Sundering stuff established in the Q&A

[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).