Tales from the Dawn

[Lurina]

That technology is called the internet and everything that makes up McDonalds and I fully support the total annihilation of one of them.

While wanting to destroy the internet is absolutely valid and reasonable, my point is that someone wanted to do so by eradicating human civilization completely, you probably wouldn't think that was ethical.

No, this does not make Venat an objectively morally correct superbeing who we are not meant to disagree with; she was never depicted as such, and the game never treated her as such. But she is the one in the right if you're someone who believes in the right of all lives to live.

Of course, this forum's never been great at grasping this part of the story.

I really wish people on this forum would actually talk directly to the people they disagree with instead of passive-aggressively vagueposting, and I wish you specifically would stop doing this kind of thing, Cleretic. Just because someone doesn't think a part of the story came together well doesn't mean they don't get it.

Like, the story, regardless of the fact that it doesn't try to say anyone is objectively right, obviously does want you to sympathize with Venat's faction based on the tone. But the writers refusing to elaborate on circumstances which formed the moral basis for their decision to destroy the original world makes it hard to do so. All they're presented is an abstracted ideology of not living in the past, and a sort of militantly applied vegan viewpoint that you spell out here.

Now, I'm going to going to go out on a limb here and say the majority of people playing this game are not ideological vegans. Most players probably believe that the lives of humans matter more than those of, say, snails, and probably even more intelligent animals like dogs or pigs. This makes this motive alone pretty poor at its meta-narrative 'goal' of keeping the sympathetic tone undissonant, and more than that is just weird, because the rest of the game is overtly anti-vegan. It's so out of place it doesn't feel like the writers intend you to understand this as the Hydaelynites direct motive, but rather that they're just trying to encourage the reader to just coast on vibes because they're worried about creating plot holes by defining the scenario in any detail, which is a symptom of the self-confessed lack of pre-planning in their storytelling.

Or to put it another way, I am not disputing that the main scenario team is good at establishing and conveying themes like these (life good, living in the past bad) in a broad sense. I'm saying they're using it as a crutch.