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

[Lyth]

The first step is to determine how sundering someone or something actually works, before arriving at any conclusions. This entire discussion hinges on whether sundering someone:

• kills them
• destroys all their memories

Emet-Selch's demonstration on Ryne in the Ocular during the Shadowbringers MSQ doesn't seem to support either of these. In fact, Emet makes a deliberate point of stating that 'this singular ability strikes not at such banal things as flesh'. We also know that sundered souls can retain memories from before the sundering, including some flashbacks of the Amaurotine Final Days. The entire plotline around Amon/Fandaniel hinges on him retaining his memories of Elpis from before the time that he was sundered. So that contradicts the second point as well.

We can try to piece together an understanding of how sundering magic works by inference. Argos seems to be an early precursor to sundering magic, and his duplicates are directly referred to as 'reflections' in the quest text when you encounter him on the moon. He appears to be able to sunder and rejoin himself without consequence, and his memories of who you are seem to be still preserved across 12000 years.

During the Pandaemonium questline, Lahabrea splits his soul into two, and deliberately seals away part of his personality and memories around Athena on to one of his soul fragments. This process doesn't kill him, but does result in some memories being unique to each reflection, while others appear to be shared. He seems to be able to consciously plan for what information each fragment is able to recall. That suggests to me that memories aren't necessarily 'encoded' to a single locus on a soul (perhaps there's a degree of redundancy, if you want to use a RAID analogy). Splitting the soul doesn't seem like it necessarily damages the information encoded on it.

I think if you want to develop a theoretical framework to explain all this, you need to have a clear understanding of how memory works in FFXIV and how this relates to aether. Because the rules are different from how they work in our own world.

Even inanimate objects have memory, as seen in Venat's demonstration of the Echo on Elpis. You don't need a living being to be physically present. And we know that the sundering affects inanimate objects as well, because the geographical features of the First were all parallels of Eorzea. It's not like they were destroyed in the process. So it really doesn't seem like Sundering actually damages corporeal aether (which again, we could have predicted if we listened to Emet-Selch's original explanation).

Dying doesn't remove your memories either. Endwalker used this 'underwater' effect as a storytelling motif whenever the narrator was floating around in the lifestream, during both the MSQ and Pandaemonium. Despite being very dead, both Emet and Elidibus still can recall what happened to them while they're waiting to dissolve back into the lifestream.

Your memories have to first be 'cleansed' by the lifestream before your soul returns back to the cycle. Until that happens, you still retain all your memories. Even after being sundered, those memories are preserved unless that cleansing process occurs fully. Cue to Asahi furiously scrubbing Fandaniel's soul.

I'm curious about what happens to all those memories after cleansing, but I have a personal theory that it's something important to the functioning of the lifestream and planet, as well as this slightly vague concept of 'the Will of the Star'. I'm predicting that there's an entity that predates Zodiark and Hydaelyn that was originally meant to occupy that position, similar to how Zodiark required a 'Heart' in order to function.

Either way, the fundamental assumptions that underpin this entire discussion are flawed, and the contradictions become quickly obvious if you were asking questions rather than trying to force conclusions of your own choosing.

The only reason why the term 'genocide' gets thrown around deliberately and inappropriately in here is because some Ascian enjoyers see it as an opportunity to pull an 'Uno Reverse' on the discussions of Stormblood from some six years ago. It has nothing to do with Venat herself outside of what she symbolizes to the protagonists. Previously, Garlemald has occupied a fairly uncomfortable space within game lore, drawing historical inspiration from real world fascist regimes and the war crimes they committed. Elidibus quite literally employed (al)chemical weaponry in warfare, in the form of the Black Rose. Enjoying the villains doesn't automatically mean that you condone such actions or sympathize with those ideologies, but it's not surprising that those discussions became heated back in the day. Either way, it's probably worth letting those grudges go if you're still clinging to them. And if you can't, well, it looks like this story is moving on with or without you.

The Sundering is a Garden of Eden story, with a sprinkle of Pandora on top. All these stories are fundamentally about answering the question of 'why does good and evil exist in our world?' and about how to transcend that. Is it a coincidence that the flower that Venat left behind for us, Elpis, is the spirit of hope?