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

[Kazhar]

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.

The analogy doesn't work. Venat placing a gun implies that all she did was giving them the tools, but that's not what happened. She gave them both the gun and the motivation to use it.

It would be like telling a guy in immense grief that killing someone would bring back his family, invite that someone to be in shooting range, giving the first person a gun and then being shocked they actually do it. There's a point when it goes beyond just complicity and it becomes actively malicious.

[Graeham]

The analogy doesn't work. Venat placing a gun implies that all she did was giving them the tools, but that's not what happened. She gave them both the gun and the motivation to use it.

It would be like telling a guy in immense grief that killing someone would bring back his family, invite that someone to be in shooting range, giving the first person a gun and then being shocked they actually do it. There's a point when it goes beyond just complicity and it becomes actively malicious.

Yes is good point. Venar tell the King Solus and the Elibuss and the Lahee that if he kill all the chara on all the world they come back necro in the isekai as his friend. Then Venar give the technologies to kill all the worlds. We can not find the cutescene where this is happen but is true.

[FirstGearFirstGear]

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.

Perhaps I should be clearer. FF14, like a lot of good fiction, use its setting and characters to explore ideas that relate to the real world. Ideas like colonialism, prejudice, camaraderie, and the meaning of suffering. These are ideas that, even if explored in a fantastical space, are quite relevant to the ourselves as human beings. A large part of the reason that FF14 has such a good story is that it handles and explores these themes in a mature way. Its not high literature but its pretty high-tier for the medium and especially this specific genre.

This matters because CBU3 is pretty clear that we as real world human beings are far closer to the sundered people of FF14 than the unsundered. No, you are not your character but you are still a flawed, imperfect being doomed to suffer and one day die. You have to find meaning in your life to get out of bed in the morning and a large part of what CBU3 argues is the meaning to life is the companionship that we form with others, not just of our kind but of everyone on the whole of the star.

It also matters because the logic used by the Ascians and by their defenders, that all non-Ancients are subhuman and not worth preserving, is the logic used by loads of real world perpetrators of genocide. You yourself literally equated people to monkeys and said that it would be better to kill all the monkeys in the world than the humans. Its a real short skip from there to some very, very bad ideas about the actual world.

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.

Why aren't the sundered the rightful owners of their own souls? Why do they have to give them up for people who died twelve thousand years ago (incidentally those people can themselves only exist through even more mass genocide)? And if you're going to make the argument that the Ancients were there first therefore they own them in perpetuity, I have very bad news for you about what claim you or your home country have to the land you're standing on.

If we are going for metaphors, she placed the gun on the table knowing with certainty that they would use it to start 'blasting everyone in range'. She is culpable for giving them the means to do so, she enabled it from the beginning and is every bit as guilty as they are.

The analogy doesn't work. Venat placing a gun implies that all she did was giving them the tools, but that's not what happened. She gave them both the gun and the motivation to use it.

It would be like telling a guy in immense grief that killing someone would bring back his family, invite that someone to be in shooting range, giving the first person a gun and then being shocked they actually do it. There's a point when it goes beyond just complicity and it becomes actively malicious.

The problem with this is that the Ascians still had to pull the trigger. At any point, Emet could have stepped back and realized what he was doing was wrong. He didn't until we threw an axe through his chest.

I am merely describing the sundered as exactly what they are; fragments of the ancients that came before them that only exist due to Venat's actions. Nor did I say they are only good for being murdered or worthless, you're extrapolating things from my post that I haven't even remotely implied.

You're trying to wriggle out of your own words.

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.

If you want to claim you're just neutrally describing the sundered, you should probably avoid calling the condition of existence "disturbing".

[Seraphor]

Perhaps I should be clearer. FF14, like a lot of good fiction, use its setting and characters to explore ideas that relate to the real world. Ideas like colonialism, prejudice, camaraderie, and the meaning of suffering. These are ideas that, even if explored in a fantastical space, are quite relevant to the ourselves as human beings. A large part of the reason that FF14 has such a good story is that it handles and explores these themes in a mature way. Its not high literature but its pretty high-tier for the medium and especially this specific genre.

This matters because CBU3 is pretty clear that we as real world human beings are far closer to the sundered people of FF14 than the unsundered. No, you are not your character but you are still a flawed, imperfect being doomed to suffer and one day die. You have to find meaning in your life to get out of bed in the morning and a large part of what CBU3 argues is the meaning to life is the companionship that we form with others, not just of our kind but of everyone on the whole of the star.

It also matters because the logic used by the Ascians and by their defenders, that all non-Ancients are subhuman and not worth preserving, is the logic used by loads of real world perpetrators of genocide. You yourself literally equated people to monkeys and said that it would be better to kill all the monkeys in the world than the humans. Its a real short skip from there to some very, very bad ideas about the actual world.

Why aren't the sundered the rightful owners of their own souls? Why do they have to give them up for people who died twelve thousand years ago (incidentally those people can themselves only exist through even more mass genocide)? And if you're going to make the argument that the Ancients were there first therefore they own them in perpetuity, I have very bad news for you about what claim you or your home country have to the land you're standing on.

Well said, thank you.

I usually stay away form these discussions because it's tiring dealing with the same absolutist ideals every time from those who either fanatically worship or oppose the Ascians, and ignore the larger literary and philosophical concepts that are trying to be communicated, and the overall fiction of it.

The Unsundered world is Utopia, in every aspect, and by that I mean Utopia as written by Thomas Moore. Not the perfect existence we should be striving for, but a folly of unattainable and contradictory flawed perfection. This should be more than apparent simply from the names of Hythlodeus and Amaurot, if you're aware of the book.

What's more, is that the idea of suffering being a vital part of life, and being what gives meaning to joy, is not only blatantly spelled out by the game in the form of the fate of the dead worlds Meteion visited and the world of Ra-La. It is also a core tenement of Buddhism, Jainism, and even a bit of Hinduism.

These two combine into a clear narrative that justifies Venat's actions, within the limitations of the story that has been designed around it. To not do so would be to doom the Unsundered to repeating the same self-destructive fate of the Ra-La's.
This isn't a sycophantic worshiping of a fictional character, it's a sound philosophical and literary interpretation of a fictional story, which is designed to go the way the writer planned it to. It can't be held to the same standards of real life choices and actions, it's far too directed and focused.

Buddhism isn't a 'bad' philosophy, and Moore's Utopia isn't an invalid critique of the folly of perfectionism, Endwalker merely combines these in an admittedly flawed setting (time loops are always quirky like this), but the sources it draws upon are not evil just because you identify with Hades' character and wish you were an Ascian.

[jameseoakes]

Well said, thank you.

I usually stay away form these discussions because it's tiring dealing with the same absolutist ideals every time from those who either fanatically worship or oppose the Ascians, and ignore the larger literary and philosophical concepts that are trying to be communicated, and the overall fiction of it.

The Unsundered world is Utopia, in every aspect, and by that I mean Utopia as written by Thomas Moore. Not the perfect existence we should be striving for, but a folly of unattainable and contradictory flawed perfection. This should be more than apparent simply from the names of Hythlodeus and Amaurot, if you're aware of the book.

What's more, is that the idea of suffering being a vital part of life, and being what gives meaning to joy, is not only blatantly spelled out by the game in the form of the fate of the dead worlds Meteion visited and the world of Ra-La. It is also a core tenement of Buddhism, Jainism, and even a bit of Hinduism.

These two combine into a clear narrative that justifies Venat's actions, within the limitations of the story that has been designed around it. To not do so would be to doom the Unsundered to repeating the same self-destructive fate of the Ra-La's.
This isn't a sycophantic worshiping of a fictional character, it's a sound philosophical and literary interpretation of a fictional story, which is designed to go the way the writer planned it to. It can't be held to the same standards of real life choices and actions, it's far too directed and focused.

Buddhism isn't a 'bad' philosophy, and Moore's Utopia isn't an invalid critique of the folly of perfectionism, Endwalker merely combines these in an admittedly flawed setting (time loops are always quirky like this), but the sources it draws upon are not evil just because you identify with Hades' character and wish you were an Ascian.

I despise the frankly vile suffering fetish this game pushes, pushing that a world with out want is bad and then glorifying the societies that let children freeze to death it's disgusting

[Seraphor]

I despise the frankly vile suffering fetish this game pushes, pushing that a world with out want is bad and then glorifying the societies that let children freeze to death it's disgusting

Yes, please continue to completely miss the point.
Like I said, this is why I don't do this...

[jameseoakes]

Yes, please continue to completely miss the point.
Like I said, this is why I don't do this...

Don't patronise me, get the point your making It's just the ideas that underpin it are evil the whole comfort is bad and we need people to be starving for live to having meaning is evil and the game condrictis it by most the cast being so rich and privileged they unaffected by it.