On Venat's Role in the Story

[Brinne]

A large factor in what makes people so upset with the Venat issue is that they feel they, and their WoL, are complicit in what happened. The "gross" feeling a lot of people describe is because they feel railroaded into agreeing with Venat that the massacre of the Ancients is an acceptable price to pay and it's not worth putting forth the effort to try to help them, despite being granted continuous opportunities - and a direct parallel to a time travel situation in just the last expansion where someone chose to rewrite history, at great risk to countless people, to save someone they cared for.

A story can be what it is. Venat can make her decisions, and people can decide for themselves if she's understandable or a terrible person, just like any other character in any other plot development. But when the game goes "YOU, your avatar, are happy to leave the Ancients to their fate," they are going to get a little crazier.

That is why so many say they would be okay with the existence of an alternate timeline, even if we didn't get to continue interacting with it. The existence of an alternate timeline would establish that, at the very least, the WoL is not complicit, and wanted to take steps to help the Ancients instead of shrugging off their deaths while still accepting quests from them.

[Lauront]

It's utterly bizarre to me that a happy ending for the ancients, in their world, where we can explore it further via an AU and interact with them, freed of their sacrifice on the altar of dubious "themes" and caricature worlds, is such an anathema to some posters.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Well, I always thought the Ironworks story was more a resolution to Midgardsomr's story, it was satisfying to learn that even though he sleeps, he might eventually wake up and adopt the people of Ethyris as his children and help them rebuild. The eosteric question about whether or not people still existed after the timeline branched was a more academic one to me.

I also don't think it makes G'raha's actions any less ambiguous. After all, he has no idea what happened after he left his original timeline, for all he knows, they could have blipped out of existance as soon as the Crystal Tower vanished.

Similary, if you think Venat is guilty of genocide, murder, and all those other things, a second timeline doesn't undo that. After all, she still did the sundering in the timeline we know.

Like - really, what's the point? To know that some fictional characters are "okay" in another made up timeline? It feels so hollow. Like with Midgardsomr, I would want any alternative timeline story to have a point that goes a little further than 'and then Emet-Selch sipped tea and thought about how everything was going to be great forever'.

He does know though. It’s why he acted surprised when he didn’t disappear. It means the other timeline is still intact.

Why would you ask us what we want and then try to pose a question of what’s the point? I could ask that question all day. What’s the point of keeping all the scions safe and giving them bucketloads of plot armor. What’s the point of all the fakeout deaths. What’s the point of them reiterating the final days if it didn’t amount to anything major. The point could be us getting to see an insight on what their society would look like without the final days looming over them. I figured that was pretty obvious. It’s ironic you talk about it feeling hollow, when many things in this expansion felt hollow, the aforementioned fakeouts for example.

[Theodric]

As an aside, it's interesting how the same posters insisting that any sort of mitigation of the tragedy the Ancients endured would somehow take away from the 'consequences' yet whenever it is suggested that the Scions are held accountable for their misdeeds or are at risk of permanent harm somehow the story suddenly doesn't need anything dark or gritty. Funny, that.

As for what I'd like to see? Consistency. I care less about any given character and more so about interesting world building. I want to be able to explore new lands, mingle with the inhabitants and come to my own conclusions about their culture and people. I'd like to see the same morals enforced across the board, rather than specific acts being branded 'unforgivable' when the antagonists do it but whitewashed when the protagonists do it.

A wider variety of characters to suit a broader range of personal tastes would be great, too. The single player games all have a broad range of interesting characters amongst the playable cast. In FFXIV, however, the Scions are all a bunch of scholars with no real conflict or disagreement between them. Inevitably ending up with them almost always agreeing on everything.

[Lauront]

One other thing I'd consider an improvement - removing that post-Elpis cutscene and replacing it with a proper rendition of what's shown in Elidibus's short story leading up to and including Anamnesis Anyder's events, and the sundering itself. EW had more than enough screen time to do this and plenty of redundant fluff to cut out if necessary. This is pivotal stuff. That 10 min scene does not cut it.

[Denishia]

Just to give the crowd a new target person to pile onto and continue this shouting past each other on our subjective opinions of what characters we like and parts of the story we wish focus on, I'll be the actual person and not a vague strawman to state once more that I am that fan beyond delighted and grateful that the Ancients and their world is utterly gone. All Hail the Sundering, non-facetiously. Good riddance.

I found the worldbuilding of the Unsundered World under-baked and underwhelming when not outright unsettling and skin-crawlingly awful. Just as several posters have made it clear over and over that they prefer the Unsundered to the Scions (and 95% of the rest of the game's cast and setting), to me they are about the last characters and zone setting that I'd want ANYTHING to do with. Visual design of the NPCs limiting and ugly, majority of NPCs unlikeable and repetitive, the story opportunities like Pandaemonium's raid only furthering to contradict the 'paradise' that it utterly failed to convince me it was- that in particular Emet's ableism and fascism made him revolting and unpleasant to interact with and that I saw a direct line from his creation of the horrific empires of Garlemald and Allag to the attitudes of the Ancients that so unsettled and upset Hermes.

That the Ancients provide to XIV little beyond the Doylist answer to where certain mobs and concepts originated and the other tropes and character archetypes else could be provided by the Sharlayans, Loporrits, Ea and the Omnicrons, or other present-day or more recent groups (the nation of scholarly pacifistic debaters confronting their neutrality and arrogance of deeming who/what worthy of survival, naïve creation magic wielders who all look exactly the same and are removed from the rest of the world, powerful emotion-suppressed aliens seeking perfection). And the creation magic element to them means that any gameplay as Azem would not work for this MMO but would need to be a simulation game.

I understand fans with the polar opposite feelings to me want that possibility that in some branching timeline the Sundering didn't happen. Hey, even though I doubt that said timeline had a snowball's chance in hell of surviving or defeating Meteion, I agree with the desire to have it exist. In-game our timelines converged, but it doesn't completely eliminate the possibility that some unplayable version where the timelines didn't converge happened. My interest in that timeline? Negative. Do I think it playable as part of XIV's MMO? Not until it reaches what Ishikawa strongly implies that it would be ..aka the final third of the Dead Ends dungeon. Other fans HC that it exists? Doesn't matter to me, it's not part of the game, go ahead.

I'm not going to argue you into agreeing with any more than you I. But now you can yell at me in addition to others.

My problems with Venat are what magnified a hundredfold I find disgusting in the Ancients and Ascians.

[Lyth]

...

While I'd love to hear Ishikawa talk about her influences, and while you certainly can interrogate the text from a Buddhist, Hindu, or Stoic lens, these are simply a handful of the many ways of reading it. The question of why 'bad things happen to good people' is older than literature itself, so it's not surprising that multiple cultures have commented on suffering and resilience.

Akasha is actually really interesting. Aether, as you know, has its etymological roots in a Greek word that literally means 'sky'. Not only does it have place in Greco-Roman philosophy, it also had a place in Western scientific tradition up until the Michaelson-Morley experiment of 1887. It's role in-universe for FFXIV is very similar, being the primary subject of scholarly study.

Akasha is a Sanskrit word that literally means 'sky' as well. It has a role in Vedic philosophy and Eastern mysticism/spirituality. When you put the two together, you get a clash of polarities and of values - thought/feeling, science/mysticism, Aether/Dynamis, among others. You could argue that this thematic clash symbolically underpins the unravelling of Amaurotian society throughout the events on Elpis and the Final Days, and by bringing the two into harmony with each other is the conflict ultimately resolved. Either way, the etymological parallel set up here is either clever or fortuitous, and makes me interested in where they'll take the lore around these two forces in the future.

--

With regards to your comments on depression, the story isn't making a comment about feelings of despair being 'weak'. The central theme is about resilience, which actually is an important part of the clinical literature on depression, if you really want to go into it. Some of those factors are biological, and others are psychosocial, like your network of social supports. The scene with Matsuya and the villagers of Palaka's Stand in 'When All Hope Seems Lost' is a beautiful illustration of a community coming to support each other in their time of grief. It really has nothing to do with 'being strong-minded'. There's also a scene in 6.1 where you honor the life and memory of Khalzahl, the compassionate merchant whose trading operation fell into hard times and ultimately transformed him into Svarbhanu.

'In that time of strife, any one of us could have broken. Any one of us may have been taken in by despair.'

Sorrow and suffering are part of the human condition. We are never alone in that, no matter how our disconnected society may make people feel otherwise at times. It's not about using your mind, your thought, to overpower and master some 'inner weakness' (that's a bit like trying to use aether to conquer dynamis). It's about acknowledging, understanding, and supporting each other in your times of need.

--

Your personal response to Venat largely comes down to whether or not you like her character, when the dust settles from the Gestalt response of your first meeting. Whatever conscious justification you can derive for this, necessarily comes after the fact. I can't say that I've ever personally sat down to resolve out an ethical dilemma and suddenly come out with the epiphany that I detest someone. It is, however, very easy to condemn the ethics of someone whom you already dislike.

I do think that Venat is polarizing, and I think it's more interesting to look at why. Often, that comes from transgressing the neat bounderies around a character archetype. I think if you take the Amaurotians' descriptions of themselves at face-value (i.e. a paradise of the gods), the story itself reads very similar to the Greek Titanomachy, with a seasoning of Eden and a sprinkle of Babel. Gods fight gods in accordance with their whims and personal ideologies, and everyone else tries to stay out of their way. I can't say that I've ever seen an ethical treatise on the politics of divine coups, but that's largely because you subconsciously accept the cadre of muscular old men with flowing white beards as authority figures without question. So what's the problem this time around?

While Venat's primary role in the story is as Hydaelyn, a supreme deity for the planet, she also has a role to play as the previous Azem. This is critical in that she allows us to experience what the 'Azem' role means within Amaurotian society, much like the 'Tales from the Shadows' stories, without encroaching on the character that you, the player, have built. The result is an eclectic mix of bunny ears lawyer and decisive leader that's oddly reminiscent of Sheryl Nome, of Macross Frontier fame. And it's perhaps not at all surprising to similarly see questions of 'authenticity' be front and center from people who are unable to mentally resolve these two seemingly contradictory facets of her character. This becomes especially obvious when you read some of the reactions to the Sundering scene and its Garden of Eden decree. But that's part of what I find particularly intriguing about her portrayal.

Perhaps we just need to rethink Gravitas, and consider that there's more than one way to portray inner strength.

[Brinne]

Your personal response to Venat largely comes down to whether or not you like her character, when the dust settles from the Gestalt response of your first meeting. Whatever conscious justification you can derive for this, necessarily comes after the fact. I can't say that I've ever personally sat down to resolve out an ethical dilemma and suddenly come out with the epiphany that I detest someone. It is, however, very easy to condemn the ethics of someone whom you already dislike.

I've mentioned this before elsewhere, but this was absolutely not true in my case. The second Venat got name-dropped in 5.2, I don't think I've ever been more hyped for a character in this game. My friends had to endure my constantly gushing about I WANT VENAT TO BE COOL I WANT VENAT TO BE COOL! A friend who was ahead of me in Elpis mentioned meeting Venat, and my immediate response was "PLEASE, TELL ME SHE'S AWESOME!" I found her very, very likable in Elpis and noted to that friend when I reached that point I found her super charming, and she had won me over! I was so happy! Even back in Shadowbringers, as much as I sympathized with and loved the Ancients, with the description 5.0 gave of the Hydaelyn vs Zodiark conflict at the time, I would have sided with the Hydaelyn faction being in the right, and discussed with others at the time how horrible it must have been for Venat (though we didn't know her name yet) to be confronted with an unreasonable Convocation under Zodiark's thrall.

Then things turned out the way it did, and the most generous response I could provide at the time was: "...huh?" And all further interrogation simply deepened the sense of, "Wait, wait wait. Are we actually doing a Deliberate Genocide Apologism now? Like is that point blank what we are doing? Huh???"

Even after everything, I would find Venat very compelling, interesting, and likable in a vacuum, if the story wasn't hellbent on taking her side and enforcing she was absolutely correct in her decisions and emphasizing how so very sad and guilty SHE felt over the position she found herself in (due to her own choices) over the harm inflicted on her victims.

[Theodric]

I'm not sure where the idea that people hate Venat is even coming from. Plenty of people are on record as stating that they found her to be likable during Elpis, myself included. Yet the ending cutscene for Elpis is very much this game's 'Burning of Teldrassil' moment. A highly controversial and divisive event that divides even many of the fans of a particular character.

Some of us also draw a specific distinction between Venat and Hydaelyn since in many ways they are essentially two different entities even if they're essentially the same character on a technical level.

[Lurina]

No, I'm really trying to understand where this is all supposed to be going. I am even conceding, for the sake of moving the discussion along - that the sundering was genocide, that Venat murdered her own people, and that she did not have faith in them.

So, what now? Is the entire point of this discussion to just repeat the same points endlessly? I am desperate pleading with you all the actually talk about something now. Instead of just going in circles forever about how Venat bad.

I've said before that the main reason I still discuss this stuff on the official forums is so that people's sentiment about it reaches the developers, but let's be honest: That's obviously not all that's going on. Really, I think the main reason people are still fired up about the issue (both for the people making a stink, and those defending it) is that it's human to want to defend an emotional response you have as legitimate in the public sphere. We're social animals - people putting down our feelings as stupid or illegitimate does hurt us and weaken our sense of identity, even when it's about dumb video game stories. Establishing an outlook we have as the consensus allows us to enjoy a validating feedback loop, even if nothing fundamental actually changes.

With that said, I don't agree with the people saying that an alternative timeline would really be a great solution. I wouldn't hate it or anything - it'd be nice to know the Ancients were still out there somewhere, and I do think they'll 'bring them back' in some form just because they're so popular - but what's wrong with EW isn't that the Sundering happened, it's that the plotting is a janky mess. The time loop relies on an information paradox which makes no sense. Venat's fundamental motives and to what extent her actions were informed by a desire to preserve the timeline versus preventing the sacrifices/losing faith in her people generally versus the utilitarian knowledge that people without control over dynamis and could never defeat Meteion is completely unclear, even though these motives are contradictory under scrutiny - especially given we know she chose to spare Emet and allow the Rejoinings to happen (or at least potentially happen) on purpose. And that's all without getting into the fact that the text treats her with unambiguous positivity despite the gray nature of her actions, and the awkwardness of the whole scenario (the hermes excuse for why she didn't tell the convocation makes no sense after zodiark plan is already in place, why didn't she tell more people, etc) or the plain unanswered questions (what happened to her followers? did they know everything?)

But this is just describing Elpis-specific symptoms of the real problem with Endwalker, which is that it's a thematically muddled work that feels like it was written by a team that didn't quite agree with each other about what they were trying to do. If you talk to people who've played the expansion and go beyond the superficial, they often have radically different ideas on what it was even trying to say. Is it saying that suffering an intrinsic necessity for good, with paradise another sort of hell, or just that suffering merely inescapable? What exactly is it's message about depression and the human condition beyond "keep moving forward" in a vague sense, since it spends a weird amount of time judging people and groups for being too depressed or too positive in the wrong ways? The whole story feels less like a thesis and more like the writers struggling with questions they don't really have answers to and welding that struggle into a narrative, and while I sometimes like stories with that vibe, EW's absolute confidence in its vague positivity mixed with that sense of judgement creates a really gross-feeling cocktail to me.

The truth is that a lot of this stuff isn't really fixable; it's not like they're going to go back and redo the expansion. But they could, and I expect will to some extent, do a lot to help it by going back and expanding on these ambiguous points during the post-expac content, and maybe doing some light retconning to make certain plot beats feel less "????". I hope this discourse will give them some ideas of what to do.

Like, lemme be clear: It's not like I want them to burn the story you guys liked to the ground. I want to like Venat, and feel catharsis through the whole arc of the Ancients as it exists already, rather than frustration. This isn't a WoW-esque situation where the core beats of the story are irredeemably flawed, it's that they're executed awkwardly.