Quote Originally Posted by Cilia View Post
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.

Quote Originally Posted by Cilia View Post
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.