On Themis [6.4 SPOILER]

[Cleretic]

Come on now, you cannot in good stead claim on the one hand to reject certain Ancients because the story treats them and/ or their actions too generously, and then go on to cite Venat as a good example of a character receiving adequate in-universe criticism because of some purported vague moments of self-reflection on the other. Even in good faith, that's just flat out denial, lol.

I've told you before that I don't claim Venat to be a particular favorite of mine; I hope that you're raising this more as a request for more information than as an attack because of that, because I'm going to treat it like it was just a 'please explain'. I don't like Venat in large part because in pretty much all Elpis scenes, she's just not particularly interesting in the same way as Pandaemonium Themis. She falls into that 'bland, inoffensive and nice' role, and kind of only breaks out of that right as Elpis ends. Those moments of self-reflection, coupled with what she actually did (and how, similar to Lahabrea, she sees as real bad but also that she has to do it--and later, find a way to personally accept the fact she did), is a big part of what makes her interesting.

...but so is the fact that, again, Emet spent a whole damn expansion tearing her down. Venat's self-reflection probably wouldn't have been enough for me by itself, but it also wasn't by itself; I think one of the best possible dynamics for this sort of counterbalance when plausible is 'culprit vs. victim', and that's pretty close to exactly the dynamic seen with Emet's attacks on Venat.

EDIT: One way to look at this is to go 'what more could the writers have reasonably done to sell this', and with Venat my belief is that no, they did everything reasonable; anything further would've either overdone the point, broken the pacing, or weakened other elements of her story. Meanwhile with Themis my belief is yes, they could've sold this better (or at least, more to my liking), and it wouldn't have taken much.