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

[Lauront]

If nothing else, it's hilarious to me that Venat was written to be directly and indirectly responsible for pretty much every bad thing that ever happened in the story but the game just expects everybody to ignore that and instead blame the victims of various and entirely avoidable atrocities. It's a lot how when people are at their lowest point the last thing they typically want to hear is to be told to just get over it.

There's such a tonal whiplash with the way in which Garlemald is handled. I brought it up already, but I was dreading smug commentary from the Scions about how they had it coming. Instead, they were treated with dignity and respect. Which just makes it all the more jarring that the same mentality wasn't afforded to the Ancients. Even if we concede that the timeline could not be changed for fear of erasing the Sundered...there's really no reason for at least one or two of the Scions to be disgusted and have a crisis of faith.

Much in the same way as how FFX was made all the more interesting by Wakka's crisis of faith, whilst FFIX had Steiner's conflicting loyalty to Queen Brahne and FFVI had Celes accused of still remaining loyal to the Empire despite her defection.

Such setups allow for excellent drama and dynamics between characters. FFXIV has very little of that. The Scions all agree with each other on pretty much every subject.

It did feel like at least Y'shtola was veering in that direction (the twins' empathy with Emet-Selch was more visceral but did not seem to trigger the same scepticism that Y'shtola was evincing by 5.5), but then if anything in EW she was the one who just tossed aside her earlier scepticism to Venat.

I both like and dislike Venat. I thought she was a very cool and interesting character, and I loved her charisma.

But I dislike her pseudo-Buddhist "suffering fetishism". The entire Endwalker story, for example, struck me as a constant example of "Perfection Fallacy". We're flat out told that since no civilization can achieve perfection, then they should stop striving for it. The Ea became depressed about the fact that, despite eliminating every other problem on their star, they couldn't do anything about the heat death of the universe, which led to their inevitable demise.

The premise feels laughably juvenile. Real-life academics and skeptics have long accepted the relative meaninglessness and finite measure of life for centuries, and most of them haven't shriveled into a ball of nihilism. Yes, you can't live life without some measure of suffering, but not all suffering is equal, not all suffering has the same consequences, and not all suffering is necessary. My entire problem with Endwalker's plot (and thus Venat's characterization) is that they act like it is.

Agreed, and I think it's all the more ridiculous, because the Scions still aspire to perfectionist ideals, i.e. to minimise suffering, which means that fate will eventually be a potential issue again. I don't fault them for that, but you can't then try hold to that whilst simultaneously justifying, in the story, sundering the world to avoid the Plenty. In fact, some of the impulses of the sundered open up the other worlds shown as possibilities. That is my issue with it. Had they pushed the sundering as the result of a tragic misunderstanding, but which would now come at a very gruesome cost to reverse, at least using Ascian methods (and really, from a practical perspective, requiring something like 1.0->2.0 to pull off beyond that)? I'd accept that. I also think it's a little silly for other reasons - plenty of humans are content to live their lives focused mostly on entirely hedonistic pursuits, yet the way the story is written, we should be heading to a dead end ourselves as we eclipse sources of suffering and are able to focus more on leisure. I remain committed to the idea of doing so, particularly with ills like ageing, and I found the story to be rather juvenile, as you say, in how forced a caricature the Plenty seemed to be... could these individuals not invent ways to keep their minds occupied? Even so, the setting has a star-centric system of reincarnation, so it's not like life on their star wouldn't one day rekindle (Meteion aside.)