Quote Originally Posted by Veloran View Post
Yeah, not so sure that's how it's presented. I'm also not so sure that an argument of strategy can even be made when one side didn't even know they were in a war while the other was given a roadmap.
The roadmap we gave her sucked, and most of her actual plan was completely separate from it. As I've seen it explained, while we told her the plan as we understood it, we had no idea at the time that it was actually her Plan B.

But also, absolutely nothing says that she actually stuck to what we told her because it's what we told her. In fact it's mentioned several times, including by Venat/Hydaelyn herself, that she and her allies tried other ways. They just didn't work out.

There's also two different things that make the story seem tilted towards Hydaelyn's side:
A: We got a story tilted heavily towards Zodiark's side already, it was called Shadowbringers. (And I hated it as much then as you do this now.) So from the greater view, we have an equally-sided debate, it's just that it took a couple years to get the counterpoint, and people are very susceptible to recency bias.
B: While it's very much written and framed that we as external viewers can see the equality of the sides at the time, most of the characters in the story are not part of that debate; they're from ten thousand years after the ship sailed on Plan Hydaelyn, trying to come to terms with cosmic revelations and the goddamn apocalypse. They are having an entirely different conversation, and so learning the fact 'our god loves us and had a plan in motion' is FAR more important information than 'also it turns out our god was more secretive than people would have liked at the time'.