Quote Originally Posted by Fenral View Post
It's such an obvious repression metaphor. I mean, really. Like, wowza.

Everyone's basically pressured into looking and acting the same, and while they all superficially attest to open freedom of expression, the very nature of their society constrains it to within certain "acceptable" bounds. And then Hydaelyn comes and splits the world in such a way that people can no longer hide who they really are, and the few survivors of the past age go on a rampage and lament the "good old days" when they weren't constantly confronted with the differences of others. Like all of that was acceptable, of course, but only when they didn't have to think about it.

Not that Oda and Ishikawa intended it that way, per se, ("Death of the Author" is a thing), but the work's overall stance on which world was better has been pretty clear since that first roundtable with Varis.
I mean the devs confirm themselves the sundering was bad and made the world unstable. So im more inclined to believe the Ancient world was better when we have actual proof of lore and dev statements to back it up. It's not like we have to go through many mental gymnastics though to come to that conclusion.