What lore do you ignore?

[Vallavia]

That Helions and Lost are just different fur colors depending on their group having a female Hrothgar in it or not.
It just seems really weird to me and I kinda want some explanation about how it really works, like do Helions go grey from grief when their leader dies or what?
If a Queen is so important to them, why do Lost not join groups that still have a Queen and therefore avoid becoming Lost?
It's easier to just headcanon it as Hrothgar that live in more traditional society (Helions) and Hrothgar that are basically loners by choice (Lost), with that it wouldn't be an external factor that changes them but their own choices.

The implication that I got was more that the clan divide exists only for gameplay purposes to have visually distinct subraces, while in context there is actually no combination of physical traits that are more or less likely to manifest whether you're a Helion or Lost. The race selection even says that in Hrothgar culture the distinction between Helions and the Lost are almost entirely an invention of scholars outside Hrothgar society attempting to interpret their culture. Also, in Bozja almost every Hrothgar character we see is ostensibly Lost, but several of them use Helion models, and other NPCs with Lost models use Helion names, further de-emphasizing any distinction.

eta: I swore I read it in the race selection but I can't find it there now; in any event the lack of clan divides is discussed in EE3.

[Denishia]

It's explained that by random chance, most of the family clans whose queens died in Bozja had cool fur and the ones whose Queens escaped and survived were warm-toned. It's completely artificial for gameplay character creation.

[LilimoLimomo]

Lyse is just a hallucination.

[Iscah]

Helions and Lost

The naming conventions page clarifies that there is no actual physical divide between Helions and Lost. Characters of either appearance may have either social status, and the visual division only applies at the character creator level to allow more variety in appearances.

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ng-Conventions

Though Hrothgar form their own clan-like communities, they, as a race, cannot be divided into distinct “clans” with separate traditions and features. They are instead most often sorted into the categories of “Helion” and “Lost,” according to their social status─but these labels, too, were imposed by scholars of the other races rather than the Hrothgar themselves, and have unfortunately led to certain misconceptions, such as the popular belief that Helions always have golden fur.

[Cilia]

Venat's whole "I had to sunder the Ancients to make them more capable of wielding dynamis" bit. It just feels so... tacked on.

[Cleretic]

Venat's whole "I had to sunder the Ancients to make them more capable of wielding dynamis" bit. It just feels so... tacked on.

What about the reasons for the sundering that she actually said, though?

In the game across both Shadowbringers and Endwalker, it's never one of the multiple reasons stated for why she did that, internal or external, and it only comes up in passing in the EE3; it's actually Y'shtola that points it out in-game, Venat just doesn't deny it when asked. I actually read it less as a primary motivator, and more as an important consequence.

I think it comes up among the developers and the EE3 because, from a sequential storytelling point of view (and the in-universe historical view), it's one of the most important effects of the Sundering. While on Venat's side of things, yeah, I think it was lower on the list.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Venat's whole "I had to sunder the Ancients to make them more capable of wielding dynamis" bit. It just feels so... tacked on.

I think at some point late in the process they realized they may have made a cultural argument for genocide. So they invented dynamis, to fix the problem, by making a genetic argument for genocide...

[Mostly_Raxus]

my character is all the scions, and a schizo, from everyone else's perspectives our character is just making voices talking to themself all the time, but we are so strong that no one dares call us on it.

[Cilia]

What about the reasons for the sundering that she actually said, though?

Not denying something when pointedly asked is scarcely different from saying it yourself. Anyway...

I agree with Venat's ideological reasoning (though not necessarily the methods she used), but the dynamis bit feels like an unnecessarily tacked on edit. Like you can tell from the clunkiness that it was an edit from Banri Oda or Yoshi-P; the rest of the scene follows Ishikawa's sentimental (if sometimes schmaltzy) style but then we get the clunky out of nowhere "because dynamis" bit that doesn't flow with the scene, before or after.

If you're gonna write an ideologically / philosophically driven story, go all in with it instead of shoehorning in some physical reason it was a necessity.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Not denying something when pointedly asked is scarcely different from saying it yourself. Anyway...

I agree with Venat's ideological reasoning (though not necessarily the methods she used), but the dynamis bit feels like an unnecessarily tacked on edit. Like you can tell from the clunkiness that it was an edit from Banri Oda or Yoshi-P; the rest of the scene follows Ishikawa's sentimental (if sometimes schmaltzy) style but then we get the clunky out of nowhere "because dynamis" bit that doesn't flow with the scene, before or after.

If you're gonna write an ideologically / philosophically driven story, go all in with it instead of shoehorning in some physical reason it was a necessity.

As the type of person who needs six kinds of meds to step out the house, I'm gonna have to disagree with the belief that trauma makes you stronger. The strongest people I know grew up in healthy, safe environments. Those who grew up with the things Venat introduced to the world, hunger, disease, they spend most of their adult lives attempting to heal the damage done by a traumatic childhood. It would also mean causing harm is good as it would make for tougher stock. Her ideology falls apart if you think about the real world for like five seconds. How many people do you know offed themselves because they had it too good and got bored with life? I know zero. But I know plenty of people who have tried due to not being able to endure any more suffering, myself included.

Her stance wasn't just bad. It was dangerous.

ETA: The game tells me these people needed to die because they lack fortitude, but it also tells me that the last three survivors fought 12,000 years to undo what she did to their people. We are told they did not experience "true happiness" but a significant number of the playerbase wants to collect all their shards and become an Ancient.

If you could choose between ending up a random person in the modern FF14 world or the Ancient world, which would you choose? I'd choose the place where the number one cause of death is the decision to reroll out of boredom.