What lore do you ignore?

[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.