Quote Originally Posted by KizuyaKatogami View Post
I do think, my bias against venat or hydaelyn aside, she was thrown a very big bone. Whether or not we were supposed to see her as not wholly good, is a bit undermined in the way they wrote it, where they write it in a way where it seems they very much even if it’s indirect, painted her as this benevolent person. Not only that but she got a loooot of attention, compare that to Elidibus or Zodiark. Both done with in the span of 10 minutes. At least Venat got an entire arc and then some dedicated to her.
From a meta perspective, we were always going to get more on Hydaelyn since she’s been the mysterious force that we’ve known about and been familiar with the longest. Usually in stories, the good guys are less interesting since they only exist to stop the bad guys. FFXIV was no different for a long time and fueled more to this in ShB when they added more explanation to the villain side of the story and I think that’s when a lot of people suddenly jumped on the “Emet is a soft boi who needs to be protected” train. Before that, the Ascians were mustache-twirling villains who literally say things like “we must needs destroy the Light and plunge the world into Darkness! Mwahahaha!”

What EW did was add more nuance to that and make it to be that Venat was more or less the plan maker the whole time and she’s not wholly benevolent since she created suffering (which we’ve known about since 1.0 beta from the song Answers). Now it feels like people are making Venat call-out posts like we’re on 2010 Tumblr.

The points I will concede to are:
1. The time travel was badly written and only Venat not losing her memory was a dumb idea since it ultimately changed nothing in my opinion and didn’t add to the story.

2. The explanation of the Blessing of Light didn’t make sense to me based on basically the entire game that came before it and unblessed people like Fordola being immune to tempering.

Where I feel like I disagree begins on the point of whether or not you think that the Ancients lived a “perfect” life and if you agree with the choices they made. The game spends some time hammering into your head that they weren’t ideal, which starts with the fact that they’re named after characters and places from a 500 year old book called “Utopia” which is itself arguably about how it’s not an ideal place. If after all of that, you think that the Ancients were right, then there’s no amount of discussion about everything that comes after that will convince you otherwise and you’re just searching for a reason to be upset that the writers didn’t agree with you and deliberately misunderstanding things to suit your opinion.