Quote Originally Posted by Berteaux_Braumegain View Post
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.
This is something you see a lot around here. I feel like there's just people who aren't really comfortable with the fact that the game put forward a situation with no easy answer; both sides of the conflict had to accept some troubling choices, and if you think one side was in the right, you should have to acknowledge the darker elements of that decision.

And I think what you see from a lot of people around these forums is the approach of, rather than accepting the complexity of the situation and what your beliefs on it might say about you, to instead simplify it so that the choice that person landed on is now in some way objectively right. That's why you see people painting Venat as a villain, or saying that her plan was bad despite all evidence to the contrary, sometimes to the point of writing fanfiction to declare her as such: because they want to declare their stance to be right, and therefore the opposing stance to be wrong. Essentially, rejecting the conditions of the question to instead paint it as a binary 'good' or 'evil'.

Venat is neither a hero nor villain; she's just a woman forced to make difficult choices. But to people who don't want to question the morality of their own views on those choices, they simplify her as a villain.