The Reasoning behind The Sundering? (*6.0 Endwalker Spoilers*)

[Lauront]

Yep, Yoshida does not claim that it's the only plan that would've worked. It is indeed a function of Venat's belief that the ancients could not have stopped the Final Days. At most what he is saying is that had they continued as they were (a function of not being given the full story behind what was happening), their fate would probably be similar to the Plenty. Inferring from this that her plan was the only one which would work under alternative circumstances, then trying to gaslight other posters by saying that the writer and director and "all the voices" in the narrative are suggesting any other plan was doomed, is not exactly the most intellectually honest approach. And yes, you very much can (and some of us will) posit that you'd like to see how alternative scenarios would've worked out, where she had revealed the truth. The answer he is giving is to explain why she's not a villain - not to try shut down any contemplation of alternatives, which would be rather antithetical to their typical approach.

Q: Venat had good intentions and her plan worked out in the end. But as a result the world was Sundered and most of the Ancients suffered. Was Sundering the star really the only way to save it? A: This is a question that I consulted with Nacchan (Natsuko Ishikawa, Scenario Writer of Endwalker) to come up with the answer so it will make sense when we explain it. At the very least, as Y’shtola theorizes, Venat believed that the Ancients, being so dense in Aether, could not control Dynamis. So she thought they could not have stopped the Final Days and its source. So you know there were other Ancients who thought summoning Zodiark would solve everything but she saw that summoning Zodiark and using it to deflect Meteion’s “Despair Beam” and thought, “even if we were to do this and keep going as we are the rest of the Ancients will probably be unable to change as a people” when she’s looking at Hermes, or “we will always be our own undoing”. If you look at the dungeon, “The Dead Ends”, at the very end there’s a boss called Ra-la, and that’s sort of our vision for what probably would have happened to the Ancients if we just let them continue as they were. So for that reason, she chose to Sunder the star to dilute mankind’s Aether so that someday they might be able to use Dynamis and to fight back against despair and the Final Days at the Source. As she herself says, this is not a simple matter of good and evil and she is agonized over whether her decision is correct and took it all upon herself all these time. I think everyone has a lot of different feelings about Venat and we wanted to communicate to you that Hydaelyn is not evil. However this is the decision she has made and she decided to split the world into 14 parts so that humans can use Dynamis and kill Endsinger, and that decision really makes me think, “Yeah, Venat is definitely an Ancient, huh”.

At the end of 5.0 we find out that Emet-Selch has been making these decisions about all of humanity and its imperfection. But at the very end he did grant you one more chance to re-evaluated his judgment. Hermes is also concerned with this to the degree that he erases his memory so that he can once again re-evaluate humanity and everything. He’s really concerned with fairness and humanity’s worth. Venat herself never talks about herself in this lofty way that she is making a judgment on all of mankind but when we see her holding the sword and say “Henceforth he shall walk” and Sundering the world, that really is an ancient moment that shows you how different the wholeness of these Ancient’s worth because normally we normal humans wouldn’t be able to make such a decision for all of mankind, so when I see that I really think, yeah, Venat was really one of them. I do get that Emet-Selch is really popular but I sort of agree with Alphinaud when Emet is talking about judging people and think, “What right does he have to do that?”, and that might be applicable to Venat too, like “What right does she have to do that?” with showing various things about the Ancients and how different they were from us as people and how they were sort of the same, so I think if you go back and look at all of the different parts including the side quest including the Ancients in them, you might find them interesting.

Transcript courtesy of iluna minori on the reddit discord - minor wording differences relative to this but nothing fundamental.

(At this point I would've liked someone to remind him of all the sundered characters that tried to inflict their judgement or decisions on mankind as a whole... sometimes even an entire timeline...)

As for the poster's other claims, I'd be intrigued to see how they handled "bad news" (really, platitudes about suffering) while the world was burning/dying around them.