Who knew the 6.15 Omega Quests… (Spoilers)

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Originally Posted by thegreatonemal

You seem to be misremembering. You tend to do that a lot. New game plus exist ya know.

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I mean, you forgot your name is Oatmeal so I wouldn't be talking about anyone misremembering. >_>

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Originally Posted by thegreatonemal

Did you both just forget the parts where she willingly got caught up in flow and agreed to become the word of the mother? Did you both both forget that she willingly let her soul be consumed by Ryne's. Of course you both forgot the part about Venat bringing her soul back to the Source so she can be reincarnated there. Slipped your minds.

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No one forget about that you certified wonderful person.

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Originally Posted by Kozh

Dry of aether lmao. What about the big crystal she hoards behind her? Or, idk, she seems fine when appearing in front of us in EW. Better yet, maybe try to prevent the flood of light by telling ardbert to not over do it?

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I remember a long cutscene where she explains why she didn’t use the crystal and for what it was intended to be used for. I’d suggest rewatching!

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Originally Posted by Theodric

I was referring to the cost for the protagonists and sympathetic antagonists. There's nothing remotely sympathetic to me regarding Venat or her equally subversive allies. Unless, of course, she misled them and they unwittingly aided in the destruction of the Unsundered world...?

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I find her and her allies very sympathetic! It’s not easy when your whole society is damning itself to oblivion through human sacrifice! :)

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Originally Posted by Theodric

Either way, when I speak of balance I am referring to situations where the antagonists emerge with some loved one, goal or ideal intact instead of bizarrely losing absolutely everything. It's a dull and rather predictable trajectory that I don't care for. Certainly there's some here who do and they're free to do as much.

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Emet has Hyth, Gaius has Werlyt and his daughter who he attends festivals with. Most of the villains who lose everything also attempt to destroy everything so not much empathy from me honestly.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

I also didn't get the impression that Venat cared all that much for any given individual beyond, perhaps, the player character. (Perfect for those 'Brave Little Spark' fantasies that some have, I suppose!) She had some vague supposed love for 'humanity itself' and a rather strange way of showcasing it.

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I disagree, and think her love was genuine. A person doesn’t burn their soul to ash and commit to millennia of struggle if they don’t have strong feelings. We know she cared for the Watcher, Argos, the Loporrits, Minfilia/Krile, the Scions, and of course the WoL. And that’s just the ones we’ve personally interacted with. I think you have to go out of your way to think she didn’t care about individuals in her life as well.

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Originally Posted by Kozh

No one forget about that you certified wonderful person.

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They clearly did. How could they say things that are directly contradicted otherwise? Would you care to give them a refresher, since you didn't forget an all.

Up until the Omega quests, I had been operating under the assumption Venat's faction had formed after the Final Days were stopped in response to the whole issue of the third sacrifice to Zodiark, but now that it's been specified that it was before that, it just makes me wonder what the heck they were doing while the world burned.

Did they choose to simply keep their hands clean of the Zodiark business, or did they aid in finding that solution, knowing full well what it would eventually entail?

I don't think I'll ever really feel entirely at peace until we know precisely what details Venat did choose to disclose to her followers.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I don't think I'll ever really feel entirely at peace until we know precisely what details Venat did choose to disclose to her followers.

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Unfortunately, it's unlikely we'll ever know, which is something I've been struggling with lately. They went all in on Venat being 'good' to the extent that they wouldn't show events accurately in EW likely because it would've made her look bad. I feel like the foundational lore of the game as a whole was undermined for the sake of this one character and the personification they committed to of her.

Also, I would find it deeply unsettling if we discover that her summoners knew everything. I've actually been giving them the benefit of the doubt that they did not know the truth in its entirety because 12 people on board with eradicating their race for a plan that was not even guaranteed to work is unfathomable to me.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Up until the Omega quests, I had been operating under the assumption Venat's faction had formed after the Final Days were stopped in response to the whole issue of the third sacrifice to Zodiark, but now that it's been specified that it was before that, it just makes me wonder what the heck they were doing while the world burned.

Did they choose to simply keep their hands clean of the Zodiark business, or did they aid in finding that solution, knowing full well what it would eventually entail?

I don't think I'll ever really feel entirely at peace until we know precisely what details Venat did choose to disclose to her followers.

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I'm expecting some really cringe and desperate writing in a least one of the short stories that will come with the Rising event to try and address this

When I was given the question during the new Omega quests, I ultimately chose to go with the response "None of them were." Before I disclose my reasoning for why I'd like to state that I don't intend to bash any characters here. I found Venat, Hermes, and Emet-Selch to all be compelling, even if I personally didn't agree with some of their actions. I'm simply looking at their actions from an objective perspective for the purpose of giving an answer.

If we hadn't been given the option to say that all of them or none of them were justified, I would've picked Venat. Out of the three, she had by far the best reason (preventing a mass extinction) for doing what she did. It could be argued that the Ancients were already doomed from the moment the Meteia succumbed to despair, as they lacked the ability to manipulate dynamis and therefore could only stall the Final Days rather than ending them at their source. It sounds contradictory, but in committing what was essentially omnicide, Venat ended up preventing the extinction of all life. That being said, I still wouldn't call the sundering justifiable, even if it may have been necessary. While it may have ultimately led to Venat achieving her goal, it still caused an extraordinary amount of suffering. She admits herself that "there was no kindness nor justice in the tragedy [she] wrought."

I sympathize with Hermes quite a bit. I completely agreed with his frustration over how callously the Ancients treated their creations and I found him to be a deeply relatable character. That being said, I think we can all agree that his decision to help Meteion escape was objectively wrong. In choosing for the Ancients to be tested, he allowed an event to occur that would harm all life on Etheirys. The fact that such a gentle and caring person was driven to do such a thing is nothing short of tragic.

Emet-Selch's decision to bring about the rejoinings in an attempt to restore his people was understandable but ultimately in the wrong. He saw the sundered as inferior and thought them unworthy of life. His actions caused untold amounts of suffering and the destruction of seven worlds, essentially omnicide but committed multiple times rather than once. It could be argued that since he was tempered by Zodiark he technically had no agency in the actions he took, but I disagree with this notion. We see that the extent to which a person can be tempered varies, and considering that he still displayed a sense of self-awareness, his case seems to be fairly mild. While being tempered may have made him somewhat more inclined to follow Zodiark than others, he ultimately did Zodiark's bidding because he had a personal stake in the matter and genuinely agreed with his mission, not because he was forced to. That being said, he's one of my favorite antagonists in any media ever.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

Up until the Omega quests, I had been operating under the assumption Venat's faction had formed after the Final Days were stopped in response to the whole issue of the third sacrifice to Zodiark, but now that it's been specified that it was before that, it just makes me wonder what the heck they were doing while the world burned.

Did they choose to simply keep their hands clean of the Zodiark business, or did they aid in finding that solution, knowing full well what it would eventually entail?

I don't think I'll ever really feel entirely at peace until we know precisely what details Venat did choose to disclose to her followers.

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We’ve known that her and her group were acting pre Final Days since EW, given she says that there is “much to be done” and that she will need to “carefully consider who can be trusted, and bring them into the fold.”

On the matter of how much her group knew, we have a couple of verified facts that we can use as a guide.

1. The Watcher suspects his Ancient counterpart to have known more of the Final Days than he does (Omega quest line)
2. Venats group knew her fate and were despondent over it (Omega)
3. Venat was intending to “bring others into the fold” (Endwalker)
4. The group at Anamnesis knew that Zodiark wasn’t enough and that the Convocation would not be able to address that fact (5.3)

I think we can conclude they knew quite a bit.

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Originally Posted by Rulakir

I feel like the foundational lore of the game as a whole was undermined for the sake of this one character and the personification they committed to of her.

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Agreed on that exact wording, though perhaps not to the details – in my case, I regard the undermining to be trying that they invented this new narrative of why she caused the Sundering that doesn't line up with anything before it, and cast her in a new and unflattering light in the process.

I have to wonder if the scene at the Mothercrystal was written before all of the middle part of the story was in its current form, and Venat's motives and actions got more morally ambiguous afterwards and the writers sort of lost sight of the ending as they hammered out the middle.

It drifted into my mind last night that somewhere in all the interviews they said that they weren't settled on whether Venat directly became Hydaelyn until some way into the production? If that's correct then the Mothercrystal scene could have been written primarily with Hydaelyn the entity created to act as a mother-goddess, and not directly a continuation of Venat.