Sundering stuff established in the Q&A

[Absimiliard]

The Q&A really only served to intensify the debate, I think. It at least shot holes in various ideas about Venat's intentions and laid out the whys and hows of the three remaining Unsundered (or rather two Unsundered and a primal). Most of what Yoshi-P said definitely seems to contradict some of what the game tries to tell us, but not all of it. There's still a lot of missing or conflicting information.

[Kozh]

snip

I am actually impressed at how you can stroke your own ego and put down others at the same time.

You do realize that even with how popular emet is, people who likes him or the Ascian in general are more often than not being sneered by people like you? That happens here, happens in reddit, and happens in Twitter as well. I lost count how many times I've been called "genocide apologist" whenever there a discussion about him/elidibus.

Meanwhile what venat's fan get? Pat to the back and how "benevolent" their fav is. No one called you nasty stuff. No one go to your post/tweet about to trash her. Like in reddit there's someone who intentionally went into an innocent fanart of emet just to complain about him.

[Cleretic]

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.

They did attack him and didn't die (although they got banged up pretty bad). I don't have a problem with that, although I think they should've pulled the knives out at the Throne of the Immaculate instead. No real difference in his power either way, he mostly just didn't care enough to land killing blows, because from his perspective everyone was going to die in four minutes' time anyway, which was true both at the Throne and Fake Amaurot.

But mostly I'm mad that they mostly didn't bring up his actual crimes, and weren't ruder to him in the later stages. When everyone actually fights him before the Dying Gasp, they mostly talk more personally; Alisaie is the only one who brings up that whole 'you have killed entire civilizations' thing, which I really think should be weighed heavier because it's the thing I really can't forgive. It hurts even worse after his death, when the game treats him better than it has actual allies who have died, despite again that whole 'killed civilizations' thing.

Basically, my notes are less 'the characters did the wrong things' and more 'I wish they'd been madder about it given who it is'.


...and as a mostly unrelated thing, I think it's odd that of all people, it's Alisaie that brings up the more societal-level crime, and not Alphinaud. He's a little politician-to-be who's really coming into his own on that level of things, why is his sister the one who goes big-picture?

[Absimiliard]

Basically, my notes are less 'the characters did the wrong things' and more 'I wish they'd been madder about it given who it is'.


it's Alisaie that brings up the more societal-level crime, and not Alphinaud. He's a little politician-to-be who's really coming into his own on that level of things, why is his sister the one who goes big-picture?

It is strange how not angry they were, and Alphinaud keeping his mouth shut (for what honestly seemed like the first time since were introduced to him) was even stranger still.

[Cleretic]

I am actually impressed at how you can stroke your own ego and put down others at the same time.

You do realize that even with how popular emet is, people who likes him or the Ascian in general are more often than not being sneered by people like you? That happens here, happens in reddit, and happens in Twitter as well. I lost count how many times I've been called "genocide apologist" whenever there a discussion about him/elidibus.

Meanwhile what venat's fan get? Pat to the back and how "benevolent" their fav is. No one called you nasty stuff. No one go to your post/tweet about to trash her. Like in reddit there's someone who intentionally went into an innocent fanart of emet just to complain about him.

I don't think you've been paying attention to this subforum, it has been really nasty about Venat for months now. Basically every thread has someone picking a fight and dragging the same arguments back through. I have had kind of uncomfortable ad hominem attacks slung at me at least twice (possibly more, I don't read every page, and there was one time in January where multiple pages got deleted because it got that ugly). This isn't the only place it's happening, either, although it's the only place it's happening that I frequent; I've heard MMOChampion has reached the level of 'arguing that Venat is a Nazi'.

I wasn't even claiming high ground. I was saying that I have been here before, and it was terrible then, too.

[Rosenstrauch]

What I'm getting from this is that this entire Venat/Emet-Selch kerfuffle is that one Metal Gear Rising meme, but both sides are punching.

[Absimiliard]

...Yeah, that's pretty accurate. This entire debacle is a "standing here, I realize" moment. Two sides of the same coin bickering and attempting to differentiate themselves from the other, but the more they bicker the more apparent it becomes they're virtually identical.

[Cleretic]

I've been saying that it's all equal for months now, honestly.

It is strange how not angry they were, and Alphinaud keeping his mouth shut (for what honestly seemed like the first time since were introduced to him) was even stranger still.

In retrospect, this makes sense on a meta level now that we know they were setting up the groundwork for a morally ambiguous conflict. You have to do certain things to make sure that the audience comes at that without narrative bias, and part of that is priming the audience surrogates. There's a few ways to do that (Shin Megami Tensei likes 'every side gets an equal amount of sympathetic supporting characters' for example), but FFXIV goes for having the same core cast there for both sides, and to not color our response they then have to respond largely the same both times.

That means they couldn't respond to Emet with the level of rage and hostility that they probably should've had by how their characters are and what he'd done, because this is the statement of character that will be contrasted with Hydaelyn; that means Emet gets a lot of respect, because they will offer Hydaelyn similar.

Not saying this is a good or bad thing, just saying that when you step back and take a look at the whole narrative structure, you can start to recognize the smaller decisions they made in service for the bigger picture.

EDIT: In fact, for some additional parallel, both Emet-Selch and Venat get exactly one person that isn't their direct opposition actually speak out against them; Emet gets Alisaie, Venat gets that one Ancient.

[Absimiliard]

You're certainly correct in your assessment, though I do feel SE's method of keeping biases to a minimum had the rather unfortunate side effect of making the Scions far less relatable than what I suspect was intended.

[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.