Disappointed in one Endwalker Aspect [SPOILERS]

...the Sundering plan worked, though. Like, it literally, verifiably worked. It took a long damn while, but it worked.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SquigglesMajor

We're supposed to believe that she had faith in mankind to live for tomorrow, but she didn't have faith in her own people to even try and help them avert the final days?

---

I know you're not really listening to Venat's angle, but Emet-Selch directly says that her plan worked when the Ancients' wouldn't have.

It's totally valid to argue that what Venat did was awful, something that horribly wronged her people and she perhaps shouldn't have done, and that is in fact an intended angle written within the game; we're supposed to question that either the Zodiark or Hydaelyn side was morally right on that day. But it can't be argued that her plan failed, or that someone else had a better idea; that's just not what happened.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ddwarbird

I came into the story hoping that Hydaelyn was actually going to be the villain of the story all along and we have been doing her bidding because we were "tempered" to her

---

Lots of people were betting on that. It would be a predictable course. ANd frankly, the "the patron/mentor/guardian was the villain all along" is such an overused trope. It wouldn't be good storytelling, on the contrary, it'd be cliché as hell.

Also: FF7 is not a masterpiece

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by AlexionSkyllark

Also: FF7 is not a masterpiece

---

THEMS FIGHTING WOR...... yeah, have to agree with you there. imo theres quite a few tonal whiplashs and dragging moments. its good but no masterpiece.

Quote:

---

Lots of people were betting on that. It would be a predictable course. And frankly, the "the patron/mentor/guardian was the villain all along" is such an overused trope. It wouldn't be good storytelling, on the contrary, it'd be cliché as hell.

---

this was my biggest fear going in but happily that didn't happen. now im just afraid that's whats gonna happen for myths of the realm.

It's laughable to me that her plan could be viewed as any kind of success. It was sheer luck at the end. Had it not been for Zenos as Shinryu we would not have been able to defeat Meteion because she would've fled with us not having a way to reach her. The amount of variables involved in that happening are astronomical and absolutely could not be accounted for either.

Edit: Instead we got the subverted trope.

Yes, there were a lot of variables that Venat did not and could not have accounted for. But that's because her "plan" was not a intricate rube goldberg machine she set up for us to follow. Her plan only went as far as making sure there was someone stronger than her, who could travel to Ultima Thule and confront Meteion.

After that point, she's placing her hopes and trust into us to finish what she started. This is consistent with Venat having faith in the future, in our ability to move forward even without her guidance.

Edit: This imo is what Emet-Selch meant when he said Venat's plan was the right one. Having hope for the future and faith in those who come after you will succeed whereas trying to return to the past will end in failure.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KariTheFox

Yes, there were a lot of variables that Venat did not and could not have accounted for. But that's because her "plan" was not a intricate rube goldberg machine she set up for us to follow. Her plan only went as far as making sure there was someone stronger than her, who could travel to Ultima Thule and confront Meteion.

After that point, she's placing her hopes and trust into us to finish what she started. This is consistent with Venat having faith in the future, in our ability to move forward even without her guidance.

Edit: This imo is what Emet-Selch meant when he said Venat's plan was the right one. Having hope for the future and faith in those who come after you will succeed whereas trying to return to the past will end in failure.

---

All of this, exactly. On top of that, while yes her plan did hinge a lot on essentially the roll of the dice, they're dice that the Ancients would have been unable to roll. Yeah, we got lucky that Zenos turned up when he did, but in any other plan he wouldn't have turned up at all.

I remember a similar argument about the MCU's 'twenty-eight million possible futures, and we win in one of them'. In that case Dr. Strange literally did have infallible vision of the future (as opposed to Venat, who got a single testimony told by someone who we later discovered definitely didn't have the whole picture), so I saw people arguing 'it's absurd that he planned all of this when so much relies on luck', and... well, he didn't. A lot of that success really did come down to luck. But what they really did with that information wasn't 'set up for a random animal to free Ant-Man five years in the future', it was 'do everything in our power to set things up right, and then cross our fingers and hope fate turns our way'.

Venat's plan had a chance of working, even if it was only a chance. Nobody else's did.

...and then you have to add in that this is the end of a fairly long story. The culmination of multiple heroes' journeys (and a few villains'). Of course that's going to read like the plan was luck-reliant, that's not a bad thing, because it means the characters mattered. Is Lord of the Rings a bad story because the plan to get Frodo all the way to Mt. Doom seemed pretty unlikely?

I couldn't understand time travel story:

Venat can't give you "Elpis flower" if she does not know your existence in Elpis and you cannot exist in Elpis if Venat can't give you "Elpis flower".

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Insertusernamehere

I couldn't understand time travel story:

Venat can't give you "Elpis flower" if she does not know your existence in Elpis and you cannot exist in Elpis if Venat can't give you "Elpis flower".

---

It's a Causal Loop. Event A (meeting in Elpis) must occur for everything leading up to event B (Venat giving flower) to occur, which eventually results in the time travel that leads to Event A. Both Events must always happen, and there's no way to know where it started or ended. In essence, a "Chicken and Egg" paradox.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

It's a Causal Loop. Event A (meeting in Elpis) must occur for everything leading up to event B (Venat giving flower) to occur, which eventually results in the time travel that leads to Event A. Both Events must always happen, and there's no way to know where it started or ended. In essence, a "Chicken and Egg" paradox.

---

It looks like "reverse grandfather paradox" :3 or.. I am missed something in story.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cleretic

Venat's plan had a chance of working, even if it was only a chance. Nobody else's did.

---

There is nothing in game that supports this.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rulakir

There is nothing in game that supports this.

---

Uhh, the ENDING of the story? As far a no one else...true....I suppose


Though I do feel her plan also had to be contingent on letting certain people be villains. Which probably makes it more interesting in her not speaking ill of Elidibus, as he had to play his part in order for the plan to work :P

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ddwarbird

Depends on your perspective, is Meteion winning really such a bad thing? Is there any point to saving a planet that has seen countless slaughters and evils from different species living there and will continue to do that even after this threat has been dealt with? Is it really worth it?

---

"Why not let Reapers harvest the whole galaxy every 50k years, we're going to die or eff ourselves anyway".

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rulakir

There is nothing in game that supports this.

---

Emet-Selch says this, directly.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Rulakir

Why would Emet sacrifice his own people he's trying to make whole again through rejoinings? He says to the WoL during the lift cutscene, "Should you survive the remaining calamities, you will become our equal. A complete existence in a complete world."

---

Well he said it so who knows. Maybe we as the Wol being Azem were special and he may have hoped that we would join them again. But he says that the rest of the source will be sacrificied and when everyone looked angry he was all like "are you angry that you will be offered to Zodiark?". So yes for me that means that he included all the people that would have survived.

And about the second sacrifice. The races that seemingly exist on the first and the source (and the 13 shard too seeing those survivors) must have existed before the sundering to be on all those split planets. For me it makes the most sense that they existed either as new races when Zodiark brought life back or they were created as kind of familiars by the Ancient.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KariTheFox

Yes, there were a lot of variables that Venat did not and could not have accounted for. But that's because her "plan" was not a intricate rube goldberg machine she set up for us to follow. Her plan only went as far as making sure there was someone stronger than her, who could travel to Ultima Thule and confront Meteion.

---

Why didn't her plan account for someone being faster than her? You know, since Meteion could easily just... Run away and never be caught?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cleretic

Emet-Selch says this, directly.

---

Emet-Selch also says that his ideals were inviolably correct, that the Ancients did have the will to live, and that Venat's plan had him showing up at the very end as a lynchpin. And a lot of arguments at play in this thread rely on ignoring all of these things.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Veloran

Why didn't her plan account for someone being faster than her? You know, since Meteion could easily just... Run away and never be caught?

---

Well, first of all. The Ragnorak and presuambly the moon ship were both pretty fast. The WoL could just walk back to the Ragnorak and ask the bunnies to chase that bird if it came to that.

And Meteion running away from her nest means running away from all the dynamis and siphoned souls that were powering the final days.

Edit: Also, frankly. I think you're picking nits to sidestep my point that Venat ultimately, is putting her faith and trust in us to do what she couldn't.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by KariTheFox

Well, first of all. The Ragnorak and presuambly the moon ship were both pretty fast. The WoL could just walk back to the Ragnorak and ask the bunnies to chase that bird if it came to that.

---

The ship doesn't have infinite fuel. Even if Meteion ran, she could just gather the Dynamis back to her and restart the Final Days at a later date.

Quote:

---

Edit: Also, frankly. I think you're picking nits to sidestep my point that Venat ultimately, is putting her faith and trust in us to do what she couldn't.

---

She's very selectively faithful.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Veloran

Emet-Selch also says that his ideals were inviolably correct, that the Ancients did have the will to live, and that Venat's plan had him showing up at the very end as a lynchpin. And a lot of arguments at play in this thread rely on ignoring all of these things.

---

Yeah, his whole thing there was basically 'I admit your plan worked, and that I'm probably here right now as part of it, but that doesn't mean I have to like it'. Emet-Selch was also a man of his principles, even if his principles caused genocides, and even in death (and rebirth, and death again) refused to betray them.

Neither side capitulated on their morals. Nor should they have; neither side was cleanly and definitively morally right, even if one side happened to be strategically right. That's the whole idea of that conflict, and why it is intentionally left an open question: even though her plan worked, it may not have been the morally right thing to do.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cleretic

Neither side capitulated on their morals. Nor should they have; neither side was cleanly and definitively morally right, even if one side happened to be strategically right. That's the whole idea of that conflict, and why it is intentionally left an open question: even though her plan worked, it may not have been the morally right thing to do.

---

Yeah, not so sure that's how it's presented. I'm also not so sure that an argument of strategy can even be made when one side didn't even know they were in a war while the other was given a roadmap.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Veloran

Yeah, not so sure that's how it's presented. I'm also not so sure that an argument of strategy can even be made when one side didn't even know they were in a war while the other was given a roadmap.

---

Agreed. I think a major issue people have is while the game may mean one thing…it certainly isn’t presented that way. Hence why i keep saying it just seems like a heavily biased stance.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by QT_Melon

As far a no one else...true....I suppose

---

It was that part, specifically. It was late and I was getting cranky, so I figured it best to keep it short. :P

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Alleo

Well he said it so who knows.

---

I'll be frank, I don't even remember why we're debating this. I'm not sure I've agreed with Cilia on anything, but he was right that it's irrelevant because none of Venat's motives as presented in EW relate to protecting the new life.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Veloran

Emet-Selch also says that his ideals were inviolably correct, that the Ancients did have the will to live, and that Venat's plan had him showing up at the very end as a lynchpin. And a lot of arguments at play in this thread rely on ignoring all of these things.

---

This. As much as I love Emet, he's also in no position to know what mankind was capable of had they been given the information and the same luxury of a few thousand years to devise a plan. This is the same man who was completely ignorant of dynamis until Elpis, he's not all knowing.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Veloran

Yeah, not so sure that's how it's presented. I'm also not so sure that an argument of strategy can even be made when one side didn't even know they were in a war while the other was given a roadmap.

---

The roadmap we gave her sucked, and most of her actual plan was completely separate from it. As I've seen it explained, while we told her the plan as we understood it, we had no idea at the time that it was actually her Plan B.

But also, absolutely nothing says that she actually stuck to what we told her because it's what we told her. In fact it's mentioned several times, including by Venat/Hydaelyn herself, that she and her allies tried other ways. They just didn't work out.

There's also two different things that make the story seem tilted towards Hydaelyn's side:
A: We got a story tilted heavily towards Zodiark's side already, it was called Shadowbringers. (And I hated it as much then as you do this now.) So from the greater view, we have an equally-sided debate, it's just that it took a couple years to get the counterpoint, and people are very susceptible to recency bias.
B: While it's very much written and framed that we as external viewers can see the equality of the sides at the time, most of the characters in the story are not part of that debate; they're from ten thousand years after the ship sailed on Plan Hydaelyn, trying to come to terms with cosmic revelations and the goddamn apocalypse. They are having an entirely different conversation, and so learning the fact 'our god loves us and had a plan in motion' is FAR more important information than 'also it turns out our god was more secretive than people would have liked at the time'.

Having just rewatched the scene on this character, it's not clear what the Ancients in the "Sundering" cutscene intended to sacrifice. They appear to be offering themselves, but the scene isn't literal, so mayhap the sacrifices just weren't rendered or shown for brevity's sake.

Either way, her main arguments against the faithful is that sorrow was always there (they'd just been spared it for a while), and that sacrificing the future to bring back the past is unwise and weak. She also sunders the world not because she has no faith in mankind but because she has faith in mankind, even though they've lost all faith in themselves and refuse to (ahem) forge ahead into an uncertain future. By sundering the world and eliminating the temptation of using Zodiark for whatever they want, she successfully forces mankind to rise to Hermes' challenge (or less charitably gambles everything on being able to do as much).

Emet-Selch never capitulates on his ideals, but he does acknowledge that Venat's methods had succeeded where his own would have failed.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cilia

Having just rewatched the scene on this character, it's not clear what the Ancients in the "Sundering" cutscene intended to sacrifice. They appear to be offering themselves, but the scene isn't literal, so mayhap the sacrifices just weren't rendered or shown for brevity's sake.

---

Love the rest of your post, but it's worth clarifying: the Ancient crowd in the post-Elpis cutscene are almost definitely the second of three intended sacrifices that we learned about from Fake Hythlodaeus in Shadowbringers. The detail that there were three sacrifices was extremely lost at the time, because the second one only came up in a single text box in a very long infodump while the first and third were very clearly important, but the crowd scene matches up to what we heard of the second: that after the beasts of the End of Days had been stopped by Zodiark, the world was still in a pretty bad state and they beseeched Zodiark to do things like 'stop the fires' and 'make the wind blow again'.

Afterwards, we can reason that while this was an absolutely well-meaning sacrifice, it was the wrong one, and it was possible for them to solve this problem in a smaller, more sustainable way. The Tales from the Shadows story about Azem actually tells us this; it was quite possible to use creation magic to solve natural disasters, it was just that Azem was the only one that was actively taking that angle.

...incidentally, the conditions around the second sacrifice actually resemble the things that happen when elemental crystals in Final Fantasy games go awry; Final Fantasy V and Bravely Default 2 both came to mind for me. I feel like that was intentional, but I don't know if it was 'easter egg for people who recognize it' intentional, or 'parallel problem so you can tell they picked wrong' intentional.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cleretic

The roadmap we gave her sucked, and most of her actual plan was completely separate from it. As I've seen it explained, while we told her the plan as we understood it, we had no idea at the time that it was actually her Plan B.

But also, absolutely nothing says that she actually stuck to what we told her because it's what we told her. In fact it's mentioned several times, including by Venat/Hydaelyn herself, that she and her allies tried other ways. They just didn't work out.

---

Just a coincidence that it all ended up exactly the same and resulted in her fulfilling a promise made to WoL.

Quote:

---

There's also two different things that make the story seem tilted towards Hydaelyn's side:

---

In addition to a recency effect and the fact that the protagonists were already defacto agents of Hydaelyn, I would argue that the story goes out of it's way to paint Venat in a glowingly positive light every chance it can. The standout example being, of course, the sundering cutscene. Which is ultimately massively fraudulent to what actually happened and serves only to paint Venat as a wise moral crusader and anyone standing against her as petty, small-minded, and antagonistic fools who are willfully ignorant of her "well-reasoned" argument.

I would actually suggest that the reason this was the case is because they were gunning for the happiest and most straightforwardly-uplifting ending possible. And because people were already given to liking Emet-Selch and Elidibus from Shadowbringers, and they really wanted people to like Venat, actually having a scene pitting them against each other wasn't feasible. So instead of showing the actual sundering, which would either paint one side worse than the other or at least leave both very morally ambiguous, they just show Venat versus thirteen strawmen.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Veloran

Which is ultimately massively fraudulent to what actually happened

---

How? How is it fraudulent, as opposed to just dramatic?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Veloran

In addition to a recency effect and the fact that the protagonists were already defacto agents of Hydaelyn, I would argue that the story goes out of it's way to paint Venat in a glowingly positive light every chance it can. The standout example being, of course, the sundering cutscene. Which is ultimately massively fraudulent to what actually happened and serves only to paint Venat as a wise moral crusader and anyone standing against her as petty, small-minded, and antagonistic fools who are willfully ignorant of her "well-reasoned" argument.

---

I agree. From the very beginning of the game when you log in she’s already recruiting you. Throughout the whole game you’re referred to as one of her children, her champion, told “may you ever walk in the light of the crystal…” And I’m sitting here like I’m not your child or representative, I’m just defending myself from people attacking me. Never wanted to join anything. It’s obvious that the Scions are devoted to her the whole time. Both sides look like a cult for their god, but there was an obvious bias toward the Hydaelyn cult imo.

That metaphorical cutscene just made Venat look self-righteous and lowered the opinion I had of her after getting to know her in Elpis.

It looks like I’m just not a fan of the storytelling in EW at all. With HW being my favorite storyline, I probably prefer when they stick to more local stories instead of having us fight literal concepts. At this point I’ve let my sub run out and I’m thinking of keeping an eye on the direction SE goes by occasionally watching streamers.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Cleretic

How? How is it fraudulent, as opposed to just dramatic?

---

Everything that occurred in the cutscene is untrue and did not happen...? It doesn't reflect reality.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Veloran

Everything that occurred in the cutscene is untrue and did not happen...? It doesn't reflect reality.

---

Final Days started? Happened.
Hythlodaeus sacrificing himself? Happened.
Venat trying to convince people to come to terms with the sadness and move on? Happened.
People ignoring her words and going for another sacrifice? Happened.
Venat finally deciding to become Hydaelyn and Sunder the world? Happened.

I do not see anything untrue, and I'm wondering what exactly you're looking at that is untrue.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

Final Days started? Happened.
Hythlodaeus sacrificing himself? Happened.
Venat trying to convince people to come to terms with the sadness and move on? Happened.
People ignoring her words and going for another sacrifice? Happened.
Venat finally deciding to become Hydaelyn and Sunder the world? Happened.

I do not see anything untrue, and I'm wondering what exactly you're looking at that is untrue.

---

The story didn't go in a direction he wanted, so he's attacking it. Which is fine that he didn't like. Myself and many others loved it and that scene.

What helped me is that I didn't go into EW with any preconceived notions. Speculations? Yes. But I had no beliefs about Hydalaen and Zodiark being good or evil. I didn't go in expecting a bunch if characters to die. So for me, I just got to enjoy the story without it going against my pre-established head canon, which helped immensely.

I just got to spend a lot of fun times with characters I've loved from 2.0 and new characters I met in this expac. That's all that mattered to me.

A lot of bodies in the thread like, "Sacrifices bad. Wanting the zenith of the Past, bad!" Ignoring that everything that could possibly be sacrificed was also robbed of agency and killed by the Sundering all the same.

"That Light split the world and every life upon it!"

From the tiniest termite to the broad, busty breast of her protégé, Venat sundered all Etheirysian life into 14 fragments reminiscent of their true selves, rapidly ending all life. And in this setting, the Lifestream is part of all life, and that got sundered too. Each shard has its own, and they're linked by some vaguely defined mechanism, but the Rejoinings and Soul mechanics previously demonstrated by the story's concept of Calamities/Soul Density show this to be the case.

Unfortunately, it has the unintended consequence of meaning that Venat also sundered most of the dead, too. And the unborn. And those awaiting rebirth. It turns out that in some, so far unexplained, maneuver that a few of the Ascians and those within Zodiark weren't sundered, somehow.

Then it's even told to us that the shards rely on the Source as a nucleus of sorts, so that the stakes rise higher, but this also intrinsically means that the shards are explicitly lesser to the Source, too. This opens up the sticky mess, that is a fact, that Hydaelyn's Sundering caused there to be Nucleus Lives and Orbital Lives, the Orbital Lives aren't even on the same dimensional plane. They can't even be made to come and combat Meteion, unless they are Ascian or unless they are Rejoined. Even the mechanism most important to our time conundrum and story came from an alternate Source, made by Nucleus Lives.

It's actually an incredibly complex vilification, and the real rub comes from essentially being told by the story to push that complexity out of your mind.

"Don't think too hard about all this, just go out and save the universe. It's for your own good."

"Her cannibalization of her own people was noble. They was no other way to live and win."

Survival is not intrinsically noble.

"Killing and eating my companion on the mountainside was noble. There was no other way for me to live."

It is actually a choice that debases her. Literally everyone who has said that the Ancients couldn't find a way and had no future are just echoing what Emet-selch said about the sundered.

So no, Hydaelyn wasn't a good girl all along. She was a survivor, willing to be morally unsound to live at the expense of everyone she ever knew.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

Final Days started? Happened.
Hythlodaeus sacrificing himself? Happened.
Venat trying to convince people to come to terms with the sadness and move on? Happened.
People ignoring her words and going for another sacrifice? Happened.
Venat finally deciding to become Hydaelyn and Sunder the world? Happened.

I do not see anything untrue, and I'm wondering what exactly you're looking at that is untrue.

---

Do I really need to explain to you why a sparknotes montage metaphor version of several different events happening at different times isn't reflective of the truth? Final Days happened? Yes, and then ended. Hythlodaeus sacrificing himself? Yes, not in that scene. Venat trying to convince people to her cause? Yes, not during the Final Days and not with the dialog we're actually delivered. Venat becoming Hydaelyn? Yes, not then and not after her speech there to those people.

To say that scene is true is to say that this scene is true to the fallout of the Thirty Years War - Which is to say yes, but also absolutely not at all.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Vyrerus

Survival is not intrinsically noble.

"Killing and eating my companion on the mountainside was noble. There was no other way for me to live."

It is actually a choice that debases her. Literally everyone who has said that the Ancients couldn't find a way and had no future are just echoing what Emet-selch said about the sundered.

So no, Hydaelyn wasn't a good girl all along. She was a survivor, willing to be morally unsound to live at the expense of everyone she ever knew.

---

Very well said. And not just survival but I think it also puts forth the question of how far is someone willing to go for what they believe in? To what end? And then whoever survives is the victor who gets to tell the tale.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Vyrerus

A lot of bodies in the thread like, "Sacrifices bad. Wanting the zenith of the Past, bad!" Ignoring that everything that could possibly be sacrificed was also robbed of agency and killed by the Sundering all the same.

---

I guess since everything was mortal after that, the sundering did kill many years later but right now we dont even know if the sundering act itself kills. IMO it makes no sense if it does because you need something to be alive to continue living.

What other way should it have gone? We are shown quite well that the Ancients went against their own code of honor (Emet says in Elpis that those that sacrificed themselves would be held in the highest of honor and trying to bring them back goes against this) and even when the planet was fine again they turned to Zodiark with a plan to sacrifice more to get the Amaurotines inside Zodiark back. That life they would have chosen again and again over time (since they would need a huge amount of aether to exchange the souls) would have been lost inside of Zodiark forever. Now it can at least be reborn again.

Zodiark was no long term solution even Emet says that at the end. Either Meteion would have destroyed it anyway by singing her song of oblivion or the Ancients would end as others planets did that tried to take suffering competely out of their life.

What she has done brought suffering. She does not try to hide it behind kind words. She herself says that it was horrible. But ultimately it was the solution that lets mankind continue, that stopped the faster death of the universe and that released all those captured souls from Meteion into the universe again.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Ryaz

The story didn't go in a direction he wanted, so he's attacking it. Which is fine that he didn't like. Myself and many others loved it and that scene.

What helped me is that I didn't go into EW with any preconceived notions. Speculations? Yes. But I had no beliefs about Hydalaen and Zodiark being good or evil. I didn't go in expecting a bunch if characters to die. So for me, I just got to enjoy the story without it going against my pre-established head canon, which helped immensely.

I just got to spend a lot of fun times with characters I've loved from 2.0 and new characters I met in this expac. That's all that mattered to me.

---

Yeah, I don't have a problem with someone not liking a thing. Hell, I didn't like all the Amaurot stuff in Shadowbringers, I get it.

But this has just become frustrating and sad. It's okay to not like a thing, but trying to declare the thing just factually wrong because of it, that's... I don't know. Grasping at straws to legitimize what's ultimately just an opinion, I guess. Mixed in with a very 'lore nerd' way of thinking about it all, I guess; 'if I don't like this story, and the main thing I care about is in-universe facts, then that must mean its in-universe facts are wrong'.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Alleo

I guess since everything was mortal after that

---

The new identities died more quickly, losing most of their memories, and went on to be new person after new person, some with so much of a new identity that they make fun of the old, if by chance they do get their old memories back. They gained diseases unheard of, pestilence with no cure etc. The person they were, the life they lead, the homes they had, the loves they shared, totally destroyed.

What Venat could have done with all of the knowledge at her disposal was ask of her followers to be willingly Sundered individually in order to have the requisite low aetherial concentration in their form to receive of Dynamis, and then test through that to make a team of Meteion-killers who might even be able to manipulate Dynamis at will. The Ancients had far more knowledge of all things aetherial, and if she could build the moon ship, then I see no reason why she couldn't create something to build a ship equal or greater to the Ragnarok.

There are plenty of other possibilities, but listing them is fruitless. All that is important is that there were other ways, they just wouldn't make the story that was being told. We might see them in between patch stories on the Lodestone.

I have to say I'm amazed and baffled at how many people on the forums seem to think Venat was some kind of malicious, evil person who sundered the world on her own selfish whim.

The truth is Venat was a good person. Emet-Selch was a good person. But when faced with a world ending event, they both did what they believed was best for the survival of the planet, they just disagreed on the direction it should go in. Emet's group wanted to return things to the way they were, Venat's group (yes, group, she did NOT act alone. Believing so completely disregards what we learned in 5.2) believed the only way to survive was to move forward and not cling to what they lost. They didn't have any easy options. They both had to make extremely difficult choices, whether it was repeated sacrifices that might bring back the world they had, but could have still been vulnerable to Meteion again due to their inability to move forward or gambling on sundering everyone and forcing them though millenia of suffering and death to help them grow stronger, while allow them to better manipulate Dynamis. There was no "good" outcome from this.

And we don't know what happened between our time on Elpis and the actual Sundering. For all we know, Venat tried to find other ways to stop the Final Days and failed. We don't know who she brought into the circle. All we know is the bits and pieces we saw from the memories in 5.2 and 6.0.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Veloran

Just a coincidence that it all ended up exactly the same and resulted in her fulfilling a promise made to WoL.


In addition to a recency effect and the fact that the protagonists were already defacto agents of Hydaelyn, I would argue that the story goes out of it's way to paint Venat in a glowingly positive light every chance it can. The standout example being, of course, the sundering cutscene. Which is ultimately massively fraudulent to what actually happened and serves only to paint Venat as a wise moral crusader and anyone standing against her as petty, small-minded, and antagonistic fools who are willfully ignorant of her "well-reasoned" argument.

I would actually suggest that the reason this was the case is because they were gunning for the happiest and most straightforwardly-uplifting ending possible. And because people were already given to liking Emet-Selch and Elidibus from Shadowbringers, and they really wanted people to like Venat, actually having a scene pitting them against each other wasn't feasible. So instead of showing the actual sundering, which would either paint one side worse than the other or at least leave both very morally ambiguous, they just show Venat versus thirteen strawmen.

---

Have to agree with this. I think some people are missing the point here. It is a dramatic retelling that is only true to a limited degree and omits several major details, to the point that some people took away from it that it altered the original sequence of events, which is outlined here; we can surmise it did not do this but I can see why people get this impression. The scene amounts to a fast-forward rendition of everything that happened without really giving an accurate depiction of the debate that ensued amongst the ancients following Zodiark stabilising the world, and appears to be intended to bring the audience up to speed on events detailed in text up to that point, sometimes in sidequests or short stories, with the goal you mentioned in mind - I'm of the same view as why they did it this way, i.e. the bolded. Although I'd say that the scene shown made her look utterly unreasonable to me. To approach a bunch of people as their very star was dying and as they lost the majority of their kind and offer such platitudes? Can't see why anyone would have cause to take her seriously, and without offering a true account of what had occurred, they had no reason to. The only way to make her not look completely out of touch with reality in that scene is the requirement of abiding by the original timeline with the goal of defeating Meteion in mind, meaning she'd do what she did one way or another, and that more or less absolves her of anything she does in a very forced manner and leaves open a number of what-ifs.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Vyrerus

A lot of bodies in the thread like, "Sacrifices bad. Wanting the zenith of the Past, bad!" Ignoring that everything that could possibly be sacrificed was also robbed of agency and killed by the Sundering all the same.

[...]

So no, Hydaelyn wasn't a good girl all along. She was a survivor, willing to be morally unsound to live at the expense of everyone she ever knew.

---

Good summary of the metaphysics involved - in the end it all hangs on the "stick to the original timeline" proviso, IMO.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Ryaz

I have to say I'm amazed and baffled at how many people on the forums seem to think Venat was some kind of malicious, evil person who sundered the world on her own selfish whim.

The truth is Venat was a good person. Emet-Selch was a good person. But when faced with a world ending event, they both did what they believed was best for the survival of the planet, they just disagreed on the direction it should go in. Emet's group wanted to return things to the way they were, Venat's group (yes, group, she did NOT act alone. Believing so completely disregards what we learned in 5.2) believed the only way to survive was to move forward and not cling to what they lost. They didn't have any easy options. They both had to make extremely difficult choices, whether it was repeated sacrifices that might bring back the world they had, but could have still been vulnerable to Meteion again due to their inability to move forward or gambling on sundering everyone and forcing them though millenia of suffering and death to help them grow stronger, while allow them to better manipulate Dynamis. There was no "good" outcome from this.

And we don't know what happened between our time on Elpis and the actual Sundering. For all we know, Venat tried to find other ways to stop the Final Days and failed. We don't know who she brought into the circle. All we know is the bits and pieces we saw from the memories in 5.2 and 6.0.

---

We can reason that Venat was trying to find other ways about things, from the fact that her group in Anamnesis is talking about attempts to convince the Convocation. If their whole outlook was 'heads down, work on the Sundering because that's the only thing that will work', I don't think they would have bothered with that. You don't make those sorts of pleas unless you have hope people listen to them.

But you're absolutely right. Venat poses an interesting moral question: is a horrifying deed done by a good person an evil deed? In the real world it's a difficult question because real people are complicated and weird, but in fiction... it is stated essentially as fact that Venat is A Good Person, but does that inherently make the Sundering A Good Deed? Instead claiming Venat to be somehow inherently evil just dismisses the complexity of the entire thing, and to me kind of smacks of 'didn't want to grapple with a hard question, and so is trying to force it to be easy'.

There is a mirror to this question, too, in Emet: 'how much evil must a good person do before they themselves are also evil'? I could probably word that better, but similarly, it's more or less confirmed that Emet was A Good Man back in Elpis. So, at what point were his previous actions so reprehensible that he could be considered 'evil'? Was it giving the go-ahead for the third sacrifice? Was it deciding to go ahead with the Rejoinings, sundered lives be damned? Was it the first actual Rejoining? Was it when he made an empire specifically to be terrible? Was it none, was he still 'a good man' by the time of Shadowbringers? I think it's an interesting thing to consider, and it would be lazy to throw it all away by saying 'actually Emet was already awful back in Elpis'.

Imagine being forced into a choice because it was good for the planet. Say like being gay and being forced into ONLY HAVING heterosexual relationships because you need to populate. Or like in the 40s, if you were grieving over the loss of a family member the best way to deal with it was a lobotomy (yeah referencing Bojack in this case because it actually also referenced what was deemed right). Years later it was only found morally grey because that was the solution. Even though later found out you could donate to fertility clinics or could get counseling - but was told years ago those were your only options...