*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[Lurina]

I've been wondering why people are desperate to argue that the third sacrifice would have just been some plants and non-sentient animals - when it flies in the face of the thematic meaning of the story, makes every character involved look like an idiot, and has not been mentioned once by a single character, ever. And the only conclusion I can see is that it's because it makes Venat look bad. If she tried to prevent the ancients from sundering a bunch of cows and chickens, she would be silly and callous - if she tried to prevent them from sacrificing ensouled peoples, she'd be sundering them in order to prevent her own people from committing genocide. I don't know about anyone else, but I know which one I think is more in keeping with the themes of the story being told.

No matter how unsupported by any textual evidence it is, and how frankly, silly and absurd it is, people are going to keep bringing up the possibility of a livestock powered Zodiark because they have an axe to grind against Venat.

I can only speak for myself, but my axe to grind with Endwalker isn't with Venat - I liked her character overall, and don't even per-se object to the idea that the Sundering could have a 'valid' reason; obviously the writers intended for us to feel it did. Rather, my complaint is with the writing and presentation itself. If the sacrifices were intended to be people, why is the script so shy about saying so, absent Emet's single line about sacrificing the 'remaining population of the Source' which is only applied in the present-day scenario and obviously influenced by the context of the conversation around his broader negative feelings towards Sundered life? Why does the script use phrasing like 'a portion of life' instead of just saying what they're killing, especially in the scene at the end of Elpis?

Like many details about Venat's actions and motives, the whole thing is written in a way that feels deliberately fuzzy, and I can't shake the sense that the writers were trying to have their cake and eat it. That they wanted us to sympathize with both the members of the Convocation and Venat, but realized that clearly establishing the nature of what the Ancients wanted to do would make doing so impossible. Either their entire culture comes across as monstrous in a way that clashes with the heroism we're obviously supposed to see in past-Emet and Themis, or Venat comes across as some kinda fanatical environmentalist willing to murder her people to save some cows, clashing with our own mainstream real-world values about non-sentient life.

I write for a living, and I know when you've written yourself into a corner, it's incredibly tempting to keep things abstract in the hopes that the reader will kinda 'find their own answer' based on the vibes of the story. If everything is clearly defined, it's impossible for both Emet and Venat at the time to have been acting in a way we'd broadly consider moral or heroic. However, if the situation is abstracted and left to our imaginations, that becomes possible - either through not thinking about it, or simply interpreting the story differently based on which character we were more invested in to begin with.