Sundering stuff established in the Q&A

[Cleretic]

To reiterate the twofold reasons that Venat gave for being selective about who she told, both of which were said back-to-back in the exact same cutscene after Ktisis:
1. Overall, people will take the news badly and drop into despair (which we see happen exactly). So she needs to make sure to only tell people she know can take that bad news.
2. Hermes especially needs to not know, because he as the only Dynamis-knower in a position of power is needed for creating Zodiark, and if he learns Meteion is responsible for this then he's going to either drop into despair himself or go complete turncoat, as he did at the end of Ktisis.

She didn't enjoy doing any of this, she is Not Having Fun.

...and yeah, there's literally no chance they would've gone 'okay we're doing pretty good, let's sunder our entire planet and people just a little'. That's absurd. Especially if you believe that the Sundering was a form of great mass death and suffering, which... you know, it probably was.

Emet and the unsundered were literally unsundered because when we explained our past to Venat and the others offscreen, we likely explained our entire journey from ARR to EW. Knowing Laha, Elidibus and Emet were our adversaries in the future, she likely spared them since those 3 were integral in leading the events that led up to us being groomed into the warrior of light (various calamities, allagan empire, Garleans, Ultima Weapon, primals, etc). Without those 3 being unsundered, we would never have met the scions or fought all these powerful adversaries and got to where we are. They are literally nexus characters that are required to groom our WoL into the hero they are to save the universe. It was the longest of long cons.

Did you watch the Q&A?

The way it was largely put forward was that yeah, she was crossing her fingers to spare Emet, but didn't have a lot of control over it, so she just tried her best to let Emet live and by chance he happened to also save Elid and Laha. The way I put it when trying to describe it, she couldn't actively choose for Emet to survive, but could deliberately avoid making absolute sure he didn't, so she left an opening and gambled on him being smart enough to dodge. Which he did, and then happened to crack out a clutch Rescue on both of the others.

Which is only really new information logistically; we already knew Venat planned for Emet to live from the fact that Emet himself deduced that and Emet can generally be trusted to be right about this stuff. We just didn't know how she did it.