Sundering the Nibirun

[sidurgu-12]

I don't want to speak too much for the OP, but I think fussing over the technical nature of the Sundering and beings made of aether vs. dynamis is kinda missing the point a bit.

What it comes down to is that the reconstructed races of Ultima Thule haven't fundamentally changed in their lived nature. The Nibirun (and the Ea, and sort of the Omicrons) are still presented as immortal, "transcendent" beings. However, the narrative of the Omicron questlines does not frame this as an impassable obstacle to them ultimately finding happiness and meaning.

In comparison, the narrative surrounding the Ancients treats their immortality and special powers as a "problem" that was ultimately precluding sustainable happiness and leading to their doom, and so had to be removed. This leads to an apparent contradiction that I think you can interpret in one of two ways:

1) The writers just aren't on the same page, and whoever wrote the Omicron questline has a fundamentally different philosophical opinion on how immortality and godlike power would transform the human condition and the capacity for individuals to find constructive meaning in their lives, versus whoever ultimately made the call on the Sundering plotline would be presented in the MSQ. Alternatively, they wrote themselves into a corner with the Ancients and it coming across that way in the first place was an accident, or maybe the writer for the Omicron quests just didn't care that deeply about Endwalker's specific themes to begin with and so contradicted them incidentally while writing their uplifting story about making some aliens happy.

2) We're not supposed to understand immortality and godlike power as inherently bad, but rather something that only caused circumstantial problems for the Ancients because of the way their culture had developed and specific events had played out. Thus, the Sundering was not "necessary" insofar as they had the potential (however unlikely you regard it as being reached) for cultural transformation that could solve the problem in lieu of physical transformation.

I think its the second one.

[Lurina]

I think its the second one.

If so, there's a lot of takes about how the Ancients would have been eventually destroyed one way or another because of their nature which are barking up the wrong tree.

Personally, I think it's a mix of both. My impression is that some people on the writing team genuinely do think there is something uniquely essential about mortal and specifically recognizably contemporary human life - there's a lot of emphasis on concepts like "let those who walked before lead those who come after", how living a short and difficult life makes you treasure it all the more, and how trying to transcend that is explicitly bad - while there are others who are apathetic about this theme to the point of writing in contradiction of it, and consider the Ancients downfall to be either the result of a culture that overvalues conformist positivity, or something that's a pure tragedy. The tone jumps all over the place across the various questlines.

My guess is that there was probably never a consensus on the strict necessity of the Sundering or the "inevitability" of the Ancient's fate, but it didn't matter because they agreed on the broad strokes. Here, though, the small differences in opinion are made (possibly) overt.

[Cleretic]

A Sundering wouldn't have been useful to stop the Nibirun from eating their entire society, because their end times had a much simpler core: if you killed Ra-la, that would be the end of the crisis. It's hard to get an idea how hard that would've been for the Nibirun, because they've never fought, but to us as external warriors it certainly wasn't the toughest thing we've ever fought; fair enough, because it was ultimately summoned to perform euthanasia, so it didn't exactly have to be combat-capable. Of course, then there's the possibility they could summon another, but we're unclear if such a thing would've been possible, or how they made the first one. Still, if someone was in the right place and time to save the Nibirun from themselves, it would've been quite possible without something drastic like the Sundering. However, it needs to be noted we know little to nothing about the circumstances that led to Ra-la, so it's hard to say not just how you'd solve the problem in the long-term, but even what exactly the problem is.

When considering the Ancients in parallel, keep in mind that a big problem with the Ancients was that Zodiark was both a load-bearing deity and a tool the Ancients most likely would've used to inadvertently kill their planet. So while killing Zodiark would've been technically possible (we beat it in an extreme circumstance, but even at full power it was likely still theoretically destructible by some mechanism, even if it ain't easy), it would've been the worst idea, because at that point you just kickstart the End of Days again. You need Zodiark alive, but you also need it unable to do anything extra, ergo, you Sunder both it and the people who'd desperately try to use it. Basically no other option allows the planet to keep living in any form; you kill Zodiark and the End of Days eats it, you leave it intact and Zodiark eats it. The Sundering's not pretty, nor really isn't a good idea in 99.9% of circumstances, but the Ancients and Zodiark happen to be that .1% where it mostly actually does stop the problems at hand.

You need to consider all facets of the problem before deciding on a solution. And the Nibirun are right now the biggest enigmas in Ultima Thule, so it's impossible to say with confidence that anything could've 'saved' them. The Sundering might've stopped them, sure, but does that actually help in their circumstances? Their world looked pretty dire, you might've condemned them to starving to death by doing that.

For the record, when considering everyone else... it doesn't fix the problems of the Grebuloffs, they'd still die anyway. The Dragons are in an even worse position afterward. The Omicrons are hard to judge since they're an entirely different type of being, but I'm gonna say they probably wouldn't be stopped. The Ea would just go from one problem to another, and they'd go from being burdened with infinite knowledge to being unable to comprehend their existence as weird ethereal beings. And the Karellians... well, that's just the story of Turn-A Gundam, so I'm gonna say it would solve the immediate existentially-threatening war, but they'd eventually just build up to another one and in the process make the best Gundam series.

[Alleo]

Just because they are meant to show us a possible outcome for the Ancients, does not mean that they are the same. We have no idea of their aether reserves and we do know that they are a hivemind, something the ancients were not.

As others have pointed out they are also recreations through Dynamis so sundering them would do nothing. And there is no Meteion anymore that sends out Despair into every bit of the universe.

I feel reluctant to consider the Nibirun as a parallel to the Ancients now that we know they only cared about perfection as a people and naught else.

It was stated that they might have met a similar end, though I find that exceedingly unlikely given that the Ancients were not reckless and deliberated over every decision they made for their people and the world at length.

And I am sure the Nibirun also did not start out as a hivemind race that had their "perfection" from the beginning. The point of saying that they could be parallels to the Ancients is that this could have been a road that they could have taken if they had surivived as their race.

We also have Hermes, a Ancient question exactly that: What if the star is perfect? Will we all just die?
Then there is already someone like Lahabrea that casts away his emotions because he does not want to handle them.

I see it quite a huge possibilty that down the road they could have ended like them. They after all already had problems with creativity on Elpis and some creations just followed a trend. (Hythlo being so annoyed about the sharks)

[Iscah]

Just because they are meant to show us a possible outcome for the Ancients, does not mean that they are the same. We have no idea of their aether reserves and we do know that they are a hivemind, something the ancients were not.

Where does it say that they are a hivemind? I didn't get that impression from them.

[SannaR]

Where does it say that they are a hivemind? I didn't get that impression from them.

If you poke the one that shows up in Base Omnicron during the rank 7 rank up they congratulate the Omnicrons for also choosing to become a hivemind.

[Alleo]

Where does it say that they are a hivemind? I didn't get that impression from them.

They say it in their quest (at least in german) and as SannaR said they also mention it later by that one NPC. (Which makes it even worse that you can miss them)
My only thought was: Well another case that having a hivemind is quite bad.

According to Garlandtools this was the english version of the main quest: <whirr> Situational analysis complete. New customers are of the Nibirun civilization. This society eliminated concepts deemed unpleasant by organic life-forms, such as “war” and “death.” In so doing, individuals attained physical immortality and a state of unified comprehension.

And I believe that in german it was quite clear that they got "one mind" out of that.

[redheadturk]

Then there is already someone like Lahabrea that casts away his emotions because he does not want to handle them.

Correction. It wasn't because he "didn't want to handle them." It was because the whole thing came with corruption due to the knowledge that Athena had planted. The tearing away of his emotions was a side effect, not the main idea.

[thegreatonemal]

Correction. It wasn't because he "didn't want to handle them." It was because the whole thing came with corruption due to the knowledge that Athena had planted. The tearing away of his emotions was a side effect, not the main idea.

Wasn't it more like he also had those thoughts of doing unethical experiments but would never act on them but after getting to know her soul in that way he feared that the temptation would be too great so he cut that part out of him. Sounds like not handling your emotions to me.

[Cleretic]

Wasn't it more like he also had those thoughts of doing unethical experiments but would never act on them but after getting to know her soul in that way he feared that the temptation would be too great so he cut that part out of him. Sounds like not handling your emotions to me.

It's almost definitely the temptation thing, yeah; whatever she was doing (which we don't entirely know yet) was too enticing for him to not pursue if he knew it--which we more or less know because Hephaistos couldn't resist it. Of course, difficult to say if it'd be that tempting to anyone, or just him. It's probably not some kind of malignant cognitohazard thought virus; I admit we don't have direct evidence that it isn't, but at the same time, we also don't have direct evidence that Nashu Mhakaracca isn't secretly an Ascian responsible for the Fourth Calamity. Stuff like that just isn't on the table as far as we know, so they can't just be brought up as 'fact' without some SERIOUS evidence.

However, without knowing what it was, we're not sure exactly how irrational or what kind of irrational Lahabrea was being by doing that; for all we know that could've been the right call. We also don't really know how different Lahabrea actually was after doing that; we know Emet-Selch could literally see it, and we know Igeyorhm knew him well enough to suss out that something happened, but beyond that, no idea. Even his son didn't notice, but granted, his son mostly wasn't giving him the time of day afterward. I feel like we can assume that wasn't a normal thing to do, but beyond that, we just don't have enough info.

Basically: jury's still out on if Lahabrea performing memory surgery on himself was an extremely stupid thing to do, a tragic necessity in the circumstances, specifically a 'him' problem, something that anyone would've struggled with, or anything in between any of those points. It's ABSOLUTELY fair to side-eye Lahabrea for doing that and not give him a pass yet, and he absolutely hasn't earned the benefit of the doubt at least for me, but we don't yet have any surefire evidence to either condemn or forgive him for it. (There's a laundry list of other items to condemn him for before then, anyway.)