Rewritten MSQ - Garlemald and EW

[Berteaux_Braumegain]

Putting? Venat is a villain, always has been.

I doubt my comment will sway the tide, but genuinely don't get this mentality.

The Sundering is a morally murky activity, fine. I doubt many people would contest that. Yoshi-P and the writers don't contest that. But I don't get the point of acting like Hydaelyn is a supervillain who only cares about herself and nothing else. For goodness' sake, Primals made from the Ascian's machinations (including Ramuh) talk about her as if she's a good person. Midgardsormr vouches for her acts of kidness. She saves the Warrior of Light from death at least twice in the opening arc of the game. And that's with the expectation that one day they are going to kill her for the sake of a better world once they're strong enough.

It's fine to not like her, especially for the Sundering, but at least dislike her as presented in the game, not based on some caricature that resulted from twisting the lore to fit fanfiction.

[Raoabolic]

I doubt my comment will sway the tide, but genuinely don't get this mentality.

The Sundering is a morally murky activity, fine. I doubt many people would contest that. Yoshi-P and the writers don't contest that. But I don't get the point of acting like Hydaelyn is a supervillain who only cares about herself and nothing else. For goodness' sake, Primals made from the Ascian's machinations (including Ramuh) talk about her as if she's a good person. Midgardsormr vouches for her acts of kidness. She saves the Warrior of Light from death at least twice in the opening arc of the game. And that's with the expectation that one day they are going to kill her for the sake of a better world once they're strong enough.

It's fine to not like her, especially for the Sundering, but at least dislike her as presented in the game, not based on some caricature that resulted from twisting the lore to fit fanfiction.

That's true but where is the line drawn between good will and ensuring your plan works? It's just called being pragmatic, pragmatism isn't necessarily a sign of a good person.

[Jojoya]

That's true but where is the line drawn between good will and ensuring your plan works? It's just called being pragmatic, pragmatism isn't necessarily a sign of a good person.

An action that is morally wrong can still lead to good (the stealing bread from the rich to feed the starving quandary).

Yes, Venat's actions did harm.

The Ancients were also about to do harm. They were going to sacrifice all the newly created life without its consent. How is that morally better than what Venat did?

Was this a no-win situation where the only way out was to do something morally wrong?

What we're lacking is the story of what would have happened if the Sundering had not occurred. Would it have had a happy outcome or would their salvation have been shortlived? We received a few hints that things may not have turned out for the better though we can't truly know what was in the minds of the writers.

[EgilTheStressedMage]

snip

They literally just had to not make the Ancient society perfect and there wouldn't be so many holes. This is the problem when you make a ancient advanced civilization but most of the time they're long gone at the current point in the story. When you make them literally all God in some way, you'd need to come up with the absolute best possible way to undo them and not half ass it like EW did. They could say that the new lives they were creating were thinning out the life stream and required more and more aether to create, which would eventually reduce the star to the crumble that is The Plenty but they're on dead chunks of rock floating in space. Like if events were happening that were strongly hinting towards that, and despite their best efforts could not find a reasonable way to Meteion, and was proven beyond any doubt, and all this after Venat fully explained what was going to happen, then and only then would the Sundering have been acceptable. Then and only then could we move on. Then and only then would there we some semblance of closure. Hell, you could say they lost their memory because of the Sundering instead of "haha Greek words go brrrr". But Yoshi's obsession with keeping XIV what he wants has harmed this game far more than it should have while what he personally likes remains good. If the Ancients aren't perfect in his eyes, how is Yoshi any better? Yes he saved XIV. Big deal, those days are over. That's like saying NFTlodeon is a good channel because they had Rocko's Modern Life on it in the 90s. Not anymore.

I'm grateful for everything XIV has given me, truly I am. I met some wonderful people from my FC at PAX. I engaged in content I would otherwise never do (RIP HOH at 92, killed by Heavenly Gozus who decided "Your free trial of progress has expired"). I have developed patience for annoying grinds in other mmos. I have the Black Pegasus. But this direction of game and story, it's not for anyone who wants a deep, rich lore. It's also not for people who want to improve themselves either, just look at the Duty Finder thread for details.

I'm going to bed. I have so much crap to do at work for the next two weeks and I need some semblance of mental stability. Just needed to say this, probably won't remember most of it, late night post and all. I spent too long editing this.

[Damnhedge]

I doubt my comment will sway the tide, but genuinely don't get this mentality.

The Sundering is a morally murky activity, fine. I doubt many people would contest that. Yoshi-P and the writers don't contest that. But I don't get the point of acting like Hydaelyn is a supervillain who only cares about herself and nothing else. For goodness' sake, Primals made from the Ascian's machinations (including Ramuh) talk about her as if she's a good person. Midgardsormr vouches for her acts of kidness. She saves the Warrior of Light from death at least twice in the opening arc of the game. And that's with the expectation that one day they are going to kill her for the sake of a better world once they're strong enough.

It's fine to not like her, especially for the Sundering, but at least dislike her as presented in the game, not based on some caricature that resulted from twisting the lore to fit fanfiction.

Having spend (mostly against my will) a while lurking on people here being pure anti-Venat. Their opinions stem from completely buying into Emet's Nostalgic Recreation of Amaurot. They saw the recreations of the Shades and how they interacted and took that as Gospel. People now have this weird notion that Amaurot (and the entirety of the Ancient world) was this paradise with no strife. Which is absolutely the furthest from truth. People pretend like Venat sundering the world introduced conflict and strife, when we literally spend most our time in Elpis was hanging around 2 combat trained ancients and one that apparently didn't consider himself one but still pulled out a laser. We spend our time as an expandable familiar in the eyes of the (objectively mostly caring) Ancients who put us up to killing and or testing their creations (Which were running around with Destructive Magicks, but hey Venat introduced strife to the world, it was a Utopia before. Ignore Pandaemonium, don't think about the literal hell jail for bad boys.)

They have completely fallen for an old tired man's nostalgic recreation of the days leading up to his cities' destruction, and the worst part is, are ignoring parts of the game even back in Shadowbringers that completely invalidated that because EVEN EMET KNEW SUBCONSCIOUSLY that Amaurot was perfectly content with letting the other cities get destroyed by the Final Days, there's literally shades going "Sucks for those guys across the ocean lmao" which is hilarious, cause these same people will turn around on Sharlayan's entire stance on not intervening before Endwalker and hate them for it. (See the short story of Azem stopping the Volcano from destroying a village that the Convocation was completely okay with letting be destroyed) 1/?

[Damnhedge]

They also seem to think that Amaurot is the only civilization, which is completely untrue. We have spend time in a recreation of ONE specific City and it's related buildings, and floating research facilities related to that city. People are ignoring the fact that Amaurot and it's civilization literally isn't the only one, the entire point of Azem was to travel between the civilizations as an ambassador. We don't know who or what those civilizations were, we don't know if they wore masks and robes, there could be a civilization that was outcast by Amaurot for not agreeing with their anti-individuality rules.

The devs don't even try and justify Venat and her sweeping decision to Sunder the world, but these people will try and justify Emet-Selch deciding that an entire 14 Worlds worth of Civilizations isn't worth it anymore because "They aren't as advanced and cool us as. Which y'know fair enough but let's look at all the major Ancients we've actually hung around with.

Emet-Selch - Decided that for the last 12k years, he would act as the sower of Chaos, bringing omnicide to people he felt unworthy of the star to bring back his people
Hermes - After learning that all Life out in the cosmos inevitably will be destroyed, puts a time limit on Humanity to see if they can improve and overcome Meteion's oncoming onslaught of Dynamis
Venat - Decided that Humanity was on a crash course after creating a literal BLOOD GOD (This one is important) to pure destruction, and sundred the world into 14, making them weak and susceptible to disease.
You notice something with all 3 of these major characters? They all decided they knew what was best for Humanity, yet people were so fixated on the sad grandpa that anybody else doing the same thing is completely unjustified. 2/4

[Damnhedge]

And that brings me to my favorite part of all of this, the Blood God. What was the Convocation's freaction to learning that their paradise was dying? Sacrifice 50% of the world's REMAINING population to create a god capable of saving the world. At which point they sacrificed another 50%, meaning 75% of the world's population, to bring their world back. Now you might say that it's heroic, and I agree, they did what they needed to. However it's at this point that society itself started rebelling against the Convocation (No Strife Before Sundering BTW.) and the survivors were split between killing the newly born life (Literal Children) to bring back the dead people, or letting the new life live on the planet they love. So let's pretend for a moment the Sundering didn't happen, and all the new life was sacrificed and the Final Days were stopped. Then what? What's to stop another Hermes character from making a sweeping declaration? We know the Ancients all have a habit of doing that. Just kill more people? Where does it stop then? Meteion herself goes full on despair mode because every other civilization in the galaxy reached some form of perfection and decided it was time to call it quits. The Ancients were already against people staying around longer then they needed to when their "Job" was done. So what when the World reached Perfection? They now literally have a simple "Mass Kill" Button in Zodiark. Leaving Elidibus as the last survivor on a Planet devoid of life. And that's why Venat did what she did, and that's what people seem to completely ignore because "Waaaah muh perfect world". Venat didn't sunder the world because of some hatred for Humanity, or OP's weird psychopathic head canon of her. She did it because she took Meteion's words to heart and saw that the Ancients were doomed to destruction no matter if they found another way to stop the Final Days. 3/4

[Damnhedge]

People have always weirdly mistrusted Hydaelyn, citing stuff like "But she didn't tell us about Amaurot in 3.2!!!!" when that was COMPLETELY irrelevant to what we needed to know. In that specific instance Hydaelyn told us why she sundered the world (Zodiark wanted more power, so I jailed the dude), which hilariously is backed up by Emet-Selch himself in 5.0 (Yeah we wanted to bring back the dead people so we wanted to power up Zodiark by killing childeren). Hydaelyn at no point in the game has actually given anybody a reason to distrust her, she helped us until she was literally drained and unable to speak to us. And over the last 10 years of playing FFXIV, I've seen every excuse under the sun why she's evil. "She Tempered us" "We're a Primal she made" etc etc. All of which absolutely ignore the game's story and were weird from the get go.

Am I justifying Venat's actions? God no, she was like every other Ancient we've met, flawed. I don't justify her in the same way I don't justify Emet-Selch literally killing entire planets, i don't justify her in the same way Hermes decided to kill all of Humanity because he was depressed. I am however going to point out that her decision to Sunder the world stems from the same love of the planet that Emet-Selch had.

But anyway, Foxy Grandpa sad, venat bad, bring on the rejoining.
4/4

[AwesomeJr44]

The devs don't even try and justify Venat and her sweeping decision to Sunder the world, but these people will try and justify Emet-Selch deciding that an entire 14 Worlds worth of Civilizations isn't worth it anymore because "They aren't as advanced and cool us as.

The game portrays Emet-Selch as a gray character that you can agree with if you choose. It's also very possible to disagree with him and still have the story support your viewpoint. This is not true for Venat. Ironically, the ONLY person to say what she did was wrong was Venat herself, but even that gets brushed away when every other character swoops in and says: "No mommy Hydaelyn, you did great! Your choice was objectively amazing and those evil meanie convocation members with their stupid Zodiark are losers compared to you!" If you disagree with Venat, you're in direct conflict with EVERY character in this game other than the Ascians.

Venat didn't sunder the world because of some hatred for Humanity, or OP's weird psychopathic head canon of her. She did it because she took Meteion's words to heart and saw that the Ancients were doomed to destruction no matter if they found another way to stop the Final Days.

True and untrue. She didn't do it out of malice. She did it because she was stupid. And OP wrote her that way because they took a different direction to the story. Here's a question: Have we ever met Hydaelyn herself (not one of her minions) before Endwalker? No, thus OP can take her in whichever direction they want because they are doing a rewrite. And honestly, having her like that is better than what we got. At least in OP's version she's intellegent, cunning, and has a sound plan. In canon, she's a complete idiot, sundering everything because "y u no suffer more?". She never even told anyone about the threat they actually faced. Did she not consider that if she did, things might have turned out differently?

People have always weirdly mistrusted Hydaelyn ... And over the last 10 years of playing FFXIV, I've seen every excuse under the sun why she's evil. "She Tempered us" "We're a Primal she made" etc etc. All of which absolutely ignore the game's story and were weird from the get go.

Yes, and all of those were based on the big fat nothing we actually knew about her. We'd never met her in person and all we knew about her was second-hand knowledge. (and all of that was from either people who knew nothing about the real Hydaelyn, or her servants who obviously love her) As for why she helped us against Ultima, if the Ascians are her enemy, and we're fighting the Ascians...

Now we actually have a story with her in it to base our claims off of. And she's not the hero the game has spent 10 years (including EW) trying to portray her as, she's just as stupid and bad as Hermes.

Clearly you don't read my post, at all.

Oh I did. And what I said stands.

[Rulakir]

It's fine to not like her, especially for the Sundering, but at least dislike her as presented in the game, not based on some caricature that resulted from twisting the lore to fit fanfiction.

You're reading a lot into one sentence. Someone being well-intentioned doesn't mean they're not a villain, and Yoshi-P compares her actions to those of villains, but if it's the terminology you object to then I will refer to her as an antagonist. It doesn't matter if she's likeable or if she believed she was doing the right thing, in terms of the world's history she is one of its two primary antagonists second only to Hermes.