Quote Originally Posted by polyphonica View Post
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.