Thread: The Reasoning behind The Sundering? (*6.0 Endwalker Spoilers*)

Originally Posted by Necrotica

There has been way more death and suffering as a result of Venats decision then would have been if she let the Convocation carry out their plan.

Most definitely. Because if everyone retreats into hedonistic pursuits, pretends that the Final Days are no longer an issue, and dies and accepts oblivion quicker, then there will be far fewer lives brought into this world to subsequently experience suffering and death. You can only suffer and die if you've been born in the first place.

Or alternatively, 'in my personal value system, sundering someone is the spiritual equivalent of putting anchovies on pizza, which in turn is the ethical equivalent of killing them outright.'

Pointless arguments aside, did anyone else catch that Venat has some sort of link to Thavnair's old gods? From 'When All Hope Seems Lost':

'Know this my children. There is more ugliness than beauty in this world.
To live is to suffer. To drink of calamity and drown in anguish. To toil and be tested, always and ever.
'Tis a perilous path you walk. Death lurks in the dark, and is the sole promise that awaits at journey's end.
You will tremble with terror. You will weep tears of anger and despair...
...but do not avert your eyes. See your life for what it is.
Then will you see how the hardships make you strong.
Every doubt reforged as scales for your armor. Every agony to temper your blade.'

I didn't pick up on this the first time because we're only introduced to Venat afterwards. I'm really interested in what Myths of the Realm will turn up.

Hmm... do we sacrifice unwilling non-Amaurotian souls to Zodiark to get our friends back? (Y/N?)

I didn't know that there was a third way to answer a 'Yes/No' question. And yes, the Amaurotians very clearly did change for the better. Just not as Amaurotians.

Originally Posted by Ayche

I don't know what moral calculus is being applied here, but I do not know how the death of the whole natural world is somehow equalized to the demotion of few god-wizards. God-Wizards, who on the record, were responsible for their own doom. So when one god-wizard is turned into 13 farmers and fishers, and natural order gets to, you know, not get disintegrated, I fail to see the math here.

Indeed.

Originally Posted by Rulakir

Given that a 7/14 WoL killed Lahabrea, I would think the other unsundered wouldn't take any more risks. Any new adventurer who appeared to be making strides would need to be snuffed out immediately and decisively.

Igeyorhm already pulled this stunt on the thirteenth. The end result was a Flood of Darkness that left it completely bereft of Aether and unable to be rejoined to the source. It's discussed in the EE, page 213.

Math. :P I always hear Emet in my head saying, "A vaunted hero of the Source, seven times rejoined."

I knew I should have referenced "If I Were an Evil Overlord" in my response since that's what I was thinking about when I wrote it. Lots of good advice for the Ascians in there.

Read through this thread, and the thoughts on what Venat did and whether she was justified...

I have to admit, after seeing the story play out, I was not convinced that Venat did the right thing. Her decision to withhold information and try to guide her people to saving themselves, even with the foreknowledge that this DIDN'T WORK, seemed nonsensical. At the very least, she should have shared what she knew about Metion once it became clear that things were falling apart. Even if everything worked out in the end, even if the actions taken eventually resulted in the defeat of Metion (something the Ancients might possibly never have been able to do themselves; the best they could manage was shield themselves from her influence), I was not convinced that Venat might have done a better job if she'd shared her hidden knowledge with her people, just as we chose to share our hidden knowledge of the future with her and the others.

That said, I seriously think there's an aspect of Blue and Orange morality going on here that has to be taken into consideration. Hermes was sad. He was sad because the other Ancients couldn't seem to understand that their creations could suffer, that they could fear death, that they could feel pain. Eventually, he enacted his memory erasure plan to ensure that the Ancients themselves would eventually face a trial to decide whether they were fit for survival.

I think there can be little doubt that the Ancients held themselves as being a tier apart from their creations, above them and fundamentally superior and of greater intrinsic importance. Certainly, they might favor such creations, bear affection for them - but that affection is much like the affection that we have for pets, even in cases where the creations are clearly intelligent beings. Several of the Elpis quests made it quite clear that even intelligent creations were seen as disposable and replaceable (such as the quest where we're instructed to allow the beast to rip us apart if it became a choice between its life and ours - it's an important research specimen, after all, and we're just a familiar!).

More than that, though, there were some strong hints that the Ancients did not hold their OWN lives in especially high regard, either. It's a regular occurrence, for instance, for an Ancient to simply decide that they've done enough and that it is time to die. Half of all the Ancients decided to sacrifice their own lives to birth Zodiark, and while that seems like a breathtaking spectacle of altruism from our perspective, to the Ancients it might not have been quite so unimaginable.

As another being from this culture in which Life - both that of the Ancients and not - is considered to be ultimately not that important, Venat's decision becomes a bit more understandable, even if it seems monstrous to us. She held back from spilling the beans regarding her future knowledge specifically because she was willing to allow Hermes's experiment to play out, to see if they would be able to prove themselves worthy of continuing to exist on the planet. It was a test which, in her estimation, they failed, as their solution was to hide behind Zodiark and ignore the underlying problem - and further, to hypocritically destroy the creations in which they'd claimed to have placed so much importance, simply to bring back their lost brethren. Where did their high-and-mighty ideals about maintaining ecological balance on the planet go once their collective back was to the wall?

This irreverence for the value of life was both what allowed Venat to do as she did, and also what prevented the Convocation and the rest of the Ancients from finding a lasting solution. The same irreverence for life is quite likely what would have lead the Ancients to their eventual doom - possibly one similar to that of the third leg of the Dead Ends, a world so utterly free of strife that its people had lost all meaning to their existence and any will to live. It was time to allow a new people to step up to bat.

The Sundering resulted in life forms whose existences were brutish, painful, and short. Life is fleeting and precious, and the living claw and scrape for as much of it as they can. Carelessness for life like that displayed by the Ancients, both in regards to their creations and to themselves, is regarded as abhorrent. While by no means guaranteed, this new form of life had a chance to overcome the tests that had laid every other galactic civilization low - and so far, they have.

tl;dr, it's hard to swallow what Venat did, when looking at it from our own perspective. The game, however, paints Venat as being from a culture where such an abominable act might not be quite so abominable.

Originally Posted by LineageRazor

Read through this thread, and the thoughts on what Venat did and whether she was justified...

I won't deny that the Ancients most assuredly held fundamentally different values toward life and the lives of their creations. However, while they may be alien in some ways, I do not think they are so disconnected from normal humanity that their views cannot be understood realistically, or aligned with our own. I would argue the Ancients have more similarities with us than they do differences, and those differences can be rationally understood. Death in and of itself for example was not a terrible thing for them, so much so that the term 'death' was scarcely used. This was because their lives spanned a nigh-on eternity, and they could live as much as they pleased. They also understood the world's cycle of rebirth, and that death is not the end of things. As such, they were happily willing to offer new insight as the person that they would become, when their duty reached an end. However, what was an unprecedented and awful thing to even consider for them, was the idea of a death that was not on the person's own terms. "Such tragedy, yet no catharsis." In that sense, life is absolutely important, as well as the individual contributions of the person living it. Venat putting the entire world in a state where no one can choose their own fate in the end is the worst thing imaginable for the Ancients.

That was also why being sacrificed to Zodiark was absolutely an act of altruism, and why Emet-selch, a fellow Ancient, frames it as such in Shadowbringers. Because they are voluntarily removing themselves from the lifestream to feed Zodiark's strength; to save everyone. They are condemning themselves to what they perceive to be an awful fate for the sake of those they love. It's not that they have less of a value for life, it's that their understanding of life is different.

Hermes sadness regarding the fates of the Ancient's creations was reasonable, but in the end, he refused to turn this sadness into something that would make for constructive change in his society, and it warped into essentially 'how dare people be happy in a society where I am unhappy.' And we know this change is possible, we sow some of the seeds of it ourselves. Ancients are introduced to the idea of valuing past creations more deeply, and are confronted with the notion of such lives they create not being simple aether, and like them, having the ability to host a soul. That capacity for change was there, as both Emet-selch and Hythlodaeus, staunch representatives of the Ancient's fundamental way of living, were able to see things from that perspective eventually. It's just that neither Hermes nor Venat were willing to put in the effort to enact that change themselves. In my view, they gave up on their people, where we wouldn't have, especially by not informing the Ancients that there was ever an 'underlying issue' in the first place.