Quote Originally Posted by Solarra View Post
As to her actions being driven by a desire to protect and preserve, they are anything but as far as I can see. She seems to have taken the idea that nothing can change the timeline where we travelled to Elpis and warned the Ancients but nothing was changed by our actions. All her actions seem to stem either from the idea history cannot be unwritten (Shb called and would like a word) or that it could be changed but the Ancients were somehow unfit to continue and that the only way forward for humanity is to continue with the timeline we had told her about and literally rip everything up (the sundering) and start again. You can't get a more radical or destructive path than that, besides killing everyone outright so there is no possibility of rebirth.

For me, the mixed messaging that has emerged over this expansion has been a large source of my discontent with it.
We should trust our friends and do everything to keep them safe but it's bad when the Ascian's try to do that
Genocide is wrong and that makes the Ascian's evil but it's ok when Venat/Hydaelyn does it.
History can be changed but not when the plot demands it can't be
The Garlean Empire is evil until EW when actually it turns out they're just a bit misguided and we bush aside the brutal supression of other races, human experiments, torture etc

It's not like there haven't been retcons before but the sheer number and scale of them in EW is a problem for me. It feels like this expansion turns so much that we'd come to believe on it's head and not in a particularly believable fashion, because most of the time it the story doesn't acknowledge there has been an about-face.
Still disgusts me what Venat did. Because she did it against her own people. Emet didn't turn against his own people. He was trying to save them. Venat wiped out her own race so that another race could live. Doesn't get more evil than that.