What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Brinne]

As far as the mass sacrifice of lives to Zodiark goes, the game has been crystal-clear and unwavering on that it was an utterly heroic action that saved the world, and that Emet-Selch's point about it reflecting the benevolence and general goodness of the Ancients as a whole stands true.

Trying to undermine that has always struck me as pretty off-base and wildly cynical - if you're going to try to prop up the Sundered and frame the Ancients as less worthy, I don't know that I'd resort to pointing at their heroic self-sacrifice that enabled to Sundered to live at all, and continue living for thousands and thousands of years, not gonna lie.

I also tend to think the angle of "they were going to die anyway/their doom was inevitable" is really strange, since the game simultaneously talks out of the other side of its mouth about how everything is "going to die anyway" no matter what you do, and the doom of everything is inevitable and how we must accept that while not seeing it as a reason to end things prematurely. Not to mention, I'm pretty sure the game also thematically settled this question back in Shadowbringers, where the Scions' chief defiance of Emet-Selch revolved around the fact that even though they knew that they and their loved ones would one day "turn to ashes and dust," they still loved them and wanted to protect them for as long as possible - that knowing that everything they knew and loved was fundamentally doomed was still "no reason to forsake it."

There was no immediate threat to the Ancients or the world when Venat committed to the Sundering. They were "going to die eventually" in the same way everything was, and still is - but she thought the particular end she believed they were heading towards was ideologically unacceptable. Rather than a slow, quiet end by hypothetical ennui, Venat prefers an inevitable end achieved via struggling, suffering, and screaming. One's mileage may obviously vary.

Unfortunately, I think what a lot of the toxicity comes down to partially reflects the nature of the game as an ongoing, serialized story with long stretches of time between its major plot developments: the reveals about Hydaelyn's motivations in Endwalker turned out to not be what was told to us back in Shadowbringers, and what was told to us in Shadowbringers was what years of arguments and personal investments and discussions were based around. Endwalker spun things around so that - rather than Shadowbringers's fairly straightforward "Hydaelyn was just trying to protect vulnerable lives, and there were just tragic, unforeseeable consequences" - Hydaelyn turns out to have deliberately, with complete foreknowledge, committed the same acts as most of the mass-murdering antagonist factions along with following several of their ideals, methods, and justifications (rewriting history and erasing victims if it's used to manipulate people towards violent action is good now, apparently! Aymeric and Nanamo were obviously just being dumb and not seeing the Big Picture when they condemned this). It does this while pretending that it totally isn't. So it doesn't feel like the flow of discussion and debates should be totally upended from 5.0, even if what the text demonstrates in front of our eyes says otherwise.

Shadowbringers presented Hydaelyn's faction as the side attempting to prevent mass murder, and in doing so tragically (and probably accidentally) triggered an apocalypse that killed all the Ancients. Endwalker revises this so that to Hydaelyn, actually, the point was always just killing all the Ancients. In fact, she was so determined to kill all the Ancients she was willing to kill everything else on the planet, too, if that's what it took. No acknowledgment of this extreme shift happens in the text, to the point of very weird stuff like the WoL recounting everything in Elpis to the Scions, who have no reaction in particular besides "Oh, okay, so Dynamis, huh?" and when the topic of Hydaelyn comes up, she's still just generally referred to as a benevolent deity whose help we need. The writing tries to preserve the Shadowbringers vibe of the situation while presenting text that completely contradicts it. Of course wires get crossed and baffled and tangled up. One critical aspect of the storytelling is dramatically lagging behind, or refuses to connect to, the other.

For me, if Hydaelyn's actions remained in the same framework as Shadowbringers presented, as sympathetic as I am to the Ancients, I would have remained in my 5.0 position that she had the right of things in the inter-Ancient conflict (and the Sundering was just a horrific tragedy for everybody involved). Instead, with Endwalker's revised version of events, there's just the deep unease of seeing a weird Ilberd-Thordan fusion gunning for Social Darwinist ideals - just with with a nice song, a cool character design, and the full gratitude and worship of every notable figure in the story except the toy beetle robot in a sidequest - suddenly being presented as the game's Big Good.

The Codex states flat out that Azem refused to join Venat, too, for what it's worth - if you take its recounting of concrete events, at least, as canon. Venat's short story in Tales from the Dawn has also relatively recently confirmed she didn't even tell her followers anything - in fact, she actively and deliberately chose not to - which is a very baffling decision to me as far as the writing of the character goes.