Quote Originally Posted by Brinne View Post
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.