Quote Originally Posted by Cilia View Post
My read on it is the aforementioned cross-section doesn't much care; Hydaelyn / Venat sundered the world (all but annihilating Amaurotine civilization and drastically reducing the lifespan of mortal beings) and lied about the origin of her conflict with Zodiark, which is enough to make them irredeemable monsters. Never you mind that Shadowbringers took pains telling us we should at least try to understand people before passing judgment on them, or the possibility the whole thing was an accident.

Flawed characters are necessary for good stories. I'm fine with Venat / Hydaelyn being flawed, but vilifying either to make the Ascians look good in comparison doesn't really fly with me - not least because we haven't heard her side of the story.
I've found much the same. A lot of them, when you're resistant to the 'but the Ascians are/were good people' line, will eventually try to go for the 'if you were in that position you'd do the same thing' well. Which apparently works very well for a lot of them, but is personally a total miss for me; if I put myself into the view of someone who actually is living and seeing those final decisions that were eventually cut short by the Sundering*, I don't see it as a conundrum: I'm jumping into the Hydaelyn Hole, no question. I see the Hydaelyn position as the unquestionable right one compared to unsustainable angle of constant sacrifices to Zodiark.

This is apparently the worst possible answer to these people, because they've so obviously already decided that Hydaelyn is an irredeemable objective evil that siding with her is actually worse than siding with the guys who would go on to cause fourteen planet-wide genocides.

*And as an unrelated point, it's statistically extremely unlikely that the people posing this hypothetical would have been alive to make it to that point in the Ancient world; at that point half the population had been sacrificed to Zodiark twice, so reasonably speaking only 25% of the population is living to make that call between the two. ...even less, actually, given we can reason the End of Days themselves probably had a bodycount.