Azure: I think KeA's situation in particular complicates matters here even if I generally sympathize/agree with Mac's point that many stories are pretty dismissive/hostile/bad about things like this. Basically, KeA's power is actually TOO strong for her mind/soul to handle here in exactly the same way that Demiourgous disappeared. She very much COULD use her power to help in so many ways but once she starts taking that first step I think it increasingly starts to weigh on her mind on how she can possibly draw a line and not help everyone with everything. In that sense, saving the SSS in Zero and helping Shizuku started her down that track. Basically, the conundrum is that while her ability to rewrite causality could allow her to create a better world, it's just too much for someone with a human mind to bear. If KeA starts preventing deaths, or helping North Ambria, etc. she either feels she has to help EVERYONE to be just/fair or else grapple with the fact that she's arbitrarily selecting only certain people to help when there's literally no reason she couldn't do more.
This is slightly different than the Aureole even if it's similar. The Aureole was basically a cyberpunk AI hooked up to a bunch of factories that could basically create anything to help the people on the Liber Ark. But it WAS just an AI with a directive to make people happy so eventually it realized the most efficient way to do that with its capabilities was to just start putting people in VR utopias heedless of the fact that at this point it was creating a new problem because how it defined happiness wasn't always congruent with what some people (Celeste and co.) valued. KeA/Demiourgous is NOT that and tried to approach the problem by putting the controlling entity with a human mind to better understand the people it was helping but see the last paragraph. Ironically, I think an AI approach might have worked a bit better if combined with the far more powerful ability of KeA/Demiourgous but it didn't so...
Grimwood tried to fix the issue by providing support to KeA that the Demiourgous lacked to try and keep her emotionally together but I really don't think that would have worked in the long run. I think you either end up with the cabal of people assisting KeA (whether it's Grimwood's conspiracy, Mariabell, or even the SSS) succumbing to the same moral quandary, or becoming numb to it and slowly being warped by the power at their disposal in which case they're imposing their beliefs over the world's. Like at best it probably keeps things working longer than the Demiourgous did but it just delays the same fundamental problem that existed there by distributing the emotional toll among several people now... but they'd still eventually break just the same. And anyone who doesn't break (like Mariabell) is... probably not acting with the best/most altruistic motives.
To compare it to say, FFTA, it's why I don't look too kindly on the argument the game takes that the others are just running from their problems. While this IS true, that doesn't mean the solution is to revert everything. In fact, they end up emotionally confronting and overcoming the problems IN Ivalice which actually solves the "problem" there. It no longer necessitates they end it. I'm much more sympathetic to the arguments that tackle it from the angle that Ivalice isn't exactly the improvement it seems to be by trying to raise questions like "What happened to everyone outside the core cast/the town/world? Are THEY better off?" I forget how much the game broaches that itself and how much is relegated to the fandom debates over Villain Protagonist Marche but my very flawed memory thinks it was backburner stuff in-game at best and extremely tertiary to the message of "you're just running away!"
thank you for attending my ted talk
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xp1337: Don't you wish there was a spell-checker that told you when you a word out?