What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Brinne]

Interesting! Thanks for sharing. I'm curious, if you don't mind elaborating, does it have to do with her violating people's rights?

I mean, I can’t actually speak for my friends, of course, but it’s fair to say we’re all fiercely progressive – many identifying as some variety of socialist - and almost all of us had varying levels of contempt for Venat (the person I would say was most “friendly” to her was so in a “cheerfully-acknowledging-she’s-a-comically-terrible-person” sort of way) – a few of them were legitimately, deeply, infuriated by the walking montage scene. Myself, I was so uneasy with the dissonance of Venat’s narrative presentation and her actions that the segment of the game between her montage and Zenos showing up at the very end (praise Zenos) was probably the most actively unpleasant experience thus far playing FFXIV for me – which I have been for almost ten years now - and my discomfort seemed to pale next to theirs.

I think it’s a mixture of things. As far as in-universe reasoning goes, Venat’s philosophy of embracing “strength” and more or less choosing to cull those who couldn’t live up to her ideals of “strength” rubbed us the wrong way. I suppose you could say that she expected the Ancients – and the Sundered, in many ways – to survive and thrive in conditions of hardship, to just toughen up, with their social support systems cut off and destroyed. She was full of praise for the ones able to make it, and the ones who couldn’t were, alas, an unfortunate loss at best, succumbing to weakness. Their fates are their individual responsibilities. One of my friends joked that “wow, she really told the Ancients to just bootstrap.” Venat has a focus on internal grit and the strong surviving, so to speak, and it has some overlap (to my/our perception) with something we have an inherent and fairly deep distaste for in the bigger picture, and find often translates into callousness and excuses to turn away from the needs and humanity of others less privileged. tldr; Venat is basically a Social Darwinist, do not want, lol.

The other part is a bit meta-textual. Many of us were fairly enamored with Shadowbringers because of its case for nonjudgmental empathy, for reaching out and understanding others – both individually and culturally – and respecting them, even if they were different from us. We had a fair few discussions about how Amaurot was remarkable for taking a long-worn fantasy trope – the extinct ancient civilization, often used to prop up the “modern” version of humanity – and filling it was such a degree of humanity and empathy. Rather than falling on any number of traditional Othering tropes in this context, they balanced a genuine urge to see them as people, with as much a right to live as we did, along with having a legitimately distinct and interesting culture. (I loved learning about Amaurot’s culture and sucked up every tidbit we could get like a high-speed vacuum cleaner. I’m actually not much of a world lore person, generally – my focus is usually on characterization and such – but FFXIV’s Amaurot might be one of the first/only times my brain actually got hooked on Lore in that sense.)

But we really valued that. We fundamentally rejected the idea of seeing the Ancients as the “Other,” a group alien and Not Like Us that it could justify or soften the idea of seeing them subjected to violence (or subjecting them to violence ourselves). FFXIV, at the time, seemed to reject them as empty fodder to teach a Valuable Lesson or Warning for the protagonists. The most precious thing about them in terms of narrative construction is the way Shadowbringers truly and sincerely urged us to see ourselves in them, and vice-versa, and thus mourn the meaningless cruelty they were subjected to.

Venat’s narrative upends this. Suddenly the focus, from her perspective, is on the flaws of the Ancients, how, alas, they were indeed fated to doom themselves on a Thematic Lesson Basis. What was done to them was used to augment Venat’s “determination” and her “hard decisions.” The fury of one friend in particular over the montage sequence was based around how it was contorting itself to uplift the struggles of Venat as a tragic individual, asking us to focus on her perspective and how much the Sundering was hurting her, and used everyone she had killed and subjected to suffering as narrative accessories for her noble torment.

Second tldr; we tend to find protagonist-centric morality at the expense of the masses really distasteful; Great Man Theory gtfo, never, ever look away from the humanity and consequences to other people at large and in the margins, challenge and dismantle exceptionalist thought, etc, etc.