(I don't know how much this will make sense for non FFXIV players, and also obviouosly spoilers ahead.)
The Brilliance of FFXIV's Ascians or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Sad Bird
Final Fantasy XIV, aka “the second MMO one” or “the one with Y'shtola” is maybe my favorite game of all time. At least it's the game I've spent the most hours playing. The main story line is a bit unfocused at times due to the troubled history of the game. When it released it was so bad that they fired the director guy and then literally blew up the game world in universe, and then hired a new guy to make it again. And somehow it worked! This caused a lot of “plot threads that kind of exist technically, but the new guy doesn't like them so let's just shove them over in the time out corner.“ Though “Spend tons of money to make a really bad game and then spend even more money doing it again.” was probably not the plan at the start, it ends up feeling oddly fitting, like accidental brilliance. There is probably a word for that, but I don't know it.
Anyway, I just think it's real neat. To find out why I think this is, well, you are gonna have to go play the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV with an expanded free trial which you can play through the entirety of A Realm Reborn, and the award Winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 for FREE with no restriction on playtime, which is good because you are going to have to set aside about 300 hours. Come back when you meet a very important sad bird, I'll wait.
Okay! The rest of this is going to assume you know the gist of the main storyline. Here we go! So the Ascians in 2.0 largely are just weird little evil guys doing weird little evil stuff for some kind of reasons, probably. Then in 3.0 or 4.0 or whatever we learn that they are the ones who caused the massive society altering calamities that punctuate every era. This is largely considered to be kind of a dick move. They basically just said “Hey I wonder what would happen if we imitate that meteor that smashed into The Yucatan and killed all the dinosaurs, a terror birds, except six times in a row.” and then they did it, the mad lads.
Then we come to learn that they are doing this because they did an oopsie-woopsie and blew up their civilization so bad that 13 pieces broke off and everyone became 1/14th as much of a being(?!) So now they are trying to smash them all back together to fix it. Somehow. To cause said calamities, they have to basically blow up an entire alternate dimension version of the planet. Alongside failing to do it correctly with the 13th Reflection and accidentally creating ghosts, they ended 7 entire planets worth of human and animal life. The amount people they've killed is unfathomable, so unfathomable that I think our minds kind of glaze over it and we forget just how ridiculously evil this is. I'm not even sure how many Hitler Units they've amassed but it is a very large number.
The point is they should be beyond forgivable, right? We wouldn't give the Nazis a pass if some of them had a dry wit and swagger. So why does Shadowbringers, Endwalker, and their respective post-expansion raid series all seem to be going so hard on rehabilitating the image of the lot of them? Ah yes Emet-Selch, you cantankerous bastard, that was a funny quip you just made. Hey, btw, do you remember that time you did like a thousand genocides? When the writers first started doing this, I really really really did not like it, but the more I thought about it, the more it started to make sense.
One of the major themes of FFXIV is that to live is to struggle. Pain gives life meaning, and heartbreak gives us the capacity for compassion. As far back as 1.0 the song “Answers” has been driving that into our head. The Ancients though (who become the Ascians) are what happens when you break that theme. When you live without suffering. They have nigh-godlike powers of creation magic, a utopian society, and they seem to be immortal and just live until they get bored.
Let's get it out of the way quick, The Ascians/Ancients are all fucking dumb. Nothing they do makes any sense. Some guy is like “Wouldn't it be cool if there was a big flying shark?” and then he imaginated up a species of big flying sharks and I guess they just live here on the planet now. Cool, great. They say only concepts that will improve the world of Etheirys are allowed to be set free, but this is just them having their heads up their own asses. It's a pretense for them to create a society around playing god. Then we have the entirety of Pandemonium which is so obviously a bad idea, even for them, that I'm genuinely surprised it exists. Even our lord and savior Venat mostly just seems to run around being cryptic and putting into play 3000 year long multi-dimensional Machiavellian schemes. (A lot of the MSQ could have been avoided if she just told us what was going on instead of hinting at it, but that's less fun I guess.)
And then we have Hermes. That motherfucker. What a tool. He's the one Ancient who can get a major case of The Feels and when you meet him he's trying to bureaucracy his way into showing his fellows that their creations deserve more empathy. That they deserve more than to be tossed away like garbage when deemed failures. Even still he has no frame of reference for how lesser beings like the Warrior of Light, or the Ancient's creations, (hear) feel or think or why they act the way they do.
Hermes, as a little side project for funsies, wanted to explore the great unknown of space and search for life. So obviously he creates some sentient birds to do this and not just like a fucking drone or a spaceship or something. And that's not even the dumbest part, because these Entelechy (or birds) are super-empaths that feel emotion of others incredibly strongly. Hermes even sends the bird we meet, Meteion, out of the room during a slightly heated conversation because he doesn't want her to to freak out. He knows what he's doing! He's knowingly sending the Sympathetic Bird Brigade alone into the vast emptiness of space where they could encounter literally anything. While “sad bird ends multiverse” wouldn't have been a result I would have seen coming either, it was still clearly a horrible idea and at best was just going to traumatize a bunch of beings that are basically children.
And this wasn't even his job! He did this on the side! Later when Meteion's Bizarre Adventure inevitably goes to shit, Hermes, that dumb fucking cretin, that fucking fool, that absolute fucking buffoon, that bumbling idiot, gets suicidal and depressed. So he, who again comes from a race that just decide to stop living one day because they did all the Life Sidequests that they wanted and got bored, in his alien-esque morality system decides that if suffering exists he might as well kill everyone and then himself. Because of course he does.
Sure some of the Ancients can be affable and downright friendly to us, but only because they have no reason not to be. The Ancients come from a post-scarcity society, but not one based on compassion or unity. Theirs is based on detached “academic” apathy and goofin' around with your mega wizard magic. In short they are all dumb assholes.
Except for Hythlodaeus who is my boyfriend.
The reason Hermes didn't realize his little space project was pretty damn cruel is the same reason that the Ascians, many who used to be pretty chill, will just murder a bazillion million people the moment they think it could bring back their peers. Life is cheap. When you can create a human life (or something approaching it at least) with a snap of your fingers, it's no big deal to lose one or two or all of them. We are eminently replaceable. We are vastly beneath them, as they can not be replicated. Emet-Selch himself even tell us this.
“I do not consider you to be truly alive, ergo I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you”
If a human (the real world ones) goes and picks up a rock and then draws a :) on the rock and names him Jeff, they might feel a little attachment to Jeff, they might try to keep Jeff clean and not drop him and chip him, but if they lost Jeff they would shrug off the loss near immediately. The races of FFXIV are the Jeffs to the Ascians. Their life without real pain or fear or struggle made them something different from us. Something inhuman. An extreme version to how the ultra rich in our world eventually get so used to having every whim fulfilled and everyone around them sycophantic that they can't comprehend what life is like for the masses anymore. They stop being a person in the way that you and I are and become something else. Something with much much less compassion.
But instead of becoming incredibly divorced and ruining a social media site, the Ascians casually did some omnigenocide. They became cartoonish (but well written) villains (Just like billionaires.) for the heroes, the ones that know suffering, to vanquish. Even Hermes, the mythical benevolent oligarch, is too detached and stuck in his society's batshit morality that when he tries to “help” he instead fucks everything up.
To live is to suffer and to suffer is to live, and it's very serendipitous that a game that crashed and burned and then came back better for it can teach us that.
Anyway read Karl Marx or whatever.
thx