Disappointed in one Endwalker Aspect [SPOILERS]

[Vyrerus]

A lot of bodies in the thread like, "Sacrifices bad. Wanting the zenith of the Past, bad!" Ignoring that everything that could possibly be sacrificed was also robbed of agency and killed by the Sundering all the same.

"That Light split the world and every life upon it!"

From the tiniest termite to the broad, busty breast of her protégé, Venat sundered all Etheirysian life into 14 fragments reminiscent of their true selves, rapidly ending all life. And in this setting, the Lifestream is part of all life, and that got sundered too. Each shard has its own, and they're linked by some vaguely defined mechanism, but the Rejoinings and Soul mechanics previously demonstrated by the story's concept of Calamities/Soul Density show this to be the case.

Unfortunately, it has the unintended consequence of meaning that Venat also sundered most of the dead, too. And the unborn. And those awaiting rebirth. It turns out that in some, so far unexplained, maneuver that a few of the Ascians and those within Zodiark weren't sundered, somehow.

Then it's even told to us that the shards rely on the Source as a nucleus of sorts, so that the stakes rise higher, but this also intrinsically means that the shards are explicitly lesser to the Source, too. This opens up the sticky mess, that is a fact, that Hydaelyn's Sundering caused there to be Nucleus Lives and Orbital Lives, the Orbital Lives aren't even on the same dimensional plane. They can't even be made to come and combat Meteion, unless they are Ascian or unless they are Rejoined. Even the mechanism most important to our time conundrum and story came from an alternate Source, made by Nucleus Lives.

It's actually an incredibly complex vilification, and the real rub comes from essentially being told by the story to push that complexity out of your mind.

"Don't think too hard about all this, just go out and save the universe. It's for your own good."

"Her cannibalization of her own people was noble. They was no other way to live and win."

Survival is not intrinsically noble.

"Killing and eating my companion on the mountainside was noble. There was no other way for me to live."

It is actually a choice that debases her. Literally everyone who has said that the Ancients couldn't find a way and had no future are just echoing what Emet-selch said about the sundered.

So no, Hydaelyn wasn't a good girl all along. She was a survivor, willing to be morally unsound to live at the expense of everyone she ever knew.

[Veloran]

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.

Do I really need to explain to you why a sparknotes montage metaphor version of several different events happening at different times isn't reflective of the truth? Final Days happened? Yes, and then ended. Hythlodaeus sacrificing himself? Yes, not in that scene. Venat trying to convince people to her cause? Yes, not during the Final Days and not with the dialog we're actually delivered. Venat becoming Hydaelyn? Yes, not then and not after her speech there to those people.

To say that scene is true is to say that this scene is true to the fallout of the Thirty Years War - Which is to say yes, but also absolutely not at all.

[OhNooo]

Survival is not intrinsically noble.

"Killing and eating my companion on the mountainside was noble. There was no other way for me to live."

It is actually a choice that debases her. Literally everyone who has said that the Ancients couldn't find a way and had no future are just echoing what Emet-selch said about the sundered.

So no, Hydaelyn wasn't a good girl all along. She was a survivor, willing to be morally unsound to live at the expense of everyone she ever knew.

Very well said. And not just survival but I think it also puts forth the question of how far is someone willing to go for what they believe in? To what end? And then whoever survives is the victor who gets to tell the tale.

[Alleo]

A lot of bodies in the thread like, "Sacrifices bad. Wanting the zenith of the Past, bad!" Ignoring that everything that could possibly be sacrificed was also robbed of agency and killed by the Sundering all the same.

I guess since everything was mortal after that, the sundering did kill many years later but right now we dont even know if the sundering act itself kills. IMO it makes no sense if it does because you need something to be alive to continue living.

What other way should it have gone? We are shown quite well that the Ancients went against their own code of honor (Emet says in Elpis that those that sacrificed themselves would be held in the highest of honor and trying to bring them back goes against this) and even when the planet was fine again they turned to Zodiark with a plan to sacrifice more to get the Amaurotines inside Zodiark back. That life they would have chosen again and again over time (since they would need a huge amount of aether to exchange the souls) would have been lost inside of Zodiark forever. Now it can at least be reborn again.

Zodiark was no long term solution even Emet says that at the end. Either Meteion would have destroyed it anyway by singing her song of oblivion or the Ancients would end as others planets did that tried to take suffering competely out of their life.

What she has done brought suffering. She does not try to hide it behind kind words. She herself says that it was horrible. But ultimately it was the solution that lets mankind continue, that stopped the faster death of the universe and that released all those captured souls from Meteion into the universe again.

[Cleretic]

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.

Yeah, I don't have a problem with someone not liking a thing. Hell, I didn't like all the Amaurot stuff in Shadowbringers, I get it.

But this has just become frustrating and sad. It's okay to not like a thing, but trying to declare the thing just factually wrong because of it, that's... I don't know. Grasping at straws to legitimize what's ultimately just an opinion, I guess. Mixed in with a very 'lore nerd' way of thinking about it all, I guess; 'if I don't like this story, and the main thing I care about is in-universe facts, then that must mean its in-universe facts are wrong'.

[Vyrerus]

I guess since everything was mortal after that

The new identities died more quickly, losing most of their memories, and went on to be new person after new person, some with so much of a new identity that they make fun of the old, if by chance they do get their old memories back. They gained diseases unheard of, pestilence with no cure etc. The person they were, the life they lead, the homes they had, the loves they shared, totally destroyed.

What Venat could have done with all of the knowledge at her disposal was ask of her followers to be willingly Sundered individually in order to have the requisite low aetherial concentration in their form to receive of Dynamis, and then test through that to make a team of Meteion-killers who might even be able to manipulate Dynamis at will. The Ancients had far more knowledge of all things aetherial, and if she could build the moon ship, then I see no reason why she couldn't create something to build a ship equal or greater to the Ragnarok.

There are plenty of other possibilities, but listing them is fruitless. All that is important is that there were other ways, they just wouldn't make the story that was being told. We might see them in between patch stories on the Lodestone.

[Ryaz]

I have to say I'm amazed and baffled at how many people on the forums seem to think Venat was some kind of malicious, evil person who sundered the world on her own selfish whim.

The truth is Venat was a good person. Emet-Selch was a good person. But when faced with a world ending event, they both did what they believed was best for the survival of the planet, they just disagreed on the direction it should go in. Emet's group wanted to return things to the way they were, Venat's group (yes, group, she did NOT act alone. Believing so completely disregards what we learned in 5.2) believed the only way to survive was to move forward and not cling to what they lost. They didn't have any easy options. They both had to make extremely difficult choices, whether it was repeated sacrifices that might bring back the world they had, but could have still been vulnerable to Meteion again due to their inability to move forward or gambling on sundering everyone and forcing them though millenia of suffering and death to help them grow stronger, while allow them to better manipulate Dynamis. There was no "good" outcome from this.

And we don't know what happened between our time on Elpis and the actual Sundering. For all we know, Venat tried to find other ways to stop the Final Days and failed. We don't know who she brought into the circle. All we know is the bits and pieces we saw from the memories in 5.2 and 6.0.

[Lauront]

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


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.

Have to agree with this. I think some people are missing the point here. It is a dramatic retelling that is only true to a limited degree and omits several major details, to the point that some people took away from it that it altered the original sequence of events, which is outlined here; we can surmise it did not do this but I can see why people get this impression. The scene amounts to a fast-forward rendition of everything that happened without really giving an accurate depiction of the debate that ensued amongst the ancients following Zodiark stabilising the world, and appears to be intended to bring the audience up to speed on events detailed in text up to that point, sometimes in sidequests or short stories, with the goal you mentioned in mind - I'm of the same view as why they did it this way, i.e. the bolded. Although I'd say that the scene shown made her look utterly unreasonable to me. To approach a bunch of people as their very star was dying and as they lost the majority of their kind and offer such platitudes? Can't see why anyone would have cause to take her seriously, and without offering a true account of what had occurred, they had no reason to. The only way to make her not look completely out of touch with reality in that scene is the requirement of abiding by the original timeline with the goal of defeating Meteion in mind, meaning she'd do what she did one way or another, and that more or less absolves her of anything she does in a very forced manner and leaves open a number of what-ifs.

A lot of bodies in the thread like, "Sacrifices bad. Wanting the zenith of the Past, bad!" Ignoring that everything that could possibly be sacrificed was also robbed of agency and killed by the Sundering all the same.

[...]

So no, Hydaelyn wasn't a good girl all along. She was a survivor, willing to be morally unsound to live at the expense of everyone she ever knew.

Good summary of the metaphysics involved - in the end it all hangs on the "stick to the original timeline" proviso, IMO.

[Cleretic]

I have to say I'm amazed and baffled at how many people on the forums seem to think Venat was some kind of malicious, evil person who sundered the world on her own selfish whim.

The truth is Venat was a good person. Emet-Selch was a good person. But when faced with a world ending event, they both did what they believed was best for the survival of the planet, they just disagreed on the direction it should go in. Emet's group wanted to return things to the way they were, Venat's group (yes, group, she did NOT act alone. Believing so completely disregards what we learned in 5.2) believed the only way to survive was to move forward and not cling to what they lost. They didn't have any easy options. They both had to make extremely difficult choices, whether it was repeated sacrifices that might bring back the world they had, but could have still been vulnerable to Meteion again due to their inability to move forward or gambling on sundering everyone and forcing them though millenia of suffering and death to help them grow stronger, while allow them to better manipulate Dynamis. There was no "good" outcome from this.

And we don't know what happened between our time on Elpis and the actual Sundering. For all we know, Venat tried to find other ways to stop the Final Days and failed. We don't know who she brought into the circle. All we know is the bits and pieces we saw from the memories in 5.2 and 6.0.

We can reason that Venat was trying to find other ways about things, from the fact that her group in Anamnesis is talking about attempts to convince the Convocation. If their whole outlook was 'heads down, work on the Sundering because that's the only thing that will work', I don't think they would have bothered with that. You don't make those sorts of pleas unless you have hope people listen to them.

But you're absolutely right. Venat poses an interesting moral question: is a horrifying deed done by a good person an evil deed? In the real world it's a difficult question because real people are complicated and weird, but in fiction... it is stated essentially as fact that Venat is A Good Person, but does that inherently make the Sundering A Good Deed? Instead claiming Venat to be somehow inherently evil just dismisses the complexity of the entire thing, and to me kind of smacks of 'didn't want to grapple with a hard question, and so is trying to force it to be easy'.

There is a mirror to this question, too, in Emet: 'how much evil must a good person do before they themselves are also evil'? I could probably word that better, but similarly, it's more or less confirmed that Emet was A Good Man back in Elpis. So, at what point were his previous actions so reprehensible that he could be considered 'evil'? Was it giving the go-ahead for the third sacrifice? Was it deciding to go ahead with the Rejoinings, sundered lives be damned? Was it the first actual Rejoining? Was it when he made an empire specifically to be terrible? Was it none, was he still 'a good man' by the time of Shadowbringers? I think it's an interesting thing to consider, and it would be lazy to throw it all away by saying 'actually Emet was already awful back in Elpis'.

[QT_Melon]

Imagine being forced into a choice because it was good for the planet. Say like being gay and being forced into ONLY HAVING heterosexual relationships because you need to populate. Or like in the 40s, if you were grieving over the loss of a family member the best way to deal with it was a lobotomy (yeah referencing Bojack in this case because it actually also referenced what was deemed right). Years later it was only found morally grey because that was the solution. Even though later found out you could donate to fertility clinics or could get counseling - but was told years ago those were your only options...