Let's play a game: Save the Ancients!

[Vyrerus]

I find the premise of this thread trollish, but people consider me one of those, so I'll play anyway.

Saving the Ancients is as simple as rewriting the plot of Endwalker. The plot tries its best to get you to believe these were a doomed people, but the amount of willing disbelief you need in them, and this possibility, is stacked so high it makes the Tower of Babil look cute.

In Shadowbringers we were shown that the core of Ascian society was highly bureaucratic, so much so that all new concepts had to undergo rigorous scrutiny with a whole department dedicated to doing as much.

In Endwalker we are sent back in time to the Elpis facility, which is a facility made up of floating islands, which is where all of the best concepts are sent to be perfected, as well as a place where all of the most creative Ascians go to create creatures that will, somehow, improve the planet. These creations are not exempt from being sent to the Bureau of the Architect and being forbidden.

So what we have with Endwalker's plot is Hermes. He who made Meteion illegally hundreds of time, and conducted his own illegal experiments, and was allowed to do as much because he was the head of the Elpis facility, and none of his inferiors reported him believing he was just a quirky, overly emotional, well intended little fellah (even though several of them witnessed him openly break the law).

The story of Elpis and the Ascians and of its sister facility Pandemonium show us what ills would and did arise in Ascian society. Namely, creations getting out of hand, and essentially becoming monsters. All driven by people who were mentally unsound and full of grand ambitions. Some other examples being from short stories where even prodigious children in this society could incidentally create creatures that were a danger to others.

The problem with this is that it relies on all of the competent leaders in Ascian society to suddenly be unlearned and willingly inept, or crippled by strong emotional attachments as well.

Like why would any society put someone with the mentality of a child in charge of a highly volatile research facility? (Hermes)
How did a place like Pandemonium not receive regular due diligence from the BotA or from multiple Convocation members? (Athena x Lahabrea)

Just what was the rest of the ancient world like, that the Ascians creating meteor slinging Behemoths was seen as vital to improving the planet?


I say all of this to make you realize that this old world is constantly given extreme ups and downs, almost to the point of being nonsensical. Just rewrite the Ascians to not let Hermes eschew law, and to have rigid inspections of Pandemonium in place, and that's literally all that has to happen for them to not meet their doom as told by our story.

Saving them within the context of our story though? Well, all we have to do is allow them an alternate timeline allowance as we did to the 8UC and G'raha Tia. The WoL goes back to Elpis after the events of Endwalker and opens his soul up with The Echo and shows them the memories of Ktsis Hyperboreia and Meteion, and this allows them to make changes and actually face Meteion as a unified society, instead of propelling them to making Zodiark at all. They could even see the WoL's memories from the future in Ultima Thule to piece together how they could manipulate Dynamis, and what they'd need to do. Instead of getting an Ascian civil war, with Empty Zodiark vs. Hydaelyn, we get an all new solution where Venat and Hades are allies rather than enemies from the very start. And Themis never has to be sacrificed.

This would not rid the original Etheirys of all its ills, but it would save them and leave them better prepared to face that different future.

[SannaR]

I wasn't going to reply to this but then I know how my brain gets so let's go.

First thing is someone probably should have pointed out to Hermes that the Meteia needed the ability to separate their own thoughts and feelings from those they become influenced by. We see that Meteion is easily influenced by Hermes she forgets that she cannot eat, she gives praise to the Charybdis after its learned to fly. Most likely expressing Hermes own thoughts if not feelings. She also is in need of reminding that the syrup covered apples are Hermes favorite snack. Now does this mean doing so would mean you wouldn't have the Metiea become an echo chamber of negativity? If not completely it would probably have less of a chance of happening.

The next thing is trying to get Hermes to see taking the seat of Fandaniel not as cosigning someone else's death but as an opportunity to try and change Amaurotin social norms. After all we get shown in various media and from history that if you don't like how something is ran or how society is you go and get elected or aim for a way where you can try and change how things are. As Cilia stated anything that was seen as different than normal was seen as strange at best. We see this time and again while we're in Elpis. We even see it when it comes to the seat of Azem as Lahabreha tells Elidibus to not to get too chummy with our past unsundered self stating that they're corruptive. You know the seat that's known as the counselor to the people. The person who's entire job is to wander the star and helping people with whatever problem they have.

We again see while we quest around Elpis that our past self is seen as an odd duck, but everyone tends to laugh it off as of course Azem would be the one to do something unusual as make a very thin aetherical familiar that also happens to look just like them. Then there's Venat who people treat with respect due to two things. One being she had been one of the fourteen. The other being her white robes. Robes that we are told that no one is going to question what comes out of the wearer's mouth. That is until the Final Days happened.

Lastly no one seems to ever want to go and find new perspectives. To go and explore. Most of our time helping the researchers in Elpis we get praised for our fresh perspective. These people are supposed to be well researchers. You know people who are meant to be problem solvers. Yet even when we're dealing with a small group of them they behave as though they already ran all of the gambits trying to problem solve.

[ZavosEsperian]

Ahh, one of these threads. I have an idea of what may end up happening in this thread given enough time and willingness on other parties to get into squabbles, but I can entertain this a bit I supposed.

Saving the Ancients requires one major question to be asked before the task is attempted, that being one related to time travel in the context of the game. Depending on the interpretation, that being either the timeline is converging or the timeline is able to diverge, determines the various rules of the game at hand. Based on the various scenarios presented by the OP, it appears they are not opposed to diverging timelines, and thus we will assume timelines are able to diverge in this case. I could go into proving how this does work in-universe as it does happen at least once thanks to a certain G’raha, but I do not think this explanation is required at the time.

With that question answered, the issue then becomes naming a path where the Ancients as a race are spared from their fate due to the events showed in Endwalker. To do this, the preferable method would be to nip the Meteia problem in the bud, however they are only a problem after they receive orders from Hermes to sing their song of oblivion. In addition, Hermes would be someone who would have to be addressed at some point in time. How Hermes is handled is variable and there is no “one size fits all” solution for him.

Diverging timelines allows for the existence of two of the same entity to exist at the same point in time at the same time…as such it would be possible for the most brilliant minds of Etheirys to create a device and send the WoL back to the past to the same point in time as they were sent the first time. This of course results in two WoLs to be in the same place at the same time, but in a diverging timeline this is more humorous than reality breaking. The WoL who came from the point past 6.0 would be able to fill in all of the various gaps in the story when it comes to the events that are about to unfold in Elpis, thus would allow all present parties the ability to intervene and tack action before it is too late and for events to repeat like they did during 6.0.

What this action looks like is up to interpretation. Emet-Selch, for instance, could end up taking the Meteia away from Hermes with the help of Hythlodaeus while Venat and the two WoLs deal with Hermes. From there, it would be possible to get Hermes some help, perhaps from Emmerololth as they are the seat of medicine and therapeutic practices.

Admittedly, this particular topic will likely lead to a lot of arguing and people getting all upset over fun speculation, and I don’t mind fun speculation. For all I know, while I was busy typing this, people could have already begun tearing into each other over this particular topic.

[Lyth]

How very exciting! I do enjoy games.

One of the difficulties around time travel is that it's not always straightforward to get to the specific time and place that you want to. G'raha's attempt on the First was off by a hundred years. It's also worth noting that even when Elidibus, for all his mastery of magic, attempted the feat, we were so insubstantial that we couldn't even open doors. So there are lots of potential pitfalls here in creating a completely fresh time loop. For one, perhaps you attempt to travel back in time but end up in the wrong era. Alternatively, perhaps you end up incorporeally stuck inside of Deudalaphon's broom closet, with nobody aetherically gifted enough around to recognize that you're trapped in there and spare you a snifter of their bountiful aetheric reserves. Or perhaps you do arrive at the correct time only for Alexander to show up and prune off your spin-off story idea because it's bad for the space-time continuum.

I think if you want to try to develop a solution for this, Yuella is probably on a much better track, in that you'd have to make use of the existing time loop that the authors have conveniently gifted you. You certainly could go to the Convocation and tell them everything that you know. That option is technically available even now, given that Elpis exists in a moment prior to the Final Days. They would probably be skeptical at first, but everything can be verified from memories around Elpis. Fandaniel would likely be detained and punished for his role in assaulting a senior Convocation member, and the seat of Hermes would be left open. Without Hermes' unique knowledge of extant phenomenon, the Convocation would be rendered unable to develop a solution for the Final Days and Zodiark would never be summoned. Amaurot would fall, resulting in the destruction of humanity in the new, divergent timeline.

Shall we try some more solutions? I'm up for it if you are.

[Iscah]

If we're talking in terms of the WoL personally intervening once they arrive in Elpis, I don't think we can.

The biggest thing to note is that the destruction of the Ancients is an un-erasable event that happened in our timeline. We cannot save them; the best we could possibly do is create an alternate timeline, and even then their survival is not ensured.

By my take on the rules of time travel at least, there are two possibilities:

1. We cannot change it because we don't know what will fix it: Our lack of detailed knowledge about the past ensures that whatever we do while we are there, the blank parts of history that we do not know will inescapably lead to the things we do know: the Sundering and the modern world.

2. We can change it, but at an unreasonable cost: Somehow, we blindly stumble into Elpis and change events so Meteion never gets corrupted.

At minimum, we never get the answer we need to the question of why the Final Days are happening in the present day, and so cannot save our world from destruction.

At worst, changing history means that we trap ourselves in the alternate timeline we've spawned, in which case we not only failed to discover the cause of the Final Days but can't even report back to our friends that we failed. They will either be forced to evacuate without us or they will stay there resolutely believing we will come back before it's too late; either way Etheirys as a whole is doomed when it could have been saved.

So, in short, "saving the Ancients" – in actuality, creating a second copy of the Ancients who might fare better than the first timeline – comes at the cost of giving our own world up to inescapable destruction, one way or another. (And yes, technically G'raha did that, but he was of the understanding that the 8UE world was already beyond saving – and the story should have leant harder on making that a true and unfixable fact to justify it.)


So, having said all this, how could one go about saving the Ancients anyway?

The simple answer is that it isn't done by the WoL in Elpis at all.

Rather, having learned a number of critical pieces of information from the WoL's trip to Elpis, it would now be possible – if we had a suitable time machine – for a time traveller (WoL or otherwise) to travel back with the specific goal of making things happen differently this time, while being aware that this may make it impossible for them to return to this timeline. This, again, is essentially what G'raha did.

From there on, everything is up in the air and a story could be written to resolve the would-be original Final Days very differently. But there are also many ways it could go wrong again and the Ancients end up just as doomed or worse.

Additionally, it must be emphasised that although we as players of the game are aware that the 8UE timeline continues to exist, the characters do not know this and have no way of ascertaining whether it does. To them it is entirely hypothetical whether changing the timeline would split the timeline or just overwrite it entirely, and who would be so desperate to actively create and then attempt to save an alternate timeline where things already went badly once, with a 50/50 chance of obliterating the current timeline which contains everything they have ever known and loved?

I think this is a blind spot when people say "I love the characters of the Ancients and my WoL should care more about them than the Scions who are boring". They're all just characters to us, but to the WoL it's essentially ancient history on one side (even if the people seem nice) and their actual home, town, country, world and longtime friends and acquaintances all on the line. Which would you expect a hero to pick?


TL;DR: "Saving" the Ancients requires an unreasonable gamble with the fate of the existing timeline and then still faces many threats before it could be considered the better choice. I don't believe the heroes would actively choose it – the WoL got swayed by Venat's suggestion in the moment, because all this time travel stuff is probably above them and they just want to help people wherever, but a careful consideration of the risks reveals that we are quite simply fortunate that we either couldn't change it (scenario 1) or got back on the track of the existing timeline (scenario 2) so we did make it back to our present with the information we needed, rather than potentially ending up with two timelines that were both doomed.

[Anteiron]

I want to clarify something. By saving the ancients I don't necessarily mean saving the civilization of Amarout. Sooner or later it would have fallen anyway, nothing is eternal, there would have been other crises that would have led to its fall. What I would like to only save souls, leave them whole and not in pieces. Even if Amarout fell, even if the magic of creation disappeared, the souls would still remain whole. Furthermore, we know that 75% of the inhabitants of Etheirys trapped inside Zordiak have returned to the flow of ether with their entire souls, and that in any case when they are reborn they will do so as one of the current races and not as ancients with the magic of creation. So in the future there will be many people in the source with their whole souls, but I would like to save them all.

[Iscah]

I want to clarify something. By saving the ancients I don't necessarily mean saving the civilization of Amarout. [...] What I would like to only save souls, leave them whole and not in pieces.

The distinction is irrelevant. The events that led to the fall of Amaurot and the events that led to souls being sundered are one and the same.

And the intactness of souls seems to matter very little in the long run, besides populating the shards, so I don't see the point in inventing something to enable that change and nothing else.

[Lunaxia]

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.

And then from there we start delving into the idea that if it hadn't been Hermes, some form of calamity would have come along and obliterated them at some time another because of the nature of their powers and the flaws of their society. But then that ignores two things: that the Ancients lacked any real capacity for growth or perspective, which flies against near enough every interaction we've had with them bar Athena, and that mortals themselves are not inherently at risk of the exact same possibility. If anything, they are infinitely more fragile; the Ancients' powers and their innate beliefs and morality act as a shield as well as a sword in case of such a scenario, and the only real advantage mortals have over them in Endwalker would be of absolutely no benefit outside of that highly specific situation.

The irony is, in reality, mortals as they are in Hydaelyn currently exist for two reasons: one of them is an Ancient who has made a point of trying to keep them alive, and the other is a sort-of Ancient fighting who intermittently appears to use their supernatural strength to save them from the latest threat of the day. Without those two factors, they are far more vulnerable and at risk of annihilation from evil space rocks, giant, flying death machines and psychopathic dictators than the Ancients themselves ever would have been.

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

And the same four or five of you will inevitably show up first and hungrily anticipate their arrival. As always, I admire the dedication.

[LilimoLimomo]

And then from there we start delving into the idea that if it hadn't been Hermes, some form of calamity would have come along and obliterated them at some time another because of the nature of their powers and the flaws of their society. But then that ignores two things: that the Ancients lacked any real capacity for growth or perspective, which flies against near enough every interaction we've had with them bar Athena, and that mortals themselves are not inherently at risk of the exact same possibility.

I agree that modern day folks could still potentially destroy their societies and/or the world, but the risk is significantly lesser. When most members of your society are born with the capability to single-handedly end the world, all it takes is a single person's poor judgment or dissatisfaction to trigger a world-ending catastrophe.

Meanwhile, there's a whole lengthy scene in Stormblood showing that it takes an army of mages and more to do something as simple as break through a big metal door. It takes modern day folks orders of magnitude more effort, time, and organization to generate the kind of threats that the Ancients could with a snap of their fingers. And that's important, because the need for lengthy timelines and supply chains and communication all create additional points of failure for such threats, making it easier to detect them, react to them, and dismantle them. To achieve the same destructive means that Ancients could simply wish into existence requires the consolidation of a great deal of power now, and since very few have access to that amount of power, that reduces the number of potential sources of destruction.

So in summary, there are vastly fewer who have the potential to destroy the world, and it takes them a lot more time and effort to do it which makes it easier to intervene and prevent or prepare for such plans. Compared to the world being endable if any single person has a sufficiently bad day, the world is much safer now.

[Lunaxia]

I agree that modern day folks...

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. It took incredibly high levels of intelligence and ability even as Ancients for them to reach the scale of the threat they posed, and they were also potentially the first outliers in who knows how many thousands of years in contrast to the relative consistency the mortals have in churning out criminals and villains who manage to cause enough carnage even without their powers of creation.

A lot of players cling to the weird fallacy that stripping humans of these powers will prevent the foreseeable potholes the Ancients may have fallen prey to, such as society stagnating or some evil figures wreaking havoc, when in truth, it would merely slow down their progress on such an imaginary road. Yes, an Ancient may be able to open a door with a click of their fingers, but mortals will have it opening automatically within a number of years, and while Amaurot may have been special, look at the heights of the Allagan Empire, what they achieved and what exactly they were capable of - the potential for mass destruction is well within mortal means, even if it takes a little longer to get there, they'd be far more likely to be killed off by an extinction event in the meantime that didn't make use of the world's cheapest narrative device, and nor do they have the Ancients' inclination in acting against their baser whims and impulses. The Ancients were not without their safeguards, either, if the meticulous bureaucratic process we bore witness to in Amaurot was any indication; Hermes wasn't exactly playing by the rules with Meteion, and as with mortals there's only so much they can keep hope to keep an eye on or prepare for without taking it too far.

Are the Ancients infallible? Of course not, and I'm reminded of a Dumbledore quote along the lines of "I'm highly intelligent, so I seldom make mistakes, but when I do, they tend to be correspondingly huger." But they also have similarly potent means and deserve equal opportunity to judge and rectify those mistakes, and it remains gross to use their perceived lack of perfection as a reason to justify their end in a game that endlessly seeks to find the good amidst mankind's myriad inherent flaws and support their fight for survival. If you want to say both possess their own risks, fine, but judging the Ancients as more dangerous or vulnerable to catastrophe than mortals? On what grounds, sir, on what grounds? etc.

I don't give a damn about Azem

I'm talking about the general survivability prospects of humans here, given that some remain unconvinced of the Ancients' ability to survive even in a post-Endsinger world and continue to tout the superiority of mortals when it's by the grace of two of them that they're even here at all. The power of mankind and hope and faith and all of that rings rather hollow without the long arm of Azem's shard doing all of the all-important actual punching to sort things out for them. They didn't halt every Rejoining, no - nor did any other mortal - but I imagine there were no small number of Ardberts and Shadowkeepers who didn't end quite so tragically but never made the headlines despite their victories against the Ascians.

...also

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.

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.

Sure, Jan.