On Themis [6.4 SPOILER]

[Lunaxia]

Fair enough, and thanks for the insights. I'm not really going to counter anything, since most of it comes down to a matter of preference regarding themes, aesthetics, character archetypes, tropes and the like, and that's an intrinsically personal thing very rarely swayed by argument, but I always like hearing other points of view.

Something that has occurred to me about the 8UC timeline.

Isn't the crux of the issue here that G'raha not being there is part of a plan where they were willing to wipe out a timeline for the sake of saving someone in the past? That that was a gamble they apparently decided to take, despite survivors of the 8UC wanting to live on and focus on improving the lot left to them?

[Denishia]

Fair enough, and thanks for the insights. I'm not really going to counter anything, since most of it comes down to a matter of preference regarding themes, aesthetics, character archetypes, tropes and the like, and that's an intrinsically personally thing very rarely swayed by argument, but I always like hearing other points of view.

Thank you. I couldn’t cover everything but I tried to list as many of the additional elements that stacked on top of why Amaurot was not going to appeal to me and how the choices like music and having the interiors as Art Deco which, okay not the worst design option but the association with the 1920-30s was another red flag in symbolic suggestion, meant that I don’t think that they could have designed a zone of NPCs that would turn me off more if they tried.

And the Tolkien fan that I am -epecifically Silmarillion and years dealing with some inane fan wank over Númenor (especially the Gift of Men and the Ban and the Sinking) and multiple hot take arguments about Valinor and the Valar with their role as stewards of the planet and Fëanor’s war crimes apologia- carried baggage of its own. Though on the superficial level to Amaurot with those examples, my positions would be closer to yours, if you believe it (okay no when I write and there’s a lot of fic, I tend to avoid Valinor during the First Age until after that paradise recovers from its equivalent of a Calamity unless I’m focusing on the two groups ignored as more boring than the dramatic fan favorites. But I like the mortals more)

[Lunaxia]

Thank you. I couldn’t cover everything...

I really get that. You could say I was similarly put off the Empire in a big way owing to the clearly deliberate but uncomfortable parallels with various IRL, ah... world issues (which I'm not getting into because ye gods do I not need to open that can of worms here again), and seeing Garlemald up close and personal and where they blatantly took their inspiration for its design from was quite a "wow, they went there" moment for me. I still view it as fiction, ultimately, and the most such references do is give me a distinct "ick" factor I'll typically choose to keep my distance from, but I can understand people really taking umbrage at it and the characters involved. Ironically (or perhaps not, given where it ended up) it wound up one of my favourite parts of Endwalker; so I can be brought around if the writing's good enough and treats the subject matter maturely and objectively, but any prompts of sympathy fell very flat for me, lol.

[Cleretic]

I bet the venn diagram between 'people who didn't like Emet' and 'people who didn't like Elpis' has a LOT of overlap. And I'm not terribly surprised by it; even if there's a lot more going on, it still opens and structures itself around the base fanservice concept of 'hang out with this character we're pretty sure you like, in the place he waxed poetic about'; there's just very little appeal to Elpis that doesn't link very directly to that one character.

Pandaemonium I think stood a better chance because it was, literally and figuratively, 'the Ancient world Emet didn't tell us about'. It can tell its story on its own--and sure enough, the story it chose to tell serves to undermine the perfection we were first shown.

Isn't the crux of the issue here that G'raha not being there is part of a plan where they were willing to wipe out a timeline for the sake of saving someone in the past? That that was a gamble they apparently decided to take, despite survivors of the 8UC wanting to live on and focus on improving the lot left to them?

Sure, that's the crux of the story of the 8UC timeline. But when it comes to the Elpis trip that part either is resolved and not a problem (to the players) or is an acceptable risk (to the characters), so it doesn't matter for the comparison often raised; moralizing about the 8UC decision doesn't help us when talking about the WoL's Elpis trip and the notion of them staying to save the Ancient world, so my brain just went 'what happens if we don't get caught up in that part', because we always do.

And my conclusion is that the 8UC timeline is absolutely fine without G'raha (depending on what the Tower left behind I could even debatably see it being better), but the Source is screwed without the Warrior of Light returning.

[Ayche]

8UC scenario is presented as a heroic sacrifice, I don't know how it gets more complicated than that.

[Denishia]

Elpis and Pandae Venn Diagram = nailed it and nailed it.

I was initially furious when I realized where zone five was going to be and who the NPCs we immediately met were because this was not what I wanted to waste an entire zone and several levels on. Walked into Elpis with more exasperated dread than excitement and it was only meeting Hermes and being fascinated by how well-actualized he felt in characterization and how while I didn’t agree with him and his conclusions even before Meteion’s turn still ….sympathized with him than any other Ancient. Venat was the only other zone 5 NPC I liked (Meteion too overtly cute but I liked her more when it became the struggle against the rest of the nihilistic hive mind) - but even then when I say I liked Venat it was the same milquetoast affection afforded Chai-Nuzz and Dulia-Chai before the giant Talos quests, which the Summoning cutscene strengthened. And I know the Tolkien meta fueling that personal reaction.

Pandae had as its hook giving Lahabrea more depth and then the introduction of Erichtonios, of the character tropes that could propel him to NPC I genuinely like instead of ‘best of lackluster lot’. Plus a plot about the consequences of literal dark underbelly, murder and toxic family abounds - okay I’m on board.

[Tehmon]

I like the ancients. I even like Emet whom I hate. I liked the idea of Elpis and loved going through it on my playthrough, but in hindsight the writers didn't succeed in what (I think) they were trying to accomplish with the area, to portray the ancient civilization as inherently flawed contrary to Emet's idealization, as well as give reason to Venat's actions.

At the end of Elpis, what I am left with is a general feeling that the ancients are creepy and cult-like, but that's not much is it? Ultimately the critical analysis of the ancient civilization kind of fails because the entirety of the criticism is based on one character's views, Hermes. Even if Hermes brings out good points, he is only ONE character, and all of his critical views on the lifestyle of the ancients can be disregarded as his own personal views that stem from mental problems. Another issue is that none of the failings of ancient civilization is ever addressed outright, all of it is metaphoric and there are tons of mixed signals, which leads everyone to make their own conclusions of morality of choices of the events that occurred. It is as if the writers are too afraid to say that Venat was in the right, or that the ancient civilization was inherently flawed, wasn't nowhere near as great as Emet depicted it as, and was rife with issues and maybe even on the brink of horrible events even without the events that led to Final Days. It's like we are supposed to come to that conclusion without being outright told so.

With Venat, while I am personally satisfied with the reasons she gave for everything she does, and I think she was justified, I also understand why people would question her decisions to keep everything under wrap, and question why sundering was necessary. After all, you just spent the entirety of Shadowbringers claiming that the ancient world was an immaculate paradise and ancients were just inherently better, more intelligent and more powerful, but in Endwalker you didn't correct those faulty statements enough to make Venat's action seem more reasonable. Like I've said, while the way I've connected the dots led me to the conclusion that sundering was necessary, I can see why others wouldn't come to the same conclusion.

Thankfully with the 6.4 raid story, we got more clues about the issues within the ancient civilization. It might be a bit dampened by the Heart of Sabik perhaps influencing Athena to be worse than she probably was, but I believe what Lahabrea said in that Athena was rotted to the core regardless of it's influence. More than that, Eric's message revealing that the convocation perhaps had to order their people to sacrifice themselves to Zodiark instead of everyone unanimously agreeing to do so certainly puts a new spin on the situation, granted that was what they were going for with his statement. Me having to make such a comment on Eric's statement kind of proves how it's hard to be confident about much of the writing around ancients.

[Brinne]

It is honestly a little bit weird to me that so long after the fact - four years later! - peoples' primary lens towards anything Ancient-related or Ancient-correlated still seems to be "proving Emet-Selch wrong about his people being perfect." I mean, that was done and dusted by the time of Shadowbringers, and then Endwalker shifted the conversation towards arguing that perfection is bad anyway. Even Emet-Selch's phantom Amaurot never gave me the impression things were literally perfect - what charmed me so much about the Ancients, both there and in Elpis and now in Pandaemonium, was that they were so clearly human with all sorts of human idiosyncrasies. Generally well-meaning, good people, doing their best - my heart still melts a little bit thinking about the Ancients fretting over you under the impression you're a child - but you still had overbearing jerks, people angrily and loudly railing against government policy, people complaining about suffering the weight from the DMV wait, people who were eccentric and people who were anxious about the reception to their creative work. Their sheer recognizable mundanity balanced with the haunting aspects and the overall good-natured, if sometimes clumsy and abrasive, beats of most of the NPCs was basically the recipe for the I Love Them concoction for me.

So, like, yes, you won the argument against Emet-Selch's trauma and broken psychological coping mechanism. Congratulations, the Ancients weren't literally perfect. They were human beings, they were people, and they all died a horrible, unjust death. When people still lift the "perfection" framework like a weird corpse to keep happily beating against, it sometimes comes across to me like their priority is mostly to just keep sticking it to Emet-Selch out of spite above all else, to the point of, well, basically dismissing even the idea that those he loved were ever even worthy of being loved, period. If they weren't "perfect," if they didn't always live up to the claims of a broken person who watched them all die, does that justify their judgment and then fate of being universally executed? Does not being "perfect" preclude the idea of them still being, overall, a good group of people who are doing their best, who are capable of learning, working through difficult situations, and growing, ala Erich and Lahabrea? Of being people who nonetheless deserved to hold onto their agency and their right to live? Of being people worthy of being mourned and fought for?

(If the argument is "well, we need to prove Emet-Selch wrong about why he's justified in killing us," that's also weird to me, because even if the Ancients WERE literally perfect he still wouldn't have been justified. Erich's counter to his mother about how sacrificing the currently living for some ideal goal is unacceptable does apply just as much to him as it does Athena and Venat, and though I've talked about it before, Shadowbringers's assertion that the debate of "who is more worthy to exist" is inherently invalid is a large part of why it touched me. In the end, what was truly driving Emet-Selch was duty and love, but buried under twelve thousand years of frantic, sometimes outright cowardly rationalizations, because of the kind of person he is.)

It's always been a little odd to me when people point to Pandaemonium in terms of "see, look how secretly bad the Ancients were! That sneaky Emet-Selch was hiding how monstrous they really were!" Because the vast majority of the actual Ancient cast in Pandaemonium, down to minor characters like Hesperos and Agdistis, are portrayed and described as incredibly good and kind people. Themis, Erich, and I would say even Lahabrea speak for themselves. The big solitary standout evil Ancient is the lovely Athena, and she's basically universally condemned by every voice coming from the society around her, and her apparent sole Ancient supporter, Hegemone, is still explained by being under the influence of Athena's mind control. (If the concern is about a society capable of occasionally producing individuals like Athena, who might then happen to come across an evil space rock, then every society we've ever encountered deserves identical condemnation.)

My impression is honestly that Pandaemonium (and its author) generally does not care about weighing in on Endwalker's tortured debate on the merits of Ancient society, for better or worse - Pandaemonium is, first and foremost, a story about people - mostly good people, at that - and a story about a troubled family. And in that capacity, I think it does do it well.

[Lyth]

Context is always important. The reason why Amaurot in particular came under so much scrutiny is because the Convocation specifically used its resurrection as justification for their destruction of about seven different worlds and their inhabitants. It's our people whom the Convocation had considered to be less than human, so it's unsurprising that the view was unpopular. If we encountered Amaurot in passing, and Emet casually turned to us and said 'See? Isn't this city so much more fun than Limsa?' I don't think the audience would scrutinize the place as much.

Elpis does a good job of showing what's 'under the hood' of Amaurotine society, so to speak. A recurring theme throughout is the societal focus on 'duty', although I wonder if 'fate' or 'dharma' would have been a better substitute. It seems like there's less focus on the 'rightness' or 'wrongness' of an action, and more of whether it is your duty ('to the star,' as it were) to fulfil it. This is reflected in our conversation with Lahabrea and Elidibus' souls in the afterlife of the Lifestream. They state flat out that what they did was monstrous, but it was their duty to see those deeds through nonetheless. It's also why I think they would reject the option of an alternate timeline to 'do things over' in. Their values are not the same as ours.

Pandemonium very much ties into this. There's an extra unmarked cutscene with Claudien after you've finished the final quest that helps put a lot of this into context. Pandaemonium was created by from the outset by Lahabrea as a prison for Athena, even before she began her hemitheos experiments. He knew the problem from the very start. His decisions around her, his family, and even his ultimate decision to embrace the side of himself that has become twisted and corrupted by Athena (and extension, Sabik) are all motivated by this austere sense of fulfilling his ultimate 'duty'.

It's the opposite of Azem's volcano story, in a way.

I think that's part of what makes Pandaemonium's Lahabrea fascinating as a character, and sets him diametrically opposite to Azem.

[Teraq]

Elidibus fan since before ShB here, checking in for probably one last time before unsubbing again until further notice.

A massive thank you to both Lunaxia, Lurina and Brinne for articulating a lot of my Ancient love so well, why I loved Shadowbringers for telling me that everyone deserved to exist in spite of flaws, and why I found the callousness with which Endwalker treated them deeply dispiriting and hypocritical given the precedent.

The argument on "perfection" and how "HAHA SEE, Pandaemonium shows they weren't so perfect after all, EAT THIS EMET-SELCH!!!!!" simply irks me. Like Brinne said, it feels like people are still stuck on 5.0 Emet for some reason. Even though it's always been plainly obvious to me that Emet was speaking from a place of hyperbole born of isolation, resentment and having lost everything he loved, a world where someone will just inadvertently manifest a gryphon instead of a lion because they saw an eagle fly by simply cannot be perfect. Imagine how wrong things went on a daily basis. We don't give Ancients nearly enough credit for managing to not blow themselves or each other up for so long.

Besides, the "perfection" argument falls flat when Ancients are also equally condemned for not being perfect. So… what, then, exactly? Why not also point out the myriad ways in which the Sundered are less than moral and point to these to say "see, you're just going to end up like the Grebuloff or the Karellians sooner than later!"? What is the precise measure of perfection to deserve to live and not be blamed for every ills in your society?

Shadowbringers answered this perfectly in my opinion: there is none. The question is invalid to begin with. Both sides were just people fighting to survive given the horrible situation they were put in.

And coming back to Elidibus (who I personally believe to still be at his core the same person as an Ascian as he was as an Ancient – in my opinion, it is merely that he consciously chose to lean into his professional self to get the dirty job done, and the constant prayer aether washing over him thus eroded his private self more readily), I find it speaks volumes that in spite of witnessing personally the terrible events of Pandaemonium, and the varied situations he alludes to dealing with alongside Azem, he still unwaveringly chose to save his world at all costs. Warts and all. This, to me, makes him the actual Ancient hero.

I bet the venn diagram between 'people who didn't like Emet' and 'people who didn't like Elpis' has a LOT of overlap. And I'm not terribly surprised by it; even if there's a lot more going on, it still opens and structures itself around the base fanservice concept of 'hang out with this character we're pretty sure you like, in the place he waxed poetic about'; there's just very little appeal to Elpis that doesn't link very directly to that one character.

On this, if I may, I am conflicted about Elpis. Emet isn't my favorite character, as that would be Elidibus, but I'd say he comes second – and indeed he was by far the character I found most relatable throughout all of Elpis, because I simply do not relate to Hermes's quandaries over life and death, nor did I ever manage to care for the unmaking of what are, for all intents and purposes, arcane AIs designed to imitate real animals. (There's an entire philosophical debate to be had with the line between AI and sentience, but it is a debate Endwalker was very obviously not interested in having with any degree of honesty, in favor of simply waving the ANCIENTS BAD AND COLD AND CALLOUS! flag at the audience.)

What I loved about Elpis was the world building and its beauty, with the diversity of NPCs that showed us that indeed not all Ancients were the same, just like… people. It gave me more information on this setting I instantly loved in Shadowbringers. It gave me some lore on the Convocation. The side quest with the Words of Mitron students was perfect (Greedily hoards stash of Loghrif/Mitron fan art), and the complete lack of gendering of OG Artemis – especially in the French localisation where lack of gender is a most perilous grammatical exercise still (much to the chagrin of our local enbies), massive kudos to the FR team – added more fuel to my headcanons.

On the other hand, I hated everything about the narrative presented. Not just because I disliked the very obvious underlying intent – blaming Ancient society for Hermes's mental state and decision, othering them, making them "scary" as per the YoshiP interview, and overall implying they "deserved it" – but because I found the way events progressed very contrived. Nowhere I found it more obvious that the writers wanted to get from point A to point B, and contorted themselves into precarious positions to accomplish that. Never mind that the prospect of yet another instance of time travel turned me off (I thought we had gotten rid of that plot device with the Twinning and destroying the Tycoon…), Endwalker teased me with the possibility of a happy ending for the people I love, only to take that away and condemn them all to a time loop of hopelessness, suffering and loneliness, all so they could be cogs in the machine of a woman who never gave them a true fighting chance.

"Well that's tragedy for you!" All right, but it feels terrible when it's always on one side, and there is very little catharsis or light at the end of the tunnel.

Perhaps you are correct in this assertion. If I might offer a counterpoint, however.... The best outcomes are when you prevent the tragedies of the past from repeating, or even outright preventing said tragedies in the first place. Visions of a time never to be, I suppose.

Indeed. I don't enjoy emotional suffering simply for the sake of it. I thought there would be a satisfying pay-off…

Gimme that alt timeline. I don't care if it doesn't hit as hard.

And on that, I actually disagree: the way I imagine it going hits me very hard. Telling past Elidibus everything, and him resolving to give his people the chance Venat always denied them by never telling the full truth to anyone we know of. Him actually bringing hope, and Justice to his people, because he loves them and trusts them. That they would succeed or fail against Meteion does not matter to me in this scenario (of course, I imagine they would succeed and go on to live and flourish and figure out spacetime travel… sigh…). The only thing that matters is that they are finally given their chance. A chance to properly prepare themselves. A chance to exist still. A chance to set themselves free of this horrible time loop where the worst happened because a certain someone liked the future she heard of the Sundered world (by one of its most, if not the most exemplary resident), and seemingly distrusted her people and feared what could happen so much that it inadvertently (or not?…) ended up playing out exactly like she was told it would – "proving her right". Ah, self-fulfilling prophecies…

The catharsis of a possibility of an AU existing would hit me hard as an Ancient fan. To know that maybe there is a way out. Especially now that the timey-wimey stew is not constrained anymore by having to defeat Meteion in our timeline (and thus largely depending on Venat's expertly thrown Apple tag).


And Pandaemonium did not offer that catharsis. Not there was a high chance it would, anyway. …but instead this final tier of Pandaemonium was a wishy-washy cop-out to me. Incredibly whelming. Certainly one of the Ancient storylines of all time.

The very fact that it had Themis, Lahabrea and Erich there be only memories and not their actual past selves transported to the future was an instant turn-off that made it feel like everything that would happen would be inconsequential. It is incredibly unfortunate that this story persists in its time loop, which I personally find to be badly executed, in large part because we have been shown timelines can diverge – therefore to maintain a time loop would seemingly require active participation, as Hydaelyn does when she choose to be responsible for The Unsundering, and seemingly everything that comes after as well – there is where I mentally check out. Not to mention that I find "Character X did Y because this is how a time traveler told them the future happened" an incredibly lackluster motivation, where the plot writes the characters instead of the characters organically resulting in the plot.

But whatever. Speaking of my favorite character in particular, again, I have to thank Lunaxia for expressing a lot of things I'm feeling:

So apparently I'm one of the few who found the whole patch a massive disservice to his character overall, then.

I genuinely hated it, I'm sorry to say. It's bad enough Emet-Selch's character was rewritten and toned down in order to give the writers' chosen narrative surrounding the events of the story a Villainous Seal of Approval, but apparently Elidibus and Lahabrea couldn't be left alone either?

I actually liked the way his arc ended in 5.3/ Endwalker. I like that he had little regard for our optional apology,…

I loved how he acted in his (far too brief – this is still the most utterly galling sin of Endwalker, finale of Hydaelyn AND ZODIARK, to me) 6.0 scene: he isn't giving you anything. He sounds (in JP at least) pissed you're waking him up and he can't feel Zodiark anymore and Explain Yourself; he calls your gesture of giving him the memory crystals superfluous; he doesn't care for your apology because hey, you still terminated the last chance for the people he loved to exist again; if you choose to thank him for giving you information (as opposed to just laughing in your face and telling you to **** off, had he been more driven by personal feelings of spite than by duty), he urges you to stop that because he is merely doing his duty; and in his last words, he, speaking as Zodiark (he doesn't in EN, by the way), almost sounds playful as he saddles Hydaelyn with the cruel role of the last survivor… …even though I think he is being a little too generous in his faith of her, here, as frankly I am not sure how much she cares for their people for it to actually be cruel. (I would have given anything for him, acting like this, to be part of the main protagonist cast in 6.0. RIP.)

And him speaking to Hydaelyn as Zodiark, playfully and bitterly, touches on another reason why this all (both 6.0 and Pandaemonium included) feels like a missed opportunity. Where was the Hydaelyn/Zodiark Venat/Elidibus character dynamic other than in this one single line (that doesn't even have him refer to himself as Zodiark in English)? Themis here actually being either Past Elidibus or Present Ascian Elidibus would have IMO made this much more interesting, but instead the Themis we get is… neither. It isn't really him. (Similarly, the Actual Elidibus (rather than him cosplaying as Zenos/Ardbert/Dissidia WoL) fight I finally got is largely an inconsequential test of your reflexes. Also, I'm sorry, but why a visor instead of Justice's blindfold? Come on. I'll reluctantly take the lack of snake imagery because it's rather obvious that by now the Ascians' zodiac theming has been largely abandoned in favor of the Greek pantheon, but come on.)
Though I suppose it is understandable that Hiroi might not have wanted to touch the mess that is Venat and kept her and discussion of her actions far away from his side-story… I don't know. It feels to me like narrative cowardice, so to speak. Dancing around the glaring issue of the presentation of Ancients in Endwalker. All of this feels like inconsequential, feel-good fluff. Look! Themis is an adorable sweetheart and he praised Me™!
Yeah… and it's because, as he himself says, he refuses to look too much into his Ascian memories to not make this moment… less good. Should I complain about this as a fan of the character? On one hand, it feels in-character for him to do so, not wanting to taint a good moment with a friend with unnecessary conflict, not to mention he is no stranger to refusing to look into his memories. On the other hand… narrative cowardice.

On what I liked about his character here, I liked him actually wanting to fight us all along out of curiosity. Actually fits him and how he acts throughout his fights as Zenos and Ardbert. For all his day job is about resolving conflicts amicably, the guy wants to hit things deep inside of him. #Relatable

His line about "History is usually written by the victors"… …is EXACTLY what I wanted out of Endwalker's story. EXACTLY. And… there it goes. It's gone.

Oh.

Sigh…


I will give this finale this, though: at least it wasn't my worst case scenario. That would have been us telling Themis everything of the future, and him nodding and swearing his oath to us that he would do anything to preserve the timeline, because it is the Hard But Right Thing To Do™. Feel free to cringe at this, fellow Ascian enjoyers and Endwalker dislikers.