What lore do you ignore?

[Cleretic]

Venat's whole "I had to sunder the Ancients to make them more capable of wielding dynamis" bit. It just feels so... tacked on.

What about the reasons for the sundering that she actually said, though?

In the game across both Shadowbringers and Endwalker, it's never one of the multiple reasons stated for why she did that, internal or external, and it only comes up in passing in the EE3; it's actually Y'shtola that points it out in-game, Venat just doesn't deny it when asked. I actually read it less as a primary motivator, and more as an important consequence.

I think it comes up among the developers and the EE3 because, from a sequential storytelling point of view (and the in-universe historical view), it's one of the most important effects of the Sundering. While on Venat's side of things, yeah, I think it was lower on the list.

[Cilia]

What about the reasons for the sundering that she actually said, though?

Not denying something when pointedly asked is scarcely different from saying it yourself. Anyway...

I agree with Venat's ideological reasoning (though not necessarily the methods she used), but the dynamis bit feels like an unnecessarily tacked on edit. Like you can tell from the clunkiness that it was an edit from Banri Oda or Yoshi-P; the rest of the scene follows Ishikawa's sentimental (if sometimes schmaltzy) style but then we get the clunky out of nowhere "because dynamis" bit that doesn't flow with the scene, before or after.

If you're gonna write an ideologically / philosophically driven story, go all in with it instead of shoehorning in some physical reason it was a necessity.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Not denying something when pointedly asked is scarcely different from saying it yourself. Anyway...

I agree with Venat's ideological reasoning (though not necessarily the methods she used), but the dynamis bit feels like an unnecessarily tacked on edit. Like you can tell from the clunkiness that it was an edit from Banri Oda or Yoshi-P; the rest of the scene follows Ishikawa's sentimental (if sometimes schmaltzy) style but then we get the clunky out of nowhere "because dynamis" bit that doesn't flow with the scene, before or after.

If you're gonna write an ideologically / philosophically driven story, go all in with it instead of shoehorning in some physical reason it was a necessity.

As the type of person who needs six kinds of meds to step out the house, I'm gonna have to disagree with the belief that trauma makes you stronger. The strongest people I know grew up in healthy, safe environments. Those who grew up with the things Venat introduced to the world, hunger, disease, they spend most of their adult lives attempting to heal the damage done by a traumatic childhood. It would also mean causing harm is good as it would make for tougher stock. Her ideology falls apart if you think about the real world for like five seconds. How many people do you know offed themselves because they had it too good and got bored with life? I know zero. But I know plenty of people who have tried due to not being able to endure any more suffering, myself included.

Her stance wasn't just bad. It was dangerous.

ETA: The game tells me these people needed to die because they lack fortitude, but it also tells me that the last three survivors fought 12,000 years to undo what she did to their people. We are told they did not experience "true happiness" but a significant number of the playerbase wants to collect all their shards and become an Ancient.

If you could choose between ending up a random person in the modern FF14 world or the Ancient world, which would you choose? I'd choose the place where the number one cause of death is the decision to reroll out of boredom.

[Dorito_Burrito]

If you could choose between ending up a random person in the modern FF14 world or the Ancient world, which would you choose?

The one that actually survives.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

The one that actually survives.

Yeah, it is good to be on the winning side. Again why this story direction was so dangerous.

"I choose to be the ones who benefit from the massacre instead of the ones massacred."

The Ancients didn't die from stagnation. They were sabotaged and murdered. And if you think the sundered civilizations are beyond dying out due to sabotage and murder, let me direct you to the 7 shards that were created as fodder to build us. Entire worlds worth of sundered who exist only to be slaughtered and consumed. Oh, and all the civilizations on the Source that were doomed due to the calamities. The only way one could be sure they "survived" as a sundered being is to be the WoL -- with Mommy Goddess literally shielding us from death, minus the time she needed us to die so time travel could be invented. And even they will die thousands of years before they would have had they not been sundered.

[Cleretic]

If you could choose between ending up a random person in the modern FF14 world or the Ancient world, which would you choose? I'd choose the place where the number one cause of death is the decision to reroll out of boredom.

I've hated the question of 'where in FFXIV's world do you want to live' ever since Shadowbringers, because I feel it always needs the corollary of 'aside from Amaurot or the Crystarium'. They're the obvious answers to the point of being the boring answers that say nothing about you, because they're the ones written without surface-level, 'first paragraph of the wiki entry' (if not first sentence) flaws, so if they're admitted into the conversation then the entire discussion becomes either picking the boring obvious answers, or finding a stone to throw at them so the conversation can be interesting.

And for the Ancient world, yeah, Dorito is right: the main one is the fact that it burns to the ground. It's not the only flaw, I actually think the Ancient world sounds like sort of a horrifying place to live and 'but nobody fears death' is a thin comfort, but that's some secondary evidence.

Personally, my answer even with those two in contention is 'either Sharlayan or Radz-at-Han', because I have a long-term medical condition that I can't picture not existing in XIV's world, so I'm going to pick one of the two places that I'm fairly confident have fairly strong medical care. (The decider is 'which of these two cuisines do I feel the most willing to live with', which honestly does change every so often.) But I feel like, if I were to say this without preemptively shooting down Amaurot, the immediate followup would be 'why not Amaurot' despite Amaurot not having anything at all to say about my primary deciding factor.

[YianKutku]

If you could choose between ending up a random person in the modern FF14 world or the Ancient world, which would you choose? I'd choose the place where the number one cause of death is the decision to reroll out of boredom.

The world where, if I or someone else is feeling depressed, other people will come up and say "hey, let me help you, we'll get through this together", rather than "have you tried not being depressed?"

The Ancient world empirically lacked any institutional knowledge on how to handle trauma. The point of Endwalker was never "trauma makes you stronger", but rather "together we can overcome what each of us might not". This is consistent with what we've heard of Azem's duties and personalities, ever since we learned of them in Shadowbringers 5.3.

If someone is depressed and offed themselves due to not having anyone to share their troubles with, that illustrates the brittleness of Ancient society, not the suffering of modern Eorzean society. The consistent theme throughout the FFXIV story is we should help each other.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

*snip*

The Ancient world was not destroyed by the Final Days. The Ancient world was destroyed in a terrorist attack -- The Sundering. That same person causes the destruction of several sundered worlds, and I made a point of saying in this hypothetical that you couldn't choose who you end up as, just which world. Because yes, if you can choose to be a Leveilleur or the WoL then things are working out pretty great for you. But with no choice in who you are born as, you could be that child who freezes to death in the snow or eaten by a dragon or die of any number of horrific diseases or burned in your crib during one of the rejoinings. Sure if you picked the Ancient world there is a chance you die in Venat's terrorist attack, but you have a way higher chance of just walking back into the lifestream after a few thousand years cause you got bored watching fish swim.

*snip*

As a person who suffers from depression, I assure you, the number one response I've gotten is "have you tried not being depressed." Right now, I am dealing with an uncle with severe mental health issues and just no support systems whatsoever. No one in the family knows what to do as there is no resources to help handle someone in his condition. Most nursing homes nowadays won't even take on new patients because there is no room, no staff and they are operating at a loss. Someone who lives in this world attempting to justify the eradication of the Ancient world due to a lack of mental healthcare services is laughable. How about Venat invent therapy instead of just murdering everyone. How about that?

The message that we should all work together to get through the hard times is severely undercut by having a person take it upon themselves to mutilate the human race, name themselves a god and make sure we're stuck living by her terms and her terms alone for the next 12 millennia being hailed as a hero. Her actions and beliefs run contrary to every moral this story has attempted to push before and after Endwalker.

Hermes got no help in this new world of Venat's creation. He got worse. No one was there is help him through it. So if the sundering was meant to make us more supportive of one another, then it's a failure. Not only were the Ancients willing to give their lives en masse to protect one another, the Ancients we know, who have been wronged beyond imagining, still go out of their way to help us even though we are the benefactors of their suffering. Is Themis so unsupportive he needs to die? What about Hythlodaeus? Is he sooo genetically and/or culturally inferior to your average sundered that the only solution is the eradication of his species?

[MikkoAkure]

The Ancient world was not destroyed by the Final Days. The Ancient world was destroyed in a terrorist attack -- The Sundering.

They weren't called the "Not That Bad, Actually Days" and the debris and dead Ancients littering the streets of Amaurot were very real. Zodiark and Hydaelyn were summoned in a post-apocalyptic scenario. The world was already over and the Schism was the survivors arguing over how they were going to try to pick up and continue after everything that happened.

The world was so thoroughly destroyed that it took half again as many people who were initially sacrificed to Zodiark to seed the world with new life. Zodiark wasn't going to bring back the people who died in the Final Days either, only the survivors who were sacrificed to him. Everyone left went through hell and saw the magic lauded by their people turn against them and create horrors beyond comprehension.

According to EE3, in the face of that, the growing anti-Zodiark faction didn't believe they could go through that again and argued against the Convocation's plans to just continue on as if nothing happened. Venat's supporters knew about her plan for the Sundering. The Ancients were also the custodians of the planet and their entire culture was around curating life. They saw themselves as an extension of that life and gave it back to the lifestream when they were done with it. But the only path forward that was absolutely known where life continued was the path already presented to her where she sunders the planet. She didn't relish in it and acknowledged what she was doing was cruel, but that it had to happen and that if anyone had to do it, it might as well be her.


Speaking from outside the universe of the game, all of this HAD to happen because that's the only way that the world we've been playing our game in exists. None of this was written in the game's setting when the game was first released. Ascians were just "doing bad things" for their bad god. The story from around SB on when they bothered to start writing more of the background over time is a result of the writers trying to add complexity to everything after the fact and then trying to wrap it all up together with the song Answers, which while retroactively is song by Hydaelyn, came out in 1.0 before Hydaelyn as a goddess even existed.

So the writers had to come up with a reason why this would HAVE to happen and I won't pretend that what we got wasn't awkward at best and that they wrote themselves into a corner. But in the scenario presented, everyone had a reason for doing what they did. Our direct involvement could also mean that none of it could have happened unless we were there and that it was all fated to happen anyway because it couldn't have happened unless it already has already. If we didn't tell Venat about a world that she sundered but is full of people who have the capacity to handle the very specific energy that's the cause of their demise then maybe it wouldn't have happened. She could very well have gone against fate and not done that, but then we wouldn't have a game to play in.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

*snip*

The Ancients didn't die from the Final Days. The Ancients were killed after the Final Days had been stopped and the world repaired. Know why? Cause she needed them weakened so that she could do what she did. That's the only possible reason to get the exact same timeline we laid out to her. If she's actively trying to maintain it, trying to make sure every atrocity happens and described. And not just to save humanity as we've not yet averted the Final Days by the time we lay out what she did. The one and only reason she could be trying to do everything in the exact way that happened is to ensure the creation of us.

Even if she came to the conclusion she had to sunder the world, the only reason to spare the Ascians and insure the rejoinings is to make sure we're born to come back in time and to tell her to do it again, to lock us in a loop where she's god.

And no, the writers had an easy way out. They could have avoiding sending us into the past making us the trigger and end goal of a genocide for no reason beyond making us feel like super special butterflies around which all life revolves. And if they wanted Venat to be seen as a good person, then the sundering should have been an accident and then the difference between her and the Ascians would be that she saw the sundered as people and wanted to save them while the Ascians did not.

Instead, she did it on purpose, with full knowledge of all the suffering she'd cause, with that suffering being her goal and making sure the Ascians were in position to murder as many people as she needed dead. At every decision she chose the most horrific path possible, yet I'm supposed to accept she's a good guy cause she wears white and speaks softly. WHAT?! Name one "good" thing she did. If you say "ensured the survival of the human race," she had no way of knowing we'd win, even with her future knowledge. So she eradicated her race on the hope her familiars would wear their skin better than they did. How is that different than Athena's plans? If you find out a nuclear attack is coming and you turn the species into cockroaches given they'll survive the radiation without warning people a nuclear attack is coming, you're not a hero, you're a cockroach fetishist. If people only cared about survival and not quality of life, then we wouldn't have concepts like heaven and hell. We wouldn't have prisons. Quality of life matters. And the sundered world is a fantasy Tuskegee experiment.