Quote Originally Posted by Vyrerus View Post
It's not pearl clutching at all. It's mostly akin to the idea that rewriting a person to be fundamentally different destroys them.

The destruction of a people and their society can only be described as evil to said society.

Consider this: By the end of EW, Emet-selch considers Hydaelyn/Venat, "The Last of Us." aka The Last Ancient. She herself also considers herself in this way. They do not consider the Sundered to be the same people, even though they carry fragments of that dead people with them forever. Take notice that in spite of Venat knowing we are her fragmented protégé, there is no call from her to remember that side of ourselves. It is ignored.

In this small way, EW itself tacitly confirms that the Sundering was genocide. Which says a lot, considering they bent over backwards to bend the story around trying to hide the evil in that act.
Why do people always ignore that Emet-Selch in ShB explicitly says the Convocation's plan was to generate a massive amount of life purely to kill it in order to bring back the Ancients who originally "sacrificed" themselves? Venat's "sundering" solution is typically seem as the "better" option because the simple fact is that a massive genocide was going to happen no matter what. The only question was whether the victims would be completely innocent beings or the people who were going to murder them in the first place.

As for us as "Azem," part of that is obviously the natural development of a story over a decade resulting in some retcons - the other part - I'm genuinely curious if it's even possible for sundered beings to "remember" their other parts. We only know about Ardbert because we physically interact with him, and despite knowing now that we're a fragment of Azem, it doesn't somehow give us the ability to reach out to or remember our other fragments or past self. Put simply, I don't think Venat "ignores" who we are because we're fragmented; I think she "ignores" it because there's literally nothing that can be done about it, anyway.

I'm kinda in the same boat. If 7.0 is as bad as 6.0 Endwalker was, I'll probably lose any small amount of faith I have left in the writers to turn this ship around.
For me, if the writing continues being as good as I found it in EW, I'll continue loving this game. A bonus if we keep most of the hundreds of thousands of players, maybe add a few more, and weed out the sad naysayers who are so bitter they can't stand the thought of other people being happy .

(Oh, and going back a couple pages, I've stated numerous times the support for why the echo chamber of negativity here is minuscule in comparison to most players. You can ignore it all you want, but it doesn't make it any less true. Heck, it's frequently the bitter cabal who provide the info...)