Sundering stuff established in the Q&A

[Brinne]

I think it’s very possible to reconcile Venat’s words in Elpis with her actions in attempting to adhere to the timeline, to the point of knowingly encouraging the Rejoinings by letting the Unsundered live. It’s a matter of understanding that her broader goals never changed, but her tactics did in response to the Ancients disappointing her.

Venat, fundamentally, is an ideologue. Her sense of love and wonder is sincere and true, but she is a big-picture person in the extreme, who thinks in the abstract. When she says she loves, it’s not of any specific person or thing. It’s love of “humanity’s potential.” It’s love of “a flawed world,” of “mankind’s ability to find a way forward,” - a particular way of seeing the world that she believes only she, at this point, has, that she waxes poetic about in her big speech leading up to her question of her journey. Our Azem is quoted as describing her as "both close and incredibly distant," "akin to a force of nature," and that seems very apt. She also admits that she, like Hermes, is dissatisfied with the world order as it exists now – she wants others to see the world as she does. To welcome struggle and strife and flaws and therefore, in her eyes, truly treasure the “miracle of creation.”

Connecting her to Hermes, in terms of her dissatisfaction with the world and taking it upon herself to force it to change, in that sense, basically makes everything fall into place. People have pointed out Venat gives some vague lip service in the aftermath of Ktisis about why she can’t warn the Convocation – before she lands on the conclusion that “actually, mankind must pass Hermes’s test.” Venat, like Hermes, wanted a fundamental change in her society, and was hoping that the Final Days would trigger that change – so that they would, like her, learn to love “a world with flaws,” a world “with warts and all.”

The way Hermes sent out the Meteia in hopes that he would discover an outside answer for a better way for the world to exist? Venat actually got exactly that, dropped into her lap – in the form of the WoL. It’s clear she completely falls in love with us and the picture we paint of our world. She’s constantly showering praise about how, despite the state of the world, we’re so resilient and strong, more than she dared hope, and our world sounds so exciting, so full of hardship, and yet the beauty of people enduring it.

Boiling it down, all of her praise and wonder at us, connected with her future actions, comes down to “the Sundered world sounds ideologically awesome to me, the more I see and hear about it from WoL.” See her insistence in her speech that accepting suffering (like the WoL does!) would lead to the path of "finding true happiness" - as opposed to the more shallow, fake happiness she seems to believe her people held prior to that point.

Largely because of her interactions with us, the portrait she receives of someone from “a flawed world full of suffering,” Venat further romanticizes the idea of beauty and strength in the face of struggle and suffering. She sees that version of the world as more exciting, more appealing than the one she lives in now, which she sees as misguided and indolent – she already had, hence her being extremely receptive to hearing Meteion’s two-sentence description of the Plenty, and deciding the Ancients were on the same path based on that.

Her goal was always to create a world like the one she heard the WoL describe, that she fell in love with through their stories. But again, Venat is a big-picture, thinking-in-the-abstract kind of person. She wasn’t necessarily pursuing the WoL’s exact, specific world from the onset. She was initially hoping that the Ancients would convert to her viewpoint in the wake of the Final Days – have a deep, divine-feeling revelation, the way she had. That they could organically agree to live in a world and in conditions similar to that of the Sundered one. And, yes, to her own beliefs, one that stood a better chance of standing up to a threat akin to Meteion. When they refused, she switched her tactics to pursue the literal realization of the WoL’s world by signing off on and pursuing their exact timeline.

(Sucks for the Rejoined shards! But again, according to Venat's way of thinking, there is no concrete sacrifice not worth making if it means "mankind" can "find a way forward" as a whole.)

[Skyborne]

...

Pretty much, and why I personally dislike her/the writing around her. And the poor WoL, who ended up causing all of this.

[Lauront]

Pretty much, and why I personally dislike her/the writing around her. And the poor WoL, who ended up causing all of this.

Same here. If she was simply striving to maintain the timelines, there is at least the fig leaf of justification for her actions in my eyes (although it pushes my dissatisfaction back to the time travel mechanic used), because she was aiming at what she thought would be the plan where she could control for the most variables, even with the knowledge that it came at a tremendous cost, which she herself was conflicted over. I can understand this in a pragmatic sense, though whether I agree with it or not is another question. But if we were to say she did this due to an ideological fetishisation of what the WoL had told her (even if the two motives coincided, though in that case one has to question to what degree is the effort she's putting in commensurate with and dictated by her fascination with the WoL's tales)? Hmm let us just say that as with Hermes, she would be little more than a radical/subversive ideologue in my eyes, and that at least my Azem would treat her no differently to any other such actor. My view is that the ancients had lessons they could draw from the Plenty, and ideally should've been given the full information to interrogate further and make the necessary changes, but that her approach to "teaching" them is not something I could get on board with.

I agree with Brinne that she and Hermes are not coming at it from the same angle at all, and that the sundered world would fail his test in even worse terms. As I've said, she does not incorporate his viewpoint into her rendition of the test at all. And I wonder if to some extent her decision was not already made when she was having that chit chat with the WoL on the sky bridge. Overall I agree that Brinne's analysis of her character is plausible (almost like an aristocrat romanticising the notion of a wild safari while dragging the entire world with her while she stays in the jeep with the binoculars, or in more modern terms, the gamer who is desirous to experience a zombie apocalypse for the thrill of it, although she herself keeps the VR goggles on until the end), but at least in my eyes it pushes her further into the territory where while I understand her motives, I am left even colder towards her. I believe it's why, during the Q&A, they didn't really try double down on "you have to like her", because no matter how much some insist upon it, it won't be the case. But I can at least understand that's what they may have been angling for in terms of her mindset.

[polyphonica]

(Sucks for the Rejoined shards! But again, according to Venat's way of thinking, there is no concrete sacrifice not worth making if it means "mankind" can "find a way forward" as a whole.)

In the end, it ends up just being a question of what the sacrifice should be and what should be the result. They basically all believed that there is no concrete sacrifice not worth making for the sake of Etheirys's future, but disagreed about what that future should look like.

The key fork in the road here happened when the Convocation decided they were ready to seed and sacrifice all non-Ancient life on the star to bring back their own past sacrifices. If they did that, how does that get them any closer to beating Meteion? Doesn't it entirely prove the reason for Hermes's own despair with Ancient society to begin with (at how little they valued the lives of those they considered inferior to themselves)? Doesn't it strongly support the argument their that their own decadence was leading to their inevitable downfall regardless? So it's at that point (to counter the third sacrifice-to-Zodiark plan) she decides that pursuing the sundering path that led to the WoL was the more hopeful option. She was told about the rejoined shards she wouldn't be able to save, but better that (and to have their souls rejoined) than to kill all other life on the planet just to appease what is essentially the Ancients' inability to accept the pain of loss.

I'm not so sure that all this is because she became enamored with the WoL to exactly the degree stated, but at the very least she saw a path with potential there, despite knowing the cost it'd take to reach it. So the decision she had to make was to weigh the cost of that path (and all the sacrifices involved) with the cost and likely result of the path the main faction was pursuing. They were all gambling with lives at an unbelievable scale. With respect to the criticisms offered, perhaps it could have helped to spend more time covering that interim period, all the alternate things that were tried, and exactly what led to Venat realizing she had no choice but to go this way. (Clearly it wasn't her first choice because she let the Convocation do the first two rounds of sacrifices to the Zodiark; she wanted them first and foremost to pass Hermes's trial on their own. But the third round was the bridge too far.)

[Brinne]

The key fork in the road here happened when the Convocation decided they were ready to seed and sacrifice all non-Ancient life on the star to bring back their own past sacrifices. If they did that, how does that get them any closer to beating Meteion? Doesn't it entirely prove the reason for Hermes's own despair with Ancient society to begin with (at how little they valued the lives of those they considered inferior to themselves)? Doesn't it strongly support the argument their that their own decadence was leading to their inevitable downfall regardless? So it's at that point (to counter the third sacrifice-to-Zodiark plan) she decides that pursuing the sundering path that led to the WoL was the more hopeful option. She was told about the rejoined shards she wouldn't be able to save, but better that (and to have their souls rejoined) than to kill all other life on the planet just to appease what is essentially the Ancients' inability to accept the pain of loss.

Putting aside that it's been established repeatedly that the Convocation was not preparing to sacrifice "all" non-Ancient life - Hermes and Venat shared a dissatisfaction with the world, but they were coming from very different directions. Hermes disliked what he perceived as a lack of empathy and a willingness to, yes, sacrifice lesser beings for the greater good. The Sundering, and the Sundered version of the world, does not change this at all - if anything, it only deepens it and makes it worse. We even see Hermes's soul end up in more or less the same place of despair and nihilism in Sundered form for similar reasons, through Amon. The Sundered world sacrifices other lives to suit themselves far more readily and more painfully and for far more selfish reasons than the Unsundered did.

Venat's line of thinking with her dissatisfaction is entirely different. Rather than lack of empathy, she resents (for lack of a better word) the lack of appreciation for struggle, the lack of "strength" to stand against despair. She doesn't mourn loss, like Hermes - she mourns that others can't see the true beauty inherent within struggle and overcoming suffering and flaws in the way that she does. Unlike Hermes, she specifically criticizes her fellow Ancients for "weakness," and when we win the fight against her, she praises our "strength." So the Sundering does address the root of her problem with the world - she changed the environment to one that forces humanity to confront suffering and learn resilience in the face of it, reaching a place that could create someone as impressive and one that fills her with such hope as the WoL does - even if it was on a pile of corpses. Hermes and Venat share the fact that they don't like their society, but the gripes they have are entirely different. Hermes thinks they're too cold. Venat thinks they have it too easy.

Fundamentally, I think Venat's character makes much more sense and basically coheres together well when you understand that yes, she took some ruthless and utilitarian actions to fight Meteion and that was a factor, but her primary motivation was not practical, not a matter of "saving the most lives" or "preventing the most sacrifices." It was ideological.

[polyphonica]

Venat's line of thinking with her dissatisfaction is entirely different. Rather than lack of empathy, she resents (for lack of a better word) the lack of appreciation for struggle, the lack of "strength" to stand against despair. She doesn't mourn loss, like Hermes - she mourns that others can't see the true beauty inherent within struggle and overcoming suffering and flaws in the way that she does. Unlike Hermes, she specifically criticizes her fellow Ancients for "weakness," and when we win the fight against her, she praises our "strength." So the Sundering does address the root of her problem with the world - she changed the environment to one that forces humanity to confront suffering and learn resilience in the face of it, reaching a place that could create someone as impressive and one that fills her with such hope as the WoL does - even if it was on a pile of corpses. Hermes and Venat share the fact that they don't like their society, but the gripes they have are entirely different. Hermes thinks they're too cold. Venat thinks they have it too easy.

I will try to re-read again, but I just don't recall enough evidence in the text to really support this analogy at least insofar as it was a pre-established ideology to an equivalent degree. They were very clear with Hermes to portray his ideology before anyone became aware of the time loop, so it was unambiguous: this is his way of viewing the world to start with. But they made no such clear efforts with Venat, although they certainly could have developed things differently if they wanted to do that. Yes, when she meets the WoL she is inspired by their adventures, moved by how they overcame such adversity, and she praises their strength (both in character and in battle) -- it's definitely clear that she likes the WoL a lot, as she obviously has a more in common with them than the average Ancient, and any unexplored world sets off her adventurer spirit. (That same topic of adventurer spirit of course comes back at the very end of the game, so is a broader theme here and leading into future patches.) But to go from that to asserting that she had an ideological dissatisfaction with the lack of suffering in the world to begin with that led to her decision... it just seems like a bit of a bridge too far to me. The links are too tenuous, and IMO it's a bit too important of a point -- it addresses her core motivation -- to leave to so much to inference when there are plenty of ways they could have driven the point home (and were very explicit to do with Hermes). IMO, they wouldn't spend so much time clearly laying out only Hermes's prior motivation if they were trying to draw such a broad parallel with Venat, nor would Venat's key thematic motifs (like the song Flow) be written the way they are.

That her views solidified into so firm an ideology by the point of the montage and her big speech has, I think, a much simpler explanation: she was resolving herself to completely alter the fate of the world, so she was at the peak of her self-righteousness to carry through that resolve and overcome lingering fears and doubts. This was the argument she made against the path her world was otherwise taking, with all the conviction needed to see it through. So yes, in that moment, it was absolutely an ideology that rivals Hermes in the peak of his own arrogance/self-righteousness. But circumstances had so entirely changed. In a very broad sense you can certainly say that it takes an adventurer to believe in the reward in facing adversity and taking the road less traveled, but I don't think it's clear that's rooted in the same kind of deep dissatisfaction that Hermes had.

I do realize that this inference that she had this deep prior dissatisfaction may help some to reconcile what they feel is an incongruous or inexplicable choice on Venat's part to choose the WoL's future rather than telling the hidden truth to the Ancients, but it's basically acting instead like she was predisposed to "betraying" them from the start -- that somehow this was just the excuse she needed to right what she felt was wrong about the world (as was portrayed of Hermes's action). And again, although I think that's potentially an interesting angle, I think that kind of implication requires a lot more evidence than the story showed.

[EaraGrace]

I think it’s very possible to reconcile Venat’s words in Elpis with her actions in attempting to adhere to the timeline, to the point of knowingly encouraging the Rejoinings by letting the Unsundered live. It’s a matter of understanding that her broader goals never changed, but her tactics did in response to the Ancients disappointing her.
) Venat, fundamentally, is an ideologue. Her sense of love and wonder is sincere and true, but she is a big-picture person in the extreme, who thinks in the abstract. When she says she loves, it’s not of any specific person or thing. It’s love of “humanity’s potential.” It’s love of “a flawed world,” of “mankind’s ability to find a way forward,” - a particular way of seeing the world that she believes only she, at this point, has, that she waxes poetic about in her big speech leading up to her question of her journey. Our Azem is quoted as describing her as "both close and incredibly distant," "akin to a force of nature," and that seems very apt. She also admits that she, like Hermes, is dissatisfied with the world order as it exists now – she wants others to see the world as she does. To welcome struggle and strife and flaws and therefore, in her eyes, truly treasure the “miracle of creation.”

Connecting her to Hermes, in terms of her dissatisfaction with the world and taking it upon herself to force it to change, in that sense, basically makes everything fall into place. People have pointed out Venat gives some vague lip service in the aftermath of Ktisis about why she can’t warn the Convocation – before she lands on the conclusion that “actually, mankind must pass Hermes’s test.” Venat, like Hermes, wanted a fundamental change in her society, and was hoping that the Final Days would trigger that change – so that they would, like her, learn to love “a world with flaws,” a world “with warts and all.”

The way Hermes sent out the Meteia in hopes that he would discover an outside answer for a better way for the world to exist? Venat actually got exactly that, dropped into her lap – in the form of the WoL. It’s clear she completely falls in love with us and the picture we paint of our world. She’s constantly showering praise about how, despite the state of the world, we’re so resilient and strong, more than she dared hope, and our world sounds so exciting, so full of hardship, and yet the beauty of people enduring it.

Boiling it down, all of her praise and wonder at us, connected with her future actions, comes down to “the Sundered world sounds ideologically awesome to me, the more I see and hear about it from WoL.” See her insistence in her speech that accepting suffering (like the WoL does!) would lead to the path of "finding true happiness" - as opposed to the more shallow, fake happiness she seems to believe her people held prior to that point.

Largely because of her interactions with us, the portrait she receives of someone from “a flawed world full of suffering,” Venat further romanticizes the idea of beauty and strength in the face of struggle and suffering. She sees that version of the world as more exciting, more appealing than the one she lives in now, which she sees as misguided and indolent – she already had, hence her being extremely receptive to hearing Meteion’s two-sentence description of the Plenty, and deciding the Ancients were on the same path based on that.


Her goal was always to create a world like the one she heard the WoL describe, that she fell in love with through their stories. But again, Venat is a big-picture, thinking-in-the-abstract kind of person. She wasn’t necessarily pursuing the WoL’s exact, specific world from the onset. She was initially hoping that the Ancients would convert to her viewpoint in the wake of the Final Days – have a deep, divine-feeling revelation, the way she had. That they could organically agree to live in a world and in conditions similar to that of the Sundered one. And, yes, to her own beliefs, one that stood a better chance of standing up to a threat akin to Meteion. When they refused, she switched her tactics to pursue the literal realization of the WoL’s world by signing off on and pursuing their exact timeline.

(Sucks for the Rejoined shards! But again, according to Venat's way of thinking, there is no concrete sacrifice not worth making if it means "mankind" can "find a way forward" as a whole.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this scene but there’s a particular moment during Meteions report that in my view contradicts this description of her, or at least adds more complexity to it. When Meteion is listing off the dead civilizations and their goals, there’s a moment where she describes one particular world and it’s people.





To me, her reaction says clearly how she feels. The fact that a world, which sought to remove suffering and succeeded, ended up damned as well hurt to hear. If she always sought a world where hardship and struggle existed and proliferated, and was more excited or appealed to by that world over her own, then hearing this would be a confirmation of that worldview. Not something to feel sad about or despondent over right?

The conversation with her at the observation facility suggests this as well. When she discusses the world she currently lives in, she doesn’t lament its current state, rather she expresses an undying love for it and it’s people. One born of a fundamental faith in humanity’s strength and virtue. It’s only after everything with Elpis, and the Final Days, that we see her speak of the Ancients and their inability find a way forward in their current state.

[Brinne]

To me, her reaction says clearly how she feels. The fact that a world, which sought to remove suffering and succeeded, ended up damned as well hurt to hear. If she always sought a world where hardship and struggle existed and proliferated, and was more excited or appealed to by that world over her own, then hearing this would be a confirmation of that worldview. Not something to feel sad about or despondent over right?

Venat does not take any joy in the prospect of causing destruction or destroying her world. Again, she thinks in the abstract, of an intangible sense of "beauty" that can only be sparked by "in deepest darkness, find light everlasting." That being said, she's willing to go ahead and do it on her ideological basis, because she thinks that's the proper way for people to live - to "become strong", again, "find true happiness." She doesn't relish the idea that the people she knows are headed down a bad path, or that she has to cull them, but more tellingly, she accepts that premise. I think that the fact that she takes, again, a two-sentence description as the basis of which to destroy her current world speaks to a confirmation bias.

The conversation with her at the observation facility suggests this as well. When she discusses the world she currently lives in, she doesn’t lament its current state, rather she expresses an undying love for it and it’s people. One born of a fundamental faith in humanity’s strength and virtue. It’s only after everything with Elpis, and the Final Days, that we see her speak of the Ancients and their inability find a way forward in their current state.

She actually does lament its current state.

On Hermes, Venat says this:

I understand his anguish after a fashion─my own refusal to return is in opposition to the world's established order.

She relates to his desire to oppose the world as it currently exists to the extent of anguish. She does go on to say that she still loves the world, and wants to save it, but of course - Hermes's anguish led him to a subconscious wish to destroy the world. Venat's led her to wish to change the people on it.

The cutscene where Venat hears about the WoL's adventures and their world, and then talks about her own sort of strange, vaguely-defined divine revelation about the correct way to appreciate the beauty of the world, is also very interesting in light of Venat's decisions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7MgvB7sxLU

[EaraGrace]

Venat does not take any joy in the prospect of causing destruction or destroying her world. Again, she thinks in the abstract, of an intangible sense of "beauty" that can only be sparked by "in deepest darkness, find light everlasting." That being said, she's willing to go ahead and do it on her ideological basis, because she thinks that's the proper way for people to live - to "become strong", again, "find true happiness." She doesn't relish the idea that the people she knows are headed down a bad path, or that she has to cull them, but more tellingly, she accepts that premise. I think that the fact that she takes, again, a two-sentence description as the basis of which to destroy her current world speaks to a confirmation bias.

She accepts it due to the inescapable reality they find themselves in. One of the cornerstones of her outlook is a belief that one must look honestly and truthfully at the world one lives in. When she speaks of her own revelation she describes how “freed from presumption or prejudice, I saw the world through a newborns eyes. Everything fresh and new and so, so beautiful.” It’s why she doesn’t reject our story when Emet and Hythlo did and it plays into how she responds to Meteions breakdown, with her stating that Hermes has a right to hear Meteions report but that they should be there as well so he isn’t alone.

So rejecting the premise to her is the equivalent of rejecting gravity or time or any other constant. And that’s very different from believing her world needs to suffer out of preference for that state. One is a begrudging acceptance of the nature of existence, the other is a belief that it is right and good that people should suffer. Perhaps its not an important distinction in other peoples view, but it’s one that I think helps to define her character. The Sundering was a necessity in order to overcome the challenges ahead, not a good in it of itself.

She actually does lament its current state.

On Hermes, Venat says this:



She relates to his desire to oppose the world as it currently exists to the extent of anguish. She does go on to say that she still loves the world, and wants to save it, but of course - Hermes's anguish led him to a subconscious wish to destroy the world. Venat's led her to wish to change the people on it.

I think that quote shows her struggling with a specific cultural norm, rather than being indicative of her distaste for the state of the world then. In her speech to us she actually reaffirms the Ancients way of thinking, stating that as soon as she feels she’s accomplished her purpose she’ll return to the star. It’s just that that purpose has a much longer path than the others. If she had felt that mankind can find it’s own way before stepping down, I don’t think she’d even be voicing that frustration.

The cutscene where Venat hears about the WoL's adventures and their world, and then talks about her own sort of strange, vaguely-defined divine revelation about the correct way to appreciate the beauty of the world, is also very interesting in light of Venat's decisions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7MgvB7sxLU

I’m a particular fan of that speech, as well as the one from the (in)famous cutscene after Elpis. The way she describes how she came to love humanity is I think, regardless of anyones feelings on her beyond that scene, beautiful.

[Firlont]

I’m a particular fan of that speech, as well as the one from the (in)famous cutscene after Elpis. The way she describes how she came to love humanity is I think, regardless of anyones feelings on her beyond that scene, beautiful.

It was that sequence, as well as the joy she took in the sparring match against us, that really sold my vision of Venat as a kindred spirit to the WoL. It was like a version of us that had grown a bit and calmed down a little, but never stopped chasing the (eternal) wind or helping wherever she could. She really was an Azem.