Rewritten MSQ - Garlemald and EW

[Lauront]

One survivor and two accidental ones mean it's not a genocide? What are you even smoking?

Furthermore, not once do the writers allude to the 3rd sacrifice as even registering on her radar as a motive. Not once does she do so, except when discussing them as the instrumental means to return to how things were, and there it is because she wants them to accept the 'necessity' of suffering. She does not even question the Convocation on the morality of this whole affair and states they sought to safeguard the best possible future for the star. Her concerns are solely presented as dynamis manipulation and their fate resembling the Plenty. If you want to bring in the supposed immorality of the very sketchy third round of sacrifices, which her people were already divided on, I am going to ask for sources - good luck, because I know these sources, and I can tell you, you and others are headcanoning this in to being her primary motive as well as liberally filling in details as to what they were, to try make it seem far more nefarious than we're told.

How would allowing the Ancients proceed to performing the third sacrifice not be equally reprehensible if not more so? They weren't going to just exterminate one new life form - they were intent on exterminating them all for the sake of people who were already dead and unable to return to life if what Sri Lakshmi said in Stormblood is true.

Their souls quite literally persist whole in Zodiark, and were cut off from the Underworld (return to which they valued as a species) as a result of the desperate measure they had to undertake to protect their star. So irrespective of what some amateurish, third-rate primal said, which has zero bearing on what Zodiark and his creators could do, they would still need to be freed from within him at some point to be released from that purgatory.

If one is gonna make a villain do something you give a reasoning for why they did it, thats simple story writing. Couldn't care less if it wasn't putting venat in a good light or not since this is a AU situation. Zenos does what he does because he wanted to feel something, Hades and the unsundered do what they do to bring back their lost civilization, Meteion does what she does because of all the sadness she absorbed from the countless lost stars they visited and the twisted answer she got from it.

If Zenos and Hermes are the minimum threshold here, we should be good.