What lore do you ignore?

[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.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

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.

This is another one that haunts me because it's another example of how Endwalker makes the morals of the average player worse when applied outside of the game. If it's okay for everything they have to be given to us due to their lack of proper mental healthcare, how does that moral work when we come across a tribal culture with land we want? We can make better use of it, build schools, hospitals, etc. We can "civilize" the place. So if it's okay for Venat to take their world from them and give it to us cause "we're better" then it's okay for us to take from any group we deem lesser, right?

[Cilia]

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.

Actually, the point of Endwalker was neither "trauma makes you stronger" nor "together we can overcome what individually we cannot." The point of it is exalting the power of the individual, a call to live on your own terms and nobody else's. The collectivist ideals are a consequence of the Eastern lens, I think.

Whether or you like her or hate her, it's impossible to deny that by following her own ideals Venat influenced the course of history more than anyone else in Etheirys' recorded history. Nearly the entire rest of Amaurotine civilization was content to follow the ideals set forth by their society, and when that failed created and looked to Zodiark for guidance instead of deciding for themselves what was worth living for. Standing in stark contrast to Venat's conclusion that life has no objective purpose, it's something you have to decide on your own to find true happiness and fulfillment in life; letting others decide these things for you makes you unable to cope when they inevitably fail, as happened to Amaurot.

... Endwalker is a lot of Nietzsche. Like, a lot a lot. Like, wow.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Actually, the point of Endwalker was neither "trauma makes you stronger" nor "together we can overcome what individually we cannot." The point of it is exalting the power of the individual, a call to live on your own terms and nobody else's. The collectivist ideals are a consequence of the Eastern lens, I think.

Whether or you like her or hate her, it's impossible to deny that by following her own ideals Venat influenced the course of history more than anyone else in Etheirys' recorded history. Nearly the entire rest of Amaurotine civilization was content to follow the ideals set forth by their society, and when that failed created and looked to Zodiark for guidance instead of deciding for themselves what was worth living for. Standing in stark contrast to Venat's conclusion that life has no objective purpose, it's something you have to decide on your own to find true happiness and fulfillment in life; letting others decide these things for you makes you unable to cope when they inevitably fail, as happened to Amaurot.

... Endwalker is a lot of Nietzsche. Like, a lot a lot. Like, wow.

It's funny that people like this because it has a positive spin, but I don't disagree with your read. And who is the Ubermensch in the FF14 universe? Zenos. I've stated multiple times that Zenos is the embodiment of Venat's philosophy. But people don't like that.

My issue with Venat wasn't that she lived by her own ideals. But that she forced everyone else to live by her ideals by devolving them and shaping their beliefs for the next twelve thousand years. You and I don't seem to disagree on what happened, we just seem to disagree on if that's cool or monstrous.

So you and I actually agree on what happened, and it feels good to at least get that far. I've spent so much time arguing over if I really saw what I saw, it's nice to have someone admit, nah, I saw that too.

ETA: Wait, it just hit me. When she sundered the star, she also believed she was acting in service of what was best for the star. She just didn't bother to work with her people and instead chose to work on them...She's still following the purpose the rest of her species believes to be their reason for existing, to serve the star. The only people truly acting against that believed purpose are the ones who want to replace the souls in Zodiark with some of the star's living energy. For Venat's actions to be truly Nietzschean, she'd have to be as self-serving as people assume I think she is by the way I talk about her.

[Cleretic]

... Endwalker is a lot of Nietzsche. Like, a lot a lot. Like, wow.

I mean, nihilism is not inherently negative. And I think one of the many abstract things Endwalker is focused on, many of which are related, is a very similar fundamental question: 'if life has no meaning, what do you do with it'. And your answer is ultimately personal, but that doesn't mean it has to be individualist: remember that the people who we directly see stare down the End of Days and overcome it are Thavnairians, who end up leaning on faith and religion, an ultimately extremely communal subject. Most of the role quests are also about addressing communal pains and helping each other.

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

You are so obviously not paying attention to the arguments actually being made, and are stuck so stridently on the one you think you're having.

If I woke up as some rando in the Ancient world, I'm not scared of the End of Days. Frankly, I think I die ten seconds after the skies go red and the city is destroyed, and there's almost a level of comfort in dying so suddenly to something absolutely colossal that I both had no part in creating and had no power to stop; not really a lot of time or place for fear, at least as I process it.

I'm scared of a world where a child's nightmares can become real.
I'm scared of the world where the Behemoth is celebrated as an achievement.
I'm scared of a world so normative they can't even fathom a deviation from the norm--and what that means for me, as someone who so often doesn't fit it.
I'm scared of a world where literally anyone I meet has magic that can cause me great pain and danger, and whose power over that is so tenuous that a stray thought makes it go wrong.
I'm scared of having that power myself.
And I'm scared of a world run by fourteen people who only leave office voluntarily, who select their successors personally when they do, and who are all completely okay with everything I just mentioned.

Yeah, Thavnair's not perfect--even if I dodge the End of Days somehow, this is still a place that lost so many people on a specific pilgrimage that they started praying to the crocodile that might've eaten them--but I would still be happier and feel safer there than Amaurot. And it has nothing to do with who you think.

EDIT: Y'know what, as much as I love the non-sequitir, that needs and deserves the context.

[redheadturk]

If I woke up as some rando in the Ancient world, I'm not scared of the End of Days. Frankly, I think I die ten seconds after the skies go red and the city is destroyed, and there's almost a level of comfort in dying so suddenly to something absolutely colossal that I both had no part in creating and had no power to stop; not really a lot of time or place for fear, at least as I process it.

I'm scared of a world where a child's nightmares can become real.
I'm scared of the world where the Behemoth is celebrated as an achievement.
I'm scared of a world so normative they can't even fathom a deviation from the norm--and what that means for me, as someone who so often doesn't fit it.
I'm scared of a world where literally anyone I meet has magic that can cause me great pain and danger, and whose power over that is so tenuous that a stray thought makes it go wrong.
I'm scared of having that power myself.
And I'm scared of a world run by fourteen people who only leave office voluntarily, who select their successors personally when they do, and who are all completely okay with everything I just mentioned.

Yeah, Thavnair's not perfect--even if I dodge the End of Days somehow, this is still a place that lost so many people on a specific pilgrimage that they started praying to the crocodile that might've eaten them--but I would still be happier and feel safer there than Amaurot. And it has nothing to do with who you think.

EDIT: Y'know what, as much as I love the non-sequitir, that needs and deserves the context.

Yeah, no. why the *hell* would you be scared of a world where the entire society is pretty much gender non-conforming in the sense of "My body is just the one I was born with and does not define me as a person."? One where you don't need expensive surgeries or hormones to change your body if you feel uncomfortable in it because hey, magic can be used to shape your flesh how you want it? I would love to live in a world where I can just ]create whatever is needed so no one needs ever to starve again or fight over scarce resources. I mean, sorry, but your fears seem silly to me when the Sundered world with its pain and scarcity seems so much worse.

[Cleretic]

Yeah, no. why the *hell* would you be scared of a world where the entire society is pretty much gender non-conforming in the sense of "My body is just the one I was born with and does not define me as a person."?

It says such interesting things about you that you look at a world with one single uniform, and see any form of 'non-conformity'.

There are more parts to me than the flag that hangs in my home and the pills I take every day, all of which weigh in on my feelings about this. But even that part doesn't look at Elpis and see anything I'd want to call 'home'.