Quote Originally Posted by Rulakir View Post
It's a cycle. Several new(er) posters have found their way to this thread*, possibly because word has been getting around that if you didn't like EW the official forums are one of the few places you can discuss it. Reddit is still aggressively downvoting anyone who doesn't lavish it with praise. At any rate, they post, the usual defenders show up, then the usual detractors have to show up to counterbalance, and then we end up back at square one.

* It's a shame out of all of them this is the thread that persisted. Both "On Venat's Role in the Story" and "[Spoilers] Venat's motive" were much better.

Some of it is probably also a remaining need to rant about it. Personally, I was so disappointed with EW I considered for weeks whether or not I wanted to quit. It's not like venting about it once was enough to work through everything I was thinking and feeling. I think we can all relate to disliking something so much it feels good to ruminate with others who felt similarly. Due to how social media works, you can't post "I hate this" and only attract like-minded people, you will attract people who disagree and then proceed to detail every which way you are wrong and the cycle continues.
I feel like I am in the case you describe – I have mostly been a Reddit poster, up until Endwalker's release. I found MSQ to be such a disappointment I was flabbergasted to see the widely positive response, I entirely quit /r/ffxiv and now only sporadically posts in the "discussion" subreddit which, according to a comment I read, is more "contrarian" than the main sub. It was pretty hard to feel so isolated from a fandom I had loved so much after Shadowbringers, especially because, in retrospect, I had been way too invested in FFXIV to sort of escape from real life, and once my expectations came crumbling down I was honestly in a rather bad place mentally throughout the month of December. What brought me some solace was reading comments from other disappointed people I could relate to, however few we seemed to be (also – I got over some things in real life, so that got better as well). Now that some of my close friends have also finished MSQ, I can rant with them, and that is a real outlet too. I think I have a Discord discussion that has been pretty much nothing but complaining about EW for like, a month straight now.

This situation is reminding me of mid-10's Game of Thrones – before it became acceptable to say the story development was subpar and the entire thing ended in... a non-satisfactory way, to put it mildly. As a fan of the books who didn't care for the show earlier on, I loved lurking on westeros.org's "Rant and rave without repercussions" threads that popped up after every new episode. Just pure, distilled complaints and expressions of disappointment. It was (shamelessly so) an echo chamber, but one that I imagine was created to counter what felt like an opposite echo chamber.
This present thread here is drawing attention simply because of its number of pages. I feel like it's the place where I can pop my head in and timidly go "hello, is this the Rant and Rave Without Repercussions – Endwalker Edition thread?"... so it's just self-perpetrating.

Now, I think I could rant for several paragraphs about exactly how and why Endwalker let me down in myriad ways – and surprisingly enough, not all of them have to do with Venat – but I will try and make it short and actually relevant to this thread: I feel like Endwalker undid what I loved so much about Shadowbringers, the moral ambiguity of the two sides that each felt like they had their own valid points, by telling me that actually, one side had all the information and ended up factually correct and proven right by how the plot was written. Like some of you in this thread, I very much take issue with how the game feels like it's desperately trying to sell me on Venat while acting sort of coy about it: oh sure, she says herself the Sundering was bad, that it was the source of so much suffering, and oh my god look at her she's metaphorically covered in blood/muck/grime – yet it is presented as unequivocally the right thing to do and ultimately the only way to defeat Meteion, and even Emet, of all people, seems to tell me so in Ultima Thule. And oh, look! Those people in the Dead Ends! Obviously meant to be a parallel to the Ancients, am I right or am I right? Well now, I can sleep easy, knowing that the Ancients were doomed anyway because of their own frivolity/naivety/ignorance/nostalgia/inability to cope/hubris/callousness toward animal lives, because Crystal Mom knows best!

And I honestly do not agree with or believe any of this, both for in-universe reasons and out. According to Emet, which I equate to Word of God out-of-universe tbqh because this whole thing has made me cynical, mankind could have never set foot on Ultima Thule? How so, exactly? We are talking about the civilisation of erudites and scientists who have been shown to be able to create Aether-depleted, Dynamis-capable familiars, right? Familiars that could develop enough knowledge of space travel to guide us all the way to Ultima Thule, correct? Gods damn it, Emet, so maybe you have always been too grumpy to invent star-trekking bunnies and dark matter-powered cute bird lolis, but please do not project your lack of imagination onto everyone else!
The Ra-La strawmen? Yeah. Whatever. I'm sorry for them, and every other planet, but they were not the Ancients. If only because the Ancients were nowhere near as universally "positive" – we know for a fact the Ancients were human with human feelings, both positive and negative, and their society was not "perfect". (On this point, I will contend that Emet's argument of the Ancient world being "paradise" was made from the point of view of a man who spent literally twelve thousand years watching mortal societies live and die, fall prey to disease and wars, while actively trying to empathise by living out full mortal lives, and yet still he could not relate after all these years. A little hyperbole seems understandable, here.) Perhaps, after an untold number of centuries, the Ancients might have become them. Maybe. And so what? Are we going to condemn them for eventually dying out, just like everyone and everything else, including the universe itself?
The Ancients were never going to learn, or cope, or evolve past the trauma? Well, talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy here: not only did she never give them the knowledge to adequately prepare for the Final Days, but she never gave them the time to recover, either. Eventually, the Ancients would have had to deal with the loss of everyone who actually died during the Final Days – the third sacrifice was never going to fix this (nor was it ever intended to). Ah, this third sacrifice that was never really expanded upon in Endwalker. The only thing we do know about it is that it was going to involve only a portion of the new life. Listening to some people talk, you'd think the Ancients were going to make Etheirys some sort of dead planet for their Dark God...

...I, frankly, don't feel like I have the energy right now to spell out everything that bothered me and made me feel very uneasy in Endwalker, try to make sense and know that my post is inevitably going to get dissected to tell me how wrong I am and how dumb my reading of the story is.

tl;dr: Enjoyed ShB because it made the villains compelling and relatable. Sequel is telling me, in more or less subtle ways because it feels like it's trying not to say it outright but the writing is on the wall, that actually they were largely ignorant, their narrative was a dead end and they just, kinda sorta deserved it. It's okay, because we literally just punched Despair in the face at the end of the universe, and those dumb Ancients would have never been able to!