Let's play a game: Save the Ancients!

[Cleretic]

But you're merely assuming here that most Ancients could single-handedly end the world in a way their superiors could not contain,

One of them did, though.

Even if you think Hermes has some kind of elite status that makes him uniquely capable that few shared (which I don't, nothing in the game actually says it, we only get notably underpowered people singled out), we're still looking at a world where one of those few people can just cause an apocalypse by themselves, accidentally. And their 'superiors' only solved it by sacrificing half the planet, which I would at best call a pyrrhic victory. So yes, I think it's valid to see the Ancients as very dangerous people; they themselves know that, it's why creation magic has so many checks and balances.


Also, 'the loporrits eventually made the Ragnarok' doesn't actually mean 'the Ancients could've made the Ragnarok no problem'. I read them as like Deep Thought from Hitchhiker's Guide: Venat and Co knew this was needed, but couldn't do it themselves, so they made people to run those numbers and do that work.

[Lunaxia]

One of them did, though.

He almost did. And the argument was that most could. Hermes was a mad scientist trifling with a force he oughtn't have messed with at best, and in the context of the game that's not even an Ancient-specific phenomenon.

Even if you think Hermes has some kind of elite status that makes him uniquely capable that few shared (which I don't)

Actually, we are given explicit proof that...

...what? Multiple NPCs comment on the extent of Hermes' ability. He's actively called a genius at points, his knowledge and talent are remarked upon by his compeers as being unmatched, and he's considered the foremost expert and leading authority within his field. He is the only Ancient thus far to not only be able to make use of Dynamis, a form of energy supposedly beyond their powers to manipulate, but to actively utilise it in developing the first functional entelechy, and one possessing of free will and intelligence at that. Moreover, he's said to be more or less the only one with the know-how required to properly identify and halt the phenomena directly behind the Final Days. He might be crazy, but he's absolutely a prodigy even by Ancient standards and you have to give him credit where it's due. Likewise, the Convocation are referred to as being the most formidable and talented figures in their respective domains by NPCs on several occasions and are recruited for that very reason. We've already effectively lost to three of them purely on our own merit, and trying to prop up the notion that simply anyone can be elected purely because Hythlodaeus is ridiculously self-deprecating is hilariously off-base and smacks more than a little of bad faith. This is literally why I will never take any of you seriously when you purport to come here in the guise of neutrality or objectivity, because your supposed knowledge and interest in basic lore manages to drop off a cliff the moment it steps beyond the boundaries of takes or opinions you're comfortable with.

And their 'superiors' only solved it by sacrificing half the planet, which I would at best call a pyrrhic victory.

And yet it was a victory nonetheless. Were it a war with a litany of casualties, what would you say then? Were it... dare I say, a form of pandemic created by a malevolent entity, what would you say then? The Ancients have Ancient-specific crises, for sure, but again I'm still seeing no argument that justifies why they're inherently more dangerous or at risk than mortals, who are more far more vulnerable and lack the same resources they had to address problems facing the planet in the case of a mass emergency.

ETA: After having time to glance through the thread, I will say I do agree with the point that the portrayal of the Ancients suffers for the writers attempting to show them both as a distant, biblical fall-from-grace allegory and a bunch of extremely powerful albeit fundamentally human characters scarcely any different from Bill from Accounting that we should be sympathising and feeling for. And that feeling of dissonance is, ironically, where the bulk of the game's criticism comes from. The story tries to tell you one thing but then shows another, all while handholding you towards the "correct" perspective the writers intended you to take away from all of this. And while some people are perfectly content to go along with that and take things as they find them, for those accustomed to forming their own opinion and FFXIV *usually* managing to follow through on putting together a coherent and nuanced narrative that allows you to do so, it made the whole experience... well, jarring, to say the least.

[jameseoakes]

The entirety of it; it's all technology of Ancient origin and blueprint. If one Ancient was sufficient to create the moon itself and the creatures necessary to (eventually) follow through with a vessel design that would sufficiently shelter and transport an entire race of people with ever-evolving needs that can neither create nor fend for themselves and will need quite literally everything supplied for them in such a window, that the Ancients, with the powers of creation and all the collective knowledge and expertise of their best and brightest at their disposal, could not at the very least create a form of vehicle to act as a temporary transport and shelter on a much, much smaller scale is more than a little doubtful. The immensity of the project, the limited guidance Hydaelyn would have been able to offer in her position as the sole advisor coupled with the lack of urgency and the loporrits'... "quirks" would have been considerable factors in its delay.

It's a strange take to push that the Ancients couldn't engineer a means to get to the Meition when one of them engineers the means to get there. If the ancients couldn't do it they could have made a race that could like Venat did and maybe made one that wasn't so inept.

[LilimoLimomo]

But you're merely assuming here that most Ancients could single-handedly end the world in a way their superiors could not contain, and ignoring that Hermes and Athena were both immensely gifted and near enough the "pinnacle" of their race, if you like, if we accept the premise Amaurot was the intellectual capital of the world, the Convocation the most powerful of them, and that they were considered to be on the same level.

Actually, we are given explicit proof that the Convocation are not determined based on power; Hytholodaeus — who had exceptionally low power outside of his perception — was offered the position of Emet-Selch before Hades, and the only reason he wasn't on the Convocation was because he refused the invitation.

As for the proposal that Hermes is immensely powerful, I don't see anything in the narrative that supports that idea. We're never told that, never shown that. Are we assuming he's powerful because he has a high-ranking position? Again, Hythlodaeus is his boss and outranks him, reminding us that there is no correlation between power and Amaurot's hierarchy.

[Dikatis]

As for the proposal that Hermes is immensely powerful, I don't see anything in the narrative that supports that idea. We're never told that, never shown that. Are we assuming he's powerful because he has a high-ranking position? Again, Hythlodaeus is his boss and outranks him, reminding us that there is no correlation between power and Amaurot's hierarchy.

Well, we do know that the researchers of Elpis come running to him to subdue any creations that are running rampant and he quickly puts them down when needed. In addition, he fought WoL (who would go on to defeat the Keywarders of Pandaemonium, who are all immensely powerful mages recognized by Lahabrea himself), Emet-Selch (Hythlodaeus knows of no mage more powerful despite regularly bumping into the best and brightest of Amaurot), and Venat (a former Azem who once stopped a cataclysmic meteor and more or less laughs off her successor fighting a volcanic eruption turned into a creation). Yes, the security measures of Ktisis Hyperboreia weakened his opponents, but Hermes is not to be trifled with.

[Cleretic]

Honestly, all I'm seeing in this thread are some very disingenuous takes that opt to severely underestimate the Amaurotines while simultaneously placing mortals on a pedestal they've only managed to clamber near because they have a sundered quasi-Ancient fighting all their battles for them, and then paint it as an objective truth. Suggesting a race that can create concepts out of thin air as easily as breathing, and have entire libraries and archives dedicated to aetherical blueprints of every conceivable type of invention under the sun (and that managed to come up with both an all-encompassing guardian entity like Zodiark and the tecnhology involved in the moon shuttle in a relatively short timespan) could not come up their own Ragnarok, for instance, is ridiculous. As is the suggestion they would have succumbed to outside threats without the WoL's help - our original incarnation with all of their powers intact is right there, along with a group of some of the most powerful mages to ever have existed who we were unable to defeat without divine intervention.

I don't give a damn about Azem, because they don't actually solve this problem. They are by all appearances, much like us, a professional Thing-Puncher; you get them in front of a problem and they'll do some shenanigans to solve it, but that requires getting to the problem, which we know first-hand they can't just do by sheer force of will. We needed the help to handle the Endsinger. And incidentally, the Azem shard didn't just space out for twelve thousand years after the sundering and then suddenly come back to go deal with Eorzea's problems; by all available evidence, that soul must've been there for every other Calamity too. Reasonably, with support. And that didn't stop 'em. Allag still died, despite the work of the resistance.

...also, they... didn't 'make the technology involved in a moon shuttle', what? I'm not even 100% sure what you think you mean there. Menphina's precursor made the moon prison, is that what you mean? It was the loporrits that made the thing move, and the tech for the Ragnarok to get there, but it took them twelve thousand years to get to that point. And that point was still only 'mostly there', they were behind schedule!

But in truth, the reason that we're critical of the Ancients' abilities to solve the problems ahead of them is because that's the name of the game. If we were playing 'Save Mhach' or 'Save Allag', I'd be just as critical of them. However, I somehow doubt you'd be as defensive of them.

[Lyth]

Amaurot is simply a humanist retelling of the standard creation myths that we're all familiar with. The primary difference is that humanity is the 'higher power' guiding its own creation.

One of the primary goals of such a story is to offer an explanation why we live in an imperfect world. Hesiod's Golden Age is not too dissimilar from the society described in Amaurot. The cracks start to show once you attempt to hold any proposed 'perfect society' up to scrutiny, however, which is what has happened here.

The instant that you portray people as individuals with their own unique wants, needs, and desires, then you create interpersonal clash and the potential for aggression and violence. That is magnified when you give individuals enormous amounts of destructive power. You end up with wonderful paradoxes like a non-violent society in which conflicts are always resolved amicably through debate, except for when Lahabrea murdered his wife Athena in the heat of the moment and concealed the evidence. The storytelling just ends up being inconsistent.

I think the more you attempt to write stories around the actual people of Amaurot, the more you end up converting it into yet another vice-laden human nation, simply with more unwarranted jingoism than the rest. And that's not a particularly compelling story to dwell on in the long run.

[Cleretic]

Amaurot is simply a humanist retelling of the standard creation myths that we're all familiar with. The primary difference is that humanity is the 'higher power' guiding its own creation.

One of the primary goals of such a story is to offer an explanation why we live in an imperfect world. Hesiod's Golden Age is not too dissimilar from the society described in Amaurot. The cracks start to show once you attempt to hold any proposed 'perfect society' up to scrutiny, however, which is what has happened here.

The instant that you portray people as individuals with their own unique wants, needs, and desires, then you create interpersonal clash and the potential for aggression and violence. That is magnified when you give individuals enormous amounts of destructive power. You end up with wonderful paradoxes like a non-violent society in which conflicts are always resolved amicably through debate, except for when Lahabrea murdered his wife Athena in the heat of the moment and concealed the evidence. The storytelling just ends up being inconsistent.

I think the more you attempt to write stories around the actual people of Amaurot, the more you end up converting it into yet another vice-laden human nation, simply with more unwarranted jingoism than the rest. And that's not a particularly compelling story to dwell on in the long run.

This is a really important thing to bring up and remember about Amaurot in general: it's just not a place written for the same purposes as basically anywhere else in the game, it's telling a fundamentally different sort of story. I think it borrows the most from the story of Atlantis (and ironically, not from its actual namesake), but it really is just a creation myth that we happen to walk through. And like many creation myths, it acts as both an explanation for the world we live in, and a parable of how not to live in that world; the Garden of Eden tells you not to eat weird fruits or trust snakes, Atlantis tells you to not fall to base instincts or get in a war with Athens, and FFXIV's Amaurot tells you the wrong ways to both care for the world around you and deal with suffering.

All that, I think, is why all the serious attempts to grapple with the question of this thread either go so far back as to essentially redefine Amaurot, or just throw their hands up and say 'you don't'; Amaurot is designed to fall to its own flaws, and give us the world we live in. That is the story of Amaurot, so saving the Ancients requires rewriting that story from the ground up.

[jameseoakes]

. ....and FFXIV's Amaurot tells you the wrong ways to both care for the world around you and deal with suffering.

Which makes one of the most sick points that suffering is good for you and needs to inflicted, which is a lot of the problem, the ancients give us a look at a world that better and then screams that what's wrong with it is that people aren't suffering which is really evil

[Iscah]

All that, I think, is why all the serious attempts to grapple with the question of this thread either go so far back as to essentially redefine Amaurot, or just throw their hands up and say 'you don't'; Amaurot is designed to fall to its own flaws, and give us the world we live in. That is the story of Amaurot, so saving the Ancients requires rewriting that story from the ground up.

I just want to object to that generalisation, because my own "serious attempt" has no judgement on the nature of the civilisation (besides that its doom is set in stone from present-day Etheirys's perspective) and everything to do with the cost to those doing the saving. It could be attempted by someone who wanted to live in that world so much that they don't care if the original timeline might be destroyed in the process.

That said, your observation makes sense in part, but I think a lot of the story issues with Amaurot come from the writers wanting to have it both ways. They want a mysterious precursor civilisation of all-powerful god-men and a cast of lovable individuals. They want a world where suffering is inevitable and nobody in the universe is immune and a world where Pandora had to open the box to artificially make it so. They can't even seem to decide whether they want to contrast Elpis and Labyrinthos or go for a "researchers are the same everywhere" vibe.