On Venat's Role in the Story

[Cleretic]

They could rely on familiars of similar composition to Meteion. Familiars that they could in turn shield from the negative effects of dynamis if need be. By working in tandem with them, as we ultimately did with Emet-Selch, Hythlodaeus, and Venat/Hydaelyn as well, they could accomplish the same as us.

And before anyone replies with the obvious rebuttals, the possibility of failure is not an absolute refutation. Any plan can fail, even ones relying on the WoL.

Familiars instantly get converted into murderous terminus beasts. That's what their incarnation of the End of Days was, they interpreted it as 'their magics turned against us' because anything they created just came out as one of those. We saw this in both Emet's and Venat's memories. Sundered people clearly had some kind of edge; it's impossible to say what, but remember that Omega outright tried to answer that and only came back with the indistinct answer of 'heart'. The way I generally interpret that, it's that we could reach into ourselves to find reasons to keep going when faced with despair, much like how the Scions pushed through in Ultima Thule--something the familiars couldn't do because they had a lifespan of approximately a nanosecond before being faced with it. To a degree, that makes quite a lot of sense; they convert the instant they're cohesive enough to ask the question of 'why am I alive' and then get gripped by existential terror. It also makes a very difficult challenge for the Ancients to overcome, because as Hermes' conflict with others demonstrated, they never really asked that sort of question of their creations.

You're right, the plan that ended up working wasn't a surefire success. There was actually an absurdly high chance of failing, and personally I'd put the final success more on the shoulders of Thancred's sacrifice, Zenos' clutch breakthrough and Estinien happening to be the perfect guy to empathize with the dragons way more than I put on the WoL, who let's be honest, didn't exactly do a whole lot that someone else couldn't have in the same position (which personally I find the best part about the WoL as a character, that they aren't special but they're there anyway). But as slim a chance of that is, it's a chance the Ancients wouldn't have had, because... well, remember the obstacles we hit in Ultima Thule. Familiars wouldn't have survived as a base rule, but even if they could, they still would've required some with the same sort of outlooks as Thancred, Estinien (again, very difficult since he was responding with direct evidence and experience), Y'shtola and Urianger, G'raha, and the twins. That's a stacked goddamn deck.

(And of course it's a stacked goddamn deck because Ultima Thule is the end point of the Scions' journey meant to show the culmination of their characters, so asking if someone else could be capable of it is actually akin to asking 'could Kratos beat Pyramid Head', but that's a different conversation)

[MikkoAkure]

Ultimately the flimsy excuses we got like "Ancients are useless against dynamis" and "Hermes will rebel if he finds out about his role in the Final Days" show that anything we could come up with that would cause the Ancients to live would get shot down by the devs because they weren't meant to live no matter what. Our characters and over 10 years of the game require the Sundering to happen in order to exist, and events from the game with Hydaelyn plus the songs Answers and Dragonsong that are sung by her establish her as a "light" character as opposed to a "dark" one.

This is a consequence of writing your story as it's going with no clear ending at its inception or even a backstory for the main villains until you're over halfway through it.

The whole idea of the Ancients exist only as a plot device to to explain Hydaelyn and the Ascians and bridge them from ARR to the end. They aren't the crux of the story, so the story isn't going to bend over backwards for them. The fact that there's so many holes after Elpis shows that the writers didn't care enough for their own creation of the Ancients to properly explain things and just said "this is the way of things, trust us".

We got what we got because of a combination of ShB expanding the plot like crazy from "Ascians want to revive their one true god to plunge the world in eternal darkness" to "precursor race wants to revive themselves at the cost of us". EW then had to somehow juggle reconciling the new plot with the fact that Venat was always intended to be the one we side with per that interview with Yoshi-P on her side of the story. Thrown into that mix is that the writers decided to invoke Answers literally.

[Rosenstrauch]

Good God, this isn't worth my time, but I'll bite.

Familiars instantly get converted into murderous terminus beasts. That's what their incarnation of the End of Days was, they interpreted it as 'their magics turned against us' because anything they created just came out as one of those. We saw this in both Emet's and Venat's memories.

You know this is wrong. And I know you know this is wrong, because I've seen you put in the effort to research what you're talking about before. You of all people should be aware that you're talking out of your ass here. But since you seem compelled to engage in sophistry:

The Final Days does not instantly convert anything. It permeates the environment, causing individuals on the verge of mental breakdowns to be consumed, producing a blasphemy in their stead. And all evidence suggests that this remains true for the Ancients, save for the fact that they could not be converted directly. Instead, the effects manifested in the form of the afflicted losing control of their creation magicks and producing blasphemies that way. Not once however are we shown an entity, "living" or otherwise, instantly turn into a blasphemy without at least the implication of having succumbed to fear and despair in the moment of their transformation.

Not only that, but we can technically count the familiars who have been seen afflicted on one hand, because they're all technically the same person: Meteion. Who is, quite clearly, not a blasphemy. This in spite of her and her sisters living in the very heart of the Final Days' source.

Not even the player's familiars are affected—carbuncles, egis and the like retain full functionality and don't spontaneously start eating your face in Thavnair, Garlemald, or Ultima Thule the instant you summon them. And to cut off the immediate counterargument—Yes, the developers aren't going to lock 2-3 classes/jobs out of playing Endwalker. But I could just as easily argue that the player's familiars are mentally sound enough to not be turned into blasphemies, so there.


Everything else isn't worth addressing, as it's either built on this faulty assumption that familiars instantly transform from a whiff of the bad juju, or is more "I don't think the Ancients could pull it off!", and to reiterate:

The possibility of failure is not an absolute refutation. Any plan can fail, even ones relying on the WoL.

I mean this with the utmost sincerity: I do not care what you think about the Ancient's chances. Probability in storytelling is horseshit.

[Iscah]

The Final Days does not instantly convert anything. It permeates the environment, causing individuals on the verge of mental breakdowns to be consumed, producing a blasphemy in their stead. And all evidence suggests that this remains true for the Ancients, save for the fact that they could not be converted directly. Instead, the effects manifested in the form of the afflicted losing control of their creation magicks and producing blasphemies that way. Not once however are we shown an entity, "living" or otherwise, instantly turn into a blasphemy without at least the implication of having succumbed to fear and despair in the moment of their transformation.

What do you mean, "all evidence remains true" that it only affected certain ancients? From what we are told, it sounded like it was affecting everyone back then.

I agree we have no guarantee that familiars would be immediately corrupted by dynamis, but neither do we know that they would be immune, especially if they are intelligent enough to be expected to do battle with the Meteia. Perhaps she could drive them to despair and transformation easily.

We're way out in the realm of speculation, but what we do know is that the authors want the ancients' efforts to fail. So if they put the effort into speculating all the possibilities as far as sending familiars to fight Meteion, they would invent a reason for that effort to be thwarted.

It doesn't matter that there might be a plausible path to victory for the ancients if they did the right things. What matters is that there needs to be a way for it to go wrong.

As much as I think they glossed over the complexities of Venat's path, I also don't need a detailed list of everything the ancients might have tried. For all we know, they might have taken the "Venat runs away" story path because it was too convoluted explaining why she split from them later.

[MikkoAkure]

Good God, this isn't worth my time, but I'll bite.

The problem with your proposed theory of sending in Dynamis familiars like Meteion to fight fire with fire is that only Hermes knows how to make those, Hermes can't be trusted to help since he's pro-Meteion, and they have no example of one to copy.

Besides all this, Zodiark would've already need to have been created at this point to stop the Final Days unless you expect them to do research on familiars from zero and send them into battle while the world is still burning and the sky is falling. And Zodiark's creation would've brought us back into the whole thing where part of why Hydaelyn did what she did is because she didn't like the 3rd sacrifice.

We could sit here over and over making theories, but like the holes we're trying to fill, the theories themselves are full of holes.

[Rosenstrauch]

What do you mean, "all evidence remains true" that it only affected certain ancients?

That's not what I said, nor what I meant. Let me try again.

All evidence suggests that the Ancients are affected by the Sundered through the exact same sequence. The afflicted region is permeated. Those on the verge of mental breakdowns succumb. They then proceed to produce a blasphemy. The only difference is the outcome—the afflicted Sundered are consumed wholly to produce a single blasphemy, while the afflicted Ancients instead begin to uncontrollably produce blasphemies.

But not every Ancient was afflicted, just as not every Sundered mortal was afflicted. We know this to be the case because the people of Amaurot were able to create Guardian Forces and eventually summoned Zodiark, both acts that required the use of creation magicks.

I agree we have no guarantee that familiars would be immediately corrupted by dynamis, but neither do we know that they would be immune

What matters is that there needs to be a way for it to go wrong.

We're way out in the realm of speculation, but what we do know is that the authors want the ancients' efforts to fail.

Putting aside that I fundamentally disagree with the idea that the Ancients need a perfect and unassailable plan, for the exact same reason I've said twice now...

Why even ask what the Ancients could do, then, if you're just going to go "Speculation is pointless, the authors' will is final"? Might as well just delete the Lore forum.

[Lurina]

Familiars instantly get converted into murderous terminus beasts. That's what their incarnation of the End of Days was, they interpreted it as 'their magics turned against us' because anything they created just came out as one of those. We saw this in both Emet's and Venat's memories. Sundered people clearly had some kind of edge; it's impossible to say what, but remember that Omega outright tried to answer that and only came back with the indistinct answer of 'heart'. The way I generally interpret that, it's that we could reach into ourselves to find reasons to keep going when faced with despair, much like how the Scions pushed through in Ultima Thule--something the familiars couldn't do because they had a lifespan of approximately a nanosecond before being faced with it. To a degree, that makes quite a lot of sense; they convert the instant they're cohesive enough to ask the question of 'why am I alive' and then get gripped by existential terror. It also makes a very difficult challenge for the Ancients to overcome, because as Hermes' conflict with others demonstrated, they never really asked that sort of question of their creations.

This is guesswork that I don't even feel like is supported by the text. We only see the Ancients creating Terminus Beasts when Meteion is driving their magic haywire; it's never elaborated what happened to their creations which already exist, not least of all their sapient ones. Since they'd have thinner aether presumably they'd have been affected exactly the same as the present day Sundered races (reminder to MikkoAkure that the PCs aren't dynamis-based beings either; it's just repelled less by them, which is enough), which is to say that they'd be normal until they got sufficiently bummed out and transformed.

Unless your point is just that the Ancients couldn't have created anything specifically new to combat the final days after it had started, in which case I'd remind you that there was a long period after the Final Days started but before it covered the whole world when creation magic was still quite normal. Remember that in phantom Amaurot and Akadaemia Anyder they're still making stuff like it's no big deal.

Honestly, I really wish people would stop acting like the script did some perfect job of making the hopelessness of the Ancients completely unquestionable. Like, it's been over a year now. Everyone has calmed down, and we know a lot more from interviews about how much the developers fussed with the specifics of the Hydaelyn vs. Zodiark plot, to the point they didn't even have a final villain in mind until relatively close to the deadline.

It doesn't make Endwalker irredeemably awful or anything, but can't we admit that it's a little bit jank? That it did a quick little flirt with trying awkwardly to justify genocide because the scenario got out of the writers hands?

[Rosenstrauch]

The problem with your proposed theory of sending in Dynamis familiars like Meteion to fight fire with fire is that only Hermes knows how to make those, Hermes can't be trusted to help since he's pro-Meteion, and they have no example of one to copy.

It's funny you should mention this, because I wrote exactly that in Ashes. YMMV on how believable it is, but I wholeheartedly see Hermes as a man who could learn what he did, come to terms with it, and do the right thing.

[Iscah]

Why even ask what the Ancients could do, then, if you're just going to go "Speculation is pointless, the authors' will is final"? Might as well just delete the Lore forum.

In most cases of speculation, we are wondering what the authors' intent is for future story beats. In this case, we know their intent is to bring the story full circle and have the ancients' collective actions lead to the Sundering, because narratively they were locked into this years ago, and the only thing to debate is the details of how it happened.

Also, the Lore forum is a repository of current lore, not just speculation.

[Rosenstrauch]

In most cases of speculation, we are wondering what the authors' intent is for future story beats.

Well, then I see what the problem is. I'm not here to try and guess what the authors' intent is. I'm here to talk about my ideas. My perspective. What I care about.

Edit: To give an example:

Remember the Nier raids? Prior to Endwalker, one of the things I gushed about regarding them is that I found to Dwarves' half of the story to be a good analogue to the Final Days and the conflict that led to the Sundering. And to an extent, I still believe that! At least as far as Shadowbringers is concerned. But absolutely none of that has anything to do with what the authors intended to write. For all I know or care, they were writing by the seats of their pants without regard for whether or not their story would even make sense. And obviously as of Endwalker it demonstrably isn't a good analogue for the aforementioned conflict. If it was, the whole thing would've been orchestrated by Anogg after falling into the mystery pearl, or a heretofore unmentioned third sibling with a preexisting chip on his shoulder, or something. But I still believe my perspective on it was worth sharing here.

If I didn't feel that way, I wouldn't even be here.