metaphorical level too.

Two of the big themes of FFXIV has always been, one, that it is understandable, but wrong to value your own kind over others, and two, it is important to place faith and hope in the future, and not cling to the ways of the past.

The choice between the third sacrifice and the sundering represents the ultimate expression of that conflict, with Venat being the ultimate expression of the "light" aspect. 'I value people outside my own ingroup that will sacrifice my own people for thier sake, I trust and value the future so much that I am willing to erase the past for the sake of the future.'

Many of the characters involved talk about the targets of the third sacrifice being capable of inheriting the will of the star, becoming stewards like the ancients were, or just being allowed to decide thier own future. Rhetoric that resonates if they are indeed people, will the potential to have a future. Which is why on a thematic level, it makes the most sense for them to be some form of people.

If the targets of the third sacrifice were instead trees and livestock, what would that mean on a thematic level? Suddenly one of the central conflicts is stripped of any weight, and Venat looks like a rabid enviromentalist - which would be fine, if the theme of nature versus technology has ever been a central plank of the conflict between Zodiark and Hydaelyn, but that really is not the case.

The issue is that the way the themes have been applied to the Sundering narrative since it was introduced in 5.0 hasn't really been consistent, though.

Like, I would have agreed with you back in the days of Shadowbringers, when the emphasis of the conflict was heavily on how the Ancients 'ought' to have stepped aside and let the new life thrive. (Though I can only recall one actual instance of the third sacrifice being framed as the successors to the Ancients as stewards, which is during the conversation with Hythlo in Amaurot - what else were you thinking of?) Back then, everyone kind of took it as a given that the third sacrifice was the player races. That made the story line up very nicely. The Amaurotines wanted to wipe 'us' out 12,000 years ago to bring their people back, but Hydaelyn stood in opposition to them, which led to us inheriting the world. However, Emet and the Ascians still want the same thing in the present: To kill us and save their own people and bring back their civilization as it was. Nice and clean, right?

...but in Endwalker, the framing shifted towards the player races being descendants of the Sundered Ancients instead, which was ultimately confirmed explicitly in an interview. So now everything is muddled. There's no obvious conclusion to draw about what the third sacrifice was, and despite what Hydaelyn's efforts, whatever they were didn't end up inheriting the star after all - we did. Or rather the Ancients kept it, just Sundered.

This makes the message very muddled. My guess is that the original intent in Shadowbringers was that the player races were the new life, but they decided to change that in Endwalker to fit with the narrative about the Sundering's purpose being to force humanity to understand grief and loss. It's no longer a tale of people resisting passing the torch, but a tale of people refusing to accept loss and change and having it forced upon them, then collectively overcoming far in the future. In Shadowbringers Hydaelyn fights Zodiark to save the new life from her people, while in Endwalker Hydaelyn fights Zodiark to 'save her people from themselves'.

But this change left the identity of the third sacrifice blank - a hole in the story. Which the developers decided to address by, well, just not talking about them.

It's hard to really make a good-faith judgement about writer intent when it feels overwhelming like the writer intent isn't even completely consistent behind the scenes.

[KariTheFox]

This makes the message very muddled. My guess is that the original intent in Shadowbringers was that the player races were the new life, but they decided to change that in Endwalker to fit with the narrative about the Sundering's purpose being to force humanity to understand grief and loss. It's no longer a tale of people resisting passing the torch, but a tale of people refusing to accept loss and change and having it forced upon them, then collectively overcoming far in the future. In Shadowbringers Hydaelyn fights Zodiark to save the new life from her people, while in Endwalker Hydaelyn fights Zodiark to 'save her people from themselves'.

I don't think it's that muddled, every interaction we have with the ancients as far back as Shadowbringers has them treating us as thier children, even literally in Emet-Selch's recreation, or as a familiar as a proxy-child in Elpis (I'll put Pandemonium to the side now since I view it as post-EW materiel that represents us growing and starting to interact with our ancestors as adults.)

So if we know as far back as Shadowbringers that the ancients are our ancestors, and we all thought back then they planned to sacrifice us for the sake of bringing themselves back , I don't see how that fact being explicitly confirmed changes anything.

Nor do I see Venat's motivations as contradictory, she wants her people to grow beyond thier pain and loss by entrusting the world to future generations, because she believes in mankind's potential and all that.

Which does tie back to Hermes and what he was grappling with: did the Ancients have the right to dictate life into forms that their society approved of, and how did this presumption tie into what was expected of themselves?

Given that Venat had explicit future knowledget, allowing the ancients to cultivate livestock for the third sacrifice, if that is indeed what is going on, also means explicitly cutting off the future civilizations of the sundered world from ever existing if she doesn't have history play out in a way that can lead to thier coming into being. They're longer a hypothetical future possibility, but a confirmed fact that she feels compelled to protect.

[Lurina]

I don't think it's that muddled, every interaction we have with the ancients as far back as Shadowbringers has them treating us as thier children, even literally in Emet-Selch's recreation, or as a familiar as a proxy-child in Elpis (I'll put Pandemonium to the side now since I view it as post-EW materiel that represents us growing and starting to interact with our ancestors as adults.)

So if we know as far back as Shadowbringers that the ancients are our ancestors, and we all thought back then they planned to sacrifice us for the sake of bringing themselves back , I don't see how that fact being explicitly confirmed changes anything.

Nor do I see Venat's motivations as contradictory, she wants her people to grow beyond thier pain and loss by entrusting the world to future generations, because she believes in mankind's potential and all that.

Feel like you're not really acknowledging the contradiction here. Like, you've made two assertions in your last couple of posts:

1) We can assume the third sacrifice was sapient beings even if it's not explicitly stated because the story has a broader theme of letting go of the past to secure the future, and it's stated that Hydaelyn's faction wanted the new life to inherit the star in line with the idea of 'let those who walk before lead those who walk after' and of how one mustn't prioritize ones in-group at the expense of others, so it would feel out of place if they weren't sapient.

2) The player races, collectively 'mankind', have always been meant to be Sundered Ancients.

These are mutually incompatible ideas. If 2 has been true from the start, 1 cannot be a consistent application of the theme because, again, the 'new life' didn't inherit the star. We did. And whatever the third sacrifice was has disappeared from the story (or more accurately, been written out).

If the theme is not being applied consistently, it cannot be used as a basis to make an inference of writer intent. We cannot use the thematic resonance of the new life succeeding the Ancients as stewards of the star to presume their sapience when they didn't.

[Iscah]

2) The player races, collectively 'mankind', have always been meant to be Sundered Ancients.

Where does this come from? At the point of Shadowbringers, that question was one of the big confusing ones that wouldn't get addressed at Q&A events – whether we were descendants or creations of the ancients, or even simply co-inhabitants of the planet alongside the Amaurotine race.

I don't recall having gotten a definite statement on it before Endwalker, so unless I've missed something, how can we be certain it was their intent all the way from Shadowbringers?

[Lurina]

Where does this come from? At the point of Shadowbringers, that question was one of the big confusing ones that wouldn't get addressed at Q&A events – whether we were descendants or creations of the ancients, or even simply co-inhabitants of the planet alongside the Amaurotine race.

I don't recall having gotten a definite statement on it before Endwalker, so unless I've missed something, how can we be certain it was their intent all the way from Shadowbringers?

You've misunderstood me. I'm saying that KariTheFox seemed to be making that assertion, which I was saying was mutually exclusive with their other assertion.

Like I blabbered on about a couple pages ago, I personally believe that the third sacrifices were originally meant to be the player races, conjured into existence for the first time by Zodiark, but then they soft-retconned it to make way for their new storyline without really thinking through the repercussions it would have on the story.

[RyuDragnier]

1) We can assume the third sacrifice was sapient beings even if it's not explicitly stated because the story has a broader theme of letting go of the past to secure the future, and it's stated that Hydaelyn's faction wanted the new life to inherit the star in line with the idea of 'let those who walk before lead those who walk after' and of how one mustn't prioritize ones in-group at the expense of others, so it would feel out of place if they weren't sapient.

2) The player races, collectively 'mankind', have always been meant to be Sundered Ancients.

These are mutually incompatible ideas. If 2 has been true from the start, 1 cannot be a consistent application of the theme because, again, the 'new life' didn't inherit the star. We did. And whatever the third sacrifice was has disappeared from the story (or more accurately, been written out).

This brings to mind something I've been pondering for a while. Are the Sahagin, Kobolds, and Sylphs Sundered Ancients, or are they in fact part of the new life?

[Puksi]

This brings to mind something I've been pondering for a while. Are the Sahagin, Kobolds, and Sylphs Sundered Ancients, or are they in fact part of the new life?

I think the only member of any of the tribes to have the Echo was the Sahagin priest from ARR, but that was via Ascian shenanigans. iirc, the Ixal were outright confirmed to be of Allag creation in the Fractal Continuum. Not sure about the rest...I really have to play through the MSQ again. I think there were hints in Elpis of some of the other tribes having started as creations of the Ancients, but I don't think anything was definite.