When are we supposed to stop fighting?

[Necrotica]

Let's not get into the time travel nonsense. It is already a mess of paradoxes with no start point or original timeline to explain any of it ever happening.

Going forward in the timeline as it is now, there is hope for the future, so long as we find Venat's soul and find a way to permanently destroy it. Cause I have a feeling that thing will turn up like a bad penny every time life gets close to being too happy.

[Cleretic]

Let's not get into the time travel nonsense. It is already a mess of paradoxes with no start point or original timeline to explain any of it ever happening.

Going forward in the timeline as it is now, there is hope for the future, so long as we find Venat's soul and find a way to permanently destroy it. Cause I have a feeling that thing will turn up like a bad penny every time life gets close to being too happy.

...This is so insane, extreme, out of nowhere and against the whole themes of the story that I had to read back two pages to confirm it was as ridiculous as it seemed. Calling it 'nonsense' would be giving it too much credit, because 'nonsense' suggests a weightlessness to the allegations.

Is this a 'people are born inherently evil' thing combined with an insidiously bad take on Venat? Because Eden confirms this is not that kind of story, and that it's wrong to pretend it is: Gaia is not Loghrif, no matter how much Mitron kicks, screams and overwrites memories, and he was wrong to enforce what he believed her to be.

Similarly, it's wrong to assert Venat's sins to be somehow inherent to and an inevitable consequence of her soul; you're asserting that just because she mad an extreme choice in extreme contexts, she will always make that extreme choice in any context, and therefore should be forbidden from all contexts. Which is both blind to actual evidence of how the game's setting works, and absolutely horrible besides.

[Tsiron]

Jesus christ......

[KariTheFox]

I'm honestly impressed that a hatred for Venat can be so strong that even though she's already dead at this point in the story, you'd want to double-kill her soul just to make sure she's super duper for real forever dead.

[Veloran]

Is this a 'people are born inherently evil' thing combined with an insidiously bad take on Venat? Because Eden confirms this is not that kind of story, and that it's wrong to pretend it is: Gaia is not Loghrif, no matter how much Mitron kicks, screams and overwrites memories, and he was wrong to enforce what he believed her to be.

WoL and Amon (and Zenos) would suggest that people's souls do have an intrinsic character that transcends incarnations. Even with Eden it wasn't so much that Gaia rejected her self-as-Loghrif, rather she didn't want to have her current person and the connections she'd formed destroyed. Of course, Mitron erasing who Gaia was against her will was wrong, but in terms of the connection between the two Gaia acknowledged it and in the end hopes to meet him again after he himself reincarnates.

you're asserting that just because she mad an extreme choice in extreme contexts, she will always make that extreme choice in any context, and therefore should be forbidden from all contexts.

Venat made that selfsame assertion against the entirety of her people.

[Lyth]

Eh, I wouldn't take Necrotica's post too seriously:

I fully believe Venat/Hydaelyn is a good person. Just not sure she is a smart person with the decisions she has made.

Don't give them too much grief for just wanting to fit in.

I'm talking more along the lines of something like a branched timeline. Would we be able to go back there once we shunted it off ala G'raha? No. But it'd be enough for me to know they still survived in that alternate timeline. The way I am playing it in the AU I am writing is that my WoL went back a second time, and sabotaged Kairos so that no one forgot. Which meant that Emet could plan a way to take care of Meteion without all that mess and bloodshed. That basically branched off the timeline. Venat knew it and actually approved of my WoL's ingenuity and determination that no one was to be given up for lost.

Well, there's more to it than that. G'raha no longer exists in the Eighth Umbral Calamity timeline. Altering the timeline into a new branch turned it into a one way trip. If then he tried to travel forward in time, he would now simply end up in our timeline's future, not the Eighth Umbral Calamity timeline.

So in a way, you would get your wish - the current timeline would continue forward without you, and you would now only exist in the new Elpis timeline where Amaurot is saved, unable to return. I'm not sure how you would resolve the issue of two Azems co-existing in the same timeline, though. In G'raha's case, he not only travelled to a different time, but also a different dimension which he was never originally a part of. And when he finished his task on the First, he turned to stone, such that we were back down to only one G'raha. Likewise, future Azem would probably need to die, and hand off their memories to past Azem to resolve that paradox. But if they're passionate enough about it, it might be worth it for them.

I think that there are plenty of events that would be nice to redo. Could we go back and undo Moenbryda, Haurchefant, Ysayle, and Papalymo's deaths? I'm sure that these are all in the realm of possibility, but I suspect that the writers have deliberately kept time travel as a high cost venture to keep the floodgates closed.

[Veloran]

Altering the timeline into a new branch turned it into a one way trip. If then he tried to travel forward in time, he would now simply end up in our timeline's future, not the Eighth Umbral Calamity timeline.

Aside from the fact that we obviously have nothing in the narrative stating or supporting that idea - If we're conceptualizing timelines in this way, wouldn't it be possible to simply go back before the timelines diverged, and simply take a turn into whichever one you wanted to go to?

I'm sure that these are all in the realm of possibility, but I suspect that the writers have deliberately kept time travel as a high cost venture to keep the floodgates closed.

But it's a zero cost venture. We're literally doing it for side content now.

[Lauront]

WoL and Amon (and Zenos) would suggest that people's souls do have an intrinsic character that transcends incarnations.

Indeed, it's even a hypothesis G'raha puts forward in Labyrinthos.

[Cleretic]

Indeed, it's even a hypothesis G'raha puts forward in Labyrinthos.

Even then... what, do people think Venat's intrinsic character is 'let's shatter the world when it looks too good'? That this was the end goal of all her lives, she just happened to pick the Sundering as her avenue that one time? Reincarnation was a standard part of how the world worked even before the Sundering, wouldn't a soul with a predeliction towards planet-cracking have feasibly, y'know, caused some severe problems before then?

It's hard to get a bead on the 'intrinsic character' of Venat, since we don't have a lot of time with her when she's putting on a genuine face, but I would probably characterize her as 'unyieldingly principled'. With the Sundering, she made the ultimate statement of the Ancients' actual principles, when even most of the Ancients went against them. And even after twelve thousand years of walking the hardest possible road in every possible way (especially emotionally), and never once wavered. And this isn't emotional deadness, or psychopathy or anything someone might want to negatively ascribe to her; she is empathetic to the highest degree, and still goes on.

...which means that, ironically, the Goddess of Light was the greatest Dark Knight we've ever met, as she more than anyone is of Unyielding Principle. She's not someone who chooses violence for fun or for ease, she's someone who will do what's right, no matter what. That's the intrinsic character she would bring, not 'mass destruction because you've got it too good'.

[Theodric]

I'm honestly impressed that a hatred for Venat can be so strong that even though she's already dead at this point in the story, you'd want to double-kill her soul just to make sure she's super duper for real forever dead.

Given that she's a fictional character, I doubt anyone here is actually losing any sleep over her. That aside, it hasn't been very long since Endwalker launched so the latest story beats are fresh in many people's minds and are naturally going to be a topic of discussion and debate.

I'd like to note that for much of Shadowbringers and even before that point it wasn't at all unusual to see certain posters post scathing commentary in relation to many of the antagonists, most commonly the Garleans and the Ascians. If that wasn't enough, any character that was depicted as anything less than perfect - such as Merlwyb - also happened to be attacked with consistency.

So I suppose I'm a little confused as to why Venat, a character who cruelly committed genocide upon her own people, is supposedly a 'no go' for criticism and playful commentary.