Who knew the 6.15 Omega Quests… (Spoilers)

[Cleretic]

My opinion has always been that Emet was unjustified in committing genocide, just as Venat was in commiting genocide with the sundering. But her genocide sits okay with you, I suppose?

My view is that, in the Final Days of Amaurot--so basically, Elpis through to the Sundering--nobody was definitively in the moral wrong. Hermes was a dingus, but that's about it. From various perspectives they were all doing what they felt was right, all making as educated a decision as they could have. But it also has a facet of unreality about it all; we've got characters named after Greek gods for a reason, and it's because we're essentially looking at a creation myth playing out in front of us, I can't really declare anyone guilty of any real crime. It would be like putting the Judeo-Christian god on trial for flooding the world for forty days. On a moral level I would say that I'd be on Venat's side if I were in Amaurot in those days, because ultimately I'm an environmentalist, but the stakes are too absurd for me to truly take that point all too personally or to say that anyone is guilty of, really, any crime recognized in 2022 legal systems.

...at that point. Because in general concept I think it's completely understandable that the Rejoinings represent sort of a decline into villainy for the Ascians; it remains abstract, but across the Calamities we stop looking at a group trying to do their best, and eventually start looking at a group with far more blood on their hands than they could have ever saved, and with nothing more than superficial or inhumane reasons to defend themselves ('to me you're not people, so it's not murder if I kill you' may or may not have been meant when it was said, but it was definitely the genuine party line at some point). While the story didn't have any villains in the days of Amaurot, it did have some by the time we hit the days of Ul'Dah, Gridania and Limsa.

Especially because Emet-Selch took those abstract and unreal crimes and made them irredeemably real. Knowing that the Garlean Empire was an Ascian plot, as were all of their evils, which are based heavily on real-life atrocities of war that still have reverberations to this day, completely destroys for me the notion that Emet, and indeed any Ascians, could be sympathetic. The Sundering is abstract and fantastical, but a great number of the Garlean Empire's acts (particularly in Stormblood and its patches) are not, and tying the two scales together as Emet-does makes him too real an evil for me to accept him as just 'a man who had to make hard choices'. The Sundering is absurd fantasy genocide; the Garlean Empire has performed actual, UN-definition genocide. (As has Allag, which was apparently also him.)

It's complicated, and honestly Emet-Selch is a black spot in my entire enjoyment of the game because of that; I can enjoy both origin-myth-scale fantasy and down-to-earth war stories, but Emet-Selch is the exact wrong way to do both of them at the same time for me. As I've said before, I feel I land in Venat's court for genuine personal reasons, and if I completely extracted all characters and personalities from the events I would make the same choice. But at the same time, I can't say that my feelings about Emet-Selch don't factor into a full explanation of my views.