I thought The Plenty was interesting in isolation, but then people started attributing it not only to the Ancients but everything. "Perfection = bad!" Now it's just an irritating point that keeps turning up like a bad penny.

It wasn't perfection, it was boredom. There's nothing wrong with wanting to reduce suffering and improve the lives of everyone, that's the goal of basically every good society. I don't like the idea that because these people over here did something then it's guaranteed those people over there will do the same thing. That doesn't even work among humans, the same species on the same planet, let alone different beings on different planets. I also don't like the idea that if one person determines a civilization is on the path of destruction they have the right to wipe it out and force it to start anew. Again, that's antagonist behavior.

Also, just my personal nitpick, but in studies where creatures are given the 'perfect' existence they end up turning on each other due to lack of purpose. A true 'perfect' society would've resulted in chaos, certainly nothing like what we saw in The Plenty.

Quote Originally Posted by Seiori View Post
It seems like writers were not sharing notes with one another makes a lot of stuff sound contradictory, like Venat the reason I don't make a comment about this character is because I think they are a mess of characterization. Wasn't the reason for the delay to mostly touch up on the story? I think needed more time if that was it. They really should not bunch a lot of key story arcs together along with time travel that is just trouble. Still see this expansion as rushed and my opinion is they just wanted to move on new things. Hopefully they can learn from the criticism and mistakes to make a more structured story going forward, now that they have a clean slate.
I think there were too many cooks in the kitchen with it being the finale. I also think that Ishikawa had a different direction she was going with Venat/Hydaelyn, was possibly told she needed to make her good, and then did the best she could given the time crunch and existing story outline. Maybe I'm giving her too much benefit of the doubt, it's just the impression I get. Her vision in ShB was fantastic, but EW was such a mess I can't help but think it was compromised by outside forces and extensive rewrites.