Quote Originally Posted by Midareyukki View Post
That's the thing. I'd argue that she was no different than Meteion and Zodiark. Eventually both of them would lead to the destruction of their people and culture. Even if Zodiark promised to preserve it, you'd basically be killing off people who didn't partake in the mega suicide project at the risk of tempering. She just saw the writing on the wall and went for the path that saved the most life. And I mean "life" in the sense that it apparently is a quantifiable substance what with the Lifestream and souls being a thing, rather than "life in general". Meteion wanted "life in general" to be gone, so she's the most off-kilter of the three. It's cultural genocide, yes, but the others are full-on genocide.

...which now that I write that I realize "yeah, that doesn't make it better" so nevermind |D

Not that it excuses Venat, mind you. She basically took it upon herself to make sure present and future life would go on in a mangled state. Preserved, yes, but she still imposed her own vision on the world and cleaned the slate a little too hard.

As for the player races being ancients' souls, they said before that only some of us are, including some of the Beast Tribes (Sahagin priest with the Echo). The rest is just new life that sprouted from the Lifestream in an already sundered state.
What you don't seem to get, and neither do the white knights who think this is about Emet VS Venat, is that we don't think the treatment of Venat in the MSQ sucks because we're "team Emet-Selch". It's because she's just as 'bad' but doesn't get called out for it. The MSQ forces us to be sympathetic and treat her like 'mommy'. Both Venat and Emet are self righteous genocidal, only differed by the justification they gave to their actions. The treatment of Emet in ShB is better because we're allowed to choose how to respond, and even though the Scions eventually understand where he comes from, they ultimately disagree because, well, they don't want to die or have the people they care about die. It's the supposed "grey area" that Yoshida loved to talk about during the Endwalker preparation hype. Grey area which turned out to be absent in Endwalker's MSQ.