What lore do you ignore?

[Palladiamors]

Anything past 5.0. Zeno's revival, the Ascians being hamfisted into suddenly being a tragic ancient race of super beings with godly powers who created everything, the removal of any gods in the story, the Empire being chumped out, the Final Days being caused by an actual Woobie, destroyer of worlds, the weird way the writing suddenly started sprinting straight down trope territory...

It's all just a fever dream in the wake of recovering from the wounds inflicted in our final fight with Zenos.

[SannaR]

Is it plot armor or tone armor? They don't have to be the same thing. What I mean by tone armor is no one for instance wouldn't get whiplash if Shaggy out of no where suddenly threw out his back the instant Scooby-Doo lept into his arms. Or that Wile-E-Coyote was a one and done after the first time he had an explosion go off in his face or fell off a cliff. Or (yes I know how lame of me) soon after the red wedding in Game of Thrones it suddenly went into a musical number. Cause that's not the tone those worlds had been cultivating. Done right a tonal shift can happen to where a story the was fun, happy and full of whimsy seemingly having few or little consequences is now one that is more gritty, dirty, depressing and realistic. The same can happen in reverse. And plot armor can still end up happening. You can also agree or disagree that a tonal shift was done well or not. People can also grow and change.

[Iscah]

Not only that, the person who is pointing out that I'm coming at this in the opposite direction is right. I'm staring at the billion person high stack of corpses and deciding no good person does that. So this must be a bad person. They are coming at it from everything I am seeing and hearing is telling me this is a good and loving person, therefore this massive stack of corpses must be at worse a 'necessary evil.'

That's not what I have said at any point.

I am saying that according to the story there is no "stack of corpses", even figuratively, for Venat to be accused of. It is clear that the writers do not intend sundering to be equal to death, no matter what the player may think of it, and therefore it is necessary to use that interpretation when considering what characters have canonically done according to the story.

That does not mean I am condoning Venat's actions by that interpretation, or even that the interpretation is objectively wrong, only that when you are viewing the story that the devs intended to write, the villainy is not there and nobody was murdered by Venat's decision.

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. It was a writer's decision that sundering does what it does, a writer's decision that this is nevertheless not equatable to death, and a writer's decision that Venat could decide on this course of action and still be presented as a good character.

[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.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

That's not what I have said at any point.

I am saying that according to the story there is no "stack of corpses", even figuratively, for Venat to be accused of. It is clear that the writers do not intend sundering to be equal to death, no matter what the player may think of it, and therefore it is necessary to use that interpretation when considering what characters have canonically done according to the story.

That does not mean I am condoning Venat's actions by that interpretation, or even that the interpretation is objectively wrong, only that when you are viewing the story that the devs intended to write, the villainy is not there and nobody was murdered by Venat's decision.

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. It was a writer's decision that sundering does what it does, a writer's decision that this is nevertheless not equatable to death, and a writer's decision that Venat could decide on this course of action and still be presented as a good character.

Even if you can somehow convince yourself that the sundering is not mass murder, purposely sparing Emet-Selch and the other Ascians so that they can do the rejoinings most certainly is. If both of these aren't murder then there is no such thing as murder in FF14. She left alive three people to murder en masse "her children" to make her super special star child. My character carries the weight of so much death having both been the inspiration for it and the benefactor. How this made it out the writing room is beyond me.

ETA: So if someone erases your memory, reduces your intelligence to half that of an ape, mutilates your body so bad you start to turn into an animal and five minutes later you die of natural causes because they've reduced your lifespan from 70 years to five minutes, they didn't kill you? Really?

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.

This ignores that both her rise to godhood and the creation of her champion is dependant on the rejoinings. So why assume she let him go with hope in her heart he wouldn't do exactly what she needed him to do to maintain the timeline when her every other action and inaction suggests she's attempting to maintain the timeline and any comments they've made about it tell us she's purposely maintaining the timeline? At that point you're just ignoring even what the people who wrote it said she's doing to read her as good.

[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.

[Iscah]

Even if you can somehow convince yourself that the sundering is not mass murder, purposely sparing Emet-Selch and the other Ascians so that they can do the rejoinings most certainly is.

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.

This ignores that both her rise to godhood and the creation of her champion is dependant on the rejoinings.

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.

[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.

[MikkoAkure]

This ignores that both her rise to godhood and the creation of her champion is dependant on the rejoinings. So why assume she let him go with hope in her heart he wouldn't do exactly what she needed him to do to maintain the timeline when her every other action and inaction suggests she's attempting to maintain the timeline and any comments they've made about it tell us she's purposely maintaining the timeline? At that point you're just ignoring even what the people who wrote it said she's doing to read her as good.

What "rise to godhood"?

She became an elder primal/deity concept before the Sundering and she didn't act as the world's goddess afterwards, demanding prayer and reverence. No one apart from some scholars and the Forum in Sharlayan, the Scions, Echo-bearers, and the leaders of Eorzea even knew she existed. EE1 even treats Hydaelyn as a "living will of the star" as a theory.

The way you word it, it feels like your take on this whole thing is that Venat maliciously orchestrated the death of the Ancients for personal gain. She and her Twelve weren't the only people who were anti-Zodiark and the sentiment seemed to exist without her having to shepherd her flock to her desired position. Enough people believed that humanity couldn't survive another coming of the Final Days as they were with the failure of their creation magicks, and considering how multiple civilizations were destroyed and very nearly their own as well because one guy innocently released an unapproved concept into the cosmos and then decided to put the universe's life on trial, they at least have valid concerns.



Could Venat have just told the Convocation about Meteion and Kairos? Perhaps, but the end of all life was at stake and she only knew of one sure fix and even then she didn't put all her eggs in one basket if her plan B is anything to go by. She also had enough suspicion that Hermes would spoil any attempt to rectify the situation had he known the truth but his knowledge of celestial aether was necessary for the success of Zodiark so she made the executive decision that going off-piste and alerting the Convocation wasn't worth the life of the universe.


I don't believe she was just allowing Rejoinings to happen in order to bring Azem-WoL around though. Otherwise there would have been no point in resisting by making WoLs and Echo-bearers ahead of every little disaster or Rejoining attempt until the end of the Sixth Astral Era but we know of the existence of past historical examples. Unless the WoL is an all-knowing sage, they can't have known every little skirmish between the WoLs and the Ascians over the past 12,000 years and told Venat all of it so that she can pick and choose which battles to win or lose in order to preserve the timeline. That sounds like a bit much.

If we're going to count Venat letting Emet-Selch go as her being responsible for the deaths of those killed in the Rejoinings, then what about when Emet-Selch himself doomed Elidibus and the whole plan he and Emet had worked 12,000 years on by letting us free when Elidibus had us dead to rights and was on the cusp of knocking down the last barrier to bringing back Zodiark? By that measure it was Emet-Selch who killed off the Ancients, not Venat. If Emet-Selch wanted the Ancients to come back, all he had to do was to do nothing but his involvement was the final nail in the coffin that killed the last Unsundered and relegated the Ancients forever to history.

[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.