Quote Originally Posted by Brinne View Post
As far as the mass sacrifice of lives to Zodiark goes, the game has been crystal-clear and unwavering on that it was an utterly heroic action that saved the world, and that Emet-Selch's point about it reflecting the benevolence and general goodness of the Ancients as a whole stands true.

Trying to undermine that has always struck me as pretty off-base and wildly cynical - if you're going to try to prop up the Sundered and frame the Ancients as less worthy, I don't know that I'd resort to pointing at their heroic self-sacrifice that enabled to Sundered to live at all, and continue living for thousands and thousands of years, not gonna lie.
ShB makes this quite the opposite. People seem to completely ignore "Steps 2 and 3" of the Convocation's plan when discussing things here, which Emet-Selch clearly explains in ShB. Step 1 was the "sacrifice" of about half the population to summon Zodiark. Step 2 was going to be the "sacrifice" of another half of the remaining population to bring about the creation of a myriad of new life. Step 3 was going to be the mass murder of that new life in order to restore the parts of the population that had previously "sacrificed" themselves.

There's two huge things there. One of them is factual - the new life that was going to be killed was not going to be any sort of "voluntary" act by that life. It was going to be mass murder by the Ancients of soul-filled life. THAT is presented in ShB at least as a key part of the reason why Venat chooses the path she does. EW adds the second motive of making the new life more susceptible to dynamis and thus potentially able to stop Meteion. But from the start another key motive was to prevent the Ancients themselves from creating life just to murder it.

The second huge thing is purely opinion, but I'll state mine. I have a lot of trouble calling something a "heroic self-sacrifice" when the plan all along was for those very people who "sacrificed" themselves to ultimately be brought back to life. I don't see it as some amazing, heroic action to "sacrifice" oneself if you do so fully expecting to just be brought back as if nothing happened later. (Side note - one of the things detractors of the EW story love to claim is that the Scions' "sacrifices" in Ultima Thule are "meaningless" for exactly that very reason: the existence of a plan/plot device to bring them back, anyway.)