Sundering stuff established in the Q&A

[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.