What lore do you ignore?

[RavLandslide]

Why would she thank him? She gave the Warriors of Light crystals knowing what would happen to their world. Ardbert was right to try to put an axe through her head. As Varis would say, "IT WAS BY DESIGN?!"

I don't really understand what that has to do with her thanking G'raha for what he did during Shadowbringers, but I'll try to clarify:

I should've maybe clarified that it's not while we meet Venat, but Hydaelyn. When we go to the Aetherial Sea together with the other Scions.

And my reason for why she'd thank him is because he basically saved the world. He did it together with the Sons of Saint Coinach and the Ironworks, of course, but those people weren't there when we met Hydaelyn. In a perfect story all the Scions would've been personally addressed for what they've done for the Star, but I think G'raha has really done the most considering how he travelled through time and space to prevent the 8th Umbral Calamity.

We don't know for sure if Hydaelyn would have "lost" if he hadn't done that, but we do know that she got a lot closer to "winning" by him doing it.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

I don't really understand what that has to do with her thanking G'raha for what he did during Shadowbringers, but I'll try to clarify:

I should've maybe clarified that it's not while we meet Venat, but Hydaelyn. When we go to the Aetherial Sea together with the other Scions.

And my reason for why she'd thank him is because he basically saved the world. He did it together with the Sons of Saint Coinach and the Ironworks, of course, but those people weren't there when we met Hydaelyn. In a perfect story all the Scions would've been personally addressed for what they've done for the Star, but I think G'raha has really done the most considering how he travelled through time and space to prevent the 8th Umbral Calamity.

We don't know for sure if Hydaelyn would have "lost" if he hadn't done that, but we do know that she got a lot closer to "winning" by him doing it.

But he was predestined to do it. She set up the First to fall to light so that the WoL would die, so that the alternate timeline would figure out time travel, so that G'raha would come back to save the WoL, so that time travel is now available, so that the WoL can be sent back in time and tell her what she does so that she can do it. Thanking him would be like thanking a domino for falling over when pushed. Plus, I don't think she really cares about individuals. If she did she wouldn't have created seven worlds just to be smashed into the Source, not to mention what she allowed and/or instigated on the First and Thirteen.

So what would she be thanking him for? "Thank you for doing exactly what I set you up to do." If so, should she also thank the Ascians for destroying all the worlds she set them up to destroy right on schedule? Because literally everyone was unknowingly acting on her agenda. The WoL included.

[Iscah]

But he was predestined to do it.

You're blurring two things here: someone having knowledge of the future, and what causes people to act.

If there's some higher-level embodiment of Fate in this story's universe that drives people to act in a certain way, then Venat is as much a puppet as the rest. She is not the controller of fates and doesn't have influence over what other people will do; she's simply relying on the sequence of events in which things will happen as she has been told they will.

And if there is no driving force of fate, then there is only a world shaped moment-by-moment by the decisions of the people living in it, and those people are in control of their own path at the time they are taking it, no matter whether someone from the past has knowledge that they will do it in future, and no matter whether someone in the future knows that it happened in history.

G'raha did not somehow magically decide to save the world because Venat knew he would; he made that decision for himself, and Venat has learned about it as "future history". That is all.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

You're blurring two things here: someone having knowledge of the future, and what causes people to act.

If there's some higher-level embodiment of Fate in this story's universe that drives people to act in a certain way, then Venat is as much a puppet as the rest. She is not the controller of fates and doesn't have influence over what other people will do; she's simply relying on the sequence of events in which things will happen as she has been told they will.

And if there is no driving force of fate, then there is only a world shaped moment-by-moment by the decisions of the people living in it, and those people are in control of their own path at the time they are taking it, no matter whether someone from the past has knowledge that they will do it in future, and no matter whether someone in the future knows that it happened in history.

G'raha did not somehow magically decide to save the world because Venat knew he would; he made that decision for himself, and Venat has learned about it as "future history". That is all.

But without knowledge of "future history" you don't really have the choice to do anything differently. The only person that can choose to act differently is someone who knows what they did before and the results of their actions making Venat the only person with true agency in the FF14 universe. Everyone else is just following a script. We do what we do because it's what we've always done.

ETA: Actually that's not true. The WoL could also choose to act differently and chance the course of events because they also have knowledge of the future.

[Iscah]

But without knowledge of "future history" you don't really have the choice to do anything differently.

There is no need to do things "differently" though – that implies that something is happening a second time. There is only one moment in all of spacetime where G'raha makes his choice, and he chooses it for his own reasons, not because some distant observer is already aware of what he chose to do.

Venat is no mastermind of fates; she simply considers the future that you describe to her and accepts to take her part in it. If anything, she is the one who has lost agency of her own future and can now only play the part that has been told to her.

...or perhaps she did struggle against her dictated fate, and she was able to act differently and split off a timeline that we will never see but the ancients are saved ultimately due to the warning we gave to Venat – but that can't happen without the original timeline still happening as well.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

There is no need to do things "differently" though – that implies that something is happening a second time. There is only one moment in all of spacetime where G'raha makes his choice, and he chooses it for his own reasons, not because some distant observer is already aware of what he chose to do.

Venat is no mastermind of fates; she simply considers the future that you describe to her and accepts to take her part in it. If anything, she is the one who has lost agency of her own future and can now only play the part that has been told to her.

...or perhaps she did struggle against her dictated fate, and she was able to act differently and split off a timeline that we will never see but the ancients are saved ultimately due to the warning we gave to Venat – but that can't happen without the original timeline still happening as well.

G'raha chooses to do it because of every moment that led up to that moment. But the moments he's experiencing are being curated by a god aware of the future. Things are happening again and again because we're in a loop. We go to the past which prompts Venat to sunder the world and set up the Ascians to do the rejoinings, which leads to our creation, so we go back in time and tell her all this which prompts Venat to sunder the world.

The only people with enough knowledge of what's going on to break the loop are Venat and the WoL and while the WoL has chosen inaction, Venat has chosen to do everything in her power to maintain the loop. G'raha will always make the same choices because he's unaware of the loop. The only people capable of making different choices are those aware of the loop and that's Venat and the WoL.

Sure the WoL telling Themis and therefore the convocation about Meteion and Venat's plans to sunder the world *might* cause our timeline to end, which was a risk the people of G'raha's future were willing to take and commended for doing so. To plant seeds they'd never see grow. And both Shadowbringers and 6.5 taught me it's wrong to doom a world to save your own. Unless it's the Ancient world, I guess. Then it just can't be helped or changed or nothing. Just gotta accept the eradication of every man, woman and child without even clearing your throat and throwing a "by the way..." out there in an effort to help them.

Traversing space and time when it comes to saving the WoL, but pimp shrugs when it comes to saving the Ancients.

[Iscah]

Things are happening again and again because we're in a loop. We go to the past which prompts Venat to sunder the world and set up the Ascians to do the rejoinings, which leads to our creation, so we go back in time and tell her all this which prompts Venat to sunder the world.

The only people with enough knowledge of what's going on to break the loop are Venat and the WoL and while the WoL has chosen inaction, Venat has chosen to do everything in her power to maintain the loop.

The term "time loop" is a simplification. It's more like a series of interlocking time-travel-related events that make some people's path from "past" to "future" rather more squiggly than it is under normal circumstances, but that doesn't mean that the people are stuck in a loop or living through the same events multiple times.

Venat is not seeking to maintain some trapping loop indefinitely, but to ensure that in this one sequence of events, things play out as you told her they would and will lead back to your existence and your seeking her help in Elpis. Once the world has reached that point, the history she knows is over and everything else is up to you.

What are you thinking a time loop would even look like? Do you think Venat is somehow stopping time from progressing beyond the point where we travel back to Elpis? Why would she do that? Her end goal is saving all of humanity (which, whether we agree or not, she sees as continuous with her own ancient race), and the route to do so is equipping you with the knowledge that you need and then trusting in you to defeat Meteion.

Additionally, the WoL does not "choose inaction" in Elpis but has no choice but inaction. This is a vision of the past and they need to learn what happens in this timeline's past. There is nothing to be prevented, because it already happened, and even Elidibus warns you of this before you enter the portal - that you cannot change the tragic outcome, only observe it. Our time to act is in the present, not the past.

[Cleretic]

Venat is no mastermind of fates; she simply considers the future that you describe to her and accepts to take her part in it. If anything, she is the one who has lost agency of her own future and can now only play the part that has been told to her.

...or perhaps she did struggle against her dictated fate, and she was able to act differently and split off a timeline that we will never see but the ancients are saved ultimately due to the warning we gave to Venat – but that can't happen without the original timeline still happening as well.

My read is that she actually didn't do either of these. She doesn't accept her place in The Time Loop; the scene right after Ktisis basically has her saying that she'll look for other options if at all possible. It just seems like those options weren't really viable. ANd yet, we know she was pursuing them even before the Sundering, because of the Anamnesis Anyder discussion.

But even when we have completed the time loop, we know she's not sticking to it: remember that when we meet her in the Aetherial Sea, we learn that her plan is several layers more complicated, reliant on both events that happened afterwards that couldn't have been part of what we told her (specifically, tagging Meteion) and multiple factors we didn't even know were on the table after we left her alone (for example, the Ragnarok).

If she were simply following her assigned role with no agency, everyone would've been screwed: it was her rejecting that 'future history' being told to her and deciding to be more clever that anyone had a chance of survival anyway.

All this assumption about the time loop is predicated on the assumption that our intel was a perfect blueprint anyway, and the entirety of our eventual success was predicated on the fact it had massive holes: even assuming we were as exhaustive as possible, we had a very limited perspective, and gave her a history with a good ten thousand years of '???'. If your information on the time loop that you're allegedly in is so limited, how can you be sure that any deviation you even try to make wasn't just an unrealized part of the loop? Why can't you just try some stuff?

We explained Hydaelyn's Plan B to her, and then found out about the Plan A much later. How do we know we haven't been surrounded by the failed remnants of Plans C through W this whole time?

[Iscah]

My read is that she actually didn't do either of these. She doesn't accept her place in The Time Loop; the scene right after Ktisis basically has her saying that she'll look for other options if at all possible. It just seems like those options weren't really viable. ANd yet, we know she was pursuing them even before the Sundering, because of the Anamnesis Anyder discussion.

But even when we have completed the time loop, we know she's not sticking to it: remember that when we meet her in the Aetherial Sea, we learn that her plan is several layers more complicated, reliant on both events that happened afterwards that couldn't have been part of what we told her (specifically, tagging Meteion) and multiple factors we didn't even know were on the table after we left her alone (for example, the Ragnarok).

Yes, she says she'll be looking for other options, but to me that just sounds like the precursor to the two possibilities I listed. Either she discovers some alternative path that plays out in a split timeline we'll never see, or the single timeline remains as it is and always was: she searches for alternatives, finds nothing and concludes that she cannot deny that the Sundering is the only viable route that might still save her people - and it needs to be emphasised that whatever reading the fans ascribe to it, it appears to be the intent of the story writers that from Venat's own viewpoint, the ancients and modern humanity are the same continuous people so she believes she is ensuring the survival of her race and not destroying it.

As for your "additional factors", yes, she has clearly put a lot of work and thinking into setting up additional elements outside of what we were able to tell her - essentially solving the puzzle of "why would I tell them to flee?" with "maybe it's all a ruse to get them to build a starship capable of reaching Meteion" - but she is still locked into complying with the bigger parts of what we told her, and is not fully free to act. Imagine how she must have to think about the calamities occurring on the earlier shards - if this is fated, should she try to intervene? Would it be futile? Can she bring herself to sit idle while it happens because it is a necessary event on the road to reaching the WoL's present?

And to come back to the argument that started this tangent, the point here is that she is not in control of people's fates. She can do her best, lay what plans she can to help bring about her goal, but knowing she can plan on other people acting a particular way in a particular circumstance is not the same thing as having control over their fate.

[RavLandslide]

But he was predestined to do it. She set up the First to fall to light so that the WoL would die, so that the alternate timeline would figure out time travel, so that G'raha would come back to save the WoL, so that time travel is now available, so that the WoL can be sent back in time and tell her what she does so that she can do it. Thanking him would be like thanking a domino for falling over when pushed. Plus, I don't think she really cares about individuals. If she did she wouldn't have created seven worlds just to be smashed into the Source, not to mention what she allowed and/or instigated on the First and Thirteen.

So what would she be thanking him for? "Thank you for doing exactly what I set you up to do." If so, should she also thank the Ascians for destroying all the worlds she set them up to destroy right on schedule? Because literally everyone was unknowingly acting on her agenda. The WoL included.

I'm kind of late with my reaction, seeing how much debate this has sparked, but I still felt like I should reply.

I personally think you're giving Venat too much credit. She was a fighter and a friend, not a genius. She was the person who sundered the world on, what the cutscene made out to be, an impulse, with seemingly no further plans besides waiting for us to be born. She of course did know that we were going to be saved, but I don't think we told her every second of what we experienced/read/heard or that she was able to perfectly lay out a plan that would result in the Calamity being stopped. G'raha and his pals made a clever plan which Hydaelyn knew would happen, but did she, herself, personally make that happen? I personally do not think so.