What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Seiori]

The sundering scene should have had more clarity and honestly told forward. Instead we got some artsy collage of disjointed moments of events that still leave a lot vague. Either they did not have enough time for those events or they did not know how to portray it and just were eager to rap up the whole story to move on to the next, so it resulted in what we got (IMO).

[Tsiron]

I'd like to point out that that scene is not the first time we see a character's memories not be 100% accurate (unlike Echo flashbacks for... some reason). It's admittedly optional content, but as part of the Bozja storyline you

go into Cid's memories which turn out to be a complete mess, you fight Bahamut and Varis and other such nonsense etc.

[Rulakir]

The thing about Themis and the timeline that bothers me the most is that tidbit about Azem cryptically telling him about, seemingly, our coming. But this plot point is really vague for now so there isn't much solid ground to go on, here.

This is why I've been worried about Azem being retconned. Also, as much as I like Elidibus, it's a bit odd to be developing this relationship with him now. I know they have the convenience of his failing memories to fall back on, but in ShB there's little indication Elidibus and Azem (or the WoL) were close outside of that one scene where we inadvertently 'call' him. I have seen a theory that his speech preceding the Seat of Sacrifice was about Azem when he says, "This I swore to...to someone." Seems unlikely though given the context.

I still want to know what he meant by "And a truth...that fills my heart..." when he remembers seeing the WoL in Elpis. Granted, we still have a lot of Pandemonium left to go, but whatever we did there didn't result in averting the Final Days or sparing Elidibus his fate.

No, what I mean is that she could have participated in some capacity into working for a solution once dynamis and Meteion were acknowledged as the real problem. Does every single person working on a space mission share the same degree of knowledge into the same fields, including those building the physical parts of a rocket?

Instead she observed her peers look at the wrong places, get to the wrong conclussions and when everything was said and done she pulled her shotgun and said "shame".

This. All the knowledge Elidibus attributes to Fandaniel was told to us by the Watcher. We don't know how much valuable time was lost due to waiting for him to arrive at the conclusions he did when Venat could've told them what they needed to focus on from the beginning. She didn't need to be an expert in dynamis for that.

[AnaviAnael]

I feel like the honeymoon phase is starting to end and now that people are stopping and really thinking about Endwalker's plot that it's losing a lot of its luster.

[DevonEllwood]

Well I was going to post on Monday, but ended up doing something else. I think the main point was my gripes with how Fandaniel. They could have just kept him as someone who had beef with society in general. I mean we kind of got that? But the sympathetic angle about life and death wrecked it for me. Fandaniel would have been fine as a selfish a-hole. Someone who was tired of doing things for the sake of the star and for paradise, tired of being pushed to do what is considered right for their society. He didn't need a good reason, selfishness is good enough on an individual level. He may have not ended up well liked, but when even the main subreddit is poking holes in your life/death argument, then you pretty much failed on the sympathetic front.

Some images posted showing Venat's dialogue from Shadowbringers again makes it seem like the sundering was not planned. Which relates back to Elpis Venat saying she wouldn't do something like that unless she had a good reason. We aren't shown that reason and instead all we get for dialogue for the reason when won't say anything is that she doesn't want to potentially make an enemy of Hermes. Does she know his memory is not wiped or something? Do those memory become "burned on the soul" after death? Does she know all this already?

It seems like there's a conversation going on about how much Azem knows of us in the past. With the raids in mind, it seems quite a bit, which makes sense for people to assume Azem is the reason the unsundered are unsundered. We have received help from both Hades and Elidibus/Themes (sp?) yet have not gotten help from Lahabrea in our own timeline, which makes me think we are not done with him. We still don't know what Azem was doing before the sundering and them knowing more than what is presented in the story would explain why they left the convocation and rejected Venat's invitation. If this is true, them my question is what in the world happened to the original bodies of the unsundered? If they were "saved" from the sundering, why do they need to take over bodies when they should have originally had their own? Was it just their souls and memories that escaped?

Also I guess I can assume this is Azem's mask?


It being a main feature on Hades's design would make sense, but why is it also on the Hades weapons and why was it in the scene on the moon? Unless it's just an all encompassing convocation mask meant to represent everyone, then why have all the other masks that have clearly belonged to individual characters.

I know some people are tired of the ancients and the ascians, but I am not convinced it's all over yet. There are way to many unanswered questions and I don't believe that Lahabrea is actually fully dead. I pretty convinced that Hades and friend are in the Square Enix "use later" pocket and I am indifferent to Schrodinger's Zenos but I'm not convinced the writers won't use him as well.

All we have been told is Endwalker will end the Zodiark and Hydaelyn story, and that has been repeated multiple times in interviews to a point it's suspicious. I believe they're both dead, but I don't believe everything surrounding them is over, including the repercussions of killing Zodiark.

[Lauront]

No, what I mean is that she could have participated in some capacity into working for a solution once dynamis and Meteion were acknowledged as the real problem. Does every single person working on a space mission share the same degree of knowledge into the same fields, including those building the physical parts of a rocket?

Instead she observed her peers look at the wrong places, get to the wrong conclussions and when everything was said and done she pulled her shotgun and said "shame".

It's secondary to what they used to devise Zodiark anyway - which as per the Watcher, is knowledge of the celestial currents, and the entire effort to create and summon Zodiark is credited to multiple scholars. With Zodiark in place they then had plenty of time to develop further understanding of dynamis, potentially better than Hermes's for that matter.

The cutscenes are even worse IMO because they display attitudes at specific points in time where they were still grieving. It wasn't even lack of knowledge she gave up on them over, but their responses to the situation.

[Fayt1203]

Also I guess I can assume this is Azem's mask?
.

Azem mask is unknown at the moment when Emet-Selch glimpses Azem in us, he sees Azem without the mask, but the face appears blank to the player. Elidibus later also perceives the us as Azem, and in that vision Azem is wearing a black mask

[RoroCookies]

It's secondary to what they used to devise Zodiark anyway - which as per the Watcher, is knowledge of the celestial currents, and the entire effort to create and summon Zodiark is credited to multiple scholars. With Zodiark in place they then had plenty of time to develop further understanding of dynamis, potentially better than Hermes's for that matter.

The cutscenes are even worse IMO because they display attitudes at specific points in time where they were still grieving. It wasn't even lack of knowledge she gave up on them over, but their responses to the situation.

I still like to bring up the parallels of how the scions respond to people grieving in Thanivar compared to how Venat respond to the ancients grieving. You simply just don’t go up to people and tell them to get over the situation then offer no means of comfort. If the scions started yelling at people that the suffering of turning into monsters was normal it only would’ve made the situation way worse. Then imagine the scions being like, “wow people aren’t listening to us. Time to alter humanity to what we want it to be instead.”
They wouldn’t because they would spend time actually trying to solve the issue instead of going to the extreme first.
Also one other thought that has been bothering. Venat probably benefitted, if not the most, from the state of ancient society. I doubt she herself fully understood what it means to suffer and that maybe why her own response to people in pain was so weak. She has only heard of suffering horrors from our WoL and decides to use that as her own evidence of what it means to live.

[Rosenstrauch]

I'd like to point out that that scene is not the first time we see a character's memories not be 100% accurate (unlike Echo flashbacks for... some reason). It's admittedly optional content, but as part of the Bozja storyline you

go into Cid's memories which turn out to be a complete mess, you fight Bahamut and Varis and other such nonsense etc.

The same storyline actually goes into why this is, in a roundabout fashion, by differentiating between "extrinsic" memories and "intrinsic" memories. The former being conscious/subconscious memories and thus being prone to errors, and the latter being an accumulation of the person's senses and thus being perfectly accurate. If we assume that Echo flashbacks tap into intrinsic memories, then it actually makes sense that they'd be more accurate to reality than otherwise.

But yeah, the Venat flashback we experience during our return to the future is so wildly inaccurate to what we learned in Shadowbringers that—whether it's "symbolic" or an abridged but literal version of events—it's questionable if any of it even happened in reality, or if it's just a self-serving memory from a person who can't or won't remember what actually happened. The biggest differences being that the flashback presents Venat as alone in her opposition to Zodiark's followers and Hydaelyn's creation and the Sundering being a spur of the moment decision, whereas Shadowbringers depicted her as having a bare minimum of twelve accomplices and their plan to create Hydaelyn and oppose Zodiark having been decided well in advance of her actual fight with him.

[MagiusNecros]

Fun video. Worth a watch. Explains the story so much better IMO.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IhYo5u568o