Quote Originally Posted by Rulakir View Post
I don't believe it's discussed enough how Venat/Hydaelyn has no downsides.

We have the unsundered Ascians on one hand who are depicted as struggling emotionally and psychologically with everything from the end of their world to their laborious efforts to restore it over the course of several millennia. This eventually leads them to making missteps by the time the WoL encounters them resulting in their deaths and failure of duty.

Meanwhile, supposedly Venat had suffered for the same amount of time, but displays no ill effects from it. On the contrary, she is the picture of mental clarity and purpose. At most she says she had bouts of despair, but was able to overcome them thinking about the WoL.

She's also singularly the only primal to have no consequences of being one. She doesn't require aether beyond her original sacrifices and she doesn't temper. Conversely, even though the first part is also true for Zodiark, there are still numerous people who insist by nature of being a primal he was some sort of blood god who demanded endless sacrifices. This mentality is never applied to Hydaelyn who, as a primal, should be no different using that logic.

I suppose I should just chalk this up to the rules don't apply to the "protagonists" because that seems to be how the writing for this game has operated since HW.
I mean, they are different situations.

The unsundered struggled yes but all for different reasons: Lahabrea's fanatical devotion and going through other bodies at the pace he did wore his mind to the point that he seemed focused on the destruction caused by rejoinings more that their actual purpose. Emet fundamentally was tired and didn't entirely believe his own spiel about the sundered not being living (he thought them lesser sure, but that's different than not living), and Elidibus, due to not refreshing his memories entirely forgot why his duty may or may not have mattered, though his drawing on the hopes of sundered beings very much exacerbated this.

Venat/Hydaelyn however doesn't fall into these pits. She has no need to possess bodies, until canocially very recently and even then it's short enough that she wouldn't suffer ill effects, she doesn't have Emet's sense of exhaustion and need to rationalise her deeds, she knows exactly what she's done, and all the good and ill that's come of it and she never put herself in a situation where she'd lose sight of why she was doing what she was doing the same way Elidibus did.

Besides she and Zodiark while being, as Emet called them "the eldest primals" they are for the most part just powerful creations. Zodiark's tempering wasn't even intentional, it was a side effect of how big a creation he was and the large scale he was designed to act on. Venat meanwhile is noted to have been a smaller creation, so of course unintentional tempering wouldn't happen.

The rules apply, the parties are just different enough that they are affected differently.