What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[MikkoAkure]

As for Dynamis, we have one line from Hermes that they had no practical use for it. Not that ancients can't use Dynamis, but they had no reason to use it. One line from Y'shtola theorizing that's why the sundering happened. We are given no information that states only Dynamis can beat a being made of Dynamis. If it was there, I missed it.

It was described a couple of times that the Ancients were unable to manipulate Dynamis due to the fact that they are incredibly suffused with aether. The reason why we and Meteion can is because our aether is much thinner. Aether easily cancels out Dynamis, which is why the Ancients had no use for it.


As for familiars, Y’shtola didn’t purposefully give them speech to make them suffer. If you didn’t skip the “Sailor Moon” cutscene, you would have seen that she had to follow the exact steps when she created them for the first time as a very young child. She was basically just doing a very limited summoning ritual to call forth an entity that already had a pattern than making something completely for scratch just for one mission.

If you did the Elpis side quests, you’d find that the Ancients don’t exactly treat their familiars better as a whole either. Some are kindly but others purposefully send you into combat expecting you to die and another even asking you to please die instead of killing creations you’re supposed to be capturing. Players who play summoner aren’t exactly better either. Carbuncle is a familiar like all of the others. Just the aether of a rock given a specific form and purpose like how nixies are aether manifested from water.


Segueing from there on why the Ancients were “othered”, the writers ultimately decided to follow the path many fantasy/sci-fi stories have taken before about a precursor race being full of hubris and ultimately responsible for their own destruction. They wanted to add nuance to the story so they made them more empathetic than most incarnations of this trope though and mostly ended up with just “clearly you don’t own an air fryer” levels of arrogance.

Would you have rather had the Ancients be completely irredeemably vile with Venat being the sole voice of reason? That would have barely changed the trajectory of the story.