*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[MikkoAkure]

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised after the events of the past two years, but I never cease to be amazed how people when presented with the same information can arrive at different conclusions. I often think a study on the different perspectives of players would be fascinating. Does it come down to culture, values, personality type? I'm almost tempted to make a survey. :P

My angle is "making sense of the lore in a manner that supports the story that the writers are trying to tell".

This isn't a historical record of events, this is a video game. And as many on both sides have said, the video game is pretty heavy-handed in portraying Venat/Hydaelyn and her actions as benevolent regardless what the player thinks. That means that's the story the writers wanted to tell. I personally feel like it's an exercise in futility to try to poke the story in a way that makes the Ascians indisputably right when to me, the end result of the game is that the writers put Venat on a pedestal. That doesn't mean that I agree with how the story got there. There were more than a few headscratchers throughout EW especially, but it is what it is I guess.

Ultimately, the story the writers wanted to tell is that Hydaelyn was on our side and the Ascians were the force we were fighting in order to stay alive and protect people. The revelations of the Ascians in Shadowbringers gave much needed nuance and depth to the story, but I don't believe that the intention was for players to take that and immediately go "everything that we've done is bad and we need to kill Crystal Mom as well as the whole world in order to make sad grandpa's dream a reality".


I suppose if I were to make sense of my views in some sort of relation to my personality, I think "edgy" or "grimdark" stories are typically cringy and I really dislike the trope where a media (show, video game, book, etc.) starts off typical but then it turns out that the force of "good" was bad all along. I feel like that works better in stories like the Drakengard series where it doesn't take itself seriously at all without any attempt at a "moral dilemma".