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

[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.