What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[FirstGearFirstGear]

From an outside perspective that doesn't allow itself to be biased by either side, Ancient life is more valuable by it's very nature of being complete and unsundered. I can't speak for you, but if I was given the choice to either save the human race or save all of the monkeys on the planet, I'd choose to save the humans. It's a regrettable decision, but the correct one.

Yeah, this is why I keep saying genuinely disturbing. You are declaring that anyone who doesn't meet your arbitrary standard of existence is worthless. You have written off 28 iterations of society, countless millions if not billions of people, untold works of art and culture all for the sake of one civilization that peaked and then was violently destroyed. All this despite the game telling you repeatedly and directly that the Ancients aren't inherently more valuable than the sundered.


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To put it more succinctly, you do realize you're the monkey, right?

Why would it have to be someone who hasn't seen SHB or EW? Surely your argument doesn't rely on your audience's ignorance, does it? Your response to my observation that uses all information available is to say "well what about asking someone who doesn't have all of the available information? I bet they'd agree with me!". Even if they did agree with you, that opinion would be uninformed.

It's to establish a baseline understanding of the world before revealing that everything that person has seen was technically built by "lesser beings". But you're right, the experiment has no guaranteed outcome because as this thread demonstrates, there are somehow people who play through most of FF14 before deciding they should kill themselves so Emet won't be sad any more.

In the case of a contradiction (such as the one in this game's story), I shall believe what is shown, rather than what is told. If the writers of the story don't like that, they should have written a better story with less contradictions.

What contradiction? In the worst possible interpretation, Venat actively did one genocide knowing it would lead to life later on and the hope it would preserve the entire universe. The Ascians chose to do a few dozen more.

Once it was revealed in the Q&A that Venat purposefully let those who would become the Unsundered Ascians escape the Sundering—despite knowing exactly what they would do—their actions and the consequences became blood on her hands as well as their own.

Venat placed a gun on the table. Emet and pals picked it up and started blasting everyone in range. Both bear responsibility, but one of them is pretty clear worse.

I also find it kind of funny that the example we have of Venat saving Ancient lives is just as bad as killing them apparently.

Venat also took her own people and reduced them to their current state of vulnerability and mortality against their own will, she then referred to those broken, incomplete remnants of her former peers as her children. Regardless of motive, I find that quite disturbing.

Again, this is you, this is your character, this is literally 99.999999% of the people you meet, this is the entire world that you have presumably sunk hundreds if not thousands of hours into. You are literally describing yourself as worthless and incomplete and only good for being murdered. I don't know how to make it clearer how insane that belief is

[AwesomeJr44]

You are literally describing yourself as worthless and incomplete and only good for being murdered. I don't know how to make it clearer how insane that belief is.

Again, this is you, this is your character, this is literally 99.999999% of the people you meet, this is the entire world that you have presumably sunk hundreds if not thousands of hours into. You are literally describing yourself as worthless and incomplete and only good for being murdered. I don't know how to make it clearer how insane that belief is

You are not your character. You are a human being who lives on or in the very close proximity of the planet Earth in the dimension of reality. You are also not a fractured piece of a larger whole whose existence is mutually exclusive to yours.

[Xirean]

Honestly, a lot of what FirstGear has been saying is quite refreshing. I'm very firmly of the belief that what Venat did was by far the worse move. All actions the Ascians take is directly on her hands and she is complicit in the evil things they do, but that in no way resolves them of guilt for doing those horrible things. Regardless if the sundered started as malformed beings incapable of speech, they grew into fully formed and thinking beings who can build civilizations. Emet even calls their societies civilizations in Ultima Thule. Being able to empathize with Emet/Ascians plight does not mean you have to justify what they are doing and if you do then yeah it's intensely disturbing.

The Ascians destroyed 7 entire planets, several civilizations on The Source and an unknowable amount of civilizations on The Reflections. They also had a habit of finding and taking the reincarnated souls of the sundered Ancients and replacing the entire consciousness/memories of that new person with their long dead friend/coworker. Any one of those actions is enough for me to brand them as villains/monsters alongside Venat. What happened to them was horrible, but does not justify their later actions.

You are also not a fractured piece of a larger whole whose existence is mutually exclusive to yours.

Technically you don't know that for 100% certainty. If you were shown proof beyond any shadow of doubt or scrutiny that you were also a shard of some shattered person, would you then willingly set down your entire existence to become part of a long dead individual? If so, would you be in favor of forcing others to do the same?

[HollowedDoll]

Yeah, this is why I keep saying genuinely disturbing. You are declaring that anyone who doesn't meet your arbitrary standard of existence is worthless. You have written off 28 iterations of society, countless millions if not billions of people, untold works of art and culture all for the sake of one civilization that peaked and then was violently destroyed. All this despite the game telling you repeatedly and directly that the Ancients aren't inherently more valuable than the sundered.

This really isn't about a whose standard of existence is worth more or less, Ancients came first, the sundered only being able to exist due to the mass genocide, the rightful owner of those souls would be the ones who were hacked into pieces, not the random personality that happened to come afterwards. That is my outsider perspective. It's a shit circumstance, the Dying Gasp probably puts it simplest, the victor will be hailed as a hero and it's loser as the villain, yet they're basically two sides of the same coin in terms of morality.