Fun times when players are having to try to "fix" the MSQ through fan fiction. I've heard this has increasingly become a thing since EW. I have my own version as well I've been half-heartedly writing on the side, but EW crushed so much of my love and enthusiasm in the story it'll probably never be completed.

I've been going through ShB cutscenes in JP and revisiting it I can't help but wonder not only what went wrong, but if EW retroactively ruined ShB? The only benefit, from my perspective, was the added context of Emet and Hyth. Everything regarding the Final Days and the Sundering was made worse. I also noticed Emet in ShB consistently believes that Hydaelyn was created to keep Zodiark's immeasurable power in check, which makes me wonder what her followers were telling people and, likewise, what Venat was telling her followers. Then I despair :P because we'll probably never know. We can't have lore that makes Venat look bad and Yoshi-P wants to be done with the story, so suffer well, I guess. (Yes, I'm malding. :P)

Quote Originally Posted by Brinne View Post
I can point out that Endwalker's writing Did A Genocide Apologism, Using Classic Apologism Techniques, and that is Really Not Okay, without that meaning I actually think Yoshida and company are literally pro-genocide. There's no way to absolutely know that - but I don't have to know that to think the disingenuous way they went about communicating the story and uplifting a single character felt gross and harmful.
It is baffling to me that the man compares Venat to both Emet and Hermes, but doesn't seem to make the connection that makes Venat an antagonist. Having to say, "We want to communicate Hydaelyn's not a bad guy!" should be an indication. Plus, saying, "She really was an Ancient, huh?" is so lazy. I guess the Ascians weren't villains then. Just Ancients doing Ancient things. Oh wait, the narrative still very much presents them as villains and wholly in the wrong, it's just magically Venat who's exempt. Funny how that works.

Where's my codex entry for Elidibus who sacrificed himself to become the heart of a primal - the actual will of the star before it was usurped - that saved the world and ended up going out as time travel fuel never knowing the truth? Where's my codex entry for Emet who spent 12k years of "hatred and heartbreak" trying to put his broken people and world back together in complete ignorance while being manipulated the whole time by Hydaelyn? Instead, we get this ridiculousness of how much Hydaelyn loved mankind. Yes, so much that Miss "Nothing Is Impossible" gave up on them, wiped them out, and forced their broken remnants to restart from zero from literally not being able to speak. Indeed, so much love.

While I appreciate the Omega quests, I do find it laughably twisted that they further undermined the sundering. I'll just quote Veloran here:

Quote Originally Posted by Veloran View Post
The whole premise has been doing nothing but falling apart like a jenga tower with every new piece of information related to it released since 6.0. Since the Omega quests just come out and say that the resistance to the Dynamis transformation is almost totally random and not strongly correlated to one's life conditions or strength of character, the entire idea that the sundering was necessary to create a world of people that could withstand despair and existential oblivion through their inurement to suffering basically becomes moot.
Fantastic. Yet, we're still going to present Venat as a heroine.