*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[Lium]

To be fair, the first 5 seconds of the game is you in front of an Ascian wanting to fight you and then they spend the whole original game and the first 2 expansions trying to kill you, everyone you know, and the world as you know it before they make any actual attempt at making us understand their motives beyond "Hydaelyn is bad, mmmk". The first couple of quests in the game include a black-masked Ascian trying to kill you for no other reason besides "they like to do that to adventurers".

Venat may be a lot of things, but unlike most of the Ascians, our WoL's first meeting with her doesn't include a monologue followed by her trying to kill us. I'd be on my guard too after the first couple of weirdos in masks who teleport in from the shadows appeared and tried to kill me. Without any context, I wouldn't need a "Goddess of Light" to tell me that's bad news whenever one appears before me.

We finally learn in ShB that there's more nuance to it, just as we learn in EW that Hydaelyn isn't pure and gave the whole world the school of hard knocks, but at least she never tried to directly kill us the entire game and only ever acts benevolent towards us. If the Ascians didn't immediately treat us with hostility and said "hey, this low level adventurer is uncommonly strong, maybe we should tell them our story and bring them on our side", things might have been different but that's not how it went down.

Great post. And I would add this is why I'm still not high on Emet-Selch like everyone else is because the guy has killed tens of billions of people - seven worlds worth - through Rejoinings and wholesale genocides on the Source (not even counting the Primals which existed to cause chaos amongst the beast tribes) just to bring his world back at the expense of our own. And the kicker is because he didn't see us as truly living beings. I mean, I get it. He's a well written character. But that does not excuse the fact that he's right beneath Meteion in wiping out life on a very large scale.

Devil's Advocate for one moment, though. The devs back in ARR really had no idea where the overall story was going. So, back then I think the Ascians were more or less just your standard generic evil video game villains. It wasn't until around 3.x that the current story started taking shape. I think that's what Yoshi P had said. If they had the whole story from the get-go, then I think there would have been much more nuance to the Ascians.

Edit: Actually eight worlds worth. I forgot about the Thirteenth. It was just never Rejoined because it was turned into an actual void.