On Venat's Role in the Story

[Veloran]

Unmarked spoilers oncoming. Basically, I'm saying here that nearly every part of Venat's role in the story is nonsensical on multiple levels.

To begin, the sundering itself. Supposedly this was done for two reasons - To increase people's ability to interact with Dynamis and thus be more capable of combating Meteion, and to destroy Ancient society because they would ultimately doom themselves. Venat's reasoning on both of these fronts is wrong. Firstly, because WoL themselves is 9/14 parts rejoined, meaning that the sundering as Hydaelyn enacted it was at least 66% pointless. There was no reason to sunder everyone so thinly when we see that even a one-half split would have been more than enough to do the job. Secondly, the destruction of the Ancients was pointless because the sundering did not inherently change the nature of mankind in the sense of always seeking out advancement and the creation of a better world. As long as humanity persists they will always seek out the best of all futures, and this is the moral motivation of all of the protagonists. As such, if mankind does not destroy itself and is not destroyed by some other force, they will eventually reach the same point as the Ancients once again, residing in a world where the vast majority of their suffering has been mitigated and they eventually lose reason to continue living. On this front Venat did not solve anything, she simply delayed the issue to some point in the future.

Moreover, doing this opened up mankind to extinction through various other means that the Ancients were not susceptible to. War and strife, disease, political manipulations, we see that countless other civilizations fell prey to such maladies and destroyed themselves. Indeed, we see that sundered life is very vulnerable to these things - In the Fifth Era the warring states nearly drained the land of aether to the point of desolation warring with each other, and it was only the setup for a rejoining on another shard which destroyed their civilizations and saved the world from being sucked dry. In the Third Era the Allagans even fall to nihility after reaching the apex of their civilization and slowly declining, at which point Xande concludes that life is meaningless and everything should return to nothing. This is exactly the mindset that Venat set out to stop from happening, but here we have a sundered lifeform reaching that same point and nearly obliterating the star in the process, and once again were it not for the setup of a Calamity intercepting things the world would have been swallowed by the Void. I'm sure people will claim that these things are wholly attributable to the Ascians, but we see time and again that their modus operandi is to hand out power and allow mankind to destroy themselves rather than directly manipulating events, and this is precisely the case in at least these two situations.

Next, we have the issue of alternative solutions which go unconsidered by either Venat or the story itself. The plot tries to excuse this in advance by introducing the closed-loop time travel and suggesting that Venat must have done everything she did purely to reach this ending rather than attempting anything else, but due to the limits of everyone's knowledge on the subject I find this to be an extremely questionable proposition. WoL knew the future as well yet chose to reveal that future to the others even after being told that it would change nothing, but Venat does the opposite and willingly withholds her knowledge despite knowing the tragedy that would befall everyone. Just on the face of it this shows that WoL and Venat are not operating with the same moral compass. But this is an aside.

Why did nobody try anything else? We're told that aether is more powerful than Dynamis despite being less abundant in the universe, so why does everybody act like Meteion cannot be confronted without the ability to manipulate Dynamis? We're shown outright that sundered life is actually more susceptible to being manipulated by Dynamis, so why is the conclusion that more aetherial density = loss? If Zodiark has the power to shield the entire planet from Meteion's influence, why could Zodiark not simply defeat Meteion without being touched by her powers? If Meteion is still an aetheric being, why did Venat not consider sundering her, as we're told that her aether is inherently so thin that she is in danger of dissipation? If interaction with Dynamis is necessary, why not create a new lifeform in the same vein as Meteion to challenge her, but without the hivemind that renders it too easily influenced by despair? Why not create an aetheric being with no soul and no emotions which is immune to the power of Dynamis? Why not create a construct that can only feel joy and infect Meteion with it? If sundered life is necessary, why not simply sunder a number of volunteers in order to confront her? Why not increase the Ancient's aetherial density even more so that they're completely shielded from having their magicks hijacked by the power of Dynamis, and confront her like that? We are not given any reason for thinking all or any of such other solutions are impossible or that they were even considered. WHY is Dynamis even supposedly necessary, when the only time we seem to use it outright against the Endsinger is with the LB3 when she calls that out as Dynamis, despite the fact that Emet-Selch, Venat, Hythlodaeus, and Elidibus can all Limit Break as well. Elidibus even has a Limit Break FOUR. This is a major contradiction.

Next, the morality that Venat displays is, frankly, terrible. She unilaterally decides that the Ancients one day coming to an end of their own volition is unacceptable, and does not allow them to even try to challenge Meteion themselves thus stealing their freedom to fight for their own fate, let alone figure out what had happened. She hides the truth of the Final Days from them, yet argues with the Convocation under false premises trying to convince them not to go forward with their plans, without telling them anything that might convince them not to. She seemingly murders a bunch of people in the street after giving a moralizing speech about burning their "wings", because they rejected her statements. She sunders the world, genocides her people, and leads all of humanity through 12,000 years of suffering without telling them why. She opposes the Ascians and the rejoinings and creates Warriors of Light to die for her cause while stopping the Calamities despite knowing that at least seven or eight of them need to happen anyway. She bodyjacks Minfilia despite being perfectly capable of talking to WoL directly, lies to WoL the person she knows comes back to the past about the past, and insists that the Ascians cannot be suffered to exist despite never having told them why their cause might be wrong. Due to knowing the future and intentionally leading people towards that future, in effect every bad thing that has ever happened is directly attributable to Venat. Even some things that were previously unexplained, like her not answering the Warriors of Darkness, allowing the First to be 90% consumed by the Light, and sending Ardbert to wander around in isolation for 100 years, can now be understood as actions she took to match up with the future she knew.

And with all of this, her motivations are completely backwards. She tells us herself when WoL reveals that she was planning to evacuate the planet that she would never do that, and instead choose to fight to the last to avert it. But that's not what she does, instead she does nothing to avert it the first time and puts all the burden of fighting it the second time on generations that will be born 12,000 years in the future. She creates millennia of suffering ultimately for the sake of one person, WoL, on blind faith that they will solve all the world's problems in their future that is, as far as she knows, doomed. And this segues in to the even worse issue with Venat.

The writing. My God, the writing. As I've outlined above, there are numerous logical inconsistencies with Venat and issues relating to the sundering/Dynamis in a lot of regards. Some other major offenders include the LB problem I pointed out above, the problem of the non-tempering nature of Ancient creations which retroactively confuses elements in Shadowbringers where the opposite was directly stated (which was seemingly invented purely to dodge the idea of Hydaelyn tempering people), and the problem of Ancient concepts not having souls, which was explicitly shocking to everybody in the short story when it happened. And of course, a side issue is that the player and the main cast hardly even has the opportunity to take issue or disagree with Venat on much of anythig. But, by far, the worst offender of all is the massive gaping plot hole that is the combination of Shadowbringers Rift time travel, and Elpis "closed loop" time travel.

Let me lay this out for you: WoL travels back in time to Elpis, and among everything else, inadvertently gives Venat the idea to sunder the world to begin with. It is WoL's presence here that motivates her to do this, because she perceives flaws in the Ancient society and their supposed eventual fate, while also gaining hope for another future to guide mankind down, eventually leading to WoL. WoL traveled back in time here and has reached this point to begin with due to the events of Shadowbringers, and the arrival of the Crystal Tower in the First from another timeline. Now in that timeline, WoL died in the Eighth Umbral Calamity, leading to a devastated world languishing in ruin, which motivates the AU Ironworks to attempt to go back in time and undo their doomed future and revive their hero. However in this timeline WoL is dead - Meaning that WoL cannot go back to the past to Elpis using a Crystal Tower on the now-rejoined-First, and cannot motivate Venat to do the sundering, thus the entire 8th Umbral Calamity timeline cannot exist. And if the 8th Umbral timeline cannot exist, that means that the main timeline cannot exist, as it is dependent on events in that timeline occurring. It's a massive two-way paradox that utterly destroys the logic and plot of the story. And this is all to say nothing of the fact that that timeline is now supposedly doomed despite a short-story being written specifically to inject some hope back into it.

All of this, I'm pretty sure, because the writers insisted on not having Venat mindwiped as well, because they wanted to tie WoL directly to her character for the sake of trying to form a bond between the two. This is a massive fumbling of the story that, frankly, I would not have previously thought the XIV writing team capable of - Simply put it is probably the single worst piece of writing in the entire game, due to how far-reaching and complete it's impact is. It's practically a case study in why writers should never mix-and-match different types of time-travel storytelling, much less in a hackneyed way that involves the necessary addition of amnesia from the outset.

Altogether, this is why I cannot consider Venat or her role in Endwalker anywhere close to a good addition to the story. She's bad on every single level, from the logical to the motivational to the basic barebones plot conception of her narrative. It's all atrocious.

[sidurgu-12]

i respect your opinion but disagree with everything.

[BetaKeja]

I agree with a lot of that. They really fumbled things with the time travel part and Venat. Now, I think the time loop can be explained without breaking the branching timeline of the 8th umbral era, but it's the kind of thing that should have been in the story. When you leave the audience to fill in plot holes everyone's going to have different answers, including future writers.

Basically it goes like this: we assume that time travel always creates a new timeline. There was an original timeline where there was no WoL from the future, but things happened much the same. Metion falls to despair, Hermes declares mankind will be tested and erases his memory; or maybe something else. Events progress, the world is sundered and someone goes back in time and events gets nudged a bit. Repeat until things barely change with each iteration and you have a quasi-stable time loop. A time spiral perhaps?

But we don't get an explanation. Instead we have words from Elidibus about not changing the past, then our character refuses to speak of the future, then they find out anyways, and then memories of the future are erased from half the people who know...

The part that gets to me is that Venat practically gives up on changing the future. She could have shared her memories with Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus to prove what happened; either through those crystals or with whatever they called the echo in their time. Instead of doing that, instead of doing everything in her power to avert the disaster she knows is coming, she keeps it secret. She's shown to have tried but failed but she still ends up in the exact same position she was forewarned against. It's actually quite ironic. She's supposed to be this kindred spirit to the WoL, who suffered for millennia to keep hope alive, but she's also the one who gave up on her own people, who decided they were all beyond hope.

Make the time travel mechanics less confusing and add dialogue choice to condemn her choices and I think it would have been a much better experience. Perhaps there truly was no other way but who are we to accept that? It would have certainly fit the theme of this expansion well.

That actually sounds pretty cool now that I've written it out. But simply making the time travel a clean break would have worked as well, I think. We could have (potentially) averted disaster in one timeline while gaining the knowledge to save our own.

[Rulakir]

What threshold do I have to pass to submit posts that exceed 3000 characters? Begrudgingly split response. 1/2

I suspect the short answer is:

1) The writers decided to go all in that she was good. This meant having to justify an unjustifiable act, which required a lot of convoluted writing to excuse.
2) They wanted a closed time loop so badly they were willing to sacrifice whatever it took whether it be logic or story consistency.

I suspected #1 was a possibility, but I'd hoped it wouldn't go the route it did. The WoL has been the champion of Hydaelyn since ARR, having her as evil would've soured many a player's journey. It would seem they decided her even being morally grey was not acceptable as well.

As for #2, it was an odd choice given that ShB indicated Azem had ghosted Venat in the past after leaving the Convocation. Learning that Venat was their mentor raises even more questions as to Azem's actions. It's possible Azem didn't know what her plan was, but if they did then it seems odd our original incarnation would be opposed to her while the WoL was 100% on board. It's for this reason I wonder if we'll ever see Azem's side of the story and if that's why those plot elements were absent in EW because it would require more contrivances to explain.

[Rulakir]

Split response. 2/2

Next, the morality that Venat displays is, frankly, terrible.

She was essentially Hermes v2.0. Left civilization in ignorance, expected them to prove their worth, and literally put them to the sword when they didn't live up to her ideals. It's especially egregious following an event that ushered in creatures of nightmare slaughtering people in the streets, but the Ancients were supposed to handle it better? Has anyone been paying attention to how the public has been handling a pandemic that's not even remotely in the same realm as the Final Days, but we're going to judge the Ancients on being ill-equipped to handle a horrific situation we're not even capable of comprehending? The whole thing was monstrous.

Due to knowing the future and intentionally leading people towards that future, in effect every bad thing that has ever happened is directly attributable to Venat.

Adding that it was also without knowing it would ever end in resolution. We take for granted that there was only ever one outcome in which the WoL wins because it's a game in which we, the players, are the WoL. It's not as if it was ever going to end with us failing to defeat her trial, failing to reach Meteion's nest, failing to defeat Meteion, or being forced to flee into the stars indefinitely (dooming all remaining shards in the process) even though all of those outcomes would have been possibilities.

Simply put it is probably the single worst piece of writing in the entire game, due to how far-reaching and complete it's impact is.

Agreed, with this and all of your criticisms. The writing is so heavy handed that you like Venat/Hydaelyn to the extent of trying to form a 12k year bond with her, that her way was the only way, and that she's a tragic figure who's suffered for millennia to save the world. The player is given no breathing room to question anything because all of the NPC dialog undermines it. Did you think Venat was wrong? Too bad, here's even Emet-Selch saying the Ancients never would've made it that far when the truth is they were never given the opportunity to try.

[Cleretic]

What threshold do I have to pass to submit posts that exceed 3000 characters? Begrudgingly split response. 1/2

None, you can exceed 3k characters in an edit. So basically, original post is shorter, then add the excess. (However, I will caution that if you go over 3k characters it can get a bit of a 'too long, didn't read' response from some)

I think it's folly to read Hydaelyn as intended to be sort of an unambiguous good, when the truth is she's not, and is rather abundantly not painted as such. She openly admits she did something horrible and loathsome, it's just that she saw it as necessary and better than the alternative, and was still acting out of love for the planet and its inhabitants. You are absolutely allowed to and are likely expected to think ill of her, but ultimately, she did something immensely ugly out of knowledge that, if she didn't, even worse would happen.

What is unambiguous isn't the morality, it's that her plan ultimately worked, while the opposing plan (the Convocation's, including when becoming the Ascians) categorically would not have, and that said plan was not one of malice. You can compare her to a lot of the Ascians in several different ways, but I think in this regard, the contrast is strongest against Elidibus; Elidibus was a hero in his own mind, wielding heroism itself as a weapon to enact the Ascians' will to bring back an age past; meanwhile, Venat performed an act in full acceptance that it makes her the villain in the tale of her people, out of nothing but a selfless love for the lives of the future.

I think a lot of dislike of Venat's Endwalker story comes from sort of a misunderstanding of the fact that... well, you're not necessarily meant to think she was in the right, it was fully intended to be unclear and ambiguous if she did the just and right thing. You thinking she did terrible things and is not a hero, while not the only intended response, is one of the intended responses.

[Rulakir]

Thanks for the response about the character limit.

We're never going to agree about the rest. I certainly did not feel I was allowed to think ill of her. My WoL goes along with everything she does (returning to those lobotomized days of ARR) while all the major NPCs repeatedly excuse or defend her actions. Her having a couple of moments of self-awareness doesn't change anything. Speaking of ARR, I can't help but notice the similarities with Minfilia. I found her a thoroughly unlikable character, but NPCs consistently gush over her. Maybe having a few dialog options where I could've at least said "I don't agree with what you've done, but you've given me no choice other than to follow through" would have helped, instead it was quite the opposite.

[KageTokage]

I really don't consider Venat's decision to cause the Sundering "unjustifiable" after it's implied in the Elpis quests that the "beast" tribes were created by them.

The Ancients largely (And perhaps logically from a certain viewpoint) held to a standard that only their lives mattered but if they were poised to start routinely offering up mass sacrifices including sentient beings that were scarcely different from them aside from the amount of power/aether they held, I feel like they had it coming. Opening up a solution to the Final Days by enabling the people of Etheriys to wield dynamis was just another reason to go through with it.

Not to mention there's no guarantees their plan would've even worked; even moreso when we learn Zodiark was basically a hivemind of all the Ancients who sacrificed themselves to bring salvation following Elidibus' decision to cease being his heart, so what happens when those souls are replaced by those who are unwilling?

[Theodric]

I agree wholeheartedly, Veloran. Venat really needed more build up and the story needed more time to properly 'settle' and allow each event to properly register and be acknowledged by the protagonists.

The story would have perhaps worked better had Venat lost her memories alongside Emet and Hythlodaeus. That she chose to not even attempt to try and help or warn her people is just utterly bizarre and makes her come across as a complete psychopath.

In general, much of Endwalker's story felt rather poorly paced and needlessly convoluted. As far as I'm concerned, it jumped the shark on many fronts. The finale was originally planned to be in 7.0 and looking at Endwalker, I can't help but feel that such a plan should have been actively embraced.

[Adeacia]

She didn't tell anyone because that would create a different timeline that wouldn't result in us being where we are now. Everything she did was to ensure time would happen as she was told by the player.