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

[Theodric]

Can you explain why it is that you do find the mother goddess motif creepy? It's common symbolism in many religions, it's not unique or unusual.

I'm not religious myself and although this isn't the place for a deep debate on the subject, it could be proposed that a lot of real world religions strip away freedom and agency from believers who in turn then sometimes seek to spread teachings which do the same to other people.

Another factor, specifically for Venat is that her behaviour is very similar to munchausen by proxy. Yet in the case of the Sundered she isn't even their mother to begin with - only masquerading as such and declaring that everyone on Etheirys is now suddenly her 'children' based on a non-consensual act of forcing them to be more to her liking.

I don't necessarily have a problem with the 'mother goddess' motif in general, so much as in the context of Venat. As I mentioned in prior posts, I don't think her reasons for inflicting genocide upon her own people were particularly strong. She deduced, with no guarantee that it was the correct judgement, that the Ancients would eventually suffer a similar fate to the inhabitants of the planets mentioned in Meteion's report. However, even if we concede that such might have been true...she had information that allowed her to know of the impending approach of the Final Days as well as Meteion's existence. She insisted on withholding both pieces of key information from her people despite it clearly being something that would have helped the Ancients respond accordingly. They did, after all, have a society based around research and debate.

In terms of the player character, the lack of an ability to express our disagreement with what she did is also rather strange. That a significant chunk of the most recent Live Letter was focused on 'clarifying' elements of the story suggests to me that quite a lot of people found the premise of the expansion to be rather bizarre in places. I also get the impression that Venat wasn't nearly as universally loved as the development team were led to believe which likely caught them off guard.

If nothing else, I think the writers dropped the ball in regards to handling the controversial subject of genocide. I don't agree that there was a 'good reason' for the genocide of the Ancients and I thought it was pretty weird that the Scions are so lukewarm in their reactions to Venat. It's entirely possible for someone to directly or indirectly benefit from an act as horrific as the Sundering but still find the act to be utterly reprehensible. The story seems to pick and choose which morals and themes it wishes to embrace at any given time instead of maintaining a sense of consistency.

Ultimately I think Venat was done a major disservice. I found her to be likeable during the Elpis portion of the story - right up until the infamous 'thou shall walk' cutscene which, conveniently, involved exaggerated caricatures of the Ancients and reduced the complex reasoning outlined in Shadowbringers and Elpis to eyebrow raising parody. The other jarring element is making her responsible for sparing the three Unsundered and viewing the Rejoinings as a 'necessity' for her plan to work. I think it takes away the agency of many different characters and factions.

[Lauront]

involved exaggerated caricatures of the Ancients

This guy ended up being the unsung tragic martyr of the resistance against Venat's "grand plan":



Bizarrely enough, Yoshi's "she's an ancient huh" is applied to her (again, I'll reiterate how unconvincing I find this given that we see many sundered characters engaged in similar "for the greater good" and "the ends justify the means" reasoning, but whatever), but no such luck for the poor strawmen. No, they just have to react to immense grief and loss the right way, in the face of very weak reasoning. We can conveniently neglect that the majority of their number had to sacrifice to prevent their star from dying beneath their feet and how we'd realistically react in this scenario and hope for platitudes to carry the day.

[Skyborne]

This guy ended up being the unsung tragic martyr of the resistance against Venat's "grand plan":

All hail the boomer amaurotines. They just wanted to grill and mow their beautiful perfect lawns in their beautiful perfect world, then walk into the suicide machine 5 minutes later. Also, the perception that Zodiark was putting on his bib and slamming 3 pairs of forks and knives on the table begging for more souls still is funny since it was revealed that he had been keeping them all intact for all these 12k years while the ones in Hydaelyn were consumed.