Disappointed in one Endwalker Aspect [SPOILERS]

[Ayche]

This has come up and has been remarked upon. It's more that said premises are considered to be irrelevant or side considerations by some of us, particularly to the sundering. If their world is less than perfect (but in relative terms I find them to be quite remarkable beings compared both to RL humans and the sundered), should they not strive to regain what they lost, even if that exact thing cannot be regained? After their star had nearly been desiccated and most of their people sacrificed to staunch it? As if many of the sundered would not desire and act towards the precise same thing? Note that the dispute between Venat and her faction and the remaining ancients was less to do with any of their imperfections, real or imagined, but more to do with the attitude she thought they should have to suffering, based on context she had and which they were not given and thus lacked.



Yes, much as ideology focused on discarding the past (except when it comes to using it caricatures of it to ideologically browbeat opponents), fixating on "brighter tomorrows", destroying all opposition to withering away the status quo and ushering in their own new glorious revolution, thriving on crises as pretexts for doing so, has very bad echoes to certain movements.

Considering the Final Days ended up being a self-inflicted problem in the end, we can surmise that if this case, then eventually some other future problem would had destroyed their civilization. Now there is no real way to debate this, this is question of outlook at this point, there is no evidence for it really.

In same matter, in our real world could we actually ever go back 3 years? 10 years? 20 years? No, because usually the conditions that created benefits in the past were built on conditions that no longer apply or were inherently temporary. Great Recession of 2007-2009 was result of insane shadowbanking (and so many other factors), which probably gave us before its crash great prosperity and happiness. Hell, it is not really controversial to say that our current modern world is unsustainable and will crash in one way or another in the future, and there is no going back to a world where we just had not used the carbon.

In FFXIV they deal with fantastical elements like aether and dynamis and souls and stuff, but they are still forced to deal with the same basic moral principle that you reap what you sow. They created a society that created a Hermes who then doomed them all, same way we humankind might had doomed ourselves to a slow death by the invention of combustion engine. Give another timespan and some other amaurotine would had created a different crisis with same results. I wager the Pandaemonium raid series explores that possibility.

[EaraGrace]

She did not save everyone's lives. She was given her Hydaelyn powers by her followers' lives, and then she killed the entire ancient world. She only saved our present-future.

Enervation is very specific in its effects, it weakens but does not kill. The removal of memories and other effects people purport is unsubstantiated at this point.

For the survivor cannibalism analogy, look at it like this: When someone is forced to eat another human, it comes from desperation (usually). The Sundering came from supposed desperation, and it used the lives of everything from the Ancient world to make the new life that you value more than the old. That's cannibalization.

Real live people who've survived desperate situations by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of others do generally go on to have good lives and do good things afterwards. The fact that they intend to and do good afterwards doesn't make what they did right. Neither does the sympathy of the public, who generally place the blame on the dire situation.

I think the analogy you use is inaccurate. The Sundering was much closer to that of a doctor amputating a limb, a painful and harmful action done for the persons benefit. And yes the Sundering was what was necessary for the Ancients and life on Etheirys to survive. Was it kind? No. Was it good? No. Was it necessary for their lives and the lives of everyone? Yes.

As for her giving her own life... she didn't do that. She challenged us to a trial by combat and lost. If we had lost, then she would have commanded the exodus. She wanted us to win, but supposedly fought with intent to kill. It wasn't self sacrifice. It was, "Prove you're better saviors than me."

And what was the outcome of both options? Do you believe Hydaelyn planned to leave the Aetherial Sea in either circumstance? Her intent to kill was motivated solely by the desire to ensure humanity would be able to confront Meteion, not to survive.

We don't know her, not really. We know her mission. It's our mission, and we made it hers via time paradox.

We know her much more than most characters. We know her feelings, her desires, her dream for the world.

[Veloran]

The Ascians are guilty of fourteen counts.

Given Venat knew about the future and decided to go ahead with it anyway, it can be argued that she's culpable for every rejoining, on top of every instance of suffering and death across the history of the 14 worlds. The latter was actually her intent, and the former was at least known by her and in the case of the First completely allowed to happen.

Enervation is very specific in its effects, it weakens but does not kill.

Are we still on this? Yes, it clearly killed people. The removal of memories is hardly "unsubstantiated", it is explicitly stated. And as yet nobody has been able to explain to me how beings which had already lived eons could possibly survive having their lifespans suddenly reduced to ~100 years.

[Vyrerus]

Enervation

You are wrong about Enervation. Its effects were stated clearly and truthfully in Shadowbringers.

EMET-SELCH: "As a counterbalance to Zodiark, Hydaelyn was created with the power to enervate her foe. This singular ability strikes not at such banal things as flesh, but at everything that defines the target, diluting its existence. For example, if she were to strike at you... *points to Ryne and snaps his fingers, a second Ryne appears* Two individuals identical in appearance, yet reduced in all respects. Strength, intelligence, the soul itself -- all is halved."


Also, no. The Sundering is nothing like amputating a limb. Amputation requires that the limbs die, not gain new wills of their own. The parts of the original people of Etheirys were split into identical physical copies, which then died 14 times faster than they otherwise would have. The only thing it was necessary for was our precise story, and issues within that story, its plot holes, question that necessity.

We don't even know Venat as well as we know Hermes. A character that just showed up this expansion. Which, Venat pretty much is, since all past renditions of her have been vague expositors which add almost nothing to the character we know her as now.

[Ryaz]

I have to say I'm amazed and baffled at how many people on the forums seem to think Venat was some kind of malicious, evil person who sundered the world on her own selfish whim.

The truth is Venat was a good person. Emet-Selch was a good person. But when faced with a world ending event, they both did what they believed was best for the survival of the planet, they just disagreed on the direction it should go in. Emet's group wanted to return things to the way they were, Venat's group (yes, group, she did NOT act alone. Believing so completely disregards what we learned in 5.2) believed the only way to survive was to move forward and not cling to what they lost. They didn't have any easy options. They both had to make extremely difficult choices, whether it was repeated sacrifices that might bring back the world they had, but could have still been vulnerable to Meteion again due to their inability to move forward or gambling on sundering everyone and forcing them though millenia of suffering and death to help them grow stronger, while allow them to better manipulate Dynamis. There was no "good" outcome from this.

And we don't know what happened between our time on Elpis and the actual Sundering. For all we know, Venat tried to find other ways to stop the Final Days and failed. We don't know who she brought into the circle. All we know is the bits and pieces we saw from the memories in 5.2 and 6.0.

[Cleretic]

I have to say I'm amazed and baffled at how many people on the forums seem to think Venat was some kind of malicious, evil person who sundered the world on her own selfish whim.

The truth is Venat was a good person. Emet-Selch was a good person. But when faced with a world ending event, they both did what they believed was best for the survival of the planet, they just disagreed on the direction it should go in. Emet's group wanted to return things to the way they were, Venat's group (yes, group, she did NOT act alone. Believing so completely disregards what we learned in 5.2) believed the only way to survive was to move forward and not cling to what they lost. They didn't have any easy options. They both had to make extremely difficult choices, whether it was repeated sacrifices that might bring back the world they had, but could have still been vulnerable to Meteion again due to their inability to move forward or gambling on sundering everyone and forcing them though millenia of suffering and death to help them grow stronger, while allow them to better manipulate Dynamis. There was no "good" outcome from this.

And we don't know what happened between our time on Elpis and the actual Sundering. For all we know, Venat tried to find other ways to stop the Final Days and failed. We don't know who she brought into the circle. All we know is the bits and pieces we saw from the memories in 5.2 and 6.0.

We can reason that Venat was trying to find other ways about things, from the fact that her group in Anamnesis is talking about attempts to convince the Convocation. If their whole outlook was 'heads down, work on the Sundering because that's the only thing that will work', I don't think they would have bothered with that. You don't make those sorts of pleas unless you have hope people listen to them.

But you're absolutely right. Venat poses an interesting moral question: is a horrifying deed done by a good person an evil deed? In the real world it's a difficult question because real people are complicated and weird, but in fiction... it is stated essentially as fact that Venat is A Good Person, but does that inherently make the Sundering A Good Deed? Instead claiming Venat to be somehow inherently evil just dismisses the complexity of the entire thing, and to me kind of smacks of 'didn't want to grapple with a hard question, and so is trying to force it to be easy'.

There is a mirror to this question, too, in Emet: 'how much evil must a good person do before they themselves are also evil'? I could probably word that better, but similarly, it's more or less confirmed that Emet was A Good Man back in Elpis. So, at what point were his previous actions so reprehensible that he could be considered 'evil'? Was it giving the go-ahead for the third sacrifice? Was it deciding to go ahead with the Rejoinings, sundered lives be damned? Was it the first actual Rejoining? Was it when he made an empire specifically to be terrible? Was it none, was he still 'a good man' by the time of Shadowbringers? I think it's an interesting thing to consider, and it would be lazy to throw it all away by saying 'actually Emet was already awful back in Elpis'.

[OhNooo]

I have to say I'm amazed and baffled at how many people on the forums seem to think Venat was some kind of malicious, evil person who sundered the world on her own selfish whim.

The truth is Venat was a good person. Emet-Selch was a good person. But when faced with a world ending event, they both did what they believed was best for the survival of the planet, they just disagreed on the direction it should go in. Emet's group wanted to return things to the way they were, Venat's group (yes, group, she did NOT act alone. Believing so completely disregards what we learned in 5.2) believed the only way to survive was to move forward and not cling to what they lost. They didn't have any easy options. They both had to make extremely difficult choices...

It's all about perspectives. Each side thought they were doing the right thing - doing what they had to do. Each side thought they had no other option. I see parallels between Hermes, Venat and Emet-Selch in that all three of them looked at mankind and made a judgement. After thousands of years of observing the sundered, Emet made a judgement that they couldn't be trusted with the star and were not worth saving. Venat also looked at her own people and made a judgement that they were hopeless and could not be trusted to come up with a solution. Hermes made a judgement that his people should be tested to see if they truly deserved to live. From each group's perspective, they are the heroes in their own story. I agree with you that they aren't bad people - they all had good intentions.

I think one of the issues people have is how there seems to be a bias in Venat's favor, pushing a more sympathetic view towards what she did. That's definitely the impression I got throughout the game. In the other expansions it was like the writers left a lot of things up to the players to interpret. But this time it was like they were trying to tell me how to feel instead of letting me interpret things for myself? That's just the vibe I felt on my end.

[QT_Melon]

Imagine being forced into a choice because it was good for the planet. Say like being gay and being forced into ONLY HAVING heterosexual relationships because you need to populate. Or like in the 40s, if you were grieving over the loss of a family member the best way to deal with it was a lobotomy (yeah referencing Bojack in this case because it actually also referenced what was deemed right). Years later it was only found morally grey because that was the solution. Even though later found out you could donate to fertility clinics or could get counseling - but was told years ago those were your only options...

[Ayche]

There are some premises that sometimes feel go unremarked. Like there is the premise of "amaurotine paradise", that everything was perfect for the ancients. Not really, there is a lot of subtext and clues hidden in side quests and the main quest, especially the coming raid series seems to be going into the direction, that their society was very good at hiding its ugly side and people kept a stiff upper lip about it. And then there is a premise that is ... all too relevant to our actual, real life world. The premise that there is a normal you can return to after an event that shocks the everyday. But since there is no actual way to relive the past, it is always impossible to return to what was. Regardless of the intent, any motivation built on the idea that if we just do this thing and that thing, we can all return to the status quo and continue from there involves some amount of self-deception.

Also I should resist, but ... ideology motivated by return to a glorious past has ... very bad echoes to certain movements.

[Lauront]

There are some premises that sometimes feel go unremarked. Like there is the premise of "amaurotine paradise", that everything was perfect for the ancients. Not really, there is a lot of subtext and clues hidden in side quests and the main quest, especially the coming raid series seems to be going into the direction, that their society was very good at hiding its ugly side and people kept a stiff upper lip about it. And then there is a premise that is ... all too relevant to our actual, real life world. The premise that there is a normal you can return to after an event that shocks the everyday. But since there is no actual way to relive the past, it is always impossible to return to what was. Regardless of the intent, any motivation built on the idea that if we just do this thing and that thing, we can all return to the status quo and continue from there involves some amount of self-deception.

This has come up and has been remarked upon. It's more that said premises are considered to be irrelevant or side considerations by some of us, particularly to the sundering. If their world is less than perfect (but in relative terms I find them to be quite remarkable beings compared both to RL humans and the sundered), should they not strive to regain what they lost, even if that exact thing cannot be regained? After their star had nearly been desiccated and most of their people sacrificed to staunch it? As if many of the sundered would not desire and act towards the precise same thing? Note that the dispute between Venat and her faction and the remaining ancients was less to do with any of their imperfections, real or imagined, but more to do with the attitude she thought they should have to suffering, based on context she had and which they were not given and thus lacked.

Also I should resist, but ... ideology motivated by return to a glorious past has ... very bad echoes to certain movements.

Yes, much as ideology focused on discarding the past (except when it comes to using it caricatures of it to ideologically browbeat opponents), fixating on "brighter tomorrows", destroying all opposition to withering away the status quo and ushering in their own new glorious revolution, thriving on crises as pretexts for doing so, has very bad echoes to certain movements.