On Themis [6.4 SPOILER]

[Kozh]

*shrug* Yoshida's comments about the Ancients rang true enough to me. As a location and collection of NPCs it ranked at its best as equal to Eulmore under Vauntry, with the same skin-crawling revulsion that I Did Not Like This Place.

Honestly I'm still baffled as to why people treat the Ancient world as "peaceful town that hides sinister things/death cult/etc" horror movie trope, or that Pandaemonium and Elpis are a "gotcha!" against the Ancients. Sure they look like humans, but their biology and culture are very different they might as well considered as aliens. So why are we using our moral standard to judge them? What's normal to us may not normal for them, and vice versa. Saying that they're "scary" and "wrong".... no offense but I can't help but to see it as an intolerant act.

(also, even using our moral standard, what the Ancients did are far, far better than what humans did. Go ask the kidnapped women in sastasha which world is worse)

You know, I don't remember people condemning all those au ra tribes on Steppe, even though they have customs and cultures that's borderline criminal from our perspective. It's interesting that a lot of people doesn't extend the same understanding and tolerance to the Ancients. Why is that I wonder? Is it because the narrative tried to sell the Ancients way of living as a bad thing? Or was it born from jealousy of seeing how much better the Ancients world is compared to the sundered (and real life)?

Something that has occurred to me about the 8UC timeline, although probably not an intentional thing, is that the Ironworks gambled with the exact right piece, as G'raha and the Crystal Tower actually wouldn't really help in the task of dragging them towards the Eighth Astral Era. They just don't really provide anything useful for the task at hand, which I read as basically a Mad Max or Fallout situation; facing both mass death and crop failings causing a lawless wasteland.

After having the short story quoted here, I don't get why you fail to understand that the Ironworks didn't gamble anything for their future. They didn't wake up G'raha and invent time travel to save their present and future, they did it so to create an alternate reality where the 8th calamity is prevented even though it may result in them being erased. The moment Cid and others decided on this plan, we could argue that they have given up on their timeline. With how advance Omega and Allag technologies were, I doubt they couldn't build their own labyrinthos if they wanted to. Yet they focused (and imo, wasted) their resources on the time travel plan.

And funny enough, the game presents this as a selfless heroic thing. Never did once it give us the chance to doubt or disagree with it.

But when it comes to the Elpis trip that part either is resolved and not a problem (to the players) or is an acceptable risk (to the characters), so it doesn't matter for the comparison often raised; moralizing about the 8UC decision doesn't help us when talking about the WoL's Elpis trip and the notion of them staying to save the Ancient world, so my brain just went 'what happens if we don't get caught up in that part', because we always do. And my conclusion is that the 8UC timeline is absolutely fine without G'raha (depending on what the Tower left behind I could even debatably see it being better), but the Source is screwed without the Warrior of Light returning.

Just in case it's lost on you, we've been talking about time travel in Pandaemonium, not in Elpis (6.0). And as you might notice, Pandaemonium happens after we save the universe by beating meteion.

[Kozh]

I think that Venat's statement that end "so I take nothing for granted as I walk my path" and the uncertainty that we were in a closed loop timeline or not until the Mothercrystal scene meant that Venat was trying to find solutions to the Final Days that wouldn't involve Zodiark or the Sundering

And yet we don't see any proof of this contigency/defense plan of her, not even in her walk scene.

until she pulls out the sword Venat is trying to debate that change of attitude without the change of the physical world.

If this is true, then she did a very bad job of trying to convince her people.

But this is interesting, as you said, the game posits that the Ancient couldn't defeat meteion because of dynamis. So why did she even bother trying to change everyone's mind about 3rd sacrifice? Shouldn't she just sunder them regardless?

[Denishia]

We know she convinced some people and gathered allies - we don’t know who or how many -if the Twelve seen in Anyder were the only ones or even just the only ones alive, considering this was after the Final Days had just wiped out the vast majority of the planet and half of the population sacrificed to Zodiark. Seems rather obvious that the people Venat would have been recruiting to fulfill the criteria of Not the Convocation but also willing and able to actively search for a way to stop the Endsinger would have been people caught up in the destruction and chaos of the Final Days as it approached Amaurot or ones also willing to become Zodiark’s fuel. Or perhaps Venat’s sense of who fit the narrows qualifications of trustworthy and useful to solve the problem of the approaching apocalypse that would still threaten even after Zodiark put up the shield was so small that Venat put them in a safety bunker until after the first two sacrifices.

Because dynamis wasn’t just about swapping to a different magic source, and the only reason the Ancients would fail was because they biological can’t use it any more than the Garleans use aether. Yes, it is one of the main reasons and why the Venat solution that we play as in this game is as a mortal being. It was also the emotional mindset to look at the Endsinger’s Fermi Principle, recognize the emotion of despair that it created, and have developed a coping mechanism that wasn’t just straight denial of despair or embracing oblivion. The scenes in Thavnair pre-Elpis and everything post Elpis but particularly Ultima Thule was making the statement that thinking horribly negative emotion and life experiences is something you can avoid or shield yourself from isn’t going to work in the long run, nor should you expect to defeat it solely on your own. Nor that there is only one answer in how to solve it or find meaning in life that helps to combat that despair, as the later halves of Ultima Thule stress, but one way for sure not to solve it is to completely give up on survival and one way to win against it is having friends help you through it once and point out it’s a repeatable victory. Venat thought that the Ancients’ status quo was self-defeating and trying to argue a course-correction to defeat the Endsinger and stop another Hermes Despair Event from arising and to avoid the nihilistic fate of the worlds that transformed Meteion into the Endsinger.

The game tells you that this particular version of Venat’s plan worked and why- but not any other would or could. Our impasse is agreeing if that assessment is right or not.


Another impasse is that I don’t think the UnSundered World appealing or feasible for a MMO game setting and the only likable NPCs able to tell interesting stories are those that defy its setting - Hermes and Erichtonios.

[Yuella]

And yet we don't see any proof of this contigency/defense plan of her, not even in her walk scene.




If this is true, then she did a very bad job of trying to convince her people.

But this is interesting, as you said, the game posits that the Ancient couldn't defeat meteion because of dynamis. So why did she even bother trying to change everyone's mind about 3rd sacrifice? Shouldn't she just sunder them regardless?

She let Elidibus, Lahabrea and Emet-Selch escaped the Sundering so they could bring the rejoining 7x which will result in US, the warrior of light who visited her in Elpis, to be born and have the proper aether/dynamis balance to be able to beat Meteion.

Second question, if her people were willing to deal with their suffering, then she would not have to sunder the world because there's no danger of them becoming suicidal and deactivating Zodiark to let Meteion's attack through. Eventually they would find a way to confront Meteion via whatever method.

[Cleretic]

We don't hear about Venat's group's contingency/defense plans (aside from the moon escape plan) because they literally do not matter. We weren't there, they were either tried but didn't work or weren't tried because they clearly wouldn't work, they moved on; they have absolutely no relevance whatsoever to the stories actually being told. The only thing we need to know was communicated by Venat in the last conversation with her before we left Elpis, where she says she's gonna do all she can (she actually specifically mentions having faith in Hermes), and the Anamnesis Anyder scene, where it's clear that her group have been trying to convince people and getting nowhere, possibly but not confirmably because of tempering.

You could ask the exact same question about the Ascians' ideas for how to fix the planet after the Sundering, but we don't, because we all know that the only ones that mattered were the ones that had measurable results, albeit negative ones (the Thirteenth, and Calamities); it's not important and doesn't matter if the Ascians tried 'nicer' contingency plans, it matters that they did the thing that actually had effects. But for some reason, people trying to bring up This Same Damn Argument are never as critical of the Ascians.


Which is a shame, because--to bring back on topic--I think Themis would've had an interesting view on this if the story had ever tried to ask him.

[TowaIsBestGirl]

It is an interesting little anecdote though, isn't it. But Cleretic's right in that they don't show any of these commonly inferred hypotheticals so a lot of people are arguing from the basis of rather shaky hypotheticals. For better or worse, we can only formulate theories and points of view from what information the game actually provides us with.

[Yuella]

Also remember that the sundering cutscene is not real time. It's a snippet/summary of major events that happened during the Final Days. Maybe Venat did try harder to convince the people not to sacrifice more lives to Zodiark.

[RyuDragnier]

Also remember that the sundering cutscene is not real time. It's a snippet/summary of major events that happened during the Final Days. Maybe Venat did try harder to convince the people not to sacrifice more lives to Zodiark.

We also don't even know how long she tried to convince them. She could have been trying for years, decades, or centuries before the 2nd sacrifices to repair the planet, and then kept trying until before the 3rd, when she realized there was no point. We have no clue when she finally "broke" and realized she couldn't reason with them. Nor do we know just how much the Convocation were willing to listen at all during that time...or even how Z-Elidibus (Zodiark's Heart) reacted if/when Venat tried to speak with him to come up with another method.

[Lurina]

It's tempting to get back into the weeds of the scenario like in so many preceding arguments now that it's risen up again for maybe the last significant time (well, depending on the last Myths of the Realm and the next round of Tales from the Dawn...) and to talk about Venat's actions and the necessity of the Sundering diagetically, or to criticize the awkwardness of the scenario itself, where the writers clearly fudged a haphazard mix of worldbuilding and thematic justifications , often with ambiguous details that the reader can fill in the blanks on - as people are doing in this thread! - to create a problem for the Sundering's solution.

But you know what?

It's all dumb. That stuff isn't, and probably has never been, even worth discussing.

The Sundering-as-written is (unlike the Rejoinings, which the narrative (correctly, for any unabashed Ascian fans) frames as abominable) a rotten plot beat because it expects the player to accept what is basically a genocide as ultimately necessary and reasonable, and employs every tool in its storytelling arsenal to do so. Everything else is just fluff.

It's gross, and I felt gross playing it. The writers should have just made it an accident.

That's my final word on it.

[Brinne]

It's a little frustrating, I admit, to be interested in talking about the writing parallels between Athena and Venat, only to see the topic immediately get derailed by the same old arguments ignoring the core question entirely and acting like it's a given that well it's okay because Venat was doing it for the greater good, and she did feel bad about it, and we don't know everything she did, and, and!

...when, as I said, Pandaemonium's ultimate condemnation of Athena had nothing to do with that entire framework and was instead about the unacceptable cost to the people currently living around her. If Athena's own plan (as opposed to Venat's) of rising to godhood and subsequently erasing, then reshaping, the Ancients, souls, bodies, and all, into something better - and it just so happened to turn out that whatever Athena's version was also capable of dealing with the Endsinger (keeping in mind that Hydaelyn also had no guarantee and no way of knowing if we were up to the task or not)--

Is the argument that Athena would have been right, as the story argues Venat was?