What lore do you ignore?

[Lyth]

Looking back on Cleretic's original statement, a request was made that evidence be provided to back up claims about the story. This is not an unreasonable expectation for anyone, and the burden of proof rests with the writer to make sure that they provide their sources. This is a good habit to get into even if you're not specifically asked to. I spend a fair amount of time backtracking to previous scenes and quest dialogue lines in order to make sure that I can provide people with a reference so that they can check any queries for themselves. It's not appropriate to put that responsibility onto everyone else and force them to wade through an opinion video for the purposes of doing your fact checking for you.

That's shouldn't give cause to be interpreted as slight, either. Repeating an opinion, even across multiple accounts, does not make it fact. I'm aware that this community has some, shall we say, 'complex histories' amongst its members that apparently still rankle from the sounds of it, this really has no bearing on whether a statement is backed by evidence or not. It also seems to me that this particular routine gets trotted out frequently as a distraction tactic when its revealed that there's no actual substance behind the presented arguments.

If anything, I think that people here have a tendency towards being overly charitable, especially when there's clearly a recurring pattern.

Back (if fleetingly) on the thread's actual premise, I'm inclined to put "Venat deliberately spared Emet, Lahabrea and Elidibus" as at least tentatively "ignorable" in that it seemed like a hastily invented answer to something the writers hadn't properly considered when they settled on the final version of the plot.

The main opportunity to clear up their explanation would have been EE3 but that part of the plot summary (on page 13) simply states that they escaped the Sundering "by means unknown" and does not attempt to attribute it to being a deliberate part of Hydaelyn's plan.

In any case that comes back to what I was saying in an earlier post, because being given knowledge of the future puts Venat/Hydaelyn in an unpleasant situation so far as making decisions that would be cruel to individuals (on the assumption that the game is not lying when it portrays her as a wise and compassionate person).

Does she really wilfully leave the will-be Ascians unsundered and tormented, or does she reason that she will simply aim to sunder all of existence and that if the future-history is true, there must be some unknowable occurrence when she does so that results in those few people slipping through the cracks?

I also feel that the provided explanation is flimsy, but they wrote themselves into a corner with the 'Unsundered' designation. It is very difficult to create a global event that specifically spares three people. It gets even more complicated when one of them is supposed to be the Heart of Zodiark, and the EE Vol. 3 states that Hydaelyn and Zodiark were locked in combat when the Sundering happened. They could try to invent loopholes to get around this (perhaps another time travel loop), but I'm actually glad that they just gave up and handwaved it rather than potentially digging themselves in deeper.

Setting aside the philosophical question of whether events are stochastic or deterministic, 'future knowledge' is really only useful if you can safely act on it. It's actually more more beneficial to be able to reset a decision, because that way you can actually test whether the outcome is better or not.

Given that Venat has to get this right on a single playthrough, it really comes entirely down to her judgement of the personalities involved. Based off of what she heard in Poieten Oikos, it probably would have made sense not to let Emet escape. But for whatever reason, she counted on him to do the right thing in the end, and it actually proved to be the winning gambit in Ultima Thule that ensured everyone's survival.

[ZavosEsperian]

That is my main issue, people reading from front to back are lead to believe if a good person did something evil, then the thing she did must not be evil. I was also led to believe that. But then at the end I sat with that massive stack of corpses for awhile and everything started to stink.

So they are right, I am coming at this from the end because the longer I sat with those corpses, the more her every word and deed becomes tainted...by all the murders she committed.

She is a good person as long as I ignore everything she did, her reasons for doing it and just pay attention to the color scheme, the lip service and the power ballads. But both actions and inactions alike fall under top tier villainy.

Towards the beginning of the expansion, I had viewed Venat through rose-colored glasses because of how she was presented. These days my view is a darker shade of grey as elements present through the story would give you the ability to interpret her in a more negative/evil light. And as you have put it, the presentation itself is capable of changing someone's opinion of her to a more positive tone. The necessity of suffering she introduced along with the immediate aftermath of the sundering is extremely jarring compared to her overall messaging and causes Venat to have a large amount of cognitive dissonance. As such, it is why I am not as critical of people who view her negatively.

*snip*

If true, this would make the individuals you are referring to extremely detestable. I have said this before but individuals who behave in this way disrupt how the forums function and will cause newer players to be dissuaded from interacting with them directly. While I am not opposed to debate as people are entitled to what they think, I am opposed to people like the ones you are describing here.

Vitriolic behavior as you are describing is something I would expect out of some of the worst cesspits of the internet. It is extremely vile and the individuals who are participating in said behavior should be ashamed of themselves. With that said, I suspect they are not ashamed of their behavior either...but that is something I would not know.

My apologies you had to deal with such detestable people.

In a different context, if you ask me my personal opinion on the story presented in Endwalker, then yes it is absolutely a messed-up thing to have done – but I regard the fault to be laid at the writer's level rather than the character's.

Generally, I tend to lay the blame on the writers here, and as Venat is likely the most affected from this, she is a character I expect to see a wide variety of opinions about her character. It is something that has pained me greatly because it caused parts of the game that use her as a central figure to feel...incomplete or lacking to me. I have no direct issues with people who like Venat or dislike Venat, I just need some semblance of an argument where I am able to reach whatever the other person's opinion is without needing a large number of logical leaps.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Towards the beginning of the expansion, I had viewed Venat through rose-colored glasses because of how she was presented. These days my view is a darker shade of grey as elements present through the story would give you the ability to interpret her in a more negative/evil light. And as you have put it, the presentation itself is capable of changing someone's opinion of her to a more positive tone. The necessity of suffering she introduced along with the immediate aftermath of the sundering is extremely jarring compared to her overall messaging and causes Venat to have a large amount of cognitive dissonance. As such, it is why I am not as critical of people who view her negatively.

I don't actually hate the character. I hate the framing of her actions. No one is expecting me to accept Emet-Selch is burning babies in their cribs due to his deep love for humanity. He makes it clear he doesn't view them as human and he's trying to smash everything back together again. His actions fit his views and stated values.

Venat keeps saying how much she loves humanity, but at the same time she's responsible for the destruction of 9? 10? worlds full of people with laughter that warms her heart? And to accept that as good I have to accept that some lives are just worth less than others. And I refuse.

And her values and motives go so much against just regular human decency that people are trying to find ways to believe she didn't want the rejoinings to happen given they'd cause untold suffering and death, but that ignores her motives for the sundering. The suffering is the point. The trial to which she subjected humanity is generations of torture so that we would grow strong and overcome despair. People assume she attempts to alleviate suffering because that's what a good person would do, but no, the suffering is the point. She's hurting us on purpose because she believe trauma makes us strong. Didn't make the Ascians strong though, made them go crazy. Maybe that's why she deemed them inferior and killed them off...

Based on her values, anyone trying to improve the conditions of the world is leading us towards a dead end and the only person living like they read her rulebook is Zenos. He too is causing suffering so that the people enduring it will grow strong. But when he espouses the same values he's scary, crazy and evil. Should have put him in a white dress.

Yep, the more I think about it, the worse it gets. Every layer I peel back, just another fetid layer of unspeakable horror. I can't believe all it took was Answers to get me to buy onto this, even for a time. Nobuo Uematsu is a genius.

I have no intention to "convince myself" because I am not trying to give a personal opinion, I am trying to discuss a story written by someone else though the lens of what they appear to have believed.

And I already addressed the matter of accounting for the unsundered being another failure of the writers. If I had to give a theory to explain it within canon, I would go with my earlier speculation: Venat may not have deliberately spared them at all, but tried to sunder everything and found that they somehow slipped through unaffected, just as the time traveller prophesied. But canon has avoided addressing this, so people are going to ascribe well-intentioned or malevolent purpose to it as they see fit.




You'll have to explain how the rejoinings are in any way necessary for her "rise to godhood", given that they only happen after she has become the heart of Hydaelyn and taken over Zodiark's place as the will of the star.

Also please explain why someone whose final aspiration is godhood for the sake of it would be so ready to sacrifice herself at the end of it all, instead of seeking to prolong her reign infinitely.

Without the sunderings, we do not develop time travel to go back in time to tell her what to do and how to do it to become a god. She gives us the Elpis flower to lead us down the path to coming back to her so that the loop is maintained. If she had any motivation to break the loop, she could have tried to do literally anything differently, like perhaps only sunder the people in half if her only motivation was the reduce their power level or make sure she gets the Ascians so that her 14 worlds could develop in peace and harmony. But she doesn't want peace and harmony. She wants suffering and destruction. We can't learn the endure despair without being placed in despair. And burning out the last of her soul in a duel which spares her from having to face the people whose souls she used for 12k years and whose families she murdered in the aetherial sea AND allows her to skip out on being reborn into the torture machine of her own creation is the most Zenos act of all. She didn't "sacrifice" herself at the end. She purposely destroyed her soul for a duel sparing her the suffering to which she subjected her children for so long. Before she went, she should have told Amon how one destroys his soul to opt out of the cycle of life. That would prevent future suffering, but given preventing suffering has never really been her thing, I can see why she didn't mention it as an option.

[ZavosEsperian]

No one is expecting me to accept Emet-Selch is burning babies in their cribs due to his deep love for humanity. He makes it clear he doesn't view them as human and he's trying to smash everything back together again. His actions fit his views and stated values.

As I believe you are an Emet-Selch fan. I will share with you a question and its answer during one of the Q&A Sessions. These questions were asked to Yoshi-P during Letter from the Producer LIVE Part LXVIII, which took place on (03/03/2022). Links will be provided should you wish to confirm what I have said:

Q: I’d be interested to know how the unsundered Ascians (Lahabrea, Elidibus, and Emet-Selch) avoided being kicked into fourteen pieces by Hydaelyn.

A: As Emet-Selch implied towards the end of the 6.0 main scenario (“So, here I am Venat. I suppose you needed me to tie it all together…”), Venat had purposefully allowed him to survive. The attack intentionally left something like an opening which Emet-Selch could just barely wriggle through. With that said, with the limit of Hydaelyn’s full power behind the attack, fine-tuning wasn’t possible and whether or not he would actually survive was somewhat of a gamble. In the end, Emet-Selch, with the help of Lahabrea (who happened to be nearby) and Elidibus (who had fallen from Zodiark’s core), was able to evade the attack by temporarily escaping to a rift between dimensions. -Yoshi-P

Link to video with timestamp at（02:51:46）

Link to Forum Post

Link to full transcription

-Letter from the Producer LIVE Part LXVIII (03/03/2022)

In the case of Emet-Selch, Lahabrea, and Elidibus, they were intentionally spared by Venat/Hydaelyn based on the answer Yoshi-P gave regarding this question. What you make of this is up to you.

And her values and motives go so much against just regular human decency that people are trying to find ways to believe she didn't want the rejoinings to happen given they'd cause untold suffering and death, but that ignores her motives for the sundering. The suffering is the point. The trial to which she subjected humanity is generations of torture so that we would grow strong and overcome despair. People assume she attempts to alleviate suffering because that's what a good person would do, but no, the suffering is the point. She's hurting us on purpose because she believe trauma makes us strong.

Once again, I am going to provide you with a question with its answer from the same Q&A session. Please note this one is explicitly Yoshi-P's interpretation of events, as Yoshi-P himself is not opposed to people interpreting events they way they want to and neither is the lore team themselves:

Q: I don’t really understand why the Warrior of Light messing around in Elpis didn’t create any alternate timelines. Can you explain what happened?

A: First of all, we’ve left that part up to interpretation.

With that said, my personal interpretation is that the past and present were always the part of the same timeline. Although there was still a possibility for the timelines to diverge, the Warrior of Light was unwittingly acting in accordance with Venat’s plans, which unified the past and present. Another interpretation might be that Venat worked really hard behind the scenes to ensure that the timeline wouldn’t go awry.

Seeing how Argos took to us on our first meeting, I’d say that proves that the past and present were already unified. -Yoshi-P

Link to video with timestamp at（03:18:39)

Link to Forum Post

-Letter from the Producer LIVE Part LXVIII (03/03/2022)

You are free to read any and all of those questions and answers and I would encourage you do so. I won't stand in the way of how you interpret the Q&A session. If you were to go off of some of the approaches Yoshi-P suggests in them, it is possible to say that Venat did indeed have some level of control of all of the events that occurred between the sundering up to the point we end up defeating her as Hydaelyn.