Quote Originally Posted by PawPaw View Post

(snip)
You have to remember that, according to the writers'/story's logic (which I definitely do not agree with), suffering and mortality = good.

The entire point of Endwalker is to try to tell the player that a life with no suffering or misery is either impossible or delusional. We're shown multiple societies that reached the "pinnacle" of whatever advancement or goal they wanted to achieve (the Omicrons, the Ea and the Plenty) and such "perfection" wound up making all of them despondent for one reason or another. The devs have even confirmed that the Plenty was meant to be an allegory for what the Ancients were probably headed toward. And then, of course, we have Cookingway flat out tell us that the Ancients "caused" their own downfall by striving for perfection instead of simply making the best of their lot in life.

To the writers, the Ancients had to go because their world didn't have enough suffering. The problem was, they were also too lazy to fully commit to the idea of "Utopia is a delusion". They could have shown the Ancients creating familiars only to treat them as full-on slaves without rights. I think that's sort of what they were going for when they initially had Emet-Selch calling your character "it" and speaking of you with disgust, but that doesn't last long. By the time you reach the next MSQ, he and Hyth are treating you with a decent amount of respect. Then, throughout the rest of the Elpis storyline, we learn that a familiar/concept with sapience and reason like the WOL is pretty much unheard of. Even Meteion is specifically stated to be unique. So basically, all of their familiars/concepts are basically monsters and animals...and if they're expecting players to dislike Ancients for treating animals and monsters as disposable, they must have forgotten what videogame we're playing. If anything, the charybdis portion shows us that even though they're pretty quick to write off "defective" concepts, they'll still listen to reason and reevaluate with sufficient evidence.

So, in the end, the entire premise of the Ancient society being bad because they didn't suffer enough relies on the logic of "trust me, bro". Even the aforementioned dead worlds they offer as "proof" (the Omicron, Ea and Plenty) come across less as worlds destroyed by their own hubris and more like juvenile writing.