Let's play a game: Save the Ancients!

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Veloran]

Just walk back through the portal and go beat up the Endsinger.

"But the Ancients are still on the road to destruction!"

So is everyone, don't care.

[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

[ZavosEsperian]

...

This post, as well as any posts that derive themselves off of this one, are irrelevant to the thread topic. The topic of the thread deals with coming up with a way to save the Ancients from their fate as it is shown in ShB and EW, where the number of solutions to the problem is infinite since it is a work of fiction. Whether or not the storytelling is good is not relevant to the success of a particular solution because if this were the case, the WoL would have failed to kill the Endsinger since there are numerous storytelling issues related to how the overall plot is conveyed, particularly where time travel is involved.

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.

Perhaps, perhaps not. This is an opinion you hold in regards to the Ancients as the writers are allowed to do whatever they want. Whether or not the story is compelling is in the eyes of those who are reading it and interpreting it, and if you happen to fall into the minority where you find the Ancients are not interesting, that is not the problem of the writers.

[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.