What lore do you ignore?

[Lady_Silvermoon]

I see what you see, I just don't agree with your take on it.

And with this one, I feel like for a lot of people, the example may be the people we couldn't save--Haurchefant, Moenbryda, Minfilia, Papalymo, Ysayle. That we aren't Superman: that sometimes, it's impossible to save everybody. And I don't think that's an invalid read, it's one that I'd certainly hear out an exploration of. But for me, the interesting echo comes from somewhere else.

I think the partner to the tale of Amaurot is actually the game's stories about necromancy: Edda's story, Palace of the Dead, Endwalker Caster, Stormblood Dark Knight, a 'weird it happened twice' amount of Alchemist stories. Bozja, in a strange form. Because no matter how many different forms of necromancy we find, the message is always the same: that death is tragic, that wanting to find a way to circumvent it is understandable and sympathetic, and that even that journey to find a way to fix death might bear important fruit, either personal or material... but that, at the end of the day, you can't bring back what was lost. That what is dead must lie, and that you have to move on. And that the living shouldn't pay the price for the dead.

To the game's timeline and characters, Amaurot is not a living friend to save: it's already dead. It's been dead for twelve thousand years. In a very real sense, the Ascians are game's biggest story about necromancy, willing to sacrifice everything to bring back what's lost. And the greatest tragedy of all is that you just can't; Amaurot will always be a graveyard, no matter if your means of necromancy is to try to change the timeline, or to sacrifice entire planets.

I don't see us as a useless pawn in someone else's game for the Ancient world. Because to me, that 'game' ended so long ago that nobody needs care about the score. And trying to replay it for a different result is only going to cause pain.

There is a difference between the inability to stop a light spear and standing next to the member of a world's governing body and not warning him of an oncoming genocide because you're afraid it might be in conflict with you benefitting from the death of everything he cares about. One is an actual "couldn't be helped" the other is the kind of "can't be helped" that is the source of my displeasure with the direction they took it. That's the kind of "can't be helped" that ends in small pox blankets and people in cages. And the fact those two are being conflated is exactly what's bothering me.

Also, why is our time the "real time" in a world with time travel? Good thing Ironworks didn't hold that position or our character would be dead. If we don't go back and tell Venat about the Sundering, the Sundering doesn't happen. We're not just witnessing the past, we're the cause of the way events unfolded.