Endwalker story doubt: spoiler alert

[Cleretic]

Stop putting everything on 'time loop requirements', it's really uninteresting and reductive. C'mon, Venat's smart enough to come up with a multi-layered plan like this herself, don't take that away from her.

I think it's a bit ambiguous whether her Despair-Bear-Stare was like a focused thing or just a general wave that could cover the entire universe. If the former, then the escape plan could work for a little while at least. If the latter, then it would obviously fail pretty fast, but I don't think anyone knew which of the two it was. And fleeing was always the back up plan, Plan A was for the Warrior of Light to be badass enough to fix things.

We know that things were focused very specifically on the Source, because we have a decent-ish sample size and know that nowhere else erupted into despair monsters. (The Nibirun got depressed enough to make one themselves, but that was more on them.) So we can reason that fleeing the planet would flee the End of Days, Meteion had a scope and it was one planet.

That doesn't mean everywhere else is fine, of course, and there's decent evidence Meteion is also making the rest of the universe worse as well, but fleeing 'certain immediate doom' in favor of 'likely eventual demise' is still a step up.

[Stepjam]

We know that things were focused very specifically on the Source, because we have a decent-ish sample size and know that nowhere else erupted into despair monsters. (The Nibirun got depressed enough to make one themselves, but that was more on them.) So we can reason that fleeing the planet would flee the End of Days, Meteion had a scope and it was one planet.

That doesn't mean everywhere else is fine, of course, and there's decent evidence Meteion is also making the rest of the universe worse as well, but fleeing 'certain immediate doom' in favor of 'likely eventual demise' is still a step up.

Those worlds died before "our" Meteion even left Etheirys though. She mentions some of them in her report to Hermes. They were what drove her to madness.

[Iscah]

Stop putting everything on 'time loop requirements', it's really uninteresting and reductive. C'mon, Venat's smart enough to come up with a multi-layered plan like this herself, don't take that away from her.

Is that in response to me? That's just fact. At the point the WoL arrives in Elpis, they believe Hydaelyn's plan is to escape the planet. Therefore the WoL – and by extension, everyone in contact with the WoL – needs to be told that's the plan, even if Hydaelyn's real plan all along was to send them to fight Meteion.

So when the Sharlayans come knocking, she tells them the plan is to escape, and sets them working on an interstellar-capable spaceship even though they allegedly only need to get to the moon and back.

Only once the WoL has been to Elpis, she can speak freely without disrupting the WoL's knowledge as relayed to her back then, and she can reveal (or rely on us to find) that the true solution is to take the spaceship and go to Meteion's nest.

What part of this is not ascribing a multi-layered plan to her?

[Cleretic]

Is that in response to me? That's just fact. At the point the WoL arrives in Elpis, they believe Hydaelyn's plan is to escape the planet. Therefore the WoL – and by extension, everyone in contact with the WoL – needs to be told that's the plan, even if Hydaelyn's real plan all along was to send them to fight Meteion.

So when the Sharlayans come knocking, she tells them the plan is to escape, and sets them working on an interstellar-capable spaceship even though they allegedly only need to get to the moon and back.

Only once the WoL has been to Elpis, she can speak freely without disrupting the WoL's knowledge as relayed to her back then, and she can reveal (or rely on us to find) that the true solution is to take the spaceship and go to Meteion's nest.

What part of this is not ascribing a multi-layered plan to her?

Sorry, I kinda jumped the gun there; I'm so used to people completely ripping all agency from her in favor of 'BUT THE TIME LOOP' (usually in bad-faith attempts to make Endwalker look worse), I immediately leapt to the worst interpretation. I shouldn't have done that, and I'm sorry.

I still disagree that she would've disclosed that without the time loop situation, just because tactically it's kinda the right move for that plan; she needs Sharlayan to help with the evacuation and spaceship-construction part, but not only does that part not require the knowledge of Plan A, I feel Sharlayan's likely to get distracted by Plan A to the point where they might neglect the thing they really need to chip in on. It's kinda hard to tell exactly when Hydaelyn gave them the rundown of all this--like, was this in the Antitower days or did they get details through the Aitiascope--but if it was to generally the same rather conservative Forum that we met I could absolutely see them going 'no, we'll focus entirely on blasting this bird out of the sky ourselves', thereby screwing up not just the evacuation plan, but also the Plan A.

If it was Thavnair that contacted her, I think they could be trusted. But Sharlayan? No, they would genuinely do a better job if they're not given the whole picture until later.