Let's play a game: Save the Ancients!

[LilimoLimomo]

I also don't understand what establishing Hyth's skill level has to do with whether there was hypothetically a way to save the Ancients.

If you want the full context, read my posts and and replies quoting my posts; that's where this aspect of the discussion comes from.

I considered offering a TL;DR, but after a few attempts I realized that in doing so I wasn't being fair to either side of the argument, so it's probably better to just let the original text speak for itself.

[Lunaxia]

Ah, my bad. Sanna is right about the LB, it's been a while since I did Trusts and I must have got the mechanic confused with Squadrons or Explorer mode.

welp

I understand the argument perfectly well, and funnily enough I have a feeling that you do too.

The assumption underpinning the majority of the arguments initially put forward with absolutely no bad faith or bias whatsoever makes use of that really fun, super swell and not at all concerning belief the Ancients were doomed to die anyway, so genuinely "saving" them is pointless/ impossible and handwaving their demise, weirdly justified. I challenged the broader reasoning behind the claim (i.e. someone else would have done it if not Hermes, they were incapable of defending or saving themselves, the Ancients were all inherently dangerous and possessed apocalyptic powers that were effectively a ticking timebomb, etc. etc.) as well as the fundamental premise behind this train of thought that claims mortals are any safer or less prone to wiping themselves out. This then devolved into, amongst other things, calling the overarching ability of the Convocation into question, with Hythlodaeus' potential recruitment being cited as a reason why they wouldn't have actually been sufficiently powerful enough to deal with any outside threats because he's supposedly a bit of a limp noodle in a fight.

It gets a little chaotic when multiple people respond with their own litany of reasons why the Ancients wouldn't have worked and ergo merited their total destruction, but that's inevitably how these discussions go.

And for the record, playing dumb and attempting to attack my credibility with strawman fallacies because you've run out of things to say is disappointing, even if I shouldn't be surprised. I take that as it being safe to say we're effectively done here.

whether a society of hedonistic and whimsical godlings could be stably governed by a small circle of nepotistic oligarchs.

This is genuinely hilarious.

Ah, but no, clearly there isn't any prejudice against them in these forums at all.

[thegreatonemal]

I guess this thought might be something better suited to a thread of it's own - but one can't help but wonder what would've happened if the Omicrons had reached Etheirys during the Ancients time.

Took them over easily and would probably find no use in anything from the planet other than its abundance in aether. Creation magic is something they added as a side function into omega to copy how dragons evolve to meet different situations.

[Cleretic]

I guess this thought might be something better suited to a thread of it's own - but one can't help but wonder what would've happened if the Omicrons had reached Etheirys during the Ancients time.

Oh, they'd be extremely screwed. Like, I think we're looking at an Endsinger-level threat, in that the Ancients are going to face losses they can't even fathom, which is gonna lead into some equivalent of the sacrifice spiral that led to Hydaelyn. The circumstances will be different, we're probably not looking at mass sacrifices to a self-made god, but we'd see the exact same beats play out.

And that's if they win. Thegreatonemal has a point, I think it's far more likely to just end in the Omicrons incorporating creation magic into themselves and inventing replicators. (If they didn't already have them, which I'm unclear on.) The Omicrons are way more implacable than any of the threats that the Ancients definitely had coming; for as bad as the Endsinger, Midgardsormr or Athena are/were, once you deal with them either by destruction or just putting them at bay, they're kinda done; there's only one of them, that's only one problem to solve. But the Omicron are a massive force, known to adapt their approach; they're impossibly hard to actually stop.

I'd be on board with a separate thread of 'how well would any FFXIV civilization handle against the Omicrons'. My initial gut feeling: I think Garlemald dies first. We know from Ghordona that the Omicrons actually do have a level of threat assessment even if it's flawed, I think the Garleans have the nasty combination of being completely ineffectual while looking very dangerous.

[Cilia]

I think there are a few holes in your logic there.

Since you seem to be having trouble following the train of thought, let's go over things from the top.

The original question is "Is it possible to save the Ancients?" The short answer is no, because Amaurot sits on a foundation much more fragile than you think, and any disaster potent enough or social issue divisive enough threatens to send the house of cards tumbling down; and a single Ancient with enough knowledge / power and the motivation to do so can, by design or by accident. To say nothing of extraterrestrial occurrences that could easily disrupt their perfect little lives.

You can only save the Ancients if you're also able to save Amaurotine civilization, because they're near to terminally dependent on the easy and comfortable lifestyle it privileges them to. When faced with hardship and an uncertain future, their reaction was to retreat inward, rejecting change and the potential of the future for the familiarity and comfort of the past. The fatal mistake in that idea is that change is inevitable; it does not matter if they stop the Song of Oblivion, go back in time and stop Hermes from dispatching the Meteia, help his mental health, allow the Meteia the life experience necessary to be emotionally prepared for what's out there in the cosmos, etc. Change will come, whether we will it or not; the question is whether or not we have the resilience to deal with it, and clinging to the ignorant bliss of Amaurot would never allow humanity even the chance to actually develop that resilience.

So between the Ancients' capacity for destruction (intentional or otherwise), their lack of resilience thanks to their comfortable lifestyle, and the inevitability of change, you've got a house of cards trembling in the wind.

"Can we save the Ancients?" quickly morphs into "Can we save Amaurot?", and the answer to that question is a resounding no; not forever, at least. The Convocation cannot have a contingency for everything (re: Song of Oblivion), and if their easy lives are upset the Ancients retreat inward because they have no resilience. Would they be able to reach a consensus on whether or not to grant Midgardsormr refuge when he arrives? Be able to react quickly and effectively to Omega crashing down and tearing up the place looking for him? Etc etc. Cast the die enough times and you're going to get a critical fail, and then it all comes tumbling down.

If you want to be a little less ambitious and ask whether or not the Ancients could have been saved from the Song of Oblivion, the answer is actually yes; but, only if you go back in time and stop Hermes from sending the Meteia on their ill-fated sojourn across the cosmos. Get him some counseling, ideally from someone worldly (like Venat or Azem); get the Meteia the life experiences necessary to handle the despair that may await them out there (somehow - easier said than done in a world where pain and suffering are virtually nonexistent). Once the Meteia are out there, how in control of things Hermes is becomes extremely questionable, and detaining / unmaking the Meteion he kept with him on Etheirys does nothing - she's just one of dozens (if not hundreds) and stopping her will not stop her sisters (or their merged Endsinger form, for that matter).

Did I convey my ideas clearly? Are you gonna strawman me again? Only time will tell!

[Lunaxia]

Lo, the charming sounds of a nerve struck. I'd look to the scarecrows in your own fields but attempting to cast about for them in mine, good sir.

I've already made clear the subject of the Ancients' inherent "lethality" so you can hold onto that all you like, evidently you'll do so anyway. So onto the other leg of your argument: was it vitally important that the Ancients learn to cope with unpleasant emotions? Absolutely. I don't think anyone would contest that.

Are they able to do that when they're blasted into the stratosphere at the first signs of division on the singular word of a traveller from the future who needed them to die so that their people could potentially live? Uh, no, not really.

Developing emotional resilience and learning to live with grief - not easy on a personal level, let alone after a worldwide apocalyptic event that killed who knows how many and left their home in ruins - takes time, and could never hope to be achieved on a societal level in such a short timespan. Given their lack of experience and the all-consuming nature of the tragedy, they would have been, understandably, completely traumatised, and the required resilience and coping mechanisms needed to make it through that do not spontaneously combust into being over night.

What we do know, though, is that the Ancients who did suffer from grief, loss and/ or trauma such as Erich and Lahabrea did actually manage to come through it to the other side, and both they and the likes of Themis, Hyth and Emet were actually surprisingly able to tolerate and cope with the prospect of the future they knew may come to pass. Those around Hermes struggled to relate to him but were kind, empathetic and curious; we see NPCs in Elpis dealing with their own feelings regarding losing someone important to them pretty well, and all round there is more evidence the Ancients were capable of that growth than there is to the contrary.

Anger, denial, sorrow are all natural responses to what came to pass for the Ancients. But again, it's that bottom line of perfection they're never quite permitted to stray from that is also used against them as a reason to be killed that means this gets glossed over, and that all-important right to life and self-determination is denied to them in the way it never is to quite literally anyone else in the story.

Oh, wait - actually, it is! (Or rather, almost is; it couldn't actually happen, of course, because our moral immaculacy might have been called into question.) And this other example is extremely interesting, because it shows mortals rather conveniently tossing aside the mantra of acceptance and moving forward you consider to be fatally lacking in the Ancients' hope for survival into the bin and committing the very act they were crucified for: the Eighth Umbral Calamity. You know, that entire timeline where rather than devote their resources to improving the future they were in, they decided to potentially throw all of it away purely on the premise of "it sure would be great if the WoL was still around and the world went back to the way it was!"

We get rather a lot of instances where we talk the talk about all this moving on and being strong, not looking back and accepting our feelings and so on (and it's good stuff and holds true, to be fair), but we never actually have to walk the walk. And the one time mortals are given a chance to... funnily enough, we don't take it!

This is never seen as form of fallibility or "giving in to temptation", though, it's seen as noble, self-sacrificing and heroic, despite the innumerable lives who like as not did not have a say in the matter being tossed into the pile as chips to pay for the price of our resurrection and a return to the better times. But since we survive in this gambit, like with the Ancients, that means it's fine, I guess. For some reason. Never mind the poor sods who might have actually wanted to, you know, live or anything, despite enough time having passed at that point that the main cast had families and descendants and new lives of their own:

This was met with some resistance, however, as many expressed disapproval at the idea of forsaking those in the present day in order to save a world they would never live to see. Unable to deny this, Master Cid simply nodded and said:
“Even so, our sacrifice will not be for naught.”

Everyone else in that timeline: Gee, thanks, Cid.

And it goes on to describe the act as:

There are those who would strive to create a place where the sun will shine again, not for their own sake, but for those in a past that may yet be saved.

Or, perhaps, the memory of their friends that they chose not to actually let go of to the detriment of the present. Tomato, tomato and all that. In this instance, this is called "hope" and is "beautiful", though, and oddly enough their ability to actually create something of sufficient scale to time travel and possibly wipe out an entire future to rewrite the past isn't perceived as dangerous or selfish, but a feat of dedication and hard work. And they don't even have the nebulous justification of a giant space bird to contend with this time! It was all for us! Which is romantic and nice and not at all concerning or its own form of avoidance at all!

Definitely not another case of rules for thee, not for (everyone else), though, or more specious reasoning that for some reason only gets applied to the Ancients because to hell with those guys. Gotta love that ironclad narrative cohesion!

Would they be able to reach a consensus on whether or not to grant Midgardsormr refuge when he arrives?

...but again, as much as I appreciate a good ol' BG3/ DnD reference, this would not be any different for the mortals without the WoL and Hydaelyn around to punch and cast protect as needed. "They could be killed off at any time" could be applied to... any race out there. We were only spared Omega's shenanigans in the first place because it was put out of order by its landing, and rolled our own die, so to speak, by booting up the giant death machine in the first place. How easily might that have gone wrong in any other scenario, I wonder?

[Vyrerus]

The house of cards trembling in the wind

LoL, lmao even.

There's a few extreme problems with your reasoning here.

First, by your own logic, any sufficiently advanced civilization could be brought to ruin by a madman or otherworldly encounter. We can look to literally every encounter the WoL has ever had starting in Heavensward when we started to be told of primals so powerful they could end the entire star (Warring Triad, any Heavensward Primal that sups on the Warring Triad, Allag in general). Even before that, there was the Cloud of Darkness in ARR. We run into more and more as time goes on, what with the writers upping the ante and all. Literally saved from our own act of turning the Omega Weapon on by the grace that it just flipped off and burrowed down to do experiments, rather than raze the Source or interfere or interact with the Garleans/Stormblood story at all.

Then there's the two civilizations shown in the front 2/3rds of The Dead Ends. The plagued otter people and the Karellians. Most notably the Karellians were an advanced science fiction civilization completely bereft of magic or godlike powers.

Second, and more importantly, you're guilty of extreme bias towards the Ascians AND you've dehumanized them to the point that you are strawmanning them as badly, or perhaps worse than, the Venat metaphor BS scene.

Think about what The Final Days did. Think about what the Zodiark sacrifices did. As we're told, quite a lot of Ascians were killed by The Final Days. Out of the remainder, volunteers of half the remaining population offered up their lives to make Zodiark.

The times got tough, and then the best of the Ascians either fell victim to Blasphemies OR nobly gave their lives to make a savior.

In other words, the people in their populace who had resilience/nobility/stalwart hearts as part of their personality were very few in number after both of these events transpired.

Most of their elders and those closest to lives fulfilled likely gave themselves up if not killed.

Riding on the coattails of this traumatic, devastating event came Venat and her civil war. Not only were the worst members of the Ascian's society the only ones left, half of them decided to make war in a world that had been without it for time out of mind, and wars hardly help anyone recover from trauma.

No earnest efforts were made to help the Ascians bounce back. Hydaelyn was not made in good faith. She was never to be a mere binding for Zodiark.

How would they fare if prepared and told the truth? What could have their collective society come up with, if they'd had the truth from the start? Cast the die for enough players, and eventually you get critical successes, too. Do you really struggle to believe that the Azem of old, along with his mentor, along with the entire Convocation with truth in hand could not stop Meteion?

If not, why then do you believe that just the WoL and Zenos using two Ascian incantations can (I guess technically 3 if we include the creation rites for Shinryu)?

[ZavosEsperian]

The original question is "Is it possible to save the Ancients?"

This is what we will be answering in this post. A majority of the arguments you are making are not relevant to the statement at hand and I would say two or three of these arguments make up a strawman army.

The short answer is no

This is a wildly incorrect assertion based off of headcanoning and/or misrepresentation of what is presented both in the game as well as what is answered from Q&A sessions. In order to dismantle this statement, I will present you with the strongest possible argument you would be able to use and work my way to what the game actually has in it from there.

In order to declaratively say there is no way to save the Ancients, you would need to prove or have definite proof of this being the only case that occurs if the Ancients are saved. Were I to attempt to prove this, the best way to go about it would be to use statements the writers have involving questions that are tangential to this question in how they are responded to or to use information presented in the game. Were we to look at the game, the strongest case would be the Nibirun being an outcome of what the Ancients would become were they to have to continue their existence as Ancients, and not be wiped out by the Sundering. Do note within this context, it is not directly stated that this is the only outcome within both the context of the game or from Q&A sessions.

Speaking of the Q&A sessions, this would likely be the only definitive way to get an answer to this question as either a "yes" or "no". For your position to be substantiated, you would need a writer or Yoshi-P himself to outright state the Nibirun ending and/or all other possible endings other than what we did would result in a bad ending for the Ancients (note the state of the Universe is not part of the prefaced question and, were it included, it would have the same problem as a whole as the question "saving the Ancients"). The problem when it comes to substantiating your argument is the writers are not using language that is conclusive: you cannot arrive at a yes or a no for the prefaced question. The only thing you can do would be trying to justify your own opinions and/or headcanons by using other information presented, but this information is not relevant to the question at hand since there is no way of knowing for sure how the Ancients would react given a specific problem.

The best information we have involving the Q&A sessions regarding this topic is this:

So you know there were other Ancients who thought summoning Zodiark would solve everything but she saw that summoning Zodiark and using it to deflect Meteion’s “Despair Beam” and thought, “even if we were to do this and keep going as we are the rest of the Ancients will probably be unable to change as a people” when she’s looking at Hermes, or “we will always be our own undoing”. If you look at the dungeon, “The Dead Ends”, at the very end there’s a boss called Ra-la, and that’s sort of our vision for what probably would have happened to the Ancients if we just let them continue as they were.


Link to Live From the Producer LXVIII Q&A

I am emphasizing the part of the quote that is important to this topic. The statement given is the vision the writers had assuming the probable state the Ancients would end up in were they to continue to go forward. Because the statement is not definitive, you cannot assume the position of no is the only answer. You are free to come up with any headcanon reasons why no is the answer you believe in, but you cannot state it as an end all be all to the question since the writers themselves purposely left a door open where it is possible to save the Ancients.

Everything else in your statement is used to back your presumed headcanoned answer, complete with an army of strawmen. The good news when it comes to dealing with strawmen is that a single spark from a match reduces all strawmen to ashes, leaving the rest of your justifications as pointless assumptions and arguments to make yourself comfortable with the solution you came up with to the problem. You will be unable to make a stronger argument than the one I presented since there is no way to arrive at a definitive answer, so it would be best to leave the steelman that I provided to you to tower over the ashes of your strawmen.

I should remind you my view of this question largely is that there is no way to answer it in a yes or no format. You are free to headcanon as you will but you cannot use your headcanon to dismantle someone else's headcanon. Such things are pointless to get into arguments over and prove you do not understand how to work with an open-ended question such as this compared to a more definitive question. I will admit going over this thread, this statement reigns true for many people partaking in the thread and makes discussing theorycrafted answers not pleasurable for the majority of us.

My recommendation is to just sit back and let people have fun. No need to make everyone else miserable in the thread with you if you don't like what is being stated, let alone using poor arguments which would be insufficient for any serious debate since it is clear you, along with others in the thread, do not particularly understand the point of an open-ended question such as this.

[Cleretic]

My recommendation is to just sit back and let people have fun. No need to make everyone else miserable in the thread with you if you don't like what is being stated, let alone using poor arguments which would be insufficient for any serious debate since it is clear you, along with others in the thread, do not particularly understand the point of an open-ended question such as this.

I actually think responding to the thread's question of 'with access to as many levers as you need, what can you come up with to stop the Ancients from meeting their doom' with a well-reasoned 'no' that he's been making since the first page is very valid, actually. I also see your response on the first page, and even without any bias of preference Cilia's argument is a lot more compelling than yours, largely because they admit that problems run deeper. Do you really think that just confiscating the Meteia leads to a happily-ever-after? That no more leaks may spring? Hell, you don't think Hermes is just gonna try to make more? Therapy's not a snap fix even when it works, especially when you're treating the subject poorly through means like suddenly stamping out their personal project.

And do us all a favor, and maybe respond on your real account; nobody thinks that the one whose only character is a level 80 Scholar who runs an FC of characters that haven't cracked 50 is your actual one.

[ZavosEsperian]

I actually think responding to the thread's question of 'with access to as many levers as you nee, what can you come up with to stop the Ancients from meeting their doom' with a well-reasoned 'no' that he's been making since the first page is very valid, actually. I also see your response on the first page, and even without any bias of preference Cilia's argument is a lot more compelling than yours, largely because they admit that problems run deeper. Do you really think that just confiscating the Meteia leads to a happily-ever-after? That no more leaks may spring? Hell, you don't think Hermes is just gonna try to make more? Therapy's not a snap fix even when it works, especially when you're treating the subject poorly through means like suddenly stamping out their personal project.

Yet none of this is backed up by citation or by definitive statements that are backed by the writers. As I have stated previously inside of the post you quoted neither side can 100% prove the question to be yes or no. It is far from my fault that there seems to be an inability to read the post and what my true position is, and that trying to state that one is "more" right or "less" wrong is not going to do anything in the long run provided no definitive statements. You, as well as everyone else in this thread, have to be beholden to whatever the writers allow for in the story, not what others believe because their headcanon says so.

It is foolish to continue to argue this with me, my position is based on what is available to the writers at this given moment were they to create or continue any threads involving the Ancients as they have never shut the door. Your biases are clear and are not being completely removed despite your aforementioned claim.

And do us all a favor, and maybe respond on your real account; nobody thinks that the one whose only character is a level 80 Scholar who runs an FC of characters that haven't cracked 50 is your actual one.

Why does this matter? The truth of an argument does not change whether it is an accredited person in a specific field or a layman. It is common knowledge you do not need to be an expert in a particular field so long as you can back up a claim, which is something you have failed to do in this rebuttal. If you think of me as an alt, I would like to know who you think I am, I could use a good laugh.

Your post is meant to be a distraction from the argument I made, mainly because I believe you cannot prove me wrong. I have provided an example of what the strongest form of the argument you are trying to back would be and I proved it to be incorrect using citations from the writers of the game. If you want to play the game that you indicated on your first post, know the rules of the game so you don't end up in this sort of position, where you have to claw at logical nothings and non-sequiturs to try and prove yourself right. Prove to me what you think is right with absolutes, this being proper citations for all of your claims, and you may be able to change my position. Or are you unable to accomplish this simple task because it is all headcanon, thus not real lore and can be readily discarded when it comes to real arguments.