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

[KariTheFox]

Gray morality is when writers say bad thing is good actually

So when Yoshi-P said "Venat was very much an ancient" and directly compared her decision to judge the unsundered to Emet-Selch's judgement of the sundered, was he saying that a bad thing is good actually?

[YukikoKurosawa]

"Remember us. Remember that we once lived… Also remember to watch out for that crazy guy Fandaniel. His pet bird caused the final days. I was there with my good friend Hythlodaeus and we ran into you because you got sent to the past by our good friend Elidibus. We went there to meet our good friend Hermes and his pet bird. Hermes's bird was capable of destroying entire planets because she had emotion energy, a concept so advanced only Hermes and an elephant knew it existed. Hermes was going to let the bird destroy our planet because he wanted to do an experiment. And then he was going to memory wipe all of us until Venat flew in on her magical dog and escaped with you. She then for some reason decided not to tell anyone about what happened and instead doomed us all to die, including our good friend Azem who fell into a Volcano while trying to find the source of the noise even though Venat knew all along because she put a magic microchip on Hermes’s bird. She then became Hydaelyn and sundered the world because a bunch of weak humans who die after 80 years were better equipped to deal with the threat than immortal gods who could create whatever they wanted at will. Except the only “human” that could actually stand up to Meteion was 9/14ths of our good friend Azem who also needed Hydaelyns blessing to survive along with my great-grandson Zenos Viator Galvus who had Hydaelyns blessing too, except his was reverse-engineered in a Garlean laboratory. And he was a good friend."

[Teraq]

So when Yoshi-P said "Venat was very much an ancient" and directly compared her decision to judge the unsundered to Emet-Selch's judgement of the sundered, was he saying that a bad thing is good actually?

YoshiP has shown time and again that he is the king of bad takes on Ancients. I know he missed the memo, but Ancients were the sort of people who debated ideas and left important decisions to a council of experts with its own appointed mediator.

There is no comparison to make between someone who had all the cards in hand and decided not to tell anyone out of her own paranoia, personal bias and time loop shenanigans, and someone who was backed into a corner by the previous person and spent 12,000 years suffering and toiling pretty much alone trying to repair the wrong that was done.

Also, Emet-Selch was right about the sundered. They're fragile, susceptible to infectious disease and their magic sucks. They are biologically inferior to the Ancients. This is a rather objective judgment.

[KariTheFox]

Well, I can see why this thread is 500 pages, anytime anyone disagrees with your takes, half a dozen of you will start dogpiling in order show them how wrong they are. It's impossible to talk about a subject when the goalposts are constantly being shifted by people who clearly have no interest in trying to understand other perspectives.

It's no wonder most people who like the story give up and leave after a few posts, you people are insufferable to talk to.

And yes, I fully expect you all to declare victory in response to this post and pat yourselves on the backs for how your facts and logic won the day.

[Teraq]

It's impossible to talk about a subject when the goalposts are constantly being shifted by people who clearly have no interest in trying to understand other perspectives.

It's no wonder most people who like the story give up and leave after a few posts, you people are insufferable to talk to.

I'm not a native speaker so please help me out here, what's the saying about pots and kettles again?

[Teraq]

for how your facts and logic won the day.

I'm sorry, I missed this.

This is pretty amusing, but this dog whistle and the misogynistic insult gives me the feeling you are painting us with a certain ... political brush that couldn't be further from the truth personally.

Ah well, back to worshipping my ancient greco-roman civilisations then!

[Lauront]

Indeed, this should be more like the lore forum, with its supreme deity LARPers fantasising about sundering posters they think are too stupid to "get" it, going on bizarre tangents about "faction shippers", individuals calling you "bad at morals" for enjoying playing villains or darker characters in pixel world, dogpiling, people disregarding black and white text about the ancients' funeral rites, cry bullies trying to get posters banned, etc...

Truly, we have much to learn. Mommy is good. Ancients bad.

It's no wonder most people who like the story give up and leave after a few posts, you people are insufferable to talk to.

Right back at you.

[anhaato]

I did appreciate their comparison to Christianity, though. In a way her story does have more parallels to the Book of Genesis than any other religious text as far as I'm aware, especially not any of those found in Buddhism because the whole premise of their "ackshually it's Buddhism" argument forgot that certain kinds of suffering didn't exist before she created them and subjected humanity to it for all eternity. This is way more reminiscent of the story of Adam and Eve defying God's will, in response to which He banished them from paradise which led them to be subject to mortality, sickness, hunger, pain, and all other symptoms of the human condition. Like, there's no possible way you can convince me this wasn't an intentional parallel.

The problem is, God was always all-powerful, He created the world before He created man, and offered man life in paradise. When man defied His will, He punished them but he did NOT kill them off. He intentionally spared some knowing that they would repopulate. Venat, on the other hand, only ascended to relative godhood upon the destruction of her world, at the expense of those who offered their life power to her and those millions-billions-whatever number satisfies you that she sundered. Hydaelyn became as god by becoming the most powerful entity by default. Instead of sparing the few to repopulate, she spared the few unsundered knowing that they were going to destroy even more worlds and pile even more corpses. The unsundered were her fellow people until she hubristically decided that she was to pass judgment on humanity's worth and deservingness of their "paradisiacal" life (debatable). Not one unsundered survived at the end of the story; there is no place in this world for them anymore. Now we sundered are suddenly her "children" and she's the abusive parent. She subjected the newly fragmented human race to suffering with no path to salvation. I guess we're supposed to be her little Jesus or something, but even for as much as we saved the world the fact of the matter is the suffering she created will always exist, and we can't fix that.

The reason for me, as someone who is FAR from being a good little Christian who goes to church every day, talking about all of this is because I'm trying to illustrate that comparisons to our God are inescapable because the sundering is nigh-inarguably derived from Genesis. And, from our perspective, she comes across as a megalomaniac who stepped over the corpses of her people to become as god, a cruel one who existed only to punish, never to offer salvation. But you don't really even need this Christian context at all to see her imposing her beliefs on others through unimaginable acts of cruelty, followed by shitty justifications from the game, and the devs in post, to make her appear benevolent. How else is someone supposed to take, to copypaste what I said earlier, hiding the truth from your fellow people, forcing your beliefs on them in the form of omicide except for three you spared because you need them to destroy seven more worlds, and toying with every iteration of the soul of your successor and their friends until the right one comes along, and doing this all because your world was full of people who were too good at making their own lives better, and because someone from the future told you to do it? The only way this is acceptable is if you don't think too hard about it, and the devs really hope you don't.

And it's not like she's a bad character because she did bad things. She could've been a fantastic anti-villain figure! The problem is that she did all of this and the game bends over backwards to make it as if this was the right/only decision, and forgiving her for it. Her people were exterminated for the crime of trying to protect themselves, and for the crime of being the one who did it she gets to pass on peacefully on her own terms having ultimately accomplished her goal. No matter how you put it, it's ass.

[Absimiliard]

Man. I popped in here to see how the trainwreck was progressing, but I made the mistake of checking the tags for the first time. Saw Genocydaelyn. My drink is now all over my monitor and keyboard, and my nose feels like I stuck it in boiling water.

[Skyborne]

-

All that thinking... far more than the developers put into it. Stop thinking! :^)

Though, for real, the game is very confused about its Christian references. Are the Ancients the angels whose wings are being clipped -- which, hilariously, would mean the Sundered are demons -- or are they the first humans who ate the fruit and were expelled from paradise?

Man. I popped in here to see how the trainwreck was progressing, but I made the mistake of checking the tags for the first time. Saw Genocydaelyn. My drink is now all over my monitor and keyboard, and my nose feels like I stuck it in boiling water.

As you can see there are many on both sides who feel strongly and need to take potshots in tags.