*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

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Originally Posted by Teah_Kaye

I'll concede that they might have given him a little extra time in the spotlight for the sake of fanservice, but I was responding to someone who said they brought him back solely for the purpose of fanservice.

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I thought they were saying it about his appearance in Ultima Thule specifically. Apologies if I misunderstood.

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Originally Posted by Teah_Kaye

I'll concede that they might have given him a little extra time in the spotlight for the sake of fanservice, but I was responding to someone who said they brought him back solely for the purpose of fanservice.

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Technically i didnt say "solely," I just acknowleged that his appearance was in part due to fanservice, But no biggie.

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Originally Posted by Denishia

His voice actor is skilled and fits the character- and exudes a negative charisma that made his choice of narrator for Endwalker my biggest problem with the Expansion.

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Actually, I didn't mind him being the narrator this time around. Emet like us had a vested interest in safeguarding the planets future and was arguably the most passionate about it across the entire cast I feel.

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Originally Posted by Rulakir

It's a cycle. Several new(er) posters have found their way to this thread*, possibly because word has been getting around that if you didn't like EW the official forums are one of the few places you can discuss it. Reddit is still aggressively downvoting anyone who doesn't lavish it with praise. At any rate, they post, the usual defenders show up, then the usual detractors have to show up to counterbalance, and then we end up back at square one.

* It's a shame out of all of them this is the thread that persisted. Both "On Venat's Role in the Story" and "[Spoilers] Venat's motive" were much better.

Some of it is probably also a remaining need to rant about it. Personally, I was so disappointed with EW I considered for weeks whether or not I wanted to quit. It's not like venting about it once was enough to work through everything I was thinking and feeling. I think we can all relate to disliking something so much it feels good to ruminate with others who felt similarly. Due to how social media works, you can't post "I hate this" and only attract like-minded people, you will attract people who disagree and then proceed to detail every which way you are wrong and the cycle continues.

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I feel like I am in the case you describe – I have mostly been a Reddit poster, up until Endwalker's release. I found MSQ to be such a disappointment I was flabbergasted to see the widely positive response, I entirely quit /r/ffxiv and now only sporadically posts in the "discussion" subreddit which, according to a comment I read, is more "contrarian" than the main sub. It was pretty hard to feel so isolated from a fandom I had loved so much after Shadowbringers, especially because, in retrospect, I had been way too invested in FFXIV to sort of escape from real life, and once my expectations came crumbling down I was honestly in a rather bad place mentally throughout the month of December. What brought me some solace was reading comments from other disappointed people I could relate to, however few we seemed to be (also – I got over some things in real life, so that got better as well). Now that some of my close friends have also finished MSQ, I can rant with them, and that is a real outlet too. I think I have a Discord discussion that has been pretty much nothing but complaining about EW for like, a month straight now.

This situation is reminding me of mid-10's Game of Thrones – before it became acceptable to say the story development was subpar and the entire thing ended in... a non-satisfactory way, to put it mildly. As a fan of the books who didn't care for the show earlier on, I loved lurking on westeros.org's "Rant and rave without repercussions" threads that popped up after every new episode. Just pure, distilled complaints and expressions of disappointment. It was (shamelessly so) an echo chamber, but one that I imagine was created to counter what felt like an opposite echo chamber.
This present thread here is drawing attention simply because of its number of pages. I feel like it's the place where I can pop my head in and timidly go "hello, is this the Rant and Rave Without Repercussions – Endwalker Edition thread?"... so it's just self-perpetrating.

Now, I think I could rant for several paragraphs about exactly how and why Endwalker let me down in myriad ways – and surprisingly enough, not all of them have to do with Venat – but I will try and make it short and actually relevant to this thread: I feel like Endwalker undid what I loved so much about Shadowbringers, the moral ambiguity of the two sides that each felt like they had their own valid points, by telling me that actually, one side had all the information and ended up factually correct and proven right by how the plot was written. Like some of you in this thread, I very much take issue with how the game feels like it's desperately trying to sell me on Venat while acting sort of coy about it: oh sure, she says herself the Sundering was bad, that it was the source of so much suffering, and oh my god look at her she's metaphorically covered in blood/muck/grime – yet it is presented as unequivocally the right thing to do and ultimately the only way to defeat Meteion, and even Emet, of all people, seems to tell me so in Ultima Thule. And oh, look! Those people in the Dead Ends! Obviously meant to be a parallel to the Ancients, am I right or am I right? Well now, I can sleep easy, knowing that the Ancients were doomed anyway because of their own frivolity/naivety/ignorance/nostalgia/inability to cope/hubris/callousness toward animal lives, because Crystal Mom knows best!

And I honestly do not agree with or believe any of this, both for in-universe reasons and out. According to Emet, which I equate to Word of God out-of-universe tbqh because this whole thing has made me cynical, mankind could have never set foot on Ultima Thule? How so, exactly? We are talking about the civilisation of erudites and scientists who have been shown to be able to create Aether-depleted, Dynamis-capable familiars, right? Familiars that could develop enough knowledge of space travel to guide us all the way to Ultima Thule, correct? Gods damn it, Emet, so maybe you have always been too grumpy to invent star-trekking bunnies and dark matter-powered cute bird lolis, but please do not project your lack of imagination onto everyone else!
The Ra-La strawmen? Yeah. Whatever. I'm sorry for them, and every other planet, but they were not the Ancients. If only because the Ancients were nowhere near as universally "positive" – we know for a fact the Ancients were human with human feelings, both positive and negative, and their society was not "perfect". (On this point, I will contend that Emet's argument of the Ancient world being "paradise" was made from the point of view of a man who spent literally twelve thousand years watching mortal societies live and die, fall prey to disease and wars, while actively trying to empathise by living out full mortal lives, and yet still he could not relate after all these years. A little hyperbole seems understandable, here.) Perhaps, after an untold number of centuries, the Ancients might have become them. Maybe. And so what? Are we going to condemn them for eventually dying out, just like everyone and everything else, including the universe itself?
The Ancients were never going to learn, or cope, or evolve past the trauma? Well, talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy here: not only did she never give them the knowledge to adequately prepare for the Final Days, but she never gave them the time to recover, either. Eventually, the Ancients would have had to deal with the loss of everyone who actually died during the Final Days – the third sacrifice was never going to fix this (nor was it ever intended to). Ah, this third sacrifice that was never really expanded upon in Endwalker. The only thing we do know about it is that it was going to involve only a portion of the new life. Listening to some people talk, you'd think the Ancients were going to make Etheirys some sort of dead planet for their Dark God...

...I, frankly, don't feel like I have the energy right now to spell out everything that bothered me and made me feel very uneasy in Endwalker, try to make sense and know that my post is inevitably going to get dissected to tell me how wrong I am and how dumb my reading of the story is.

tl;dr: Enjoyed ShB because it made the villains compelling and relatable. Sequel is telling me, in more or less subtle ways because it feels like it's trying not to say it outright but the writing is on the wall, that actually they were largely ignorant, their narrative was a dead end and they just, kinda sorta deserved it. It's okay, because we literally just punched Despair in the face at the end of the universe, and those dumb Ancients would have never been able to!

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Originally Posted by Teraq

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Very well thought out post, and i agree with all of it, especially the need to vent. I understand the whole feeling down after finishing the story, especially after all of the promoting they did, the interviews of yoshi p teasing things, the constant delays. I thought it might all be worth it and it just wasn’t for me, and i think the rift it’s created is very telling. The many unanswered questions that are still left despite this being the end of the arc is pretty ridiculous. I agree with all of your points though and i’m happy we have an outlet we can express ourselves in freely without people trying to silence others.

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Originally Posted by Teraq

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Every single bit of this sums up my disappointment with Venat and why I wrote an AU where we get to have our cake and eat it too. The Ancients deserved to have a split timeline where they got to live and have happiness too and I am absolutely disappointed, after my experiences in Elpis, that we did not get that outcome canonically. If G'raha could break time, why not us?

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Originally Posted by Teraq

Now, I think I could rant for several paragraphs about exactly how and why Endwalker let me down in myriad ways – and surprisingly enough, not all of them have to do with Venat – but I will try and make it short and actually relevant to this thread: I feel like Endwalker undid what I loved so much about Shadowbringers, the moral ambiguity of the two sides that each felt like they had their own valid points, by telling me that actually, one side had all the information and ended up factually correct and proven right by how the plot was written. Like some of you in this thread, I very much take issue with how the game feels like it's desperately trying to sell me on Venat while acting sort of coy about it: oh sure, she says herself the Sundering was bad, that it was the source of so much suffering, and oh my god look at her she's metaphorically covered in blood/muck/grime – yet it is presented as unequivocally the right thing to do and ultimately the only way to defeat Meteion, and even Emet, of all people, seems to tell me so in Ultima Thule. And oh, look! Those people in the Dead Ends! Obviously meant to be a parallel to the Ancients, am I right or am I right? Well now, I can sleep easy, knowing that the Ancients were doomed anyway because of their own frivolity/naivety/ignorance/nostalgia/inability to cope/hubris/callousness toward animal lives, because Crystal Mom knows best!

And I honestly do not agree with or believe any of this, both for in-universe reasons and out. According to Emet, which I equate to Word of God out-of-universe tbqh because this whole thing has made me cynical, mankind could have never set foot on Ultima Thule? How so, exactly? We are talking about the civilisation of erudites and scientists who have been shown to be able to create Aether-depleted, Dynamis-capable familiars, right? Familiars that could develop enough knowledge of space travel to guide us all the way to Ultima Thule, correct? Gods damn it, Emet, so maybe you have always been too grumpy to invent star-trekking bunnies and dark matter-powered cute bird lolis, but please do not project your lack of imagination onto everyone else!
The Ra-La strawmen? Yeah. Whatever. I'm sorry for them, and every other planet, but they were not the Ancients. If only because the Ancients were nowhere near as universally "positive" – we know for a fact the Ancients were human with human feelings, both positive and negative, and their society was not "perfect". (On this point, I will contend that Emet's argument of the Ancient world being "paradise" was made from the point of view of a man who spent literally twelve thousand years watching mortal societies live and die, fall prey to disease and wars, while actively trying to empathise by living out full mortal lives, and yet still he could not relate after all these years. A little hyperbole seems understandable, here.) Perhaps, after an untold number of centuries, the Ancients might have become them. Maybe. And so what? Are we going to condemn them for eventually dying out, just like everyone and everything else, including the universe itself?
The Ancients were never going to learn, or cope, or evolve past the trauma? Well, talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy here: not only did she never give them the knowledge to adequately prepare for the Final Days, but she never gave them the time to recover, either. Eventually, the Ancients would have had to deal with the loss of everyone who actually died during the Final Days – the third sacrifice was never going to fix this (nor was it ever intended to). Ah, this third sacrifice that was never really expanded upon in Endwalker. The only thing we do know about it is that it was going to involve only a portion of the new life. Listening to some people talk, you'd think the Ancients were going to make Etheirys some sort of dead planet for their Dark God...

...I, frankly, don't feel like I have the energy right now to spell out everything that bothered me and made me feel very uneasy in Endwalker, try to make sense and know that my post is inevitably going to get dissected to tell me how wrong I am and how dumb my reading of the story is.

tl;dr: Enjoyed ShB because it made the villains compelling and relatable. Sequel is telling me, in more or less subtle ways because it feels like it's trying not to say it outright but the writing is on the wall, that actually they were largely ignorant, their narrative was a dead end and they just, kinda sorta deserved it. It's okay, because we literally just punched Despair in the face at the end of the universe, and those dumb Ancients would have never been able to!

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Very nice summary of what I thought were its weakest points too.

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Originally Posted by Teraq

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Based

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Originally Posted by redheadturk

Every single bit of this sums up my disappointment with Venat and why I wrote an AU where we get to have our cake and eat it too. The Ancients deserved to have a split timeline where they got to live and have happiness too and I am absolutely disappointed, after my experiences in Elpis, that we did not get that outcome canonically. If G'raha could break time, why not us?

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I don't mind that the Ascians/Ancients never got a happy ending, but rather, how they got to that point in the first place. It was more so the fact that they were basically retroactively set up to fail via the abrupt introduction of Dynamis and the expansions theme framing every aspect of their lives as habits that needed to be expunged that rubbed me the wrong way.

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Originally Posted by Pofruin

Thank you for this ray of Hope in nest of Despair that is Lore forum lately.

I do still believe this is incomplete. There must be slightly taller Hytlogann somewhere close. And at least once he should ask: Gee, Spriggades, What do you want to do tonight?

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Spriggodaeus, surely? ;)

What is morally ambiguous about destroying eight worlds? Asking all the Emet-Selch stans.

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Originally Posted by Lium

What is morally ambiguous about destroying eight worlds? Asking all the Emet-Selch stans.

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You need to have the whole picture for that. We need to bring up how the sundering itself made things unstable and the rejoining would be fixing that. Even the devs seem to state its morally ambiguous and repeat the notion that for their plight in particular, its a matter of perspective. The sundered live at the expense of the ancient lives and world. But if we want to apply the same logic we need to apply the same answer to ironworks and their decision to effectively destroy their entire world and then some to resurrect the wol.