*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[Kozh]

What other people? I thought it was established that unlike the partially aborted 7th calamity, the 8th was a full calamity and all of society crumbled. A large chunk if not the majority of people left are wandering bandits and it's a true apocalyptic scenario that hasn't changed for the better in hundreds of years and will take many hundreds more yet for the world to get back up on its feet again to a semblance of where it was before.

UH, the people at the New World? Meracydia? Other smaller continent? During the flashback, they never say that it spreads outside of the three great continent (eorzea, ilsabard, far east).

In the end though, what the Ironworks did was pretty much the same as what the game keep opposing: An individual/a group of people decide the fate of the star by themselves. Imagine you were born and live in a post apocalypse world. You struggle to live everyday but keep (as EW love to put it) to 'forge ahead'. Then one day someone came and said "hey, we do have a plan to save the world, but by erasing it from existence. I hope you're cool with that."

Additionally, there's nothing that could be done about Black Rose by this point. The Calamity had already come and gone and since the end of the story says they're in a new Astral Era, I'm sure it's assumed that Black Rose has already dissipated. Black Rose was already stated to have destroyed the Garlean Empire 200 years ago during the Calamity so who is going to be continuously producing and releasing it? And in a world with no more countries and severely limited communications, how much of the world even knows who the Ironworks are?

They never said it dissipated, nor do we know if it's possible to considering that it's light aspected (stagnancy).

In all of the scenes of Amaurot and Elpis, we never see the Ancients gather together in darkness and raise their hands up in prayer to the "one true god", yet we see them do that in ARR. The lopporits may have said it causes a "tug", but Emet-Selch outright states he is tempered and the dialogue of the others does not sound like sane individuals possessed of their complete will.
Nabriales: "Witness the terrible might of a true servant of Zodiark!" "Insatiable hunger of the void! Devour all light and return this world to perfect darkness!" "Writhing powers of ruination! From the deepest pits of the abyss I summon thee!"

Ah yes, ARR, where nearly all the villains are morning saturday cartoon level of evil.

[MikkoAkure]

UH, the people at the New World? Meracydia? Other smaller continent? During the flashback, they never say that it spreads outside of the three great continent (eorzea, ilsabard, far east).

In the end though, what the Ironworks did was pretty much the same as what the game keep opposing: An individual/a group of people decide the fate of the star by themselves. Imagine you were born and live in a post apocalypse world. You struggle to live everyday but keep (as EW love to put it) to 'forge ahead'. Then one day someone came and said "hey, we do have a plan to save the world, but by erasing it from existence. I hope you're cool with that."

The people of the New World and Meracydia may not have been effected, but they're also not very high-density populated areas. We don't know much about the Far West, but we know that Meracydia has already been in a post-apocalyptic situation for 6,000 years. In the end, their timeline wasn't deleted, it was just a possibility. Also, I don't remember anywhere saying that the original summonings of Zodiark were a bad thing. If Zodiark wasn't summoned in the first place, then the world would have ended.

They never said it dissipated, nor do we know if it's possible to considering that it's light aspected (stagnancy).

You're answering my assumption with another assumption. The scene where we learn all this shows people walking around and mourning amongst the dead so I was of the mind that it still works as a normal gas. I'm not sure why you would be against the idea of the Ironworks doing something to fix the past if they lived in a world where the Calamity was still happening and continuing to happen and Black Rose will never fade so I don't know how that helps your argument.

Ah yes, ARR, where nearly all the villains are morning saturday cartoon level of evil.

It's still a part of the canon of the story and most importantly, the beginning where everyone is introduced to these characters. It's one thing for the story to evolve and to add nuance, but it's another to introduce inconsistencies and altogether pretend that the whole beginning of the story never happened.

In this case, we know why Zodiark was summoned and we know the Ascians had a good reason for doing so. At the same time, we know that they were tempered, are told specifically by one of their leaders that they were tempered, and that it has turned the previous logic-minded "protectors of the star" into zealous ghosts who twirl their mustaches and laugh as they wreak destruction and cause genocides. That makes the whole thing more tragic and the writing better than the alternative.

[Cilia]

Now that I don't have a splitting caffeine headache...

On the point of Fandaniel's ideals, they essentially boil down to nihilism. The thing about nihilism is that it is a purely objective philosophy - there is no objective meaning to anything. Everything you've ever known and loved will one day be so much dust in the wind. That's just a starting point, though; bereft of objective meaning people must look inward for a subjective meaning to their lives, and deciding the meaning of your existence is to hasten along the oblivion of all things is popularly decided to be an awful raison d'etre.

"Concept" is just a template for a given creation. Whether or not it gets a soul is dependent on whether or not said creation works within the laws of nature; living things like animals get souls, while decidedly unnatural things like elemental sprites don't. Such living things will be repurposed (put down) if they don't meet the Ancients' standards for being released into the ecosystem from Elpis, such as the water-leaning charybdis that was about to be put down for both its aberrant nature and being afraid to fly, as well as the aggressive fire-aspected Fenrir things whose exact names I forget. These are living beings with thoughts and feelings of their own, but the Ancients looked at them from a purely objective standpoint and did not sympathize with them except for Hermes. "It's all just aether, so who cares?"

The phoenix in Through His Eyes is meant to be an ironic representation of Emet-Selch's future self: "a soul burdened with regret... [raging] against the pull of the Underworld; [c]onsumed by the fear of death, [thrashing] blindly about, [knowing] only pain and suffering and [inflicting] the same upon others" is a very accurate description of Emet-Selch as we meet him in Shadowbringers.

While the loporrits do tell us that a primal on Zodiark's scale would cause a "tug," Emet-Selch himself says he and the Convocation were tempered when Zodiark was summoned. My take on it is that the summoning arts they taught the beast tribes greatly played up the zealotry of tempered followers, but summons will still temper people even using creation magic proper depending on the scale - it just won't make them slavishly obedient zealots.

[KageTokage]

The phoenix was a weird case of something gaining a soul in an unnatural manner as it was an arcane entity that was possessed by an existing soul that was meant to return to the Lifestream, but had lingering regrets that kept it from passing peacefully.

But yeah, they don't really care whether or not something has a soul as many of the Ancients giving out quests acknowledge that you're strange due to seemingly being a familiar with a soul, then readily send you off to do some dangerous task they'd rather not be risking their lives with.

[Zoliru]

That was a major part of ancient society, the fact that they were able to see souls meant that they knew nobody really "died", they soul would live on.

More importantly though, I am curious, souls clearly can be used for power via summoning methods, but can souls be destroyed? As in truly extinguished and gone forever?

[KageTokage]

While they initially claimed that the soul of those transformed into blasphemies is completely destroyed, it seems like there's at least some actual trace of it left behind.

role quest spoiler

Which is given a bit more focus in the healer role quest as once its blasphemy is destroyed, Fordola seems have an Echo-granted vision of its former self departing to join the rest of her friends, which grants her some measure of comfort.

[EaraGrace]

While they initially claimed that the soul of those transformed into blasphemies is completely destroyed, it seems like there's at least some actual trace of it left behind.

role quest spoiler

Which is given a bit more focus in the healer role quest as once its blasphemy is destroyed, Fordola seems have an Echo-granted vision of its former self departing to join the rest of her friends, which grants her some measure of comfort.

Role quest spoodles

In the quest line they really pushed the point on how much of Charlet remained and was guiding the Blasphemies behavior. Perhaps if one’s soul still shines through enough, it’s a sign it can still to return to the sea?

[Cleretic]

While they initially claimed that the soul of those transformed into blasphemies is completely destroyed, it seems like there's at least some actual trace of it left behind.

role quest spoiler

Which is given a bit more focus in the healer role quest as once its blasphemy is destroyed, Fordola seems have an Echo-granted vision of its former self departing to join the rest of her friends, which grants her some measure of comfort.

I'm not sure how much of that is evidence per se.

They've never shied away from doing symbolic and clearly non-literal scenes (hell, even this expansion had a big one in the post-Elpis cutscene). And on top of that, Fordola is... not well, and hasn't necessarily been kept abreast of the situation with the finer details of the Blasphemies. I think it's more likely that Fordola essentially pictured that scene to make herself feel better. Because... hell, nobody told her it doesn't work like that. And even if someone did, I'm not sure she'd listen, she is very stubborn.

[DarkKiru]

So one of the bigger questions I sort of thought of; from a practical non-ideological standpoint, was sundering the star really necessary?

A sundered Zodiark, with only 7 rejoinings (even when he had NO rejoinings at one point); was able to hold The Final Days at bay for over 12,000 years with no real sign of faltering in the slightest. Wouldn't it stand to reason that full power unsundered Zodiark could just hold Meteion's dynamis wave back for pretty much all of eternity? Making the sundering pretty much pointless for non-ideological reasons.

[MikkoAkure]

So one of the bigger questions I sort of thought of; from a practical non-ideological standpoint, was sundering the star really necessary?

A sundered Zodiark, with only 7 rejoinings (even when he had NO rejoinings at one point); was able to hold The Final Days at bay for over 12,000 years with no real sign of faltering in the slightest. Wouldn't it stand to reason that full power unsundered Zodiark could just hold Meteion's dynamis wave back for pretty much all of eternity? Making the sundering pretty much pointless for non-ideological reasons.

Sundering Zodiark served two main purposes. First and most important of which was to imprison Zodiark. A unsundered Zodiark is stronger than Hydaelyn and would also mean an unsundered Convocation and the sacrifice of the world's new life in order to bring back Amaurot, which is the entire reason why Hydaelyn was summoned to stop in the first place.

The second reason:

is the classic JRPG trope "the people of the ancient past are unable to fix the problem on our own so we shoved it away and it is up to random adventurers to meet the problem head on and destroy it once and for all". Ancients could not interact with dynamis because their aether is too dense. Sundered people can. Half of the equation for fighting Meteion is the ability to interact with dynamis, the other half is 12000 years of condensed aether Hydaelyn has collected from sitting atop the Lifestream.

So while a full-powered Zodiark could hold the Final Days at bay forever, the world would not be ours and the rest of the universe would eventually twinkle out of existence around us. In my opinion, the world wouldn't be the Ancients' either. A fully-powered Zodiark means an Amaurot that revolves around Him, not the same Amaurot that existed before.


Also, welcome to the forums!