Endwalker story doubt: spoiler alert

[Cleretic]

You want to play this game? Sure.

Let's ignore that the plan resulted in: A) the star died and those souls in lifestream gets eaten by meteion, and B) the remaining shards are left behind.

First of all: it is entirely possible that Venat actually did have plans for this if the escape plan were to go through, we were told very little about the plan because, again, it never actually reached a point of 'reality' where it had to exist as more than a vague one-sentence brief. We can't really say if she did or didn't, and it's entirely possible we never will and we just have to live with that. Granted, in a little over a week we'll have a chance to learn what the shards have a moon for, so that part might be covered. But let's first accept the possibility that she did have a contingency plan for this before discussing the currently-assumed situation that she didn't.

When you're figuring out an emergency escape plan, there's a significant element of 'you take what you can get'. Yeah, it sucks that the Lifestream will be lost and the shards can't be saved (providing, again, that is in fact the case), but far worse would be to not have an escape for anyone at all. If the best you can do is an escape pod for specifically the living on the Source, then that's what we have, and we hope they do the best they can with it.

Now, did they do the best they could? A little hard to tell, but I would say the failure point if they didn't is actually more on Sharlayan. They probably could've stood to hustle a little faster, get more than two nations partially evacuated. Granted, to be as fair to them as I'm requesting you be fair to Venat, they didn't know how much time they had, but they also should've either worked to study how to judge that (which we know was possible to track at least at one point) or gone with a worst-case scenario assumption that they'd be hit early, neither of which they seemed to do. Isolationism was definitely the wrong response for them to have; Sevestre likely caused more damage than any other single person to the chances of that plan saving everyone it could've.

I think they may be taking issue with focusing on the defence of Venat herself rather than the logic of her actions and the parameters involved...? Which the other poster likely did as a pre-emptive measure against a "why Venat was wrong" discussion, which has the tendency to go down various rabbit holes on its own.

Yeah, I am extremely conscious that this argument of 'the escape plan was actually bad' feels an awful lot like it's just being used as a new angle to say 'Venat Bad' right now, which is a ridiculously tedious argument around here.

Of course the escape plan wasn't perfect; hell, the fact it had flaws was a notable plot beat, the realization that it doesn't cover other shards was kinda the main flag that they need something better. I'd hesitate to call it a 'bad plan' because the nature of something like this kinda has to be judged in relation to other options, and in this case there kind of aren't any; the escape plan is, literally, better than nothing, and 'nothing' is all the other evacuation options available.

And the kicker on all this: I don't really like Venat that much. This isn't me 'defending my favorite', Venat is in competition as my least favorite new major character in Endwalker (to figure that out we need to answer questions like 'does Erenville count as major' and 'does Real Hythlodaeus count as new'). I'm 'defending' her here because the moon escape plan is her plan, so we kinda have to factor in her perspective, goals, and constraints and realize that any evidence she couldn't have had aren't really valid stones to throw.