Endwalker's story had me, but lost me. Ethical issues especially (spoilers)

[EdwinLi]

I pretty much agree with most of your points. A lot of the Elpis and post elpis stuff felt like a fever dream, not a particularly good one at that. Hearing Venat have the audacity go on and on about hope and suffering but then didn’t have hope for her own people and instead chose to split them all apart and basically kill them all and not at the very least having some dialogue where i could call her out on it annoyed me extremely to say the least. As did when we bring up how she/hydaelyn had lied to us so long and it just gets handwaved by the Watcher. In the end 99% of the stuff post elpis just annoyed me and bored me to death and the ending was pretty predictable. If it makes you feel slightly better, maybe Pandaemonium will bring up a split timeline where the ancients continue to survive but eh, i won’t hold my breath. SE seems to have a weird obsession with the sundered needing to be perfect beings who can accomplish anything with the power of friendship which for some random reason the ancients couldn’t do.

I believe the Venat part was just badly handled since we had a huge skip from Elpis to the moment she sunder the world.

By what we are shown, Venat could have Sundered the world at anytime as she had the power to do so at that moment but she lingered on because she wanted to find atleast a small speck of hope that the Ancients were worth saving and they had the ability to stop Meteion themselves. However, that final moment in Amaurot showed her all hope to save her people was lost and they have literally become the death cult that she feared they will become if the resort to Zodiark. SE will need a very large amount of MSQ to cover Venat's journey to that moment to understand why she had given up at that moment despite looking for a small speck of hope the Ancients can be saved before she sundered the world.

A very massive amount of plot is missing in Venat's story leading to that moment of Sundering the world. However, this is very common throughout FF14 storyline to only see a small piece of the picture rather than the entire story of that character leading up to a specific moment which is why people have a lot of moments in FF14 with hating a character at the start due to how they act in a small moment of their life that WoL see to liking and feeling sorry for the character later once we get a larger piece of their story we never saw that lead them to that moment where they are now.

Yet that is a reflection of life's stories as we may know a amount of certain people's stories which is why we are so fond or hateful of people we known for so long but at the sametime we know so little about other people's stories leading up to specific moments.