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?