What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Teraq]

You all seem to have been "wronged" by the story because you invested yourselves into the plot of characters who were meant to end up losing in the end and any step the story makes that seems to suggest their wrongness ends up rubbing you the wrong way.

Cool armchair internet psychology but no. I've loved villains since I was old enough to make up stories in my head. Losing and dying is literally what my favorite characters end up doing 90% of the time.

What I care about is this objectively terrible plot retroactively making them pointless and ignorant while the emotional crux and gravity of Shadowbringers largely rested on them having a point, all the while giving Emet non-sensical lines where he is for whatever reason blaming himself for "having forgotten" and not having followed Venat's olympic level plot gymnastics that by a massive stroke of luck resulted in us saving the day.

And please, I won't hear any argument against "objectively terrible" – any story that involves a closed time loop that justifies a character's actions, a super handy magical memory wipe-unwipe, and circumstances that should be only possible if everyone in the world is an idiot (literally the Elpis plot) while shooting dead the nuance the previous season had is bad. It doesn't mean you shouldn't like it, god knows I love some terrible things. But I get the feeling that if this had been anything other than Beloved Final Fantasy XIV and its great community BTW, it would have got torn apart shot by shot like GoT season 8 was. But it's okay, because we can just turn our brain off. I mean, I have friends who watched S8 and didn't care this much – they never cared much in the first place anyway.

Creatively speaking, Venat's plan made sense to us because we wanted it to happen.

(amazing post absolutely 10/10 holy hell)

[...]
At that time we weren't presented with any of this existentialist inevitable doom for the Ancients, or of some hanging threat that they couldn't deal with, the conflict was simply their world versus the current world

RIP I miss Shadowbringers

And even though the MSQ didn't care to so much as question her (Perhaps in part because the conflict in this "conclusion to the Hydaelyn and Zodiark saga" was in fact only tangentially related to them)

This right here was one of the most egregious things to me.

I mean, okay, a lot of things in Endwalker make good candidates for "most egregious". But that in particular.

I wish they had been honest about the story so I wouldn't have been as disappointed.