Did Zodiark ever do anything wrong?

[Cleretic]

Yes, that's why the story should never had given so many options to Venat to try solving the issue in a different way.

What options?

Pre-Sundering, Venat is greatly hindered by the fact that's she's one woman, without much in the way of actionable intel herself in a society that circumstances mean she cannot be open about the problem. Telling the Convocation (at least, before it becomes a public and present problem, at which point they don't listen to reason) will lead to them unseating the one guy that can do anything at all to stem the tide when it hits; telling the masses leads them into a panic spiral when faced with a problem that we know absolutely capitalizes on a panic spiral... and also leads to the Convocation finding out and causing the first problem anyway. Venat mentions just before Elpis wraps that she does intend to look into other possibilities, but this never comes up in other places; presumably, they're all dead ends, and are never elaborated on because they don't matter to the actual story. Instead, she recruits a trusted handful of people, and credit due to those people, it's a good lineup: they include the head of Akadaemia, multiple capable warriors, a prodigy, multiple experts in their field, and several respected public figures. They don't seem to have a dynamis expert (although Mr. Akadaemia probably has some level of knowledge), but other than that I can't really think of better options. We know that from the 5.2 Anamnesis meeting, the Sundering plan is the only thing on the table at that point, but that nobody's comfortable with it; fair enough, that is an ugly trigger to pull. But this was not a decision made of blind ignorance; this was a decision made by intelligent, qualified people who could see that there was no other option.

After the Sundering, Venat's restrictions as Hydaelyn are if anything worse. She has gotten the ball rolling on the plan that we'll end up using, mostly by putting the Loporrits onto it (and remember it's not actually the plan we told her she'd use, she's not hopelessly shackled to The Time Loop), and the Twelve are doing a good job keeping the planet stable, but other than that she's off in the aetherial sea, running on a battery of aether she will never recharge for moral reasons, doing whatever the 'will of the star' actually means, and facing down thirteen justifiably mad ghost wizards. She's heavily restricted both by circumstances and morals, but she still does do what she can--and what she can is hand out the Blessing of Light, and work with an Oracle when circumstances allow, which might've only happened once. Something about these circumstances, though, are that they mean we actually don't know how many times she tried and failed to do something; the Blessing of Light is exactly something that would get lost to history if it were on the losing side... so who's to say that Hydaelyn didn't make a whole bunch of losing gambles, that nobody wrote down?


Venat was in a real bad place all the way through her story, but that doesn't mean she was narrowly focused on one goal. It did mean that the entire way through, only one plan remained standing, and it was not a pretty one. Given all of that, my question remains: what were her other options? You act like she had a wealth of them within the text itself that would've worked so well, but what were they? Or did you just imagine them?

[Zero-ELEC]

doing whatever the 'will of the star' actually means

I assume this is stuff like sealing Ultima, the High Seraph originally before Ajora released her, since that's attributed to Hydaelyn herself. Truly, if we're making stuff up that isn't in the text at all, Hydaelyn has been staving off interdimensional incursions from other beings like the High Seraph all this time.

[unlimitedBLACK]

I assume this is stuff like sealing Ultima, the High Seraph originally before Ajora released her, since that's attributed to Hydaelyn herself. Truly, if we're making stuff up that isn't in the text at all, Hydaelyn has been staving off interdimensional incursions from other beings like the High Seraph all this time.

This gets to something that's largely a different thread discussion, but I think what it comes down to is that Venat's ONLY option was "preserve the world until This Particular WoL shows up and has a meaningful chance of succeeding against Meteion." Which meant that EVERYTHING throughout the history of Hydaelyn that threatened the stability of the star was up to Venat to manage.

Remember that part in the Praetorium where Hydaelyn soaks two casts of Ultima to keep WoL from dying and says she can't soak a third? Now imagine how much power she had to dump into subduing the High Seraph and then sealing her away. It's a ton of things JUST LIKE THAT, that the WoL couldn't have possibly told her about because the WoL's knowledge of the star's history is going to be incomplete, and Venat had to be ready for ALL OF IT.

Venat's only option was "SURVIVE."

And overall, that's because the game couldn't paradox itself out of existence. The game HAD to do the time loop and force Venat into that situation because the implications of them just being able FIX ALL TIME would deflate the stakes completely.

[Alenore]

What options?

The final cutscene in Elpis where we part, she pretty much has decided the course of actions, fully expect the Final Days to come, and that humanity would need a way to resolve the problem by bringing the fight to Meteion ("much less take the battle to Meteion at her nest")
She even says so herself : "Bewildered and divided, we would perisg like the peoples of those celestial ruins". She then proceeds to form a faction of a few people knowing the actual truth (or do they?), working against the collective will of their people, thus dividing them.


She refuses, here and there, to call upon the Fourteen based on flawed arguments.

• "Hermes might become a foe if he knew" => Then don't tell him. He's not Fandaniel yet, his name was just suggested and Emet is talking with him right now. Interrupt them, show Emet what actually transpired using the Echo, and I'm pretty sure that proposition will be rescinded.
• "We might alienate Fandaniel from helping in the tragedy to come" => Good, the point is to try to prevent the tragedy.
• As far as we're told, Hermes-as-Fandaniel contribution to the problem was identifying that it happened where the celestial currents were weak. Something she now knows.
• She differenciate telling the Convocation and telling the masses, showing that she thinks they could hold the information hidden. So this is not an issue of "if I tell them, Hermes will 100% know".

Even then, Hermes as our resident expert in Dynamis matters might prove very useful on fixing the issue if he even knew it was Dynamis in the first place, even if he had no idea it was Meteion.
As you said yourself, she managed to convince a lot of important people to act. Perhaps those people would have been better used actually working on trying to solve the initial problem, instead of doing damage control.

Like, what would have gone worse if she actually told everybody? People panicking into sacrificing themselves to save their lives, and their civilization being virtually gone? That's what happened anyway.



If you really can't see the options she might have had...

Right after Elpis :

• Tell the Convocation instead of playing 14d chess, and reach a consensus on what they should do. If they can't, apply plan B ;
• Actually "fortify their defenses", something she said they had to do but visibly never acted on since the Final days hit hard ;
• Assemble a team of experts on Dynamis around Etheirys to work on actual countermeasures to strong Dynamis waves, study its potential effect. Hermes is hardly the only one aware of dynamis ;
• Start studying entelechies, starting with the Elpis flowers, and continuing with checking how Meteion was created, if need be using the Echo ;
• Have Ancients start to research interstellar travel, super dense aether storage, to reach the Nest ;
• Since she knows time travel is possible, go back in time and prevent Meteion's creation in the first place ;
• Find ways to summon an entity like Zodiark without the requirement of sacrificing so many people ;

During the Final Days, to mitigate the issue :

• Tell them from the very beginning it seems to come from where the Celestial currents are the weakest instead of letting them find out for themselves after X days / week / months / years of damage has been done ;
• Implement solutionsto counteract the despair: showing hope in the form of Elpis flower apparently worked to convince Meteion, explain to them why it happens, so they can try to not lose control ;
• She knows of Meteion's location. Instead of a bubble bigger than the actual orbit of the Moon, perhaps a localized shield between Meteion and the Star would suffice ;
• Don't waste time trying to bring Azem or the Convocation into the fold since you know it won't happen ;
• Push for the creation of Zodiark and go through the sacrifice of 50% of the population before the world is broken to the point they need to sacrifice 25% more (if less wasn't enough to create a localized shield) ;

If everythings fails and she has to go through the Sundering :

• Create artifacts, magicks, or tools to protect somebody from dynamis waves, so they aren't unmade as soon as they reach UT and have to rely on a Deus Ex Machina to survive. Like a personal version of what Zodiark does ;
• Instead of creating Loporrits for the sole purpose of evacuating Etheirys, also tell them to create a ship to reach Meteion and study Dynamis? That was the initial long term plan, and something had to be put together at the eleventh hour to even get there ;
• Have loporrits help her gather aether for her plan, like for instance, capitalizing on the free floating aether Zodiark released when he disappeared. Might have been useful ;
• Create a simulacrum like the Watcher or the Twelve that can actually help with the problem instead of being asked stuff outside his purview and with fragmented memories ;
• Compile this story and informations somewhere, so that people don't have to guess everything and find out every details, especially if the timeline might have changed and key elements to fulfill the loop lost : Akasa might have never been studied, the Elpis flower might have disappeared, perhaps Elidibus would have been definitively killed, the Ragnarok never built, etc ;
• Actually study how it would be for the people in the Moon in outer space. It's not like Meteion is not broadcasting despair everywhere, albeit in lower concentration than she does toward Etheirys, and it might very well trigger despair related effects, especially after the entirety of the population just lost relatives, their homes, their whole planet and are facing the unknown ;
• Imagine an escape plan which doesn't leave the majority of the population, the Reflections, to an unknown fate, probably annihilation.

Tthe game explained she couldn't do that because reasons. But again, that's my point. Writing it like that just forced Venat into picking this option out of potentially many, giving bad reasons why, when it brought absolutely nothing to the story, except confusion.

If Venat had forgotten, she would have gone with the initial plan, we would meet her in Elpis, we'd go to the Aetherial Sea, she'd sacrifice herself and be free of her long duty, we'd go to Ultima Thule and end Meteion.
If you want to have her know what happened in Elpis, make it that she finally remembers what happened because she has an Echo vision of us in Elpis, and voilà, we're at the exact same point in the story.

[Cleretic]

Right after Elpis :

• Tell the Convocation instead of playing 14d chess, and reach a consensus on what they should do. If they can't, apply plan B ;

I don't need to read any more of this. You have already shown your hand: you are ignoring what the game says, to claim that the game is wrong about what it says.

This exact point, your absolute Plan A, is something that that game explicitly says is a bad idea. Not only does Venat say that she can't tell the Convocation, we know that's right, because we've already seen it: Emet-Selch is a by-the-books square doing exactly what the Convocation is supposed to do, and he made the problem so much worse that Kairos is the only reason they managed to still have a Zodiark afterwards. If your first point is so easily debunked that the game itself did it, you don't have any other points.

Everything else you said is exactly what I thought: your own imagined scenarios based off of no evidence, because your very first point was to reject the evidence we actually had.