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

[Atelier-Bagur]

I am sure that someone out there has a "wow, that person was a moron" moment for basically every character in the series. My problem with Venat specially though is that you are never really given the chance to call her out in the main story. She committed horrors worse than all of the people we have fought in the game so far, but the game treats her as a hero and expects us to do the same. It rightfully calls out the Ascians for the acts they committed even though they were trying to save their world, but it doesn't call out Venat. The theorycrafting on the Ancients is just a fun what if, but the story could have at least acknowledged that while this is the world we have now, and that there is a lot here worth protecting, Venat's actions were still not good.

And I don't mean she herself saying she wasn't kind and then having us make her feel better, like it currently does. I mean the Scions actually acknowledging the damage she did to the people and the planet, and the damage her actions continue to have. Instead the story gives us scenario after scenario were we are fighting for freedom and choice, and helping the people who seem hopeless, but then it turns around and says that in this one scenario that the destruction of an entire people is okay. It's a disconnect. It makes me feel like a hypocrite as I go through the story spouting morals and performing acts that quite clearly come with conditions on who is worth saving. It's just something that instantly brings me out of the tale, and sadly makes it much harder for me to enjoy it. I just end up wondering if the new people we meet will be considered one of the good ones by our team now. Makes me not what to get attached to any of them just in case they are not.

I still cant vibe with the "she committed horrors worse than all of the people" mentality.

So she's apparently worse than Valens who literally is a masochist and tortures civilians and children for his own personal gain?

I just dont understand where people are getting this hardcoded message where the game tries to deny the Ascians but Venat. The only thing we are against is them actively trying to kill us and causing all sorts of problems but none of the Scions ever condemn their reasons for doing so. Emet-Selch and Elidibus gets huge passes for this where the game still goes out of their way to paint them in a positive light of sorts and even then we have Y'shtola (in other languages) respecting Emet for his noble cause when she talks about their duty to save the star.

You do realize this game portrays the villians with so much sympathy that its kinda getting annoying?

The whole point of the narrative is to show that thanks to Venat's actions, we were able to save the universe. Trying to finger point her at this point would just be extremely petty on the Scions part.

[Xirean]

I still cant vibe with the "she committed horrors worse than all of the people" mentality.

So she's apparently worse than Valens who literally is a masochist and tortures civilians and children for his own personal gain?

I just dont understand where people are getting this hardcoded message where the game tries to deny the Ascians but Venat. The only thing we are against is them actively trying to kill us and causing all sorts of problems but none of the Scions ever condemn their reasons for doing so. Emet-Selch and Elidibus gets huge passes for this where the game still goes out of their way to paint them in a positive light of sorts and even then we have Y'shtola (in other languages) respecting Emet for his noble cause when she talks about their duty to save the star.

You do realize this game portrays the villians with so much sympathy that its kinda getting annoying?

The whole point of the narrative is to show that thanks to Venat's actions, we were able to save the universe. Trying to finger point her at this point would just be extremely petty on the Scions part.

I'll give my thoughts on the matter if you are looking for such interpretations.

I've said since the post EW Q&A that Venat is worse then the Ascians and I stand by it because it was revealed in that Q&A that she left a hole in the sundering for Emet, Elidibus, and Lahabrea. This combined with the story confirmed bit of her knowing how everything was going to go made it clear that she literally enabled them. Every destroyed civilization, every rejoining is equally at her hands as well as the Ascians because she knew it was going to happen and made it possible. You could even say she paved the way for it. Ever wonder why Ardbert didn't return to the Aetherial Sea when he died and just walked around as a ghost for a century? Because she knew we needed to join with him to succeed.

The line from Ardbert "We did everything right, everything that was asked of us and still...still it came to this!" sums up my frustration with her quite well. She pulled the strings from the shadows to make all of the good AND all of the bad happen.

As for the narrative showing the villains in a good light and constantly giving them passes; it still called them out as having done a bad thing, multiple times in fact. It does not do the same for her and that's the problem.

Edit: Also because she didn't change how things happened with the Ancients she allowed Meteion to sing her song for 12,000+ years and wiped out countless planets populations. I don't just want an alternate timeline for the Ancients to be alive, I want an alternate timeline so the universe can be alive.

[TheMightyMollusk]

it was revealed in that Q&A that she left a hole in the sundering for Emet, Elidibus, and Lahabrea.

This honestly just felt like them saying "Yeah, we're not sure how they survived, either, so here's a handwave."

Which really could've been avoided for all but Emet. Elidibus's soul is part of Zodiark, so he managed to stay in one piece by splitting other souls off into the Shards, keeping his core together in Source Zodiark. And Lahabrea.....well, I was half expecting to find out that the original Lahabrea was actually sundered and long dead, and the cackling lunatic we knew back in ARR was actually Hephaestus, freed from Pandaemonium by the other Unsundered who didn't know his whole story and thought he actually was Lahabrea, and he went along with it because it's technically half true and he wanted to usurp Lahabrea's life anyway. That's not how Pandaemonium worked out, of course, but it would've been a neat twist, at least to me. Would've also explained why ARR Lahabrea just doesn't at all match how he acts during Pandaemonium other than just saying he went nuts over the eons.

Hell, maybe Emet could've been in Pandaemonium looking for Lahabrea when the Sundering hit, and they were unaffected because it's a pocket dimension out of sync with the rest of the world. Boom, we have a somewhat better explanation.

[Nayukhuut]

I still cant vibe with the "she committed horrors worse than all of the people" mentality.

So she's apparently worse than Valens who literally is a masochist and tortures civilians and children for his own personal gain?

I just dont understand where people are getting this hardcoded message where the game tries to deny the Ascians but Venat. The only thing we are against is them actively trying to kill us and causing all sorts of problems but none of the Scions ever condemn their reasons for doing so. Emet-Selch and Elidibus gets huge passes for this where the game still goes out of their way to paint them in a positive light of sorts and even then we have Y'shtola (in other languages) respecting Emet for his noble cause when she talks about their duty to save the star.

You do realize this game portrays the villians with so much sympathy that its kinda getting annoying?

The whole point of the narrative is to show that thanks to Venat's actions, we were able to save the universe. Trying to finger point her at this point would just be extremely petty on the Scions part.

She split an entire planet and all life on it, all while knowing that other planets that were also full of life would be destroyed by the time we came around. She is directly responsible for the blood of the Sundering, and indirectly responsible for the blood the Ascians spilled. I will say it again. She destroyed her own people, and set up copies of the planet she knew would be wiped out well before the time where her plan might come to fruition. After that, her backup plan in case everything went pear shaped was to evacuate the people on the Source, and abandon all the Shards.

How do people NOT think she has a ton of blood on her hands? Oh right, because the story says she's good and she loves us.

And no, it would not be petty to hold her to her crimes. It would be reasonable. We can acknowledge where we are in history and past events without having to support each one of them. They should be able to say something like "this is the world we live in, and it is full of life and worth fighting for, but Venat dooming an entire species and multiple lives was still wrong."

Edit: Also because she didn't change how things happened with the Ancients she allowed Meteion to sing her song for 12,000+ years and wiped out countless planets populations. I don't just want an alternate timeline for the Ancients to be alive, I want an alternate timeline so the universe can be alive.

Oh good gosh yes, this too.

[Lunaxia]

I still cant vibe with the "she committed horrors worse than all of the people" mentality.

So I'm going try and explain this the best way I can, because it is a very hefty accusation to make, as is a lot of the criticism levied at Venat, and I want to offer some insight since I think the actual point behind it sometimes gets lost amidst the emotion the subject conjures up. I'm not a fan personally of invoking certain buzz words to describe what went on in the story for that reason.

One thing you are right on, though, is your confusion as to why the Scions or the WoL would ever be the ones to call out Venat. That could never happen, because we are the ones who actually act as the catalyst to her actions for our own benefit - but the idea that she never actually comes up against anyone who points out the double standard in her actions, even the people who stood against everything she did and worked against her, is still an issue.

But yeah, this is a thesis and I sincerely apologise for that, lol, but I wanted to try explaining this as simply as I could. It's not so much a response purely for this reply as it is for the topic in general, or anyone interested:

Why Venat Kind of Sucks, or, Why Everybody Sucks Equally:

So starting from the beginning, in ShB we hear from Emet that they summoned Zodiark to stop the Final Days, he/ it succeeded, and that there were some people who feared his power who eventually summoned Hydaelyn in response to keep him in check. They fought, Hydaelyn struck a single blow that wound up causing the Sundering - though it remains ambiguous as to how intentional it was - and later on we learn from phantom Hythlodaeus about the sacrifice required to bring Zodiark into being, how they wanted to offer up the new life in return for the lives lost in the sacrifice, and that the faction who brought Hydaelyn into being disagreed with this and it served as the motivation for her summoning.

At this stage, it's acknowledged that what happened to the Ascians and their people was tragic even in light of this disagreement and we sympathise with Emet's pain, but ultimately we can't condone his actions and allow the Ascians to continue, because murder is wrong, we also deserve to live, and it's not up to him to decide who will live and who will die. It's also inferred there was more going on behind the scenes that Emet remains wilfully ignorant of relating to the power/ influence Zodiark exerted and the fact of their tempering, and that there was a reason the situation was untenable and made the summoning of Hydaelyn a necessity, and the Sundering an unfortunate but feasibly unintended outcome. Cool.

Enter EW. We lose the angle of the Convocation and/ or Zodiark being the pivotal problem as well as the issue of the sacrifices, and it becomes purely a matter of their suitability in weathering the Final Days. We learn that Venat knew everything all along, and what we told her guided her actions and triggered the events ShB first revealed. And this is where it falls apart.

First of all, any sort of moral high ground Venat may have had over the Ascians that justified her position is now gone, because the minute she knew what the consequences of her actions entailed, what followed was no longer about concern for the preservation of life. She loses that argument after she consciously chose to sacrifice everything along with the Ancients in the Sundering to allow for the future where we exist. The new life wound up dead along with all the rest of them.

In an attempt to maintain it, the argument becomes "well, they couldn't handle despair, so they wouldn't have been able to defeat Meteion, and they needed to die to make way for the humans that could." But the problem here is that the mortals succeeding is not actually a given outcome - she even comes up with a contingency plan in the event we fail - nor is it a particularly fair comparison, when we have the benefit of prior knowledge and insight into the phenomenon because of what they went through. This is just a judgement Venat makes herself. She is given the information about what will come to pass, including the murders perpetuated by the Ascians as a result of the Sundering as well as the tragedy of the Sundering itself, she is crucially told what the Ancients never had access to in having knowledge of the true cause behind the Final Days and how to combat it, and she is left with a choice: to either believe in her own people, offer them vital information and see if she can prevent any of these events coming to pass, or going through with it and believing in us instead. And she chooses the latter. She chooses to throw her chips in with our lot, believing we are the best hope for mankind, which is meant to be very heartening and moving, but obscures the fact that in so doing not only is she making a choice here of who gets to live (and try) and who dies, and depriving the Ancients of the agency to self-determine their fate, (regardless of the outcome) - which was the very reason we fought Emet in ShB in the first place - and of the knowledge that might help spare them further, but she decides that everything the Ascians did, including the deaths of the victims of their actions, is necessary to make that happen. When the idea that "X needs to die to make future Y come to pass" is exactly the same judgement the Ascians made that they are so frequently condemned them for, only the difference here is that it is framed positively, in that she has been inspired by the WoL and chosen to place her faith in us. But that doesn't change the fact that the crux of it is that she has judged us more worthy of life in this instance, and we allow it because it preserves our future. And through this decision, the sum of her sacrifices actually winds up greater than theirs, because of the accumulative collateral damage needed to get to that future in the first place in terms of the Ancients, the new life, the seven shards and all of their inhabitants, and the victims of the Calamities. She knew all of this was the price to pay for the judgement she made, and she said "okay."

So basically the Ascians killed the Sundered, and said "we choose our people. You are not good enough to be entrusted with the fate of this star." And we criticised them for that, and we fought them believing in every living being's right to life and the ability to decide their own future.

Venat killed the Ancients, the supposedly all-important new life, allowed these other murders to go on unchecked because she needed them to happen, and said, "I choose these people. You are not good enough to be entrusted with the fate of this star." But for some reason this is seen as right, and her character viewed as wise, benevolent and kind. And this is what people are arguing against; neither side is right here, but fighting for their own corner, with Venat's decision actually having the edge on whose choices resulted in the greater number of sacrifices. To which other people say, well, Venat being seen positively is what the writers clearly intended, so it must be right, and the judgements and perceptions of the characters are correct because the writing said so, and you wind up with two different points of view duking it out on the forums for two years, when really it all comes down to a case of bad writing as a result of rewriting and cutting large chunks of an entire story at the last minute and trying to be deep and philosophical without sufficiently exploring the themes involved or providing adequate set-up to allow that to happen and feel genuine and meaningful - but not everyone wants to see or consider that, and this is where the duking it out gets personal and very heated. Whereas if this had simply stayed an issue between the two sides with no interference on our part, it all would have remained an unfortunate tragedy of clashing ideals, with Venat and her belief in the value of life giving her the moral victory over the Convocation, and leading to the natural outcome of her assuming stewardship over the newly-Sundered life after the fact and doing her best to nurture and protect them against the Ascians, which keeps her framed in a consistent, positive light and renders the rejoinings and such a sad fact of reality that she tried to prevent. Or, to put it more simply, a coherent story. Which is all most people here actually wanted, really. But apparently that just wasn't "good enough."