Disappointed in one Endwalker Aspect [SPOILERS]

[Rulakir]

As far a no one else...true....I suppose

It was that part, specifically. It was late and I was getting cranky, so I figured it best to keep it short. :P

Well he said it so who knows.

I'll be frank, I don't even remember why we're debating this. I'm not sure I've agreed with Cilia on anything, but he was right that it's irrelevant because none of Venat's motives as presented in EW relate to protecting the new life.

Emet-Selch also says that his ideals were inviolably correct, that the Ancients did have the will to live, and that Venat's plan had him showing up at the very end as a lynchpin. And a lot of arguments at play in this thread rely on ignoring all of these things.

This. As much as I love Emet, he's also in no position to know what mankind was capable of had they been given the information and the same luxury of a few thousand years to devise a plan. This is the same man who was completely ignorant of dynamis until Elpis, he's not all knowing.

[Cleretic]

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'.

[Cilia]

Having just rewatched the scene on this character, it's not clear what the Ancients in the "Sundering" cutscene intended to sacrifice. They appear to be offering themselves, but the scene isn't literal, so mayhap the sacrifices just weren't rendered or shown for brevity's sake.

Either way, her main arguments against the faithful is that sorrow was always there (they'd just been spared it for a while), and that sacrificing the future to bring back the past is unwise and weak. She also sunders the world not because she has no faith in mankind but because she has faith in mankind, even though they've lost all faith in themselves and refuse to (ahem) forge ahead into an uncertain future. By sundering the world and eliminating the temptation of using Zodiark for whatever they want, she successfully forces mankind to rise to Hermes' challenge (or less charitably gambles everything on being able to do as much).

Emet-Selch never capitulates on his ideals, but he does acknowledge that Venat's methods had succeeded where his own would have failed.

[Cleretic]

Having just rewatched the scene on this character, it's not clear what the Ancients in the "Sundering" cutscene intended to sacrifice. They appear to be offering themselves, but the scene isn't literal, so mayhap the sacrifices just weren't rendered or shown for brevity's sake.

Love the rest of your post, but it's worth clarifying: the Ancient crowd in the post-Elpis cutscene are almost definitely the second of three intended sacrifices that we learned about from Fake Hythlodaeus in Shadowbringers. The detail that there were three sacrifices was extremely lost at the time, because the second one only came up in a single text box in a very long infodump while the first and third were very clearly important, but the crowd scene matches up to what we heard of the second: that after the beasts of the End of Days had been stopped by Zodiark, the world was still in a pretty bad state and they beseeched Zodiark to do things like 'stop the fires' and 'make the wind blow again'.

Afterwards, we can reason that while this was an absolutely well-meaning sacrifice, it was the wrong one, and it was possible for them to solve this problem in a smaller, more sustainable way. The Tales from the Shadows story about Azem actually tells us this; it was quite possible to use creation magic to solve natural disasters, it was just that Azem was the only one that was actively taking that angle.

...incidentally, the conditions around the second sacrifice actually resemble the things that happen when elemental crystals in Final Fantasy games go awry; Final Fantasy V and Bravely Default 2 both came to mind for me. I feel like that was intentional, but I don't know if it was 'easter egg for people who recognize it' intentional, or 'parallel problem so you can tell they picked wrong' intentional.

[Veloran]

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.

Just a coincidence that it all ended up exactly the same and resulted in her fulfilling a promise made to WoL.

There's also two different things that make the story seem tilted towards Hydaelyn's side:

In addition to a recency effect and the fact that the protagonists were already defacto agents of Hydaelyn, I would argue that the story goes out of it's way to paint Venat in a glowingly positive light every chance it can. The standout example being, of course, the sundering cutscene. Which is ultimately massively fraudulent to what actually happened and serves only to paint Venat as a wise moral crusader and anyone standing against her as petty, small-minded, and antagonistic fools who are willfully ignorant of her "well-reasoned" argument.

I would actually suggest that the reason this was the case is because they were gunning for the happiest and most straightforwardly-uplifting ending possible. And because people were already given to liking Emet-Selch and Elidibus from Shadowbringers, and they really wanted people to like Venat, actually having a scene pitting them against each other wasn't feasible. So instead of showing the actual sundering, which would either paint one side worse than the other or at least leave both very morally ambiguous, they just show Venat versus thirteen strawmen.

[Cleretic]

Which is ultimately massively fraudulent to what actually happened

How? How is it fraudulent, as opposed to just dramatic?

[OhNooo]

In addition to a recency effect and the fact that the protagonists were already defacto agents of Hydaelyn, I would argue that the story goes out of it's way to paint Venat in a glowingly positive light every chance it can. The standout example being, of course, the sundering cutscene. Which is ultimately massively fraudulent to what actually happened and serves only to paint Venat as a wise moral crusader and anyone standing against her as petty, small-minded, and antagonistic fools who are willfully ignorant of her "well-reasoned" argument.

I agree. From the very beginning of the game when you log in she’s already recruiting you. Throughout the whole game you’re referred to as one of her children, her champion, told “may you ever walk in the light of the crystal…” And I’m sitting here like I’m not your child or representative, I’m just defending myself from people attacking me. Never wanted to join anything. It’s obvious that the Scions are devoted to her the whole time. Both sides look like a cult for their god, but there was an obvious bias toward the Hydaelyn cult imo.

That metaphorical cutscene just made Venat look self-righteous and lowered the opinion I had of her after getting to know her in Elpis.

It looks like I’m just not a fan of the storytelling in EW at all. With HW being my favorite storyline, I probably prefer when they stick to more local stories instead of having us fight literal concepts. At this point I’ve let my sub run out and I’m thinking of keeping an eye on the direction SE goes by occasionally watching streamers.

[Veloran]

How? How is it fraudulent, as opposed to just dramatic?

Everything that occurred in the cutscene is untrue and did not happen...? It doesn't reflect reality.

[RyuDragnier]

Everything that occurred in the cutscene is untrue and did not happen...? It doesn't reflect reality.

Final Days started? Happened.
Hythlodaeus sacrificing himself? Happened.
Venat trying to convince people to come to terms with the sadness and move on? Happened.
People ignoring her words and going for another sacrifice? Happened.
Venat finally deciding to become Hydaelyn and Sunder the world? Happened.

I do not see anything untrue, and I'm wondering what exactly you're looking at that is untrue.

[Ryaz]

Final Days started? Happened.
Hythlodaeus sacrificing himself? Happened.
Venat trying to convince people to come to terms with the sadness and move on? Happened.
People ignoring her words and going for another sacrifice? Happened.
Venat finally deciding to become Hydaelyn and Sunder the world? Happened.

I do not see anything untrue, and I'm wondering what exactly you're looking at that is untrue.

The story didn't go in a direction he wanted, so he's attacking it. Which is fine that he didn't like. Myself and many others loved it and that scene.

What helped me is that I didn't go into EW with any preconceived notions. Speculations? Yes. But I had no beliefs about Hydalaen and Zodiark being good or evil. I didn't go in expecting a bunch if characters to die. So for me, I just got to enjoy the story without it going against my pre-established head canon, which helped immensely.

I just got to spend a lot of fun times with characters I've loved from 2.0 and new characters I met in this expac. That's all that mattered to me.