Quote Originally Posted by Quuoooote View Post
He is literally mankind's final hope, a manifestation of the Ancients' desire to struggle and suffer in the pursuit of life, which is more than a little contradictory to the Plenty's endgame. Do the writers want us to believe that Emet-Selch struggled to resurrect his people for 12,000 years because the Ancients were ultimately apathetic to the point of self-destruction?
Zodiark, relegated to an "ill-fated wish". :P The only explanation I can think of is that for some bizarre reason they didn't expect players to look into the story too deeply. Several people have wondered if Yoshi-P even played through the side quests in Elpis, which paint a different picture than what's presented in the MSQ (not coincidentally from the POV of two of the world's dissidents).

I've said many times EW didn't feel like the spiritual successor of ShB and that the story felt like it had been handed off to someone else. It's hard to tell if ShB was truly a fluke or if EW is the result of an overworked Ishikawa who didn't have the same level of creative freedom. I suppose we may never know, but there are so many inconsistencies and contradictions between the two for me that I couldn't arrive at the same conclusions EW demanded in order for the story to work.

Did the Ancients need to be Sundered because they were too close to said line? If so, how does Sundering them and wiping them out resolve this problem? Would sensitivity to Dynamis prevent this ultimate fate, or were the Ancients essentially dealt an impossible hand in life? Are the Sundered going to be at risk if they advance too far, or are they immune to such apathy and/or existential dread because they have Dynamis?
This is yet another timeline issue (and something else I suppose will never be clarified). While we don't know for sure, it seems like the length of time between the summoning of Zodiark and the sundering was a matter of months. It doesn't sound like Venat and her crew spent any significant amount of time trying to encourage change and, frankly, I don't believe that was realistic in what was essentially a post-apocalyptic world at that point. The cutscene that is so celebrated appeared to me as tone deaf since these people were still in the midst of trauma and grief having scarcely escaped an extinction level event.

Assuming they were going to go the way of The Plenty it likely would've taken a significant amount of time to do so. This makes Venat, Miss "Nothing Is Impossible", look like she's given up on them before they can even get back on their feet in order to pursue "perfection". I can't even solely attribute it to her lacking patience because it's that she wouldn't tell anyone the truth. I don't know how reasonable it was of her to believe she and her 12 followers could change society based on whatever platitude they were peddling.

Then you add dynamis into the mix, which causes one to question how earnest her attempts to change society were if she truly believed the Ancients incapable of defeating Meteion without being sundered. So, in order for her to have "tried" then you'd have to accept that they could have come up with a way to defeat Meteion and that's not what the game leads you believe (or, in fact, many of its fans will argue). Otherwise, everything she did was all for show (or possibly even a ruse to amass followers) and her intention always was to sunder everyone.

Not to mention her making Etheirys substantially more vulnerable to other 'dead end' fates they previously weren't at risk of falling to is conveniently never addressed.

The Ancients are in a rigged, unwinnable situation because they're battling plot contrivances designed to kill them.
Essentially, yes. Worse because EW took what was presented in ShB as a tragedy and spun it as them having deserved their fate one way or another. It felt gross and unsatisfying. Particularly so when the characters who are responsible for the Final Days and the Sundering are depicted as being sympathetic and overall correct (if you apply Ishikawa's statement regarding Hermes being the "first step" for mankind).