What lore do you ignore?

[Lady_Silvermoon]

That is what I was referring to in my bracketed paragraph. The writers did a poor job at committing to the necessary scale of devastation that had to be inflicted upon the alternate timeline to justify the "it's so doomed we had to rewind and try again" outlook that the story relies on. It should have been as simple as Black Rose killing everyone in its path, ever-spreading and unable to be halted, and the few remaining survivors send G'raha back in time before they too succumb to inevitable death.

Instead, the writers hesitated first in how impactful Black Rose was, added in the contradictory secondary premise that humanity was not only mostly wiped out but also retained enough manpower to wage endless large-scale war in the aftermath, and ultimately is all set to move forwards after they've just wasted years of effort to throw away the Crystal Tower instead of regarding it as a very valuable resource and spending their time on better world-fixing innovations.

But as I said, that's poor writing and I am inclined to separate it from the clear intention to portray the world as doomed and unsavable, because the plot relies on that premise even if it was sold badly.

Every time G'raha has talked about the people he left behind in that world, it is very clear that he believes they were doomed and he is sad about what he understands to be their fate.

They spent 200 years figuring out time travel to change the past. That's 200 years they've already survived. People with next to nothing gave what little they have to help them in their work. If you've read the story, you'll know it ends with Midgardsormr waking up, being inspired and helping them rebuild. It's a story of hope, not one of a doomed disposable world. The source has survived 7 rejoinings, I believe that timeline will survive the 8th, because my hope actually is everlasting even in the darkest of times. The First that we saved was impacted way worse by Light and they will rebuild. There is no reason to believe the Source in that timeline won't also rebuild the same way it did the seven times before. They risked their timeline being destroyed, but it wasn't, and last we hear of them, they are building towards a better future.

Perhaps the mistake in writing wasn't in not killing them off completely, but in perpetuating the idea there are people unworthy of life because they will die, ignoring everyone will die. Even the races who died off entirely, their souls remained to create new life and thanks to dynamis, even their languages, cultures and histories survived in Ultima Thule. If longevity is the metric by which someone's worthiness to live is measured, then the Ascians were right. "The ephemeral lives you exalt are pale imitations, utterly devoid of meaning." This is the viewpoint you're holding, but with civilizations rather than individuals, but it's wrong by both metrics.

Personally I think the writers were banking on Venat being another Emet-Selch but due to the circumstances it didn't really land. It doesn't help that Endwalker arrived amidst a rather dire part of recent human history where people in the real world where genuinely calling for the deaths and imprisonment of anyone who disagreed with them over the pandemic and lockdowns. Not to mention those of us who lost loves one during that period aren't really thrilled by child-like stories that proclaim that some people are more deserving than others of living whereas others are just fodder to cast aside to prop up the heroes because they're extra special. Words truly cannot describe how tone deaf and infantile it all is, really.

My theory on how this happened was they were setting Venat up to be evil knowing we'd be killing both Zodiak and Hydaelyn, but that idea got vetoed by a higher up, so they switched up her tone without changing her actions. Cause I can't imagine from the onset they were aiming for her to be good and started with "then she sunders everyone with the full knowledge of the hell she'll be putting them through."

It's really just one big, giant tangled web of a mess that I do not believe the writers can truly untangle at this point...and the game isn't exactly fresh these days either. Time will tell how popular 'lol graha ate taco XD' proves to be especially with some healthy competition finally emerging on the market.

Well, as long as we don't do a colonialism. *begs* Please, please, please don't have us go there and colonize these people. I don't want to spend the next three years trying to explain why being a colonizer is a bad thing.

[Iscah]

It's a story of hope, not one of a doomed disposable world.

And my issue is that they're trying to write a story of hope for a world which, for plot purposes, does actually need to be irrevocably doomed or you can't justify the decision to abandon it. Nobody within the story deemed it as disposable until there was (allegedly) no other path possible.

On the other hand, your proposal that we should go back to Elpis and change the timeline would be deeming the present-day world as disposable just to take a shot at saving a newly created alternate version of the ancient world, while not actually saving anyone who already exists.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

And my issue is that they're trying to write a story of hope for a world which, for plot purposes, does actually need to be irrevocably doomed or you can't justify the decision to abandon it. Nobody within the story deemed it as disposable until there was (allegedly) no other path possible.

On the other hand, your proposal that we should go back to Elpis and change the timeline would be deeming the present-day world as disposable just to take a shot at saving a newly created alternate version of the ancient world, while not actually saving anyone who already exists.

But we already know from G'raha's continued existence that divergent timelines exist and are possible. There is no justifiable and moral reason to know Venat is going to kill all these people and say nothing to them. And no, she didn't simply transform them, she exterminated them, else Vauthry only transformed the people he turned into sineaters and Athena only transformed the people she turned into...whatever she was doing.

While you can question if the alternate Ironworks had he right to do what they did given they didn't know if they'd be wiping themselves and everyone else in that timeline out of existence or not. Insisting that they must be without hope to justify putting their resources towards helping others goes against the themes of Shadowbringers. We are told planting seeds we'll never see grow is in our nature. That paying it forward is the good in us. I think that's a much better moral than entire disposable civilizations giving everything up to their betters.

ETA: Also, we opened out fat mouths to cause the genocide. Why can't we keep yapping to stop it? You're arguing we can't say anything because it risks our timeline. But saying something is what puts Venat on the path of murdering her people. So we've already talked. Why not talk to some more people so she can be removed from said path we put her on?

[Iscah]

But we already know from G'raha's continued existence that divergent timelines exist and are possible.

We, the players with an external view of the whole situation, know that multiple timelines are possible. G'raha does not know, even after bringing about the change in events, whether or not the other timeline still exists.

But again, as far as he knows, the two possible states of the other timeline are (A) it no longer exists, or (B) it exists but everyone is going to die soon and there's nothing that can be done to stop it.

Knowing that it is possible to create a split timeline is not the same thing as knowing that the split timeline will turn out the way you hope it will. But the point of the post-calamity timeline was that it was (allegedly) so bad that any other outcome would be better than the 100% chance of doom they were facing.

Also, we opened out fat mouths to cause the genocide. Why can't we keep yapping to stop it? You're arguing we can't say anything because it risks our timeline. But saying something is what puts Venat on the path of murdering her people. So we've already talked. Why not talk to some more people so she can be removed from said path we put her on?

You keep presenting it as our character deliberately causing a genocide. I have already covered the fact that the writers (and by extension anyone they regard as good characters) apparently do not share the viewpoint that it is a genocide, so the characters cannot be expected to act as if it were.

Our character simply explained the future that they knew would happen; they did not encourage it to happen. Venat would be on that path whether we said anything or not. We arguably tried to stop it during our time in Elpis, up until the point where it went wrong and also we had the answer we were seeking, so we needed to get back to our present and Venat assured us that she would do what she could to avert tragedy.

It should also be noted that while for gameplay purposes we have easy access to aetherytes and infinite ability to return to Elpis at will, the story makes it quite clear that if this were a more linear game, we would have been there on limited time - probably until Elidibus's power ran out and could no longer keep the portal open. Note that for our subsequent trip to Elpis that leads us to Pandaemonium, we can't just travel there freely but have to reactivate the portal in the Ocular by using the mysterious crystal.

My theory on how this happened was they were setting Venat up to be evil knowing we'd be killing both Zodiak and Hydaelyn, but that idea got vetoed by a higher up, so they switched up her tone without changing her actions. Cause I can't imagine from the onset they were aiming for her to be good and started with "then she sunders everyone with the full knowledge of the hell she'll be putting them through."

This may be the closest we will come to agreeing, because the Sundering as it happened certainly seems to belong to a Venat who is written as more ambiguous and less "loving mother goddess but in human form" and it feels like they rewrote the rest and forgot to consider that one scene, or else the writers (or different writers/devs) were trying to have it both ways and maintain both "perfect Hydaelyn" and "everyone has their own viewpoint and nobody is entirely right" without recognising their own inconsistency.

Personally I resolve this by just regarding the whole plot as a bit of a mess, ignoring the weirder parts of their philosophy, and crossing fingers that they won't keep being weird when they're no longer trying to write themselves out of a tangled corner of the plot.

Beyond that, I'll talk about the plot as it is written - it's irrelevant whether I personally agree with the proposition that sundering would not count as death, because the characters are acting based on what the writers think is the answer to that question.

Additionally, the writers were never trying to cover all possible angles of the story. By their own previous writing they were locked into crafting a story where the Sundering does happen, Hydaelyn is somehow responsible, and there is no option of it simply not happening. Nor is there an option for the main character to abandon the ongoing world of the story and skip off into the sunset into a different world forever cut off from the setting so far. It's something you can maybe get away with (plot circumstances depending) in a movie or a one-and-done game storyline, but not for an ongoing MMO.

Though in any case, if the whole Sundering scene is a relic from a vetoed "Hydaelyn turns out to be evil" plot, then that just makes me even more inclined to ignore it, assume something else happened instead that lines up with the "yes Hydaelyn really is every bit as good and lovely as she seemed" plot that we did get in every other scene of the story (I'm inclined to assume that Hydaelyn aimed to sunder just Zodiark and the rest was an unforeseen side effect), and move on to discussing the parts of the plot that have no direct relevance to the details of how the Sundering happened.