This is a really neat read! Got a possibility to add here and a couple of tangential points.
I actually think it is possible that the sacrifice was willing and that, if all Ancients had obscene amounts of aether, they really might have used that to deal with mundane bits like running sewer systems or obtaining food and so forth. But the thing is, all of those things would still have costs on a personal level that might not initially seem obvious.
I actually owe another person a reply on this too haha, but I seriously think the Ancients stunted themselves through peace and luxury at the cost of freedom and experience. I think that doing that also made them both individually and as a society extremely fragile, and probably contributed even further to why the Ascians we’re dealing with have been so unable to deal with the new reality.
Gonna try and explain this in an allegory, see if it makes some sense.
Working in menial jobs, working retail, offers a level of perspective that could not be obtained going through life with only degree-related jobs or even very private jobs like babysitting. When you have a background in retail, you have to deal with not only potentially gross situations like cleaning toilets or dealing with mountains of other people’s trash–you face a situation where your work is largely impersonal and customers frequently forget your humanity and treat you only as a function. Just one of several interchangeable bodies executing a task. Things going wrong get similar types of hostility that malfunctioning computers get from clueless people, which is to say they might curse and insult you or be tempted to give you a smack. And thing is, on top of that customers often assume you are less capable and intelligent as a whole than you are, and treat you as an inferior by connection.
But there is a catch. Because a lot of the people in retail don’t stay there forever, and they not only remember what it was like for them–they remember the coworkers, the managers, and the people who work there after them. So they’ll give tips. They’ll make the extra effort to be kind and patient, and they’ll talk to the employees as people rather than mindless cogs in the machine that let their day run smoothly. They voice gratitude for people who otherwise might be taken for granted.
Not every person who doesn’t work retail in their life is guaranteed to be inconsiderate, and not every former retail worker is kind to other retail workers. But it raises the odds pretty significantly. Going through retail offers a source of connection and empathy through dealing with the unpleasant bits as well as a sense of appreciation for the small kindnesses people do to make your day better.
I think the Amaurotines never had an opportunity to deal with anything like that. They were inexperienced in hardship, had removed all but the most “fun” challenges from their lives, completely repressed negative emotions that they are perfectly capable of feeling, and took for granted things that by rights should be treated as precious. How could they understand mundane forms of hardship and empathize with the process of raising yourself up from nothing (as a civilization or individually) if they had always been living in luxury? If it was that easy to cultivate?
Consider how in Akademia Anyder we see an Amaurotine up and sacrifice themself to create Quetzalcoatl. It didn’t solve the problem and honestly in some ways almost reads like a casual sacrifice–at least to me. If the Ancients made similar sacrifices without understanding the weight of permanent loss, they become a kind of people who ultimately cheapen both their own lives and the lives of others.
Emet-Selch clearly realizes and is agonizing over the cost to his people, as someone who lived on afterward and got confronted with a reality where no one was coming back barring intervention. And that reality of being sole survivors is something neither he nor the other Ascians can deal with, so they try to bargain by sacrificing lives they perceive as lesser in exchange. They were completely unexposed to that kind of grief during their days in Amaurot. As a group that honestly believed they and their loved ones would be eternal–the idea of everlasting loss and change became unbearable in a way that it isn’t necessarily for mortals.
Mortals as a whole have each other, and we all need to confront realities of grief and loss through our lives. We can lend support and common experience. We can prepare each other as hardships inevitably arise. The Ancients, I really think were like children. They had the ability to conceive things like that but actively repressed it until the ideas couldn’t be contained anymore and took the most monstrous forms possible during the Terminus event. How could they face their worst nightmares when none of them could admit, even to themselves, that they had those nightmares?
The Ascians are essentially the first of their kind to be faced with long term consequences coming from that background while retaining their power and longevity otherwise. They are incapable of adapting to the change and enduring the uglier realities inherent to life. Emet-Selch talks about mortal races being diluted, but it’s telling that he only uses positive attributes as things being lessened. I honestly wonder if he’s in denial about the Terminus event being as disastrous as it was in part specifically because the Ancients had a higher capacity for evil and terror too, which (again) was ruthlessly repressed 24/7. All the worst ideas they had got to fester until there was no containing them any longer.
Basically, there are certain kinds of value, strength, connection, and skill that can only be obtained by facing hardship and confronting limits. You don’t always get a cheat code or extra time or other forms of flexibility. And when that happens, you have to adapt and find a way to succeed anyway.
There are times when obstacles overwhelm people and they fail. It’s a tragedy, but an understood tragedy. Every mortal person knows the possibility of failure is a real risk. The Ancients, meanwhile, got blindsided.
Hydaelyn splitting reality really might have been a way of saving the world and preventing tragedies of a similar scale. Introducing mortality may have given people opportunities to grow and strengthen themselves to meet challenges in ways the Ancients never had.
I do think the idea of Amaurot being a dystopia is interesting and the previous points are cool possibilities. Philosophically though I think that route would dodge Emet-Selch’s challenge about why mortals should be able to stand on-par with the “perfection” of Amaurot. Examining the necessity of Amaurot’s fall in connection to Answers, which basically asks why suffering and despair are needed, shows the reason is basically because the only path to growth comes from facing those things.
Last bit. I haven’t read More’s work so can only discuss it based on what has been said here. But it’s interesting Hythlodaeus means dispenser of nonsense to Emet-Selch’s Angel of Truth. And as another detail, I haven’t seen anyone mention the irony yet that Hades, as in king-of-the-dead Hades, crafted for himself a long-destroyed city filled with the shades of the departed–deep below the world’s surface no less.
