[6.0 - 6.4 Spoilers] An interesting video detailing Venat's polarizing reception

[Cleretic]

It's really rather strange to me that you're seriously attempting to pretend as if Venat's actions were not at all controversial. There's been numerous debates over the years relating to the subject and many posters have come forward expressing their concerns regarding the character independently of one another, largely coming together under one 'banner' precisely because of the absolutely unhinged behaviour and accusations launched at anyone critical of Venat.

I do think you should actually watch the video before commenting, though. If not now then at some point in the future when your schedule allows for it. Perhaps it might dispel some of the - frankly bizarre - framing you have of certain posters and their motives here.

I was specifically looking for sources outside of here, because I know the situation here; I didn't know the situation on, say, Twitter or Reddit, so I wanted to see if there's a large population there that I've just never looked at. I was also specifically looking for people basically saying 'I dislike this thing Venat did and am steadfastly anti-Venat because of that', which is an at-times subtle but usually distinct difference from 'Venat made choices that weren't necessarily good and I may not personally agree with but are on some level understandable and part of what makes her a compelling character', which is... broadly the most widely-held opinion among people who've written about their thoughts long enough to make it clear. Basically: I care less about the evidence the video thinks it has for why people don't like her, and more about who doesn't like her.

I've found a handful of them across the past year. Outside of here maybe a single-digit amount; mostly on Reddit, making threads where they were very clearly the minority opinion. Like what I often see from Reddit lore-talking, it was all pretty surface-level; very 'I just finished Endwalker and have some thoughts', that they're not really held tightly to or even stating all that strongly; very milquetoast. Twitter is harder, and I opted for the angle of searching for 'Venat' and reading both top posts and the last month of posts; this was a bad time for that exercise thanks to Fanfest cosplays and both her and XII Venat being brought up in relation to XVI, but I still went through and only found one person being anti-Venat. (That one guy proved that it wasn't 'people are quiet because they're afraid of getting brigaded', nobody responded to them.)

I also checked the character polls. There hasn't been a lot since Endwalker, and I'd have liked a more recent one than this time last year to see if there's been a change from people falling off over patches and if Zero blips on them, but Venat lands really well into top three. The only person who consistently beats her is Emet, who... incidentally, I do generally see get the same response as Venat of 'did stuff I definitely don't like, but part of a complex character I do like'. Both are fairly unambiguously popular, for pretty much the same reasons. Turns out, people really like this kind of complexity!

I wanted to do a search to see you as more than 'a half-dozen very opinionated people in a corner'. I want to see the side that's large enough to make 'Venat is controversial/polarizing' any sort of authoritative statement. Unfortunately, I just haven't; there's more evidence to say Harchefaunt is polarizing than Venat.

EDIT:

I think this forum's debates on the ethics of altruistic suicide were before your time, but they're definitely coloring my impression. It seems like people get their wires crossed about thematic consistency and ideological consistency WRT Venat, under the fallacious belief that a creative work needs to represent a specific, singular ideology, but I think it's ideologically inconsistent while being thematically very consistent. In the larger narrative, the 8UC timeline is a counterpoint. We as players reading the lore dumps every Rising know that that timeline ultimately continued to exist despite believing it wouldn't, but nobody active in the story does.

Flipping the issue around, had Venat been able to intervene in a way that saves the Ancients, leaving us Exarch-stranded and our timeline in an unknowable and likely doomed state, she would have been making the decision that our lives didn't matter beyond serving as one big extra failure on the path to the success of Amaurot society. It's the meaty philosophical concept that Chrono Cross entirely failed to capitalize on: what does it mean to live in a "bad end" timeline? Still probably controversial, ultimately. Not sure there was ever a "moral" way out for Venat, but I think the intent is that she accepts that.

There's definitely something of this going on; the game deliberately doesn't make a moral judgement on the entire decision, and basically leaves it to you to decide where you stand on the entire conflict around the Ancients' End of Days (to the point of a patch quest literally asking you), while also making it quite clear that this decision isn't for you to actually act on; these events are twelve thousand years ago, and outside of one emotionally confused robot, nobody in the game's present day is either interested in litigating the point, nor impartial enough to do so. We're simply asked to answer that question for ourselves, with no objective right answer to be found.

And while I think a vast majority of players accepted that quite readily (or at least didn't talk openly about it), there's some amount of people that are unhappy with there being no right answer; that there's no way to say with full assuredness that your choice is the correct one. And I think some amount of those people then respond to that by trying to make their answer the right one, often by declaring the opposition to somehow be objectively wrong. Because if the opposing side is 'the villain's side', then suddenly we've moved from a situation of moral greys to a clear good and evil.