Let's play a game: Save the Ancients!

[Anteiron]

There are many people who love the ancients, so I ask: how would it have been possible to save them?
Let's exclude the Zordiak hypothesis, because they would only have become slaves of the primal, therefore extinction would be better.
It's been mentioned a lot so let's see how to create an alternate timeline with the living ancients. After all, they are the true inhabitants of Etheirys, because nature created them like this and not with a thin ether like the modern inhabitants (who knows if the inhabitants of other worlds have strong ether like the ancients, and if their density is the normal course of nature).
Suppose that before the departure of the WoL, Venat and the WoL spoke to the entire convocation, including azem (a meeting between past and present azem would be nice), telling the truth about Meteion and the last days to come. And let's assume that concocation believes everything.
Knowing this in advance they could have instructed the population not to give in to desperate thoughts that would have created monsters, in the meantime they would have created a grandiose spaceship to travel to Ultima Thule. Maybe if the population had been spotted and educated before the last days would never have arrived, but even if they had traveled to Ultima Thule how could they have defeated Meteion if they can't interact with Dynamis? (By the way I still don't understand how Hermes created Meteion if he can't interact with Dynamis).
So we come to a blind spot, they know the cause of the last days but they can't do anything because they can't manipulate Dynamis. Could they have created an army of familiars to send to Ultima Thule? I don't know, maybe the only way would have been to know about the danger in advance, and not give in to despair and prevent the last days from coming true.
But even if they survived, for how long? The shadows of the civilizations of Ultima Thule and the "Dead Ends" dungeon made us understand that perfection leads to apathy and therefore death.
What do you think?

Sorry for my bad English

[Cleretic]

This thread is going to devolve into The Same Goddamn Argument and three people are gonna spend twelve pages brow-beating us about Venat being bad. But we're not there yet, so sure, I'll play ball; let's discuss the hypothetical, as fairly and accurately as we can, while looking at all the facts we have and dismissing none of them unless they are well and truly irrelevant or disproven. Since this is gonna be long, I'll try to format this as digestibly as I can.

The Problem We're Solving:
Theoretically, there are three potential 'killing blows' in play on the Ancients: if Hydaelyn didn't sunder them, the Convocation were going to sacrifice an unsustainable amount of the planet to Zodiark to keep trying to fix what broke, leading to a situation not dissimilar to the Nibirun. But if Zodiark's not there, the End of Days gets them and we just get a dead world. So, there are essentially three bombs to disarm here, and you have to review the conditions that led to all three.

Because of the End of Days, I see Zodiark and Hydaelyn as essentially inevitabilities in their situation; if the End of Days happens, then some equivalent of Zodiark would happen to stop it... and then some equivalent of the sacrifices would happen to try to turn back the clock, which would then lead to some equivalent of Hydaelyn getting them to knock it off. I don't think any amount of rearranging the variables that lead to Zodiark and Hydaelyn actually gets you anywhere at all in 'saving the Ancients'; in fact, you could argue that Zodiark and Hydaelyn are the best Zodiark and Hydaelyn they could've been; when faced with two questions with no good answers, they're the least bad ones you could produce. So, we have to go to the root: the End of Days. If you can defuse that before Zodiark happens, then nothing else needs to.

So, how do we fix that?
Well, if you'll forgive the play on words, you can't do that once the bird's flown the coop: this is the explicit position Venat describes being in, the Ancients as a society just aren't well-suited to handling this information or situation. In a very real sense, the End of Days is their worst nightmare, the thing that preys on all their weaknesses. So, we have to close the coop; we have to somehow ensure Meteion never breaks bad. That actually means starting before the WoL even arrives in Elpis: the moment to halt is Hermes sending out the other Meteions. If that never happens, then none of those threats to the Ancients ever do.

I don't think you can just stop the launch and then call it a win, though; Hermes will still want the answers to his questions, and will still seek them out. What you'd need to do is to alter his plans. The simplest way to do that is probably to find some way to introduce the issue Emet brings up, early enough to get it factored in: the potential of the negative hypothesis. That he might not get a good answer to his question; the thing that triggered Meteion's turn (and to a much lesser degree, Hermes' own breakdown) was that they were only prepared for a positive answer. But personally, I'm not sure that's the functional idea it sounds like; I feel like the Meteion plan probably had more than one failure point, and fixing the one we saw would've only led them to fall to another. So the better angle would probably be to divert him into a full-on Plan B; an entirely different plan that still pursues his line of inquiry. And then we just hope that doesn't cause an apocalypse, either, which is sadly not a guarantee.

So how do we really fix that?
The best plan, then, would be to solve the problems he saw in the first place. The crux of all of this is that Hermes had a point, he'd recognized a genuine flaw in his society that nobody had an appropriate answer for: 'why do we, as creatures who have transcended mortal existential threats, make creatures that face them'. It's essentially a base theological question from the perspective of gods, he's asking a flipped version of 'why does a good god let bad things happen'. He simply sought to find an answer to this question, and it's just that his attempt went really bad. I think looking at Hermes as the problem doesn't work, because just as a Zodiark and a Hydaelyn were inevitable in their contexts, so was a Hermes, every problem will always have someone seeking a solution. Now unlike Zodiark and Hydaelyn, I don't think Hermes is the best possible Hermes, but we can still solve this in the exact same way; he's responding to a problem, so if we simply solve that problem, he doesn't respond to it.

That's gonna require some difficult societal renovations, but there we have our solution: if Hermes never needs to probe at that problem, the End of Days doesn't happen, Zodiark doesn't exist, Hydaelyn never exists, and the Ancients live happily ever after!


...until Lahabrea goes insane from the Heart of Sabik. Or Athena's resurrection play happens. Or the events of Pandaemonium happen at all without the WoL turning up to stop those dangerous beasties. Or Midgardsormr turns up. Or Omega turns up after that. Or the Seed of Destruction turns up. Or any number of great existential threats the Ancient world itself could've produced that it just didn't, because the skies burned before any of them happened.

Yeah, I'm not actually sure the Ancients get a happily-ever-after here that we're ever truly happy with. That's kinda the thing with solving a problem twelve thousand years in the game's past: they then have to survive twelve thousand years' worth of problems that we know are ahead of them anyway.

[Cilia]

This thread is going to devolve into The Same Goddamn Argument and three people are gonna spend twelve pages brow-beating us about Venat being bad.

By my last count it was up to like, 6 or 7. Anyway...

In order to "save" the Ancients, it would be necessary to accept the flaws and transience of Amaurotine civilization.

The biggest flaw we saw, and the one that led to Meteion (and thus the Final Days) was its more or less mandate that everyone subscribe to its "Life and Death in Service to the Star" ideology. Anyone who disagreed or went against this ideal was seen as somewhere between strange and evil; Hermes, Venat, and Athena are all oddities among their people in their own ways for not acting in lockstep with the ideas set forth by the rest of their civilization, and all had a dramatic impact on things due to them finding Amaurot's ideology incompatible with their own and being unwilling to conform. So long as deviants are treated as strange at best, unacceptable at worst, even if we went further back in time to stop Hermes from creating and dispatching the Meteia... another Hermes would just come along someday to cast the die in his place.

Tying in to that is my second point, that being the idea that Amaurot would (or more pointedly should) exist forever. Again, even if it hadn't been Hermes (and Venat in turn) someone would eventually cast the die and make returning to "the good old days" impossible. Heck, the only reason it was even able to exist as a shattered shell of its former self was thanks to Zodiark. Even if the Convocation's plan worked, even if Venat told them about Meteion and they came up with a successful plan to stop her... the Final Days would forever leave their mark on history and impact decisions going forward. The reality of the situation is that once Hermes cast that die there could be no going back and again, even if we stopped Hermes from doing so, someone else would inevitably succeed in his place. Even if Venat hadn't sundered Etheirys, the Amaurot of eld could never last forever.

The only way to save the Ancients as a species would be to let Amaurot die when its time came, whether that be sooner or later, recognize why, and build something better. Clinging to the memory of its glory only led to death and suffering; only by moving forward could they survive. Many more of them elected to live in the past (or die for it) than not, which is why Venat did what she did. The rest is history.

[WhiteArchmage]

So, how do we fix that?
Well, if you'll forgive the play on words, you can't do that once the bird's flown the coop: this is the explicit position Venat describes being in, the Ancients as a society just aren't well-suited to handling this information or situation. In a very real sense, the End of Days is their worst nightmare, the thing that preys on all their weaknesses. So, we have to close the coop; we have to somehow ensure Meteion never breaks bad. That actually means starting before the WoL even arrives in Elpis: the moment to halt is Hermes sending out the other Meteions. If that never happens, then none of those threats to the Ancients ever do.

Funny enough, I've had a fanfic idea running around my head about "fixing" the Final Days by giving Hermes therapy, or rather, since therapy doesn't exist in this universe, several friendly hands while not having him be the head of Elpis which was one of the tipping points of his philosophy (please don't go looking for it, my only piece out there rn is a DbD fluff piece).

It is, of course, fanfiction, but I agree the nexus event there is the creation of the Meteia while under a terrible mental health state without peer review. Of course, one also has to ignore the existence and influence of the Heart of Sabik, but then (again, purely speculative) it's certainly a way of averting the First Final Days, how Amaurotine society would deal with the myriad other catastrophes the Universe was dealing with is perhaps another problem that'd need extensive societal change, but perhaps fun to explore.

[Anteiron]

What you say assumes, another WoL time travel to stop Hermes before he creates Meteion. I don't think that's possible now. The undivided Ascians knew nothing of Meteion, but they never thought of going back in time and killing Venat before he tore the world apart. Evidently because it is impossible and our trip to Elpis remains the only exception.


Of course, if they survivr, there would have been other threats to face, and perhaps civilization would have collapsed and then been reborn differently. But the souls would remain united.

[Yuella]

The first question we have to answer is, do we want to stop Hermes from creating and sending out the Meteia? Or do we want to figure out how to kill Endsinger without the sundering?

For the first option, we could build another time machine, go back even further in time and convince Hermes to change the Meteia's mission a little bit so they didn't get overwhelmed when they discover a dying star. Or maybe show Meteion the aftermath of our battle with Endsinger and show both Hermes and Meteion that everything will be fine, there is hope in the future and he didn't need to send out the Meteia to ask such deep philosophical questions to various life forms. The timeline would branch, both civilizations survive.

For the second option, we could convince Venat to share the upcoming Final Days with the Convocation and also gave them a better solution. Instead of summoning Zodiark to shield the planet with Aether to block out Endsinger's song (which would only be a temporary solution and lead up to the sundering as in our timeline), summon a primal of Dynamis filled with positive emotions to do battle with Endsinger. Venat put a tracker so they could easily find her nest.

[Cleretic]

For the second option, we could convince Venat to share the upcoming Final Days with the Convocation and also gave them a better solution. Instead of summoning Zodiark to shield the planet with Aether to block out Endsinger's song (which would only be a temporary solution and lead up to the sundering as in our timeline), summon a primal of Dynamis filled with positive emotions to do battle with Endsinger. Venat put a tracker so they could easily find her nest.

NOPE

I'm sorry, but I need to bludgeon you with why this is a bad idea, and if this thread's going to continue it needs to be on the first page. There is a reason Venat did not do this, and if we're doing textual intervention we need to understand that reason.

Essentially, Venat correctly recognized that telling the Convocation only creates problems. The easiest way to understand this is that the main people to worry about are exactly the two people we see respond to the information in the first place: Hermes, and Emet. They can't tell Hermes, because if he learns that the End of Days was Meteion's doing, he becomes too depressed to help, and possibly goes full traitor; both of those are bad, because he's the only dynamis expert in a position to actually enact anything resembling a Zodiark. (He might actually be the only dynamis expert around at all, for all we know.) And we can't tell Emet, because he's a stickler for rules and process; if he learns, he will do the same thing he did in Elpis, which if you remember, caused a lot of those problems. This is one of the two reasons she's selective about who she tells the truth to; if word gets through to the Convocation at large, everything's lost.

Honestly, the rest of this hypothetical is purely baseless what-if that I don't think can be worked with in any way; not only do I not think the Ancients can actually reach and traverse Ultima Thule, I'm not even sure a 'primal made of dynamis' is possible, that might be akin to asking for a sword made of helium. And personally, I also don't think this solves things; I think that's essentially a Zodiark of a different shape, you can't make something like that without some major cost, and after that I think an equivalent of sacrifices and Hydaelyn of some form are inevitable.

That said, you have gotten me thinking, and I think that if you really, really, REALLY wanted to tell the Convocation, there is one angle that doesn't hit this failure point: Lahabrea. The only Convocation member who can keep a secret, and also a man who's willing to do some work in the shadows for what he sees as the greater good. Now, I don't know if his assistance actually improves things, and in fact, I could argue that turning him actually might make things worse: he's also a big part of making Zodiark, so it might just result in a worse Zodiark from him not helping as much; I think this might just result in Bad Ending B rather than a Bad Ending A. But I do think that he's the only Convocation member that wouldn't immediately cause the failure points Venat was avoiding.

[Vyrerus]

Honestly, the rest of this hypothetical is purely baseless what-if that I don't think can be worked with in any way; not only do I not think the Ancients can actually reach and traverse Ultima Thule, I'm not even sure a 'primal made of dynamis' is possible, that might be akin to asking for a sword made of helium. And personally, I also don't think this solves things; I think that's essentially a Zodiark of a different shape, you can't make something like that without some major cost, and after that I think an equivalent of sacrifices and Hydaelyn of some form are inevitable.

Considering Dynamis can be used and influenced to recreate societies wholesale as shown in the Dead Ends / Omicron beast tribe quests, and considering that Hermes says that it's similar to aether, I don't think an arcane construct made from it would be impossible.

I also think you're way off kilter here, as you usually are, when it comes to the Ascian's capabilities. If Zenos with mothercrystal leftovers can mantle Shinryu and reach Ultima Thule entirely without a spaceship, then Unsundered Ascians should have little trouble managing something similar.

I think Yuella's idea about a Dynamis Primal is kind of weird, but I guess the idea would be it would achieve similar power to the Meteion hivemind, as all of their power comes from harnessing the majority universal constituent energy. It's more or less just a second kind of sentient entelechy but with a focus on positive emotion and stopping Meteion, kind of similar to how Hydaelyn was polar opposite to Zodiark and focused for the explicit purpose of Sundering Etheirys.

If they could make it, which they likely could given some time to have others study Dynamis, or by taking Hermes's knowledge of it by looking into his memories/soul with The Echo, then it'd work quite nicely.

As for your assertions before this point, you are getting away from the point of the thread in trying to justify Venat's actions within the story, where her rationale is only assumed to be correct by her, not verifiably correct, as her decisions were driven by her own fear rather than by logic. I don't think you need to bludgeon anyone into getting on board with your perception either. It doesn't serve the thread nor the discussion.

[Cleretic]

As for your assertions before this point, you are getting away from the point of the thread in trying to justify Venat's actions within the story, where her rationale is only assumed to be correct by her, not verifiably correct, as her decisions were driven by her own fear rather than by logic. I don't think you need to bludgeon anyone into getting on board with your perception either. It doesn't serve the thread nor the discussion.

On the contrary: as I said in my initial reply, I'm taking into account all the facts we have, unless there are relevant reasons for dismissal. And there is no reason to dismiss Venat's actions in hiding information. Not only does she have evidence, we were there to see the evidence! We know that Emet takes this bad and Hermes takes it worse, and those are the main problems.

If your view is 'I don't like this so I'm declaring it wrong', that's all the power to you. I haven't invented this game, so I can't tell you that's against the rules. But my view is that all evidence is accepted unless specifically proven wrong, and we know why she was right to do that. But then, I think we're playing by different victory conditions; your opening statement was to reject Endwalker, while mine was to accept it.

As to the Zenos point: Zenos isn't a reliable source of scientific intel, but to the best of my understanding, he got to Ultima Thule by tracing the path left by the Ragnarok. In essence, he was the first person to use the route that we'd later use to get back to UT for stuff like the Stigma Dreamscape and Omicron quests. He can't get there without us getting there first. You can't brute-force that, without the Ragnarok space travel is still space travel, it takes ages as seen by Midgardsormr and Omega. So in essence, the struggle isn't if the Ancients can make make a Shinryu; it's if the Ancients can make a Ragnarok. And not just that, but make it on a major time crunch, since in Yuella's hypothetical this thing is instead of Zodiark, so it's gotta do its job before the End of Days hits the planet.

Those are really bad odds, and frankly, I don't think the Ancients had it in 'em! Hermes is the only one that managed making something that can do it, and thanks to telling the Convocation, he's off the table, and since he's the only one interested in space there probably aren't ready alternatives. In the actual game it took the loporrits twelve thousand years to come up with that plan, and they still weren't sure about it; under the time crunch of the Final Days, I think the Ancients have a snowball's chance in hell.

Honestly I also think the Ancients aren't capable of traversing Ultima Thule, but I was putting that aside in this scenario because, I dunno, maybe the Feelings Beast doesn't have that same problem.

[LilimoLimomo]

Let's exclude the Zordiak hypothesis, because they would only have become slaves of the primal, therefore extinction would be better.

This is an excessively fraught claim for a few reasons:

First, the idea that it's better to die than to live as a slave is incredibly subjective. Let's not pretend for a second that being a slave isn't awful, but history shows that there are many people who preferred life under slavery over death. And of course, there are plenty who preferred death, so let's not forget them. Of those who chose life, some eventually lived to see a future that while still not perfect, is certainly better, and has hope of becoming better still. Which is to say, it is incredibly hasty and unwise to force your personal feelings about whether life as a slave is "worth it" onto an entire population of diverse people. Every individual deserves the chance to make their own choice on that matter.

Second, the Ancients didn't become slaves of a Primal. For all their talk of tempering, most if not all of the Ascians who get enough screen time to be developed as characters take actions that go against the resurrection of Zodiark in important ways. Like, Fandaniel literally kills Zodiark. There's no slavery going on here, nothing close to it.

I'll say that from the information we've been given in the game itself, I am not convinced that Zodiark was necessarily a bad idea.

After all, they are the true inhabitants of Etheirys, because nature created them like this and not with a thin ether like the modern inhabitants (who knows if the inhabitants of other worlds have strong ether like the ancients, and if their density is the normal course of nature).

Here we get even deeper into philosophical territory: what is nature? Where is the dividing line between "nature" and "not nature"? I'm not even going to get into that, but the short answer is that there are lots of different and conflicting ideas about this, among them that there is no dividing line and everything is nature.

Also, I think you're making a pretty big assumption by claiming that the Ancients were created by nature. Just as many Lalafells don't know that they were preceded by the Ancients, it's entirely possible that the Ancients don't know that they were preceded by someone else. History has a tendency to repeat itself.

Finally, I'll caution against holding up "nature" as the rationale for something being "true" or "right". There's a whole lot of stuff that is natural that the world is better off without. For example, it's natural for people to die of illness or be born with "impairments" that cause them difficulty. But I wouldn't consider these occurrences to be in any way superior due to the fact that they are natural; as someone with a disability, I'd far rather that medical science intervene and help me have a more fulfilling life, and similarly prevent me from being maimed by illness or even dying from it. Something being natural shouldn't be used as justification for its validity or sustained existence.

Knowing this in advance they could have instructed the population not to give in to desperate thoughts that would have created monsters

Unfortunately this just isn't how emotions work. Most people can't just logic themselves into not feeling fear or sadness.

So we come to a blind spot, they know the cause of the last days but they can't do anything because they can't manipulate Dynamis.

This is untrue, though: the Ancients were perfectly capable of manipulating Dynamis. Exhibit A is the fact that Hermes created Meteion, who was highly comprised of Dynamis. There's no getting around this: Meteion cannot exist if the Ancients cannot in some way manipulate Dynamis.

The shadows of the civilizations of Ultima Thule and the "Dead Ends" dungeon made us understand that perfection leads to apathy and therefore death.

Personally, my interpretation of the 3rd chapter of Dead Ends is that it's a hand-wavy cop out. If you have unlimited time and resources, you can make anything. You can change your world, you can change yourself. You could even make a 3D Sonic the Hedgehog game that's actually good! In fact, you could make millions of them! Sports, games, movies, audio - there's no limit to what you could make. You could explore the solar system, and beyond. Dead Ends refuses to grapple with any of this, instead just insisting that everyone got bored and everyone wants to die. And sure, I'm willing to imagine an alien species whose brain chemistry makes them prefer death over actually doing things. But the idea that such a contrived prospect would extrapolate to humans makes a lot of broad assumptions without challenging them in the slightest. Don't believe everything that you read!

...

Okay, now that all my counterpoints have been laid out, let's contend with the initial question: how do we save the Ancients?

I think the big question is whether you even can. For all their talk of living in a paradise, Ancient society had significant problems, and those problems eventually lead to their own downfall.

Their first problem was that their culture lacked a system to facilitate the emotional well-being of their inhabitants. Hermes felt confused by the norms and behavior he saw in his society, and it was clear that these ideas had caused him to suffer for a long time. This is an incredibly basic human problem, so to not have a system in place to address such concerns and emotional issues is careless within a purported utopia. And when most members of your society are born with powers that can literally reshape and destroy the world, investing in everyone's emotional well-being isn't just an act of decency and compassion, but a necessary preventative measure against disaster.

Their second problem was a lack of proper checks and balances. When Hermes' superior learned that he was single-handedly working on a space-faring construct — something that seemingly had never been attempted before — there was no concern, no process, no discussion of the potential ramifications. What's out in space? What could the ramifications of contact with other lifeforms be? These are questions that directly impact the well-being of every life on the planet, because you could bring back diseases or hostile invaders, etc. But no, they just let the depressed guy be the sole engineer — without any oversight or outside help — of the world's first space-faring fleet of children in thigh-high bird boots. Any decently organized society wouldn't have allowed this to happen; the Ancients were winging it, and it was only a matter of time before their lack of process resulted in disaster.

And as we saw, the Ancients had the power to destroy their entire world. At first the threat came from an army of bird girls one dude created in his spare time. Then what finally destroyed their entire society was a handful of people who disagreed with the course society was taking so strongly that they rebelled and committed genocide on their whole world. With great power comes great responsibility, and the Ancients clearly demonstrated that they did not have the responsibility to be trusted with such power. So they ended themselves.

A cautionary tale.

To be clear, what I am proposing is that if it hadn't been either of these disasters that ended the Ancients, that it would have eventually been something else. Because their society was not organized to perform an appropriate amount of due diligence, and thus problems they could have nipped in the bud were instead allowed to blossom into world-ending catastrophes. So like so many events in the real world, things seemed to be working great until it became painfully clear that they weren't. Nobody took enough time to think about the possibility of problems arising, so not only were problems not adequately mitigated, but when problems did arise they were unprepared.