Quote Originally Posted by Cleretic View Post
The failure to stop the other Rejoinings, and presumably other disasters. She knows that if she fails to stop those Rejoinings, the Seventh Astral Era gets closest, but if she manged to stop, say, the Sixth Umbral Calamity, maybe Amdapor was on track to a breakthrough.

The Seventh Astral has a big thing of 'standing on the shoulders of giants', a lot of the leading minds and civilizations are building on departed people; mostly Allag, but others contribute too. But if those giants just didn't die, they'd be perfectly well-suited. Immediately I can look at Allag and say they definitely had everything needed to pull off Plan 'Punch Meteion In The Snout', and I wouldn't scoff at someone saying that Mhach had a chance either.

What I'm saying is that Hydaelyn definitely tried to stop those Calamities, failed, and was reassured by 'well, at least the Seventh Astral Era has good odds'. That's not saying that others wouldn't have had a chance if she'd protected them--and also not saying that later Eras would've been totally lost--but is saying that we are her reassurance. If we die, she doesn't even have a prayer.
I'm not sure what plan or breakthrough or odds you're referring to. That is to say, if history up to this point wasn't according to plan - That the seven calamities were failures on her part - then I don't really see what a success state for her is supposed to be. Beating Meteion? As you say there may have been other opportunities throughout history to do it, but she never revealed the conflict to anybody else for them to make the attempt. We then might say that a success state for her was simply Etheirys existing in perpetuity while being protected by Zodiark. But... I don't really see how that's any more of a solution than the selfsame one the hologram meeting in Akademia said wasn't permanent enough.

Part of the reason why it's hard to know if the Rejoinings were actually failures is that she did need them to happen in order to reach this conclusion that is ideal for her. It's hard to argue that Venat was freewheeling it and trying to go for an alternative series of events when everything turned out exactly as WoL described to her and she was actively abetting at least some of it.