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

[FirstGearFirstGear]

You are not your character. You are a human being who lives on or in the very close proximity of the planet Earth in the dimension of reality. You are also not a fractured piece of a larger whole whose existence is mutually exclusive to yours.

Perhaps I should be clearer. FF14, like a lot of good fiction, use its setting and characters to explore ideas that relate to the real world. Ideas like colonialism, prejudice, camaraderie, and the meaning of suffering. These are ideas that, even if explored in a fantastical space, are quite relevant to the ourselves as human beings. A large part of the reason that FF14 has such a good story is that it handles and explores these themes in a mature way. Its not high literature but its pretty high-tier for the medium and especially this specific genre.

This matters because CBU3 is pretty clear that we as real world human beings are far closer to the sundered people of FF14 than the unsundered. No, you are not your character but you are still a flawed, imperfect being doomed to suffer and one day die. You have to find meaning in your life to get out of bed in the morning and a large part of what CBU3 argues is the meaning to life is the companionship that we form with others, not just of our kind but of everyone on the whole of the star.

It also matters because the logic used by the Ascians and by their defenders, that all non-Ancients are subhuman and not worth preserving, is the logic used by loads of real world perpetrators of genocide. You yourself literally equated people to monkeys and said that it would be better to kill all the monkeys in the world than the humans. Its a real short skip from there to some very, very bad ideas about the actual world.

This really isn't about a whose standard of existence is worth more or less, Ancients came first, the sundered only being able to exist due to the mass genocide, the rightful owner of those souls would be the ones who were hacked into pieces, not the random personality that happened to come afterwards. That is my outsider perspective. It's a shit circumstance, the Dying Gasp probably puts it simplest, the victor will be hailed as a hero and it's loser as the villain, yet they're basically two sides of the same coin in terms of morality.

Why aren't the sundered the rightful owners of their own souls? Why do they have to give them up for people who died twelve thousand years ago (incidentally those people can themselves only exist through even more mass genocide)? And if you're going to make the argument that the Ancients were there first therefore they own them in perpetuity, I have very bad news for you about what claim you or your home country have to the land you're standing on.

If we are going for metaphors, she placed the gun on the table knowing with certainty that they would use it to start 'blasting everyone in range'. She is culpable for giving them the means to do so, she enabled it from the beginning and is every bit as guilty as they are.

The analogy doesn't work. Venat placing a gun implies that all she did was giving them the tools, but that's not what happened. She gave them both the gun and the motivation to use it.

It would be like telling a guy in immense grief that killing someone would bring back his family, invite that someone to be in shooting range, giving the first person a gun and then being shocked they actually do it. There's a point when it goes beyond just complicity and it becomes actively malicious.

The problem with this is that the Ascians still had to pull the trigger. At any point, Emet could have stepped back and realized what he was doing was wrong. He didn't until we threw an axe through his chest.

I am merely describing the sundered as exactly what they are; fragments of the ancients that came before them that only exist due to Venat's actions. Nor did I say they are only good for being murdered or worthless, you're extrapolating things from my post that I haven't even remotely implied.

You're trying to wriggle out of your own words.

Venat also took her own people and reduced them to their current state of vulnerability and mortality against their own will, she then referred to those broken, incomplete remnants of her former peers as her children. Regardless of motive, I find that quite disturbing.

If you want to claim you're just neutrally describing the sundered, you should probably avoid calling the condition of existence "disturbing".