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

[Turtledeluxe]

After reviewing developer statements I found an excerpt where Yoshi P answered the question about time travel directly. He indicated that what happens with Elpis a closed loop, but suggested to form your own theories after pausing for a second. I think they could be saving it for later due to the reflections being untraveled. But based on his comments these are my two cases atm:

- The loop is self-sustaining, always happened and always will happen.

The problem with assigning agency to Venat in this case is that she doesn't have a choice. It's a fate vs free will situation. It also possibly puts some accountability on the player for causing the summoning of Hydaelyn in the first place as we gave her the idea when we created this loop. Technically it means we created our MSQ timeline altogether as we affected the future by visiting the past. You can't have your cake and it eat it, too. Elidibus statements about time in the game also push us toward this idea. Although small changes are tolerable, meaningful change cannot occur because what happens in the timeline has happened and will always happen.

- If meaningful change were to occur i.e the final days are averted it creates a paradox where the player may never come to exist.

This necessitates that the Elpis visit is an alternate time and there is some original timeline where non informed Venat acted, and this is the Venat the game could be reflecting. All of the hints about people remembering the player and even the Morbol thing work with the alternate timeline idea because it's possible that those are the effects of our actions being observed before we actually caused them. This is moreso what I was theorizing because i think the original events happened in an original past where we were Azem. Additionally XIV already uses this type of time travel in other cases (with multiple alter alternate timelines in fact).

And you may ask well why does everyone love Hydaelyn yet the time travel affected all these other things like Argos etc? Because as I have have said it seems like the alternate timeline gets conjoined into the MSQ original timeline very late in the game. So if dark Venat exists, her future got closed off by the conjoing. And before someone tells me this can't happen-- it has already happened in the game (G'raha mentions at some point a future of a timeline being closed off related to the 8UC).

You're welcome to your opinion but it's not exactly clear. We need more information. And when and if the devs do decide to clarify I'm highly doubtful they're going to lean into a scenario where Venat is some kind of problematic killer.

Just saying "you didn't see it" "play the game" isn't an argument for all of the reasons I just said. Arguing about Venat's actions really in any case is entirely pointless, even without director clarification. Because frankly if some original Venat does exist, then you are an Ascian apologist because their solutions involved planned and detailed instances of massacres following the summoning. They were basically planning a harvest. Not to mention they wanted to eternally avoid suffering, which is naive and dangerous. If original Venat doesn't exist and it's always dark Venat, she had no choice bc of how linear time works in that case.