Sundering stuff established in the Q&A

[EaraGrace]

Sorry to say, but I never get the feeling that you try to see other's perspective. It's hard to believe when you went to public forum, then said "gonna interrupt the echo chamber" just because some similar minded people were having a conversation. SpectrePhantasia wasn't even confrontational in their post, you're the one who decides to feel insulted all of the sudden. Using a capslock or two isn't equal to them yelling at you.

Yeah, after months of arguing with people who do so in bad faith, I got frustrated and tried to make a snide joke. Sorry.

I won't dismiss the possibility of someone being rude to you, but why take it on other people who doesn't have anything to do with it? Also, all you get is sneering and condescension? Idk about you but that feels kinda rude to people who support and upvotes your post.

I’m genuinely baffled you replied with this. Do you seriously believe I insulted the people who liked my posts by pointing out how these conversations turn into toxic?

See, THIS is the Venat I love. That's why I said in one of my previous post that pre-elpis venat and post-elpis venat are written for different story directions. Pre-elpis venat is the one who says "[the Ancients] are flawed, but I'm going to save it, warts and all" and "nothing is impossible". She's the one who had traveled the world, find the beauty of both her world and people, and want to save it. Meanwhile post-elpis venat is written more as "the end justify the means". If the sundering had a term&condition that explains how it comes with the risk of rejoining and how sparing emet would significantly increase that risk, she definitely read and tick the box. Even if she meant for emet to survive for his role in ultima Thule alone (though it's near impossible since she can't predict that far), it doesn't change the fact she accepted the chance for rejoining to happen.

You can apply to the Sundering in general or any action she would take. “Oh, you’re deliberately trying to do things differently in order to prevent the rejoinings? Oh well, that’s pretty fucked up, after all doing things differently risks creating another doomed timeline and killing all life!”

Yet he still doesn't know about meteion. If venat decides to not tell everyone before final days happen because she doesn't want to instigate panic, then after final days has passed and zodiark was summoned, shouldn't it be the best time to tell them? And per elidibus dialogue, it looks like venat faction never seek peaceful option. It was elidibus who wanted reconciliation and was forced to fight hydaelyn.

Was that before or after they formed the Ascian squad and got to work secretly causing calamity’s? Seems like the moment the three Unsundered escaped they got to work.

And never sought a peaceful option? We’re shown her begging them to not sacrifice innocents though?

Like you said before, maybe she want to make sure she's not that weak by the time she had to help us. Or maybe she want to "lessen the pain" (lol).

Her efforts to halt the calamity weakens her though? By the time we show up she’s burned through everything she has, and not just holding back Zodiark either. Not to mention, if she is following the script we laid out then any intervention not mentioned by us to her would be useless and counterproductive.

But nah, the real reason is because it was written way before Endwalker. After all, the writers were forced to retcon her explanation of zodiark from HW by having the Watcher to basically goes "yeah, she kiiiind of lying, but that's because she doesn't want to lose your faith tho".

Ok so where’s the dialogue explaining the retcon for her attempts to stop the calamities? Why double down and have multiple characters talk about her trying to stop them, including her herself if that’s not meant to be true?

I mean, we're allowed to disagree with the writer, but fine I'm willing to suspend disbelief for now considering this isn't a thread to discuss the writing itself.

You can disagree for sure, but we’re arguing over canon and that inevitably involves authorial intent.

And we saw how effective it was by being vague like that. Death is not natural for them. They don't know what will happen should they choose the "eradicate sorrow" path. They don't even know what this "destruction" means or how it relates to their suffering and the final days.

Death and suffering is natural for them though, they were only spared it’s workings for a time, as Venat notes. Erichthonios, Athena, and Hermes are examples of Ancients who faced death in some form before the Final Days.

[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.

[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.

[Iscah]

I just don't understand why they took this whole angle on her character to begin with.

They have retconned the existing facts about Hydaelyn, Zodiark and the circumstances of the Sundering to make her into this morally ambiguous figure.

There were story paths that could have been taken out of Shadowbringers to portray her as "good" and the Sundering as either a necessity or an accident, and those paths were not taken.

I feel like there must be two factions at work in the writers' room and one wanted to maintain her being "all-loving mother Hydaelyn" and the other wanted to drag the story as far into edgy "no right answer" territory as possible, and we've ended up with fragments of both in a story that's trying to be too many things at once.

[Cleretic]

I do have to say, I think seeing people work through their feelings on this is funny, because when people are actually talking about their feelings they're pretty much exactly how I felt about Emet-Selch pretty much all through Shadowbringers and its patches.

Emet similarly got a pretty rosy and unjudging response from characters in the story through Shadowbringers, especially in and after Amaurot, and similarly I could never swallow it, because I never found his motives sufficient for what he did, or his character all that pleasant (pretty much my very first response to the character in Shadowbringers was 'I hope the Scions spend the expansion throwing successively larger things at him to shut him up', and was very disappointed this didn't happen). In fact, I still kinda think less of a lot of the Scions for Alisaie being the only one to actually take him to task for what he did, and even that wasn't much at all.

All of this has happened before. It's just that a bunch of you never noticed because you liked and agreed with it last time. Now you're all in the same position I have been in the last two years; being faced with moral ambiguity that the game doesn't take the stance about that you would, and being uncomfortable with that. Especially because people just keep talking about it (in this subforum, at least), so you can't just file it as 'part of the game that I don't like' and move on in the same way you could if, say, you just didn't like Thordan or Nidhogg. It just keeps coming up, which means you keep having to stay in the space you hate.

But it seems that outside of this bubble that gamble paid off. There hasn't been a lot of time since Endwalker and so very little in the way of known public feedback, but one of the Japanese fansites held a character popularity poll and Venat was right up in the top three with Emet and Hythlodaeus--rather impressive for her, honestly, since she had one expansion (actually, basically only one zone) to get that following, and managed to break into what was kind of a boys' club of favorite characters.

For what it's worth, it was NOT close between her and fourth place, either, she got more than twice as much as #4 (G'raha, if it matters).

[Cleretic]

I just don't understand why they took this whole angle on her character to begin with.

They have retconned the existing facts about Hydaelyn, Zodiark and the circumstances of the Sundering to make her into this morally ambiguous figure.

There were story paths that could have been taken out of Shadowbringers to portray her as "good" and the Sundering as either a necessity or an accident, and those paths were not taken.

I feel like there must be two factions at work in the writers' room and one wanted to maintain her being "all-loving mother Hydaelyn" and the other wanted to drag the story as far into edgy "no right answer" territory as possible, and we've ended up with fragments of both in a story that's trying to be too many things at once.

I actually think they've been angling for Hydaelyn's ambiguity since at least Shadowbringers, if not before (she was a little suspect in Heavensward on review), it's just that only now were they able to throw down the hand they were holding. They also kinda had to do that if they wanted to make Emet-Selch... you know, not objectively a monster. They clearly wanted him to be sympathetic, but if Venat and Hydaelyn remained unimpeachable figures of perfect goodness... well, pretty much the same people around here would be mad, because he has a following and he has people who agree with him. It'd feel pretty bad if you went 'yeah, everyone who agreed with the most popular character we've ever written is wrong'.

Personally, I think they did it very well, because they managed to make her morally ambiguous while still keeping her as that good, loving mother goddess. It's actually kind of impressive that they were able to put both of those two sides forward at once; she is very clearly a loving and kind person... it's just that she's loving and kind to us, and was rather less so to her compatriots.

[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.

[Rulakir]

I feel like there must be two factions at work in the writers' room and one wanted to maintain her being "all-loving mother Hydaelyn" and the other wanted to drag the story as far into edgy "no right answer" territory as possible, and we've ended up with fragments of both in a story that's trying to be too many things at once.

This has been my impression since the beginning as well. It seemed like Ishikawa was going in a different direction with Hydaelyn's character in ShB and it feels like maybe she was pressured internally to change course. Either that or the First was a massive case of sleight of hand meant to throw us off and this was always her intent, which frankly makes me dislike the storyline of EW even more.

I still think the main issue is her portrayal. Emet was called out multiple times for the deaths he caused and while the Scions may have come to have sympathy for him they were never warm towards him. The only person to call out Venat was herself and the Scions have a history of borderline zealotry towards Hydaelyn, including forgiveness of highly questionable acts. I suppose it could be argued that their blind spot towards her was consistent, but I don't find that acceptable. Not to mention that no one was unhappy when Emet died, in fact, the first NPC to speak is Alphinaud with a smile who elatedly says "Emet-Selch is no more." When Hydaelyn dies it's a boo-hoo fest with Alisaie saying, "This can't be happening."

As far as popularity, most of us actually did like Venat in Elpis. It was everything after that which ruined her character. EW was also missing a lot of context that we learned in the Q&A, although, I'm not sure how much difference it would've made because the game still portrayed her as a protagonist, certainly not morally grey.

[Absimiliard]

Emet similarly got a pretty rosy and unjudging response from characters in the story through Shadowbringers, especially in and after Amaurot, and similarly I could never swallow it, because I never found his motives sufficient for what he did, or his character all that pleasant (pretty much my very first response to the character in Shadowbringers was 'I hope the Scions spend the expansion throwing successively larger things at him to shut him up', and was very disappointed this didn't happen). In fact, I still kinda think less of a lot of the Scions for Alisaie being the only one to actually take him to task for what he did, and even that wasn't much at all.

Would you have preferred they fight him and die? The WoL's ability to prevail over Emet-Selch in the end was due to a combination of factors that were not and could not have been present during the vast majority of their interactions with him. Had they taken action early, they would've been slain almost instantly. It read to me like one of those "we're only barely tolerating your presence, and even then because we can do nothing about it" things.

[Rannie]

Honestly, in my opinion, even with the live letter I felt a lot of the answers still were lacking... half the time when the questions were being read outloud Yoshi P looked , to me, like he didn't even want to answer them...