*Spoilers* Anyone feel joining Emet would have been better

[Lurina]

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".

Something you often see with long-running franchises, especially MMOs, is that people will express their reactions to what they see as bad writing not primarily as distaste for the writers, but instead towards specific characters or factions within the narrative. If you're married to a story in a long term way where you can't just say "lol, this was bad, goodbye" (such as it being part of an online game you play with all your friends for other reasons), the only way you can 'resolve' feelings of discomfort or disquiet with it is to redirect them towards something in-universe.

Like, take this whole Venat/Sundering thing. If you point your frustration where it belongs - towards the choices and beliefs of the Oda, Ishikawa and Yoshida, for whom the characters and setting elements are just devices - then the whole universe of FFXIV is fundamentally something you can't agree with, and the only way to express that disagreement is to quit the game. However, if you instead shift your perspective towards seeing Venat as an independent entity, and then judge her choices by taking the jank and vagueness of the story as literal in-setting facts, you can instead just see her as a bad person within an otherwise morally neutral setting, and continue enjoying the rest of the world without any cognitive dissonance.

People did this a lot in WoW.